In 2009, sportswriter Mike Wise had just started a radio show at 106.7 The Fan , a Washington D.C.-area sports station. Wise, now a senior writer at The Undefeated, noticed that one of his work buddies, a traffic reporter at the station named Liz Drabick , had an evocative pet phrase.

"Whenever someone was having a really bad day, or someone was completely out of sorts, she'd just go, 'Oh man, guy's a dumpster fire.' Or she'd go, 'Oh, that whole organization is a dumpster fire,'" Wise recalled in a phone conversation recently. "And I was like, Hey, that's pretty good." That very year, he used it in a column about the Washington football team, writing, "[I]f Jim Zorn has to answer one more question about his job security, it's time to also hold the coach's players and his superiors accountable for this dumpster fire -- this abomination of a loss."

Wise was hardly the first to commit a metaphorical "dumpster fire" to print, but 2009 was a different time. His smidgen of hesitation as to whether his readers would be familiar with the term emerges after the em dash, when he elaborates on what the "dumpster fire" was, for those who weren't clear.

No one would need such an explainer now. Seven years later, more or less every politician, sports team, mediocre TV show and annoying celebrity has been compared to a receptacle full of burning waste. Have we reached peak dumpster fire? And how did it come to ... well, to this: