[Ads-l] "Foxtrot" redux

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Here is a 1977 citation mentioning both "Whiskey, Tango, Fox Trot” and
 “W.T.F."   Both terms were supposed to appear in the title of a
forthcoming book, but I could not find the book via a quick search.

Date: March 3, 1977
Newspaper: The Cincinnati Post
Newspaper Location: Cincinnati, Ohio
Article: Whatever happened to...?
Quote Page 21, Column 2 and 3
Database: Newspapers.com

[Begin excerpt]
Here we've compiled a list of familiar faces who once made news for
one reason or another in the Cincinnati area.
. . .
STEWART (SKIP) WEINER—Former editor of Cincinnati's "Writer’s Digest,"
free-lance writer now rubbing elbows with arty people such as Norman
Mailer in Provincetown Mass., and writing book called "Whiskey, Tango,
Fox Trot (W.T.F.)."
[End excerpt]

Garson

On Fri, Jul 8, 2022 at 2:41 AM Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Relatedly, here's a Vietnam memoir describing an incident from 1968:
>
> ---
> https://books.google.com/books?id=8qgaDgAAQBAJ&pg=PA395
> _White Water Red Hot Lead: On Board U.S. Navy Swift Boats in Vietnam_
> (2017) by Dan Daly, p. 395
> My attempt at humor was based on the fact that I remembered that sometime
> in his naval career Eldon [Thompson] had served on an aircraft carrier. In
> response, I received Eldon's now famous "Whisky, Tango, Foxtrot, Oscar,"
> response which loosely translated meant, "What the fuck, over?"
> ---
>
> On Fri, Jul 8, 2022 at 2:30 AM Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > 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