# Does the word "bad" mean "good" in some language? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 22, 2006, 1:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426 "2006-03-22T13:50:07Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2006, 1:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426/1 "2006-03-22T13:50:07Z")
I seem to recall encountering a language in which this fun translation occurred, but it’s a difficult question to Google. Does anyone know of any word-pair that has a positive meaning in one language and a negative meaning in another? Daniel ---
**Author:** ![Giles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giles/32/60_2.png) [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2006, 1:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426/2 "2006-03-22T13:55:51Z")
> [@Left Hand of Dorkness](#): > > Does anyone know of any word-pair that has a positive meaning in one language and a negative meaning in another? One example is “Gift”, which means poison in German, and another thing in the closely related language English. ---
**Author:** ![MikeG](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mikeg/32/4329_2.png) [@MikeG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MikeG)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2006, 2:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426/3 "2006-03-22T14:09:24Z")
In Greek, the word for no is pronounced Neh and sounds a lot like Nay! “No way” is O Shee which to me can sound like OK. ---
**Author:** ![Bear\_Nenno](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bear_nenno/32/3358_2.png) [@Bear\_Nenno](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bear_Nenno)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2006, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426/4 "2006-03-22T14:57:05Z")
I know on tv, there’s been many (not funny) jokes made about how kids say “bad” when they mean “good”. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2006, 3:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426/5 "2006-03-22T15:09:34Z")
Coincidentally, _bad_ means ‘bad’ in Persian. It’s even pronounced with the same short vowel [æ] as in English. And the Persians had the word first; we must have copied from them. I don’t know in which language _bad_ means ‘good’, but there is plenty of other language fun along those lines… Catalan _alt_ 'high - ’ Turkish _alt_ ‘low’ Dutch _beter_ ‘better’ - Turkish _beter_ ‘worse’ English _black_ - Old Chinese _bhlak_ ‘white’ Mongolian _bog_ ‘demon’ - Russian _bog_ ‘god’ Kashmiri _ded_ ‘grandmother’ - Russian _ded_ ‘grandfather’ English _he_ - Hebrew _hi_ ‘she’ Coptic _i_ ‘come’ - Latin _i-_ ‘go’ Mongolian _ir_- ‘come’ - Spanish _ir_ ‘go’ Hebrew _ish_ ‘man’ - Jacaltec Mayan _ish_ ‘woman’ English _lumbar_ (back) - Pashto _lumbar_ ‘front’ English _mama_ ‘mother’ - Georgian _mama_ ‘father’ English _nay_ ‘no’ - Greek _nai_ ‘yes’, Korean _ne_ ‘yes’ Basque _ni_ ‘I’ - Chinese _ni_, Tamil ni\* ‘thou’ English _no_ - Hawaiian _no_ affirmative English _papa_ ‘father’ - Old Japanese _papa_ ‘mother’ Arabic dialect _rah_ ‘go’ - Hindi _rah_ ‘stay’ Hindustani _rog_ ‘disease’ - Pashto _rogh_ ‘healthy’ English _sad_ - Turkish _sad_ ‘happy’ English _server_ ‘one who serves’ - Ottoman Turkish _server_ ‘one who rules’ Italian _si_ ‘yes’ - Swahili _si_ negative Arabic _su’_ ‘evil’ - Sanskrit _su-_ ‘good’ Basque _su_ ‘fire’ - Turkish _su_ ‘water’ Malay _tak_ ‘no’ - Polish _tak_ ‘yes’ French _toi_ ‘thee’ - Vietnamese _tôi_ ‘me’ Mordvin _tol_ ‘fire’ - Nivkh _tol_ ‘water’ Mayan _yum_ ‘father’ - Tibetan _yum_ ‘mother’ Italian _va_ ‘go!’ Tamil _va_ ‘come!’ If we find out the answer to the OP, it would make a good addition to this list. ---
**Author:** ![pravnik](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/8edcca/32.png) [@pravnik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pravnik)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2006, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426/6 "2006-03-22T15:49:46Z")
In Czech, “no” means “yes.” It’s the short form of “ano.” ---
**Author:** ![Malacandra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Malacandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malacandra)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2006, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426/7 "2006-03-22T16:33:33Z")
In French, “blesser” is the verb “to injure”. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2006, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426/8 "2006-03-22T16:39:32Z")
I don’t know if there is, but if you found it, it would be wicked. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2006, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426/9 "2006-03-22T16:54:48Z")
> [@Sage Rat](#): > > I don’t know if there is, but if you found it, it would be wicked. 😃 😃 “Wicked” was the best example I could think of on my own, but I hoped someone out there could come up with better (beter?) examples than mine. Y’all have not disappointed–these are great! I ask because [of this](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=7221390#post7221390): this list of words will help me shred [Masaru Emoto’s claims from the movie](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Bleep_Do_We_Know%21%3F#Water_crystals). Daniel ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2006, 5:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426/10 "2006-03-22T17:13:44Z")
I can’t think of any examples from Japanese (at the moment at least.) I don’t know what claims the movie makes, let alone what that has to do with whether bad means good in some language. But just as it is interesting and potentially relevant I would point out the Chinese practice of giving their male children girls names to last them through their youth. This is because girls are nasty and demons won’t bother them–thus the boy will be safe until he is strong enough to handle demons. ---
**Author:** ![Hampshire](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hampshire/32/4887_2.png) [@Hampshire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hampshire)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2006, 5:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426/11 "2006-03-22T17:17:07Z")
If I told my next door teenage neighbor that I thought his car was “the shit” he would think it was “good”. If I told my 68 year old father that his car was “the shit” he would think it was “bad”. ---
**Author:** ![Maastricht](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a88e57/32.png) [@Maastricht](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maastricht)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2006, 5:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426/12 "2006-03-22T17:39:04Z")
The English word " bad" means bath in Dutch. And don’t forget words that have totally opposite meanings within the same language, depending on context. Like " bitch" “screw” " fine" " kid" . Or Joke and yolk. Or words that have different meaning when pronounced different. Is that crystal forming water supposed to have ears? ---
**Author:** ![DarrenS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/977dab/32.png) [@DarrenS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DarrenS)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2006, 6:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426/13 "2006-03-22T18:04:31Z")
These just seem like examples of a particular type of [faux ami](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faux_amis) to me. ---
**Author:** ![AskNott](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asknott/32/5790_2.png) [@AskNott](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AskNott)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2006, 10:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426/14 "2006-03-22T22:14:22Z")
Then there’s the made-up tale of a minor league baseball team whose equipment trailer caught fire on the road. By the time help arrived, everything was lost, but two kinds of gear were still the same. The burnt cork the players put under their eyes was still burnt cork, and the ash (wood) bats were still ash. ---
**Author:** ![Mbossa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@Mbossa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mbossa)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2006, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426/15 "2006-03-22T22:33:06Z")
> [@Sage Rat](#): > > I can’t think of any examples from Japanese (at the moment at least.) This may be a bit of a long shot, but the Japanese word for ‘no’ is _iie_, which sounds a teeny little bit like ‘yeah’. ---
**Author:** ![yBeayf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/e274bd/32.png) [@yBeayf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yBeayf)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2006, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426/16 "2006-03-22T23:09:00Z")
> [@](#): > > Coincidentally, bad means ‘bad’ in Persian. It’s even pronounced with the same short vowel [æ] as in English. And the Persians had the word first; we must have copied from them. Dunno if you’re seriously proposing that, but [www.etymonline.com](http://www.etymonline.com) states its etymology is unknown for certain, and speculates it came from an Old English word for an effeminate man, hermaphrodite, or pederast. ---
**Author:** ![Anaamika](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Anaamika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anaamika)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2006, 11:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426/17 "2006-03-22T23:21:36Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > Hindustani _rog_ ‘disease’ Unless it’s _prem-rog_ - which is lovesickness. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2006, 3:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426/18 "2006-03-23T03:18:14Z")
> [@yBeayf](#): > > Dunno if you’re seriously proposing that, but [www.etymonline.com](http://www.etymonline.com) states its etymology is unknown for certain, and speculates it came from an Old English word for an effeminate man, hermaphrodite, or pederast. I know, I’ve examined that etymology and found it wanting. That was years before I developed into a _bæddel_ girl myself. The explanation just sounds too farfetched and too dependent on transphobia. Besides, there’s no explanation offered for the origin of _bæddel_, so it still isn’t much of an explanation. If the world is held up by an elephant, what holds up the elephant? Then we have to find a turtle for the elephant to stand on, etc. So I gave this etymology a lot of consideration, but it just makes my Occam’s Razor-o-Meter go off, and I pronounced it overly farfetched. Ask yourself: are _you_ convinced by that? The history of transgender and transphobia, especially in the Middle Ages, is tangled and controversial. Leslie Feinberg published a study, _Transgender Warriors_, connecting the practice of gender-crossing among mediæval peasants with peasant revolts against the lords, citing several cases in which the two were correlated. So according to Feinberg, gender-crossing took on political significance in the Middle Ages. The use of a pejorative specifically targeted at gender variant people may be a lexical remnant of political strife a millennium ago. Can anyone quote the context of these Old English pejoratives? What was the motivation of an author using the words this way? The _American Heritage Dictionary_, whose etymologies I have consistently found the most reliable, does not trace _bad_ any further back than Middle English _badde_. They recognized the _bæddel_ theory for the flimsy speculation it is. My own hypothesis runs like this: The original etymon \*_bæd-_ meant generally the opposite of good, as it does today. It may have been a word spoken in a low prestige dialect or argot, which would explain why it wasn’t recorded by King Alfred’s scribes as such. Standard, literary Old English used _ful_ (\>foul) to mean ‘bad’ in the general sense. Maybe some Rush Limbaugh of Anglo-Saxon times wanted to propagandize against gender variant people, and coined a new pejorative _bædling_: took the low-class word \*_bæd-_ and added the regular attributive ending -_ling_ (which survives in words like _Earthling_; it was used much more frequently in Old English), or the diminutive ending -_el_ (frequently used in Yiddish to this day, _bubbeleh_). Diminutives can be either endearing (as in _bubbeleh_) or pejorative (as in _bæddel_). Who knows, _bæddel_ might have originated as an endearment by someone with a tranny lover, but then was twisted by a satirist into a pejorative mockery. Anyway, this derivational path makes more sense to me than _bæddel_ just appearing out of nowhere and then changing to a completely different meaning in some obscure way. Old English, in my reckoning, got the word from Proto-Indo-European \*_bhadh-_ ‘hurt, sicken, repel, nauseate’. Whew! Is that bad enough for you? Related forms of this root included \*_bhoidhos_ ‘horrid; horror’ and \*_bhodh-_ ‘pang, pain’. Cite: Stuart E. Mann, _An Indo-European Comparative Dictionary_ (Hamburg: Buske Verlag, 1984), 59, 88, 89. Mann also cites Julius Pokorny, _Indogermanisches Wörterbuch_ II, 130 Words derived from this root include Sanskrit भाधा _bhādhā_ ‘pain’; Lithuanian _bodau_ ‘tired, bored’, _bodus_ ‘nauseating’; Latin _foedus_ ‘foul, horrible’; Latvian _baida_ ‘fear, horror’; Old Church Slavic _bĕda_ ‘hardship’; and possibly Greek πηθω _pēthō_ ‘suffer’. What’s more, I would derive Persian _bad_ from the same root, making it not a coincidence but a cognate with English _bad_. Linguists will recognize that \*_bhadh-_ \> \*_bæd-_ strictly observes the laws of sound correspondence from Proto-Indo-European into Germanic: \*bh- \> b-, \*a \> æ, \*dh- \> d-. So what do you think, Doper linguists? Have I nailed it? BTW, someone should update etymologists that the term _hermaphrodite_ for people with ambiguous genitalia or anomalous chromosomes is now considered obsolete. We now say “[intersexed](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersexed).” Back to the OP: [etymonline.com](http://etymonline.com) says in their entry on _bad_: “Ironic use as a word of approval is said to be at least since 1890s orally, originally in Black Eng., emerging in print 1928 in a jazz context.” Hey, thanks for the link, **yBeayf**. Here’s another one for the OP: The Proto-Indo-European root \*_bhodh-_ ‘pain’ has a homonym \*_bhodh-_ ‘good’. 😃 You’re really onto something here, **Daniel**! ---
**Author:** ![Kyla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/eada6e/32.png) [@Kyla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kyla)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2006, 3:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426/19 "2006-03-23T03:30:26Z")
The Hebrew word for _she_ is _he_. And the Hebrew word for _he_ is _hu_ (ie, “who”). And the word for _who_ is _mi_ (ie, “me”). These coincidences are more funny than they are confusing, honestly. ---
**Author:** ![yBeayf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/e274bd/32.png) [@yBeayf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yBeayf)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2006, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426/20 "2006-03-23T03:36:29Z")
> [@](#): > > Ask yourself: are you convinced by that? I agree, it looks like grasping at straws. I was just questioning your implication that English had borrowed the word from Persian. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-word-bad-mean-good-in-some-language/349426.md?page=2)