The complicated world of dating neologisms continues apace. First there was ghosting, then benching and then orbiting. And now, apparently, there is fleabagging. The dating site Plenty of Fish says fleabagging is a new term to describe the act of repeatedly dating people who are wrong for you– like Fleabag did in the eponymous TV show, with the nice man she lived with in the first series, and then the priest she had sex with once.
The problem with fleabagging as a term, though, is twofold. First, there’s the fact that it is a gross misreading of what Fleabag was about. Second, repeatedly dating people who are wrong for you already has a term; it’s called dating. That’s the whole point of dating.
Luckily for Fleabag, fleabagging hasn’t just been created as a cynical way to fill a dating site’s end-of-year press release. There are plenty of other meanings for fleabagging, some of which work and some of which don’t. People have also used the term to describe the act of a character breaking the fourth wall. Which isn’t particularly great because it ignores the millions of other fictional works that had previously broken the fourth wall as a plot device. But, still, it could be worse. It could have been called House of Cardsing instead.
There’s also the use of fleabagging to describe the moment when a real person tells you what they really think about something as an aside. So, for example: “Hi, great to see you – I hate your shoes and your hair. How are the children?” This doesn’t deserve a name, though, because it’s just horrible behaviour.
Then there is the use of fleabagging to describe being a bit of a mess, but in an aspirational way. Everything in your life is falling apart, and you are filled with existential dread about your own future, but you still wear nice clothes sometimes. That’s fleabagging.
And yet even that doesn’t really capture it. Fleabag is such a rich show, full of so many themes, that there has to be a better way to turn it into a verb. What about when you manage to say something profound about modern feminism in a way that is incredibly accessible? Is that fleabagging? What about when you realise that your complicated sibling relationship ultimately means more to you than surface-level romance?
Or maybe Fleabag doesn’t need to be turned into a verb at all. Maybe the series should be left to exist on its own merit.
