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Title : The "'skeeviness" of the 1990s "gave us the Trump Teens."
link : The "'skeeviness" of the 1990s "gave us the Trump Teens."

The "'skeeviness" of the 1990s "gave us the Trump Teens."

That's the puzzling teaser on the front page of the NYT right now:

Who the hell are the Trump teens?, I wondered long enough to decide to write this post. It's hard to get used to the expression "the teens" to refer to this decade we're in. The first two decades of the century have been this weird anomaly, interfering with our conventional style of talking about decades. It's messed with our minds.

Soon enough, we'll be in the 20s and back to our old way of talking, the old decadism. "The teens" — it doesn't even make sense, what with the first 3 years not having "-teen" in the name. We wandered groggily through those 3 years, still reeling from that first decade of the new millennium, the decade we just refrain from talking about casually.

And don't tell me we called it "the aughts." We didn't. We called it nothing. It was the decade with no name. If we had to refer to it, we just described it, with some blabber of words like the first decade of the new millennium or we said something like "the ohs" and proceeded to explain what we were talking about so it took even longer.

Now that I know this is just an article saying one decade led not to the next decade but the one after that, I really don't care. I'm wistful about the loss of the nonexistent teenagers who somehow, being children when Bill Clinton was President, fell in love with Donald Trump. I still haven't read the article. I'm curious to see if there's some idea that the political effort to pull Bill through he's sexual harassment troubles desensitized people to flaws in Trump that might otherwise have been effectively exploited.

The article is adapted from a book by David Friend, “The Naughty Nineties: The Triumph of the American Libido.” Ugh! "Naughty Nineties." When I was growing up in the 50s, I always heard about "the roaring 20s" and "the naughty 90s" (meaning the 1890s, of course). Those were the 2 big decades, so exciting they had their own special adjective. I remember asking my parents what the decades I'd lived in were called. My mother informed me that the 50s were called "the fabulous 50s." And the 60s? She said: "the sexy 60s."

Anyway. From the article:

[A] Trump presidency would never have been possible had the ’90s not normalized new depths of voyeurism, mudslinging and hardball politics. That decade had its dark-arts tacticians, such as Roger Ailes, Rudolph Giuliani and Newt Gingrich, and the recent election had its equivalents, such as, well, Roger Ailes, Rudolph Giuliani and Newt Gingrich. Bill Clinton’s base warmed to his naughtiness, neediness and narcissism; Mr. Trump’s did precisely the same....

Ever since, it has been hard to miss the 1990s underpinnings of the Trump Teens. The tabloidism. The gutter talk. The kinky dossiers. (Remember the X-rated Starr report?) Had America not absorbed the sheer skeeviness of that decade, how else would it have become comfortable electing a thrice-married man who ran beauty contests and graced casinos, one of them with a strip club, with his name — a man accused of a string of unwanted sexual advances and assaults (all of which he denied)?

Yeah, strip that down to the essential, and it's what I said: Bill Clinton paved the way for Donald Trump.

As for "skeeviness" — which remains interesting, even as the "Trump teens" turn out to be only a group of years — it's a great word with a strong origin story. Here's Mark Liberman at Language Log:

I knew I'd heard ["skeevy"] before, but I figured it was just another onomatopoeic amalgam.

According to the OED, I was wrong. The gloss, as you'd expect, is "Disgusting, distasteful, or dirty; discomforting; sleazy". But the etymology is more interesting:

[< Italian regional (Tuscany) schifo, adjective (< Italian schifo (noun) sense of repugnance, nausea, disgust (1353 in Boccaccio) < Old French eschif hostile, fierce: see ESCHEW a.) + -Y. Cf. later SKEEVE v., SKEEVE n.]

And the first citation brings it close to home:

1976 J. D'ALESSANDRO in Philadelphia Mag. Mar. 125/1 The word ‘skeevie’ used by South Philadelphians to indicate something disgusting is from Italian ‘schifare’, to loathe.

I'm a little skeptical about South Philly slang coming from Tuscany, though.

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