Gay old time

Of course, the stigma against such children led to the change in meaning/connotation.

The occasion was celebrated with a "coming-out party," also known as a debutante ball, where the graduating class was presented as proper ladies.^note These balls still exist in the upper class, but they're more focused on the young women's charity work than their marriageability. This connotation dates from the 1970s backlash against figures like Jim Jones.

Most dictionaries still accept this as a secondary meaning, so it's still technically correct to say things like "a terrific tragedy", though most people will probably look at you funny. Thus, it's not uncommon for a man in an older British work to say casually "Oh yes, I know him well — I was his fag at school."

(For example: U.S. congressman Anthony Weiner was an easy punchline after getting into a sexting scandal.) This one was inevitable, given that sausage has a phallic shape, and indeed the word "sausage" is also sometimes used as a euphemism for a penis.

• Wien is the German name for the capital city of Austria (known in English as Vienna). The word "compassion" retains this root, as it literally means "to suffer with".
• One possibly created by mistake: Nimrod is the name of a great hunter from The Bible, and was sometimes used (with a lowercase n) as a term for a person who is good at hunting (hence the X-Men villain Nimrod who is a mutant-hunting robot from the future).

  "Lisa's Coming-Out Party" under "Then" was a girl in a ballgown. a woman who is part of a royal court or the equivalent; compare French courtisane (feminine of courtisan) or Italian cortigiana. As with many things, the sense evolution happened through the sexist assumption that women were most likely to get close to power by Sleeping Their Way to the Top.

• While not extremely common, some people might occasionally use unicorn hunting as an idiom meaning "an impossible task".

  "Getting off" could be used to the same effect as "pulling [something] off"/suceeding, like moments in Stephen King's IT where Richie Tozier "gets one off", referring to executing a joke well. In context, "homo" is short for "homicide" (which itself comes from the Latin word). Later, it predominantly became used as a slur against transgender people.

  But very few readers of the novel and viewers of the movie knew the reference, and they assumed it meant someone who sells his services as a hired gun. Thus, a building was sometimes referred to as "an erection". However, there are still informal senses such as the one of "doing" someone if you paint their portrait or perform an impersonation of them.

• Being turned on is now usually taken to mean "aroused by." Traditionally, it was simply a generic way of describing an interest or preference for something, as in "I'm feeling turned on by a lot of the food in this menu." In the 1960s, when Timothy Leary started out promoting LSD as beneficial for therapeutic psychiatry, things changed when he started promoting it for non-psychiatric reasons, with his "turn on, tune in, drop out" philosophy, with many of the New-Age Retro Hippie and flower child movements being "turned on" by this, and as a result, the FCC started to closely monitor the radio airwaves and ban songs that had the words "turn on" or some variation thereof, especially The Beatles' "A Day in the Life" with one of the verses saying "I'd love to turn you on".

  That was a complicated one. However, it entered the English language (via French) to mean "failure" or "humiliation" for reasons that are unclear, possibly via an expression fare fiasco, meaning to lose at a game and have to buy the next bottle of wine for the table as a forfeit.

• Naughty originally meant worthless, as it comes from the same word root as "naught" (i.e.

  Industry professionals are pretty much the only people who still use the term that way; to the average person a "tabloid" has become a demeaning term specifically for newspapers that rely on sleazy, sensationalistic articles of dubious truthfulness, with the phrase "tabloid journalism" by extension replacing the older term "yellow journalism."

• Dutch could refer to people from both the Netherlands and Germany up through the late 1800s.

  As time progressed and the haughty upper-class people looked down on them, the word "villain" today usually refers to, well, villains, and its older meaning of a villager, serf or lord's servant nowadays is found in medieval literature or William Shakespeare's dramas and literature. Or if you happen to touch a vaguely humanoid object.

• Penis euphemisms:
  • Cock means a number of things, the most dominantly used in American English certainly refers to the penis.
    

    Since then, it has expanded to also include a hatred or general aversion to the thing as well as an outright fear, as is often the case with "xenophobia" or "homophobia", as most homophobic people don't break out in a cold sweat over the thought of gay people, for instance.

  • Gnarly originally meant exactly what it looks like it means — twisted, coming from the word knar (a knot on a tree).

    They beget terror.

  • On a similar note terrible itself didn't always mean "really bad", but something more like "terrifying".