"Hey @realDonaldTrump I oppose civil asset forfeiture too! Why don’t you try to destroy my career, you fascist, loofa-faced, shit-gibbon!"
— Pennsylvania state senator Daylin Leach (Father, husband, progressive, and Pennsylvania Senator; like Gandhi, only less), on Twitter/X, circa 2017
This morning, on a whim, I happened to type "shitgibbon" into Presearch, because reasons. What I found was an article on the etymology of the word (and other insults in the same category: Arse-pirate, butt-nugget, butt-trumpet, cockwomble, dog-fucker, douche-canoe, douche-nozzle, face-loofa, fuckweasel, jizz-wicket, piss-gopher, spunk-monkey, twatwaffle, wankpuffin, et cetera). It turns out that the word "shitgibbon" is not a recent creation, but has actually been in use for far longer than I thought:
In the HBO show Veep, the phrase "a gold-plated fucking shitgibbon" is used (S01E02: Frozen Yoghurt).
"Hi, I wrote the Veep line. It was originally “spunk-faced shitgibbon”, a phrase I used in a 1988 column in New Musical Express and have put in most of my writing since. PS I’m not Scottish and have nothing to do with bootlegging."
— David Quantick; novelist, comedy writer, critic, journalist and screenwriter
Well, there you go, folks: That's thee origin of "shitgibbon", one of my favourite insults. But wait, there's more!
"I argue that the rule for making a novel insult of this type is a single syllable expletive, such as “douche”, plus a trochée. A trochée, as a reminder, is a word that’s two syllables with stress on the first. Examples are puffin, womble, trumpet, biscuit, waffle, weasel, and of course, gibbon.
Tons of words in English are trochees. Because so many words are trochees, you’ll have to pick wisely — something like ninja might not be as humorously insulting as waffle.
In principle, monosyllable expletive + trochee seems to give really good results."
— Taylor Jones; PhD candidate at The University of Pennsylvania in linguistics and the author of LanguageJones, a blog devoted to this sort of thing.
Thumbnail image: A gibbon, from Getty Images
