[Ads-l] Trash Panda

[Ben Zimmer]

Way back in 2016, Dave Wilton brought up "trash panda," a facetious term
for "raccoon" that's still popular, with an active subreddit,
https://www.reddit.com/r/trashpandas/ . Dave dated the term to 2015, but it
first popped up on Reddit a year before that.

---
Carl Peligro, Jan. 13, 2014, /r/aww
raccoons = trash pandas
https://web.archive.org/web/20200317183940/https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/1v382q/raccoon_in_a_suit/ceockdk/

---

This early use was mentioned in a Business Insider article from Sept. 2015.

https://www.businessinsider.com/trash-panda-subreddit-raccoon-pictures-2015-9
https://web.archive.org/web/20150930171423/http://www.techinsider.io/trash-panda-subreddit-raccoon-pictures-2015-9

--bgz

On Sat, Mar 19, 2016 at 10:27 AM Dave Wilton <dave at wilton.net> wrote:

>
> "Trash panda" as a term for raccoon.
>
> It seems to have arisen in 2015. Urban Dictionary has an entry dated 26
> July 2015. My Facebook feed is overrun with the term. (The creatures are
> major pest here in Toronto.) And there's at least one Reddit feed
> devoted to videos and images of "cute" trash pandas.
>
> I've found a couple of ambiguous references from earlier. One is a Saint
> John, New Brunswick music group "Trash Panda & and The Plywood Carousel
> Rejects" (Telegraph-Journal, 30 Jan 2007).
>
> The other is the from Michael Shilling's 2009 novel "Rock Bottom": "The
> box was impaled on her heel. She shook her foot, but it wouldn't come
> off, hanging there like a little baby trash panda." There's no further
> elaboration of the term, so it's not clear if it refers specifically to
> raccoons or just to a supposed panda characteristic to cling to things.
>
>
> --Dave Wilton
>    Department of English, University of Toronto
>    dave.wilton at utoronto.ca / dave at wilton.net
>

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