Coffee, “Star Wars,” turtlenecks, grief: These four seemingly unrelated things are “horny” — or induce horniness — at least according to many young women online, who are openly asserting their desires with a term long thought of as crass and juvenile.

But now, like vape stores or a broken container of glitter, it’s suddenly everywhere.

Take the last few months, when people called chicken parm, Ariana Grande’s “Christmas and Chill” EP and the obsessions of right-wing conspiracy theorists “horny.” While promoting “Hustlers,” Jennifer Lopez told GQ, “A lot of things make me horny.” It would seem as though people are horny for the word itself.

Phonetically speaking, “horny” is ugly. It lends itself to a nasal sound that’s comically inelegant. “Horny” is the aural equivalent of those Chinese Crested dogs that are so ugly that it’s actually funny — endearing, even. “Horny” has benefited, in part, from that same so-bad-it’s-good rationality.

“I used to hate the word,” Sophia Benoit said. “I used to think it was so disgusting.” Ms. Benoit writes a column for GQ about the sexiest things that men did during the month, called “Horny on Main,” which on the internet means posting sexually charged content to your main social media account, as opposed to posting on a separate, and likely secret, account that was created for that purpose. (According to Know Your Meme, a website that investigates and documents online phenomena, the first appearance of “horny on main” was in June 2016.)