Fiddlesticks: Part Two — Fish Out of Water
Fiddlesticks: Part Two — Fish Out of Water
I think I made a major mistake with Part One of my piece about slang through the century—it was much longer than it should’ve been. If you’re like me, you already spend too much time reading Substack posts, so maybe it’s better if I keep this one to something close to a five-minute read. I’ve never been sure how “reading time” is measured anyway—probably just a guess by some dude in the back office.
I often feel like a fish out of water when I’m writing. I hated English grammar in high school, and I’m one of the worst spellers in the younaverse. (That one was intentional... probably.)
I’ve opted to use Fish Out of Water as part of the title. Why? Because I like the phrase. Yes, I know it’s an idiom, not slang—but it’s my post, and I get to pick the title.
The phrase is one of those old English language blurbs that’s been around since Geoffrey Chaucer used it in The Canterbury Tales in 1483. Unlike many ancient words, phrases, or slang terms, it still means exactly what it meant when Chaucer wrote it.
Now that I’ve explained the title and illustrated my spelling, you’ve probably figured out I was not the valedictorian of Grammar University.
Let’s get back to slang. I left you off with some zingers from the 1970s, but this time I want to try something different. Instead of looking at slang by the decade, I’m going to explore it by theme. To keep it readable and tight, I’ll stick to just three categories: Politics, Sex and Relationships, and Tech.
Politics: Where Words go to Brawl and Blame.
Politics is a slang factory, and in America the slang factory retools every 4 years. That results in a lot of turnovers, a conveyor belt of buzzwords with a shelf life shorter than a campaign promise… or a carton of gas station sushi.
Of course, political slang has been around since who laid the rails. Some date to the early days of our Republic, others were already old when our first president was sworn into office.
One of the older words is Demagogue, originally from the Greek dēmagōgos , a leader of the people. A positive or neutral word which later became a slur directed at politicians who stir the pot, yell the loudest, point at scapegoats, and believe themselves equal to God.
Another oldie but goody is Whip, taken from British fox-hunting slang. He’s the guy who keeps the hounds from straying. Today a whip is a political party enforcer (for lack of a better term) in Congress.
The third is not quite so old, dating to just a few years after the founding of your nation but is still used regularly. Gerrymander, dates to 1812 after Governor Elbridge Gerry approved an oddly shaped congressional district that resembled a salamander. Both of our major political parties have engaged in the practice and the other party always throws out the term in a pejorative manner. I guess in general everyone considers it cheating, but only if the other side is doing it.
Mugwump, is one of those slang terms that appeared quickly and disappeared just as fast. It originated during the 1884 election to mock Republicans who refused to support their own party’s nominee. By 1910, it had already become a linguistic curiosity. These days, you'd probably call that person a RINO or DINO—modern slurs for party disloyalty with all the same finger-pointing but none of the charm.
Yellow Dog Democrat: another one that’s slipped into the political archives. The term was mostly heard in the rural South and came with a drawled-out declaration: “I’d vote for a yellow dog before I’d vote for a Republican!” While you don’t hear the phrase much anymore, the sentiment is alive and frothing. The modern version goes something like this. “I’d vote for a pile of warm vomit before I’d vote for (insert hated candidate here).” Same blind loyalty, same party disgust—but now it comes from both sides of the aisle, and it’s definitely no longer exclusive to Southern Democrats.
I imagine any of my readers could easily come up with a half dozen current political slang words. Just in case none of you can here are exactly six. Woke, Snowflake, Dark Money, MAGA, Fake News. OK, I know, that’s only five but I wanted to save room for a couple I like from a generation ago. Plumbers and Deep Throat. We’ve all heard those first five and are still hearing them ad nauseam. I’m ready to stop hearing them.
For my younger readers Plumbers and Deep Throat are both tied up with White House corruption during the Nixon Administration. The plumbers were a leak squad. People assigned to plug information leaks, especially leaks that would highlight administration corruption. Deep Throat…slang for any shadowy political whistle blower and it is still used today, plumbers pretty much died after Nixon’s Watergate scandal.
If you have paid attention, you probably noticed one clear commonality concerning political slang. It is overwhelmingly adversarial. It is a weapon, language with teeth…and it bites. Sometimes with surgical precision but just as often like a drunk raccoon in a dumpster brawl on Taco Tuesday. Of course, the seriousness of the bites depends on who’s getting and who’s giving. Shall we move on?
Love, Lust, and Labels
If politics is where language goes to fight, then sex and relationships are where it goes to flirt, fumble, and fake its way through the night. Been there, done that. We humans have gone a long way to avoid saying “sex” and have invented lots of words we can substitute… and yet everyone knows exactly what those slang terms mean. If everyone knows what you’re saying, what’s the point?
Social expectations around polite language have changed a great deal over the last 100 years. Plenty of slang we don’t think twice about today would’ve been considered scandalous in 1920. You just didn’t hear those words.
Much of the older relationship and sex slang has faded and been replaced by what some might call “cruder” lingo. These days, even the F-bomb isn’t uncommon in polite company. Social rules change, and our language—including slang—changes with it. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not.
Make whoopee comes from the 1920s and is a euphemism for having sex, phrased just cute enough to get past censors. I haven’t heard it in a while, but I think everyone still knows what it means.
Hanky-panky meant pretty much the same, but it also included activities short of “going all the way.” Today it’s become an all-purpose slang term for any sneaky or dishonest behavior—political shenanigans, for example.
Friends with benefits—that one doesn’t take a genius to figure out.
Hit it and quit it: crude shorthand for a one-night stand. I guess I haven’t hung around locker rooms often enough to hear that kind of bragging.
Get lucky: a casual term for casual sex which can get you something other than luck if you aren’t careful.
Hook up: can mean anything from kissing to “all the way,” depending on who’s saying it and who’s hearing it.
Situationship: more than a hook-up, less than a relationship… I’m confused, but probably no more than the couple who describes their own relationship that way.
If you’re a coward and want to end a relationship, try ghosting. It probably works well enough, but if word gets around, there’s only a slim chance you’ll get many more first dates.
Make out: I know it’s still going on, but is that still what they call it?
One thing to remember about relationship slang: it has always carried gender double standards. Men bragged; women blushed.
While straight folks were busy “making whoopee” and “getting lucky,” LGBTQ+ communities had to build a secret slang toolkit of their own. In the 1940s–60s, when being openly gay could get you arrested, fired, or worse, gay men needed a safe way to identify each other. Asking “Are you gay?” wasn’t an option. Instead, they would casually ask: Are you a friend of Dorothy? (A nod to Judy Garland’s Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and her anthem of longing: “Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue…”) Could that song have inspired the Pride flag? The artist never claimed so, but the overlap feels almost poetic.
The LGBTQ+ community embraced slang terms like twink, bear, top, bottom, cruising and lipstick lesbian. If you don’t get it, relax. You were never invited to the party anyway.
I’ll close this section with a couple of stereotypical punchlines:
What does a lesbian bring on the second date? A U-Haul.
Commitment phobia not included; U-Haul sold separately. Mileage may vary.
You’ll know you’ve found a bear bar when you walk in and realize you’re the only one without a beard or a flannel shirt. It’s like accidentally stumbling into a lumberjack convention… only with better music. At that point, your choices are: order a drink or grow a beard… fast.
Next stop: tech slang…the only slang where the words can be outdated before you even finish typing them.
Are You a Techie?
Remember dial-up phones hanging on the kitchen wall, VHS tapes, pay phones, pagers, and Pong? We had dial-up internet too, but you couldn’t use the phone and internet at the same time. We thought we were cutting-edge when push-button phones came along. All the cool kids had those little pocket calculators which the teachers confiscated if they saw you using it.
Tech comes and goes—and all of those have gone. Generation Z kids would probably give you a blank stare if you asked them where the nearest phone booth is.
Some tech slang, even from the 1980s, is still recognizable today… or maybe only recognized by us oldsters. I think surf—as in surf the web—is still a thing, zipping down the information superhighway until a hacker forces you off the road and you crash.
I intended to show off a few tech slang goodies, but I keep hitting speed bumps and learning I don’t know as much about tech lingo as I thought. Imagine that. One of those bumps sent me right down the rabbit hole of language history.
Take hashtag, for example. The now-ubiquitous word was born on Twitter in 2007, mashed from two ideas. Coders had called the # symbol a hash since around 1970 (thanks to its chopped cross-hatch look in programming). A tag is simply a label. Smush them together: hashtag. An inside joke between early users became global. Linguists call this conventionalized slang—when slang goes mainstream and earns a place in the dictionary.
Which got me wondering… how did # even come to represent numbers or weights? (Yes, I get easily distracted.)
We can thank the Romans. They measured weight in libra pondo, or “a pound by weight.” Over time, libra was shortened to lb., and scribes added a flourish to mark it as an abbreviation. Eventually, it got simplified into the # symbol we know today.
In the late 1990s, as internet culture exploded, new words popped up regularly. Viral and virus both showed up during that period. They share ancient roots, but today they’ve split into near opposites. You must see the context to understand which meaning is intended.
Virus originally meant “poison” or “contaminated liquid” in Latin—essentially a one-word public health warning in a world of polluted water. In tech, a virus isn’t biological but behaves the same way: self-replicating, infecting, and damaging systems.
Viral is a derivative of virus, but while a virus spreads bad stuff, viral came to mean something good (at least online). Everyone wants their cat video or Substack post to go viral. So, simple equation: virus = bad, viral = good.
Spam: First known as a mystery meat (still is). In the 1930s, Hormel wanted to sell unwanted pork shoulder, so they created a canned concoction of ham, shoulder, preservatives, and gluey starch. A naming contest produced Spam (supposedly short for spiced ham, though I checked—there are no spices). The internet later recycled Spam to mean junk mail: mystery meat → mystery messages. I’m not a Spam lover (either kind), but fried Spam was a popular wartime meal. Dad loved it.
404: In tech slang, 404 means “not found,” which also describes my car keys or my glasses. I keep a pair of glasses in every room just in case, but only one set of keys… so if those go missing, I’m up the creek. HTTP can be called a kind of computer language that lets computers talk to each other and share web pages. When you type a website address, HTTP delivers the page to your screen. Sometimes, however, the page can’t be found and you get a 404 error message instead.
My final tech slang choice is joystick—the early video game controller first used in gaming in the early 1970s. The term originally came from aviation slang in the early 1900s, when pilots referred to their aircraft control stick as a “joystick.” I suppose I could’ve included joystick back in the Love and Lust section… but I decided to play it safe.
A Multi-Purpose Word
If you’ve followed me this far, I’ll leave you with one last word: drag. There aren’t many words in English that are this flexible. It’s been a verb, a noun, a fashion statement, a car race, a long boring meeting, and even a cigarette break.
Drag has a couple of core meanings. In physics, drag slows things down. In daily life, we might drag our feet. Smokers take a drag on a cigarette. In the 1940s and ’50s, young drivers—especially in California—would “drag the Main”, cruising up and down Main Street to attract attention and show off their cars. The Beach Boys even gave the practice a shout-out in Fun, Fun, Fun. That milder form of cruising sometimes escalated into drag races (not especially popular with local police or city fathers). Eventually, that kind of racing was moved to designated tracks—drag strips—which first appeared in the early ’50s.
And of course, there’s drag as in full costume and attitude on stage, where it morphed from backstage theatrical slang into LGBTQ+ cultural celebration.
Not bad for a four-letter word that just wanted to get from point A to point B—and somehow ended up taking the scenic route through the English language.
I only wish I were as multi-talented.
Language, like life, drags us along whether we’re ready or not. Might as well enjoy the ride.
Photographs by the author. Cartoon is AI generated.
_____________________________________________
IS IT JUST ME is a reader-supported publication and you may choose to be an important part of bringing more of these sorts of stories to the playground. To support my storytelling work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. And for those who can’t afford or don’t yet see the value, please become a free subscriber to receive notifications each time I post new content. Please share if you find something worthwhile. I always welcome comments. Thanks for joining me here today.