When Donald Trump suggested we should label those behind the Manchester bombing as “losers” – rather than “evil” – it occurred to me that I can recall a time when “loser” was not used as an insult, but was a simple description of a circumstance or outcome.
It is hard to check such things; perhaps Hitler was calling Churchill and Stalin losers in the second world war, although I doubt it. However, the Language Log website records such data, and it seems losers really gained traction some time after 1980. By the time my children were born around the millennium, it was pretty much the go-to insult, at least among kids.
It seems that in the early days of the Reagan/Thatcher years the idea of “winning” became all important and the idea of “losing” was not merely a description of a situation, possibly brought about by bad luck, but a description of personal weakness, of individual failure.
When I was a child, our insults tended to be gentler. “Wally” was the most common one, and later “muppet”. These are very general in their application, and quite mild. They do not suggest that someone is something, but that they have behaved in a silly way; but “loser” has the feel of a permanent label, and is hard to shrug off. You can say “he was being a bit of a wally”, but “he was being a bit of a loser” doesn’t make sense. You either are or aren’t a loser.
I do not know what other insults my children use between themselves and their schoolfriends. I think they are somewhat restrained in the kind of abuse they employ. The nasty sort of insults I used to hear thrown around as a child usually referred to disability – “spakka”, “retard” or, worst of all, “mong”. They seem to have been almost entirely pensioned off (I hope “loser” goes the same way). I’m not sure that more current insults such as “fucktard” or “scumbag” are much better but, on the whole, insults – among children anyway – have evolved, or at least been somewhat edited.
Loser, however, seems to be proving durable and popular because it can be used to describe anyone of any race, colour or gender with equal impact. But the thing is, most of us are losers – that is, capable of weakness, sometimes inadequate, imperfect, found to be wanting.
We can deduce something about a society’s values from the insults people use about each other. And the “loser” tag strikes fear into my children. I know because I have asked them of what they are most afraid, and their answer is not death, or disease, or poverty, but “failure”. Failure equals loser equals the existential collapse of the human project.
To try to detoxify this word, I am going to come out of the closet. On occasions in my life I have lost my dignity, my self-respect, my pride, my sense of worth and even my sanity. But this does not make me a loser. It makes me someone who has, on occasion, lost something that I value, and that I have later been able to reclaim. To lose is not a disaster – it is part of life, part of growth.
Of course, there is a difference between losing a game and losing some personal quality. But the two are related, because to be described as a loser is to lose face. And this periodic diminution of self – failure, if you prefer – is absolutely essential in the building of a complete human personality. In other words, if you are not prepared to admit to being a loser in your life, you will never know fully what it is to win.
