June 12, 2000

broad

I occasionally hear the word broad still used to refer to women, and I'm always offended, but it occurred to me that I had no idea what the origins of the term were. Was broad always a derogatory usage, or am I just over-sensitive?

I'm amazed you still hear this word, since it's definitely on the wane in current use. Still, if you do hear it, it's likely to mean one of three things:
1. The user is in a time warp and still probably says "my old lady" instead of "my wife" or "my mother."
2. The user is calling the woman in question a prostitute.
3. The user is conciously using the word to be derogatory or for effect.

Believe it or not, the word broad may come from an 18th-century slang use of the word to mean 'playing card'. How that meaning sprang up is uncertain, as is when and why the word broad came to mean an entrance ticket or transportation ticket. The origin of the 'ticket' meaning is in American circus slang, but it's only speculative to say that entrance tickets looked like playing cards in the era when this usage arose (1912 is the earliest citation).

What we have to connect women with tickets is a definition in Jackson and Hellyer's 1914 A Vocabulary of Criminal Slang, with Some Examples of Common Usages. It's worth quoting in full:
"Noun, Current amongst genteel grafters chiefly. A female confederate; a female companion, a woman of loose morals. Broad is derived from the far-fetched metaphor of 'meal ticket,' signifying a female provider for a pimp, from the fanciful correspondence of a meal ticket to a railroad or other ticket."

Those genteel grafters weren't the only ones using the term, and it became widespread in gangster-speak and then spread to "uneducated" youth, then (as slang usually does) to more mainstream youth trying to sound cool. The original meaning implied a woman who, if not a prostitute, was at least of loose moral character. The connection to prostitution was close enough that we get a false etymology from 1926 saying that broad is derived from bawd, and this exchange from Raymond Chandler's 1934 magazine piece "Finger Man": "I saw plenty wrong with your broad's manners." "She's not a broad."

However, the general use to mean 'woman' spread fairly quickly too; in "Guys and Dolls" (1932), one character says "He refers to Miss Perry as a broad, meaning no harm whatever, for this is the way many of the boys speak of the dolls." This use was never really approved of, and the women's movement drove in the final coffin nails, so that it's rare to find a use of broad after 1975 that simply means 'woman'.

Nowadays, although the sexual innuendo has pretty much vanished from the meaning of broad, its use is still chiefly contemptuous, as exemplified by the fact that it's also prison slang for a man who plays the woman's role in homosexual sex. So I think you're pretty safe in taking offense if you're called a broad--unless, of course, you practice the oldest profession.

Wendalyn