Have A Gay Old Time / Other

• Other languages, German: A "Dirne" was simply a girl (and still is in dialect: cf. "Deern" and "Dirndl"). Nowadays it means a prostitute, but the word is so obsolete that it is only used semi-poetically even for that (akin to the English "harlot" and "strumpet"). "Wichsen" meant to apply shoe cream, but transfer by analogy shifted the standard meaning completely. "Geil" went ping-pong. A biological term first ("wild") the meaning turned first into "horny" and by overuse it now rather means "cool, groovy" or something like that.
• 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 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 foreign 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… odd to contemporary viewers. ^note Arrested Development had fun with that last confusion, with a joke about two programs called "startled straight", for entirely different purposes.
• There is a Finnish educational video titled Muna on mukava juttu, "An egg is a nice thing", which tells about the health benefits of eggs. Unfortunately, showing the video to a school class is bound to cause some snickering due to the word "muna", "egg", also being a slang term for a testicle. Make the word a plural and it either refers to multiple eggs or testicles. Cue laughter when one of the kids on the video instructs his friends to "take the eggs in your hands…"
  • Likewise, the Spanish word for "egg" is "huevo". "Huevos" both means "eggs", in the plural, and is used as a slang word for "testicles" in Spanish. Actually, "eggs" is a pretty common slang term for "testicles" worldwide: witness^note There's a pun in there for anyone who knows Latin. Eier in German and beiḍān (which specifically means "pair of eggs") in many Arabic dialects. And let's not forget that in many an ulpan (intensive Hebrew course for new immigrants) class in Israel, there's plenty of giggling over learning the word beitza (especially amongst Russian speaking immigrants, where the slang for "testicles" is exactly the same as in Hebrew).
  • The Nahuatl word for avocado (āhuacatl) was also used in pre-Columbian Mexico to mean "testicle".
• A filmstrip put out by the LDS church back in the 70s has a funny example of this in its Spanish translation. The filmstrip is an allegory comparing a caterpillar in its cocoon to the resurrection. At one point, the younger brother insists that the caterpillar must be dead since it's been inside its cocoon for so long. The older brother explains to the younger brother that these things just take time and that "pronto saldrá de su capullo y será una bella mariposa." Technically, that means "soon he'll come out of his cocoon and be a beautiful butterfly." However, taking into account certain slang terms, it can also mean "soon he'll come out of his foreskin and be a beautiful gay man."
• The term "G-string" originally meant "a loincloth worn by American Indian men". Referring to the groin, then an inappropriate term for polite company. G-string was intentionally juxtaposed with the musical term (the lowest string on a violin, which is tuned to the G note).
• Related to the above, "thong" originally meant "leather strap". Fashion-wise, it referred to basic sandals with a single strap that you slid between your first and second toes. Today, "thong" exclusively refers to risque underwear that goes between the buttcheeks, while thong sandals are now called "flip flops" and are conflated with slide sandals that you slide your feet into, as both styles make the same "flip-flop" noise while walking.
  • Averted in Australia, where flip-flops are called "thongs", leading to awkward conversations with foreigners.
• The first Russian translation of Theatrum Orbis Terrarum was called Pozorishche Vseya Vselennyya (The View/Show of the Whole World). The first word used to mean "show" back then, but now it means "great shame".
• A 1972 paper by WD Hamilton on the evolution of altruism in insects uses the word "bisexual" to mean that a behavior is found in both sexes of a species. Nowadays the term is "unisex".
• Apparently, a 1883 London Times article had this little line describing the role of a Bouncer:
  "'The Bouncer' is merely the English 'chucker out'. When liberty verges on license and gaiety on wanton delirium, the Bouncer selects the gayest of the gay, and—bounces him!"
• In the Flashman novels, the eponymous anti-hero uses genuine Victorian slang, in which "bouncers" are a coarse expression for female breasts.
• Various TV shows, movies, and animes up to around the mid 90's would sometimes refer to condominiums as "condoms" for short. This descriptor stopped being used after real estate industry people realized that the word "condom" has an entirely different meaning outside of the real estate market.
• Xbox Live once suspended a Fort Gay, West Virginia resident for putting the town's name as his profile location. That user brought it up with customer service, trying to convince them that Fort Gay is a real location, and had nothing to do with sexual orientation. Even the town's mayor tried to intervene, to no avail. Fortunately, the situation did eventually get reversed when Stephen Toulouse, the director of policy and enforcement for Xbox Live, personally intervened.
  • This problem is a common one; for instance, in the British branch of AOL, it was (is?) difficult for residents of Scunthorpe, Penistone, et cetera, to get accounts.
  • The residents of Gay Head, Massachusetts (on Martha's Vineyard), named after the brightly-colored cliffs surrounding its beach, voted to officially change the town's name to Aquinnah in 1997.
• A long time ago, German men named Ignaz (from Ignatius) often got the nickname "Naz" or "Nazi". Guess why this stopped sometime during the twentieth century, especially with the latter nickname.
  • But in America at least, the nickname was probably pronounced "Nazzy" rather than "Notzee."
  • This hasn't stopped with "Naz" though. There is a female Ed, Edd n Eddy character with Nazz as a name.
  • This is actually the origin of the term "Nazi" as we know it. The name Ignaz is common in Bavaria, a region stereotypically associated with rural hicks^note "Hick" itself followed the same process, being an obsolete nickname for "Richard", so "Nazi" (being a nickname for Ignaz) became a term for "yokel" in Germany. When the Nationalsozialistische ("National Socialist") party came along, its opponents shortened Nationalsozialistische to "Nazi" in order to insult them. It helped that the Nazi Party originated in Bavaria.
  • In Spain, Nazareth is a common female name. And it was shortened to Nazi. In the XX century, all those poor girls found themselves looking for a new nickname. Desperately.
  • "Nazi" is actually a common Persian name for girls, derived from the Persian word naz, which means "coy". If you're in Persian-speaking regions (i.e. Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan), no one will bat an eye if you have it, since the Nazi German connotation is not really strong there.^note Then again, Iran is what "Aryan" properly refers to. Incidentally, "Arya" is a common name in Persian-speaking regions, this time for boys.
• In the (German) opera Lohengrin, the title character insists upon being called the Leader rather than the Duke of Brabant. In the opera itself, the word Führer was originally used for "Leader" in performances. This was changed to Schützer (protector) for reasons that should be obvious.
• George Gordon, 1st Duke of Gordon was known as "the Gay Gordon", primarily because of his many extramarital affairs, but also because of a general love of high life.
• The word 'courtesan' is also a fine example. At one time, it was simply the word that applied to women who had a position at Court, just as 'courtier' applies to men. (It's from French courtisane or Italian cortigiana, which are simply the feminine forms of the words for 'courtier', courtisan or cortigiano.) Now...
  • This is brought up in Moonlight, when Mick tells Beth that Coraline used to be a courtesan in pre-Revolutionary France. Beth immediately assumes this means a "hooker", but Mick explains that it simply means a "lady of the court". However, Coraline does have a fleur-de-lis brand on her shoulder, which some assume means that she was a prostitute.
• A French example: The verb baiser, which originally meant "to kiss," now only means "to fuck." (Confusingly, the noun un baiser still is just a kiss; the noun for "a fuck" is une baise. The modern verb for "to kiss" is embrasser.) Since this verb was obviously used abundantly in earlier times, it's very common to find it in old works of literature... and even old dictionaries, much to the dismay of students of French. This may have been deliberately invoked in Hunter × Hunter, which actually has a character named Baise. Her power is to invoke intense sexual desire of any type she likes in any man by kissing him.
• Likewise, nowadays embrasser is usually taken as meaning "to kiss", but etymologically it means "to take in one's arms".^note  The English word embrace is in fact a cognate of the Old French form embrachier Those evolutions are related, by the way, as embrasser started to take its modern meaning to make up for baiser having increasingly vulgar connotations (all of this dates back from the second half of the 19th century).
• In a different kind of evolution, the word "nyctalope" has kept its meaning of "able to see in the dark" intact... what changed, however, is that in modern French the word sounds almost identical to "nique ta lope", a phrase that means "fuck your bitch"^note "Nique" comes from "fornique" ("fornicate"), and "lope" from "salope" ("dirty bitch"), making it very hard to use in a serious conversation. In the early 20th century there was actually a French superhero called "Le Nyctalope"; needless to say, no one would even think of publishing a comic under that name now, unless it's a satire.
• Former MEP Godfrey Bloom of the far right UK Independence Party used this trope to justify remarks in which he referred to women who don't clean behind the fridge regularly as "sluts". His excuse was that the word "slut" apparently used to mean a lazy or slovenly woman. ^note He was right. It goes back to Chaucer and meant slob. Dust mice used to be "slut's wool". Later a slut was a maid whose job was to clean filthy messes, which led to the term being associated with romantic and marital infidelity. It didn't work, and Bloom was forced to resign.
• When the term "black hole" came into vogue in the West in the 1960s, the older terms "collapsar", "collapsed star", or "frozen star" remained in use in Russia for some time longer. As it happens, the direct translation of "black hole" (Чёрная дыра/chornaya dyra) has a somewhat scatological meaning in Russian slang.
• In computing, "to hack" used to refer to programming (said to be from the "hack-hack-hack" noise of typing on a Teletype 33 or one of its many clones). However, tabloid newspapers tend to abuse the term to mean penetration of security systems (for which the correct term is "cracking"). This is probably due to TRON, where Kevin Flynn in one early scene admits "I've been doing a little hacking" ("I've written a program to penetrate Encom"), which is easily misinterpreted as "I have penetrated Encom". Some organisations, such as the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the Inkscape Foundation, are trying to reclaim "hacking" in its original meaning.
  • Among programmers, hacking generally refers to a style of programming that favors speed of development and one-off solutions (which makes it favored by crackers) over careful design, stability, and reusability. It's best summarized by Facebook's "hacker way" philosophy of "move fast and break things". Thus, "a hack" is an often-derogatory term for a quick-and-dirty fix to a problem. But it has entered the popular lexicon more as "a cool trick to impress your friends".
• In medical usage, a "thrill" means a pulse that can be detected with the fingertips, and "to feel for a thrill" thus means to search for the patient's pulse. This can lead to unfortunate double meanings depending on which part of the body the doctor is searching for a pulse, especially if it's a male doctor and a female patient.
• Not extremely awkward, but before "cool" became a synonym for "hip", it meant cold (as in, bland or unemotional). Confusion easily arises when, in older literature, a character who is anything but is described as "cool" (when the writer meant to use it in a similar metaphorical sense as that assigned to "cold").
• In politics, terms now reserved for very bad leaders were once neutral terms. The term "despot" was a title given to members of the Byzantine royal family. A "tyrant" was an ancient Greek monarch who did not inherit his position. A "dictator" was a Roman official who held absolute power for six months during times of emergency.
• On a related note, a certain symbol which is now permanently associated with the Nazis was originally a positive symbol, typically used to represent good luck. (It also originated in India.)
• The original usage of Pilot referred to sailor who guided ships through dangerous or congested waters. While it is still used in that sense the newer definition of aircraft pilot is a lot more common and the original usage can sound strange to modern ears (for example in Pirates of Penzance).
• In Esperanto, the word gaja means "cheerful" or "merry". Take a wild guess where the term came from. ^note Esperanto was created in the 19th century, and thus contains relics of that era - another example would be knabo, meaning "boy", from the German Knabe, although modern German instead uses Junge to mean boy. "Gay" in the sense of "homosexual," though, is geja (where the first syllable is pronounced like the English word; the first syllable of gaja sounds like "guy.")
• Supposedly, this was a major reason that Disney renamed their Euro Disney Resort theme park "Disneyland Resort Paris" in 2002. The park was first opened in 1992, when "Euro" was a perfectly innocent abbreviation for "European". Then in 2002, most of the European Union (including France) adopted the "euro" as their new currency, and it suddenly seemed pretty awkward that a major theme park had "euro" in its name — as if it was just an expensive place where guests could throw away their euros. We mean, it is, but just stating that is kinda crude, you know?
• In Portugal, a money box, or any sort of small decorative box, is called a boceta. In Brazil, the world is, almost exclusively, a vulgar term for vagina (just like "box" is used in english), with caixa being the name for literal boxes. This leads to a lot of sophmoric giggling whenever someone reads an old text about "Pandora's box", or about a boy whose money "comes from his mother's money box".
• Paragraph 96 of the Constitution of Norway used to include the sentence, "Pinligt Forhør maa ikke finde Sted". This says that interrogations can't be "pinlig", which means that the interrogators can't pressure you to confess. However, the modern meaning of "pinlig" is "embarrassing", so it sounds like a ban on embarrassing interrogations. This was finally changed when the Constitution was modernized in 2014: Paragraph 96 now says something else, and the prohibition on stuff like torture was moved to paragraph 93 (and, of course, no longer includes the word "pinlig").
• "Boomer" once meant something that was large and/or notable, or, more uncommonly, it could be a name given to boys. It was then used to refer to people born in the Baby Boomer generation. It's also a Cold War era slang term for a submarine that launches nuclear missiles. It's also Aussie slang for a male kangaroo. Nowadays, it's commonly used by younger people as an insult against older and/or out-of-touch people, though it has roots in using the latter definition in a derogatory way.
• When a Laurel and Hardy Appreciation Society was being set up, Stan Laurel himself suggested it be named "Boobs in the Woods". It was explained to him that the meaning of that word had changed over the years, and the society became "The Sons of the Desert" instead.
• There is an Australian ice cream known as Golden Gaytime, colloquially shortened to just "Gaytime." This ice cream has long been a fixture in Australian popular culture, the word being very closely associated with the ice cream. This association has allowed "Gaytime" to remain intact in Australian speech up to the present day—at the expense of non-Australians, who might get confused as to why everyone is suddenly going to get together and "have some Gaytime."
• The Western Illinois/Eastern Iowa ice cream brand Whitey's, is beloved by those in the region, and a source of amusement to tourists. The brand was founded in the 1930s, and "Whitey" was the founder's nickname, not because of his skin, but because of his hair.
• There was a type of dish popular in 16th century England known as "Farts of Portingale" or "Portugeuse Farts".
• A "Geek" used to be a type of circus performer who would perform gross stunts like swallowing and spitting out nails, or biting the heads off animals. Now, it's pretty much synonymous with "Nerd," denoting someone who has an interest in science, technology, or non-mainstream culture like Sci-Fi, while also being shy or awkward. While it's pretty obvious from context what type of geek is meant, it's still pretty strange to think that a word most people reading this have been called or called themselves used to mean you bit the head off a chicken.
• The word "perish" was intended to mean suffering eternal damnation (see the Bible verse John 3:16), but nowadays, it's mostly referred to as slang for just dying.
• Some years before Jackie Robinson broke the Major League Baseball color line, there was a short-lived team in the Negro American League (NAL) called the Atlanta Black Crackers. Fast forward a few generations, to when "cracker" became a racial slur against white people.
• The word "ace" refers to either the playing card or means "excellent" as a verb, or someone who is an expert in something, here as "excellent craftsmanship in caravan manufacture", and this is probably what ABI (Award Belmont International) meant when they launched their caravan and motorhome ranges. Nowadays, Ace caravan rights are held by the Swift Group in Humberside, England instead of ABI while the ABI name trades as a separate entity producing park homes, holiday homes and static caravans. However, The Swift Group discontinued the brand in 2008, probably unaware that the term "ace" was becoming slang for asexual people as of The New '10s. However, the intended meaning of "excellent" was what they aimed for when marketing these range of budget caravans from the 1970s to 2008. However, older generations probably may not get the reference, as the brand disappeared due to the recession and Swift Group making cutbacks because of it.
• The British Broadcasting Corporation has found itself running afoul of many parental control filters, including their own, that keep flagging their acronym as meaning something else entirely.
• Inverted when Lynda Carter made a tweet about Fat Bear Week, saying that when she first heard of it, she thought it was about the gay male subculture and body positivity (likely because she's had a strong LGBT Fanbase for decades), only to later find out it's about actual grizzly bears gorging themselves before winter hibernation. She loved it all the same.
• "Grooming" originally meant "caring for one's personal appearance or hygiene" or "brushing & cleaning an animal's fur." In recent times, the term has come to mean "gaining the trust of somebody with intentions of luring them into sexual activity."
• Emo is a chain of petrol stations operating in Ireland, Northern Ireland and parts of the UK mainland. The chain, when it was founded, was named for the County Laois town of Emo, who's name was based on the Irish word Ioma, meaning "bed" or "resting place", but nowadays "emo" is the name of a subculture and music genre characterized by an emphasis on emotional expression. Emo petrol stations remain a frequent sight on the island of Ireland to this day — at the expense of being a source of amusement for tourists, who might giggle when spotting the sign for an Emo station.
• Pickaway County, Ohio has various places with the name Hitler, such as Hitler Road, Hitler-Ludwig Cemetery and Hitler Pond. These places were not named after Adolf Hitler, but instead a local family named Hitler who lived in the area long before the Nazis came into power.
• In Brazil, the name Bráulio^note pronounced BROW-lee-oh became a slang for penis after a 1995 TV spot that was part of a Ministry of Health campaign for condom use showed a man calling his penis by that name. Due to that, the campaign was taken off air and the name became less and less used as time went by (not that it was a popular name before). Many men with that name got the legal right to change it after proving it became an Embarrassing First Name for them, the same way not many men in the Anglosphere go by "Dick" anymore (though admittedly that's just a diminutive of "Richard" and such a man has other options to go by).
• Up until well into the 21st century, there was a common slang term for an automotive transmission that happened to be identical to a well-known disparaging term for transgender people. Since the latter usage is now widely recognized as a slur, transmissions are seldom called that anymore.

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