Its lexicographers added the term to the dictionary this year, calling it “an utterly calamitous or mismanaged situation or occurrence,” or simply a “disaster.” Depending on who you follow on Twitter, you may not have needed a definition.ĭumpster fires spread like wildfire through social networks. Fortunately, Merriam-Webster is here to help. Later, he added: “If a word is used by some people, it should be in a dictionary for all people.A dumpster fire is like porn: it’s hard to define but you know it when you see it. We’re not trying to be Urban Dictionary,” he said. We’re not trying to be something we’re not. If anything, dumpster fire’s introduction to the dictionary comes after its most recent peak as a metaphor, which isn’t something that really bothers Sokolowski. That rapid rise is reflected pretty well in Google Trends’ history of the phrase, which shows a spike upward in interest around October 2015. “But if you read a description of the degree to which things have been bad in the world of politics lately, you’re likely to see two words: dumpster fire.” ” Things are bad everywhere, always, and forever,” said writer Erin Gloria Ryan.
A DUMPSTER FIRE FREE
In 2010, the Winnipeg Free Press wrote that “The Chargers are in the midst of pulling their season out of a dumpster fire and this gets them in the clear.”īut the real shift came before the 2016 elections, when the dumpster fire’s use as a metaphor for the elections was so widely used that it prompted an oral history in the Daily Beast. However, one 2011 newspaper article from the Times Herald in Port Huron, Michigan, about Big Ten football contained the following: “I think Ohio State is at the bottom of that list, but the Buckeyes spend so much time rotating between competent team and dumpster fire it’s tough to tell.” Through 2012, most of the articles about dumpster fires were easily about dumpsters that were on fire. That matched the searches Sokolowski and I ran in Nexis, a database of news article archives. Chances are, if you were tweeting about dumpster fires in 2010 that were not literally dumpsters on fire, then you were tweeting about sports. worst team in the league.” Other teams that were “dumpster fires” that year included the Cleveland Browns, the New York Jets, the New Jersey Devils, and the Capitals. Another tweet reads: “the Kings, such a dumpster fire. “My picks are turning into a nuclear waste and tire dumpster fire,” wrote one Twitter user, apparently disappointed by his fantasy team. One person tweeted in 2008 that traffic was “a dumpster fire,” and another commented on how much he liked the phrase itself: “I just really like the term ‘dumpster fire.’ As in, ‘man, that guy is just a dumpster fire.’ It’s just a really funny way of saying ‘uh oh.'”īy 2010, Sports Twitter really loved the dumpster fire. Who knew that you were alowwed (sic)to bench your QB?” There were a few other uses. How did it spread? I searched for tweets before 2008 that mention the term, and of the few that weren’t about literal dumpster fires, I found a handful about sports, like: “that team is a dumpster fire. “If you’re a meme, if the word itself expresses a meme, then it spreads like wildlife.” “That shows incredibly fast – you might say viral – spreading of the terms,” Sokolowski said.Īnd the term “dumpster fire”has become a meme. “Initial coin offering” and “manspreading” are both new dictionary entries on Merriam-Websters’s online version. But there are some that have made the leap even faster. In dictionary time, a decade is a really short span between first usage and a dictionary entry. Others included “hate-watch,” “bandwidth” as a figurative term referring to emotional capacity, “embiggen” and “mansplain.” Dumpster fire was one of hundreds of new phrases and words the dictionary introduced into its online version on Monday.
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