Shot in the arm: how the pandemic transformed protest slang

There was something in the air last year and it wasn’t just a deadly virus. Cooped up in our homes, we began to crave the warm presence of strangers in busy theatres, at packed football stadiums – and even in angry swarms. Rendered powerless by an invisible killer, we turned our minds to causes that we could, perhaps, do more about.

We found many reasons to be angry. Discontent seeped out of living rooms and into city centres, as millions of people took part in protests in Beirut, Baltimore, Bristol and beyond. The crowds often had similar adversaries: corrupt or tyrannical rulers; heavy-handed and violent police officers. Yet each protest had particular local elements too, that shaped its rage, its fear and its slogans.

Demonstrations often take on a life of their own, developing their own codes and metaphors. Dissidents develop a lexicon to send signals to allies and root out spies. If you’re thinking of joining the throng, you’d better speak the lingo to show you can belong.

Ai hia O (ไอเหี้ยโอ)
1. The king is a lizard
2. Fuck the king
The reptile hunters of Thailand

Monitor lizards are fearsome creatures, notorious for eating chickens and robbing Thai farmers of precious livestock. Calling someone ai hia – a giant lizard – is an insult in Thailand, denoting that the intended target is both a nuisance and a thief. It’s a strong term of abuse. Now many young Thais are using it about their king.

Thailand has strict laws against criticising the monarchy. So the taunt marks a big departure from the past. But in recent months there has been a change in attitudes to the king. Demonstrators have repeatedly taken to the streets of Bangkok with a litany of complaints – chief among them is anger at the wealth and power of the royal family. Many have screamed ai hia O as they marched, adding the nickname of King Maha Vajiralongkorn to the lizard insult. It has now taken on a second meaning: “Fuck the king”.

Protesters are breaking social taboos and even risking a 15-year prison sentence. Their actions are a sign of their fury. But they should watch out. Monitor lizards are carnivorous predators known for sitting and waiting for their prey. The young defiant Thais rewriting the rules of royal engagement may need to watch their step.
Caleb Quinley

El-helaho (الهيلا هو)
A moniker to mock a Lebanese politician
Music to Lebanese ears

Gebran Bassil has a lengthy CV: Lebanon’s former foreign minister is still leader of the country’s biggest parliamentary bloc and son-in-law of the president. When public anger at the country’s dysfunctional government sparked protests in October 2019, Bassil became a target for mockery. Enter helaho. It began as a nonsense word, the first part of a popular chant which cursed the politician – helaho roughly translates as “la-di-da”, and rhymes with a lewd reference to his mother. The word became Bassil’s nickname among protesters, with the prefix el attached.

The chant and nickname were meant to humiliate a ruling elite that has gouged the country and collapsed its economy. There was special joy, too, in publicly jeering at a man who is so sensitive to criticism that he often sues journalists for defamation. This time Bassil could do nothing, even as the word helaho became a refrain in a heavy-metal song, an operatic aria and an Alpine yodel. Each version immediately went viral online. Bassil’s supporters later tried to reclaim the word by rhyming helaho with a full-throated cry of “we love Gebran Bassil”. It didn’t catch on.

Lebanon’s squares are now empty and the country is more depressed than ever after months of hyperinflation, the pandemic and the giant explosion that devastated Beirut in August 2020. Yet the term el-helaho has stuck. Its jovial tone captures the initial euphoria of Lebanon’s protests, when breaking long-held taboos felt like a precursor to long-awaited justice.
Lina Mounzer

Titushka (тiтушка)
An agent provocateur (noun)
A hooligan’s lot is not a happy one

Do you enjoy starting fights? Want to be paid for it? Consider becoming a titushka: a pro-government provocateur who turns up to protests in Ukraine or Russia to incite chaos and violence. Regular duties include pretending to be an opposition activist, attacking the police and wearing a balaclava. If all goes well – meaning that you disrupt anti-government protests or ensure gatherings are condemned for being violent – you can expect to earn around $18 a day. Genuine loyalty to the state is not essential.

This new occupation was named after Vadym Titushko, a Ukrainian amateur martial-artist who was arrested for beating up a journalist at a protest in Kyiv in 2013. Opposition supporters were furious when it turned out he had been paid to act as a counter-protester by the government. Titushko’s name became a moniker for the thuggish masked men the authorities hired to stir up trouble at demonstrations against the government’s decision to forge closer ties with Russia rather than the EU.

Titushko later said he regretted that his name had become associated with violence and has since expressed his support for the protests. But he’s unlikely to reclaim his name. The government has now hired titushkas to work as trolls on social media. They are known as IT-tushki, and the virtual blows they strike are often more damaging than the hardest punch.
Sasha Raspopina

“Buhari has been a bad boy”
A slogan of the #EndSARS protest movement
The president has been a very naughty boy

In 2020 thousands of people took part in the #EndSARS movement in Nigeria protesting against police brutality. In this instance, SARS stands not for a respiratory illness, but the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, a Nigerian police unit formed to fight violent crime, which had in essence become a protection racket. Its members demanded bribes and even killed those who didn’t pay up. Anger was directed not just at police but at Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s president, who allowed the murderous group to operate.

Demonstrators lacked a catchy slogan to express their dissatisfaction with Buhari until one of them accidentally provided it. “We will still tackle Buhari,” a young woman told a Nigerian TV channel. “He has been a bad boy.” The scolding went viral and the phrase #BuhariBadBoy was printed on T-shirts and screamed by protesters from Lagos to Glasgow.

In October at least 12 peaceful protesters in Lagos were shot and killed by Nigerian security forces. But the marchers will not be stopped. Young Nigerians are fed up with a political system that has been dragged down by “bad boys”: plundering plutocrats who have left Nigeria without good roads or reliable electricity. The rising generation is confident enough to challenge its leaders and dream of better governance.
Georgia Banjo

Tarakanishche (Тараканище)
1. Cockroach (noun)
2. A nickname for Alexander Lukashenko
It’s hard to squash an autocrat

Every Russian-speaking child can recite Korney Chukovsky’s poem “The Mighty Cockroach”. It tells the story of a tiny insect who rules over all other animals, demanding to eat their babies for dinner and terrifying them with his whiskers. But when a kangaroo points out that this overlord is merely a small bug who rules by fear – “if you obey him you’re to blame!” – a sparrow gobbles up the tarakanishche (cockroach). The transfer of power is complete.

The story offers a clear moral in a country like Belarus, which has been ruled by one man, Alexander Lukashenko, for 26 years. In May 2020 the leader of the opposition, Sergei Tikhanovsky, vowed to “stop the cockroach” and tied a giant slipper to the roof of his own car, signalling his desire to splat Lukashenko in the presidential election. The symbol caught on and many Belarusians took to waving pink slippers at demonstrations.

Much has happened since then. The opposition leader was imprisoned and his wife stood in his place in an election in August. Her defeat in the rigged poll led to a wave of peaceful protests across Belarus which have continued despite plummeting temperatures and brutal suppression by government goons.

Hated by his own people, Lukashenko looks ever more like the cockroach of the poem. Perhaps he will one day feel the sole of the proverbial slipper. Yet many still fear that, like the only animal apparently able to survive a nuclear holocaust, he might somehow cling on.
Arthur House

ACAB
“All cops are bastards” (acronym)
From skinheads to twee handicrafts

In 1970 a young British man called Graham Van Hovston Johnson wore a denim jacket that landed him in court. It had the letters “ACAB” stitched across the back. At the time the acronym was so obscure that he pleaded ignorance. “I copied it from a Hell’s Angel,” Johnson said. “He told me it means: ‘all Canadians are bums.’” He was fined £5 ($7) for “displaying insulting letters likely to cause a breach of peace”. If the defence failed then, today it would be futile. The expression “All Cops Are Bastards” has entered the mainstream lexicon.

The term was used in a ditty in the 1920s: “I’ll sing you a song, it’s not very long, all coppers are bastards.” It crept its way into popular culture via skinheads, football hooligans, criminals and the criminalised, who used it to mock the authorities. In the 1970s punk music further popularised the term, which is also written as 1312, referring to the place of the letters in the alphabet. In prisons, ACAB can be displayed as four dots tattooed across the knuckles. The police struck back: from Austria to Indonesia, people have been arrested for raising banners with the phrase or shouting it in the streets.

A lot has changed in the intervening decades. In 2020 the four letters were emblazoned on placards and T-shirts as millions of people across the world protested against police violence after the death of George Floyd, an African-American man, in Minneapolis. The meaning has shifted, too. In America ACAB is often accompanied by a call for police reform, or a demand to cut police budgets and reallocate money to other services. The term is no longer the preserve of anarchists: you can find ACAB stitched onto twee handcrafted gifts and displayed in TikTok videos made by teenagers. The slogan is now as likely to be used to criticise the police as it is to describe a picture of a kitten: “All Cats Are Beautiful” is the latest incarnation of the defiant refrain.
Will Coldwell

香港倒立 (hoeng gong dou lap)
1. Hong Kong handstand (noun)
2. Hong Kong independence
Hong Kongers are performing linguistic gymnastics

Wordplay is a powerful weapon for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protest movement. In their fight for greater independence from mainland China, demonstrators conjure up new slang to subvert the authorities. One trick is to conceal political messages in similar-sounding, more innocent sayings. In 2019 protesters mocked supporters of the Chinese government by dubbing them “blue corpses”, an insult that sounded just like “blue ribbons” – a symbol that some Hong Kongers wear to signify loyalty to mainland authorities.

Puns have become a political necessity. In 2020 China imposed a security bill on Hong Kong, banning acts of “treason, secession, sedition [or] subversion” against the central government. Public support for Hong Kong’s independence was criminalised and popular slogans were outlawed. Protesters had to get creative to avoid prosecution.

The latest catchphrase is the “Hong Kong handstand”. The word for handstand is pronounced “dou lap”, a near-perfect homophone for “independence” (duk laap). Demonstrators deploy the slang to ward off prying ears in the streets and lurking eyes on social media. To avoid Chinese censors, protesters have even altered the slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times” to read “bacon and sausage, vegetables and noodles”, which sounds similar. As many people discovered in 2020, sometimes you just have to make do with the ingredients you’ve got.
Amy Hawkins

ILLUSTRATIONS: JULIA GEISER