“Word of the Week” is a biweekly column by Allie Gruber about the joy of language. Every fortnight, she will choose one unusual word or group of words that tingled her ears and widened her eyes. She advises readers to pepper their day-to-day conversations with her selections. Everyone likes a bit of seasoning.
Some insults are worse than others. “Repulsive” is worse than “plain.” “Incompetent” is worse than “organizationally-challenged.” “Shit-fashion-sense” is worse than “he’s-finding-himself.” But “dry” is about as bad as it gets. To be labelled “dry” is to be deemed so boring that the snub itself is bland. Few other insults are so tauntingly nettling, so sharply needling. If you’re mean or arrogant or selfish, you at least have one distinctive quality. “Ugh, he’s so dry,” Yale sophomore Jennifer might exclaim after her first date with Irvin. The problem with gangly, stubbly-chinned Irvin isn’t that he was rude or plain or—God forbid!—that he didn’t hold the door open for her when she entered Jack’s Bar And Steakhouse. It’s precisely that there wasn’t a problem. Poor Irvin was just . . . there.
“Dry” has become so widespread among Gen Z-ers that few stop to consider its relation to its other meanings. “The turkey is dry,” old aunt Gertrude might announce on Thanksgiving, frowning scrunchy-nosed at her plate. “I knew I shouldn’t have entrusted it to Auntie Marge!” Here, “dry” signals that the turkey has been overcooked. Alas, the high heat of the oven deprived it of moisture. But in Shakespeare’s time, the word started describing personality, too. To be “dry” was to be, alas, deathly boring. In Act 2 of As You Like It, Lord Jacque declares that the fool’s brain is “as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage.” Good one, Shakespeare. Sleek.
And yet! “Dry” is not the only personality descriptor that once applied to taste. When little Gordon scores against his lean-muscled brother Xavier in a game of footie, Xavier puts up a fight. “It was rigged!” he cries, and he lurches at poor limby Gordon. And how will little Gordon respond? Only one word will do him justice.
“Dude, stop being salty!” he will cry. “I beat you fair and square. Learn to take an L.”
Xavier holds his ground. “You kicked my foot—not the ball. That should be a foul! Ref!? He deserves a yellow card.”
The ref glares at him—fiercely, penetratingly—and he backs down. Beneath the protesting and the screaming, the shouting and the wrangling and the tussling, Xavier knows what he is: a salty loser.
Like its cousin “dry,” the word “salty” was first used to evoke taste. Today, it’s another way of saying, essentially, you-sore-loser-you’re-just-upset-that-you-lost-stop-acting-like-a-petty-5-year-old.
But—and here lies the term’s complexity—our society likes salty food. When the large french fries we ordered at McDonalds aren’t salted enough, we lament that fast food standards are going down and, “Oh, nothing these days is as good as it used to be!” Salt is like the beds in Goldilocks and the Three Bears. One doesn’t want too much of it. (No! Not that, not a salty lamb stew.) Nor does one want too little. (Then, our beef would taste, yes, dry.) Just right: that’s the sweet spot.
Why, then, has “salty” taken on such negative connotations? It’s certainly possible to conceive of a universe in which “salty” is a great compliment. If dry people are uninteresting, surely it’d make sense for “salty” people to be full of charm and wit.
“Hey man, I like your salty new girlfriend. She’s got real pizzazz.”
“I know, right? Ever since our very first date, I’ve known she was the one. Never met anyone so salty.”
But to our modern ears, this just doesn’t sound right.
“Saucy” is another gastronomic term that Shakespeare seems to have co-opted to represent personality traits. The earliest meaning of “saucy” was literal. It simply meant: “resembling sauce.” By 1599, it came to suggest impertinence and a lack of proper etiquette. “What meanest thou by that?” Marcellus cries in the first scene of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. “Mend me, thou saucy fellow!”
“Spicy” is a more recent example of this phenomenon. “Yo, she be spicy!” puffer-coat-clad, East Londoner Oscar might say to his homie, his trousers hanging low on his hips. There’s a sudden gust of wind, and his trousers fall down—down, humiliatingly down, all the way down to his ankles. Silly Oscar! Get a belt. Or perhaps Queen Bey alone lives up to the swank of this adjective. “Don’t try to lessen yourself for the world,” Beyonce wrote in her high school yearbook. “Let the world catch up to you.” With that, she swishes her ponytail—to the left, to the right—and returns to her trigonometry homework. God, what a woman. So much spice, so much zing.
As went the fortunes of “dry,” “salty,” “saucy,” and “spicy,” so went the fortune of “sour.” And as went the fate of “sour,” so too did “sweet” come to be associated with gentle people whose voices are soft like honey tea. And “bitter” followed. And “fruity” followed “bitter.” And “zesty” followed “fruity” which followed “bitter.”
The pattern is plain enough. As with the trajectory of “brother,” it may be possible to make predictions about the evolution of our slang. Which food-related words will be next to signify personality traits? Might “savory” be the next “it” word of our generation?
“OMG, she’s so savory,” mini-skirted middle-schooler Matilda might say of her classmate Winnifred. Would “savory” be a compliment? A gross insult? Perhaps savory Winnifred would be a horrid Goody Two-shoes. She’d drink milk at every meal. She’d do her algebra equations immediately after getting home from school. She’d snitch on her little brother Johnny when he played his PlayStation 5 instead of doing his French homework.
“Jeez, Winni,” he’d cry exasperatedly. “You’re the most savory person I ever met. Have a bit of fun, why don’t you?”
Winni smacks her lips together, points up her nose. “No wonder mummy likes me more than you,” she retorts. And with that she flounces off, leaving little Johnny simpering and whimpering in a heap on the fluffy rug.
Or maybe “creamy” will be the next slang word to enter our vernaculars. But, we wonder again, what might it mean to be creamy? Perhaps “creamy” people will be those who cry too easily. Wallowing tears, loud tears, mascara-running-down-your-face-so-that-people-whisper- that-you’re-an-ugly-cryer tears.“Oh, stop being so creamy,” Lillian’s best friend Juniper might tell her curtly. “He’s only a guy.” Leonora gapes up at her, her face strewn with mascara-infused teardrops. Sniffle, she breathes in. Sniffle louder, sniffle longer.
Over time, we’ve stopped associating our slang words with their original meanings. We rarely take time to reflect that our word for sore losers is also the one we use to describe french fries or sautéed zucchini or even beef rib-eye strips. Decades ago, someone must’ve taken a bite of salty poached salmon and thought… blimey, that’s what being a sore loser tastes like. Once we realize that some of our most beloved slang words derive from their food-related meanings, our understanding of our slang becomes all the richer. Or, perhaps, just maybe, all the creamier.
