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The earliest known use of the adjective feel-bad is in the 1870s. OED's earliest evidence for feel-bad is from 1875, in the writing of A. Stone. feel-bad is formed within English, by conversion.
The full word was a nickname British scientist Charles Darwin and his wife Emma used in their letters to each other in the 1840s. She used it as a "term of endearment" and he used it "playfully...
Oct 25, 2016 · Its effect can be explosive and painful: Harvard University professor Randall Kennedy has traced the history of the N-word to understand the evolution of the infamous racial slur.
- PBS News Hour
- 9 min
Apr 30, 2021 · The N-word euphemism was an organic outcome, as was an increasing consensus that “nigger” itself is forbidden not only in use as a slur but even when referred to.
- Ass. How did a word meaning “donkey” come to mean “butt”? It didn’t: Each ass has its own etymology. Ass the donkey is an Old English term derived from asinus, the Latin word for the animal.
- Bitch. Bitch hails from the animal kingdom, too. The earliest sense of the word—Old English’s biccean, a borrowing from Germanic languages—refers to a female dog.
- Cunt. Today, however, cunt (also likely from Germanic) often takes the cake when it comes to offensive appellations given to women. But it didn’t become an insult until the 1600s; for centuries before that, it mainly just referred to female genitals.
- Damn. Damn, which comes from French and Latin verbs, wasn’t always an expletive. To damn someone circa 1300 often just meant to sentence them for a crime.
Jun 14, 2023 · But where, exactly, does profane language come from? From ancient Rome to the Renaissance to today, there’s lots that the history of swearing can teach us about how taboos, language and culture evolve — and it can provide a glimpse of the future of (mostly) four-letter words.
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Dec 30, 2015 · It’s been around since the 16th century, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary. In the earliest adverbial uses, “bad” wasn’t an intensifier. It was used more literally and meant “badly” or “not well.”
