Ameliorated words of offensive origin

[Gregory {Greg} Downing]

At 04:13 PM 2/27/2001 -0500, you wrote:
>I'm working on a short and pressingly-deadlined essay and need to
>come up with examples of words that are viewed as innocuous today
>(or at least not _that_ bad) but whose origins are offensive in some
>way. One example might be "scumbag," which is generally thought to
>be less offensive by people who don't realize it's a word for a
>condom; another might be "schmuck," which is perhaps less offensive
>if you don't know it's Yiddish for 'penis'....
>
>Jesse Sheidlower
>

Your examples all appeared to be sexual, but if your definition of
"offensive" is a bit wider, I've recently glanced back through Trench's _On
the Study of Words_ (1851), that classic of Victorian popular philology,
where a passage in Chapter II discusses words formerly employed in
pejorative senses but more recently used neutrally or positively: Whig,
Tory, Prime Minister, Lutheran, Methodist, Capuchin, etc. Of course, I
haven't checked to see that all his historical information, now a
century-and-a-half old, still holds up.


Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at nyu.edu