In the third and final presidential debate last night, Donald Trump – amid his yet more shocking refusal to say whether he’ll accept the election results – called Hillary Clinton “a nasty woman.” Nasty can be such a nasty word. Where does it come from?
Nasty
Nasty starts “fouling” up the English language in the 14th century. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) first attests it in Carleton Brown’s 1390 Religious Lyrics of the 14th Century: “Whon we be nasti, nouȝt at neode, Neore wimmen help, hou schulde we fare?”
Back then, as it still does for some speakers of Black English, nasty meant “filthy” and “dirty.” The word has since made quite a semantic mess, so to speak: “offensive, annoying” (1470s); “unpleasant” (1540s); “repellent (to the senses)” and “lewd” (1600s); and “ill-tempered, spiteful” (1820s). Slang has also widely taken up nasty, from a term for “excellent” to sex-related usages.
For as much use as English has made of nasty, we aren’t certain about its origins. Here are three leading theories:
- Nasty comes from the Dutch nestig, “dirty” like a bird’s nest. The source of this word, alas , is also unclear.
- Nasty (and nestig) could be related to a Scandinavian source, such as the Swedish naskug, “dirty,” with nask meaning “dirt.” Walter Skeat maintains, though, this dialectical word lost an initial s- and comes from snaska, “to eat like a pig,” that is, greedily and noisily. Snaska, Skeat continues, imitates the sound of such consumption. Middle English has nasky, a variant of nasty, which suggests some Scandinavian word at least reinforced nasty if they’re not immediately related.
- Nasty derives from the Old French nastre, “strange, lowly, bad,” shortened from villenastre, “infamous, ignoble.” Villenastre joins villein (source of villain, a “rustic” that became associated with more nefarious qualities, perhaps not unlike clown) and -aster, a pejorative suffix seen in the likes of poetaster, an “inferior” poet.
Nasty, it seems, is a nasty little word with a nasty little etymology.
Mashed Radish 
Thomas Nast the cartoonist was nasty.
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Hah! See the very end of my own post on “nasty”: http://nancyfriedman.typepad.com/away_with_words/2016/10/word-of-the-week-nasty.html
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Hah! I read your post. The Nast cartoon you offer is not his best nasty work. His common Irishmen were composed nastily in a bigoted way and his legacy for fighting high-ranking officials, and winning, is a story of legendary democratic success against corruption for American politics. Thanks for the message. Ben
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https://cartoons.osu.edu/
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“ein Ast,” a tree branch. Interesting. That was a great post, by the way.
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Probably coincidental but the Sanskrit word nāstik / नास्तिक has been adopted in Hindi to refer to atheists (the term originally described the main schools of Indian philosophy that reject the Vedas e.g. Buddhism). Nāstik is almost a dirty word in that cultural context and not how one would prefer to be described.
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