To me, for my entire life, “sketchy” has always meant “poorly defined, indistinct, like a sketch rather than a photograph”.
At some point in the last few years, it has acquired a new meaning, something like “suspicious, seedy, worrisome”.
The other word is “random” - the new meaning of which is still pretty sketchy to me. Something like “surprising, unexpected” seems to be what they’re trying to say. Correct me if I’m wrong here.
Using random to mean something other than “random” seems to be a younger person thing, but the new use of sketchy seems quite common across the spectrum.
So my questions are:
When did the new meanings appear? I’ve never heard either word in their new contexts until the last year or two.
Where do the new meanings come from? I don’t watch much TV, so I suspect one or both might have come from some TV show I’ve never seen. My only other theory is that someone, somewhere, misunderstood a word and started using it incorrectly, and that it caught on.
I’m also assuming that both coinages are American, since I’ve only heard/seen those usages in US TV/movies and from Americans on internet forums. I’ve also never heard anyone question the new meaning of “sketchy” - everyone seems to accept/understand the new meaning without discussion. Apparently I didn’t get that memo.
Supplementary question: has anyone noticed any more of these old words having new meanings? Did I miss more memos?
Grrr, can some Mod fix the title? I meant to use a slash, not a question mark.
The use of the word “random” to mean unexpected or strange goes back at least to the very early 1990’s. I know that because I started hearing it immediately when I went away to college in 1991 and people from lots of different places used it all the time, especially those from the Northeastern U.S. I am not sure how much further back that usage goes because I never heard it used that way growing up.
“Sketchy” is a pretty old American term as well although I am not sure how old. I think I almost always knew that meaning and I am 36.
I’ve certainly noticed Americans using sketchy with the “new” meaning in the last few years, but to the best of my knowledge I hadn’t heard it used that way before.
I guess the answer is that someone, somewhere, misunderstood a word and started using it incorrectly, and it caught on. Oh well, I was kind of hoping that there would be a more interesting answer.
I don’t know if it’s just a Toronto thing or how widespread it is but it’s common to hear, “That is so sketch.”
I say it a lot and I probably hear sketch more than sketchy but it might just be the people I hang out with.
There’s also “randoms” which refers to people who you associate with even though you don’t know who they are.
“I lived with Ray, Steve, Pete, and a couple of randoms during second year.”
“My lab group for Chemistry was John, James, and a random.”
They were using it in a similar sense at MIT in the 1970s when I was there, and I’m sure it’s much older. They even had a quasidorm named “Random Hall” which housed visitors (“random people”)
Welcome to the world of getting old. This is going to happen to you for the rest of your life. Words that had what you thought were well established meanings are going to be acquiring new meanings, and sometimes those new meanings are going to drive the old meanings out of existence. This is what always (and, yes, I means always) happens in the history of any (and, yes, I mean any) living language. Languages are always changing, and they are always changing at approximately the same rate. This is true of all aspects of language - new vocabulary items, the meanings of older vocabulary items, their pronunciation, and the grammar of the language. You might not notice it particularly until you’re at least middle-aged because you will think it’s just something that you’ve missed until now. At some point though you will start to notice that the language you speak is actually slowly changing.
Fair comment, and I was thinking something along those lines myself, but it looks like - in this case - the alternate meanings for those words have been around since I was a kid, and maybe before I was born - they’re just not in common usage outside the US yet. Though “sketchy” meaning “seedy” is probably on the verge of entering non-US vocabularies.
Yeah, I think of sketchy as in “this is a sketchy neighborhood” as extremely well-established - something I’d say to my grandmother and never think she might not know what I was talking about. “Random” is a great indicator for stupid now - if somebody tells you they “really like, you know, random humor” then you know you’re never going to have a really satisfying conversation with them.
This usage of sketchy is pretty easy to understand. A sketch is a rough, crude drawing. Therefore, a sketchy neighborhood would be a rough, crude neighborhood.
Random is a little tougher. It’s used to refer to an action or event that has no obvious connection to previous events, seemingly coming out of nowhere. The implication is that the person who instigated the event is operating off of some internal list of possible responses, from which he draws randomly, without regard to the appropriateness of the situation. That’s a much more tenuous etymology, and by this point, it’s just a straight up synonym for “non-sequitor,” but I believe that’s the most likely derivation of the usage.
Yes there is an old “nerd” usage that definitely seems to have a meaning related to the new one. However, for some reason it seems to have recently become widely fashionable with the high school crowd many of whom are still using it as young adults. Which is to say that it’s a slang usage that may become standard over time or may be replaced with some other “random” idiom next season.
With others I’ll say that I’ve been hearing both meanings of “sketchy” for almost half a century here on the Canadian plains. I’ll also mention that, when I hear people here and elsewhere complain about new usages that they dislike, half the time I can’t remember every hearing them before. From then on, I hear them all the time. Seems like I filter out a lot of new usages that I can’t really believe until I’m forced to confront them.
Finally, a big “this” to whoever said that you start getting used to this nonsense as you age. As time goes on I’m finding it harder and harder to care.
I am totally on the opposite side of this. I can see no real connection between the “new” meaning of “sketchy” and the old one (I do not think I have heard the “new” meaning very much, but I have only been living in America for 20 years :rolleyes:). The connections Miller draws between the meanings are little more than unfunny puns. The meanings of “rough” and “crude” as those might be applied to a hasty drawing (a sketch) are far,far away from the meanings of “rough” and “crude” as those might be applied to a neighborhood or a person. A rough, crude person or neighborhood is not rough and crude because they are hastily made, or lack detail, or only approximately resemble what they are meant to represent (they are not meant to represent anything!). Likewise, a rough, crude sketch is not rough and crude because it is dirty, or dangerous, or poverty stricken, or lacking in manners, or otherwise offensive to delicate sensibilities.
My best guess on “sketchy” is that it arises from the fact (in some circumstances) that if one only has sketchy (metaphorical old sense, i.e., incomplete) knowledge of a person (or place, or whatever), then one may be wise not to be too trusting of them. It does not seem impossible that “I am not going to trust them, because my knowledge of them is sketchy,” might, through carelessness, mutate into “I am not going to trust them, because they are sketchy.” This seems a stretch, but it is the best I can think of.
On the other hand, the “new” meaning of “random” seems to me like a fairly natural extension of the traditional meaning (which is not to say that it does not sound slangy to me). Events that happen “at random” (a perfectly good, traditional use of the word) are events that happen unpredictably, or for no good, or discernible, reason, or that do not fit into an established pattern. Thus random things comes to mean things that are like they are, or where and when they are, for no good or discernible reason, or that do not fit into some established pattern. A random person in your study group is one who is there for no particular reason that you know about, and also, very likely, does not fit into your established pattern of relationships; a person house in Random Hall at MIT would be there because, as a visitor, they did not fit into the established MIT hierarchies of faculty, staff and students. (A random person might also be one who seems to do things at random, i.e., is unpredictable in their behavior. I believe I have heard the word used in this sense too.)
There seems to be an assumption here that they are American terms and ways of using the language. I’d like to see some sort of cite that would determine if that’s true. As far as I’m aware this has been the accepted usage of these words in Britain for a long time.
I’ve only ever seen them used that way by Americans. I’ve never heard a Brit or Australian or other English speaker use them that way, though I expect that it will happen at some point, if it doesn’t already.
Checking online dictionaries shows that American dictionaries include the new meaning of “sketchy” and non-American ones don’t.
US:
English:
If you can find a cite for it being a common usage in non-American English, let’s see it.
Are you referring to the usage as in “Well that was random!” when, say, referring to some event that just occurred? If so, I wouldn’t consider that a new meaning of the ‘random’. That’s the same old meaning of ‘random’, specifically, “lacking a definite plan, purpose, or pattern”. By observationally declaring something as random you’re underlining that even though it appears to have a pattern it was purely coincidental, and is, as such, surprising and unexpected.
