Sometimes, words do become dangerous—because of the bad uses they are put to. Consider the word
occupy: the OED traces the word to the fourteenth century but says:
quote:
The disuse of this verb in the 17th and most of the 18th c[entury] is notable. Against 104 quot[e]s for 16th c[entury], we have for 17th only 8, outside the Bible of 1611 (where it occurs 10 times), and for the 18th c[entury] only 10 ... The word occurs only twice (equivocally) in Shakes[peare], is entirely absent from the Concordance to Milton and Pope, is not used by Gray; all Johnson's quot[e]s, exc[ept] 2, are from the Bible of 1611. It was again freely used by Cowper (13 instances in the Concordance). This avoidance appears to have been due to its vulgar employment.
From the late fifteenth century until the beginning of the eighteenth,
occupy was a euphemism: to occupy someone meant to have sex with them. This is kind of a nice euphemism, as a metaphor for the way troops
occupy a town after a battle, sometimes without a struggle. When the word stopped being used to mean sex, it came back into use again—its meaning unchanged, and the language unharmed. Remember to tell your friends about the verb
occupy when they complain about
gay being ruined forever because it is now used to mean "homosexual." [Jim Quinn.
American Tongue and Cheek, pp.92f.]
But seriously, I wonder whether "know" suffered a fate similar to "occupy," since it too was a sexual term in days of yore.
