[Ads-l] "Foxtrot" redux

[Ben Zimmer]

When I posted about "WTF" on Language Log back in 2009 (when the 3rd
edition of Jesse's "The F-Word" was published), some commenters brought up
"Whiskey Tango Foxtrot."

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1766

One regular LL commenter, Jim Gordon, shared this memory from serving in
Vietnam:

---
September 24, 2009 @ 7:56 pm
JimG said,
VietNam-era conversations (in-theater) sometimes included mock radio
procedure using standard phonetics, coming out as "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?,
Over" = WTF,O and thus "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Oscar?" I and some of my
old-fart contemporaries sometimes use it still, as an opening greeting as
well as an expression of disbelief or lack of understanding. We also
inserted the adjective form into out*standing, out*rageous and abso*lutely.
---

--bgz

On Thu, Jul 7, 2022 at 11:28 PM Jesse Sheidlower <jester at panix.com> wrote:

> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org