History Main / HaveAGayOldTime

* "Spastic" has fallen into this in UsefulNotes/BritishEnglish, where it has come to be a very offensive term meaning "someone with cerebral paulsy." [[SeparatedByACommonLanguage This can cause confusion]] when used by an UsefulNotes/AmericanEnglish speaker, because in America the word retains its original, inoffensive meaning.

* "Spastic" has fallen into this in UsefulNotes/BritishEnglish, where it has come to be a very offensive term. [[SeparatedByACommonLanguage This can cause confusion]] when used by an UsefulNotes/AmericanEnglish speaker, because in America the word retains its original, inoffensive meaning.

* "Spastic" has fallen into this; in UsefulNotes/BritishEnglish it has come to be a very offensive term, such that it can and does cause ValuesDissonance when used by an American-English speaker who is only aware of the original meanings. (The Spastics Society had to change its name to Scope because of idiots abusing this term to project their stupidity onto disabled people.) Fortunately, there are still inoffensive alternatives; "spasmodic" if referring to the original meaning, "manic" or "frantic" if referring to behaviour, and so on.

* "Sod", another name for a clod of earth, is also an insult in Britain. This leads to a lot of giggling from school children during Christmas performances of "[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_King_Wenceslas Good King Wenceslas]]."

* "spastic" has fallen into this; in UsefulNotes/BritishEnglish it has come to be a very offensive term, such that it can and does cause ValuesDissonance when used by an American-English speaker who is only aware of the original meanings. (The Spastics Society had to change its name to Scope because of idiots abusing this term to project their stupidity onto disabled people.) Fortunately, there are still inoffensive alternatives; "spasmodic" if referring to the original meaning, "manic" or "frantic" if referring to behaviour, and so on.

[[quoteright:216:http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/comic.jpg]] [-[[caption-width-right:216:How the hell was this ''[[AccidentalInnuendo not]]'' [[GettingCrapPastTheRadar on purpose]]?! Time, my friends, time.]]-]

* The word "Negro", now considered to be a racial slur or at least a politically incorrect term, used to be a neutral term to refer to black people until the late 1960s.

Words changed meaning less frequently before the advent of radio and television, and when they did change the transformation could be slow (as seen with "gay" above). It took over a hundred years for the primary meaning of the verb "want" to change from "lack" to "desire". Television sped things up: it took only a few weeks in the 70s for the meaning of "boob" to change from "dummy" to "breast" [[Series/MatchGame among the general public]]. Naturally, with the advent of the uncensored Internet, words can change meaning almost overnight these days.

Keep in mind that some of these words actually ''did'' have their modern meaning at the time they were used, but [[GeniusBonus only within certain sections of the populace]]. The meaning of the word "gay" began to change as early as ''1870'' among the criminal classes of New York, where it originally meant "prostitute" (yes, before TheGayNineties); around 1900 the meaning changed to "homosexual prostitute" and within five years of that to simply "homosexual". This means that in some cases the writers are using the words deliberately in order to [[GettingCrapPastTheRadar get crap past the radar]]. [[hottip:* :It would be amusing if people from TheGayNineties {{Time Travel}}ed to today, and wondered why there were people who opposed prostitutes getting married, and happy marriages in general.]]

Words changed meaning less frequently before the advent of radio and television, and when they did change the transformation could be slow (as seen with "gay" above). It took over a hundred years for the primary meaning of the verb "want" to change from "lack" to "desire". Television sped things up: it took only a few weeks in the 70s for the meaning of "boob" to change from "dummy" to "breast" [[Series/MatchGame among the general public]]. Naturally, with the advent of the uncensored Internet words can change meaning almost overnight these days.

* The word "Negro", now considered to be a racial slur, used to be a neutral term to refer to black people until the late 1960s.

* Similar to one HaveAGayOldTime/VideoGames example, the eponym "Lesbian" (title case) means "person or thing from the Mediterranean Isle of Lesbos" (aka Lesvos or Mytilini). However, since one such person in classical Greek times was Sappho, who specialised in poems about friendships (at all levels) between women (though whether she herself was gay is unknown), the metonym "lesbian" (sentence case) has come to mean "gay woman". Hence the original, eponymic meaning is seldom or never used these days. There was [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesbos#LGBT_tourism an attempt in 2008]] to "rectify" this by banning the metonym, but this case was ruled an attempt to breach human rights.

* Similar to one HaveAGayOldTime/VideoGames example, the eponym "Lesbian" (title case) means "person or thing from the Mediterranean Isle of Lesbos". However, since one such person in classical Greek times was Sappho, who specialised in poems about friendships (at all levels) between women (though whether she herself was gay is unknown), the metonym "lesbian" (sentence case) has come to mean "gay woman". Hence the original, eponymic meaning is seldom or never used these days.

* There is an icecream in Australia titled as the "Golden 'Gay'time, with the tagline of "It's hard to have a gaytime by your own!"

* With some words, the shift comes from a narrowing of the meaning. "Aroused" originally was just a past-tense version of "arise" and could be used to refer to all manner of raising, such as being awakened or having one's emotions stirred up, or rising sexual desire (usually accompanied, in men, with a ''physical'' rise in a certain part of the anatomy). Nowadays, nearly the only use for it is the sexual one, making the other uses in older works sound a bit funny. Likewise, "straight" originally could be the opposite of being morally crooked, strung out on drugs, or sexually devious. Nowadays, only the last definition is usually applied, and that usually only as opposed to homosexuality (though occasionally, one can still see it applied to other unconventional sexualities in warning labels on important works, e.g. "If you're straight and don't like incest, this manga is not for you.") Older works such as the TV special "Scared Straight" (about scaring kids out of juvenile delinquency and criminality) and drug-addled hippies talking about "getting my head straight" in movies may therefore seem rather, um... queer to contemporary viewers.

* Similar to one HaveAGayOldTime/VideoGames example, the eponym "Lesbian" (title case) means "person or thing from the Mediterranean Isle of Lesvos". However, since one such person in classical Greek times was Sappho, who specialised in poems about friendships (at all levels) between women (though whether she herself was gay is unknown), the metonym "lesbian" (sentence case) has come to mean "gay woman". Hence the original, eponymic meaning is seldom or never used these days.