[Ads-l] "Foxtrot" redux

[Jesse Sheidlower]

Exactly one month ago, Fred Shapiro posted about "foxtrot" as the name of a dance, leading to a discussion of the interpretation of the early examples.

This got me wondering about a different Foxtrot, the capitalized version, as a radiocommunications spelling-alphabet term for the letter "F", representing the word "fuck" in phrases or compound words. There are a number of widespread examples of this, including "Charlie Foxtrot" for "clusterfuck" (Florida governor Ron DeSantis got some notice for using this in January of this year) and "Foxtrot Oscar" for "fuck off".

The earliest I've been able to find is 1967, for "Romeo Foxtrot" for "ratfuck", in (of course) a military source.

But I'm curious about these examples of "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot", from The Bomb of 1974, the yearbook of the Virginia Military Institute:

https://archive.org/details/bomb1974virg/page/32/mode/2up?q=%22whiskey+tango+foxtrot%22

(alt text of the first example: "A senior at last, Dave devotes full energy towards sleeping, drinking, and wenching. Dave bids farewell to VMI--WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT, OUT!!")

There are many later examples of "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" meaning "What The Fuck", but I'm not sure what these 1974 ones mean. The earliest I know of for "WTF" as "what/who/etc. the fuck" is 1985 (though it's almost certainly earlier, but this is very hard to search). These VMI examples don't clearly mean "what the fuck", but no other interpretation jumps to mind either. Any thoughts?

Jesse Sheidlower

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