Honest to gods, this conversation happened today, and it may have cost me a job opportunity. The customer was super impressed with my menu design and animation, and wanted to know who we got it from. When I said I did it, their face lit up! Too bad as soon as i said GIMP, they weren't interested anymore. Has anyone else experienced this? What do you say in similar situations?
From Wiktionary:
A person who is lame due to a crippling of the legs or feet.
(slang, derogatory) A name-calling word, generally for a person who is perceived to be inept, deficient or peculiar.
(BDSM) A submissive dressed in a full-body suit of latex or a similar material.
I'm vaguely sure the first two meanings above appeared earlier. ~~Perhaps the name was taken as a nod to ‘geek’ and ‘dweeb’, which were slurs for programmers back before the profession became mainstream.~~ Edit: apparently not: "The software was originally named the General Image Manipulation Program. Kimball and Mattis formed the acronym GIMP by adding the letter G to '-IMP,' inspired by a reference to 'the gimp' in the 1994 film Pulp Fiction."
Somewhat relatedly, Torvalds called his versioning software ‘git’, which is also a derogatory term, a British-specific one at that. (And the original name of Linux was 'Freax'.)
I doubt that many people know that word. I just tried looking it up in my Collins Cobuild English Dictionary, which has frequency information and tells you how common or uncommon different words are, but it didn't have any entry for gimp at all. In its own roundabout way, I guess that's also a pretty good indicator of how uncommon that word really is.
Merriam has the definition I knew it by before I saw Pulp Fiction, which is a synonym for limp. I think I was also vaguely aware it was an offensive word for someone disabled.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gimp
Merriam-Webster has an amazing amount of words in their online dictionary, but no frequency information. I don't have any of their print editions nearby at the moment — do you happen to know if they considered this word common enough to include in any of their print editions? That might be a useful indication, in lieu of frequency statistics.
And it really is quite an unusual word to know. How did you learn it? Did you maybe grow up in an English speaking community, or was it just pure coincidence that you happened to encounter such an unusual word?
Yeah I'm a native speaker and read a ton as a kid, and then ended up being a lit major, so I guess my idea of what words are normal could be somewhat skewed. But I think that one I probably heard it from my dad.
Looks like the gimp usage peaked in the 1860s, at least in books.
Then I feel my doubt that many people know that word reinforced.