Cheugy

Cheugy (pronounced chew-gee)

A specialized form describing the un-cool: either (1) out of touch with current coolness and continuing to adhere to fashions or following trends which have become unfashionable or (2) trying too hard to be trendy.

2013: Coined by Gaby Rasson (b 1998) of Los Angeles, California while a student in a Beverly Hills high school (such institutions perhaps among the more productive sources of linguistic invention and re-purposing) although a normally reliable source (urbandictionary.com) includes the claim cheugy was “a technical term used by software engineers beginning in the mid-2000's meaning poorly maintained, damaged but narrowly functional, full of security holes, or quaintly obsolete and probably broken”.  Because of the nature of the word, non-standard forms such as cheugesque, cheuginess, cheugette, cheugism, cheugology cheugcologist, cheugivistic, cheugster, cheugaholic, cheugmeister, cheugmaster, cheugmistress etc have probably been used for humorous effect.  Not all lexicographers agree cheugy or any of its derivations are “real” words although none deny their existence as slang.  The objection from the professionals is that other than multiple instances of definitions and deconstructions, there’s scant evidence the word is actually in real-world use although, curiously, there was once a minor linguistic industry in disparaging (1) those using it (rare as such folk seem to have been) and (2) those who comment on those who use it (some noting the irony, some not).  Cheug & cheuginess are nouns and cheugy, cheugier, & cheugiest are adjectives; the noun plural is cheugs.  

Ms Rasson said she coined cheugy for the perfectly reasonable reason that the word she needed didn’t exist.  At the time, she wanted a single word descriptor for those schoolmates trying without success “to be trendy” and “…there was a missing word that was on the edge [sic] of my tongue and nothing to describe it and cheugy came to me.  How it sounded fitted the meaning.”  Ms Rasson didn’t expand on the process but it may have been a thing of phonetic association with an expression like “eww” and a word like “ugly”.  Whatever the inspiration(s), cheugy seems not to have circulated beyond the inventor’s circle of acquaintances until 2021 when it went viral in the now traditional way: appearing in a TikTok video.  In the clip, cheugy was said to be the perfect word to describe those who posted TikTok videos in hopes of being thought cool or edgy but whose content was just cringeworthy ("cringey" in TicTok talk).  By mid-May #cheugy had gained over 10 million views, trending on Twitter within a year and clearly feeling proprietorial, Ms Rasson tweeted that she’d “…decided to do the cheugiest thing possible and make an NFT out of the word cheugy”, entreating “place your bids cheugs.”

Gucci's double-G belt appears on most lists of cheugy stuff.

Similar terms of derision had before existed in slang (basic, normie etc) but they didn’t convey quite the same thing so, as long as it attains critical mass, cheugy might find a niche.  It’s too soon to tell whether the word will survive in democratic, unforgiving English but there’s definitely a cheugy aesthetic or, more correctly, a number of lists of the practices, preferences and proclivities of others judged to be cheugy.  The lists were presumably predictable to those immersed in the minutiae of such things and perhaps baffling to others.  More interesting was that cheuginess appeared to be (1) a weaponized label with which GenZ and the millennials could exchange cultural blows and (2) another way to disparage women, an arsenal already large.  There will be obsessives who will read the lists and worry but it’s hard to take seriously any list which condemns lasagna.

Once was (sort-of) trendy, now judged chuegy: Chrysler PT Cruiser (2001-2010), the convertible was produced between 2005-2008.

There were even those who compiled lists of “cheugy cars” and the focus was very much on anything “fake” or “try hard”, markers of the breed including an excessive number of stickers claiming to acknowledge after-market accessories added, the presence of plastic fittings of dubious taste or studied pointlessness (heckblendes; wings and spoilers etc) and wheel & tyre combinations approaching absurdity.  Occasionally, a specific car would be included and these tended to be once fashionable or trendy models which, as used cars, had devalued to the point where they could be afforded by those would never be thought “fashionable or trendy”.

A thousand years shall pass and lasagna will never be cheugy.

It didn’t take long for the zeitgeisters wearily to observe that the very spike in the use of cheugy meant it had itself become cheugy, enjoying a brief, shining moment of newness, before becoming dated.  In linguistics the process is known as "the snake eating its tail", a fate which the coiner of "bedint" noted was probably the fate of his creation.  Technically then, cheugy is an auto-antonym or contronym, a word with multiple meanings, one of which is defined as the reverse of one of its other meanings (a phenomenon which in structural linguistics is called enantiosemy, enantionymy or antilogy).  The common way of expressing this is “Janus word”, the name derived from Roman mythology, Janus a god of doorways (and thus also of beginnings), and of the rising and setting of the sun, usually represented as having one head with two bearded faces back to back, looking in opposite directions, historically understood as the past and the future (and adopted in linguistics to describe a word with two, opposed meanings).  Still, the word is there to be used and, some cheugs being more cheugistic than others, the comparative is "more cheugy" (or cheugier) and the superlative "most cheugy" (or cheugiest).

Cheugy has "happened" but may or may not become embedded in English, something which relies on sustained use by a critical mass.  The size of the mass can vary, some embedded words used by a relatively small sub-set while other innovations (like "okay") are more widely adopted, sometimes even beyond English.  However, just if a word or phrase "happens" that's not enough to make it endure and there was no objective reason why "okay" survived while other handy, functional forms flourished for a while before going extinct; in English the phenomenon is noted as the "stranded phrase" (uses which became "stranded" in a pop culture moment which passed).  Fetch never happened (Mean Girls (2004)) although, as a convenient clipping of “fetching” (usually in the form quite fetching or very fetching and meaning “charming; captivating; compelling”), it might have had "fetching" not already having descended into the category of "dated".  By the early twenty-first century, "fetching" wasn't cheugy because it was so rare.

Bedint

Bedint (pronounced buh-dent (U) or bed-ent (non-U))

(1) Something which suggests a bourgeois aspiration to the tastes or habits of the upper classes.

(2) A generalized expression of disapproval of anyone or anything not in accord with the social standards or expectation of the upper classes.

(3) Any behavior thought inappropriate (ie something of which one for whatever reason disapproves).

1920s:  A coining attributed to variously to (1) English writer, politician and diplomat Harold Nicolson (2) his wife, the writer Vita Sackville-West or (3) speculatively, Vita Sackville-West’s family.  The word is of Germanic origin and although there are variants, the source of all was the Middle Dutch bedienen, the construct being be- +‎ dienen.  The Middle Dutch be- was from the Old Dutch bi- & be-, from the Middle High German be-, from the Old High German bi-, from the Proto-Germanic bi-, from the primitive Indo-European hepi and was used to indicate a verb is acting on a direct object.  Dienen was from the Middle Dutch dienen, from the Old Dutch thienon, from the Proto-Germanic þewanōną and meant "to be of assistance to, to serve; to serve (at a tavern or restaurant); to operate (a device)".  In the rituals of the Roman Catholic Church, it has the specific technical meaning "to administer the last sacraments (the last rites)".  A bedient (the second third-person singular present indicative of bedienen) was thus a servant, a waiter etc.  The acceptable pronunciation is buh-dent while bed-int, be-dit or anything else is the depth of bedintism.  Bedint is a noun & adjective; the noun plural is bedints.  As a non-standard word, there are no derived forms but, for humorous effect, some have appeared including the nouns, bedintism bedinity & bedintism and the adjectives bedinted, bedintish & bedintesque.  The noun bedintologist is non-standard but there are a lot of amateur bedintologists active.  Caution must be exercised because the very use of the word can be condemned as bedint.

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December, 2011.  

The idea thus is exemplified by a maître d'hôtel (head waiter) who, well dressed and well mannered, appears superficially not dissimilar to someone from the upper classes but of course is someone from a lower class, adopting for professional reasons, some of their characteristics (dress, manner, speech (and sometimes snobbery) etc).  Whoever coined the word, it was certainly popularized by Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West, neither of whom were much reticent in finding fault in others.  It seems initially to have been their shared code for discussing such things but soon became common currency amongst the smart set in which they moved and from there, eventually entered the language although not all dictionaries acknowledge its existence and it should probably be thought non-standard.  It one of those words which need not be taken too seriously and is most fun to use if played with a bit (bedintish, bedintesque, bedintingly bedinded, bedintism, bedintology etc).  As a word, although from day one weaponized, bedint was subject to mission-creep to the point where, as Lewis Carroll's (pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898) Humpty Dumpty "in rather a scornful tone" explained to Alice in Alice Through the Looking-Glass (1871): "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

Figures from that lost, pre-1914 world: Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) & Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962), London, 1913.

As originally used by Nicolson & Sackville-West, bedint was one the many linguistic tools of exclusion and snobbery; these devices exist among all social classes, some of which, when part of “working-class consciousness” or similar constructs are classified as “inverted snobbery”.  Bedint was used to refer to anyone not from the layers of the upper class (royalty, the aristocracy, the gentry) in some way aping the behavior or manners of “their betters”; the behavior need not be gauche or inappropriate, just that of someone “not one of us”.  Nicolson didn’t exclude himself from his own critique and, as one who “married up” into the socially superior Sackville family, was his whole life acutely aware of what behaviors of his might be thought bedint, self-labelling as he thought he deserved.  His marriage he never thought at all bedint although many of those he condemned as bedint would have found it scandalously odd, however happy the diaries of both parties suggest that for almost 50 years it was.

Harold Nicolson & Vita-Sackville West, Sissinghurst Castle Garden, Kent, 1932.

Bedint as a word proved so useful however that it came to be applied to members of the upper classes (even royalty) were they thought guilty of some transgression (like dullness) or hobbies thought insufficiently aristocratic (ie "a bit middle class" which was about as bad as insults got).  The idea of some behavior not befitting one’s social status was thus still a thread but by the post-war years, when bedint had entered vocabulary of the middle-class (a bedint thing in itself one presumes Nicolson and Sackville-West would have thought), it was sometimes little more than a synonym for bad behavior (poor form as they might have said), just an expression of disapproval.  That didn't mean all "non-typical" behavior was bedint because certain eccentricities or a bohemian lifestyle might be tolerated or even admired.  Bedint-tagging can thus be thought as something within the rubric of labeling theory and to this day there are many practicing bedintologists although not all will be familar with the word.  

Harold Nicolson & Vita-Sackville West, Sissinghurst Castle Garden, Kent, 1960.

The biographical work on Nicolson reveals a not especially likable snob but, in common with many fine and sharp-eyed diarists, he seems to have been good company though perhaps best enjoyed in small doses.  One of those figures (with which English political life is studded) remembered principally for having been almost a successful politician, almost a great writer or almost a viceroy (the latter perhaps more in his mind than that of the cabinet), he even managed to be almost a lord but, despite switching party allegiances to curry favor with the Labour government (1945-1951), the longed-for peerage was never offered and he was compelled to accept a knighthood.  His KCVO (Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, an honor in the personal gift of the sovereign) was granted in 1953 in thanks for his generous (though well-reviewed and received) biography of the stamp-collecting George V (1865-1936, King of England 1910-1936) although those who could read between the lines found it not hard to work out which of the monarch’s activities the author thought bedint.  As it was, Nicolson took his KCVO, several rungs down the ladder of the Order of Precedence, accepting it only "faute de mieux" (in the absence of anything better) and describing it “a bedint knighthood”, wondering if, given the shame, he should resign from his clubs.

Wedding day: Duff Cooper & Lady Diana Manners, St Margaret's Church, London, 2 June 1919.

So a knighthood, a thing which many have craved, can be bedint if it's not the right knighthood.  When the Tory politician Duff Cooper (1890–1954) ended his term (1944-1948) as the UK's ambassador to France, the Labor government (which had kept him on) granted a GCMG and although he thought his years as a cabinet minister might have warranted a peerage, he accepted while wryly noting in his diary it was hardly something for which he should  be congratulated because: "No ambassador in Paris has ever failed to acquire the it since the order was invented and the Foreign Office has shown how much importance they attach to it by conferring it simultaneously on my successor Oliver Harvey (1893-1968), who is, I suppose, the least distinguished man who has ever been appointed to the post".  Still, Cooper took his "bedint" GCMG and when a Tory government returned to office, he was, shortly before his death, raised to the peerage, choosing to be styled Viscount Norwich of Aldwick.  His wife (Lady Diana Cooper (1892–1986) didn't fancy becoming "Lady Norwich" because she though it "sounded like porridge" (additionally, she had good "brand recognition") and took the precaution of placing notices in The Times and Daily Telegraph telling all who mattered she would continue to be styled "Lady Diana Cooper".  They had a "modern marriage" so differences between them were both negotiated and not infrequent.

A faute de mieux moment: Lindsay Lohan with “award surfboard”, The Teen Choice Awards 2004 cermony, Universal Amphitheatre, Universal City, Los Angeles, California, 8 August, 2004.

From his grave, Harold Nicolson might be amused that since his death more attention has be paid to the details of his remarkable marriage than his careers in politics, diplomacy or literature, despite the latter yielding a biography of his father, a best-selling life of George V, a study of Mrs Charles Lindbergh’s (1906-2001) father, novels and historical works.  Of all he wrote, perhaps the one that will continue to be mined for “source material” was the most “postmodern”: the pseudo-autobiographical Some People (1927), the Author’s Note cautioning “…many of the following sketches are purely imaginary.  Such truths as they may contain are only half-truths”.  A book thus with modern qualities and whether it revealed much about its subjects can be debated but it was an insight into the author, not so much what he was but how he wished to be perceived.  Nicolson clearly conveyed this was not a work to be read by bedints with an ostentatious use of devices of the type Henry Fowler (1858–1933) in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) called a “pride of knowledge”: Much of Some People was in French, the text littered with untranslated allusions to classical literature and words (some of which long assimilated into English) appearing in the original Ancient Greek script.  Genuinely, it’s an often amusing work even bedints can enjoy in translation (it’s ideal for a hypertext edition) but old Henry Fowler would not have been impressed and would likely have dismissed the devices as “pretentious”.  Others, well acquainted with Nicolson's social aspirations, called it “a cad’s book”. 

Vita Sackville-West (left) and Violet Trefusis (right), Villa dell'Ombrellino, Florence, Italy, circa 1920.  The Tuscan estate belonged to Ms Trefuis's mother, Alice Keppel (1868–1947) a long-time mistress of Edward VII (1841–1910; King of the UK & Emperor of India 1901-1910).

It was an indication of how important it was for Nicolson not to be though bedint although, of course, as he likely would have admitted, trying so hard is about as bedint as things get but if anything, it was the publication in 1973 of Portrait of a Marriage by his son (Nigel Nicolson, 1917–2004) that confirmed him (among those few who much dwelt on the matter) as “really not a bedint”.  The book was a son’s unadorned tale of his bisexual parents' extramarital arrangements but so convivial were the agreements between them about the many trysts and affairs it seems absurd to characterize them as infidelities, indeed, nothing as romantic as Vita Sackville-West's “elopement” with Violet Trefusis (1894–1972) could possibly be thought bedint.  Indisputably a snob and a racist, Nicolson divided the planet’s population (that literally was his vista) in a tiny racial, social and intellectual aristocracy (with which he self-identified) and “the rest”; in that he wasn’t greatly different from many except in using “bedint” as a kind of convenient shorthand he did display what more than one biographer and critic would call his “inferiority complex” (one acquaintance labelling him “a national figure of the second degree”).  Like his contemporary the expatriate American Sir Henry "Chips" Channon (1897–1958), his ambition was to be rich and be raised to the peerage although such was his character it may be than even had he collected a viscountcy, he’d have begun to fret about not being an earl, that notch on the peerage a kind of fence between them and the “bedint lords”.  Certainly he anticipated the title would one day come, planning to commandeer one of the vacant Sackville titles, his name “insufficiently aristocratic” despite the pleasing “elegance of the absent ‘h’”.  Curiously, despite blatantly being anti-Semitic and contemptuous of most of the usual suspects (working class, middle class, foreigners etc) he supported the Balfour Declaration (1917), advocated for the creation of the state of Israel, was appalled by the Treaty of Versailles (1919), approved of the League of Nations (1920-1945), applauded the Beveridge Report (the 1942 paper by Sir William Beveridge, (1879–1963) detailing the original framework of the post-war welfare state) and ended up in the Labour Party.  No biography of Nicolson has made him seem especially “likeable” but among history’s footnotes he remains memorable, a quality transcending bedintism.

The BEM (British Empire Medal), the lowest of the six rungs of the Order of the British Empire.  Politicians would regard the BEM as “a bedint award for bedints” and would be insulted if offered one.

As a species, politicians have a sense of entitlement like few others and while that’s hardly a revelation, what is amusing is to speculate whether the “pathologically entitled” are drawn to the business or it grows in them as they notice the trough seems always to be topped up no matter how deep they bury their snouts.  More amusing still is to create two lists categorizing politicians as one or the other and what’s striking is how few don’t make the cut for either.  As a breed, one thing to which most felt entitled was an honor, and from minor worthies such as mayors hoping for a OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) to put them a notch above the nurse given an MBE (a Member in the same order) for many decades of dedicated service, to cabinet ministers lobbying for a knighthood or peerage, the lure has always been strong.  There have been exceptions.  Enoch Powell (1912–1998) declined the offer of a life peerage on the basis the proffered barony “wasn’t hereditary”; presumably he thought a “non-ongoing nobility” just too bedint to be contemplated while others would make light of being dubbed.  Sir Arthur Fadden (1894–1973; Prime Minister of Australia Aug-Oct 1941) was in 1951 made a KCMG (Knight Commander of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George) and to mark his retirement from politics in 1958 he was elevated to GCMG (Knight Grand Cross in the same order).  He welcomed the new honor by remarking: “Twice a knight, not bad at my age.”

There have also been politicians who seemed to find the whole honors system totally naff.  Paul Keating (b 1944; Prime Minister of Australia 1991-1996) declined the more or less obligatory AC (Companion of the Order of Australia (the de facto “top-of-the-tree” since the AK (Knight of the same order) went into abeyance after a brief and controversial revival by Tony Abbott (b 1957; Prime Minister of Australia 2013-2015)) on the basis “…prime ministers are well-rewarded for their service” although it’s tempting to think while Mr Keating might have thought most honors were too bedint for him to accept, given his self-regard, he might have been tempted if offered a dukedom; there hasn’t been (a non-royal) one of them created for 150-odd years and they’re no longer as costly as once they were.  He made one memorable speech making his disdain clear.  Rising in the House of Representatives on 27 February, 1992, he castigated conservative politicians for” “…still looking for your MBEs and your KCMGs and all the rest of the regalia… we will have no bar of you or your sterile ideology.

Lord Salisbury speaking in the House of Lords (1894), supplement to The Graphic, after a chromolithograph by Sydney Prior Hall (1842-1922).  In Great Contemporaries (1937), Winston Churchill (1875-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) alluded to Salisbury's many years as prime minister: “...venerable, august Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister since God knew when.”

Mostly though, politicians’ lust for honors has been strong and many went beyond dropping hints to lobbying.  George Goschen (1831–1907) served in the British government as an “average Chancellor of the Exchequer” and “competent First Lord of the Admiralty” but his many years in office were noted more for the effluxion of time than substantive achievement.  Despite that, Goschen of course felt “entitled” to a seat in the Lords and even fretted about the name he’d adopt upon being ennobled, telling the prime minister he’d decide when told what grade he’d be getting, adding he hoped his elevation would not be announced as “…one of a batch”, making clear a viscountcy was merely “rations” for a retiring cabinet minister and his long service entitled him to go up a notch.  His arguments failed to impress the prime minister (Lord Salisbury (1830–1903; UK Prime Minister for thirteen years variously 1885-1902)) who told his secretary he was prepared only to create him a viscount, something that prompted Goschen to impose himself on the secretary for a long session of advocacy; it proved unproductive, the secretary laconically minuting the prime minister: “Accepts Viscountcy: would have liked an Earldom.”  Resigned to this faute de mieux, he entered the House of Lords as Viscount Goschen of Hawkhurst.

Had the word then existed, Salisbury might have though Goschen’s conduct “typical bourgeois bedintism” while reflecting on twice being offered a dukedom by Victoria (1819–1901; Queen of the UK 1837-1901).  Salisbury had told the queen he was appalled by the prohibitive cost of maintaining what was then a ducal lifestyle and that he’d anyway rather have “an ancient marquessate than a modern dukedom.”  In truth, when the offers were made, the Salisbury marquessate was barely a hundred years old (the prime minister the third marquis) although the titled roots of the Cecil family went back centuries.  Still, “ancient” is how it’s defined and Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946; Nazi foreign minister 1938-1945) justified being at the age of 33 adopted by an aunt (in exchange for payment) in order to append the nobiliary particle “von” to his name on the basis of “not wishing to see an ancient branch of the family go extinct”.  That branch was then of a 40 year vintage and the “purchased von” was within the Nazi Party a source of contemptuous humor, the acerbic Dr Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945; Nazi Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda 1933-1945) summing him up in a diary entry of typical succinctness: “He bought his name, married his money and swindled his way into office”.  Had Goebbels been aware of “bedint”, that’s what he’d have labelled the inept foreign minister.