Language evolves, and our usage of it does the same thing on both macro and micro scales. Words that our teachers drill us on might shift usage by our adulthood, and even get added to the dictionary as the opposite of what we were taught they meant (looking at you, literally). At the same time, words we’re taught are perfectly acceptable often turn out to have incredibly awful roots and prior usages that make them…problematic, at best (looking at you, gay).
All of that is to say, welcome to my new series: words you should probably think twice before using. Even though you didn’t know better. Because now you do.
I’m workshopping the title.
Let’s start with gypped. I hear this word all the time, from my contemporaries, from my older coworkers, and even from not a few members of younger generations who theoretically have exposure to information we didn’t. Webster’s uses gyp as a synonym for cheat or swindle. Various linguistic origin stories trace it back to university halls where it radicalized service workers, the further roots of mislabeled “Egyptians”, and even the horse track.
It seems harmless. As a child on the playground in the 80s and 90s, I’m sure guilty of casually flinging you got gypped! at classmates tricked in one of our tag games, or that didn’t earn the grade they thought they deserved on a project. It was a word that shows up in our pop media and within our classrooms when teachers tried to use slang rather than textbook language–though thankfully much less often than it did when I was a child.
It wasn’t until grad school that I ever saw it in print and made the connection to gypsy. At the time, there wasn’t much of a wider discussion about the implications of that term as a pejorative for an ethnic group that decidedly doesn’t use or like it. But I was at least paying enough attention to understand intuitively that gypped filled a similar role to Shylock: by reducing an outsider group to an unsavory trait, we’re synonymizing a people with a fictionalized and undesirable practice.
Traveling traders of all sorts have a long cultural history of existing in the margins, and have often been the first target for reactions against crime waves and infection. Using gyp is often an unknowing, instilled habit of perpetuating old stories of a boogeyman Other that have no real basis in history. Language is important in shaping our perceptions and our interactions with each other, and using the right words helps ensure you’re living your values–and avoiding public backlash. Try swindled, cheated, conned, or duped instead.
Something Polished 