Where Did the Nickname ‘FIB’ Come From?

Summer in Wisconsin is in sight, and you know what that means: our frenemies from Chicagoland pouring over the border to play. 

Driving wise, were some of these people raised by wolves, or what? Speeding. Tailgating – not the good kind. Lane changes as subtle as a face tattoo.   

Between the Illinois line and Door County, it can seem like every other license plate is from the Land of Lincoln (“drive without thinkin’”).  

At some point, Wisconsinites tagged these Illinoisans with a term of non-endearment:  

FIBs.  

As in, um, “Flippin’ Illinois Bastards” … except, you know.  

Not exactly Wisconsin Nice. 

We’ve occasionally heard it adorned with a suffix: FIBWAB or FIBTAB (with/towing a boat). 

FIB quickly emerged after former Milwaukee Brewers manager Craig Counsell shocked fans by leaving for the Chicago Cubs in November. “He should be forced to get a license plate with FIB,” one fan tweeted, adding that his Spotted Cow and quality-cheese privileges should be revoked, as well.  

Jonathan Schlesinger, a self-described safe driver from the Chicago suburbs, allows that some of his neighbors, eager to recreate, are “probably in a hurry and not very generous as drivers.”  

But FIB makes him uneasy. 

“Cheesehead seems kind of silly. FIB is pretty aggressive,” Schlesinger says. “I feel like I should be selling bumper stickers that say, ‘Not a FIB.’”  

We thought: Let’s find out the origin of FIB. No small task, it turns out. 

AcronymFinder.com listed 28 meanings, including the science-y Frequency-Invariant Beamformer and something called the Foundation for Internet Begging.  

The 28th listing was: “Friendly Illinois Brethren/Buddy – polite form of a derogatory nickname for Illinois residents in Wisconsin.” 

Ah, no. 

FIB also does not stand for “Fabulous Illinois Brethren,” as Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman assured his readers recently. 

For the origin of the profane version of FIB, we checked with historians in Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison and Door County – with no luck. 

Maybe FIB was coined “after a rare Chicago win in the Bears-Packers rivalry,” jabs Milwaukee historian John Gurda. 

We also checked the Dictionary of American Regional English and a number of slang/colloquial dictionaries. Nothing on the origin. 

The book Wisconsin Folklore, edited by UW-Madison folklorist James Leary, does connect FIB to Wisconsinites’ frustration with Illinois tourists, which is what we heard from a few folks who would know. 

Steven Rice, a polite man who is museum and archives manager at the Door County Historical Museum, grew up in Door County and graduated from the University of Chicago, but says he hadn’t heard of FIB until last year. “I think I know what it stands for,” he says from his office phone. “I’m hesitant to say it in a work setting.” 

Rice speculates that even though Chicagoans have visited his county for a century, the term might have originated in the 1980s “when the modern phase of Door County tourism started.” Maybe from a brash radio DJ? 

“That term feels like a 1980s creation to me, certainly in terms of the attitude fundamentally shifting into an us-versus-them mentality,” Rice says. “But that’s just a guess. … We have the love-hate relationship with Northern Illinois; it’s always going to be that way. But it’s as much love as it is hate.” 

The hate stems in part from Wisconsinites’ perceptions of Illinoisans’ behavior, driving and otherwise, according to Rice. “Just kind of a proprietary attitude perhaps, a sense of entitlement, treating a community like Disneyland, not as a real place full of real people,” he says. “But in any tourist community that has a relationship with a larger urban area, you’d see something similar.” 

Chicagoan Edward McClelland, an editor at Chicago magazine and author of How to Speak Midwestern, agrees.  

McClelland grew up in Michigan, where the term for Illinoisans is the marginally gentler FIP, which at least acknowledges Illinoisans as people. There, too, locals can’t quite relate to the Illinoisans. 

“They have a lot of money, they drive big shiny SUVs, they’re urban people and they’re going to rural areas,” McClellan says. “It’s annoyance at the ‘summer people.’ The locals always wish that they would just drop off their money and go away.”  

Milwaukee comedian Charlie Berens thinks that FIB emerged from frustration over the influx of Chicago tourists, Illinois toll booths and Bears fans.  Berens, author of The Midwest Survival Guide: How We Talk, Love, Work, Drink and Eat . . . Everything with Ranch, recalls first hearing FIB as a child in the 1990s. His uncle doubled-down at a toll booth, appending a redundant but emphatic F-bomb to a hissed “FIBs!” 

Berens theorizes that someone converted the epithet to an acronym “so then we can say it in church.” 

“If we’re spending a little extra time in purgatory because of the number of times we said FIB,” he reckons, “well, that’s just going to have to be tomorrow’s problem.”