slut / slut-shaming

Lillian Gish as Hester Prynne in the 1926 film The Scarlet Letter

12 May 2025

In today’s parlance, slut is a derogatory term for a woman who freely exercises her sexual agency. The word dates to the early fifteenth century and is of unknown origin. There are similar words in other Germanic languages, but their relationship to each other is unclear.

It is often said that the present-day meaning is a later development, and that slut originally referred to a slovenly, dirty, or unkempt woman. While this is technically true based on the earliest known citations of use, too much can be read into this evidence. The promiscuous sense follows hot on the heels of the slovenly sense, and when dealing with medieval manuscripts, a gap of a decade or more in the surviving texts is often not a significant difference.

We see the slovenly woman sense of slut in Thomas Hoccleve’s poem Litera Cupidinis, written in 1402, in which the poet claims he can make even the harshest critic fall in love with a slovenly woman:

But mawgre hem that blamen wommen most,
such is the force of myn impressyon,
that sodenly I felle can hir bost,
and al hir wrong ymagynacion;
yt shal not ben in her elleccion,
the foulest slutte of all a tovne refuse,
yf that my lyst for al that they can muse;

(Yet those who blame women the most, such is the force of my impressions, that suddenly I can cast down their boast, and all their wrong ideas; it shall not be in their power to choose, to reject the foulest slut in all the town, if it [is] my desire that it be all they can think about.)

But only ten years later, c. 1412, the same poet associates slut with prostitution. From Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes:

Demostenes his handës onës putte
In a wommannës bosom iapyyngly,
Of facë faire, but of hir body a slutte:
“With yow to delë,” seide he, “what schal I
Yow yeuë?” “xl pens,” quod sche, soothly.
He seydë nay, so dere he byë nolde
A thyng for which þat him repentë schulde.

(Demosthenes once playfully put his hands on a woman’s bosom, her face fair, but her body that of a slut; “To deal with you,” said he, “what shall I give you?” “Forty pence,” she said assuredly. He said no; so dear a thing he could not buy for which he would have to repent.)

Given that relatively few manuscripts from the period survive and that large gaps in the linguistic record are common, it is probably more accurate to say both senses of slut arose at about the same time, in the opening years of the fifteenth century.

The slovenly sense persisted in the language, but by the twentieth century it was largely overwhelmed by the sexual sense.

In the twenty-first century, we see slut starting to be reclaimed and the practice of criticizing women for exercising their sexual agency coming under fire. Slut-shaming was thus coined. The following post on Usenet from 16 April 2004 is the earliest example of slut-shaming found in the Oxford English Dictionary, although the word is not yet a compound, as the quotation marks denote. It’s a good example of the development of the word, even if the overall message expressed is a bit bonkers; not every teenager wants to engage in group sex:

Every teenager of both sexes secretly wants gangbangs, and the only boys who are afraid of them are those who are terrified that they will lose some solitary monogamous proprietary sexual access they wouldn't have because their penis is too small, or girls who have been brainwashed with the antisexual mindless “slut” shaming, or the lie that sexual giving leads to them being stuck with chidlren [sic] and no support, which is entirely only a political failure of the society.

And a few years later, on 22 September 2007, we see the verb to slut-shame emerge, again from Usenet:

Yeah. I so fucking hate moos who slut-shame other women and never once consider that men are perfectly capable of keeping their dicks in their pants when they want to.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Hoccleve, Thomas. “Litera Cupidinis.” In Hoccleve’s Works. I. The Minor Poems. Frederick J. Furnivall, ed. Early English Text Society, Extra Series 61. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892, lines 232–238, 82. Archive.org.

———. “The Regement of Princes.” In Hoccleve’s Works. III. The Regement of Princes. Frederick J. Furnivall, ed.  Early English Text Society, Extra Series 72. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1897, lines 3767–73, 136. Archive.org.

Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. slutte, n.

Miz Daisy Cutter. “Re: FAB: WAH! Grandparents Ignore the G-kids.” Usenet: alt.support.childfree. 22 September 2007. https://groups.google.com/g/alt.support.childfree/c/zi3DaCOOkF4/m/eK09JYINNloJ

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2020, s.v. slut, n., slut, adj., slut, v., slut-shaming, n., slut-shame, v.

Walz, R. Steve. “Dogging, the Latest Craze in Europe, next YOUR BACK YARD!”  Usenet: alt.parenting.solutions, 16 April 2004.

Image credit: MGM, 1926. The Scarlet Letter, Victor Sjöström, dir. IMDB.com. Public domain image.

blaster

A blaster used by imperial stormtroopers in the Star Wars movie series

9 May 2025

Sometimes you find an antedating that is much earlier than you expected. Such is the case with blaster, the science fiction word for a ray gun.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the science fiction use of blaster to 1950, with a first citation from an Isaac Asimov story, and I would have pegged that as about right for the era of the word’s invention. But this entry hasn’t been updated recently, and the word turns out to be another quarter century older. From Nictzin Dyalhis’s “When the Green Star Waned,” which appeared in the April 1925 issue of Weird Tales, in which a human encounters an alien life form and immediately kills it:

And here we found life, such at it was. I found it, and a wondrous start the ugly thing gave me! It was in semblance but a huge pulpy blob of a loathly blue color, in diameter over twice Hul Jok’s height, with gaping, triangular-shaped orifice for mouth, in which were set scarlet fangs; and that maw was in the center of the bloated body. At each corner of this mouth there glared malignant an oval, opaque, silvery eye.

Well it was for me that, in obedience to Hul Jok’s imperative command, I was holding my Blastor pointing ahead of me; for as I blundered full upon the monstrosity it upheaved its ugly bulk—how I do not know, for I saw no legs nor did it have wings—to one edge and would have flopped down upon me, but instinctively I slid forward the catch on the tiny Blastor, and the foul thing vanished—save for a few fragments of its edges—smitten into nothingness by the vibration hurled forth from that powerful little disintegrator.

It was the first time I had ever used one of the terrible instruments, and I was appalled at the instantaneous thoroughness of its workings.

The Blastor made no noise—it never does, nor do the big Ak-Blastors which are the fighting weapons used by the Aethir-Torps, when they are discharging annihilation—but that nauseous ugliness I had removed gave vent to a sort of bubbling hiss as it returned to its original atoms.

There are older uses of blaster in very different senses. It was used to refer to a trumpeter as early as the late sixteenth century, and Charles Cotton, in his 1664 translation of Paul Scarron’s mock-epic Virgile travesti, uses the word to refer to Boreas, the north wind:

And Sirrah, you there: Goodman Blaster,
Go tell that farting Fool your Master,
That such a whistling Scab, as he,
Was ne’er cut out to rule the Sea.

And the poet John Marston uses blaster in a metaphorical sense when he dedicates his 1598 book of satires, The Scourge of Villanie, to detraction (slander):

Foule canker of faire vertuous action,
Vile blaster of the freshest bloomes on earth,
Enuies abhorred childe, Detraction,
I heare expose, to thy all-taynting breath
The issue of my braine, snarle, raile, barke, bite,
Know that my spirit scornes Detractions spight.

By the eighteenth century, blaster was being used in connection with explosives, and in the twentieth the word moved into criminal slang, referring to safe-blowers, gunmen, and the guns themselves.

And by 1980, music could emanate from ghetto blasters, large portable radio/cassette players. From a review of Tom Wolfe’s 1980 book In Our Time that appeared in the Des Moines Register on 26 October of that year:

Having established his ground, he then devotes a paragraph to each thing in the ’70s that he thinks was significant: disco, Johnny Rotten, British soap operas, George McGovern, the move “The Great Gatsby,” Elvis Presley, Jonestown, designer jeans, box-office smashes, hand-held calculators, Alex Haley, Perrier water, light beer, Muhammad Ali, short hair, South Vietnam, Woody Allen, brain research, People magazine, Richard Nixon, ghetto-blaster radios and the New Left.

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Sources:

Cotton, Charles. “Scarronides: Or, Virgil Travestie” (1664). In The Genuine Poetical Works of Charles Cotton, Esq., fifth edition. London: T. Osborne, et al., 1765, 18. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Dyalhis, Nictzin. “When the Green Star Waned.” Weird Tales, 5.4, April 1925, 3–12 and 183–91 at 6/2. Archive.org.

Eagar, Harry. “Skewering the ’70s.” Des Moines Register (Iowa), 26 October 1980, 4C/6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d. (accessed 6 April 2025), s.v. blaster, n.1, blaster, n.2, ghetto, adj.

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, 17 November 2024, s.v. blaster, n.

Marston, John. The Scourge of Villanie. Three Books of Satyres. London: James Roberts for John Buzbie, 1598, sig. A3. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. blaster, n.

Prucher, Jeff, ed. Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007, s.v. blaster, n.

Photo credit: JMC, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

banjax

7 May 2025

Still from the 1930 film version of Juno and the Paycock, Alfred Hitchcock, director

Occasionally, one runs across an unfamiliar word. It can be a technical or scientific term, or it can be a slang term from an unfamiliar dialect. One such term that I ran across is banjax, an Irish slang term meaning a mess, or as a verb to mess things up. A friend of mine, who was renovating a bathroom in her house, used banjaxed in a social media post. Before this post, I’d never noticed the word, although I should have as it appears in several rather famous books that I have read, but evidently I didn’t notice the word as I was reading as the meaning was evident from the context. Anyway, my friend’s social media post read:

The real skylight is one floor above in the bathroom we’re renovating. A water leak during demolition banjaxed my entire kitchen ceiling.

To which another friend replied:

Outstanding use of “banjaxed.”

Banjax is first recorded in 1925 as a noun in Sean O’Casey’s play Juno and the Paycock, The character Jack Boyle says about an inheritance he is supposed to get from a first cousin:

I’m tellin’ you the scholar, Bentham, made a banjax o’ the Will; instead o’ sayin’, “th’ rest o’ me property to be divided between me first cousin, Jack Boyle, an’ me second cousin, Mick Finnegan, o’ Santhry,” he writ down only, “me first an’ second cousins,” an’ the world an’ his wife are afther th’ property now.

The word seems to have been a favorite of writer Flann O’Brien. The adjective appears in his 1939 At Swim-Two-Birds:

And a very good idea as you say, Mr. Shanahan. But when the roller passes over his dead corpse, be damned but there’s one thing there that it can’t crush, one thing that lifts it high off the road—a ten ton roller, mind! . . .

Indeed, said Orlick, eye-brow for question.

One thing, said Furriskey, sole finger for true counting. They drive away the roller and here is his black heart sitting there as large as life in the middle of the pulp of his banjaxed corpse. They couldn’t crush his heart!

And O’Brien uses it as a verb again the next year in The Third Policeman, one of my favorite novels:

“Michael Gilhaney,” said the Sergeant, “is an example of a man that is nearly banjaxed from the principle of the Atomic Theory. Would it astonish you to hear that he is nearly half a bicycle?”

“It would astonish me unconditionally,” I said.

“Michael Gilhaney,” said the Sergeant, “is nearly sixty years of age by plain computation and if he is itself, he has spent no less than thirty-five years riding his bicycle over the rocky roadsteads and up and down the hills and into the deep ditches where the road goes astray in the strain of the winter. He is always going to a particular destination or other on his bicycle at every hour of the day or coming back from there at every other hour. If it wasn’t that his bicycle was stolen every Monday he would be sure to be more than half-way now.”

“Half-way to where?”

“Half-way to being a bicycle himself,” said the Serjeant.

And he would use it yet again in his 1961 Hard Life in a passage discussing the Jesuits:

—The Fathers are all over the world, they speak and write in all languages, they have built a wonderful apparatus for the propagation of the faith.

—Some people at one time thought they were trying to banjax and bewilder the One, Holy and Apostolic. Oh and there are good people who are alive today and think the Church had a very narrow escape from the boyos of yesteryear.

Samuel Beckett also used it in the 1954 typescript of Waiting for Godot:

That Lucky might get going all of a sudden. Then we’d be banjaxed.

It was subsequently changed to ballocksed, which is the word that appears in most print editions of the play.

So as slang terms go, banjax has a rather literary pedigree.

The OED gives its origin as “unknown; perhaps originally Dublin slang.” Green’s Dictionary of Slang is more helpful, saying it’s a semi-euphemistic variation of ballocks. Green’s speculation makes a lot of sense when we look at the development of ballocks. It of course started out as a noun meaning testicles, but by 1919 it was being used to mean rubbish, nonsense. There’s also a 1901 use of bollocks as a verb, but that’s in an American context. E. P. Alexander, who had commanded the Confederate artillery barrage that supported Pickett’s Charge on the third day of the battle of Gettysburg wrote in a 1901 letter:

Never, never, never did Gen. Lee himself bollox a fight as he did this.

So it’s a short leap from ballocks meaning a mess, to make a mess to banjax, essentially meaning the same thing.

Oh, and my friend whose kitchen ceiling was banjaxed, she’s Irish-American. So that fits too.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove, 1954, 51. Archive.org.

Gontarski, S. E. “Ballocksed, Banjaxed or Banjoed: Textual Aberrations, Ghost Texts, and the British Godot.” Journal of Modern Literature, 41.4 (Summer 2018), 48–67 at 60. JSTOR

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d (accessed 5 April 2025), s.v. banjax, n., banjax, v.

O’Brien, Flann. At Swim-Two-Birds. New York: Pantheon, 1939, 126. Archive.org.

———. The Hard Life (1961). New York: Pantheon, 1962, 83–84. Archive.org.

———. The Third Policeman (written 1939–40, first published in 1967). New York: Plume, 1976, 83. Archive.org.

O’Casey, Sean. “Juno and the Paycock.” In Two Plays. New York: Macmillan, 1925, Act 3, 98. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. banjax, v.; third edition, June 2008, s.v. bollock, n. & adj., bollocks, v.

Piston, William Garrett. “Longstreet, Lee, and Confederate Attack Plans for July 3 at Gettysburg.” In Gary W. Gallagher, ed. The Third Day at Gettysburg & Beyond. Chapel Hill: U of North Caroline Press, 31–55 at 47. Archive.org.

Image credit: British International Pictures, 1930. Fair use of a single still frame from a copyrighted motion picture to illustrate the topic under discussion. Imdb.com.

pita

Stacks of pita for sale at a Jerusalem market, 2010

5 May 2025

Pita is a type of flat, hollow, unleavened bread, often filled with meat or other ingredients, that is associated with Middle Eastern or Balkan cuisine. Its use in English was relatively uncommon before the 1980s, but examples can be found from the 1930s.

It was borrowed into English from several languages, each case depending on the cuisine being described: Hebrew פיתה (pittah), Greek πίτα or πίττα (pita, pitta), and Serbo-Croation pita. The Greek word can be dated to the early twelfth century CE, but it does not seem to have an ancient Greek root. Pita has cognates in a variety of languages, but the connections between these cognates cannot be clearly established. Ultimate origins in Aramaic, Illyrian, and Proto-Germanic have been suggested, but these are speculative.

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the Palestine Post of 30 March 1936. It is found in an article about prisoners who built a radio tower outside of Jerusalem during British occupation of the territory:

Bread was Khalil’s greatest desire and dancing was his life. His bulging muscles produced a ravenous appetite which could never be satisfied. For a chunk of “pitah,” usually produced by Abraham, the Communist, Khalil would spend the lunch hour dancing. At this moments he was transformed from a hulking giant into a graceful dancer, whose splayed feet, writhing legs, sinuous hips, snaky arms, swaying body and joie de vivre expressed in six foot four the spirit of Oriental dancing.

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Sources:

Lurie, J. Z. “Yussef, Khalil and Abraham.” Palestine Post (Jerusalem), 30 March 1936, 28/3–4. National Library of Israel.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2006, s.v. pitta | pita, n.2.

Image credit: Gilabrand, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PileofpitaS.jpg Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Luddite

A hand-colored etching presumably depicting Ned Ludd, May 1812

2 May 2025

The word Luddite presents an interesting case. It’s a word that was used for over a century, the early nineteenth century, albeit rather rarely, to refer to a specific historical series of events. Then, in the late 1940s, use of the word exploded, but with a shift in its original meaning. 

The word has its roots in the early days of the industrial revolution, as mechanization began to be put to widespread use in the English textile industry at the turn of the nineteenth century. Up to this point, textile workers had been highly skilled craftsmen who commanded high wages and respectable social status. Being a textile worker was a good living. But the owners of textile mills, like capitalists everywhere, continually sought to reduce the wages of their workers, but until the advent of mechanization they were rather unsuccessful—the skilled weavers were essential to their business. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, however, machines had reached a level of sophistication where they could do the jobs of those highly skilled and highly paid workers. Out of this situation emerged the Luddites.

The Luddites take their name from Ned Ludd, or Lud, an almost certainly fictional character, a weaver who in 1779 allegedly destroyed several textile machines in Leicestershire. There is no strong evidence to demonstrate that such a disturbance actually happened, much less that Ned Ludd was a real person. References to Ned Ludd and the movement bearing his name would not appear until several decades later.

Starting in 1811 there were a series of riots at English textile mills in which the workers destroyed the machines that were taking their jobs. The loosely organized, underground movement professed that “Captain Ludd” or “King Lud” was their ringleader. It was a useful bit of propaganda, but it’s unlikely that there was a single leader of the movement, and far less that a person named Ned Ludd was the leader. These original Luddites were not opposed to technology per se; they were protesting the loss of their jobs. At issue was economic disruption, not distrust or dislike of machines.

The earliest reference to Ned Ludd that I have found is in the Times of London for 16 December 1811

On Wednesday, the 11th inst. was committed for trial at the Assizes, John Ingham, a workman employed by Mr. William Nunn, lace-manufacturer, for feloniously writing and sending a letter, signed “Ned Lud and Co.” directed to William Nunn and Co. threatening to break and destroy their frames, and injure his person and that of Thomas Clarke,. [sic] concerned in such manufacture; and, on the same day, William Parkes and George Shaw, for entering a dwelling-house, on the 25th of November, and breaking five stocking-frames.

And the earliest use of Luddite that I have found is also from the Times six weeks later, on 30 January 1812

About two o’clock on Sunday morning, an express arrived from Ruddington, stating that 1[3?] frames had been destroyed at that place, and that the Luddites were engaged in their mischievous work when the messenger came away. On Saturday and Sunday nights, not fewer than 60 frames were destroyed. Ludd has declared his intention of destroying all frames without exception. Five armed Luddites stopped a carrier about a mile from Mansfield turnpike; and having collected from his waggon every article obnoxious to them, set fire to the same.

 And Luddism is in place by that September. From the Hull Packet of 15 September 1812:

Our correspondent in Huddersfield, under date of the 10th inst. says:—“Several persons have been apprehended on various charges of Luddism, and are now in custody here.

Luddite continued to be used to refer to this historical labor movement through to the mid twentieth century. When people spoke of Luddites, they were referring specifically to those who destroyed the textile machines in the early nineteenth century. The word was also not especially common, which is not surprising given its limited meaning in reference to the specific historical events.

But starting in the late 1940s, Luddite started to be used to refer to those who objected to new technologies generally. There is this from the Houston Chronicle of 15 February 1947 that uses the term not to refer to the historical Luddites but to an anti-technology attitude:

I’m not suggesting that we assume a Luddite attitude toward atomic energy but even the most receptive enthusiasm for a new device requires more regard for social consequences than a Marxist is willing to assume.

And with this new, anti-technology meaning came an increase in the word’s use. Google Ngram shows a 300-fold increase in the word’s use from 1960 to 2000. A sudden rise from a steady, low level of use over the previous century and a half.*

The change can be attributed to two factors: the new, computer revolution and the shift to a more general meaning, which made the term more useful—Luddite no longer just referred to a specific and rather obscure event of a century past but to contemporary attitudes toward the increasing intrusion of new technologies into people’s lives.

I also found this in the Washington Post from 20 October 1947. It uses Luddite in the historical sense, but the context is technologies for distributing music and their impact on the musicians’ labor market. Although the specific technologies in question are no longer phonographs and juke boxes, but rather internet streaming systems, the context is the same:

The point of principle upon which Mr. J. Caesar Petrillo has declared war to the death against the phonographs and juke boxes of these United States is an interesting modern variant of Luddism. The Luddites, as you remember, were the handweavers and other artisans of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire and some other parts of England who, in the early nineteenth century, undertook to destroy the machines which had thrown them out of work and reduced them to destitution. It is not apparent that many members of Mr. Petrillo’s American Federation of Musicians are now in danger of starving because mechanical music has destroyed the market for their special skills; but Mr. Petrillo is making sure that there never will be such a danger.

For more on the original Luddites, NPR’s Planet Money podcast has an episode that nicely encapsulates the history of the movement.

* = Google Ngram results should be taken with a grain of salt. The data set is rife with metadata and OCR errors. But when Google Ngram shows a marked shift like this one, the trend is probably valid, even if the exact numbers may be somewhat off.

Discuss this post

Sources:

“According to Letters Received Yesterday from, Nottingham.” Times (London), 30 January 1812, 3/1. Gale Primary Sources: The Times Digital Archive.

Google Books Ngram Viewer. s.v. luddite.

“Hull, Sept. 14, 1812.” Hull Packet (England), 15 September 1812, 3/4. Gale Primary Sources:  British Library Newspapers.

“King Ludd: 1947 Model.” Washington Post, 20 October 1947, 6/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Nottingham Riots.” Times (London), 16 December 1811, 3/3. Gale Primary Sources: The Times Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary Online. Second Edition, 1989. s.v. “Luddism, n.” “Luddite, n. (and adj.).”

Sokolsky George E. “The Case Against David Lilienthal.” Houston Chronicle (Texas), 15 February 1947, 2/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“When Luddites Attack.” NPR: Planet Money, 6 May 2015.

Image credit: Walker and Knight, 1812. British Museum. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.