Jessica Roy writes for the NY Times (archived) about the increasing public acceptance of a term. The story’s headline is “A Wildly Obscene Term’s Path to Mainstream Usage,” and you know that’s bullshit because if it were wildly obscene the Times wouldn’t touch it, but it does relate to sex, so I guess they feel daring for running with it:
If you suddenly feel like you’re noticing the term “rawdogging” used widely and in surprising contexts — online, in the office, at the bar — you’re not alone.
Over the last few months, the slang term, which has historically been used to refer to sexual intercourse without a condom, has been adopted to describe almost any activity accomplished without the assistance of a buffer. Now, you can rawdog the flu by refusing medication; you can rawdog cooking by not using a recipe; you can even rawdog life, by being sober.
The most obvious example of the term’s spread is the phenomenon of “rawdogging” flights. The trend, which was written about last month by GQ, has been cropping up across social media platforms like TikTok and X, with people — mostly men — enduring long flights without indulging in any entertainment other than staring at the in-flight map. The concept, which was the subject of a viral tweet in 2022, has come as a shock to some commenters who couldn’t imagine why someone would put themselves through something so boring.
But according to Adam Aleksic, a linguist and content creator who is writing a book about how social media has changed language, Gen Z was using the term long before the flight videos started spreading rapidly on TikTok. Mr. Aleksic said he first noticed the usage of the word beginning to shift around 2019 or 2020. […] “It’s not a new thing that it’s like Gen Z making weird sex jokes,” he said. “Everybody’s always found sex jokes funny. That’s just a recurring, time-honored process.”
Mr. Aleksic explained that the term has become a dysphemism: instead of making a concept lighter or less offensive, as one might do with a euphemism, “we make it more intense for a joking purpose,” he said.
In a TikTok post that received more than three million views, Mr. Aleksic explained that dysphemisms typically go through three phases: “There’s the novel phase, where we create a metaphor largely for shock value,” he said. “Then we have the semi-lexicalized phase, which is still understood as inappropriate but contextualized within a larger conceptual framework. Finally, the dysphemism becomes completely lexicalized and we forget it was ever inappropriate.”
I was unfamiliar with the term, but the semantic development is perfectly normal. I predict, however, that “becomes completely lexicalized and we forget it was ever inappropriate” is pushing it: “becomes last year’s slang and we forget it was ever a thing” is more likely. Thanks, Eduardo!
“Over the last few months, the slang term, which has historically been used to refer to sexual intercourse without a condom […]”. But riding/going bareback is a much more common term for the same activity.
I thought of sending this article to you yesterday, but decided not to as it was both mundane and sensationalized. Following the strained logic of the essay, I may be rawdogging my field of daylilies when I neglect the tiller and press a seed into the heavy blue clay soil. Or I could just say I planted the seed in untilled earth.
It is both mundane and sensationalized, but the fact that it’s being sensationalized by the Gray Lady amused me.
Perhaps some speakers distinguish “going bareback” from “rawdogging” based on the particular flavour of sex involved? Further research needed.
you know that’s bullshit because if it were wildly obscene the Times wouldn’t touch it,
As a Gen Xer I do find the term far more graphic than «fucking », or «going bareback ». I did a double take when I read that article about young men flying and assumed it was Gen Z ers taking advantage of Boomers’ lexical ignorance. (I still feel that way to be honest.). To me it’s a porn word, misogynistic when referring to heterosexual sex, and thus pretty ugly. It’s adoption makes sense in the context of people like Andrew Tate and a world where Trump has a 20+ percentage point lead among white men. But given that the rather graphic « scum bag » also became normalized, this certainly isn’t the first time.
“Scumbag” as a term of abuse is a decade older than its use for a condom. Some brilliant soul saw the double meaning and happily stretched the semantics. (SNS)
I did a double take when then-President Obama used the term “sucks” in a public conversation. It had been bleached long before, but still, the etymology is clear to anyone who thinks about it for a second.
My mother certainly knew the etymology of “sucks” when she would scold me for using that word when I was 9 or so, without telling me exactly why I shouldn’t say it. But there have plenty of attempts to backfill a cleaner etymology, I have heard people say things like „that sucks rotten eggs”.
In Russian its translation is basically the verb for oral sex.
In English there are other options (and I don’t understand the logic behind “giving head”)
I’m still impressed at how Deep Throat became a journalistic household name half a century ago.
I’m impressed by the absolutely arbitrary* distinction between sex (particularly an individual specific act of it) and similar intimate notions and marriage which is basically the same just repeated many times and… NOT anything intimate.
*A Muslim lady (I mean muslim countries and not Muslims in Russia) can easily make Russians blush when talking about virginity.
I’ve probably told before that ta en spansk en “take a Spanish one” = “do it the Spanish way” is a standard Norw. expression for faking it (and hoping nobody will notice), usually out of lack of time or resources to do it properly. Not an eyebrow will rise even in the best of companies.
I did a double take when then-President Obama used the term “sucks” in a public conversation
I had a similar reaction when GHW Bush said “screw up”; William Safire also commented.
John Kerry’s wife got attacked for telling right-wing editorial page writer Colin McNickle to “shove it.” She later said, not particularly believably, she had meant to say “shove off,” but she nonetheless had no regrets about her wording.
Dick Cheney, around the same time, telling senators on the Senate floor, “Go fuck yourselves,” was treated as just another example of his funny, forthright toughness. Unexamined sexism much?
Unexamined IOKIYAR, too.
I’m trying to normalize the phrase `sucking entropy’ as a GOOD THING, \eg cleaning the garage or just being alive, cf E Schr\”odinger…
@Brett: Those are both reminiscent of Pierre Trudeau’s “fuddle duddle”.
…Oh, I had completely forgotten it ever meant “condom”, which I learnt years after first encountering it as an insult. I thought it’s just part of a series with dirtbag and shitbag – though now that I think of it, it probably started the series among people who didn’t know it meant “condom” either.
Well.
1) Not everyone does that.
2) …especially not when they learn a word early enough. I’ve mentioned before how “asshole” has exchanged its two vowels in the Bavarian-Austrian dialects – and that’s even though the “hole” part keeps the etymological vowel in the plural, so it remains fully recognizable there.
3) People who do do it routinely get it wrong, aka folk etymology.
I thought it’s just part of a series with dirtbag and shitbag
I think it really is. It’s attested (in Green’s) in 1952 (with scum-bum in 1951). The ‘condom’ sense is not recorded until the 1960s.
Green records scum meaning ‘semen’ going back to 1944, with no other sense, but I always thought of scum as a term of general abuse. As the OED puts it, “Applied to an individual: A worthless wretch. Obsolete,” with quotes from 1607, 1616 (Merry Wives of Windsor, “Froth, and scum thou liest”), and 1818.
@ drasvi
[…] (and I don’t understand the logic behind “giving head”)
Should you be the beneficiary of oral sex, look down at your provider.
A kinder, gentler version of ‘shove it’? Sit on it and rotate. Sometimes followed by the intensifier, ‘ ’til you glow’.
@David Marjanović, Y: There was an interesting discussion of the whole –bag family of terms of abuse at Language Log some years ago.
@cuchuflete: I would consider that much less gentle than, “Shove it.”
Oh yes, sleazebag, douchebag*, dickbag!
Scum is the Viking cognate of German Schaum “foam (including the stuff Aphrodite is born from)”. Abschaum, literally referring to the magnesium salts of fatty acids that can end up staining laundry gray if you wash it with soap, is an obsolete collective insult (often Abschaum der Menschheit, “the worst of humanity”) that occurs today only in schools – as the approved translation of Latin sentina**, which actually referred to the contents of a pit latrine, striking me as a much more compelling insult than its translation.
* The next smaller size after the douchecanoe, I gather.
** Cicero loved using it, so it can’t just be kept out of school.
Thanks, Brett. Following the comments, how could I have forgotten the SCUM manifesto?
enduring long flights without indulging in any entertainment other than staring at the in-flight map.
Reminds me of Lt Dunbar in Catch-22, who cultivates boredom in order to make his life seem as long as possible.
Cesspool is the word I couldn’t remember last evening! The one at the top of the Wikipedia article even has “surface scum”.
Afskum is alive and well in Danish (in the transferred sense, I think the stuff skimmed from broth would just be skum now).
@DM: Maybe that’s what you wanted to say, but it’s the concrete meaning of Abschaum that is obsolete; the transferred meaning is alive, if rather literary.
When I was young in the 80s (maybe 7? Not sure), I horribly offended an older relative by saying that something “sucked”. I was totally mystified, until my dad explained to me where that word came from, which I think I still didn’t really understand.
And I’ve known this term “rawdog” for I guess about my entire adult lifetime, and I agree with what Vanya says about it – much more shocking than seeing “fucking” in the Times
Regarding long haul flights with zero entertainment, was no one else reminded of a particular Seinfeld episode with Patrick Warburton?
I’m reminded of another aspect of why afskum is only used in its figurative sense now: the corresponding verb has lost its
separableprefix (or the base verb has been extended to transitive function, depending on your philosophy): han skummer fløden, not han afskummer fløden which did perhaps make more sense but it’s just not how it is now. (I assumed the old form would have been han skummer fløden af, but it seems I was wrong).Maybe the same happened in German?
Duden has abschäumen as a culinary term, so that can’t be the reason; FWIW, this is a word I have ever only seen in cookbooks and never used myself; I’d rather say den Schaum abnehmen. But this is one of those subjects that are normally only talked about in household situations and I don’t watch cooking shows, so I can’t say how typical my usage is for German speakers in general.
The BBC weighs in:
“ Mental recharge or ‘idiots’?
Some medical experts warn of the significant health risks of taking long flights without food, water or moving around.
“They’re idiots,” says Dr Gill Jenkins, a GP who also works as a medical escort in air ambulance work. “A digital detox might do you some good, but all the rest of it is against medical advice,” she says.
“The whole thing about the risk of long-haul flying is that you’re at risk of dehydration.
“If you’re not moving you’re at risk of deep vein thrombosis, which is compounded by dehydration. Not going to the toilet, that’s a bit stupid. If you need the loo, you need the loo.” “
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y83kj3wg2o