sickening

Like shade, slay, yaaas, tea, and many other terms, sickening has spread thanks to the popularity and influence of drag queens in the broader culture.

As shown by the 1991 documentary Paris is Burning, drag performers, especially Black and Latinx ones, have long had their own rich body of slang. Many of these terms, like slay, only recently crossed into the mainstream thanks in part to the hit, award-winning reality TV show, RuPaul’s Drag Race.

First airing in 2009 and hosted by drag idol RuPaul Andre Charles, RuPaul’s Drag Race follows drag queens as they compete to be crowned the best—or most sickening, if you will. In one memorable moment from the third season of the show in 2011, Shangela proudly described herself as sickening during an argument with fellow contestant Mimi Imfurst.

Sickening literally means “disgusting,” that is, something that makes you sick. So, how does a word for “gross” double as “great”? Sickening joins many other slang terms that invert a negative meaning into a positive one: bad, ill, wicked, and, well, sick itself can all mean “good.”

The specific sense of sickening implies that something (or someone) is so incredible that a person can’t handle it—it makes them metaphorically sick from how fantastic it is. Compared to some other drag slang terms that have spread in pop culture, sickening appears to be a relatively newer item, evidenced by at least the early 2010s.