The word “degenerate” has, across centuries, faded in and out of fashion and from one use to another, but its latest vogue feels notable. Lately there’s a comic note, a habit of self-deprecation, a sense of toying with the stern moralism the word once carried. Now you can disparage others as degenerate trash in an arch way — not to mention teasing friends about their degenerate dietary habits or writing about degenerate afternoons spent rotting in bed with a bottle of wine. Whole communities laughingly self-identify as degenerate. Gamers complain about “degenerate play styles” that ruin competition. Discussions of the word are littered with quotes from the Canadian comedy “Letterkenny,” whose rural Ontario characters are plagued by uncouth “degens from upcountry.”
Gambling can take a lot of the credit. There came a point when “degenerate” joined “inveterate” as a dear friend of the word “gambler,” in about the same way “profusely” teamed up with “bleeding” — and what isn’t gambling these days? You can now quietly use your phone to play online poker, place sports bets, buy event contracts, trade cryptocurrencies or deal in options for exchange-listed meme stocks, with the main experiential difference being that the online-poker place at least has to provide a game.
“Degenerate” boomed across that whole undifferentiated universe. It has described gamblers who bet with the on-tilt recklessness of addicts and investors who jump on risky memecoins or wildly leveraged positions with lotterylike payoffs. For a young American with some money and an iPhone, who will seem cooler: the guy who makes just-for-fun football bets and parks his savings in index funds or the wild speculator who wins and loses that guy’s annual income every other weekend? Occasional windfalls and constant memes made going all-in look fun enough that people aspired to a little degeneracy. “Degenerates are swarming the stock market,” The Wall Street Journal announced in 2024 — a rush of “amateur traders who call themselves ‘degens’ and pile into long-shot trades.”
A few months later, on a forum for people with actual gambling problems, a debate began over whether “degenerate” was a cruel word for an addict. One participant just sighed that it was a “cute buzz word” for young people putting together their little sports parlays, as opposed to the rock-bottom immorality he or she knew a little too well.
There are actually a lot of online debates about this sort of thing, one in pretty much every community that has ever been subjected to moral disapproval. For instance: “Degenerate” has long been tied to ideas about sexual immorality and perversion, including use as a straightforward anti-gay slur. (It was in 1997 that Jerry Falwell, among others, called Ellen DeGeneres “Ellen Degenerate.”) The details of people’s sexual lives are as pervasive online as gambling; there are people who discuss being furries or into bondage as easily as others discuss being Presbyterian or left-handed. Some call themselves degenerates; some use the word to roll eyes at anyone whose kinks feel too odd or depraved to go around announcing. And so begins a classic internet argument: Is that OK? Isn’t this word connected with various horrifying repressions of sexual minorities?
It’s connected with so much more! For a while, it figured into pseudoscientific theories in which some parts of the human family were evolved and others fallen — the trendsetting book “The Inequality of Human Races,” from the 1850s, devotes a whole section to “the meaning of degeneration,” and the Oxford English Dictionary preserves an even older sneer at the Indigenous Sámi of the Scandinavian Peninsula. (“Laplanders are only degenerate Tartars.”) In the 1890s, the Jewish Hungarian writer Max Nordau’s “Degeneration” (Entartung) diagnosed a widespread contempt for tradition and morality; it would later prove popular with the Nazi Party, informing their famous exhibition of “degenerate art.” Today, naturally, you can find similar uses of “degenerate” echoing on the far right. Search the word on Elon Musk’s X, and you may find yourself needing to take a long shower.
Many debates about “degenerate” treat this as ancient history that someone is tiresomely shoehorning into the conversation. In a socialist group on Reddit, though, one person says the word necessarily “plays into a right-wing worldview,” implying some untainted past to be recaptured. (Someone else responds: “I call myself a degenerate when I’m betting sports. I think context is key.”) Anarchists turn out to be pithier — “Degeneracy is a thing fascists worry about. Leave it to them.” — although one points out that the far left sometimes uses terms like “bourgeois degeneracy” to similar effect.
All this, I think, is precisely what primed “degenerate” for widespread flippant use. Its history is so intensely not flippant, in ways the word still conjures: There’s that sense of violent, fulminating, spittle-flecked moralism and disgust, the sound of full commitment to judging things scum. Yes, there are unpleasant quarters in which that disgust remains — but even there, it often seems as if people are straining to underline that they really do intend the word in its nastiest sense. On the whole, it feels as if fewer and fewer Americans can work up such nastiness in earnest, even toward things they genuinely despise; their condemnation lacks that visceral repugnance and righteous certainty. (After all, a lot of old standards would judge us all a nation of degenerates, with our phone-gambling and modern art and cereal commercials featuring multiracial families.) And so the word comes to operate almost as camp: something with the style and aesthetic trappings of a worldview the speaker can no longer take very seriously. It’s as if the actual moralism leaked out of a hole somewhere in the descending stroke of that letter G, and we’ve come to enjoy playing with the container that remains.