baggage

   At the beginning of the seventeenth century it was possible to call a man ‘a baggage’, meaning that he was a worthless fellow, a nuisance. Apart from its luggage sense, the word at that time had also come to mean ‘rubbish’ or ‘refuse’. Applied to women in the early seventeenth century, ‘baggage’ meant a prostitute or a thoroughly worthless woman. By the latter half of that century, its meaning had considerably softened. A girl could now be called a sly or saucy baggage and would interpret the word as ‘wench’ or ‘rogue’. It is sometimes difficult to know, therefore, the exact force of ‘you baggage’ in a play like Romeo and Juliet, where Capulet uses it to his daughter. When Juliet tells him that she does not want to marry Paris he cries: ‘Out, you baggage!’ and equates this with ‘you tallow-face’, ‘mistress minion’, ‘disobedient wretch’, ‘hilding’. From the early seventeenth century onwards it was only women who were called ‘baggages’. The term would only be used now, one suspects, in a jokey way by a fairly literate speaker to a youngish woman. The really insulting use of ‘baggage’ has been transposed to ‘you old bag’ or ‘bat’.