This is a re podcast of an episode that first aired July 18 2005.

I didn’t want to just recycle the same old stuff so I took a look to see if there had been any changes in the meaning or relevance of the word over the past three years.

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I was a little surprised at what I found.  At Urbandictionary it looks to me like nothing much has changed.

When I posted the ghetto episode in 2005 it felt like a hip new use of an old word.  Come to think of it I haven’t heard my kids using the word so often lately. Could it be that the fashion in slang has moved on?

I took a look at Google trends where you can see the relative frequency of words used as search terms over time.

Here’s a screenshot.

The summer of 2005 looks to me like a time when the word ghetto was coolest; the big peak is right at the time I first did the episode.  Today there are only half as many searches.

So that’s a snapshot in the life of a word.

Here’s the old episode again.

Like so many superlatives the most recent meanings of the word ghetto are polar opposites.  Simultaneously meaning “of poor quality” or “shabby” and at the same time “hip” or “cool.”

Of course ghettos are neighborhoods, usually poor neighborhoods—although there are student ghettos near universities and these can’t really be called poor.

So “shabbiness” due to lack of funds, and “cool” due to the success of rap and hip-hop.

Before ghetto attained its elevated status, large, loud portable radios first called ghetto blasters were forced to change their names to boom boxes since ghetto wasn’t politically correct—or at least pointing out habits of the black ghetto anyway.

English takes the word ghetto from Italian where getto means “foundry.”

The reason is that in the 1500s Jews living in Venice were required to live on one particular island, which had previously been the site of a foundry.

By the early 1600s English had acquired the word as a generic for such enforced Jewish neighborhoods. Later by the late 1800s ghetto applied to any neighborhood that was a slum.