I'm not sure why this short, finished post spent several years in the very bottom of my draft pile.  The club is still there.

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution raises relays a point I've grumbled about for years. A blogger I'm unfamiliar with, John Kottke said

In my experience, use of the word "classy" means the opposite of what the speaker intends.

Cowen's quote comes from here.

There's an ancient strip club on the route from home to my children's elementary school. They've recently changed their exterior design (mostly by taking down a lot of the signage and painting it brown) but for decades their motto was "Top-Class Show Girls." Their ads in the back of local alt-weeklies said the same thing.

And it just... seemed...

Ok, I want to stop here for a moment and say my take differs slightly from Kottke's. It's not that the person, place, or thing referred to is the opposite of classy. Instead it's an indication that the person doing the referring is the opposite of classy.

Update Can you think of any other words that work the same way?

The only example I can think of at the moment is that men who call women "ladies" are rarely gentlemen.