vulgar

The Latin adjective vulgaris derives from vulgus, meaning the common people or the crowd. In classical Roman usage, it was a term of description, not condemnation. Pliny used vulgare nomen for the common name of a plant, as opposed to its technical Greek designation. Cicero used vulgus to mean the ordinary Roman citizen, usually without any particular contempt.

The word entered English in the fifteenth century still carrying its neutral sense. A vulgar tongue was simply a vernacular, any language ordinary people spoke rather than the Latin of scholars. The most famous use of this sense is the Vulgate, Jerome's Latin Bible completed around 405 CE, named because it rendered scripture into the common Latin that ordinary Romans could read. Wycliffe's translators used vulgar exactly this way when describing their English Bible in the 1380s.

The pejorative shift came gradually in the seventeenth century, as European educated classes began marking a sharper line between common and refined. By 1700, vulgar in English had acquired the sense of unrefined, belonging to lower social registers. By 1774, when Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his son appeared in print, vulgar had become a social weapon: a term for manners that betrayed insufficient breeding. The people once merely named by the word had become its target.

The sexual and offensive sense, meaning obscene or indecent, solidified in the nineteenth century as a euphemism for explicit content. By the twentieth century, a vulgar joke meant a dirty one, and vulgarity had become a near-synonym for obscenity in many contexts. The common people, once neutrally named by this word, had been redefined over four centuries as the very thing the word now condemned.