In the distant pop-culture past, say early 2006, “pimp” was still the kind of shady noun most folks didn’t throw around in good company. Pimps, after all, have a nasty image: fierce characters in flashy clothes, squeezing cash from drugged-up hookers who had better cooperate – or else.
But in these high-speed times, when language morphs as quickly as presidential candidates during primary season, “pimp” has experienced a surprising image change, not to mention an idiomatic one. In a matter of months, the word has gone from a kinda bad noun to a sorta good verb.
“Pimp,” it seems, has been pimped.
“Once you get the whole sex-trade thing out of it, you don’t even think about it anymore, you just say it,” said Tyler Jacobson, a Denver DJ who spins at La Rumba nightclub and hears the expression frequently.
Still, he admits, he’s just warming up to “housewives using it when they are talking about remodeling the living room.”
But these days, “pimp,” which now broadly means to embellish or champion, or maybe to show off or sell, has worked its way into common usage. It passed a milestone when The New York Times felt comfortable enough to put it in a headline. “Pimp My Grill,” a story about high-end barbecues, became one of the linguistically conservative newspaper’s most e-mailed stories.
That belly-flop into the mainstream didn’t happen overnight, of course. The word, in verb form, has been surfacing for a couple of years, though mostly in the world of hip-hop, the subculture that continues to evolve into the prevailing culture. The mega-selling rapper Ludacris has thrown it around both in song and discourse, for years. In his language, pimping – shoes, records, clothes – is simply smart business. Though he wasn’t the first musician to use the word, Ludacris has been instrumental in transforming the entrepreneurial “pimp” into hip-hop’s iconic image, displacing, for better or worse, the iconic “gangsta.”
Mark Anthony Neal, an author who teaches about hip-hop at Duke University in North Carolina, watched as the word was embraced by black youth culture.
“Pimping is used as a metaphor for taking control of their situation, for empowering themselves,” he said.
The verb has separated quite naturally from the noun. The image of the street hustler remains – “the dirty old pimps are still in the room,” as Neal puts it – but has been overshadowed.
“Pimp” got its big mass-media break when MTV launched the rapper-driven “Pimp My Ride” in 2004, drawing hundreds of thousands of young viewers to a show about customizing cars.
Only recently, though, has the word become so common. Certainly, that was helped along on March 5 when “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” took the Oscar for best original song from the movie “Hustle & Flow,” upsetting an optimistic ditty from Dolly Parton. The sketchy lyrics were eclipsed by a catchy hook and, by March 6, everyone was humming it at work.
“Pimp” had arrived.
With the credibility of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences behind it, “pimp” was a little less dirty and the verb form turned out to be just what the language needed: a convenient catch-all synonym for a lot of wimpy words we already had, such as boost, foster, propagate, push. Pimp means all those things but adds a cynical shading right at home in an age when folks are both weary and respectful of self-promoters.
“It’s a name for something we didn’t have a name for before,” said Diana Peck, a communications professor at William Paterson University in New Jersey. She compares it to the term “gussied-up,” which is now “hopelessly old-fashioned.”
So it’s not so surprising to see “pimp” co-opted by a new-fashioned magazine like Details (in a piece this month about workers who “pimp” their desks) or by suburban teenagers, who appear to be the word’s biggest users. (They’re also mutating it into an adjective; “that’s pimp” is the new “that’s cool” in Golden.)
Parents who retain a lingering uneasiness can find reassurance from the judiciary. In January 2005, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that “pimp” was not necessarily negative. The decision came from a case in which daredevil Evel Knievel sued an ESPN website for captioning a photo of him, his wife and another woman: “Evel Knievel proves that you’re never too old to be a pimp.”
Knievel called it defamatory, but the judges disagreed, opining that the word can actually be “intended as a compliment.”
That combination of street cred and better-than-street cred opens up wide possibilities. One can only imagine the upcoming ads by fast-food joints pimping their burgers by adding bacon. Or parents pimping this year’s family vacation by taking the kids to Disneyland rather than Steamboat.
But anyone who wants to adopt the term had better hurry. Words like “pimp” gain cache because they are particularly colorful or “mildly forbidden,” Peck said. Once they become common, their hip factor can fade.
“Slang,” Peck said, “by its very nature, has to change quickly.”
Staff writer Ray Mark Rinaldi can be reached at 303-820-1540 or rrinaldi@denverpost.com.
