wsj.com
Gen. Patton used “swagger” too, but the word didn’t always suggest confidence—it started out to mean “unsteady”
Jay-Z, seen performing in Brooklyn in 2017, wrote “I guess I got my swagger back” in a 2001 song and titled another “Swagga Like Us” in 2008. PHOTO: KEVIN MAZUR/GETTY IMAGES
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When Mike Pompeo was sworn in as Secretary of State earlier this year, he promised to return a sense of “swagger” to the State Department.
“I talked about getting back our swagger, and I’ll fill in what I mean by that,” Mr. Pompeo said in his first address to State Department staffers in May. Later, he explained, “Swagger is not arrogance; it is not boastfulness, it is not ego. No, swagger is confidence; in one’s self, in one’s ideas.”
Lately, Mr. Pompeo has engaged in a swagger-filled social media campaign. On September 10, he launched his official Instagram feed with an image of the department seal rebranded as “the Department of Swagger.” The same day, he followed up with a composite photo in which he arrayed himself alongside the unlikely duo of William Shakespeare and Gen. George S. Patton.
“Shakespeare was the first to use ‘swagger,’” the caption read. “Gen. Patton had his swagger stick. At @statedept, we’ve got some #swagger too. It’s our confidence in America’s values.”
Some observers were unimpressed. “The department’s catchphrase sounds more like a product line of Old Spice deodorant than a label for a venerated institution that’s been led by American icons from Thomas Jefferson to Dean Acheson,” wrote David Wade in Politico.
In his initial Instagram post as Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo used a reworked version of the department seal and wrote, “Thought I’d launch my Instagram account with some @statedept #swagger." PHOTO: @SECPOMPEO/INSTAGRAM
Mr. Pompeo did get his word history roughly right: Shakespeare was indeed among the earliest known users of “swagger,” if not the first. It appeared as a verb in “Midsummer’s Night Dream,” when the character Puck says, “What hempen home-spuns have we swaggering here, so near the cradle of the fairy queen?” And in “Henry VI, Part 2,” a boastful soldier named Ancient Pistol is introduced as a “swaggerer.”
In Shakespeare’s time, “swagger” meant “to walk or carry oneself as if among inferiors, with an obtrusively superior or insolent air,” as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it. It originated from an earlier word, “swag,” meaning “to move with an unsteady gait,” likely from a Scandinavian source that also gave us the word “swing.”
From a confident style of walking, “swagger” developed as a noun to describe behavior marked by casual boldness. Jonathan Swift used the noun in a 1725 poem: “The butcher is stout, and he values no swagger; A cleaver’s a match any time for a dagger.”
The “swagger stick” of Gen. Patton dates back to the 1880s, when British military officers began accompanying their “walking out” uniform with a short stick carried to convey a sense of authority. The accessory spread to American armed forces in World War I.
More recently, “swagger” has received a boost in popularity from its use in hip-hop.
Jay-Z prefigured Mr. Pompeo in his 2001 song “All I Need”: “I guess I got my swagger back.” In her 2007 hit “Paper Planes,” the British rapper M.I.A. sang, “No one on the corner has swagger like us.” That line got sampled the following year in the song “Swagga Like Us” by Jay-Z and T.I. Around the same time, the term “swagger-jacking” came into use in musical circles to describe copying someone’s style.
“Swagger” is also the name of a men’s lifestyle magazine that has found itself in an unexpected branding war with the State Department. “We were a little concerned with Secretary Pompeo’s use of the term,” Swagger’s editor in chief Steven Branco told The Wall Street Journal’s Jessica Donati in May. Since then, Mr. Pompeo’s swagger offensive shows no sign of abating.
