Feels a bit weird doesn’t it? Like there’s something about it that’s not quite right, something… what’s that word? Oh yes, wrong! It feels wrong. Even as a made-up word, there’s a fundamental wrongness to it. In the back of your mind a stentorian voice proclaims “There are some phonemes that God did not intend for man to put together!” It is an abomination of the alphabet: the portmanteau of Dr. Moreau.
It came to me, naturally, while juxtaposing the concepts of “scum” and “Trump” - something that, by 2024, millions had done before me - and something that can’t be done without noticing the assonance (from the Latin: “Sounds like an asshole”) which in turn cannot be done without the portmanteau “scump” leaping to mind and followed, as you may have noticed, by an immediate, almost involuntary, desire for it to leap back out again and never return. So it was with me — but as I tried to banish it from my mind, I couldn’t help wondering how many had gone before me. Is it possible they ALL kept it to themselves? Had I stumbled on to a dirty little secret in the collective consciousness? The nickname that dare not speak its name?
You, dear readers, know better than I, for when I dared you to say it who among you did so out loud? That’s what I thought. Wise decision.
I say this not because its mere intonation will summon some Godless politician/swamp monster, but simply because your instinct told you not to, like I’m assuming millions have before. I am no stranger to these mysterious words that the 16th Century French named after carrying a suitcase. My guess would be that “portmanteau” was a term not Parisian by birth but rather a gift from the provinces, presumably due to the shortage of any more appropriate verbs and nouns. Having coined such unforgettable Bush-era flashes-in-the-pan as “Rumsfailed,” “Chimpeach” and my tribute to Bill O’Reilly, “Harrasturbator,” I felt prepared, but still oddly reticent to verbalize what I euphemistically term a “Hobbesian epithet” for being nasty, brutish and short. After a minute or two though I said it aloud and can report no ill-effects beyond the amplification of the strange, visceral discomfort one gets from merely thinking it. That, followed by a two week blackout period where it seems I felt compelled to make public what we’d all so long and successfully kept private. But I do that sort of thing all the time. Feeling adventurous? Give it a go. In the meantime, I’ll try and explain the madness that passes for method in my madness.
Simply put, I was tired of all the shit.
After ten years of hearing this shitty guy saying shitty things in that shitty little voice of his, the porn star hush money trial of the Champion of Family Values brought it all to a point of shitical mass. He’s on trial for doing such a shitty job trying to cover up shitty sex to spare his campaign further shit during the shitstorm that arose from the Access Hollywood tape, where he was caught on tape saying some of the shittiest shit ever said.
Details of the cover up included shitty accounting for shitty things like hush money and shitty deals with a publisher to cover up all of his shit and make up fake shit about his opponents in the National Enquirer, a magazine that’s known primarily for being utterly full of interesting and informative content.
Everyone agrees that cheating on Melania when Barron was only four months old son was pretty shitty. But just naming the kid Barron was a shitty thing to do given that John Barron was the name he gave himself when his shitty attempt to disguise his voice exposed him pretending to be someone else talking about how rich, happy and successful he was. It was the stupidest and most pathetic attempt by a loser desperate to pass as a winner ever recorded in the history of humiliation. Anyone else would’ve been smart enough to know it was the stupidest name he could’ve chosen, but Donald dumbly doomed his newborn Barron to bear a lifelong legacy of loserdom.
Breaking news that Trump was breaking wind had me at my breaking point. But when it was speculated that Individual One may be going number two in court, that was it: I’d simply had enough of this shit. That’s when I turned to our friends across the pond and found “scum.”
The British have been using the term “scum” to describe fascists for the last hundred years, and while it doesn’t quite take the place of shit, it comes close enough. When “scump” came to mind my first inclination was to forget it. What made me change my mind? It happened while I was driving that night: I was listening to the Cramps and something about the way the streetlamp made the onramp appear damp, made me remember my Gramps saying “Hey Champ!” when he picked me up from camp and took me to see “Lady and the Tramp” and how that dog was such a loveable…?
Scamp. That’s what he was. Mischievous and yet adorable. And I guess it was just the unfairness of it all that got to me. Why should scamp be so beloved? Why should “scamp” be some cute little irrepressible cartoon pup while “scump” is a pariah dog: hated, repressed and shunned by all?
Thus my initial challenge becomes one of the very few instances where a double-dog dare takes place in a non-idiomatic sense. To those who dared intone it, even knowing you were alone, did you quickly look around to be sure? And when you said the dread word did you say it loudly, without fear? Or did you say it softly and then feel yourself flinch, waiting for whatever might come next?
As for what motivates me, I suppose it’s the same thing that motivates most of my political work these days: morbid curiosity. I may tell myself I’m standing up for the phonetically misbegotten, but how much passion can one really have for anthropomorphized words? It’s bad enough we anthropomorphize animals (they really hate it when we do that…) I fear I’m once again being seduced by power - the power of the viscerally forbidden. I tell myself it’s for the good of the nation and that I will use the power of scump only for good and not for evil, yet all the while knowing these are the lyrics to the anthem of the damned.