WIMP° NOUN (POLITICS)

In slang, a feeble, cowardly, or ineffectual person; especially, a public servant who has a grey or weak public persona. Etymology: Probably ultimately related to whimper. In the twenties wimp was Cambridge University undergraduates' slang for 'a young woman'; when first applied to young men in US slang, it certainly had implications of effeminacy. History and Usage: A word with a many-stranded history. The present sense seems to have had some currency among college students in the US from about the mid sixties; to them, a wimp was a weedy or effeminate man. During the second half of the sixties this sense became more widespread, passing into British English as well. By the late seventies a slightly different sense had cropped up in US teenagers' slang: to describe someone as a wimp was to imply that this person was old-fashioned, especially in dress and appearance. The two meanings came together in US slang in connection with the vice-presidential and presidential campaigns of George Bush at the end of the eighties: when a number of journalists seemed to be trying to gain him a reputation as a wimp, there was some discussion of the implications of the label, from which it emerged that it was as much his background and appearance (typical of the 'Preppie') as his grey image that had prompted it. So frequently was this taunt used that it even came to be referred to as the W-word (by analogy with F-word) in some sources; Mr Bush sought to counter it in his read my lips speech and policy. Wimp has a number of derivatives, mostly connected with the connotations of cowardice and spinelessness: for example, the adjective wimpish and the nouns wimpery and wimpishness. In the US during the late seventies and eighties, a phrasal verb with out also developed: to wimp out is to 'chicken out' or fail to face up to a situation; the corresponding noun is wimp-out. 'We thought the Brits might wimp out. After Libya we hoped that the United States would not have to go out in front again,' said a senior American intelligence official. Sunday Telegraph 26 Oct. 1986, p. 40 Vice President George Bush is a preppy, despite many mouse-brained journalists' continued attempts to hang the wimp label on him. Maledicta 1986-7, p. 23 Bush and Jesse Jackson...are battling serious image problems that forced Bush to declare he is not a 'wimp'. Kuwait Times 18 Oct. 1987, p. 5 That word 'wimp', when used by an American about Mr Bush, is partly a euphemism for upper class. Sunday Telegraph 12 June 1988, p. 22