A New Breakthrough in the History of the “S—gibbon”: The Insult’s Originator Steps Forward
In an article last Thursday, I looked at the rise of the colorful Trumpian epithet
shitgibbon. The word first hit it big last June when Donald Trump was called a “tiny fingered, Cheeto-faced, ferret wearing shitgibbon” on Twitter and then made an even bigger splash last week when Pennsylvania state Sen. Daylin Leach called the president a “fascist, loofa-faced, shit-gibbon.” But where did this exquisite creation come from, originally?
Some have assumed it must be Scottish, since the June insult came at the height of backlash against Trump’s visit to Scotland, where he was lambasted for his tonedeaf comments about the Brexit vote. But that tweet actually came from an Englishman, one who goes by MetalOllie on Twitter (and will only reveal that his first name is Darren due to online death threats).
My fellow word sleuth Hugo van Kemenade found examples as early as 2000 in Usenet forum posts about bootlegging in the British music scene, where
shitgibbon was deployed against ungrateful traders of copied music. More than a decade later, it got a boost from an early episode of HBO’s
Veep in 2012, wherein the character Sen. Andrew Doyle calls a rival a “gold-plated fucking shitgibbon.”
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https://slate.com/culture/2017/02/the-origin-of-the-trump-insult-shitgibbon-revealed.html
No spoiler, you'll have to click through to find out the identity of the person who coined the term, but I will say it dates from 1990.
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