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Writing AH: Anachronisms, Part 2.

As linguistic drift goes, one could also mention expletive decay: the tendency of swear words to lose their shock value over time. Québécois French, for example, is replete with colourful phrases that originally carried sacrilegious connotations, but are now used without particular shocking intent. Ostie d'criss de tabarnak is to us just a statement of annoyance, whereas to 18th-century Catholics it was pretty much as rude as one could get. I also remember reading that for Deadwood, the screewriters used present-day instead of period-appropriate swear words because the expletives that were actually used at the time now sound quaint rather than rude.
 
There's also the more fundamental element adjectives becoming ordinary so you start adding suffixes for emphasis and it just keeps going.
 
"Pompous" is another good example. Before the advent of the Romantic movement it would have been used in an entirely positive sense- literally "in full pomp", and giving a sense of something stately, regal, awe-inspiring. Today, it is entirely used in a critical and negative sense
 
When I was running a team across three continents I found the variety of OK equivalents fun, Australian "no worries" was familiar, but the Irish "savage", and of course our South African "sharp".

Bring a large enough refugee or settler population into a timeline you can get some lovely transplants...
 
an obscure running joke uses ‘tremendous’ negatively due to a historical association with the ignore function
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So that's where it came from. Didn't realise it was unique to this place
 
Warthog said:
When I was running a team across three continents I found the variety of OK equivalents fun, Australian "no worries" was familiar, but the Irish "savage", and of course our South African "sharp".

Bring a large enough refugee or settler population into a timeline you can get some lovely transplants...
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And "fierce" in Norn Iron as an emphasis. "It's a fierce cold day" doesn't entirely depart from the original meaning but "It was fierce fun" or "They were giving the stuff away, the bargains were fierce". And then there was the visiting lecturer at Queens University who was needlessly alarmed to be told by a member of staff "There's a fierce crowd waiting for you in the lecture hall"
 
ShortsBelfast said:
And "fierce" in Norn Iron as an emphasis. "It's a fierce cold day" doesn't entirely depart from the original meaning but "It was fierce fun" or "They were giving the stuff away, the bargains were fierce". And then there was the visiting lecturer at Queens University who was needlessly alarmed to be told by a member of staff "There's a fierce crowd waiting for you in the lecture hall"
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And, to add to the confusion, that one is becoming 'generic positive' in African-American vernacular (I believe - maybe it's more specific than 'generic positive' as I've only heard it in passing).
 
A more crass example, "fuck off" being used as an expression of (positive) surprise (similar to "get out") or an adjective meaning something immense ("There's a fuck-off crowd out there.")
 
RyanF said:
A more crass example, "fuck off" being used as an expression of (positive) surprise (similar to "get out") or an adjective meaning something immense ("There's a fuck-off crowd out there.")
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I'd heard it in the second sense you use there, but never the first, when I heard @Meadow use it at an early meetup and was quite confused what he meant for a bit.
 
Warthog said:
Let's not forget as a term of endearment
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