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?
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?