Anyone know what a "shitgibbon" is and why Trump was compared to one?

[muriel_volestrangler]

25. And here is the insult of Trump, preserved forever in an academic paper:

Building the perfect curse word: A psycholinguistic investigation of the form and meaning of taboo words

Compounding represents a novel source of tabooness in English. A recent example of this phenomenon occurred in February 2017 during heated political discourse where Pennsylvania State Senator, Daylin Leach, challenged US President Donald Trump by tweeting, “Why don't you try to destroy my career you fascist, loofa-faced, shit-gibbon!” This distinctive insult garnered the interest of both the popular press and language researchers (Tessier & Becker, 2018). In a follow-up article in Slate, Zimmer (2017) subsequently traced the etymology of shitgibbon to writer David Quantic’s critiques of British pop music in the 1980s. Zimmer’s article specifically highlighted the unanswered question of why certain compounds such as shitgibbon are so effective. We hypothesize that word form and meaning interact in taboo words. In two experiments to follow, we examined factors that predict tabooness for single words and the quality of novel taboo compounds.
...
English is rife with taboo terms formed through combinatorial processes with religious terms (e.g., goddamn) and other extant taboo words ( Hughes, 1998; Mohr, 2013). In this experiment, we investigated this idiosyncratic propensity for common noun compounding. There are many such examples in common usage today (e.g., shithead, asshat, clusterfuck), and compounding appears to be a legitimate source of new words. We explored why some common nouns form effective new curse words (e.g., shithead), whereas others (e.g., shitarm) do not. It has been suggested that taboo words tend to denote negative concepts while simultaneously having phonological structures that mark sound-symbolic patterns of aggressive and/or unpleasant sounds (Bergen, 2016). We hypothesized that both of these factors (form and meaning) interact to predict the quality of emergent taboo speech, and this was indeed the case.

The data suggest that taboo compounding is a non-random process and that the quality of novel taboo compounding is to an extent predictable by a simple linear model. This compounding process did, however, differ in several important respects relative to the single-word regression data in Experiment 1. First, participants endorsed shorter words, words with many similar sounding neighbors, and words with higher levels of obstruance (e.g., abrupt stoppage of air during articulation) as superior candidates for taboo compounding. Second, prediction was optimized by a linear combination of these formal factors with semantic variables such as whether a word denoted a profession, dwelling, or receptacle.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-019-01685-8