Every generation remakes language, giving new meanings to old words. So when the younger members of the editorial team at Prospect voted for daddy as my next word, I knew something was up. I began with some informal research. Boris Johnson has seven children—is he a daddy? I asked my students. No way! they giggled.
A tentative text to my nieces: Do you and your friends use the word daddy? If so, how? The millennial, bless her, responded with all the nicknames she gives her father. The Gen Z-er, younger but more experienced on all counts, texted back with various ironic and jocular uses: Hey did you see that good looking guy, oooft daddy. John Boyega, now that’s a daddy. A well-groomed daddy with swagger is called a zaddy, she said, as in zaddy alert!
It turns out that a daddy is a man who has a strong physique and exudes confidence and sex appeal. The word is sometimes used as a term of endearment for a male lover—think a combo of Sugar Daddy and Daddy Dom.
This use of daddy dates back to early jazz and the pioneering recordings of African-American composer and singer Perry Bradford in 1919: “I got a lovin’ daddy / Who cert’nly can love sweet /When he commence to kissin’ / He really can’t be beat…” So how did Bradford’s lovin’ daddy get to my niece’s zaddy alert?
In the mid-20th century, the word thrived in queer and trans communities via “house ballroom” subculture: underground communities of black and Latinx entertainers in New York who competed with each other in flamboyant performances of drag, as shown in the cult film Paris is Burning. By the 1970s, gay men in San Francisco were wearing green daddy hankies in their back pockets when they wanted to indicate a particular sexual preference, and a straight man who preferred the company of lesbians was called a Sappho Daddy-O.
Meanwhile, daddy was also being used in porn and in leather and kink communities. A search of big data on the language of Gen Z reveals the influence of online porn on new uses of the word—for example in phrases like daddy please and daddy spank, or in the comments from gamers who donate money to their favourite livestreamers on Twitch: “I’ll donate if she calls me daddy for the rest of the stream.”
As Gen Z takes daddy mainstream—a recent play at the Almeida theatre used it for a title—we can see that true innovation happens on the margins. The sex sense of daddy might seem new, but dig a bit deeper and we find the heavy lifting was done by the subcultures of decades past.
