Word of the week: Dipshit

Governor Tim Walz drops a D-bomb.

This newsletter is (mostly) a swear-free zone, but there are no curbs on cursing at Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing that will soon celebrate its tenth year of publication. That’s where I chose to publish my inquiry into dipshit, the epithet that bounded into prominence last week when Tim Walz, the Democratic candidate for vice president, used it in a reference to Elon “Skippy” Musk.¹

But I had too much fun tunneling through the dipshit rabbit hole not to share the results with you.

Read my post, “Skippin’ Like a Dipshit.”

You can buy this slightly expurgated “Skipping Like a Dipsh*t” T-shirt for $20.99

As for “I don’t speak dipshit” — memorialized on countless pieces of swag — you’ll have to read the Strong Language post to learn its backstory.

“I don’t speak dipshit” T-shirt

Among those cited in the post are a bunch of Substackers:

Jonathon GREEN

(Mister Slang),

I Might Be Wrong

(Jeff Maurer),

James Fell

(Sweary History),

Read Max

(Max Read), and

Freddie deBoer

. Thanks for your contributions to the dipshit literature!

While you’re over at Strong Language, check out the new posts by Ben Yagoda (“Trump’s shit speech. Or was it shitty?”) and Mededitor (“Rawdog it”).

And here’s a little Substack extra that I spotted on Xitter, where you can still occasionally find something worth sharing:

I’ve been a Strong Language contributor — a “co-fucker,” in our cozy internal jargon — since almost the very beginning. You can read all of my Strong Language posts by clicking on my byline. Here’s my first one, published on December 26, 2014: “A pot to piss in.”

1. Walz has a knack for pithy and slightly fusty sobriquets. He made the news in July when he summed up the MAGA contingent as “weird,” and during yesterday’s fascist-esque Trump rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden he reacted to one of the warm-up acts, Tony Hinchcliffe, by asking, “Who is that jackwad?”