ScoMo Makes Urban Dictionary’s Word Of The Day And It’s Savage

Prime Minister Scott Morrison seems like he likes his affectionate nickname 'ScoMo'.

The easy-to-say moniker has allowed him to seem like 'one of the boys' and an everyday Australian.

But it seems like that nickname might not be so favourable for the country's leader after it was morphed into something completely different.

Urban Dictionary, the encyclopaedia for all words that don't make it into the Oxford or Merriam-Webster, has listed ScoMo as their Word of the Day this week and it is not good for Mr Morrison.

Urban Dictionary

The definition that UD decided to use (because there are actually several for ScoMo) is: "A person in charge who leaves things to others when a difficult or emergency situation arises."

Clearly it's a nod to when Mr Morrison nicked off to Hawaii on a family holiday as the bushfire crisis was escalating late last year.

For days, his office refused to reveal where the Prime Minister was before images started circulating on social media of ScoMo chatting to locals or having a beer with his wife in the American hotspot.

It wasn't until two volunteer firefighters were killed that Mr Morrison announced he was coming back to Australia. The whole debacle sparked a massive debate about whether he should have left when massive swaths of the country was on fire.

Ben Downie/Twitter

The Prime Minister ended up apologising for upsetting anyone during his absence but said that he made a promise to his kids that they would get to go on a holiday and he didn't want to let them down.

Urban Dictionary was kind enough to provide a user-generated example of what ScoMo means, which is: "S**t was going really t*ts up at work this week so I Scomo'd off to a tropical island for some R&R and let someone else sort it out."

It's nice that you can use the word in both past and present tense.

The Prime Minister certainly wasn't doing himself any favours when he toured bushfire ravaged Kangaroo Island earlier this week.

The island, just off the coast of South Australia, was decimated when a raging bushfire swept through after New Year's Day.

Two people, bush pilot Dick Lang and his youngest son Clayton, were killed while trying to defend their property. More than 160,000 hectares of land was burned to a crisp, including the world-famous Southern Ocean Lodge.

Mr Morrison toured the island to see the scale of the devastation and this is where he made his rather awkward blunder. Speaking to locals with South Australian Premier Steven Marshall, the Prime Minister was captured saying: "Thankfully we've had no loss of life."

A woman quipped back with: "Two. We've lost two."

"Two. Yes two, that's quite right. I was thinking about firefighters firstly," Mr Morrison said.

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister told the ABC that he was talking about the firefighting effort when the gaffe happened.

Topics: Viral, News, Australia

Stewart Perrie

Stewart Perrie is a Trending Journalist at LADbible. His first job was as a newsreader and journalist at the award winning Sydney radio station, Macquarie Radio. He was solely responsible for the content broadcast on multiple stations across Australia when the MH17, Germanwings and AirAsia disasters unfolded. Stewart has covered the conflict in Syria for LADbible, interviewing a doctor on the front line, and has contributed to the hugely successful UOKM8 campaign.

@stewartperrie