Was it sexual in reference or wasn’t it? According to the BBC radio news, after Godfrey Bloom, elected as a Ukip MEP, had said that all we women who didn’t clean behind the fridge were ‘sluts’, he justified himself by saying he had used the word in the ‘old-fashioned’ sense. I’m not sure history is on his side.
The first use of slut in the sense of a ‘woman of a low or loose character’, as the Oxford English Dictionary quaintly puts it, comes from the middle of the 15th century. That is exactly the same period in which the fridge-dusting sense originates, even though fridges hadn’t yet been invented for the specific purpose of dust preservation.
Caxton’s chum Wynkyn de Worde thought it worth printing an amusing poem called Cocke Lorelles Bote, which refers unmistakably to sluttes and drabbes. By Shakespeare’s day Nicholas Breton, one of my poetic minor heroes, was writing about someone who would ‘swap each slut, upon the lippes, that in the darke hee meetes’.
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