nasty, n. — Green’s Dictionary of Slang

nasty n.

[in sexual contexts an acknowledgment, if not an agreement, with the Western ambivalence as regards sexuality; note Williams (1994) for 17C use of nasty as ‘bedfellow’]

1. anything unpleasant, varying as to context (cf. nasties n. (3)).

1939		R. Chandler ‘Trouble Is My Business’ in Spanish Blood (1946) 203: He has just collected ten from your iron man for slipping me the nasty.
1981		M. Keane Good Behaviour 163: ‘The post is here’ ‘Oh, letters. There’ll be nothing but nasties. Nasty upsetting things’.
2000		Observer Screen 9 Jan. 11: The ‘video nasties’ scandal of the early Eighties.

2. anyone unpleasant, threatening or scary; often in pl.

1939		Eve. Teleg. (Dundee) 26 Dec. 6/3: Heinie Himmler’s a dirty clype, and Joey Goebbels broadcast tripe [...] Lot of nasties.
1941		A.P. Herbert Let Us Be Glum 25: So on, gallant greeks! crush and capture and slay, the Nasties, the Dirties, who stand in your way.
1968		Sat. Night Feb. 27: They’ve always been around, the Nasties—disguised as merely unpleasant people, as persons with hateful, mean, offensive characters.
1980		W.C. Anderson Bat-21 135: The nastys decided on a quick, massive attack to crush the South Vietnamese.
1989		H. Harrison Bill [...] on the Planet of Robot Slaves (1991) 115: You’ll find the nasties who shot us down.
1998		P. McCabe Breakfast on Pluto 171: Ending up being hung from the rafters by the tootle with all those nasties poking blades into her pale white flesh.
1999		K. Sampson Powder 337: Wheezer knew there were no nasties lurking in the gang, no racists or homophobes.
2000		Observer Mag. 14 May 19: Bill had ‘called the knock’ on many heavy-duty nasties, including a number of Turkish heroin traffickers.
2019		M. Herron Joe Country [ebook] ‘The Wall was down and all kinds of nasties came crawling out’.

3. sexual intercourse; thus do the (big) nasty

1961		(con. WW2) R. Poole London E1 (2012) 247: ‘The ole nasty...if you let’em you’re no good, an’ if you don’t let ’em you’re even worse’.
1971		L. Sanders Pleasures of Helen 155: ‘You know what they really want? A wee bit of the old narsty [sic]’.
1980		E. Folb Runnin’ Down Some Lines 247: nasty, the Sexual intercourse.
1992		R.C. Cruz Straight Outta Compton 64: He wasn’t about to take any gump from a so-and-so self-proclaimed homicide officer who had done the nasty with a white girl.

4. the vagina.

1963–74		B. Humphries Barry McKenzie [comic strip] in Complete Barry McKenzie (1988) 45: I’m as dry as a nun’s nasty.
2003		McGill Reed Dict. of N.Z. Sl.
2021		P. Papathanasiou Stoning 75: ‘Jammed tighter than a nun’s nasty’.

5. the penis.

1963–74		B. Humphries Barry McKenzie [comic strip] in Complete Barry McKenzie (1988) 17: The only time anything like that’s ever happened before was when I was a nipper and the scoutmaster flashed his nasty!
2001		‘John le Carré’ Constant Gardener 477: Groping her tits. Pressing his nasty up against her crotch.

6. a malicious lie or piece of gossip.

2023

A. Rawnsley in Observer 12 Nov. 🌐 Ms Truss was ‘undermined’ by the hidden hand of The Movement, one of whose operators compiled a dirty dossier of untrue nasties about her.

In phrases

do (someone) a nasty (v.)

to do something unpleasant (to someone), to cause (someone) trouble or problems.

1979		E. Torres After Hours 186: Last time out with you, you did a nasty.
1990		J. Healy Streets Above Us (1991) 22: Central Finance have done a nasty, slapped a D notice on us.
c.2003		G. Miller ‘The Relic’ FanFic on Doctor Who The Legacy 🌐 Nick gripped the hilt firmly and delicately felt the edges and the break in the blade. “You mean other than that it’s broken but you could still do someone a nasty with it?”.

do the (big) nasty (v.)

1. (orig. US) to have sexual intercourse.

1967		Frank Zappa ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’ 🎵 She’s a teenage baby and she turns me on / I’d like to make her do her nasty on the White House Lawn.
1988		G. Tate ‘A R Kane’ in Flyboy in the Buttermilk (1992) 111: Shug [...] describes it to Celie as ‘a little button’ that gets so hot it melts when you’re doing the nasty properly.
1998		T. Fontana and D. Sarjeant ‘Animal Farm’ Oz ser. 2 ep. 7 [TV script] Who’d have thought about you doing the nasty.
2006		P. Shannon Davey Darling 51: Oh, you mean have sex, do the nasty with another woman? But how?
2016		‘Chelsea G. Summers’ in Hazlitt.net 8 Jan. 🌐 We don’t have sexual intercourse—we ‘get busy,’ ‘hit it,’ ‘do the nasty,’ ‘get some,’ ‘score,’ and perform countless other acts that we refer to by adorable, horrifying, and illuminating turns of phrase.

2. (US black) to perform cunnilingus.

1980

E. Folb Runnin’ Down Some Lines 154: One of the expressions for oral sex is to do the nasty.

flash one’s nasty (v.)

(N.Z.) to expose one’s genitalia.

2003

McGill Reed Dict. of N.Z. Sl. 79: flash your nasty A lewd request for a woman to expose her genitals, or a man flashing his genitals without being asked. ANZ.

have a bit of (old) nasty (v.)

to have sexual intercourse.

1934		‘J.M. Hall’ Anecdota Americana II 55: I ain’t had a bit of nasty in four months and it would go fine.
1946		joke cited in G. Legman Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1972) I 174: We went upstairs [...] and had a bit of old narsty.