Dirty and Filthy Meaning Very or Good

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, it’s Colin. I’m calling from Newton, Massachusetts, but I live in West Hartford, Connecticut.

What can we do for you?

Well, I was listening to the show a few weeks back, and I thought about the most interesting word I’ve heard lately. The word that came to mind was the word dirty. The 14, 15-year-old boys in my town will use the term dirty as a very positive term, especially around athletes.

And so, for example, a basketball player on a court will have just driven by someone and dunked, and they’ll go, that person is dirty. And another example would be, we’re playing foosball in my house, and my son’s friends are over, and they’re all 14, 15 years old. And because I’m good at foosball, one of them said, our friend’s dad is dirty at foosball.

And so I started to think about it and how about, as a youth, certain terms, again, we’re regional, only in Connecticut, for example, and somewhere beyond that. And then there’s a derivative of it that’s interesting too, which is if someone’s really dirty, they’re filthy.

And this is often talked about with pro athletes, but it can also be just talked about with someone who just happens to be good on a travel soccer team. Yeah, they’re not regional, neither one of these. These are widespread throughout sports, and they’ve got a long history.

You have teenagers in your house, I guess? Yes, 15 and 19 at this point, 19 at the college. Yeah, so they’re carrying on a long tradition, over 100 years of these words being used in the sporting world. Some of the earliest uses we know are from boxing, to people talking about boxers with dirty punches who can really swing and get in there and knock somebody out.

Even before that, going back to the 1840s, we find filthy being used as an intensifier to really kind of exaggerate other adjectives and adverbs to indicate force and impact and indicate just kind of the strength of the word to follow. Not meaning dirty, in no way meaning dirty, but just meaning more of the same.

And you find this happening again and again where something, a word is kind of stripped of everything except its force. All that’s left is its emphasis.

Yeah, I think filthy rich.

Yeah, filthy rich is a great example.

In slang studies, there’s always talk about the interplay between the different meanings of a word. When you have a polysemous words, polysemous means that a word has more than one meaning. There’s not a clear division between these senses.

There’s always an overlap. There’s always an intersection between these meanings so that when you have something like filthy and you have part of it where it’s just as emphasis and part of it actually means dirty, sometimes the uses have layers.

Sometimes there’s a double entendre and you can definitely read it two ways. And then you get that nice little, ooh, a little buzz, that frisson up where you get that nice. This is why language is so fun. This is why wordplay is so interesting.

I’m thinking particularly, for example, you can find uses of filthy being used in surfing. Even now, people talk about filthy waves, filthy surf. And it brings to mind, because my ears perk up about this kind of thing, and the other one that’s come recently is the term just plain nice.

Nice? That player is nice.

Meaning that they’re very skilled?

Very skilled, again.

So it came to mind, and I wonder how that one will come into play, but maybe that’s for another conversation.

Oh, that looks so subtle, isn’t it? You put a lot of thought in this, and I appreciate your thoughtfulness on this subject.

And do call us and report from the field with everything else that you’ve discovered about slaying and teens, all right?

I will. Thank you so much, both of you. Have a great day.

Thanks, Colin. Bye-bye.

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