pride / proud

Pride marchers, Katowice, Poland, 2019

31 August 2026

Pride comes to us from the Old English pryde or pryte, which had a core meaning pretty much the same as the present-day word. But strangely, its origin is quite different from that of proud. Our present-day adjective proud is a reflex of an Old English word, prud, but that Old English word is a rare borrowing from the Old French, prod. We don’t see many borrowings from French from before the Norman Conquest.

Use of pride specifically in reference to the LGBTQ+ political and cultural movement dates to 1969, shortly after the Stonewall uprising. We see it, in the phrase gay pride, in an article in the zine Gay Power published in that year:

Gay pride and self-consciousness are valid tools to fight oppression. I was never self-conscious about being a lesbian and drag butch until this goddam society—straight and gay—made me feel like an isolate. When straight society recognizes my essential humanity and my right to be myself, and when gays stop dumping on drag types by outright rejection or [start] advocating that gays should love the eccentrics in their midst (meaning drag types among others), I’ll abandon my gay sensitivities, sensibilities, self-consciousness, and pride as being a pain in the ass; but in the meanwhile, being a pain in someone else’s ass has its moments.

By 1971, pride was being used without the modifier gay when context rendered that unnecessary. We also start to see it being used by mainstream publications. A 24 June 1971 article uses the standalone pride in a headline, although the body of the article uses gay pride:

Pride Week Set By Gay Libbers

Austin Gay Liberation Front (GLF) is planning weekend activities for more than 500 people it says will be in town to celebrate Gay Pride Week which ends June 27.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2022, s.v. pride, n., proud, adj.

Merriam-Webster.com, accessed 1 June 2026, s.v. pride, n., proud, adj.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, March 2007, s.v. pride, n.1; June 2003, s.v. gay pride, n.; September 2007, s.v. proud, adj., n., & adv.

Stephan, Marty. “Deliver us from our Friends—Please O Lord.” Gay Power, 1.8, 1969, 21/1. Gale Primary Sources: Archives of Sexuality and Gender.

“Pride Week Set by Gay Libbers.” Austin Statesman (Texas), 24 June 1971, A10/7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Silar, 2019. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

EGOT

Left to right: Tony, Oscar, Emmy, and Grammy awards

28 August 2026

EGOT is an acronym for Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony and is a status given to people who have won all four awards. To date, twenty-two people have achieved EGOT status with competitive awards, the most recent being Steven Spielberg, who achieved the status with a Grammy in 2026. A further six people have achieved the status with one of the awards being an honorary one.

Actor Philip Michael Thomas, who rose to fame as one of the stars to the television series Miami Vice (1984–89) is the first person recorded as using the acronym, and he is generally credited with coining the term. Thomas’s use of EGOT is documented in an Associated Press article that appears in the San Francisco Chronicle on 18 August 1984:

His career started in music, then the acting “took over,” [Thomas] said. “For a lot of years I thought one of these days I’m going to do something musical and turn on the juice and they’re going to say, ‘My God, what a talent!’ It hasn’t happened yet, but it will.”

On his 35th birthday last May, he said he launched a plan called “EGOT.” “That stand for Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony,” he said. “Hopefully in the next five years I will win all those awards.

To date, Thomas has not been nominated for any of the four awards.

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Sources:

Buck, Jerry (Associated Press). “A Pair of Cops Living on the Edge.” San Francisco Chronicle (California), 18 August 1984, 33/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, January 2018, s.v. EGOT, n.

Photo credit: Montage appeared in People magazine, 2017. Individual image credits are Jemal Countess/Getty; Scott Olson/Getty; Gabriel Olsen/FilmMagic; Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty. Fair use of a low-resolution copy to illustrate the topic under discussion.

buckaroo

1926 movie poster for Hoot Gibson’s “The Buckeroo Kid”

26 August 2026

A buckaroo is a cowboy, or in later usage someone with the demeanor and vibe of a cowboy. The word has a rather straightforward etymology: it is an alteration of the Spanish vaquero (cowherd, cowboy), and its use comes out of the nineteenth-century American West. Like many such terms, its written form took many different spellings before it became standardized on buckaroo.

The earliest use of the term, in the form bakhara, that I’m aware of is in a letter written by William B. Dewees on 6 January 1827. Dewees was describing the region in and around Saltillo, Mexico:

To me, there is nothing more agreeable than to wake in the morning, when among the mountains, and listen to the bleating of the calves and lambs, the lowing of the cows, the braying of the mules and donkies, and to behold the bakharas herding the cattle, the horses and mules, while on every cliff and rock, sheep and goats may be seen sporting from rock to rock, and leaping over every dangerous cliff.

[…]

This country is settled differently, from any place I was ever in. The people all reside in large towns, which are situated from twenty to forty miles apart. The country between these towns, is not settled by farmers, as in America. A few wealthy rancheros dwell in the country, who own vast herds of stock, of all kinds. These, usually, are surrounded by ten or fifteen families of poor people, who reside near them, together with peons and bakharas, or herdsmen.

The spelling buckiero appears in the journal of Alfred Doten for 15 April 1851:

April 15—Clear and pleasant—Forenoon I went down to McDonald’s ranch looking for my horse—I did not find him but on the way back over the hills I came across a horse and two mules which were stolen at the same time—I gave information of it at Chinn’s store and “Boss” started off after them and in the afternoon he came in with them and, to my surprise, brought my horse, which he found tied to a tree about 6 miles back in the hills—he did not see anything of the remainder of the missing animals—Chinn and his buckiero have been gone in pursuit of the missing animals since yesterday morning.

The 1889 Century Dictionary includes the term, with the spelling buckayro, as well as the clipped form bucker:

buckayro (bu-kā´ rō), n. Same as bucker³. (Western U. S.)

[…]

bucker³ (buk´ėr), n. (Abbr. of buckayro, and accom., simulating bucker¹, of Sp. vaquero, a cowherd: see vaquero.) A cowboy. T. Roosevelt. (Western U. S.)

We get closer to the standard spelling in Stewart Edward White’s 1907 Arizona Nights. The passage that uses the word describes an Englishman who wants to become a cowboy and works hard at copying the demeanor and learning the skills necessary for the occupation:

He was always easing the trigger-pull, or filing the sights. In time he got to be a fairly accurate and very quick shot.

The same way with roping and hog-tying and all the rest.

“What’s the use?” I used to ask him. “If you were going to be a buckeroo, you couldn’t go into harder training.”

Finally, we get the spelling buckaroo in a glossary published in the journal Dialect Notes for 1913:

buckaroo´, n. A broncho buster, cowpuncher, cowboy. Used throughout the cattle-raising states and in Mexico and Canada. It is probably a corruption of Span. vaquero. “That night the buckaroos shot up the town.” “He is some buckaroo all right.”

And the extended use of buckaroo to refer to a person who exudes the vibe and demeanor of a cowboy in an advertisement that appears in Appleton, Wisconsin’s Daily Post of 6 January 1920:

Buckaroo (buck-a-roo) [...] Meaning, when applied to the masculine gender of the human species, a lively young buck. 2. A gay dog.

It has been suggested by some older sources that buckaroo has an origin in one or another African languages, but the evidence for such an origin is scant, whereas the origin in vaquero is well documented and the sound and spelling changes that have transformed the Spanish word into buckaroo are both normal and well documented in the historical record.

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Sources:

Century Dictionary of the English Language, vol. 3, Bice–Carboy. William Dwight Whitney, ed. New York: Century Co., 1889, s.v. buckayro n. & bucker3, n. Archive.org.

Dewees, William B. Letter, 6 January 1827. Letters from an Early Settler of Texas, second edition. Cara Cardelle, ed. Louisville, Kentucky: New Albany Tribune, 1858, 65–66. Archive.org.

Doten, Alfred. Journal entry, 15 April 1851. The Journals of Alfred Doten, 1849–1903, vol. 1. Walter van Tilburg Clark, ed. Reno: U of Nevada Press, 1973, 84–85. Archive.org.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 7 August 2026, s.v. buckaroo, n.

Harvey, Bartle T. “A Word-List from the Northwest.” Dialect Notes, 4.1, 1913, 26–28 at 26. Archive.org.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1933, s.v. buckaroo, n.; 1916, vaquero, n.

White, Stewart Edward. Arizona Nights. Toronto: Musson, 1907, 51. Archive.org.

Image credit: Universal Pictures, 1926. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

camp

Camp of the 35th New York Volunteers, c. 1861

24 August 2026

[Edit, 26 August: added final paragraph about tarty clothing]

Camp has a general meaning of temporary dwelling place, originally used in military contexts. But it also has a slang sense, originating in gay slang, of flamboyance or exaggeration, or as an adjective meaning affected or effeminate.

The word was borrowed into Old English from the Latin campus, meaning a field, especially one used for mustering and training troops. In Old English it also acquired the sense of a battlefield, and the Old English verb campian meant to fight. But these forms dropped out of use following the Norman Conquest, when the noun was replaced by the Old French form chaump (strangely, English did not adopt the Norman dialectal form of the word, which was also camp). The English spelling of camp was reborrowed from modern French in the early sixteenth century.

We see the word being used in the Old English translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, in this case in the sense of a fight or strife:

Martyralogium be symbeldægum haligra martyra, on þære ealle þa þe ic gemetan mihte, nales þæt an hwilce dæge ac eac swilce hwilce cyne compes, oþþe under hwilcum deman hie middangeard oferswiðden, ic geornlice awrat.

(I carefully wrote a martyrology all that I could find about the festivals of the holy martyrs, not only through what kind of camp [i.e., strife, battle] and by means of which judge [i.e., Christ] they overcame the world.) 

Bede’s original Latin uses certaminis, the genitive singular of certamen, meaning strife, contest, battle.

With the reborrowing from modern French, both the noun and verb began to also be used in non-military contexts, such as hunting and fishing camps or in the context of traveling or nomadic groups. We can see this form and sense in a 1560 translation of Exodus 16:13:

And so at eue[n] the quailes came and couered the campe: & in the morning y^e dewe laye rounde aboute the hoste.

A translation printed in London two years earlier used tentes rather than campe.

The sense of camp meaning a place of recreational activity for children, as in summer camp, developed in North America in the late nineteenth century as part of the physical culture movement. Here’s an early example of the usage from Rhode Island’s Newport Daily News of 20 March 1876:

The advantages of camp life, especially for boys who are in many cases too much confined in the house or the school room, are not easy to over-estimate. Dr. J. T. Rothrock of Wilkesbarre, Penn., purposes to establish during the four warmest months of the year a camp for boys among the mountains. Studies will not be neglected, while the boys will have opportunities to hunt, fish, and reap all the benefits of life in the open air, at the same time being protected from inclement weather and under the care of a physician.

The origin of the gay slang use of camp, referring to affected or effeminate mannerisms, comes into the language via a different path and isn't known for certain. But it is probably from the colloquial French se camper, meaning to assume a provocative posture, to strike a pose. The term appears in French in the late seventeenth century and is adopted by the nascent gay culture in the mid nineteenth century. Less likely alternatives include formation in English from the military association, either from an affected swagger or from the activities of camp followers and from the Scots camp meaning lively, playful.

We can see this sense of camp in the adjective campish that appears in a November 1868 letter from Frederick Park, a noted cross-dresser, to Lord Arthur Clinton, a Liberal politician and godson of Prime Minister William Gladstone, who was partnered with Ernest Boulton, a cross-dresser who appeared on stage with Park:

[My] campish undertakings are not at present meeting with the success they deserve.

In 1870 Park and Boulton were charged with incitement to commit unnatural offenses. Clinton died the day after receiving a subpoena to testify in their trial. The cause of his death was officially given as scarlet fever, but it is widely thought that he took his own life. (Speculation at the time also had him faking his death and fleeing to live abroad.) Both Park and Boulton were eventually acquitted.

We also see camp being used in relation to the arrest of several men for vagrancy in an article in Liverpool’s Evening Express of 23 October 1874:

The ticket found on one of the prisoners was handed up to the bench, and read as follows:—“Her Majesty, Queen of Camp, will hold a grand levee and grand ball masque on Wednesday, October 21st, 1874. Dancing to commence at ten o’clock; tickets, 1s. 6d. each. Ices, refreshments, &c., will be provided.”

The article also contains a noteworthy use of gay, ostensibly in the sense of bright and lively, but clearly in a homosexual context:

The whole of the prisoners were dressed in a gay manner. Mack wore a light muslin dress, with muslin bodice, ear-rings, and white gloves; Hallas had on a black lace shawl, and Fox was similarly attired. Their hair (or wigs) were dressed after the latest fashion for ladies. They also wore dancing boots.

In the nineteenth century, gay could also be used in contexts of heterosexual prostitution. So the use of the word here could also imply the men were in tarty clothing.

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Sources:

Bede. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, eds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, 570.

———. Ecclesiastical History of the English People, part 1.2. Thomas Miller, ed. Early English Text Society O.S. 96. London: Oxford UP, 1891, 5.22, 484. Archive.org.

Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, 2024, s.v. camp1, n., campian, v.

Exodus 16:13. The Bible and Holy Scriptures Conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testament. Geneva: Rouland Hall, 1560. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Exodus 16:13. The Holie Bible. Conteyning the Olde Testament and the Newe. London: Richarde Iugge, 1558. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 6 August 2026, s.v. camp, adj., camp, n.2.

“Manchester Masqueraders in Trouble.” Evening Express (Liverpool, England), 23 October 1874, 2/2. British Newspaper Archive.

Middle English Dictionary, 28 July 2026, s.v. chaump(e, n.

“North Mountain School of Physical Culture.” Newport Daily News (Rhode Island), 20 March 1876, 2/4. NewspaperArchive.com.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1888, s.v. camp, n.1, camp, n.2, camp, v.1, camp, v.2; December 2019, s.v. camp, adj. & n.5.

Park, Frederick. Letter to Lord Arthur Clinton, November 1868. Quoted in Jonathan Ned Katz’s Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001, 193. Archive.org.

Scottish National Dictionary, 1941, s.v. camp, n.1, v., adj. Dictionaries of the Scots Language | Dictionars o the Scots Leid.

Photo credit: Unknown photographer, c. 1861. Wikimedia Commons. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

kinetic

Going kinetic: USS Shiloh launching a Tomahawk cruise missile at Iraq, 3 September 1996

21 August 2026

Kinetic is an adjective that relates to motion; it’s a mid nineteenth-century borrowing from the Greek κῑνητικός (kinetikos). The noun kinetics, referring to the study of bodies in motion and the forces acting upon them, was formed from the adjective at about the same time. Both the adjective and the noun were originally used primarily in scientific writing.

But in the second half of the twentieth century a military sense of kinetic arose, used to refer to the application of deadly force on the battlefield. There is, however, at least one use of kinetic in a military context from World War I, but this is just a general sense of the word relating to motion; in the article it is contrasted with static. From Idaho’s Wallace Press Times of 25 November 1917:

But this ideal the allies have never been able to attain, for reasons which should have been apparent in advance. In their calculations the westerners appear to have assumed a parity between the static trench warfare in the west and kinetic maneuver warfare on other fronts.

The specialized military sense starts to develop in the latter half of the twentieth century. The phrase kinetic energy projectile was in place by 1976, meaning a solid shot, like a bullet. The phrase is a retronym formed with the advent of directed-energy weapons (e.g., lasers) and high-explosive shaped-charged munitions. From Kansas’s Chanute Tribune of 25 September 1976:

Brandon, an employee of the Ballistic Research Laoratories [sic], Aberdeen, Md., and four other men were recognized for their combined efforts in developing a new 60 millimeter kinetic energy projectile as part of the Army’s Medium-Caliber Anti-Armor Automatic Cannon Program.

And here is an example of kinetic energy round from Christian Science Monitor of 8 January 1982:

But the M-1 may not be as indestructible as the army likes to claim. Congressional testimony and unclassified army documents indicate that its Chobham armor is vulnerable to penetration by Soviet shells[.]

Some experts claim that although this revolutionary British armor provides good protection against high-explosive anti-tank rounds, it has no special capability against solid-shot, or kinetic energy, rounds that tanks use to destroy each other. The Army stoutly denies the claim[.]

In the coming years, this sense of kinetic generalized to refer to any violent engagement with the enemy, not just the particular class of munition. And by the end of the century, kinetic had moved into military slang with the verb phrase to go kinetic. From Syracuse, New York’s Post-Standard of 1 October 1997:

”Avoid going kinetic”

The next time the United States finds itself facing a Saddam Hussein or a terrorist druglord with nuclear weapons, says [Gen. Jack] Sheehan, “the whole object will be to avoid going kinetic.”

That’s “kinetic” as in kinetic energy warfare—whether it’s cavemen bashing each other with clubs or the bombs, missiles and artillery of more recent conflicts.

Instead of kinetic shooting, the action in recent war games at the U.S. Army War College here has been mostly electronic. The unscripted games, set 25 years in the future, are intended to allow senior leaders to explore new technologies and strategies, and to raise problems and issues that need to be addressed.

But the jargon use of kinetic by the military continued as well. In his annual address to the British military of February 2002, Admiral Michael Boyce, then the British Chief of Defence Staff (equivalent to the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) used both kinetic form of warfare and kinetic targeting:

Precision Guided Munitions (PGMs) allow the focused application of combat power. It has been interesting to watch their use in asymmetric war, and it is clear that the United States have learned from the less effective use of air power in Kosovo. At first it appeared that this essentially kinetic form of warfare was merely turning big rocks into smaller rocks. Moreover, there were all the normal targeting problems. but the volume of kinetic targeting against the Al Qa'ida/Taliban (effectively non-state actors) appears to have helped deliver strategic success in providing the Northern Alliance and opposition forces with the tactical mass required to overwhelm, or at least turn the Taliban.

And by early 2003, with the war in Iraq, the military sense of kinetic started to be noticed by the general public. We see it in a Guardian piece on military lingo published on 18 March 2003:

Kinetic targeting

Current preferred euphemism for dropping bombs. When aircraft drop leaflets on Iraq asking the military to surrender and radio stations broadcast anti-Saddam rhetoric, the generals describe it as soft targeting. When fighter jets and cruise missiles destroy targets on the ground, the military calls it “kinetic targeting.”

For the military, it is an unusually simple and vigorous description of the destruction they are about to deliver. It has also spawned a spin-off: the tens of thousands of US and British troops poised to attack Iraq are simply waiting for permission to “go kinetic.”

And by 2007 we see non-kinetic used to refer to military operations that do not require the use of deadly force. From an article in the journal Army Logistician late that year:

The procurement and distribution of humanitarian assistance items can have an effect on mission accomplishment that is as significant as the support of kinetic operations. During a non-kinetic event, such as a medical civil action project, the FLE [forward logistics element] can prepare supplies and strategic loads to be pushed forward to villages using host nation trucks or Afghan National Army (ANA) vehicles.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan brought this military use of kinetic to the attention of the general public, and kinetic event was chosen as the “most euphemistic” word of the year for 2010 by the American Dialect Society.

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Sources:

American Dialect Society. “‘App’ 2010 Word of the Year” (press release), 7 January 2011.

Boyce, Admiral Michael. “UK Strategic Choices Following the Strategic Defence Review & 11th September. Annual Chief of Defence Staff Lecture.” Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies (RUSI) Journal, 147.1, February 2002, 5/1. ProQuest Trade Journals.

“Cooperation for Defense by Allies is Mandatory to Relieve Perilous Position of Italy in German Drive.” Wallace Press Times (Kellogg, Idaho), 25 November 1917, 8/1. Newspapers.com.

Friedman, Nancy. “kinetic.” ADS-L, 8 May 2026.

Manganaro, Christopher G. “Doing More with Less: Special Forces in Afghanistan.” Army Logistician, 39.6, November/December 2007, 26–30. ProQuest Trade Journals.

McCarthy, Rory and Duncan Campbell. “The Language of War.” Guardian (London), 18 March 2003, 7/7–8. ProQuest Newspapers.

Mullins, Bill. “kinetic.” ADS-L, 8 May 2026.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1901, s.v. kinetic, adj. & n., kinetics, n.

“U.S. Army Recognized Former Resident for Energy Projectile.” Chanute Tribune (Kansas), 25 September 1976, 7/5. NewspaperArchive.com.

Webbe, Stephen. “M-1 Tank: Prone to Fires in the Crew’s Compartment?” Christian Science Monitor (Boston), 8 January 1982. ProQuest Newspapers.

Whitman, Neal. “‘Kinetic’ Connections.” Visual Thesaurus, 4 May 2011.

Wood, David. “Future War: No Shots Fired.” Post-Standard (Syracuse, New York), 1 October 1997, A-13/2/. Newspapers.com.

Zimmer, Ben and Charles E. Carson. “Among the New Words.” American Speech, 86.2, Summer 2011, 192–214 at 203–04. DOI: 10.1215/00031283-1337010.

Photo credit: US Navy, 1996. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.