Your kids are probably using the newish insult ‘chud’. But what does it mean?

Suddenly realising that a newish word has, unnoticed to that point, been building up around you is very much a phenomenon of the internet age. Compare with a famous scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Melanie Daniels, smoking a cig in her beautiful pistachio three-piece, is dimly aware that two or three crows have settled on the kids’ climbing frame behind her. Hitch holds a shot on the character’s taut face for a good 30 seconds before she turns around to find the structure entirely covered with hostile corvids. They then try to kill her. This mirrors my experience with the word “chud” (still unrecognised by my word processing programme, interestingly). I was aware of the term as some sort of American insult for some sort of ignoramus, but it sat in the penumbra of my consciousness, unexplored in the depth it still doesn’t deserve. Over the last six months, however, chuds looks to be outpacing dorks, drongos, dopes and dweebs in the online bestiary. You have seen a bit of this in the exhausting social-media debate over Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (passim this column). It is more common for Nolan fans to identify the right-wing woke-averse in this fashion, but the other side also flings “chud” around quite a bit. That is how online etymology works. A word quietly means something for a long time. Then it means something a little different to a lot of people. Next, it means almost nothing to many more people. Expect the current example to register, come December, as a “word of the year” in various dictionaries.Yet “chud” looks to date all the way back to a forgotten film from 1984. Douglas Cheek’s C.H.U.D. – the title stands for “cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers” – visits New York City as it falls prey to subterranean predators with a particular (satirical?) taste for the homeless. “The word ‘chud’ became associated with far-right politics in late 2019,” Lindsey Weedston, writing in Daily Dot, noted two years ago. “And may be borrowed from the title and name of the creatures from the 1984 horror film.” READ MOREBefore that, it seems to have a longer history as a more general term of abuse. The ever-useful Urban Dictionary defines the word as “A poop of massive proportions. Or just another word to call a super irritating person.” The word has the right shape and sound for such an insult. One syllable. No pretty associations. A goofy core that rhymes with “thud” and (Elmore) “Fudd”.[ Elon Musk’s Wokebusters and the failing campaign against The OdysseyOpens in new window ]At any rate, as we eased into the current decade, the term was, more than anything else, being used by online lefties in lonely basements to describe online righties in lonely basements. In a New York Times article from earlier this year, Nitsuh Abebe credits this “fresh usage” to a podcast called Chapo Trap House. Abebe goes on to detail its regular appearance beside a key acronym from the Trump ascendancy. Urban Dictionary again offers assistance. A “Maga chud” is, the site clarifies, “an epithet term for supporters of Donald Trump”.It might be stretching it to argue the word “chud” was useful. But it did have a precise place in the discourse as a rejoinder to equally graceless slurs from the online right. For around five minutes or so, we knew what it meant. “The chud backlash to The Odyssey is getting more and more desperate as it becomes clear this movie will be awesome,” one Jeremiah Johnson tells us on X.Yet words that rise up so quickly following years of relative dormancy invariably end up corrupted by the social media churn. Look at what they’ve done to “gaslighting”. Derived from the title of an interwar play by Patrick Hamilton (and its immediate film adaptation), the term, for decades, was used to describe a particular form of abuse – often domestic – in which the aggressor invites the victim to question their own sanity. Now it just means “lying”. [ Passing game – Frank McNally on ‘gaslighting’ as word of the year and why some old footballers never dieOpens in new window ]A “troll” used to be someone who pretended to have opinions they didn’t hold in order to stir up online discourse. Now it just describes extreme rudeness. The internet flattens all meaning. Don’t start me on “passive voice”. Those words define a particular grammatical construction that some see as inelegant. It is not a catch-all term for any headline that fails to identify the perpetrator of an atrocity.It seems as if “chud” is already on its journey back to describing a less politically precise sort of all-round disappointment. “As it becomes more mainstream the meaning is becoming a bit more generalised,” Philip Lindsay, an American teacher who discusses GenAlpha slang online, explains. “Your kid is saying the word ‘chud’. It’s probably in the more mainstream sense. And they’re using it to call somebody a loser.”Farewell, chud. We hardly knew you.