bad [ME] Homophobia may lie at the root of the meaning of bad. The word appeared in the 13th century, and at that time had two syllables, like badder. This suggests that it may be a shortening of Old English bæddel ‘effeminate man, hermaphrodite’, but this is uncertain. A bad penny [LME], which ‘always turns up’, was a debased or forged one. Debased coinage also features in the proverb bad money drives out good, also known as Gresham’s law, after Queen Elizabeth I’s chief financial adviser Sir Thomas Gresham (1519–79). He observed that people tended to hang on to coins of a high intrinsic value, like gold sovereigns, while being happier to spend those of a lower intrinsic worth but equal face value. At the end of the 19th century bad underwent a complete reversal of meaning in US black slang, and in the 1920s jazz enthusiasts began to use it as a term of approval—something ‘bad’ was now ‘good’. Compare with the development of funk, wicked.