Now on Visual Thesaurus: Sketchy Branding

In my new Candlepower column for Visual Thesaurus, I look at the shifting meanings of sketch (originally “a rough drawing or performance”) and sketchy (originally “incomplete, lacking details”). For some time I’ve puzzled over how these terms of art—literally—came to become terms of disparagement, at least among younger Americans. And because my beat is the language of commerce, I tackle the question by way of two brand names: Etch A Sketch and Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School.

An excerpt:

Google “sketchy neighborhood” and you get more than 67,000 results. “Sketchy area” yields more than 70,000. Both references are to what Urban Dictionary’s contributors agree is a synonym for “unsafe,” “creepy,” “not kosher,” or “someone or something that gives off a bad feeling.”

And “sketchy” doesn’t even need the adjectival -y suffix to carry this newer meaning. “Sketch,” which historically has been a noun and a verb, is now also an adjective with a meaning identical to “sketchy”: questionable, of dubious character.

Access to the full article is restricted to subscribers; columns more than three months old are free at Visual Thesaurus’s sister site, Vocabulary.com.

Comments

[John Russell]

The answer to your puzzle, "how these terms of art—literally—came to become terms of disparagement", is, I think, straightforward. Somewhere in the past some semi-illiterate person struggling to describe something, misused the word. His or her peers then in turn misused it too, until it caught on. To look for logic in the development of this new meaning is, I suggest, hopeless.

It comes down to the simple fact that in language the lowest common denominator almost invariably wins, as words are misappropriated by those that don't know and don't care. Thus language changes. For good or worse, who knows?

[Nancy Friedman]

Gee, John, judgmental much? I suspect you didn't read the Visual Thesaurus column before you wrote your comment. And I'm pretty sure Chaucer's contemporaries were expressing the same declinist sentiment as you are today, only with nonstandardized spelling.

(More on declinism [aka "Kids these days!"] here: http://bit.ly/ibsEm2.)

[CGHill]

I don't know what's worse: some semi-illiterate person misusing a word, or some semi-literate person throwing around theories like so many Wiffle Balls.