Taylor Jones, a graduate student in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a post on his Language Jones blog that considers how shitgibbon fits an emerging pattern for obscene insults like douchewaffle, turdweasel, and jizztrumpet, all of which consist of a monosyllablic expletive plus a trochee (a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable). Along with metrical concerns, Jones notes how vowels often repeat in such words, as in dickbiscuit, craprabbit, and spunkpuffin. Meanwhile, Jamie Reilly, director of the Memory, Concepts, Cognition Laboratory at Temple University, has been working with colleagues on a research project analyzing people’s judgments of such novel profanities. Clearly, shitgibbon and its kin will provide scholarly fodder for years to come.

Building the perfect curse word: A psycholinguistic investigation of the form and meaning of taboo words

Compounding represents a novel source of tabooness in English. A recent example of this phenomenon occurred in February 2017 during heated political discourse where Pennsylvania State Senator, Daylin Leach, challenged US President Donald Trump by tweeting, “Why don't you try to destroy my career you fascist, loofa-faced, shit-gibbon!” This distinctive insult garnered the interest of both the popular press and language researchers (Tessier & Becker, 2018). In a follow-up article in Slate, Zimmer (2017) subsequently traced the etymology of shitgibbon to writer David Quantic’s critiques of British pop music in the 1980s. Zimmer’s article specifically highlighted the unanswered question of why certain compounds such as shitgibbon are so effective. We hypothesize that word form and meaning interact in taboo words. In two experiments to follow, we examined factors that predict tabooness for single words and the quality of novel taboo compounds.
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English is rife with taboo terms formed through combinatorial processes with religious terms (e.g., goddamn) and other extant taboo words ( Hughes, 1998; Mohr, 2013). In this experiment, we investigated this idiosyncratic propensity for common noun compounding. There are many such examples in common usage today (e.g., shithead, asshat, clusterfuck), and compounding appears to be a legitimate source of new words. We explored why some common nouns form effective new curse words (e.g., shithead), whereas others (e.g., shitarm) do not. It has been suggested that taboo words tend to denote negative concepts while simultaneously having phonological structures that mark sound-symbolic patterns of aggressive and/or unpleasant sounds (Bergen, 2016). We hypothesized that both of these factors (form and meaning) interact to predict the quality of emergent taboo speech, and this was indeed the case.

The data suggest that taboo compounding is a non-random process and that the quality of novel taboo compounding is to an extent predictable by a simple linear model. This compounding process did, however, differ in several important respects relative to the single-word regression data in Experiment 1. First, participants endorsed shorter words, words with many similar sounding neighbors, and words with higher levels of obstruance (e.g., abrupt stoppage of air during articulation) as superior candidates for taboo compounding. Second, prediction was optimized by a linear combination of these formal factors with semantic variables such as whether a word denoted a profession, dwelling, or receptacle.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-019-01685-8

A New Breakthrough in the History of the “S—gibbon”: The Insult’s Originator Steps Forward

In an article last Thursday, I looked at the rise of the colorful Trumpian epithet shitgibbon. The word first hit it big last June when Donald Trump was called a “tiny fingered, Cheeto-faced, ferret wearing shitgibbon” on Twitter and then made an even bigger splash last week when Pennsylvania state Sen. Daylin Leach called the president a “fascist, loofa-faced, shit-gibbon.” But where did this exquisite creation come from, originally?

Some have assumed it must be Scottish, since the June insult came at the height of backlash against Trump’s visit to Scotland, where he was lambasted for his tonedeaf comments about the Brexit vote. But that tweet actually came from an Englishman, one who goes by MetalOllie on Twitter (and will only reveal that his first name is Darren due to online death threats).

My fellow word sleuth Hugo van Kemenade found examples as early as 2000 in Usenet forum posts about bootlegging in the British music scene, where shitgibbon was deployed against ungrateful traders of copied music. More than a decade later, it got a boost from an early episode of HBO’s Veep in 2012, wherein the character Sen. Andrew Doyle calls a rival a “gold-plated fucking shitgibbon.”
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https://slate.com/culture/2017/02/the-origin-of-the-trump-insult-shitgibbon-revealed.html