Mind your language | 28 November 2009

Dot’s found a funny thing.

Here’s a funny thing. The New Oxford American Dictionary (or Noad, for short) has nominated teabagger as the runner-up for ‘word of the year’. The winning word was unfriend, a piece of jargon used by people who drop so-called friends from popular networking sites such as Facebook. As for teabagger, it is said to refer to someone protesting at ‘President Obama’s tax policies and stimulus package, often through local demonstrations known as “Tea Party” protests (in allusion to the Boston Tea Party of 1773)’.

In that case, one might think it would be called tea-partying. Perhaps, one might surmise, teabagging had been influenced by sand-bagging, as an aggressive act (just as Lady Thatcher’s handbagging was). There is evidence, however, that the term teabagger was foisted on the Tea Party protesters by political opponents, especially radio broadcasters, who did so with knowing reference to an obscene act.

When I discovered this, I remembered an exchange in The Thick of It, Armando Iannucci’s political satire, rich in rococo obscenities. The Alastair Campbell figure Malcolm Tucker says to the shrinking civil servant Terri: ‘Teabagging! Do you even know what that is?’ She admits that she does not, and nor did I, then.

I have since found out, though I do not think I should explain here, since this is a magazine read at the family fireside. But on co-operative dictionary websites such as Urban Dictionary, definitions of the word have been peer-reviewed by thousands of users. These peers are, admittedly, as ignorant as the beast of the field, but language does not evolve by the judgments of the learned. Teabagging was Urban Dictionary’s ‘word of the day’ on 13 April 2009, two days before a planned nationwide outbreak of anti-Obama Tea Parties. In March, a pro-Tea Party website had urged: ‘Teabag the fools in DC on Tax Day’, but it was not clear that many supporters then saw the term as ambiguous. On 13, 14 and 15 April, however, several American broadcasters used double entendres about the notion of political teabagging.

Since Oxford University Press announced its choice of teabagger as word of the year, its website has been flooded with comments by people who object to the publishers of the dictionary adopting a pejorative term for the Tea Party campaigners. That is not a lexicographical objection. After all, Tory was coined as a term of opprobrium. But if the OUP is publishing an academically honest dictionary it should note the obscene as well as the political sense of the term it has chosen to include.