to talk dirty
17
8.7
- phrasal verb
- /tɔk ˈdɜrti/
- Offensive
:
hablar sucio
- ARDELIA (grins) I love it when you talk dirty.
- want to talk dirty
- like to talk dirty
- going to talk dirty
Did you know that you you can't talk dirty to me?
- Did you know that you you can't talk dirty to me?
- He's I guess that is kind of off putting, like hearing a British person talk dirty too, you know what I mean?
- Remember they can talk dirty to us all year long up to the day they realize they've gone too far and they could just U-turn.
Examples
-
I love it when you talk dirty.
-
Elsa liked to talk dirty once she got into it.
Fiction book (2000) -
Right, or like: "Do you like talking dirty in bed ?"
-
- Does she talk dirty to you?
-
Oh, God, I love it when you talk dirty.
-
-I love it when you talk dirty.
-
Oh, I love it when she talks dirty.
-
"You just love it when I talk dirty, don't you?"
Fiction book (1990) -
I'd be happy to find a girl who'd talk dirty to me.
-
I think it can be really exciting when you talk dirty during a romantic evening.
How Explicit
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'to speak in a sexually suggestive or explicit manner' is directly derivable from combining 'talk' (to speak) with 'dirty' (lewd/indecent) in a standard verb+adjective pattern that indicates manner. This compositional logic is cross-linguistically common, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents will typically infer the intended sexual sense.
Etymology
Talk dirty may come from the simple image of words people called 'dirty' because they were not clean or proper. To talk using dirty words was to say sexual or rude things to excite someone, so talk dirty now means 'to speak in a sexually suggestive way'.