How did 'expletive,' 'explicit,' and 'exploit' become such sleazy words?

If you want to search out the best way to make the most of a relationship, you will want to use plain language, perhaps with some padding out.

If you want to explore the best way to exploit a relationship, you will want to use explicit language, perhaps with some expletives.

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There are just seven basic words in common use in English (plus words derived from them) that start with expl, and they're not all related. What's more, none of them originally have to do with anything sexual or negative. And none of them now mean only something negative or sexual. But take a look at this bunch, some of which, like a movie group of high school friends, turned out to be bad apples:

Exploit was the first of them to start turning rotten. Back in the 1830s it was already being used to mean making use of something for selfish ends. But something else happened in the 1960s: "exploitation films" started coming out, cheap movies aiming to exploit a current hot topic loaded with lurid material for commercial gain. The echo of sex in the ex helped this — sex-exploitation film readily became sexploitation film, and the overtone stuck. Exploit was no longer simply greedy. It was now decidedly seamy. The term sexual exploitation first became common in the 1970s.

Those exploitation films, along with other naughty movies and magazines, came to be of increasing concern to lawmakers and other upstanding citizens. They wanted a technical-sounding word for what they were talking about. They found this word explicit, which didn't at the time have specific sexual overtones — and just happened to sound a bit like exploit too. So the phrase sexually explicit came into regular use in the early 1970s, and so did use of explicit by itself to mean "sexually explicit."

Something else happened in the early 1970s: Watergate. Richard Nixon had been taping conversations in the Oval Office, and when the investigation into the Watergate break-ins started, they had to deal with tape transcripts that were full of naughty words. What euphemism did they use for these rude filler words? Expletive — as in expletive deleted. All of a sudden an odd little linguistic term was pressed into service as a synonym for "vulgarity." Why that word? At the time it seemed so technical — though it did just happen to have that expl, as in explicit, exploit, and maybe explosive, which is what the tapes certainly were.

An added bump to explicit came in 1985, when Parental Advisory labels started being put on music in the U.S. The first songs to get the label were ones such as Prince's "Darling Nikki," which doesn't have any profanities but is rather frankly naughty. The labels have become common, and now a song that has nothing to do with sex but is padded out with vulgar words will also get a warning of "explicit" language — by which is just meant expletives, in the new sense.

James Harbeck is a professional word taster and sentence sommelier (an editor trained in linguistics). He is the author of the blog Sesquiotica and the book Songs of Love and Grammar.