{"id":61657,"date":"2025-01-28T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-28T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/?p=61657"},"modified":"2025-01-28T06:33:03","modified_gmt":"2025-01-28T06:33:03","slug":"how-do-bad-words-turn-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2025\/01\/28\/how-do-bad-words-turn-good\/","title":{"rendered":"How do bad words turn good?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In my last article I discussed pejoration, the historical process by which words develop negative connotations. Now let\u2019s look at the other side of the coin: amelioration. This is another type of semantic change, that is, the process by which the meaning of a word evolves over time. Amelioration is when words with negative or neutral connotations improve in meaning and develop positive connotations. Bad words turning good is less common than good words turning bad, but it still happens occasionally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For instance, in Middle English, nice meant \u201cfoolish\u201d or \u201csimple,\u201d before it developed positive connotations in the 1800s to mean \u201ckind\u201d and \u201cfriendly.\u201d Also in the nineteenth century, Yankee was an insult wielded by Confederate (Southern) soldiers against Union (Northern) soldiers during the American Civil War, although the term ameliorated when it was co-opted by them. (We\u2019ve seen this happen with words like queer and gay too.) Nowadays, Yankee is popular in branding for everything from the name of the New York Yankees baseball team to scented candles. (Yank is also a colloquial term for Americans that can be used in a derogatory or playful way.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In modern times we\u2019ve seen a few examples of amelioration, especially in slang. Negative words develop positive or ironic senses that often coexist with their original ones. A good example is wicked, which means \u201cevil\u201d or morally wrong, coming from Old English wicca for \u201cwizard.\u201d On the other hand, in a positive sense it can mean \u201cwonderful\u201d or \u201cgreat.\u201d This positive use has been traced back to 1920 when F. Scott Fitzgerald used the word in his debut novel This Side of Paradise. He wrote, \u201cPhoebe and I are going to shake a wicked calf,” to mean they were going to dance well. Wicked is often associated with Boston, Massachusetts, where it is used as an intensifier to mean \u201cvery\u201d or \u201cextremely\u201d in phrases such as \u201cwicked smart\u201d and \u201cwicked cheap.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, bad originally meant \u201cinadequate\u201d or \u201cworthless\u201d and evolved to mean \u201cwicked\u201d or \u201cevil.\u201d Nowadays, bad can mean \u201cgood\u201d too. This ironic use dates back to the 1890s, coming from African-American vernacular. By the 1920s, it was used in a positive way specifically in the context of jazz music. Sick is another one of these words. It dates back to Old English s\u0113oc, meaning \u201cill,\u201d but by the 1980s, it was being used by younger people to describe something \u201ccool\u201d or \u201cimpressive.\u201d In Aboriginal English, deadly can be used to mean \u201cexcellent\u201d or \u201cawesome.\u201d The word \u201cnasty\u201d has also developed an opposite positive meaning. It became a feminist rallying cry after Donald Trump branded Hillary Clinton a \u201cnasty woman\u201d during the US presidential campaign back in 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes the ameliorated version of the word is spelled differently to differentiate it from its negative sense. Since the 1990s, phat has been a slang term for something \u201cexcellent\u201d or \u201cgreat.\u201d It\u2019s used to talk about music in sentences like \u201cthat song has a phat beat\u201d or to gush over \u201ca phat car,\u201d while a phat guy or girl is \u201chot.\u201d In some uses, both past and present, bitch has also improved in meaning just like this, reversing its general trend of pejoration. In terms of slang, bitch can be an empowering term for a strong, powerful woman, and while being a good bitch is a good thing, so is being a bad bitch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why do words ameliorate? It seems to be a case of groups of people, such as adolescents, developing a word that\u2019s used in-group, which is then gradually adopted on a popular level. Like pejoration, amelioration is a natural phenomenon that is found across languages, and it reflects shifting values and attitudes in society across both culture and time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To find out more, read Karen Stollznow\u2019s new book Bitch: The Journey of a Word<\/a>, published by Cambridge University Press.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Bitch by Karen Stollznow<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my last article I discussed pejoration, the historical process by which words develop negative connotations. Now let\u2019s look at the other side of the coin: amelioration. This is another type of semantic change, that is, the process by which the meaning of a word evolves over time. Amelioration is when words with negative or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":824,"featured_media":61658,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11372],"tags":[],"coauthors":[7604],"class_list":["post-61657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-language-and-linguistics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/824"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61657"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61676,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61657\/revisions\/61676"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61657"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=61657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}