this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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I mean - nowadays it sorta is, it's been heavily relegated to sexually fetishised contexts.
But the reason a "Dirndl" is called that is, because "Dirne" is a word that used to mean just "woman" but went through a linguistic evolution to mean "prostitute" quite a while ago. Off the top of my head, I don't know of an example that happened similiarly in English, but I'd guess there's bound to be something like that there, too
"Courtesan" is an example in English, originally meaning 'noblewoman'.
There's also "minx", which originally just meant 'person'. (It's a cousin of "mensch".)