Would you raise this issue? Unwittingly appropriating/laughing about a term for selling women

In that Google definition it seems a very pro-prostitution explanation - almost as though a pimp is some sort of legitimate business person.

'Pimp' and 'pimping' also implies grooming and deception/manipulation, coercion, breaking down the sense of self in the person to prostitute. I once watched something I can't unsee called something like 'the art of pimping' and it was all about how to identify the right girl (young & vulnerable), how to groom her (gifts, promises, glamour, affection, getting her hooked on drugs), how to 'train' her (basically scare her, abuse her, guilt trip her so she 'knows you are the boss' and won't 'disobey' and you can get her to do things against her instincts and wellbeing) and how to keep her (make sure she is too scared to keep any money and gives you the lot). It isn't just 'arranging clients' for a cut. It can include orchestrating gang rapes, beatings, terrorising. Obviously not all pimps go for that, some do just get a 'girlfriend' hooked on drugs and guilt trip her into getting money to pay for both your habits, but the word has a lot more connotations than Google divulges.

It's quite rare for a slang meaning to overtake the main meaning ("gay" being a notable exception). More typically the meanings run in parallel until the slang falls out of fashion.

It's interesting to me that Americans (of which I am one) have not taken up the cause of preventing falls with national campaigns referencing pimping. I did find a care home in the Midwest that has a "bling my walker" program. I think that elders and their advocates would resist pimp references in national wellness campaigns.

The original meaning is still very much alive (it's the first meaning in the Google definition). The "showy" meaning has certainly not displaced the prostitution meaning.

Of course lots of older people will be familiar with the 'pimp my car' trope but, at the same time, their more instinctive association would be with prostitution.

Exactly. You can be aware of a word being used differently in slang but the original meaning will stay with you.

As with faggots for firelighting - we now have electricity and piped utilities - so the meaning is completely lost with changing technology.

Unfortunately pimping doesn't look like it is going anywhere for the time being and the 'pimp my ride' use of the word is already looking a bit dated, so I am sure that in say 20 years time teenagers hearing a 50 year old say 'pimp it up' will snigger like they are old dinosaurs saying 'daddy o' or 'groovy' or being cluelessly inappropriate like saying 'poofter'.

I'd suggest 'bling up my zimmer' which I think is culturally similar without the prostitution aspect but agree that 'soup up my frame' might be more meaningful to the people involved.

Of course lots of older people will be familiar with the 'pimp my car' trope but, at the same time, their more instinctive association would be with prostitution.

'Pimp up' is plainly 'bling up as one might if a pimp, showing off one's wealth'. While as a phrase, it has a life of its own, it's a very straightforward derivation.

In slang words are always being abused to form new superlatives.

Eg- 'bad' of Michael Jackson era. I don't think people really use bad in that way any more - you'd show your age (people say baadaaass but that is slightly different), so it has long fallen out of favour, as will 'sick' in a couple of years.
Older people feel like twats taking on the lingo of teenagers. The idea of someone 50 saying "man that's sick" without any irony is ridiculous.
In the same way, the misuse of 'pimp' is very much 'of an era', and just like 'wicked' has gone back to being used for baddies in fairytales, pimp will go back to meaning nasty gangster who grooms into and exploits women and girls into prostitution.

If they were 10 or 20 years older than me I would be absolutely gobsmacked if they thought the main use of the word pimp was the one mainstreamed at the turn of the millennium. It would be as weird as them saying that 'sick means good, not ill'.

Explain rather than dismiss

I would suggest that the only reason you would want to know my age, sex, whatever is so that you could use it as a “reason” to legitimately (in your mind) dismiss my opinion.

I would say it would explain your lack of awareness about how the word has changed in use. If you were born in say 1995 - it would seem to you that pimp was 'mainly' used to mean 'make something showy and flashy' because thats how it started to be used in the mainstream, and you wouldn't learn the actual meaning until, say 2008, at an age when you would probably learn about prostitution which you had been previously shielded from because you were a child.

Is there going to be a "buy one sense of humour get a grip free" stall too?

and was informed that pimp means ‘make fancy’ and nothing else.

Disgusting ignorance.

*Procured

ICJump

And I agree - as long as we see a pimp as a flashy aspirational figure - with no reflection on how he precured his wealth - then more vulnerable young girls are going to be taken in by his 'gifts' and his 'flashy rides' without realising they are being groomed for expoloitation - and he is definitely not and never will be/has no interest in ever being her 'boyfriend'.

Why do you need my age to accept that I think differently to you?

Because it would explain why you seem a bit oblivious to the origins of the words mainstreaming.

Just checked the etymology - it's origins are uncertain but it has been in use for about 500 years.

Pimps are people, usually men, who sell prostituted people, usually women and girls.

The 'positive' use of the word is one that comes via cultural appropriation at the same time as: (apols this will be offensive)
nigga - to mean man
ho or bitch - mean woman

This came via the music industry (& blacksploitation movies I think too?) because there are links between the American music industry and prostitution (in fact there has been for ages right up through jazz) and Don 'Magic' Juan makes no disguise of it.

This promoted the idea of the flashy pimp as an aspirational figure more globally as American rap spread 'gangsta' culture to the mainstream.

Pimp also is the person who made money off when men paid to have a sex with me.

It’s bullshit to use it as term to make something excessive. Where it’s possibly to stop people giving pimp a positive meaning let’s do it. So that less woman are prosituted.

*how