Fritinancy

Word of the week: Bawbag

Do insults sound funnier with a Scottish inflection? They do to many Americans, and even to Brits. As evidence, I direct you to Saturday’s events in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and the Trump golf properties in Turnberry and Aberdeenshire, where crowds turned out to mock and protest the visit of the American president, whose ties to Caledonia go beyond real estate: his mother was born in the Outer Hebrides and emigrated to the U.S. in 1930.

Some of the epithets sent Americans like me to our Scottish slang dictionaries. Bawbag, for example, has a familiar ring, but what does it really mean?

pic.twitter.com/xI2UshCEAU

— Empirecookie (@Empirecookie) July 14, 2018

 

Welcome to Scotland ya giant tangerine bawbag in a wig#TrumpProtest #ScotlandAgainstTrump #TrumpVisitsUK pic.twitter.com/akaxXb7tjl

— Bigkenny (@bigkenny1975) July 13, 2018

 

Word of the week: Gammon

Another week, another epithet. Last week we had a look at soy boy, although I’d considered shining a spotlight on incel instead. (For an analysis of this insult, a portmanteau of involuntary and celibate, see Ben Zimmer’s essay for Politico.) This week we have another way to dis (white) men, this one instigated by our cousins across the pond: gammon.

Fooled you! Today’s gammon is unrelated to backgammon.

Word of the week: Soy boy

Settle in with a nice tofu sandwich and some edamame as I tell you about soy boy and how it became the insult of choice among alt-right troglodytes – the sort of chuckleheads who call Trump “god emperor.” 

 

Via Reddit/The_Donald. Note pussy hat.

Word of the week: Jabroni

The word may be unfamiliar to you – it was to me, until a few weeks ago – but you undoubtedly know a jabroni or two. We all do. He – it’s always a he – isn’t mean enough to be called a jerk. He’s annoying, but not as obnoxious as a douchebag. He’s not as contemptible as an asshole, an epithet Geoffrey Nunberg defines, in his 2012 book The Ascent of the A-Word, as having at its heart “a culpable obtuseness—about one’s own importance, about the needs of others and the way one is perceived by them.” *

To call someone a jabroni, by contrast, is to mock rather than to condemn. The very sound of jabroni – a coined word with an Italianate flair – evokes ridiculousness and loserdom. Unlike jerk, asshole, and douchebag, the word doesn’t originate in obscenity; it comes instead from the colorful, carnival-influenced world of professional wrestling.

 

Wrestler-turned-actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, credited with popularizing “jabroni.”

Word of the week: Popinjay

The perfectly calibrated insult is a rara avis nowadays – ass- and douche- compounds don’t really count – so when someone resurrects an elegant 16th-century epithet, attention must be paid.

So: Scaramucci will be fine working with Reince. Even if Reince continues to loathe the popinjay.

— Felix Salmon (@felixsalmon) July 22, 2017

The reference is, of course, to the former hedge-fund manager (and former supporter of liberal causes like gun control) Anthony Scaramucci, who last week was appointed White House communications director despite, or because of, having no experience with media or communications other than having granted interviews to reporters. He’s known familiarly, if not always approvingly, as “the Mooch.” “Reince” is White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, formerly the chair of the Republican National Committee.

Anthony Scaramucci, July 21, 2017: “I love the president and I’m very, very loyal to the president.” In 2015 he called Trump a “hack” and a “bully.” Via Business Insider.

 

Popinjay is a wonderful old word and a memorable descriptor for the slick, effusive Scaramucci. For the last 500 years or so it’s meant “a vain, conceited, shallow, talkative person,” although its original definition was neutral and zoological.

Word of the week: Vainglorious

Certain adjectives fit certain public figures so perfectly that they become Homeric epithets. The Anglo-Saxon king Æthelred (966–1016) is known to us commoners as The Unready, a mistranslation of an Old English word meaning “ill advised.” President Obama was frequently tagged with aloof – disregarding his deeply empathetic side, beautifully revealed in this recent New York Times Sunday Magazine article about the Office of Presidential Correspondence. The engine of paranoia, fury, and malign intelligence that drove the 37th U.S. president eventually gave rise to its own adjective: Nixonian.

The current occupant of the White House has spent only a little more than two weeks on the job. Yet already one word is appearing so often in connection with him that it merits close attention: vainglorious.

I have to say, this administration has certainly given the word "vainglorious" a workout.

— Kyrie O'Connor (@KyrieMeMo) February 2, 2017

Word of the week: Mountebank

Mountebank: A charlatan; a seller of quack medicines who attracts customers with stories, jokes, or tricks; a con artist. From Italian monta im banco, one who gets up on a bench (to speak). Pronounced with three syllables.

I’m imagining the members of the New York Times editorial board debating which of several synonyms to use in the lead editorial of September 16, headlined “Donald Trump’s Latest Birther Lie” – “Mr. Trump’s Birther Nonsense” in the print edition – before settling on mountebank.

The midday bulletin arrived as another bizarre moment in the absurdist presidential campaign of Donald Trump: News Alert: Trump admits Obama was born in the United States.

What? It read like some variation on “Trump Finds the Earth No Longer Flat.” But no, Mr. Trump, the ultimate mountebank, was at it again, altering but not abandoning the Big Lie campaign that first made him the darling of wing nuts and racists five years ago: his vicious insistence that President Obama was not born a legitimate American citizen.

(Emphasis added.)

The honorable member

It seems like only yesterday – it was, in fact, just over two months ago – that linguists and political pundits were parsing schlonged, a derivative of a Yiddish vulgarism for “penis” that had been emitted by presidential front-runner Donald J. Trump in his disparagement of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton (“she got schlonged”).

It turns out that was just a warmup for the current penis-palooza we’re now seeing in commercial and political language. And it’s not just any old male genitalia that are commanding center stage: it’s undersized ones.

Banksters

An ad on the op-ed page of yesterday's New York Times caught my eye, and not only for its ransom-note design:

   

It was that word banksters along the right-hand margin that made me pause. Clever, I thought: a portmanteau of banker and gangster. Seems like the perfect coinage for the high-finance bailfest we're currently witnessing.

The ad was produced by the Institute for America's Future, a D.C. "center of non-partisan research and  education" (with a K Street address, I feel obliged to add) whose efforts "help shape a compelling progressive agenda primarily focusing on kitchen-table concerns such as affordable health care, accessible higher education, retirement security, living wages, healthy workplaces, strong infrastructures, safe food, fair trade and clean energy."

Sign me up for all of the above. But what about banksters? Was it invented by one of the institute's neologists?

The Google says ... not so fast. A search for bankster produces more than 27,000 results. Some are for people with the surname Bankster, but there also are many citations from earlier this year, when large cracks began appearing in the fiscal infrastructure. (See, for example, "Saving Bankster Bonuses," posted in March 2008 by a Ron Paul supporter, and "[Treasury Secretary] Paulson's Gift to His Bankster Buddies," also posted in March, on a "radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and justice.") The relevant entry at Urban Dictionary is likewise dated March 2008. (The other entry refers to graffiti artists who emulate British street artist Banksy.)

Double-Tongued Dictionary, Grant Barrett's excellent lexicon of slang and jargon, provides an even earlier--and non-U.S.--citation. A Nov. 10, 2005, article in the Miami Herald claimed the word had been coined by Ecuadoreans during their country's 1998-1999 banking crisis. But in a comment, Tad Cook pointed out that bankster has a much longer and uglier history. "This term has been used by the fringe of the far right in the USA for at least 70 years," Cook wrote, "in reference to some sort of conspiracy involving bankers and the Federal Reserve."

He's right. And not just "some sort of conspiracy." Take a look, if you have the stomach for it, at this venomous bit of propaganda about "Judeo-Masonic Banksters" and "Jewish Banksters, such as Rothschild and Warburg." Or this screed, sweetly titled "Time to Remove the Parasitic War-Loving Zionist Bankster Brain."

Coincidentally or not, Time magazine in the 1930s was fond of bankster as a descriptor for crooked lenders. "Bankster Jailed," reads the headline on a Sept. 5, 1932, story about "Scottish immigrant, onetime plumber, Bankster [John] Bain [who] had prospered in real estate, then branched into banking." And "Bankster's Moll" was the Runyonesque headline on a 1933 review of a novel that attacked "U. S. economic conditions in general, on small-town banksters in particular."

Will the Institute for America's Future reclaim bankster as a progressive epithet? Or will anti-Semitic hatemongers hear it as a dog whistle--a code word aimed at their ears? I wonder.

Update: I also wonder whether the old/scurrilous bankster usage was a portmanteau of banker and shyster.

Branded by the Right

I went to the Commonwealth Club yesterday to hear linguist Geoffrey Nunberg talk about his new book, Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show. The subject was ostensibly political speech--in particular, the way in which conservatives have appropriated certain words such as "freedom," "values," and "elite" while turning "liberal" into an epithet of scorn. But the word I kept hearing was "branding."

Nunberg pointed out that in the 1950s and 1960s, Americans took much of their everyday vocabulary from the social sciences; phrases such as "status symbol" and "organization man" (and "inferiority complex" and "juvenile delinquent") became common parlance. But beginning in the 1970s, Nunberg said, "marketers became the new cartographers of the American landscape." As a result, we no longer think of "branding" as something cowboys inflict on bovines (in the 1960s, there even was a TV series called Branded; the hero was constantly trying to escape his "brand"). And we sprinkle our conversation with words like "upscale" and "demographics." Gradually but inexorably, we've stopped being citizens--it happened right around the time civics stopped being part of the public school curriculum--and started being consumers. Of everything from health care to education to television shows to, yep, politics.

Branding is a powerful means of articulating a message. But it also can create artificial polarities in which MyBrand dukes it out with YourBrand: "Cool" Macs vs. "stodgy" PCs, the "new Alero" vs. "your father's Oldsmobile" (yeah, that one really worked!), this year's skinny jeans vs. last year's tragically outmoded flares. All too often, it's a distinction without a difference.

And that's Nunberg's point about political branding: it forces us into identity groups defined by brand names and articles of consumption. Volvo, Brie, and Chardonnay have been attached to "liberals" for so long that it's easy to overlook that Republicans outbuy and outconsume all three products. (Brie is a convenient symbol for conservatives to associate with liberals, said Nunberg, because it's pale, soft, runny, and French.) As sociologist Alan Wolfe has written, Americans--Democrats, Republicans, Greens, libertarians--have more in common than you'd assume from listening to AM talk radio. Nunberg pointed out that while "Brand Nashville" may connote country-western music, in fact the number-one radio station in Actual Nashville plays adult-contemporary music. That means Billy Joel, not Bubba.

Funny thing, though: We're beginning to see a branding backlash, both in the political arena (witness the dismal drop-off in voter turnout) and in the marketplace. Product marketers are scrambling to adapt to the world of "brand hijack," in which consumers rather than companies define the brand experience. And blogging is redefining the political experience. It's all very well to reclaim language, as Nunberg and others urge. But if we don't listen carefully, we'll be using that language to tell a meaningless story.