Vulgar

Vulgar (pronounced vuhl-ger)

(1) Characterized by ignorance of or lack of good breeding or taste.

(2) Indecent; obscene; lewd, ribald.

(3) Crude, coarse; unrefined, boorish, rude.

(4) As, the vulgar masses, of, relating to, or constituting the ordinary people in a society (mostly archaic).

(5) Current; popular; common; crude; coarse; unrefined.

(6) As the vulgar tongue, spoken by, or being in the language spoken by, the people generally; the vernacular; colloquial speech (mostly archaic).

(7) Lacking in distinction, aesthetic value, or charm; banal; ordinary.

(8) Denoting a form of a language (applied most often to Latin), current among common people, used especially at a period when the formal language is has become archaic and no longer general spoken use (often with initial capital; usually pre-nominal).

(9) In mathematics, a representation of a fractional number based on ordinary or everyday arithmetic as opposed to decimal fractions.  It refers to one in which two whole numbers (the numerator and denominator) are placed above and below a horizontal line (neither can be zero).  Vulgar fractions are also described as common or simple fractions.  Now rare, in US English, the term vulgar faction is obsolete.

1350-1400: From the early Modern English vulgare, from the vulgāris (belonging to the multitude), from volgus & vulgus (mob; common folk), from the Sanskrit vargah (division, group), from the primitive Indo-European wl̥k.  The construct of vulgāris was vulg(us) + -āris (the suffix a form of -ālis, used to form an adjective, usually from a noun, indicating a relationship or a pertaining to).  As an example of the forks of the root, related European words included the Welsh gwala (plenty, sufficiency), the Ancient Greek ἁλία (halía) (assembly), eilein (to press, throng) & εἰλέω (eiléō) (to compress) and the Old Church Slavonic великъ (velikŭ) (great).  The meaning coarse, low, ill-bred was first recorded in the 1640s, probably from earlier use meaning people belonging to the ordinary class dating from the 1530s.  The derived negative forms such as unvulgar and unvulgarly do exist but are rare to the point of being probably obsolete.  When used in disapprobation, the synonyms include boorish, naughty, tawdry, profane, tasteless, ribald, off-color, disgusting, obscene, impolite, suggestive, indecent, crude, scatological, nasty, filthy & coarse.  As applied to linguists, they include conversational, colloquial, vernacular & folk.  In mathematics, they are common (and most frequently), simple.

Vulgar Latin

Vulgar Latin or Sermo Vulgaris (common speech) is a generic term for the non-standard (as opposed to classical) sociolects of Latin from which the Romance languages developed.  It’s said the works written in Latin during classical times almost always used Classical rather than Vulgar Latin and while that is certainly true of what has survived, the literal volume of ephemeral material written in the vernacular is unknown.  Vulgar Latin was used by inhabitants of the Roman Empire and subsequently became a technical term from Latin and Romance-language philology referring to the unwritten varieties of a Latinised language spoken mainly by Italo-Celtic populations governed by the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire.  Traces appear in some inscriptions, such as graffiti or advertisements but almost certainly the educated population mainly responsible for Classical Latin would also have spoken Vulgar Latin in certain contexts irrespective of their socio-economic background.  In that, things were probably little different then than now, educated people using at least some of the phraseology of the less well-spoken, even if only ironically.

Campaign buttons used in the 1964 US presidential campaign: Republican Party  (left) and Democrat Party (right).  It wouldn't be for many decades that the red would be standardized as the color of the Republicans and blue for the Democrats (as the result of a somewhat random allocation of colors by the television networks when illustrating results with charts and other graphics.

It shouldn’t be confused with "barracks Latin" (originally a casual description of the "rough" language of soldiers and others compared with "polite, educated Latin" of the Roman elite) which is the rendering, with humorous intent, of common English phrases into something which sounds as though it might be Latin.  One of the Monty Python films used the barracks Latin names Sillius Soddus and Biggus Dickus and the best known is Illegitimi non carborundum, an aphorism translating as "don't let the bastards grind you down".  First recorded among soldiers during World War II (1939-1945), an association from which it gained the "barracks" label (although it's not clear in which branch of the military it originated nor even if the coiners were British or American).  It caught on and was famously popularized by Republican candidate Barry Goldwater (1909-1998) during his disastrous 1964 presidential campaign.  Despite the Kennedy assassination, those who voted (and there were many who were prevented from exercising that constitutional right) in the 1964 election represented the United States in the era during which prosperity and optimism were were more widely distributed than at any point in its history.  Vietnam, Watergate, malaise and trickle-down economics would follow.  In the 1964 election, Goldwater lost to President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ, 1908–1973; US President 1963-1969) in one of the biggest landslides in US electoral history.  It was also one of the more polarized campaigns and the electorate responded better to Johnson's "building a great society" than Goldwater's "fear and loathing" although such were the atmospherics that it's now remembered more as "crooked old Lyndon vs crazy old Barry".  

Goldwater hung in his office a sign reminding him of his dictum although his used an embellished barracks Latin: Noli permittere Illegitimatis carborundum (Never let the bastards grind you down).  He always denied being a Freemason and admitted membership only of a fraternal organization known as the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks.

Although an avowed conservative (with at least some of what that implies), he wasn't above using vulgar English if he thought there was a point to be made.  When told Johnson aide Walter Jenkins (1918–1985)  had been arrested in a YMCA (Young Men's Christian Association) toilet in the act of "performing an indecency upon another man", although he declined to use the event to attack the Democrats (some suggesting he had no wish to provoke the Republicans into probing for evidence of homosexuality among his staff), in "off the record" comments to journalists he would complain: "What a way to win an election, communists and cocksuckers".  As it would transpire, others in rge Republican machine didn't share Goldwater's reticence and tried to use the arrest as a smear against the administration but the general public reaction was more amused than outraged.  Jenkins paid a US$50 fine for "disorderly conduct".

In the election, Goldwater did however win five states in the South, the best result by a Republican in the region since the reconstruction-era after the US Civil War (1861-1865), a harbinger of the shift in political alignment which would transform the South from a Democratic stronghold (the so-called “Solid South”) into a bastion of Republican strength.  There were many reasons for this and it may be some of them were probably more significant than Goldwater's uncompromising positions on economics and his staunch anti-communism.  Nevertheless, his mystique among American conservatives remains based on the legend of him being the intellectual trailblazer for the “Regan Revolution” and the transformation of the Republican party from a centrist aggregation of the north-eastern establishment into a collective of regional and sectional pressure groups, the factionalism prone to unleashing the forces of extremism which now contest for control.  After Ronald Reagan’s (1911–2004; US President 1981-1989) victory in 1980, one Washington Post columnist noted the feeling of those who had voted for Goldwater in 1964 being one of vindication, regretting only it had taken “…sixteen years to count the votes".

The vulgar, indecent, obscene, lewd & ribald

Although the technical uses in mathematics and the categorization of Latin strains are long established, the best known and most common use of “vulgar” is to describe things considered indecent, obscene, lewd or ribald.  Given the habits and tastes of men, there’s little shortage of such material thus to be described but shifts in public perception and tolerance means vulgarity is a moving target and there is certainly no consensus, opinions varying not only between but within regions, class, generations and probably just about any segmentation of society yet devised.  The unifying factor though is usually anything involving sex or any conventionally sexualized body parts (such as the foot fetishists free to indulge most aspects of their hobby).  Although in recent decades there’s been something of a retreat, this remains a permissive age as regards what were once considered vulgarities.

Vulgarity remains in the eye of the beholder.

So, something vulgar can sometimes be judged an obscenity and is often lewd or ribald but not of necessity indecent.  The linguistic tussle is because the words “obscene” and “indecent” appear sometimes in legislation and something so defined can even attract criminal sanction whereas anything lewd is subject merely to social disapprobation while ribald carries the connotation of “humorously vulgar”.  Standards shift (and sometimes are nudged along by this force or that) and it is almost always a subjective judgement as Potter Stewart (1915–1985; associate justice of the US Supreme Court 1958-1981) explained in his famous concurring judgement in Jacobellis v Ohio (378 U.S. 184 (1964)): "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within [the shorthand description “hard-core pornography”], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it…

That may have been what prosecuting counsel Mervyn Griffith-Jones (1909-1979) had in mind when in R v Penguin Books Ltd ((1961) Crim LR 176) he asked the jury to consider whether DH Lawrence’s (1885–1930) novel Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) was too obscene to be read by the British, alleging it “…induced lustful thoughts in the minds of those who read it” and begging them to ponder “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?”.  There was a time when an English jury might have allowed themselves to be told by one of their “betters” what they should be permitted to read but those days were done and the jury (more likely to be servants than masters) had decided they would decide which vulgarities they would tolerate.