History Analysis / HaveAGayOldTime

* '''Spunk''' used to be synonymous with pluck, moxie, fight, and spirit. Nowadays, though mostly in Britain, the term more often refers to semen and the ejaculation thereof. The aforementioned trope has mostly dropped the term as a result in favor of other synonyms.

** '''Cock''' means a number of things, the most dominantly used in American English certainly refers to the penis. However, its oldest meaning is "rooster" or male chicken. It can also mean a spirited, arrogant person. This can lead to confusion in certain parts of Asia where roosters are always referred to as cocks (as a result of this, Huy Fong sriracha, which has an image of a rooster on the bottle, is sometimes called "cock sauce", which some people may find funny).

* '''Jackass''' or simply "ass" used to only mean "donkey", but is now an insult, or a slang term for the posterior in American English. The combination of a Bible quotes chatbot and an auto-censor script can be [[http://bash.org/?178890 interesting.]]
** The confusion between "ass" as donkey and "ass" as rear end occurs in a dialogue in the novel ''Tristram Shandy'' written from 1759 to 1769.

** Speaking of queer women, a woman's "girlfriend" used to be her friend in a purely platonic sense, as in "Going to the movies with my girlfriends." But with same-gender romance being far more normalized today, straight women gradually phased out the term to avoid sounding like they mean something else. Nowadays a woman's female friends are either her girls or her friends, but not her girlfriends. Though you may hear it from older women for whom the habit stuck.

* '''Vintage''' was at first used specifically for high-quality wine, given that it derives from Latin ''vin''. Nowadays, however, it refers to something of high quality that has stood the test of time.

* '''Rude''' used to be frequently used to mean unrefined or primitive. Thus when ''The Song of Hiawatha'' refers to itself as a "rude inscription," it means something like a rustic piece of writing, rather than an impolite or obscene one.

* '''Cream''', as a verb, is dated slang for "to beat up" or "to thoroughly defeat." Now it often means "to have sex with" or "to ejaculate on or in.". The meaning of "to (literally) add cream to something", is still currently safe.

*** Actually, it retains its original meaning of "strange" dialectically in many parts of the United States (New England, for example). This can lead to [[SeparatedByACommonLanguage funny conversations]] with city slickers and British visitors.

* '''Naughty''' originally meant worthless, as it comes from the same word root as "naught" (i.e. nothing).[[Literature/BookOfJeremiah Jeremiah 24:2]] mentions a basket of "naughty figs", meaning they were spoiled and worthless.

* '''Miscreant''' originally meant a heretic, as it comes from the roots "-mis" ("bad"/"wrong") and -credent ("believer), so basically "person who believes something bad/wrong". Nowadays it's almost always used to just mean a bad person in general, although most dictionaries also list the archaic definition as well.

** '''Homo''' can mean one of two things: either the Greek prefix ''homo-'', meaning "the same" (for example, "homogeneous" basically means "the same throughout"); or the Latin ''homo'', which can mean either a human being or the human species (this is where our species name, ''Homo sapiens'', lit. "thinking man", comes from. Latin ''homo'' as a prefix becomes ''homi-'', as in "homicide"). Since at least the '60s, however, 'homo' on its own has come to be a shortening of "homosexual", which leads to many snickers in introductory biology classes where the instructor explains that every person in the room [[DoubleEntendre is technically]] a ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo Homo]]'', or is descended from the unfortunately named species ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus Homo erectus]]'' (which contains another example on this list). Though the last example is inherently funny anyway.

* '''Holocaust''' originally meant a burnt offering made as a sacrifice to a deity in which the sacrificial animal was entirely burned (instead of some of the meat being eaten). Later, it meant any kind of [[KillItWithFire destructive fire]] (The literal meaning of the word is "burning everything"). Nowadays, the term automatically calls to mind UsefulNotes/TheHolocaust. Even [[AllLowercaseLetters uncapitalized]], the term still refers to mass-murder or a mass-casualty event on an extreme scale, such as genocide or nuclear war. Of course, that last one still implies death by nuclear fire.

** The {{Trope Namer|s}} is of course based on the word "gay", which once meant "happy, carefree, joyful". It started to take on its modern meaning of "homosexual" in the 1930s, but continued to be used in its original sense throughout TheForties and TheFifties (giving us things like "a gay little love melody" in works as late as 1959's ''WesternAnimation/SleepingBeauty''). The original meaning was still in common use as late as TheSeventies.
*** You still won't find a nosegay in the ''Literature/KamaSutra'', but in a florist shop.[[note]]"Gay" was also a Middle English word meaning "ornament", so a nosegay is literally "an ornament that pleases the nose".[[/note]]
*** "Gay" even saw use as a girl's name up until the '60s or so. It was never too common, but more than one woman was named "Gay" and lived long enough for "I'm Gay" to take a totally different meaning. It is also a reasonably common surname of French origin. Sometimes people change the spelling to "Gey" or "Gaye" in order to avoid ridicule--though others revel in it.
*** For a somewhat brief period, the early 1990s until the late 2000s, "Gay" could also be a pejorative term for anything the speaker didn't like, a slightly stronger version of "lame". As in the same period, the LGBTQ+ movement gained new ground in both legal rights and cultural visibility, the UnfortunateImplications of using "gay" in this fashion became more widely known in the English speaking world. Consequently, this use has fallen out of favor since the late 2000s-early 2010s, and is rarely if ever used in this way even now, making works from the era where it was common half an example of this, and half an example of Main/GetTheeToANunnery depending on the context. This example is notable because "Gay" was used to mean "lame" specifically because of the connotations of homosexuality it already had; Casual homophobia was quite common in the late 90s, especially among teenagers.
** "Queer" originally meant "strange or odd" and later came to refer to homosexuals, sometimes pejoratively and sometimes not. (Lately, this has been fluctuating as the cultural context shifts.) Nowadays "Queer" has largely become an umbrella term for LGBTQ+, though some older people in the community disagree with using it that way, as they remember when it was a slur.
*** Saying "I'm queer for (blank)" used to mean "I have a strong liking for (blank)."

*** Actually, it retains its original meaning of "strange" dialectically in many parts of the United States (New England for example). This can lead to [[SeparatedByACommonLanguage funny conversations]] with city slickers and British visitors.

** The word "faggot" used to be an alternative spelling of "fagot", which means a bundle of sticks -- before becoming a pejorative term for homosexuals, as well as a vulgar insult in general. From the original term also came the word "fag," which, in Britain is a slang for cigarette but is basically considered "the ''other'' F-bomb" in the United States, which can lead to [[SeparatedByACommonLanguage occasional unfortunate misunderstandings]].
*** "Fag" was also slang at British public schools for a younger boy who essentially acted as a servant to an older boy. While this no doubt included sexual favors in some cases, that wasn't the default assumption. Thus, it's not uncommon for a man in an older British work to say casually "Oh yes, I know him well--I was his fag at school."

*** The musical instrument known in English as the bassoon is named "fagotto" in Italian, "fagot" in Spanish, and "Fagott" in German. It's common to see these terms abbreviated in scores as "Fag."

*** Fag is English slang shorthand for "Cigarette", though it has largely been replaced by variants of the word "Ciggie", which is far less offensive, and makes considerably more sense as shorthand.
** "Coming out" is now short for "coming out of the closet," which is when someone publicly reveals that they're LGBTQ+. The term "come out" used to refer to upper-class young women graduating from finishing school, where they learned social etiquette and could now be married and otherwise viewed as adult women. The occasion was celebrated with a "coming-out party," also known as a debutante ball, where the graduating class was presented as proper ladies.[[note]]These balls still exist in the upper class, but they're more focused on the young women's charity work than their marriageability.[[/note]] However, finishing schools became obsolete in the 1960s as it became more acceptable for women to go to college and pursue careers after high school rather than husbands. As a result, using "come out" in this manner has been forgotten in modern times.
*** This was parodied in ''[[Magazine/{{MAD}} MAD Magazine]]'s'' "Then and Now" strip. "Lisa's Coming-Out Party" under "Then" was a girl in a ballgown. Under "Now," she was a lesbian introducing her girlfriend to her parents.

** The gender-flip is in the process of happening in Quebecois French, where ''chum'' can mean both "male friend" and "male significant other," and straight men are more reticent these days about referring to ''mon chum,'' at least in the singular.
** '''Homo''' can mean one of two things: either the Greek prefix ''homo-'', meaning "the same" (for example, "homogeneous" basically means "the same throughout"); or the Latin ''homo'', which can mean either a human being or the human species (this is where our species name, ''Homo sapiens'', lit. "Thinking man," comes from. Latin ''homo'' as a prefix becomes ''homi-'', as in "homicide"). Since at least the '60s, however, 'homo' on its own has come to be a shortening of "homosexual", which leads to many snickers in introductory biology classes where the instructor explains that every person in the room [[DoubleEntendre is technically]] a ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo Homo]]'', or is descended from the unfortunately named species ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus Homo erectus]]'' (which contains another example on this list). Though the last example is inherently funny anyway.
*** Thus there is an episode of ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'' where Martin Prince gleefully tells Bart that the bone he found might be a fossil from "one of the major Homos!" to which Bart says, [[NoYou "You're a major homo,"]] only for Lisa to tell him not to bother, since Martin is so naive and lacking social skills that he genuinely ''does not know'' the word's more common meaning and thus won't get the insult toward him.
*** In French spy terminology, the correct term for wetwork is "opération homo". In context, "homo" is short for "homicide" (which itself comes from the Latin word). Out of context, the term is kinda awkward in France, due to "homo" having exactly the same common meaning it has in English.

* Companies and organizations rarely use [[EverythingsBetterWithRainbows rainbow imagery]] as a logo anymore, due to it now being the symbol of queer pride. Or if they do, they'll change it such as adding or [[RainbowLite removing a color from the basic six]], have one color be out of order etc. Or even making it a (usually) temporary variant to show their support for their queer fan/customer base.

* The word '''lover''' used to mean nothing more than "fond friend" and had nothing to do with whether the two were romantically connected. In early modern English it could even mean "ally," as when Theatre/JuliusCaesar reads a note signed "thy lover Artemidorus." The term used for a sexual partner back then was "paramour". The old use of the word survives in the [[UsefulNotes/TheWestCountry West Country English]] dialect, where the phrase "Hello my lover!" is often used as a common greeting. Now it mostly means not merely a sexual partner but an adulterous one. For a while in the 1990s and 2000s, people in the LGBTQ community commonly used it to mean "person one is in a relationship with," with nothing illicit intended, but it's since been superseded in that sense by "partner."

[-''NOTE: Please only list words or phrases that are '''way''' more commonly used with its vulgar definition than its original innocent definition that was commonly used back in the past. Clean words or phrases that happen to have dirty slang meanings simply aren't enough.\\
(Also, this list is meant for common words or phrases. If you have one that's more specific or less known, it's better off in the "Other" folder.)''-]

[[/folder]]