dip shit

It took some reative Americans, to invent dipshit. I don't know the precise circumstance that led the first American (probably a teenage male) to gaze at his friend and say, "You are a real dipshit," but we do know that the first literary attestation of the world was in the 1963 book American Speech. It meant a stupid, inept, or contemptible person; an idiot. Here is the inaugural sentence: "Pejorative expressions traditionally directed at the supposedly less sophisticated rural resident: country bumpkin, dipshit, etc." By the time we get to 1970 we definitely have an American usage of the term: "It's not the dumb, jerkoff dipshits that are doing it.." And then, from Rolling Stone in 2003, a magazine put out by Wenner publications (where my daughter worked for a while): "A cowboy isn't some dipshit with a ten-gallon hat and a dinner plate on his belt." Well, since there are more than 600,000 other attestations of the term, there is no need for me to multiply references to it. But you get the point. "Dipshit" emerged at a time when the language of invective or insult was underg oing dramatic change in America. (Ref: Bill Long 11/26/2006)