Cover of New York magazine, 10 June 1985
3 November 2024
A brat is a spoiled or misbehaving child. The origin of the word is not known for certain, although there are at least two hypotheses that have some degree of evidence behind them. It may come from an Old English word of Celtic origin, bratt, meaning a cloak. The same word can be found in Old Irish. The other hypothesis, which I favor, is that it is a clipping of the Scots bratchart, meaning an unruly child.
The Old English bratt is only attested once in the extant corpus. It appears in a tenth-century gloss of the Latin pallium in the Lindisfarne Gospel of Matthew. It remained rare through the Middle English period, where it is only attested in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale:
Yet of that art they kan nat wexen sadde,
For unto hem it is a bitter sweete—
So semeth it—for nadde they but a sheete
Which that they myghte wrappe hem inne a-nyght,
And a brat to walken inne by daylyght,
They wolde hem selle and spenden on this craft.(Yet of that art they cannot be satisfied,
For unto them it is a bitter sweet—
So it seems—for had they nothing but a sheet
Which they might wrap themselves in at night,
And a cloak to walk in by daylight,
They would sell them and spend it on this craft.)
It starts appearing more frequently at the start of the sixteenth century, and initially in Scottish sources. The poet William Dunbar uses the word twice, once unambiguously to mean a cloak and once where it could be interpreted as either a cloak or an illegitimate child. The ambiguous use appears in his poem “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie.” The poem is a depiction of a flyting, a poetic exchange of insults, that took place c. 1500 between Dunbar and fellow poet William Kennedy. In it, Dunbar says of Kennedy:
Iersche brybour baird, vyle beggar with thy brattis,
Cuntbittin crawdoun, Kennedy, coward of kynd,
Evill farit and dryit, as Densmen on the rattis,
Lyk as the gleddis had on thy gulesnowt dynd,
Mismaid monstour, ilk mone owt of thy mynd,
Renunce, rebald, thy rymyng, thow bot royis.
Thy trechour tung hes tane ane Heland strynd,
Ane Lawland ers wald mak a bettir noyis.(Highland vagabond bard, vile beggar with your brats,
Syphilitic skulker, Kennedy, coward by nature,
Ugly and dried up, like Danes on the wheels,
Like the kites had on the yellow-snout dined,
Deformed monster, each moon out of your mind,
Renounce, rogue, your rhyming, you but rave,
Your treacherous tongue has taken a Highland strain,
A Lowland arse would make a better noise.)
The unambiguous use is in his “General Satyre,” written c. 1510:
This to correct, thay schoir with mony crakkis,
But littill effect of speir or battell-ax,
Quhen curage lakkis the corss that sowld mak kene;
Sa mony jakkis, and brattis on beggaris bakkis,
Within this land was nevir hard nor sene.(This to correct, those who threaten with many boasts,
But have little effect of spear or battle-axe,
When courage lacks, the body that it should make brave;
So many doublets, and brats on beggar’s backs,
Within this land was never heard nor seen.)
An unambiguous use of brat to mean a child appears in 1557, in a poem by Henry Howard, the earl of Surrey:
What path list you to tread? what trade will you assay?
The courts of plea, by braul, & bate, driue ge[n]tle peace away.
In house, for wife, and childe, there is but cark and care:
With trauail, and with toyl ynough, in feelds we vse to fare.
Upon the seas lieth dreed: the rich in foraine land,
Doo fear the losse: and there, the poore, like misers poorely stand.
Strife, with a wife, without, your thrift full hard to see:
Yong brats, a trouble: none at all. a maym it seems to bee:
Youth, fond, age hath no hert, and pincheth all to nye.
Choose then the leeser of these twoo, no life, or soon to dye.(What path do you choose to tread? What trade will you try?
The courts of pleading, by brawling and contention, drive gentle peace away.
In a house, for a wife, and child, there is but anxiety and care:
With travail, and with toil enough, in fields we use to sow.
Upon the seas lies dread: the rich in foreign land.
Do fear the loss; and there, the poor, like misers poorly stand.
Strife with a wife, without, your prosperity very hard to see:
Young brats, a trouble: none at all, a wound it seems to be:
Youth, a fool, age has no heart, and squeezes nearly everything.
Choose then the lesser of these two, no life, or soon to die.)
The connection between a cloak and a child isn’t clear on its face. But in the sixteenth century, the cloak sense specialized to refer to child’s pinafore. This sense of a child’s pinafore could easily have transferred over to the child itself. The pinafore sense appears in the surviving corpus a few decades later than the child sense, but given the gaps in the corpus, we can’t really say which sense came first. The dates are close enough to be labeled as contemporaneous. The word also started appearing more commonly in Early-Modern English, although it’s difficult to say whether this is due to an actual increase in usage or to simply more texts surviving due to the advent of the printing press.
Alternatively, the child sense could stem from the Scots bratchart, which also means child and itself is of unknown origin. If this hypothesis is correct, the cloak sense is etymologically unrelated. The bratchart hypothesis has the advantage of explaining why the early uses of the word are all in Scotland. It has the disadvantage, however, of not being recorded until nearly a century after Dunbar’s ambiguous use and some forty years after Howard’s poem. But given the gaps in the surviving corpus, even a century-long gap is not impossible, and if both of Dunbar’s uses are in the cloak sense, the gap is even narrower.
Bratchart appears in another flyting, Alexander Montgomerie’s Flyting Betwixt Montgomery and Polwart, which was written some time before 1598. This flyting was between Alexander Montgomerie and Patrick Hume, a.k.a., Polwart:
The King of Pharie, and his court, with the Elfe Queen,
With many Elrich Incubus, was rydand that night.
There ane elf, on ane aipe, ane vnsell begat,
Into ane pot, by Pomathorne;
That bratchart in ane busse was borne;
They fand ane monster, on the morne,
War fac’d nor a Cat.(The king of Fairy, and his court, with the Elf queen,
With many supernatural incubus, was riding that night.
There an elf, and an ape, a devil begat,
Into a pot, by Pomothorn;
That bratchart in a bush was born;
They found a monster, in the morning,
Wicked-faced, not a cat.)
Pomothorne is either a reference to Polwarth, a neighborhood of Edinburgh and the home of Hume or to an unincorporated area near Edinburgh with that name.
So that’s what we know about the origin of brat. As to Brat Pack, the commonly told story of its origin is wrong. The Brat Pack was a grouping of young and bankable movie stars in the 1980s, modeled after the famed Rat Pack of the 1960s. But exactly which stars constituted the pack varied in the early years, before settling in on a canonical grouping. The first known use of brat pack, uncovered by researcher Fred Shapiro, is from the Times-Colonist of Victoria, British Columbia of 1 April 1984:
It’s been said here before, in a wrap-up of the best movies of 1983, but it’s worth repeating: film actors Sean Penn and Nicholas Cage, not pre-fab baby macho packages like Matt Dillon, will emerge as the James Deans and Marlon Brandos of the 80s. They need no conditioning—their magical onscreen naturalism is emitted from within.
In Racing With the Moon, a dutifully old-fashioned romantic drama set in a North Carolina town during the Christmas season of 1942, these shining members of Hollywood’s new “brat pack” have found a charming vehicle for their instinctive talents.
The commonly told tale is that Brat Pack was coined by David Blum in the pages of New York magazine on 10 June 1985, but the appearance of the term a year earlier shows that it was already in use in film circles. While Blum may not have coined the term, his article certainly brought the term to the attention of the wider world. Blum wrote:
This is the Hollywood “Brat Pack.” It is to the 1980s what the Rat Pack was to the 1960s—a roving band of famous young stars on the prowl for parties, women, and a good time. And just like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, and Sammy Davis, Jr., these guys work together, too—they’ve carried their friendships over from life into the movies.
According to Blum, the membership in the Brat Pack depended on who you asked, but his list was all male, like the original Rat Pack, and included Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, Timothy Hutton, Matt Dillon, Nicholas Cage, and Sean Penn. Others would focus on the stars of director John Hughes’s films, dropping Cruise, Hutton, Dillon, Cage, and Penn from the pack, and adding Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, Anthony Michael Hall, Andrew McCarthy, and Demi Moore. It is this latter group that would become the canonical membership of the Brat Pack.
More recently, the summer of 2024 was declared to be brat summer. Three cultural events contributed the name. The novel Brat by Gabriel Smith, published on 4 June 2024; the album Brat by Charli XCX,was released 7 June 2024; and the documentary Brats, written and directed by Andrew McCarthy, about the Brat Pack, debuted on streaming television 13 June 2024. Of these, Charli XCX’s album had the most direct influence on the coinage.
Pinning down the first use of brat summer is challenging, as the phrase is part of the marketing campaign for the album, and merchandise promoting the album started appearing in May, or even earlier. But on 1 June 2024, the artist posted to Instagram:
BRAT SUMMER BITCH GET READY (also lol i literally can never remember if its brat Brat or BRAT oops)
The phrase hit the big time on 14 June with a pair of articles in the New York Times and on Slate. The Times article included this:
Kelly Chapman, a longtime Charli fan based in Washington, D.C., similarly defined a “brat” as “someone who misbehaves in a cheeky way and doesn’t conform to expectations.”
Ms. Chapman, 30, mused that a “brat” summer would involve: “embracing being a woman in your 30s, rejecting expectations, being honest, having fun but making moves, dating a guy from Twitter.”
And the Slate article had this to say:
In 2019, we were promised Hot Girl Summer. In 2022, finally beginning to emerge from the shadow of the pandemic, it was supposed to be Feral Girl Summer. In 2023, Rat Girl Summer poked its head around a corner and then promptly skittered back behind a dumpster. Now, we’re staring down the barrel of what I hereby declare Big Brat Summer: It’s time to let loose and do what you want, because the world is already over.
In 2024, I, like so many of us, feel a little washed and so much older, eager for some hedonism and some revolution. The themes colliding this summer—our fuck-it indulgences, the feeling of being over, a crushing sense of nihilism that has no cure other than, perhaps, dancing in a smoke-filled basement—are perfectly encapsulated by Charli XCX’s new album Brat. It’s already being hailed as a release that speaks to the moment. “Why I wanna buy a gun? Why I wanna shoot myself?” Charli, patron saint of 31-year-old straight women appealing to 21-year-old queers, sings over a synthy beat. We hear a disassociation from grief, even as we can’t escape its pull: “While she’s spinning around on the dance floor she’s also spiraling out in her head,” Rolling Stone wrote in their review of Brat. “[She’s] digging deep into the type of insecurities and fears reserved for the comedown the morning after.” What have we been doing all this time if not trying to outrun that comedown?
But on 21 July 2024, the mood of brat summer changed. That’s the day President Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign, handing the reins to Vice President Kamala Harris. The gloom of the prospect of another Trump presidency turned to elation, and Harris was anointed brat-in-chief. Some on the internet went so far as to create a logo for Harris’s campaign based on Charli XCX’s album’s lime-green art, with the word brat replaced with kamala.
How long the political valence of the phrase will last remains to be seen, but I can make one solid prediction. Like its predecessor hot girl summer, the phrase brat summer itself, will fall out of use by September, recalled only in “remember when” lists and on websites like this one.
Sources:
Blum, David. “Hollywood’s Brat Pack.” New York, 10 June 1985, 40–47 at 42. Google Books.
charli_xcx. Instagram, 1 June 2024.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 8.877–82. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.
Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, University of Toronto, 2024, s.v. bratt, n.
Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (up to 1700). Dictionaries of the Scots Language | Dictionars o the Scots Leid, 1937, s.v. bratchart, n.
Dunbar, William. “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie” (c. 1500). William Dunbar: Selected Poems. Priscilla Bawcutt, ed. London: Longman, 1996, lines 49–56, 266.
———. “A General Satyre.” The Poems of William Dunbar, vol. 2 of 2. David Laing, ed. London: Laing and Forbes, 1834, 25. lines 36–40. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Friedman, Nancy. “Word of the Week: Brat.” Fritinancy, 17 June 2024.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. brat pack, n. https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/hpl4dmy
Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey. “Mans life after Possidonius, or Crates.” Songes and Sonettes. London: Richard Tottel, 1557, fol. 114r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.
Koul, Scaachi. “Get In, Loser: It’s Big Brat Summer.” Slate, 14 June 2024.
Madden, Emma. “It’s the Summer of ‘Brats.’” New York Times, 14 June 2024.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. brat, n.
Montgomerie, Alexander. The Flyting Betwixt Montgomery and Polwart (before 1598). Edinburgh: Andro Hart, 1621, sig. Bv. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Online Etymology Dictionary, n.d., brat, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. brat, n.2, brat, n.1., bratchet, n.; Additions Series, 1998, s.v. brat pack, n.
Reid, Michael D. “Film: Racing with the Moon.” Times-Colonist (Victoria, British Columbia), 1 April 1984, D-1/1. Newspapers.com.
Shapiro, Fred. “Antedating of ‘Brat Pack.’” ADS-L, 2 November 1984.
Zimmer, Ben. “’Brat’: Maybe that Spoiled Kid Is Cool After All: A Once-Scornful Label About Immaturity Is Getting a Pop-Culture Renaissance.” Wall Street Journal, 7 June 2024, ProQuest Newspapers.
Image credit: New York magazine, 10 June 1985. Photo by Greg Gorman/Columbia Pictures. Fair use of a copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.
