Once-fresh metaphors can curdle into clichés, and these words are already growing stale.
“Plus, unlike many derogatory terms, they’re not slurs for any particular demographic group, so they’re versatile insults that are also not going to offend anyone (except maybe Oscar the Grouch!).” McCulloch also pointed out that these words are less offensive than many other insults, which makes them safer to use. Bodily functions are also gross, but ‘shit’ and so on are already widely used, so they don’t have as dramatic of an effect,” McCulloch said. McCulloch has a more convincing explanation: “I’d say trash and garbage are popular because they have an easy association with a gross thing that’s not already overused. I’m afraid of spiders, though, and people have been fixated on youth and novelty forever. “For example, British English has ‘rubbish,’ which means the same as garbage but is now used all over the place for things that are only somewhat bad.”Įven though their moment in vogue is temporary, why so many garbage words, all of a sudden? If I throw on my crotchety-old-man hat (which is a crumpled fedora covered in dust and spiders), I would say it’s unsurprising that a culture that venerates the young and new would embrace a category of insults that mocks the used-up. “Like any hyperbole, I think ‘trash,’ ‘dumpster fire,’ ‘garbage person,’ and the like will eventually lose their oomph - one generation’s vivid metaphor is the next generation’s cliché,” McCulloch told me over email. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch often writes about how people use language on the internet, so I asked her if she thought these phrases have staying power, or if their potency is fading. Garbage person isn’t inherently lazy or bad, like Gwen Stefani, but it’s overexposed and pretty corny, like Gwen Stefani. “Cum dumpster” is far more evocative but, alas, too nasty for regular use. “Dumpster fire,” on the other hand, is not only worn out, it’s not even the best two-word dumpster-based stock insult. I’d argue that trash has not yet been completely played out.
Fusion’s Lilian Min recently wrote about how Tumblr communities are using trash to describe themselves, as a sort of tongue-in-cheek preemptive acknowledgment that it’s not cool to be obsessed with Harry Potter or Hamilton. And then there is “trash.” Unlike the other sanitation-adjacent slang, trash has a more specific use case in some pop culture fandoms.
A dumpster fire plus#
You can spit it like an insult, plus there’s always the option of saying garb-aje like you’re some French éboueur delicately plucking waste from a quaint bin on your way to the brasserie. (Whether Shirley Manson has ever referred to herself as a Garbage person is unknown.) The rise of dumpster fire has coincided with the rise of “garbage person.” Atlas Obscura’s Cara Giaimo wrote a great piece tracing how garbage person became “the internet’s favorite insult.” Giaimo noted that Charles Manson had described himself as a garbage person in 1970, but that its popularity has spiked in recent years, with characters on Broad City, Girls, New Girl, and BoJack Horseman all using it as a catchall term for a suck-human. (No relation to the actor Patrick Dempsey.) Even though many people write it in lowercase anyway, Dumpster is technically a brand-name waste container a mashup of “dump” and the name Dempster. “We now lowercase dumpster, so you could write dumpster fire,” The Associated Press Stylebook recently tweeted - a testament to the word’s faddishness, as well as the AP’s thirstiness. The word “dumpster” is technically supposed to be capitalized, although the rules are relaxing to reflect this new use case. And Oxford Dictionaries added the phrase to its online dictionary this year.
Donald Trump and his presidential campaign, on the other hand, get the dumpster-fire designation so often that there are now articles about the trope of Trump-as–dumpster fire.
Two out of three! Carlos Santana, according to my preliminary research, has never been called a dumpster fire online.
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