So, what do we think? Come December, is “rawdogging” going to be Oxford University Press’s word of the year? It’s certainly a strong contender. Around this time last year, rawdogging – originally slang for sex without a condom – wasn’t the sort of word you would hear in polite conversation or find in the pages of the Guardian and the BBC. Now, it’s everywhere and being used, largely by gen Z, for the most innocuous situations. Drink black coffee? You’re rawdogging caffeine! Don’t drink coffee at all? You’re rawdogging your mornings! Just finished a nine-hour flight with no entertainment but the flight map? Bro, you rawdogged travel!
The trend for rawdogging flights, which started getting attention earlier this summer, has propelled the term into the mainstream. But the word has been used in nonsexual contexts for several years and, over that time, undergone the early stages of “semantic bleaching”. Its obscene origins have been diluted and for a lot of people it’s no longer remotely scandalous; it just means doing something without assistance.
The English language changes all the time, of course, and lots of terms have gone through a similar process. Millennials, for example, will have been chided for incorrectly using the term “literally” when they were younger (I certainly was). Despite the fact that literally has been used as an intensifier since the late 17th century, people seem to get irrationally annoyed when the term is “misused”. When, in 2013, various dictionaries added the informal, nonliteral definition of literally to their hallowed pages as an acceptable usage, it caused quite the uproar.
While the word “sucks” is commonplace and almost quaint now, it also used to be subject to much heated debate because of its sexual origins. That slowly changed: a 2006 article from Slate offered “a defence of the much-maligned word” and decreed that “it’s impossible to intelligently maintain that sucks is still offensive. The word is now completely divorced from any past reference it may have made to a certain sex act.” So, excuse my language when I say that rawdogging literally seems to be the new sucks.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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