To celebrate rawdog winning word of the year per the American Dialect Society, I’d like to tell the story of how I learned that the meaning of rawdog changed in the past couple years.
If anyone doesn’t know, the original and long-held meaning of rawdogging was fucking without a condom. The new meaning has extended to doing any kind of action unshielded, plain, or without preparation.
So, about a year ago, I’m eating lunch with coworkers. It’s an office job and we’re generally pretty professional. People swear a lot, but there’s never any innuendos or sex talk.
A coworker is describing a recent trip she took to a vendor to get a demo of equipment we were considering purchasing. Someone else asks “Did you meet Bob LastName while you were there? He’s kind of an interesting guy.”
“Yeah I did, and he is a little strange. I walked into the breakroom one morning and he was rawdogging two blueberry bagels”
Cue my high-pitched shriek of “He was DOING WHAT.”
Followed by my coworkers explaining the meaning and my faint, flustered reply of “ah…well… I’m used to that meaning…. something else.” Some people knew what I was talking about, but unfortunately others did not, and I had to face the ordeal of explaining as delicately as possible to a group of coworkers aged 22 to 60
official semantic extension post
amhrancas 