just do it

22 September 2025

Nike’s famous Just Do It advertising campaign was launched in 1988 and went on to become one of the most famous slogans of all time. But the inspiration for the slogan is somewhat morbid, rooted in the execution of an infamous spree killer.

The campaign was the brainchild of the Wieden+Kennedy ad agency, and co-founder Dan Wieden says he got the idea from the last words of Gary Gilmore. Convicted in Utah of multiple murders in 1976, Gilmore was executed by firing squad in January 1977. The case was notable because Gilmore had refused to appeal the case and had protested stays of execution made on his behalf, and because in 1972 the U. S. Supreme Court had ruled capital punishment unconstitutional but reversed itself in 1976. As a result, Gilmore was the first person executed in the United States after that reinstatement. That, plus Gilmore’s express wish to die, made the case something of a media sensation. For example, prior to the execution, the cast of the comedy-variety show Saturday Night Live had performed a medley of Christmas songs titled “Let’s Kill Gary Gilmore for Christmas.”

Shortly after the execution, Playboy published an interview it had conducted with Gilmore. And Norman Mailer wrote a Pulitzer-prize winning book, The Executioner’s Song, about Gilmore, which was later made into a TV movie starring Tommy Lee Jones as Gilmore. And as late as 1991, an episode of the sitcom Seinfeld was quoting Gilmore’s “immortal” last words.

Those last words were, “Let’s do it.”

In 1988, when tasked with the Nike account, Wieden recalled the phrase and tinkered with it, producing Just Do It. Evidently at the time, Nike was unaware that Gilmore had been Wieden’s inspiration.

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Sources:

Greene, David. “In the Immortal Words of Gary Gilmore and NIKE, “[Just] Do It.” Entertainment Agent Blog, 20 June 2010. Archive.org.

Jones, Michael Owen. “Dining on Death Row: Last Meals and the Crutch of Ritual.” Journal of American Folklore, vol. 127, no. 503, Winter 2014, 3–26 at 14. Project Muse.

Peters, Jeremy W. “The Birth of ‘Just Do It’ and Other Magic Words.” New York Times, 19 August 2009, B3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Shapiro, Fred R. The Yale Book of Quotations. Yale UP, 2006, 310.

Image credit: Carolyn Davidson/Nike, 1971. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image, but subject to trademark restrictions.

whole nine yards

7 May 1921 headline from the Spartanburg Herald

19 September 2025

Few phrases have as many tales attached to their origin as does the whole nine yards, which has spawned a raft of popular etymologies, all of them wrong. The phrase doesn’t have one particular origin, nor does it represent one particular metaphor. Instead, it seems to have evolved from a sense of yard meaning a vague quantity of something. Later, the words full or whole were attached to it, and even later it was quantified by the numbers six and nine (cf. cloud nine), with the whole nine yards eventually winning out and becoming the canonical form. Use of the full phrase was for a long time restricted to the American Midwest, in particular to the region around the Kentucky-Indiana border, before breaking out into general American parlance in the middle of the twentieth century.

The word yard has long been used to denote an inexact linear measurement. Chaucer’s fourteenth-century The Knight’s Tale has these lines:

Yclothed was she fressh, for to devyse:
Hir yelow heer was broyded in a tresse
Bihynde hir bak a yerde long, I gesse.

(She was cheerfully clothed, so to say:
Her yellow hair was braided in a tress
Behind her back, a yard long, I guess.)

Chaucer is not saying that her hair was literally thirty-six inches in length, but rather that it was very long. More recently, Robert Southey’s Southey’s Common-Place Book, published in 1850 has this disparaging the works of Spanish poet Luis de Góngora:

Latinisms,—yard-and-half-long words. The pedantry of Pagan mythology—violent metaphors, and more violent hyperboles.

Here the word yard is being used completely figuratively. Southey is not intimating, nor would any reader assume, that Góngora’s words are literally four-and-a-half feet long. But while figurative, it’s still a linear measure.

But at about the same time, use of yard to mean a great quantity, and not necessarily a linear or spatial dimension, appears. And we still use the phrase by the yard to describe producing a great quantity of something. The Razor Strop Man an 1845 song by Joseph W. Turner published in 1852 has these lines:

He was spinning poetical rhyme by the yard;
Had Shakespear been living ‘twould astonish’d the bard.

Also in the nineteenth century, the phrase whole yards started appearing in the sense of a great quantity of something, especially of talk, writing, or information. An early example is this line from a sermon by British Baptist preacher Charles H. Spurgeon. The sermon is undated, but was published in 1883:

We have heard of men talk of their experience, which can give us whole yards of godliness, if that consists in the tongue; but when they come to practice, ah! their religion is not made to bear every-day pressure.

Also in the mid nineteenth century we start to see numbers, most commonly six and nine, attached to this figurative use of yard. The following letter appeared in the Louisiana, Missouri Democratic Banner on 4 December 1850. It is part of a verbal feud between two local notables, W. K. Kennedy and Edwin Draper. Kennedy writes, referring to Draper’s last statement:

SIR, — Your last “nine yards” would be unworthy of notice, as it commences with a falsehood and ends with a lie, was it not that you therein wish to create the impression on those that are unacquainted with the circumstances, that I had endeavored (had it not been for your shrewdness) to swindle the treasury out of a portion of the revenue. [...] I will not attempt to follow you through your “nine yards” in all its serpentine windings, but confine myself to one or two points more, and compare.

And there is this later example from the 7 May 1902 Atlanta Constitution:

The International Magazine of Billville has out a prospectus nine yards long. The editor says the first number of the magazine “will be a gem.” He is a trifle short of copy just now, as the favorable crop season has constrained him to make hay while the sun shines. He is therefor plowing his leading poets and novelists; but they will soon order pens, ink and paper and get down to business.

But nine is not the only number associated with yards. There is this earlier example, from a poem titled “A Flowery Tragedy,” published in the Atlanta Constitution on 12 November 1895 that uses six yards:

The poet found a violet
   Upon the frozen way.
Blue-eyed and bright it charmed his sight—
   A memory of May.

He took the outcast to his breast—
   A little pearl of price;
And marveled much at finding such
   A tender flower in ice.

He wrote a poem six yards long:
   His wife—she laid it flat
By saying: “Dear, that violet
   Was cloth—from Sallie’s hat.

The poet would seem to be engaging in wordplay, using yard in the figurative sense of quantity while also referring to cloth measurement, and with a double entendre in laid it flat.

But in all of these examples, we don’t have an actual instance of the present-day phrase the whole nine yards. Bonnie Taylor-Blake, who the etymological world owes a great debt for her indefatigable work on this phrase, has unearthed the earliest known use that combines all the elements of the present-day phrase in its current sense. It’s from a Mitchell Commercial (Indiana) newspaper article of 2 May 1907 about a local baseball game:

This afternoon at 2:30 will be called one of the baseball games that will be worth going a long way to see. 

The regular nine is going to play the business men as many innings as they can, but we can not promise the full nine yards.

But note this instance uses full, not whole. And it’s tempting to associate nine yards with nine innings of baseball, and undoubtedly the journalist who penned this was playing off this idea, but a year later, on 4 June 1908, the same newspaper published the earliest known use of the phrase as we commonly use it today, and it has nothing to do with baseball:

Roscoe Edwards and wife returned Wednesday evening of last week from Saltillo where they had been visiting Mr. and Mrs. W.C. Cook.  While there Roscoe went fishing and has a big story to tell, but we refuse to stand while he unloads. He will catch some unsuspecting individual some of these days and give him the whole nine yards.

The lack of significance of the number nine is buttressed by this use in reference to the battle for the Republican presidential nomination between Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft in the 17 May 1912 edition of the Mount Vernon Signal (Kentucky):

But there is one thing sure, we dems [sic] would never have known that there was such crookedness in the Rebublican [sic] party if Ted and Taft had not got crossed at each other. Just wait boys until the fix gets to a fever heat and they will tell the whole six yards.

And nine years later the phrase The Whole Six Yards of It turns up as the title of an article in South Carolina’s Spartanburg Herald of 7 May 1921, which gives a detailed summary of a local baseball game.

It’s common for numbers in slang expressions to vary like this in the early uses, until a convention is established and usage settles on one particular number. Another example is cloud nine, which in early uses appears as cloud seven, cloud eight, and cloud thirty-nine.

By mid century, the phrase had broken out of its Midwestern place of origin and began to be used across the United States. The fall 1962 issue of Michigan Voices: A Literary Quarterly contained a short story by Robert E. Wegner, “Man on the Thresh-Hold” that used the phrase:

Then the dog would catch on and go ki-yi-yi-ing from one to the other of the shouting pyjama clad participants mad, mad, mad, the consequence of house, home, kids, respectability, status as a college professor and the whole nine yards, as a brush salesman who came by the house was fond of saying, the whole damn nine yards.

And in December of that year, the magazine Car Life used “all nine yards of goodies” to describe the Chevrolet Impala. So by this date, the phrase was well ensconced in general American parlance.

One thing to note about research into this phrase is that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of examples of nine yards or six yards to be found. Most of these are literal measurements of length, and it is often difficult to determine a century or so later if a particular use is figurative or a literal, linear measure. These can very easily trip up a researcher. The examples I have given above are clearly figurative uses and likely precursors to the present-day phrase. There are many others I could have included but are ambiguous. One such ambiguous instance which is commonly cited by many sources, including the OED, is from an Indiana newspaper in 1855. But this would seem to be simply a collocation of the words denoting a literal measure of length, and not an example of the catchphrase as we know it today. The phrase appears as the punch line of a humorous story, “The Judge’s Big Shirt,” published in New Albany (Indiana) Daily Ledger on 30 January 1855. The story has a tailor telling a seamstress to purchase enough material for three shirts and then complaining:

What a silly, stupid woman! I told her to get just enough to make three shirts; instead of making three, she has put the whole nine yards into one shirt!

The story is republished in many different newspapers of the era—it was a common practice in the nineteenth century for newspapers to reprint, often plagiarizing, material from other papers. The story was thus repeated many times and was certainly well known. The fact that these are Indiana papers would seem to be significant, but the long gap, over fifty years, between this citation and the next militates against this story being related to the present-day phrase. 

So regardless of what someone else has told you, the whole nine yards does not refer to the length of a belt of WWII machine-gun ammunition, the amount of material needed to make a Scottish kilt, the number of spars on a sailing ship, the amount of concrete a cement mixer holds, or anything else.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

“Baseball.” Mitchell Commercial (Indiana), 2 May 1907, 2/3. NewspaperArchive.com.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Knight’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales, 1:1048–50. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Goranson, Stephen. “Re: The whole nine yards (1937–1916).” ADS-L, 8 September 2013.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 16 August 2025, s.v. whole nine yards, n.

“The Judge’s Big Shirt.” New Albany Daily Ledger (Indiana), 30 January 1855, 1/4. NewspaperArchive.com.

“Just from Georgia.” Atlanta Constitution, 12 November 1895, 4/6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

———. Atlanta Constitution, 7 May 1902, 6/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Kennedy, W. K. “Third Epistle to Edwin.” Democratic Banner, Louisiana, Missouri. 4 Dec 1850, 1/1–2. NewspaperArchive.com. (The database’s metadata gives the location as Bowling Green, Missouri.)

“Livingston.” Mount Vernon Signal (Kentucky), 17 May 1912, 1/5. NewspaperArchive.com.

Mitchell Commercial (Indiana), 4 June 1908, 3/5. NewspaperArchive.com.

O’Toole, Garson.  “Re: Major Discovery Relating to ‘Whole Nine Yards.’” ADS-L, 27 April 2015. (There are multiple, relevant posts on that date by O’Toole with this title).

Oxford English Dictionary Online, September 2003, s.v. nine, adj. & n.

Shapiro, Fred. “Major Discovery Relating to ‘Whole Nine Yards.’” ADS-L, 27 April 2015.

———. “You Can Quote Them.” Yale Alumni Magazine. May/Jun 2009.

———. “You Can Quote Them: The Inflation of ‘Cloud Seven’ and ‘The Whole Six Yards.’” Yale Alumni Magazine. Jan/Feb 2013.

Southey, Robert. Southey’s Common-Place Book, second series. John Wood Warter, ed. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1850, 148. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Spurgeon, C. H. “A Visit to Calvary.” Sermons of Rev. C. H. Spurgeon of London, second series. New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1883, 328–44 at 341. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Turner, Joseph W. “The Razor Strop Man.” Boston: Prentiss, 1845, 4. Johns Hopkins University, Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection.

“The Whole Six Yards of It.” Spartanburg Herald (South Carolina), 7 May 1921, 5/5–6. Google News.

Image credit: Spartanburg Herald (South Carolina), 7 May 1921, 5/5–6. Google News. Public domain image.

unicorn

Domenichino, “Virgin and Unicorn,” fresco, c. 1602. The woman depicted is, ironically, Giulia Farnese (1474–1524), mistress to Pope Alexander IV (and sister of Pope Paul III).

17 September 2025

We all know a unicorn is a mythical creature resembling a horse with a single horn projecting from its forehead, but the term has some quite interesting slang uses. The word comes to English via Anglo-Norman, the variety of French spoken in England after the Norman conquest, and ultimately from the Latin unicornis, uni- (one) + cornu (horn).

The earliest appearance of unicorn in English is in the text Ancren Riwle, a monastic manual for female anchorites, written c. 1230:

Wreaððe is a forschuppilt, as me teleð I spelles, for ha reueð mon his wit ant changeð al his chere, ant forshuppeð him from mon into beastes cunde. Wummon wrað is wuluene; Mon wulf oðer liun oðer unicorne.

(Wrath is a shape-shifter, as it is depicted in tales, for it takes from a man his reason and changes his countenance, and transforms him from a man into the nature of a beast. A woman’s wrath is wolf-like; man’s is wolf, or lion, or unicorn.)

Common medieval typology had the unicorn representing anger or wrath, especially the wrath of God, which was tamed by Christ, represented as a virgin. Hence the myths about maidens taming unicorns. Medieval texts almost invariably represented unicorns as male; evidently there were no female unicorns. The unicorn’s horn and the spears that penetrate the beast’s flesh during a unicorn hunt are phallic and a commentary on virginity and temptation.

Middle English translations of the Bible and various bestiaries used the word unicorn as the name for the rhinoceros, not a mythical or symbolic beast at all. These were translations of either the Latin unicornis, the Greek μονόκερως (monoceros). From a 1382 Wycliffite translation of Numbers 23:22:

The Lord God hath ladde hym out of Egipte, whos strengthe is lijk to an vnycorn.

The translator here was working from Jerome's Vulgate text which uses the word rinocerotis. Modern translations tend to render the term in this passage, the Hebrew רְאֵם (rĕ’ēm), as “wild ox.”

But in present-day slang, unicorn is used to refer to something that is highly sought after but extremely rare and perhaps non-existent—not unlike the medieval unicorn. For instance, this sense appeared in the Los Angeles Times in April 1987 about the search for extra-terrestrial life:

[Robert] Rood, professor of astronomy at the University of Virginia, was giving the people what they presumably wanted. Speaking Friday at the annual conference of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, a national organization of skeptics, he sought to “cast some sees of doubt” regarding the international network of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which is listening for intergalactic radio transmissions.

[…]

Two scientists who have participated in the activities, sometimes wincing at Rood’s jabs, defended their beliefs in extraterrestrial life. It is a matter of overwhelming probabilities, they said, that other planets in the universe have life forms as advanced as ours.

“We’re not looking for unicorns but something we know very well exists—evidence of another technology,” said Jill Tartar, research astronomer at University of California, Berkeley.

This general slang sense has spawned several specific applications of the word. One such comes to us out of Silicon Valley, where a unicorn is a software startup that is valued at over $1 billion dollars, what every venture capitalist wants to find. Unlike most slang usages, we can pinpoint an exact origin for this particular definition. Venture capitalist Aileen Lee used this sense in a blog post in November 2013:

We found 39 companies belong to what we call the “Unicorn Club” (by our definition, U.S.-based software companies started since 2003 and valued at over $1 billion by public or private market investors).

An older and very different slang sense is sexual in nature. The word has been used to refer to bisexual men, a mythical creature in the eyes of those who think men must be either straight or gay. This sense appears in The Advocate as early as 2007:

“I’m a unicorn.” That’s what I may as well have said to the handsome man sitting across the table from me. We were on our first date, having “met” on MySpace. Thanks to his online profile, I already knew he was competing for the title Mr. Gay Universe, that he often frequented pool parties wearing nothing but purple paint and a few strategically placed sequins, that the wrote poems a first-grader would call puerile. Even so, it was he who regarded me as a potential embarrassment.

“I’m bisexual” is what I actually said.

His response, i.e., repulsion barely masked as fascination, was one I've become accustomed to. I'm not alone. Other members of society—alcoholics, ex-convicts, cast members of Diff'rent Strokes—all face similar skepticism when revealing personal information to new acquaintances. People simply don't trust us.

Or they claim that, like a unicorn, we don't exist. Were I to include an online poll with this article, I'm willing to bet most of you believe we're more likely to suddenly find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq than a true bisexual.

The term is also used to refer to a bisexual person, and unlike the medieval unicorn usually female, who is willing to have sex with a couple with no strings attached. Urban Dictionary records this sense from 16 February 2004:

Young girls that have three ways with couples (woman and a man)

Hubbie and I are still looking for our Unicorn.

The word has come a long way from referring to a creature that only a virgin can tame.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Brother, Job. “Fairy Tales.” The Advocate, 1 October 2007.

Forshall, Josiah and Frederic Madden, eds. The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, with the Apocryphal Books, in the Earliest English Versions Made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and his Followers, vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1850, Numbers 23:22, 430. Archive.org.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 15 August 2025, s.v. unicorn, n.

Lee, Aileen. “Welcome to the Unicorn Club: Learning from Billion-Dollar Startups.” TechCrunch, 2 November 2013.

Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. unicorn(e, n.

Millett, Bella, ed. Ancrene Wisse. A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 401, with Variants from Other Manuscripts. Early English Text Society 325. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005, 48. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, fol. 32v. Archive.org.

Newton, Edmund. “Skeptics Spar with Scientists Seeking ETs.” Los Angeles Times, 5 April 1987, Part II-AR 11/1–2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1924, s.v. unicorn, n.

Urbandictionary.com, 16 February 2004, s. v. unicorn.

testilying

Los Angeles police detective Mark Furhman being examined by prosecutor Marcia Clark during the O. J. Simpson trial, 10 March 1995. Fuhrman was later convicted of perjury for his testimony.

15 September 2025

That police officers often lie when giving sworn testimony has long been a truism in legal circles. Irving Younger, law professor and former Assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, observed in 1967: “Every lawyer who practices in the criminal courts knows that police perjury is commonplace.” The practice was so common that it spawned its own label in police slang, testilying, a blend of testify and lying.

Testilying appears to have been coined in New York City Police Department, although it may be that the term originated elsewhere and only came to the public’s attention via use by the NYPD. It first appears in print in the New York Times on 22 April 1994:

New York City police officers often make false arrests, tamper with evidence and commit perjury on the witness stand, according to a draft report of the mayoral commission investigating police corruption.

The practice—by officers legitimately interested in clearing the streets of criminals or simply eager to inflate statistics—has at times been condoned by superiors, the report says. And it is prevalent enough in the department that it has its own nickname: “testilying.”

The Times report was picked up by the Associated Press and the term appeared in papers across the United States that same day.

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Sources:

Sexton, Joe. “New York Police Often Lie Under Oath, Report Says.” New York Times, 22 April 1994, A1/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Younger, Irving. “The Perjury Routine.” The Nation, 8 May 1967, 596–97 at 596/1. EBSCOhost The Nation Archive.

Photo credit: Nick Ut/Associated Press, 1995. Fair use of a low-resolution copy of a copyrighted image used to illustrate the topic under discussion.

Groyper

13 September 2025

This is free issue of the monthly “Words in the News” feature.

Groypers are a loose association of white-nationalist, antisemitic homophobes who follow neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. They are known for targeting conservatives whom they deem aren’t fascist and antisemitic enough. One of their primary targets was right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk and his group Turning Point USA. Speculation on social media has associated the man suspected of assassinating Kirk with the Groyper movement, but as of this writing we don't know the assassin’s motives.

The followers of Fuentes began to be known as Groypers in 2019, although the name dates to several years earlier. The original Groyper was a cartoon variation of the Pepe the Frog meme used as an alt-right meme and icon. The Groyper cartoon started to appear in 2015 and depicts a corpulent version of Pepe the Frog, usually depicted as sitting with his chin resting on his interlocked fingers.

A Groyper cartoon

The etymology of Groyper is unknown. It may simply be a nonsense name. It is sometimes claimed to by a blend of goy (gentile) + groper (sexual assaulter), but this seems to be an etymythology arising from the term’s later association with Fuentes and his followers. (Fuentes has been accused of supporting and covering for men accused of soliciting sex from underage boys.)  

In November 2016, a person joined Twitter with the handle @groyper. There are a few earlier tweets that use groyper starting in 2013, but it’s unclear what the word refers to in these tweets. Some sources claim uses of the word started to appear in 2015, but none provide actual citations of the term prior to the 2016 Twitter handle. The 2015 date may be a conflation of the cartoon with the word.

Groyper, referring to the cartoon, starts to make its way into print media by 11 December 2017, when it appears in the Colorado Springs Gazette in an article about then-Republican Congressman Mike Coffman tweeting in Spanish in favor of legislation to legalize the status of immigrants brought to the United States as minors, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA:

"Do you speak English?" roars a dapper blonde youngster into a bullhorn in front of a chalkboard, in one.

It was among several replies to Coffman's tweet posted by a prolific Twitter user going by the name Dangerous Groyper, who uses an avatar depicting a grotesque smiling toad dubbed a Groyper—what's been described as an even more racist counterpart of Pepe the Frog, the cartoon character adopted as a mascot in recent years by white supremacists and members of the alt-right.

Coffman has been tweeting for some time—in both English and Spanish—about a DACA fix and his support for pending legislation, including the DREAM Act of 2017, which would provide a pathway to citizenship for some immigrants brought to the country illegally as minors. But none of those tweets attracted the kind of vituperative scolding Friday's tweet drew.

In 2018, conspiracy-theorist Shiva Ayyadurai unsuccessfully ran for the Republican nomination for US senator from Massachusetts. During the campaign, he distributed campaign pins featuring a brown-skinned version of the Groyper cartoon. This was picked up by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz when Ayyadurai was included in a list of neo-Nazi politicians running for office in the United States:

Ayyadurai issued campaign pins featuring the white nationalist symbol Groyper, a cartoon toad. He’s also friends with Matt Colligan, who marched in the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville and once said “Hitler did nothing wrong.” Ayyadurai appeared in a live video broadcast with Colligan and called him “one of our greatest supporters.”

Several definitions of Groyper appear in Urbandictionary on 30 October 2019. Two of these are as follows. The first:

A groyper is a smug toad used as an avatar by trolls online. His often refashioned face seems to entice a penchant for chaos and perhaps even a little comfiness.

Why do these groypers in my mentions keep telling me to Google the U.S.S. Liberty and Dancing Israelis?

The USS Liberty was a US Navy surveillance ship that was attacked in international waters by the Israeli forces during the 1967 Six-Day War. 34 crew members were killed and 171 wounded in the attack. Dancing Israelis is a reference to the conspiracy theory that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks.

The second definition in Urbandictionary on that date refers to Kirk as a target for Groypers:

A friendly individual who prefers to relax, read and drink tea. Groypers can be characterized by loving their frens, their country, animals and God. Groypers are very well versed in history and have no trouble questioning established historical or political sentiments when the logic/facts behind them are proven to be false. They are easily identified by their obese frame and green skin. Groypers are closely related to Pepe.

“Congratulations to the Groypers for crushing Charlie Kirk.”

“Hey groypers, what's the deal with the USS Liberty and the Dancing Israelis anyway?”

And a 11 November 2019 article in London’s Independent associates the Groyper meme with Fuentes and his followers:

Charlie Kirk, TPUSA’s leader and a pro-Trump activist, was denounced as a “political liability” running a group that “SMEARS socially conservative Christians and supporters of President Trump’s agenda” by far-right figures on Twitter. “Our problem is not with @DonaldJTrumpJr who is a patriot—We are supporters of his father!” tweeted one, Nicholas Fuentes.

Another said: “THIS IS A REVOLUTION among the conservative youth in this country . . . WE WILL NOT STOP until the sanctioned invasion of our country through mass legal immigration comes to an end.”

“Congrats, Charlie Kirk. You just made the Groyper Army more powerful than before. All you had to do was just take a few questions . . .” tweeted a third.

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Sources:

Luning, Ernest. “Mike Coffman’s DACA Tweet in Spanish Draws Heated Response.” Gazette (Colorado Springs), 11 December 2017. ProQuest Newspapers.

“A MAGA Groyper? Charlie Kirk Shooter Tyler Robinson’s Political Leaning Unclear; Nick Fuentes Reacts to ‘Pure Evil.’” Times of India, 13 September 2025.

Miller-Idriss, Cynthia. “Grooming and Recruiting: Cultivating Intellectual Leadership. In Hate in the Homeland. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2020, 116. JSTOR.

“Record Breaking Number of Neo-Nazis and White Nationalists Running for Office in the U.S.” Haaretz (Tel Aviv), 15 July 2018. ProQuest Newspapers.

Rivera, Joshua. “Groypers, Helldivers 2, Furries: What Do the Messages Left by Charlie Kirk’s Alleged Killer Actually Mean?” Vanity Fair (online), 12 September 2025.

Sherman, Jon. “Trump Jr Abandons ‘Triggered’ Book Event in Just 30 Minutes after Being Heckled.” Independent (Online) (London), 11 November 2019. ProQuest.

Urbandictionary.com, 30 October 2019, s.v. groyper.

Wiktionary, 4 August 2025, s.v. groyper.

Image credit: Groyper cartoon, unknown artist, 2015. Wikipedia. Fair use of a low-resolution copy of a copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.