"PIMP MY PROFILE" screams a banner across the top of my weblog, inviting me to visit a website called webfetti which has facilities to enhance my site with generators (whatever they are), 3D graphics (a neat trick on a flat screen) and "bling".

I suppose I'm getting old, and I suppose the last dregs of liberalism have yet to be crushed by this country's seemingly endless lurch to the right, and I suppose I think about words too much... but am I alone in being uncomfortable with the appropriation of the word "pimp" into widespread use? Pimps are not people to be admired, even in a postmodern, ironic sense. Pimps trade on the fears and desperation of vulnerable women for their own gain. They are not, as seems to be the notion in much popular culture, simply kitsch, Huggy Bear types with a flamboyant dress sense and gaudy jewellery.

It's the thin end of a wedge which has also seen "bitches" come perilously close to being accepted as a synonym for "women", a truly deleterious state of affairs to my ears. Although these linguistic trends have come about as the result of British kids being in awe of the culture and street slang of the American gangsta rap movement, their affectations are not enough on their own to have created this shift towards the mainstream. For that it has also needed a complicity by the record labels, TV channels, magazines and websites which allow such repugnant terms to be used out of context and thereby broaden their original meaning. Who knows what is behind such an idle abrogation of responsibility, but I wouldn't bet against a pusillanimous unwillingness by white middle class executives to take a stand against the spreading influence of an artform which has its origins amongst the oppressed black.

I seem to have travelled in one paragraph from feminist to Daily Mail reader. What is happening to me?