"Badass"
« previous post | next post »
Screenshot of a post on Threads:
The audio:
Why wouldn't we choose
a leader who's tough,
tested,
and
a total badass.
Of course there was extensive mass-media coverage of Whitmer's remark and others' use of the same word in evaluating Harris, as well as plenty of other social media notice. And we should note the flurry caused by Mark Zuckerberg's assertion last month that Donald Trump's response to the July 13th assassination attempt was "one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life".
The valence of the term badass is ambiguous. Wikipedia gives two glosses:
1. (US, sometimes considered vulgar, slang, negative connotation) A belligerent or mean person; a person with an unpleasantly extreme appearance, attitudes, or behavior.
2. (US, sometimes considered vulgar, slang, positive connotation) A person considered impressive due to courage, skill, daring, audacity, and/or toughness.
The OED defines the noun as "A tough, aggressive, intimidating, or uncompromising person", and the adjective form as "Belligerent or intimidating; ruthless; tough. Also as a general term of approval: formidable, superlative", with a link to the entry for bad IV.13:
Originally in African American usage. Of a person: (originally) dangerous or menacing to a degree which inspires awe or admiration; impressively tough, uncompromising, or combative; (in later use also) possessing other desirable attributes to an impressive degree; esp. formidably skilled.
It seems to me that the positively-evaluated form of badass has become increasingly common, especially as a term of praise for women. As a first step in checking current usage, I took 50 examples at random from the 1,920 instances in the Corpus of Contemporary American English.
22 (44%) were applied to women, 14 (28%) to men, 1 was ambiguous, and 13 were non-human (stapler, belt buckle, sword, dragons, moment, …) Essentially all of the examples seemed to be positively evaluated, or at least a sign of admiration.
It looks to me as if searches on current social-media platforms (X, bluesky…) give similar results…
A small sample of the female-associated examples from COCA:
Mia, you are so much like your father. Out on that field, so badass. I'm so proud of you.
I think the only legitimate reason to ban that catsuit, it was so badass that it gave her psychological advantage on the court.
Your girl seems like a serious badass.
Geraldine, you are such a badass.
That is, while she realizes nothing will make them stop believing in monsters, it's much easier to make them believe she's enough of a badass to take them.
"We get beat by J.Lo. She's a badass pirate," he added.
Female roles have continued to adapt and evolve and thanks to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, yes, even blondes can be badass monster killers.
As far as girls go, I have a really badass personality. I'm smart and I can be really funny and interesting and I can go toe-to-toe with anybody in a conversation.
Here's one worth a bit more context — "On Feeling (A Little Bit) Like A Badass", Simple Lovely 9/14/2012.
Some semi-relevant past posts:
"Root haughtiness", 8/20/2011
"Can '[adjective]-ass' occur predicatively?", 11/18/2013
"A productive-ass suffix", 1/29/2018
Philip Taylor said,
August 26, 2024 @ 10:16 am
OED "Word of the day" —
Coincidence ?
Allen W. Thrasher said,
August 26, 2024 @ 10:34 am
The d in Hindi bada is retroflex. It sounds much like buh-RAH. It just means “big,” “great.” A total coincidence.
Yuval said,
August 26, 2024 @ 10:40 am
Pretty sure Philip was referring to the selection timing, not to etymology.
Victor Mair said,
August 26, 2024 @ 2:48 pm
Notice that Gov. Whitmore uses the negative rhetorical question form to emphasize her point. Cf. the mention of litotes (classical antenantiosis or moderatour) in the comments to the previous post.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 26, 2024 @ 4:16 pm
As one of the quotations suggests, one plausible theory (subject to a deeper dive into corpus data to work out the timeline etc.) is that the Buffy the Vampire Slayer tv show, or perhaps more precisely its obsessive fanbase, was a key historical context/factor in making it common to apply "badass" to human females. Indeed, the google books corpus contains a 2018-published self-help book with the impressive title: "How to Slay the Buffy Way: Badass Buffy Attitude and Killer Advice." At a minimum my own (potentially unreliable) memories from the pre-Buffy era of the English language are that "badass" was a word in reasonably common use but at the time rarely applied to human females.
My recollection could certainly be falsified if anyone can find a contemporaneous 1980's reference to a then-prominent female politician like Geraldine Ferraro or Pat Schroeder being labeled a "badass," especially by a supporter. I'll offer one ambiguous and non-political datapoint: an essay published in an early issue of Bitch magazine (established 1996, just prior to the 1997 debut of the Buffy series) refers to female rock musicians like Joan Jett and Chrissie Hynde as having "insinuat[ed] themselves into the badass canon." The context is the writer's memory of having seen those two performers on MTV a dozen to fifteen years earlier, but I don't think the "badass canon" label is meant to be a literal memory of how the writer actually described the situation in the Eighties. Also, this successful insinuation was accomplished by Mmes. Jett & Hynde "[n]ot so much rejecting femininity as cloaking it in the historical acceptability of male rebellion." I daresay that by the time of Gov. Whitmer's description of the incumbent vice president any specific implicature of "rebellion" had been bleached out of the semantics of "badass."
Note, however, that Joan Jett is an overwhelmingly obvious (to the point of being stereotypical) female rock musician to describe as "badass" or "a badass," so the fact that that "badass canon" reference is the only thing in the google books corpus (admittedly not the ideal corpus for this …) to affix that label to her before 2002 is pretty good negative evidence that the default understanding of many Anglophones through the end of the Nineties remained that the "badass" label didn't get applied to females. And the earliest hit I could find for "badass" applied to Joni Mitchell was from 2012, suggesting a further drift away from the sort of rebelliousness that requires a fairly literal wearing of a literal black leather jacket into something vaguer than that.
VVOV said,
August 26, 2024 @ 4:19 pm
American in his early 30s here – I am not sure I've ever heard the "negative connotation" version of badass ("A belligerent or mean person; a person with an unpleasantly extreme appearance, attitudes, or behavior").
If someone described another person to me as a "badass" in a clearly insulting context, I would likely be confused since that word has an exclusively positive connotation in my idiolect.
I just did a quick google books search for slightly older examples of "badass" (circa 2000 and earlier). From that time period, most uses of "badass" that I found (though obviously a biased sample since these are printed examples of what originated as an unwritten/oral slang term) described males who are intimidating/tough/dangerous/macho, though usually with some degree of admiration/respect, rather than a purely "negative connotation". Regardless of whether the connotation is negative/positive, it is striking that the gendered application of "badass" has shifted so much in 20 years per the examples in the OP.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 26, 2024 @ 4:41 pm
In the various illustrative samples in Green's Dictionary of Slang, the earliest to apply "badass" to a human female looks to be from 1999 (and is British FWIW) – at least if you don't count a 1980 instance of "bad-assed bitch" (listed as a separate lexeme) which looks just a little suspect to me because the quoted work is itself a scholarly description of slang ("Runnin' Down Some Lines: The Language and Culture of Black Teenagers").*
OTOH, there's a 1974 example describing a woman wearing a "bad-ass mink round her shoulders," which is a good earlyish example of it being a generally positive descriptor without too much specific content.
*Don't quote the guide to slang's reference to the lexeme in the author's own voice, quote the sentence using the lexeme that the author quotes! Unless the work doesn't have one, or only has one clearly concocted by the author as an example sentence or self-consciously extracted from an informant rather than noted in the wild during fieldwork, all of which seem to me to make the reference of less value.
Josh R said,
August 26, 2024 @ 6:49 pm
Related to this, I was rather surprised to hear "half-assed" used in Kamala Harris's speech at the Democratic National Convention. I'm not sure if this is part of the general shift towards "rougher" or "courser" speech in politics in general, or if it is part of the general expansion of "acceptable" discourse to include words that have generally been considered expletives.
(My apologies for the excessive use of scare quotes. I'm trying to convey my perspective as someone whose extended time outside the U.S. has resulted in a somewhat dated sense of what is permissible.)
J.W. Brewer said,
August 26, 2024 @ 7:17 pm
In terms of general shifts in acceptability, Josh R. may wish to consult a 2006 FCC decision regarding what's okay for broadcast television that includes the following: 'The Commission has before it twenty complaints concerning programming that contains the following allegedly obscene, indecent, or profane words and phrases: “hell,” “damn,” “bitch,” “pissed off,” “up yours,” “ass,” “for Christ’s sake,” “kiss my ass,” “fire his ass,” “ass is huge,” and “wiping his ass.” We conclude that, while these words and phrases are understandably upsetting to some viewers, in the contexts used here, they are neither obscene, indecent, nor profane.'
RfP said,
August 26, 2024 @ 8:45 pm
@Josh R
This is just a personal observation, but it really felt like there was a shift towards much wider public use of “fucking” both online and “IRL” (in the US, anyway) during and in the immediate wake of the height of the pandemic.
I don’t know whether this was out of frustration or due to the heightened use of social media—or something else—but it felt pretty striking to me to see rather sedate people using rather “improper” language!
Philip Taylor said,
August 27, 2024 @ 1:29 am
The [Manchester] Guardian has deemed the C-word acceptable — what more need be said ?