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Wag
Professor David Crystal
WAG. W-A-G. WAGs. When the English football team was
in Germany in 2006, they were accompanied by their wives
and girlfriends and it was their lifestyle that attracted the
attention of the tabloid press, and people started calling
them ‘wives and girlfriends’ - W-A-Gs. Now, the acronym
had been around for a couple of years, but it wasn’t much
used until then, and what was interesting is that it very
quickly generated this singular form, ‘she’s a WAG’ – well,
that’s wrong! You can’t be a wife and a girlfriend, really! I
mean, it would have to be wife or girlfriend, but that didn’t
seem to make any difference – people talked about a WAG,
and lots of WAGs.
Anyway, it was usually capitalised, it was in the
newspapers more than anything else. I’ve hardly ever hear
it as a spoken form, actually, probably because of
ambiguity with the older word ‘wag’ – meaning, you know, a person who
makes facetious jokes.
Well, it soon went well beyond football. Other sports stars got involved
and then, other kinds of male personalities. I’ve heard all sorts of usages
since. Wimbledon wives and girlfriends have been called ‘W-WAGs’;
cricket wives and girlfriends have been called ‘C-WAGs’; many members
of the British royal family are called ‘RAGs’ – that’s ‘royals and
girlfriends’, you see; and even mothers aren’t exempt – I once actually
heard the mother of a WAG called ‘a MAG’.
© British Broadcasting Corporation 2007
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