The slippery meaning of ‘brat’

The singer Charli xcx (or “Ninety Ten” as my husband insists on pronouncing it) has endorsed Kamala Harris, in a way. “kamala is brat,” she tweeted. Since the slippery meaning of brat includes elements of dirtiness, drunkenness and hedonism, it might not define all that Americans want in a president.

Not that Charli is American. She was born in Cambridge (England, not Massachusetts), given the names Charlotte Emma and went to a private school in Bishop’s Stortford. Her album brat came out in June, with a lime-green cover and the name in fuzzy type.

She has characterized brat as “trashy… a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra.” I know that a couple of years ago Bic ran ads using figures such as Snoop Dogg (who has marketed legal cannabis products). I don’t know what else Bic lighters are useful for, apart from those cigs.

Is brat like punk, or would circular-saw hair be too much trouble? In the Guardian, Zoe Williams said brat “predates the album as a term in the kink community.” Definitions on the online Urban Dictionary refer to a sort of masochistic defiance. Not my world.

Brat in the established sense was defined by Samuel Johnson in the mid-eighteenth century as “A child, so called in contempt.” It had only been in use for about 300 years. The meaning of “a child’s pinafore,” from a Celtic word for cloth or cloak, may have come first, but it is hard to establish a sure connection.

In The Spectator for September 9, 1712, Richard Steele characterizes the reluctant father Will Sparkish as annoyed at home by ‘the Noise of those damned Nurses and squaling Brats.” He soon runs off to the coffee house.

Brats grew older with the centuries, I think, and acquired the conventional epithet of “spoiled.” In the 1980s, Brat Pack was a nickname (playing on Rat Pack) for stars in coming-of-age films like The Breakfast Club. Now they never seem to grow up. Charli is thirty-two; Kamala turned sixty in October.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 2024 World edition.