Re: If anybody cares ...
According to the OED, "dumpster fire" seems to have first showed up in print in the newspaper Arizona Republic in 2003. It was in a review of the movie Texas Chainsaw Massacre, written by one Bill Muller. Sadly, Bill passed away in 2007, so we can't ask him where he got the phrase ... but as is almost always the case, it was probably around in the spoken language for a number of years prior to that.
Despite it apparently being common in the sports-talk world since about 2009, I don't remember hearing it until it entered Politics with the Trump nomination ...
As a side note, the word "dumpster" was coined for the first modern refuse collection system, where a truck picks up the box of trash and deposits the contents into an opening at the top, for transportation to the dump (tip, to you Brits), leaving the box behind for another fill. The inventor of this system was a dude named George Roby Dempster, who coined the trademark names "Dempster Dumpster" and "Dumpster" in 1935. These days, like kleenex, hoover and xerox, it is usually used as a generic noun and not capitalized. It's a good thing a guy named Dempster invented it ... Somehow "wheelie bin fire" or "skip fire" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
