Editing Vulgarity (section)

==Evolution of the term==
From the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, "vulgar" simply described the common language or vernacular of a country. From the mid-seventeenth century onward, it began to take on a [[pejorative]] aspect: "having a common and offensively mean character, coarsely commonplace; lacking in refinement or good taste; uncultured; ill bred".{{cn|date=July 2020}}  

In the [[Victorian age]], vulgarity broadly described many activities, such as wearing ostentatious clothing. In a [[George Eliot]] novel, one character could be vulgar for talking about money, a second because he criticizes the first for doing so, and a third for being fooled by the excessive refinement of the second.<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=oU68f9ScRpEC|title=Victorian vulgarity: taste in verbal and visual culture|author=Susan David Bernstein, Elsie Browning Michie|publisher=Ashgate publishing|year=2009|pages=1–10|isbn=978-0-7546-6405-5}}</ref> The effort to avoid vulgar phrasing could leave characters at a loss for words.  In [[George Meredith]]'s ''[[Beauchamp's Career]]'', an heiress does not wish to make the commonplace statement that she is "engaged", nor "betrothed", "affianced", or "plighted". Though such words are not vulgarity in the vulgar sense, they nonetheless could stigmatize the user as a member of a socially inferior class. Even favored euphemisms such as ''[[toilet]]'' eventually become stigmatized like the words they replace (the so-called [[euphemism treadmill]]), and currently favored words serve as a sort of "[[cultural capital]]".<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=oU68f9ScRpEC|title=Victorian vulgarity: taste in verbal and visual culture|author=Susan David Bernstein, Elsie Browning Michie|publisher=Ashgate publishing|year=2009|page=17|isbn=978-0-7546-6405-5}}</ref>