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> How about, because flowers are girly (note that -y suffix!), and daddys and
> paddys are not?
That doesn't explain why flowers are girly in our particular culture at this particular epoch.
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> These words become famous because they achieve exposure. It gets used in a
> popular book or play. A celebrity begins using it. Things like that. "Don't
> tas me, bro!"
Sometimes. And certainly increasingly so today in our rather totalitarian media. But often these media are merely the mouthpiece of public opinion (I'm tempted to say again, in our time, the era of the focus group, increasingly so). And those who write books and plays are read becuase they are the most talented at articulating a particular culture at a particular time. So even if you reduce it to this (and "reduce" is the right term - although I didn't consciously choose it, my sentence just sort of generated it... hehe) you still have to explain why the author/celebrity/irritating pundit chose a certain term over another term. This brings up interesting questions, such as: why have certain terms from black culture in the US come into usage all over the world, especially among wealthy, middle-class Anglo-Saxons?