I've decided that keeping my score at golf is vulgar, and I shall no longer do it.
Or, if you want the honest version: my scores are so vulgar I refuse to keep them.
No matter.
It's a good word, vulgar.
Pleasant enough to say. Soft in the mouth. And yet it arrives carrying a sneer, like it's wrinkling its nose at you on the way in.
I started wondering where it came from. It doesn't look English.
I had it down as German, or maybe something Spanish, with that -ar ending sitting there like a verb waiting to be conjugated.
Turns out it's Latin. Vulgus. The crowd. The common people, the throng, everyone milling about in the street.
Vulgaris just meant ordinary. In general use. The sort of thing everybody has.
So here's the part I liked. For about three hundred years, calling something vulgar simply meant it was common. Widespread. Shared.
The Bible that everyone could read was the Vulgate, same root, because it was the one for ordinary people. No insult in it at all.
The "coarse and ill-bred" meaning only shows up around the 1640s. Somebody, somewhere, decided that what the crowd had in common was beneath them. And the word soured.
Which is a long way round to saying my golf scores are common in every sense.
Ordinary. Widely shared by hackers everywhere. Nothing remarkable about them.
So I won't be keeping them. On grounds of good taste.