English has many well-known colloquial synonyms for “untrustworthy”: fishy*, sketchy, shifty, shady, dodgy, dicey. (My thanks to Ben Yagoda for illuminating the last two.) But it wasn’t until recently that I learned about their close cousin sheisty, which isn’t a new word, just new to me. Blame my limited exposure to rap music, sheisty’s source.
Or at least its proximate source.
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They finally did it. They made “fetch” happen.
OK, not “fetch,” exactly. The thing that’s been made to happen is a made-up word: cheugy. As with “fetch,” though, the word’s inventor was a high school girl, and the people spreading, defining, and discussing it are young women. Unlike “fetch,” which in the 1997 2004 film Mean Girls was supposed to mean “cool” or “desirable,” cheugy is the opposite: out of date, trying too hard, inauthentic.
Taylor Lorenz wrote about cheugy for the New York Times (“What is ‘Cheugy’? You Know It When You See It,” April 29, 2021):
It’s not quite “basic,” which can describe someone who is a conformist or perhaps generic in their tastes, and it’s not quite “uncool.” It’s not embarrassing or even always negative. Cheugy (pronounced chew-gee) can be used, broadly, to describe someone who is out of date or trying too hard. And while a lot of cheugy things are associated with millennial women, the term can be applied to anyone of any gender and any age.
(It’s closer to CHOOG-ee. Here’s a pronunciation guide from the hypnotic #EnglishWithJulien.)
Cheugy was coined by Gaby Rasson in 2013, when she was a student at Beverly Hills High School. Now 23 and a software engineer, Rasson told Lorenz that she’d “wanted a way to describe people who were slightly off trend”:
“It was a category that didn’t exist,” she said. “There was a missing word that was on the edge of my tongue and nothing to describe it and ‘cheugy’ came to me. How it sounded fit the meaning.”
What sort of sound symbolism did Rasson have in mind? That remains unclear, as does any specific meaning of cheugy. (It has “slight negative connotations,” Lorenz reports, but is also “totally open to your interpretation,” according to one of her sources, another 23-year-old woman.) It may be worth pointing out that similar-sounding slang terms have been circulating for decades. A 1997 commercial for Sprite poked fun at a fictional soda brand, “Jooky,” the antithesis of Sprite’s authentic flavor. The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) recorded a 1968 citation for chookee in Louisiana: “a country hick”; the author Shelby Foote, who was from Mississippi, used chookie in his 1977 novel September September: “One of those hungry little nineteen-year-old chookies—hair ironed flat, pullover sweater a couple of sizes too small, white socks.”
Cheugy spread among Rasson’s friends, and then to their friends. Someone called @cheuglife posted a definition on Urban Dictionary on November 8, 2018.
Cheugy finally went mainstream (-ish) when 24-year-old Hallie Cain, aka @webkinzwhore143, posted a TikTok about the word on March 30. Cheugy, Cain told her 4,000+ followers, “is the opposite of trendy … it’s used when someone follows these out-of-date trends.” The following day, Cain defended cheugy against accusations of “classism”: “Really expensive designer things can be cheugy, the same as inexpensive things can be cheugy,” she insisted.
Oh man, "cheugy" is a wonderful word. Thank you SO much Gen Z, once again, for finding the perfect word for a feeling I've been trying to put my finger on for 15 years.
— Oweeeeendennis (@OweeeeenDennis) April 30, 2021
if I could buy stock in a word... cheugy is going to go up in value to be one of the words of the year pic.twitter.com/45m8HztLFl
— Joe (@joeburgertweets) April 27, 2021
And some people don’t.
The word "cheugy" doesn't exist; it's a mass hallucination, not unlike the persistent belief that "dilemma" is spelled "dilemna."
— Benjamin Dreyer (@BCDreyer) May 1, 2021
Using the word "cheugy" is cheugy.
— Emily Nussbaum (@emilynussbaum) April 30, 2021
There’s also a backformed noun: a person who’s cheugy is a cheug.
Discovering chuegy reminded me of two things: 1. Girls and young women are constantly inventing slang, and hurrah for that. 2. A lot of that slang is designed to police one’s peers: Who’s out? What’s ugly? Who should we shun? Girls need to keep tabs on that stuff, and it takes a long time to outgrow the need.
The cheugy of my own Los Angeles adolescence was sosh, pronounced with a long O. It was a vague put-down; in my junior high school, girls were constantly rolling their eyes and saying so-and-so was such a sosh. (In my memory, boys never used the word.) It apparently was clipped from social, but I never figured out why “social” was a bad thing to be, or what sosh really meant. As far as I could tell, it had something to do with trying too hard, which overlaps with cheugy’s connotations. And if there’s one thing a girl or a woman must never do, it’s look like she’s trying too hard; just ask Hillary Clinton. Fortunately, I eventually went on to high school, where there was a whole new set of vocabulary words, and customs, to master.
_
Related: An excellent word invented by a teen girl: bershon.
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What kind of word is lingualer? A rare one, that’s for sure. In fact, it may qualify as that rarest of rare words, a hapax legomenon: a word that occurs only once within a context or in the entire written record of a language. We can thank Variety, the show-business weekly that has been inventing words for more than a century, for its existence.
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Almost every day I get an email from a company called Oh! Nuts, a company based in Queens, New York, that sells kosher nuts, dried fruit, and candies for every Jewish occasion, including Tu B’shvat and Israeli Independence Day (and for non-Jewish occasions as well).
Oh! Nuts mixed nuts snack packs
I started thinking about the Oh! Nuts brand name, which led me down a nutty path indeed. You’ll find the fruits of my research over at the Strong Language blog, because—spoiler!—nuts and aw, nuts and nuts to you were at one time considered highly improper. Those words, along with their milder cousin nerts, were outlawed in Hollywood scripts beginning in the 1930s, when the Production Code held a tight grip on the movie industry.
Today, not so much.
Nuts to You!, by Lois Ehlert (1993). A picture book about a rascally squirrel, for children age 4 to 7. It wouldn't have made it into school libraries eight decades ago.
Although even in the 21st century some usages of nuts are decidedly raunchy.
Nuts, a British lad mag, published from 2004 through 2014. This issue is dated February 11, 2005. (Hat tip: Stan Carey)
Read my Strong Language post “When ‘Nuts’ Was Taboo.” If you stick with it to the end, you’ll be rewarded with a limerick.
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Last week’s big financial story sounded like April Fool’s in January: Some mischievous day traders on the WallStreetBets subreddit noticed that GameStop, a struggling chain of brick-and-mortar video-game stores, was heavily shorted by Wall Street hedge funds—in other words, the hedgies were betting that GameStop would soon go belly-up. To stick it to the big-money investors, and maybe to make some money themselves, the Redditors began buying up undervalued GameStop stock, which drove up its price: from $4 a share a year ago to about $150 at market close on Friday, January 29. (They also bought up low-priced stock in other struggling companies: AMC movie theaters, Macys department stores, Blackberry. Yes, Blackberry is still around.)
There’s a lot more to the story than my synopsis; CNN Business reporter Allison Morrow broke it down concisely and clearly, and Bloomberg’s Matt Levine did his best to find The Meaning of It All.
Me, I’m going to stick to my own stock in trade: words.
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At an October 24 drive-in rally in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was heckled by small group of Trump supporters, who honked horns, waved flags, and shouted “Four more years!” Addressing his own supporters, Biden said: “By the way, we don’t do things like those chumps out there with the microphone are doing, the Trump guys.”
It didn’t take long for the derogatory term chump to circulate widely. Although some Biden supporters picked it up as an insult, the other side chose to reclaim it. Within minutes after Biden’s appearance, #TrumpChump had popped up on Twitter, appended to tweets like “I’m a proud TrumpChump!” and “Congrats everyone we’ve been promoted from a #Deplorable to a #TrumpChump.”
And at 6:57 a.m. PDT on Monday, October 26, an email from a pro-Trump PAC appeared in my inbox. Subject line: “Chumps for Trump!”
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A TikTok video by QueenBV59, about her preparations for casting a ballot during early voting, was shared all over Twitter on Thursday. I’ve watched it half a dozen times myself.
SHE READY pic.twitter.com/zLWQbSMljH
— Meena Harris (@meenaharris) October 15, 2020
One repeated word—jush—was new to me and, apparently, to some other viewers as well.
OK, folks, I’m gonna go over here and get my jush
Y’all need to get y’all jush and get y’all vote on
I’m gonna get my damn jush
Jush—rhymes with push—turns out to be a rare slang term that can be traced to a single person. But it isn’t quite as simple as that.
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Earlier this month, the US Supreme Court heard arguments (by telephone, because of the COVID-19 pandemic) in a case with special interest for those of us who follow developments in naming and trademark law. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office vs. Booking.com, the case argued on May 4, is the culmination of eight years of efforts by Booking.com, which calls itself “the world’s #1 choice for booking hotel accommodations,” to register its full name, including the .com, as a US trademark. My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus gives you a sense of what’s at stake by examining some key terms, including generic, domain, and, yes, booking.
The Booking.com wordmark
Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers (still just $19.95 a year!). Here’s an excerpt:
Continue reading "On the Visual Thesaurus: The case of the generic name" »
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This month’s book recommendation is I Like to Watch (2019), by the Pulitzer Prize–winning television critic Emily Nussbaum. The book collects a decade’s worth of Nussbaum’s reviews and essays for the New Yorker and other publications, including one written especially for the book. Nussbaum is such a good writer that she made me care about shows that hadn’t appealed to me (I’ve watched exactly one episode each, for example, of “The Sopranos,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and “Lost”). And she made me care even more deeply about subjects I was already drawn to, like the complicated career of Joan Rivers and the way the 2016 presidential election made “jokes” unfunny. (You can read the jokes essay—one of the best pieces of writing to come out of that twisted season—here.)
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This month’s book recommendation is Uncanny Valley: A Memoir, by Anna Wiener, who, as a twenty-something in 2012, left a low-paying publishing job in New York to work in the world of San Francisco tech startups. Until she moved across the country, she writes, it had never occurred to her “that I might someday become one of the people behind the internet, because I had never considered that there were people behind the internet at all.”She goes to work for company founders even younger than she is, managing millions of dollars of seed money and wearing “startup twinsets, branded hoodies unzipped to reveal T-shirts with the same logo.” Wiener’s voice is original and unforgettable: a mixture of skepticism and gullibility, of clarity and befuddlement. San Francisco is “an underdog city struggling to absorb an influx of alphas.” (Perfect.) San Franciscans, “living in neighborhoods where every other storefront had a pun in its name, were corny.” (True, alas.) Notably, Wiener declines to identify by name any of the companies she works for or near: they are, instead, “the social network everybody hated,” “an app for coupon-clipping,” “the online superstore” with the “chelonian” founder (a word I had to look up).
For more on the “uncanny valley” of the title—in tech, it refers to the dropoff in humans’ acceptance of robots when those creations’ appearance becomes eerily lifelike; in Wiener’s book, it also refers to Silicon Valley—see my December 2009 post.
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