This. For the longest time it had a neutral connotation and it just meant that someone was being mentored and specifically supported with an eye to bringing them in to a higher position. Child grooming was adopted to describe adults manipulating children to make it easier to commit child abuse and has a genuinely legitimate use in that context. And then a couple of years ago the :frothingfash: fash picked up the old "All Homosexuals are P*" lie and started leaning in to it hard, turning "groomer" in to a dogwhistle fog horn for Fash beliefs.
My guess without doing any etymology research is that the term fell out of fashion around the same time it came to be used in the sense of "child grooming", and hasn't been widely used in the last decade or two, so many people are likely encountering it in the wild for the first time.
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those other contexts are the original meaning, applying it to child abuse is the newer application
This. For the longest time it had a neutral connotation and it just meant that someone was being mentored and specifically supported with an eye to bringing them in to a higher position. Child grooming was adopted to describe adults manipulating children to make it easier to commit child abuse and has a genuinely legitimate use in that context. And then a couple of years ago the :frothingfash: fash picked up the old "All Homosexuals are P*" lie and started leaning in to it hard, turning "groomer" in to a
dogwhistlefog horn for Fash beliefs.deleted by creator
My guess without doing any etymology research is that the term fell out of fashion around the same time it came to be used in the sense of "child grooming", and hasn't been widely used in the last decade or two, so many people are likely encountering it in the wild for the first time.