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14 September 2022
(Updated 15 September: added the quotation from Ulysses)
The phrase see you next Tuesday is a euphemistic acrostic for the word cunt, specifically for the use of that word as an abusive epithet, a sort of reverse acronym. This use of the phrase dates to at least 1989, although it’s undoubtedly older in oral use. (Obviously, literal uses of the series of words referring to a meeting the following week date back even further.)
I first became aware of the phrase from the television series Dead Like Me, in which the episode that first aired on 25 July 2003 contained this exchange among a group of office workers:
MICHAEL: Are you going on the Excel retreat?
GEORGE (GEORGIA): I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Am I going?
DELORES: No. We’ve had a bad experience with one of the tutorial staff. What was her name? Diane something?
GAIL: Farber? Farmer? Wilson!
DELORES: I’ve blocked it out.
GAIL: She was a big see-you-next-Tuesday; that’s what she was.
DELORES: Gail!
But I was late to the game by several decades, and this is far from the earliest known use of the phrase.
In his 1922 Ulysses, James Joyce employs a similar acrostic. In the Circe episode, the Girls of the Prison Gate Mission sing:
If you see Kay
Tell him he may
See you in tea
Tell him from me.
While not exactly the same wording, it is another acrostic for cunt (as well as one for fuck). The Dublin Prison Gate Mission was sort of a halfway house for women being released from prison.
An enigmatic early use of see you next Tuesday is as the title of an instrumental track on the 1972 album Turkey by the group Wild Turkey. But since the track has no lyrics, the meaning of the title is mysterious. It could be a reference to the slang phrase or to something else.
The earliest clear use of the phrase that I’m aware of is an article on profanity in the 2 November 1989 edition of the Guardian newspaper:
“He’s a real See-You-Next-Tuesday.”
“Pardon?”
“A See-You-Next-Tuesday. You know, a c-u-n-t…”
Obviously I didn’t know, though apparently it’s a fairly common phrase. Imagine a word so powerful that it has to be disguised, even when used as a term of abuse.
When I proposed this article to the Guardian’s women’s page, the answer came back: “Great, but in deference to our readers, try to use the word only once.”
Sources:
Campbell, Katie. “The Last Word.” The Guardian (London), 2 November 1989, 17. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Fuller, Bryan and J.J. Philbin, writers. “Reaping Havoc.” Dead Like Me (television show). James Marshall, director. Aired 25 July 2003. MGM Television.
Joyce, James. Ulysses (1922). New York: Vintage Books, 1986, 15.1893–96. 405.
Mullins, William D. “see-you-next-Tuesday, n. (UNCLASSIFIED).” ADS-L. 12 March 2019. (The reference to a 1983 play in this email post would seem to be a typo. The play See You Next Tuesday, by Ronald Harwood opened on the London stage in 2003, not 1983. The play is an adaptation of Frances Veber’s 1998 film Le Dîner de Cons. While the play is literally about a group that gathers for dinner every Tuesday, the title of the English version is obviously a reference to the slang epithet. But since it comes well after the phrase was well established, it’s not the origin.)
“Wild Turkey—Turkey” (1972). Discogs.com.
Image credit: Videoplasty.com, 2018. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.