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  • Essay / The History of the Word "Whore" - 2392

    The word "whore" has a long and complicated history. Questions about how it entered the English language and how, when, and why it came to mean the things it does are difficult to answer. It can be used to mean to condemn or condemn specifically to the ward (by God), and can be used as a mild profanity. Tracing the journey to becoming both a religious term and a swear word shows many interesting features of language and the way language is used. The word damn entered the English language from the Old French word damne-r during Middle English. period and first appeared in writing in the early 14th century. (OED sv damn). In Latin, the word "damnā-re" meant to damage, injure, or condemn, which, with the suffix con-, meaning together or intensive, became the French and English word meaning more or less to condemn. It only obtained its current spelling in the 16th century; before, it was sometimes spelled or . It is now spelled and pronounced /dæm/. To understand what the word originally meant, we need to look at what types of words it was and who was using it when it was first borrowed into the language. Most of the earliest appearances of damn in scripture are religious texts. It first appeared in Cursor Mundi (OED sv damn 1), a Middle English poem describing world history based primarily on the Christian Bible. Since many manuscripts of this poem have survived, we can assume that it was popular (Watson 334), and therefore probably also had an influence. The OED cites this text twice to define damn, once as “[t]o pronounce an unfavorable judgment upon, affirm one's guilt; to pronounce a judicial sentence against" (OED sv damn 1 a), and once as "[t]o sentence to a particular punishment...... middle of paper .......oed.com/entry /50124865 > Kearse, Randy “Mo Betta. Street Talk: Da Official Guide to Hip-Hop and Urban Language. Fort Lee: Barricade Books, 2006. Metzger, Bruce, M. The Bible in Translation: Old and English Versions. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001. Rawson, Hugh. Wicked. New York: Crown Publishers, 1989. Smith, Jeremy J. "The Use of English: Language Contact, Dialect Variation, and Written Standardization during the Middle English Period." English in its social contexts. Ed. Charles T. Scott, Tim William Machan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 47-68. Watson, Nicholas. "The Politics of Writing in Middle English". The idea of ​​the vernacular: an anthology of Middle English theory 1280-1520. Ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, et al. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. 331–352.