Sovereign Citizens with Badges? (Neon Liberalism #84, with Jessica Pishko)
So-called "constitutional sheriffs" are spreading across the country, declaring that they have the right to nullify federal
Half the Answer
2025's Word of the Year (Half the Answer #60, with Savi Namboodiripad and Daniel Midgley)
82 min read
Caitlin and Trent chat with linguistics scholars Savi Namboodiripad and Daniel Midgley on what word most exemplifies 2025. Was it a new coinage? A pre-existing word that gained a new meaning or usage this year? A word that seemed to be on everybody's lips in 2025?
Half the Answer can be heard on Spotify, on Apple, on YouTube, on Amazon, and elsewhere via its RSS feed.
Resources:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year
"6 7" song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07xpV4ix2K8
https://www.economist.com/culture/2025/12/03/and-the-economists-word-of-the-year-for-2025-is
https://www.dictionary.com/articles/word-of-the-year-2025
https://corp.oup.com/word-of-the-year/
https://www.cam.ac.uk/news/cambridge-dictionary-reveals-word-of-the-year-2025
"getting sendy" song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYAQEJyqR7E
group 7 https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2025/10/27/tiktoks-group-7-meme-explained/
https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/lore
https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/unc
https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/chopped
https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/huzz
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051221126040
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/23/us/rapture-tiktok-sept-23.html
Epstein's email simulator https://www.jmail.world/
https://othermeans.io/p/the-glonzo-strategy
https://www.theverge.com/policy/798491/frog-portland-trump-national-guard
https://the-monsters.fandom.com/wiki/The_Monsters
https://lafufu.art/blog/labubu-vs-lafufu
https://www.thelist.com/1817157/what-is-mar-a-lago-face-who-has-tried-the-trend/
https://bsky.app/profile/canadiandictionary.bsky.social/post/3m7tf3jm2fc2c
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/us/politics/doge-musk-trump-analysis.html
https://www.vox.com/culture/376401/r-word-slur-return-euphemism-treadmill-cycle
https://www.lawdork.com/p/the-kavanaugh-stop-50-days-later
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/30/politics/trump-taco-angry-tariff
https://www.buzzfeed.com/abbyzinman/canadians-elbows-up-explainer
https://pen.org/banned-words-list/
https://www.dailydot.com/memes/everythings-computer-trump-quote-meme/
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/trump-promises-harsher-ice-crackdowns
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/12/27/chatgpt-suicide-openai-raine/
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/snap-welfare-queen-ai-memes-1235460824/
https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/rapid-unplanned-disassembly-rud
https://becauselanguage.com/131-wotwoty-2025/
Transcript
**Caitlin M. Green [00:00:06]**
Karen, Chad, Mason.
**Daniel Midgley [00:00:07]**
Yeah, enter Mason.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:00:11]**
Karen and Chad had a son. Yeah, and honestly, yeah.
**Trent R. Nelson [00:00:30]**
Well, happy days are here again. You know that understanding a question is half of an answer. This is Half the Answer. And my name is Trent R. Nelson, and you know that I do this thing with Caitlin M. Green. And well, it has been such a wonderful year, and I mean that a bit sardonically, but we've had a great time, and surely it will not end until we get one more episode in. Well, Caitlin, what are we doing today? It's kind of special, isn't it? And who are we doing her with?
**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:03]**
Oh, I'm so excited. I brought you some linguists so we can just, like, linguistics it up out here. Because it's the end of the year, and what does a linguist want to do at the end of the year? Well, we have a biological urge that compels us to discuss what words rose to prominence, were coined, became used in a particularly interesting way over the course of the previous year. So here I am like the groundhog. My body is just like forcing me to get online and talk about the word of the year. So I brought some friends with me, and I'm going to have them introduce themselves. Let's say Savi, if you could tell us a little bit about yourself.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [00:01:49]**
Yeah, I'm Savi Namboodiripad, and I'm an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Michigan, and I don't actually study words, per se. I feel like my professional interest in Word of the Year is also, yeah, it's not really based on my research so much as my extreme enthusiasm for the idea and also the process of it and how we do it, and how we vote for it, and all the ways everything around it. I love it so much, so I'm here as a word of the year enthusiast. But yeah, it's just an activity. It's an activity we all do together, exactly.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:02:27]**
And Daniel, how about you?
**Daniel Midgley [00:02:31]**
Hey, I'm Daniel Midgley from Because Language podcast, and I teach linguistics at the University of Western Australia. We are big fans of the word of the year. We have every episode, or just about every episode. We do Words of the Week, things that we've noticed, things that I've noticed, things that seem to be coming to prominence. And then at the end of the year, I gathered them all up, and we let everyone in the world vote on them for our Word of the Week of the year. We just had our episode. It was a bonanza. It was a smorgasbord. It was a Gorgonzola of words. And so I brought a bunch from here. But man, Caitlin, you've been an absolute ferret at unearthing words that I have missed. And it's easy to miss the words, isn't it?
**Caitlin M. Green [00:03:11]**
Yeah, it is easy to miss them. And I let Savi look at my document, and she was like, "Oh, I think you need to do these things." And I was like, "Oh, right, right." So it's a whole thing, but I really appreciate your weekly thing, because I think a lot of times we suffer from a recency bias where it's December 2025 and our memories only go back so far, and then we can only think of the stuff that was big the last few months. But when you're doing it consistently throughout the year, it helps you kind of avoid that issue.
**Daniel Midgley [00:03:46]**
That is true, and it's a good reminder that the process of language creation is ongoing, that language reflects social trends, and that it's good to look back and see where we've been. So thank you for inviting me on. This is gonna be fun.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:04:01]**
Yeah. So what was your Word of the Week of the Year winner this year?
**Daniel Midgley [00:04:06]**
The Word of the Week of the Year was "temu" -- derogatory, a cheap or knockoff version. So for example, Australian right-wing former politician Peter Dutton was sometimes called Temu Trump because of his urge to link himself to Trump, and also people saying something like, "Oh, it's a bit temu." So just as an adjective.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:04:30]**
Love that. That's amazing. Yeah, that's a good one. And that is one that I had actually missed on my list. And Savi was like, "Hey, you have to put temu."
**Caitlin M. Green [00:04:38]**
Because you have teenagers in the house with you right now, Savi, right? Because you're like, with family.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [00:04:42]**
Well, I will not be in the house right now, but I was. I've been hanging out a lot with my niece and nephew, who are 15 and 17, and so I did look over the list that Caitlin sent with them, and got some good commentary from them. And they're highly online as well. So it was great.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:05:00]**
Yeah, amazing. And do you know, like, teenagers and preteens are just such delightful resources for this kind of thing, because they're doing a lot of the innovation.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:05:13]**
Yeah, right. And I'm sure I was doing all kinds of stuff. I just don't remember what it was when I was, like, 13 years old.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [00:05:21]**
And also, no one's saying that anymore, or that was really -- I love that. "Oh, it's so old."
**Caitlin M. Green [00:05:27]**
I have to say, one of my favorite moments with my brother, who's 12 years younger than me, was when I asked him about, like, what are young people saying? This is like, I don't know, I was probably in grad school, so like, five, eight years ago. And he goes, "Oh, people are really describing a lot of things as whack, like, in a derogatory way." And I was like, "Oh, wow. Like, like, in the 80s and 90s." And he had no idea, like, Whitney Houston, "crack is whack," and he's like, "Absolutely not. I have no clue." They just organically, like, rediscovered "whack."
**Daniel Midgley [00:06:02]**
"Awesome" went through the same thing. It was 1983 and everything was awesome. And then it had a big fallow period, and then in the mid 2000s awesome was awesome again. It does that.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:06:14]**
Yeah, wonderful cycles, like wide-leg jeans. It's just on a cycle, right?
**Trent R. Nelson [00:06:19]**
And that's not even to talk about, like, "awesome" 130 years ago, literally, like, "awesome," right? Like, full of awe. We just lose words' meanings as well. And that's why I think Word of the Year, Word of the Week of the Year, it's really super important. We got to know what the words mean. He who knows what the words mean knows the history of all things.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:06:43]**
It just trips off the tongue, doesn't it? Word of the Week of the Year.
**Daniel Midgley [00:06:47]**
I have to think every single time. Yeah, "Word of the--" Hang on a second.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:06:52]**
All right. Well, why don't we get started with some of the words that other organizations have named. I say "other organizations" as though, like, Liberal Currents is one of them, like, the institutions of language. We are now, yeah.
So Merriam-Webster went for "slop," right? So I advocated for that one last year. I was like, I think slop is going to be big. And I feel so vindicated at this time. I feel like a winner. So they talk about it, they said we define slop as "digital content of low quality that is produced, usually in quantity, by means of artificial intelligence." And so one of the examples that I threw out there was like, why are there so many short videos of sexy cats having soap opera storyline things happen to them? It's just the thing that keeps showing up places. It's these super ripped cats. And they're pilots and they're cops and they're having affairs and they're dying, and their kittens are being saved from fires. And I don't know what. It's just wild, but that's slop for sure.
**Daniel Midgley [00:08:03]**
And then they're not the only ones, either, because the Economist voted for slop too.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:08:09]**
I love this book. Yeah, for my visual aid, I put the book. I really like *Slop* by Mo Willems, which is about a pig, and she's offering it to the elephant. And the elephant's like, "Absolutely not. This is so gross."
**Daniel Midgley [00:08:27]**
We had AI slop as one of our words of the year. Last year, it was our second-place winner, AI slop. So we kind of refrained. I refrained from slapping it in again, to your dismay. Caitlin, I believe you would have liked to see more slop.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:08:43]**
I was all over the Discord being like, "But slop you guys." But I understand the reasoning. It is good reasoning.
**Daniel Midgley [00:08:50]**
Well, some words are just perennial. We did do "sloppers." I was trying to get that going for people who use too much AI or use AI irresponsibly. So I think, yeah, it's a good one.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:09:04]**
Maybe mainly from you, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it's so gross. It sounds really gross. And I think I talked to Maureen Costello about this kind of thing where it's like evoking disgust, and that's kind of on purpose, right? The idea of slop being this kind of noxious thing, and it's just thrown together, and it's not thoughtful at all, and the people who make it and consume it are, by extension, gross. And I think that's part of it, sort of as a feature, not a bug, right?
**Trent R. Nelson [00:09:40]**
Very much, right. Well, let's pull for "slopper" 2026. Slopper pejorative, 2026.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:09:48]**
"Slopper," brackets. It makes me very unhappy to think about as a word. I don't know why.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:09:55]**
Dictionary.com of course went for "six seven."
So I put a couple of images up here to help me remember about six seven, because it was featured in a song by Scrilla called "Doot Doot (Six Seven)," and in it, he says the number "six seven" in a way that's kind of pleasing to the ear. And I think that's part of why it took off, is that it became like a vocal stim for people to be like, "six seven."
And then it became this thing that kids would do, and they would never explain it to adults. And that is what is going to make slang take off: if it is opaque to grown-ups and it maybe annoys them how they don't understand it. That is catnip for kids. So it was like a self-fulfilling thing. And there's a bunch of interviews with Scrilla, the artist, that purport to be like, "Scrilla explains what six seven really means," and in it, he does no such thing. He talks around it. He'll say contradictory things, because I think he knows that part of what's making it so sticky is that nobody can actually give you a proper explanation, right?
**Trent R. Nelson [00:11:10]**
Well, nothing is as cool as something that your parents don't like. That's kidding 101, you know. Like my uncle always used to say when I was growing up, "No, Mom liked the Doors. Now everybody's mom likes the Doors." And I guess for children, that's just the eternal -- I mean, after the French Revolution, there were teenagers who were royalists. What are you gonna do?
**Savithry Namboodiripad [00:11:47]**
Right? It's the new punk rock. And even better, there were all these moral panic articles about it, like, "Oh no, this is ruining --" That makes it even better. That makes it even more alluring and exciting. The best thing that could happen is for people to clutch their pearls and go, "Is it Satan worshiping?" That's really gonna -- that's what you want.
**Daniel Midgley [00:12:08]**
Well, it's been really fun to have a couple of little alphas at home, especially my nine-year-old daughter, seeing her get together at a birthday party and having them just bust out in this chorus. It was really gorgeous and really inclusive, which is another great thing about it.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:12:20]**
Yeah, belongs to everyone. My six-year-old daughter said it, and I was like, what's happening? But of course, she goes to a school that has bigger kids in it, so it's all coming, filtering through them. And so one of the kind of iconic images associated is the six seven kid, which is this guy who's in middle school, and he's got this sort of blonde hair in what is called an "ice cream haircut," which is like -- his head looks as though a scoop of ice cream has been splooched onto it, and then it's kind of swooping out. And honestly, boys had that haircut when I was in middle school. I don't know that it had a name. I like "ice cream haircut." It's cute.
**Daniel Midgley [00:13:11]**
Comedian Rich Hall, who wrote several books of sniglets, which is words that aren't in the dictionary but should be, picked this hairdo and gave it a name. This was back in the 80s. It was called a "blossore." Blossore: the hairstyle that comes after you take off your hat. I don't know the etymology of it. It didn't have staying power, but it has been picked as a thing as early as that.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:13:39]**
Is that why the Mason or the six seven kid -- is it that he's been wearing a baseball cap, and you took it off and now it's like this? Because I've seen other pictures of the same kid, and he has lovely, poofy hair, actually.
**Daniel Midgley [00:13:54]**
I hadn't heard that. I thought it was a hat, kind of. It kind of looks like it. Helmet hair, hat hair, kind of thing.
**Trent R. Nelson [00:13:58]**
The reason why this keeps coming back every generation is because children continue to wear hats and to grow their hair out longer. It's just a functional thing, more than anything else.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:14:11]**
I'm just waiting for the other popular haircut to come back. In my head, when I was in middle school, I used to call it the "picket fence haircut," which is when you would gel your bangs straight up, and then the other part from the back of your head would swoop up with it, and so you just have a straight-up. I miss that. I think that's very funny, because it involves effort, and that's hilarious to me. Like, you spent time and money to look this way.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:14:43]**
Yeah, it's a good time. So yeah, the six seven kid. There was just a video of him at, I think, a basketball game at school, just going, like, "six seven," and his eyes were wide and his mouth was wide, and people just sort of glommed on to that. And so he became a meme. And then, of course, what happens is, if a person becomes a meme, they go into this whole meme machine. And so he became like an SCP meme, which is like a horror, scary meme. So that's why there's that black version that's all in negative, and the mouth, the jaw has unhinged, and the teeth have gotten bigger, and it's all very scary. You have to survive a night with the six seven kid in a haunted house or whatever.
And then the other word that I didn't put in here officially, that's related, is "Mason," which I brought up on the Because Language podcast when I visited, because I thought it was interesting that this archetype has now been given a name. The type of kid that this is, right? Karen, Chad, Mason. Enter Mason.
**Daniel Midgley [00:15:51]**
Karen and Chad had a son.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:15:53]**
Yeah, and his name is Mason, honestly. And if you look at references to Mason, he's often suggested to be a little Trumpy, honestly, like a little MAGA child. So that's Mason, I guess -- Karen and Chad's kid. That makes sense to me, in my heart. And he's always got what are they, ice cream shorts, which I don't know if you guys know any middle school boys, but apparently it's all the rage -- athletic shorts that have a pattern that looks like an ice cream cone with dripping blue or pink around it, so that it looks like a melting ice cream cone. I don't know. Fashion.
**Trent R. Nelson [00:16:38]**
Does it have lightning bolts on it? I don't think so. I was gonna say that is just the Gucci Mane face tattoo.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:16:48]**
So that could be part of it.
**Daniel Midgley [00:16:53]**
When we talked about it on the show, I said, this is wonderful to me, because it's really the first time that these little alphas have come into their own as memetic beings. And Hedvig had said, "Wait a minute, have you forgotten about all the brain rot stuff like skibidi, Ohio, riz?" And I thought about that, and I realized what we're dealing with here is kind of a micro-generation. Alpha isn't just one thing. If you're an alpha, you could be as old as 15, but a 15-year-old and a nine-year-old are very different things. And the nine-year-olds, they are into the six seven thing, even if the 15-year-olds have discarded it as passe.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:17:33]**
Well, that's part of why generations are tough, because really, when you're children, one year to the next is so different, and your culture is totally -- you have to discard things really fast because they're for babies really soon.
Oh, the other thing I wanted to say, and I don't know if any of you guys have noticed this, but when I asked my daughter, "What does six seven mean?" she said, "It means so-so. It means not great and not bad, because it's like a six or seven on a scale of one to ten." And I've never heard this anywhere else.
**Daniel Midgley [00:18:16]**
Okay, keep an eye on that one.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:18:25]**
And you do this, right -- the hand gesture that's associated looks like you're saying "it's so-so." I know, right? Because never anywhere else have I seen this. It's only my own kid in my own house that was like, "No, I mean so-so." Okay, sure. She can't use the internet, so she has to rely on what she gets from other kids.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:18:35]**
Okay, so Oxford University Press went for "rage bait."
Yep, which I get. And so I put some examples to help us. Just things I remember from being on the internet. Like, there's that one girl who was like, "My beauty routine involves simply dousing my face in foundation and then just blending it in forever," and it looked nuts. And then what would happen is she would cut, and then she would have a beautiful face of makeup. And people would be like, "She wiped it all off in the cut. She took all the makeup off, and now she has a normal amount of makeup on, and that's why she looks good." But it just generated all this discussion, right? Which is the point.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:19:21]**
I thought of people making their meals in sinks for content, or on the counter. Yeah, or just putting whole blocks of Velveeta in the oven with uncooked macaroni. And then, like, the trad wife who said the N-word, right? She was hoping to catapult herself into -- what was her name, Lily Gaddis. She was like, oh, she's gonna totally become a trad wife influencer. But she did not have the juice, unfortunately, and also lost her job. So that was a failed rage bait, but she got people to talk about her for a while.
**Daniel Midgley [00:20:04]**
It happens. I do a lot of media stuff on the Australian broadcast, on the ABC, the Australian ABC, and what happens is, they'll do a thing. In fact, it happened just in Melbourne last Thursday. They said, "We're going to have Daniel Midgley on to talk about your language questions. What words do you hate? What words do you really dislike? What words should be banned?" It was just anger-tainment. So I came on and I said, "If you have any words that you hate or anything you don't like, you can take those complaints and stick them in your ear. I'm not here for them. I'm not doing rage bait." So I really do try to squash that down, but it works.
**Trent R. Nelson [00:20:54]**
Exactly. Shout out to "anger-tainment," though. Anger-tainment is also a fantastic word, and I feel like anger-tainment is taking over entertainment. People just love to be pissed about stuff and enjoy being pissed about stuff with each other.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:21:13]**
None of us are immune to it, right? We've all taken the bait at some point or another.
And you know, Trent, I have rage-baited you, right? Like when I say something about history that's upsetting.
**Trent R. Nelson [00:21:27]**
Oh yeah, when you did the art question, yeah, you got me real good.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:21:35]**
Yeah, I rage-baited you. Actually, something that I have talked about on this podcast a few times where I get so mad about Grok AI and why it's called that, and when he referred to it as being the grouchy robot from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is not what it is. That's got to be rage bait, right? Because he would love for people to engage with him, comment on his posts, talk to him and be like, "You complete -- you illiterate monster. Grok is from a different book by a different author." And that's perfect for him, right? Because now he's getting attention. So I think that's what it is. And so that's why from here on out, I will not be complaining about Grok being called Grok anymore, because it is bait, and I am not a fish.
**Daniel Midgley [00:22:27]**
Very good. Haven't we learned from the Trump years that one of the most powerful forces in the world is shared hatred? Shared hatred, getting together people in a common hatred, is really, really powerful. I don't think it's long-lasting. I don't think it's sustainable or productive, but man, it works.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:22:50]**
Yeah, okay. Cambridge Dictionary, they went for "parasocial."
I get it. I think it was a relevant term, but I don't know -- it was my least exciting one of the bunch, I think. Like, yeah, sure, that's a thing. But I didn't particularly notice it getting used in a new way. In fact, I found myself getting frustrated when people would be like, "There's this new thing of people developing parasocial relationships with their chatbots." And I'd be like, "You mean, like they did with celebrities and basically everything before? Influencers, whatever. Yeah, I know about that. It's called parasocial."
So yeah, Collins Dictionary went for "vibe coding," which I also -- I like, I think it's a little bit niche, but it was definitely coined this year. So that's big.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:23:43]**
So it was Andrej Karpathy who said: "There's a new kind of coding I call vibe coding, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs, e.g., Cursor Composer with Sonnet, are getting too good. Also, I just talked to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like 'decrease the padding on the sidebar by half' because I'm too lazy to find it. I accept all, always. I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages, I just copy paste them in with no comment. Usually, that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension. I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug, so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or web app, but it's not really coding. I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works."
**Daniel Midgley [00:24:47]**
I feel like the word "mostly" is doing a lot of work there.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:24:51]**
It mostly works, right? But there's so much in there where he's like, "Hey, I am literally just conversationally talking to a chatbot and hoping that it does a good job."
And I did a little bit of -- I took some computer science classes. My spouse is a computer software developer. He and I both are aware of the fact that one of the things you have to make sure of, especially if you have a big project, is you need to be efficient and organized. And vibe coding creates a situation where you are doing the opposite of that. It is a tangled mass of code. There's redundancies, there's stuff that is not the most efficient choice, there's inconsistencies, and it's going to make it so hard. One of the big things about making software is it's supposed to be something that anybody could walk in and read your code, and you've done a good enough job organizing it and documenting it that they could figure out what you've done and build on it or use it or whatever.
And so, yeah, the vibe coding movement or whatever, I think, is pretty sad, because it is definitely encouraging people to not use the skills that you're supposed to use on this kind of thing. And it could become really dangerous, because for him, he's like, it's good enough for a weekend project, right? Well, is it good enough for a glucose monitor? Because I don't think it is. Is it good enough for an airplane? Because I don't think it is, right? So vibe coding, I think, was a good choice because it's representative of the way that LLMs are getting used and the way that AI is getting used. So that's my rant. Sorry.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [00:26:43]**
I think we're seeing some themes of, like, temu, slop, vibe coding. These things are semantically related, and they're feeding into each other. One could vibe code and create slop code, and so on.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:27:03]**
Yeah. It's quantity over quality. It's taking your hands off the steering wheel, right? Human involvement reduced, in a way that's a little frustrating for people, I think.
And I had something else, and I don't remember what it is, but that's okay. Guess what? I'm sick again. Everybody, the podcast world is just on tenterhooks to hear what new virus Caitlin has picked up. And I can't tell you. I don't know.
**Trent R. Nelson [00:27:34]**
She was sick before that. You can go watch the prior episode. She's been sick. Check the record.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:27:39]**
It's just another one of them. I skated straight in from food poisoning in Japan. I get home and my kids cough in my face, and I'm like, immediately into a new one.
Roll the tape. We're gonna do a supercut of me, like, "I'm so sick, you guys." And that's what it is to have a kid in first grade and a kid in preschool. It's just being sick all the time.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:28:12]**
The whole country of Canada -- I didn't know they did a word, but it was, it was all of Canada, and their word was "maple washing," which I love. It's so deeply Canadian, but it's essentially pretending that something is made locally when it's not, right? Especially because there's this little sticker that you can put in the grocery store that has a Canadian flag on it that says this product was made in Canada. But people go in there and they take photos of the shelves, and they're like, "Simply Orange is not made in Canada. Why is the sticker under the Simply Orange orange juice?"
And then there will be banners on websites, and then you go look at the actual label on the box, and it says "made in the US and Canada." Not good enough, especially because Canada is trying to do this tariff resistance thing of buying local as much as possible. And it makes it hard when the products are like, "Yeah, sure, we're from Canada," and they're not. So I get it.
**Trent R. Nelson [00:29:15]**
The great orange groves of Canada. Yeah, very famous.
**Daniel Midgley [00:29:20]**
Well, this is yet another example of our winner last year, which was the "-washing" combining form. There's been all kinds of washing. Sports-washing, when countries try to do sports to improve their image. Pink-washing, when something is supposed to be for cancer research but does nothing. Sane-washing, when the press launders Trump's comments to make him seem coherent, which wasn't very nice, but it was one of those. So "-washing" has a long history, and this is yet another example.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:29:52]**
Yeah, "-washing." That was a good one. You guys always do a good job. But I think that was really appropriate, because it's a very -- what we say, like, productive morpheme. It binds to new stuff, and you get a new word.
So, yeah, I think that was great. Did we say green-washing? I think we did.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:30:16]**
Yeah, rainbow-washing? Yes, that was the one. I thought pink-washing was, but no -- rainbow-washing is when you're like, "Oh, are we having a PR problem? Well, look how gay-friendly we are, actually. So don't even worry. Keep buying our things."
**Daniel Midgley [00:30:28]**
And then abandon it when there's pressure.
**Trent R. Nelson [00:30:30]**
Yeah, Target. We're looking right at you.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:30:36]**
Okay, so now we can get into just my words that I collected. So I made some categories. The first one I'm calling "kids today," which is the things that we think the young people are saying. And so, Daniel, for you, "temu X." We had Temu Trump. We had a temu version of Netanyahu that became a whole thing, especially in the Indian media sphere, where there was this big comment that got people all activated about, "What do you mean calling Modi the temu version of Netanyahu?" That was a hot take.
So yeah, I can see a spike on searches for temu. But the problem with doing Google Trends lines like this is that probably people were just trying to buy stuff on Temu, right? So it is hard to measure actually how much people were saying "the temu version" or whatever. I think on this one, I actually looked for "temu version" specifically to see if I could get a little bit narrowed down, so there's a spike, but it's before this year. So it is good, though.
**Daniel Midgley [00:31:47]**
I first noticed it with Temu Melania, when some woman appeared with Trump on election day, but it didn't look like her. And she did kind of, but she was smiling. Somebody said people referred to her as Temu Melania. So that was where I first noticed it.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [00:31:52]**
I've been interested in this little construction for a while. So before it was temu, people would say -- there's other ones, like "Dollar Store version," "store brand," "bargain bin," "Walmart," yeah, "bootleg."
**Caitlin M. Green [00:32:17]**
And then there's also "we have that at home," is the other one, right? Where it's like, "Oh, we have Melania at home." And then the Melania at home is this other person.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [00:32:35]**
Yeah, so this Oreo and Hydrox thing is very exciting to me, and I love that.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:32:40]**
Oh yeah. I like this category. It's really useful. We can all use it, whichever version makes you happy. I think it's funny that maybe a year or two ago, people were saying "Wish," and then now it's temu. It's been supplanted by a different, but same kind of a company. I noticed that when they would do celebrity look-alike contests, they would call the winner like "Temu Timothee Chalamet" or "Temu Robert Downey Jr."
**Daniel Midgley [00:33:09]**
Could the theme here between slop and temu and the rest be like, we're seeking authenticity?
**Caitlin M. Green [00:33:16]**
Yeah, inauthentic. Not quite right. And cheap. I think that makes sense. So yeah, I think people are concerned with that.
Also fairly related is the construction "close enough, welcome back." The first post I could find of that was from 2024, which is some manga thing which I'm not very familiar with, but it was some character that they felt looked like another character. So they said, "Close enough. Welcome back, Megaru Bachira." But there's a lot of them, like this one of a Mini Pony that's being really cute at Wimbledon. And so somebody said, "Close enough. Welcome back, Little Sebastian."
So yeah, I've been seeing that a lot. I like that one a lot.
**Trent R. Nelson [00:34:01]**
It is the meme format where somebody died the same year that somebody else was born. So we're "welcoming back," like Nikita Chef. Is that 2025 or am I confounding that with '24? That's one of my favorite formats, though.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:34:22]**
They're easy. It's easy to mix up adjacent years, right? Because it all blends together in our brains. I like that though. I also like "RIP X, you would have loved" and then something crazy.
Okay, "kids today" word: "selling" or "sold," which means messing up. And I found a lot of Reddit questions of people my age being like, "I just finished a game, like a Madden or whatever, and on the mic, somebody was like, 'You sold.'" And I was like, "What does that mean?" And so then people have to be like, it means a thing that should have been fine, like a pretty sure thing, you totally biffed it and you messed it up in a way that's embarrassing and bad.
And so I found it as a hashtag on Snapchat a lot, where people just remember a time when they messed up real bad, did something embarrassing. So this one was like, "Remembering this one time I went on a date and the guy was driving me home and started playing music that was trash. So I jokingly said, 'This song is ass. Pass me the aux right now.' And he told me it was his song. He was planning on releasing. Hashtag awkward. Hashtag sold. Hashtag selling. Hashtag dating tips."
**Caitlin M. Green [00:35:51]**
I'm sorry. Sorry to that girl. She's very cute. I'm sure she'll be fine.
And then we got "send" and "get sendy," which Trent was like, "Tell me everything about this." So it comes from the X Games, and it just means to full-throttle it. Just go all out, do the most. And then what happened is people would post videos that were not in selfie format, so it looked like someone was filming them doing something that they thought looked cool, and they'd be like, "Oh, my friend caught me getting sendy with the skateboard or whatever." And it obviously looked so silly. It was kind of like those "bae caught me slippin'" memes where it would be like, clearly, you staged this so that you could be like, "I wouldn't just post a video of myself looking cool. It just so happened that somebody caught it." People love to post those kinds of videos where they're like, "Oh, it was just an accident. I can't believe I accidentally recorded this. Well, anyway, I guess I'll post it, whatever."
So it was that kind of thing. And then it became a joke where people would say stuff like, "Accidentally caught myself getting sendy." And a lot of times it would be with food, and there's a specific gesture you have to do, which is where you take the piece of food and you put it to your mouth, and then you whip your head back to twist it to the side and just savor the hell out of that food. And then people would just do it with stuff that's not food. It just expanded.
And usually it involves a particular song, which is like, I may be wrong, but it's kind of a house song, and it's usually the one that people are playing along to. So that'll become part of the setup for the joke, that song will be playing, and you'll be like, "I know what kind of video this is. This is a getting sendy video."
**Daniel Midgley [00:37:59]**
Do we have a sense as to why the word "send" was chosen? I'm still a little fuzzy on that bit.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:38:10]**
I think it was about the commentator -- you know, the person that talks into the microphone when sports are happening -- would say things like, "Send it!" when the person's about to really gun it on the track. And so that's "send it." "Send." And then "getting sendy" is the extension of it.
**Trent R. Nelson [00:38:37]**
The lion does not bother himself with getting sendy.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:38:42]**
Yeah, that was one of my favorites. Somebody did a meme combination thing where he said, "The lion does not realize he's being recorded while getting sendy," because he riffed on the "lion does not concern himself" memes and also the "getting caught getting sendy" memes. And then, if you're really cringe, if you're gonna really do it, you're supposed to get caught getting sendy, and then, "Oh, notice the camera." And then come towards it like, "No, hey, whoa, hey, stop recording me." So that it really looks legitimate, like you got caught doing something very cool. So that's the goal.
**Trent R. Nelson [00:39:23]**
Which, again, it's like a riff on inauthenticity, right? People are making a lot of jokes about --
**Caitlin M. Green [00:39:31]**
Which is why I compare it to "bae caught me sleepin'." Those memes where somebody would post a picture of themselves lying down with their eyes closed, but you can see in the background, because there's a mirror or something, that it's themselves holding the phone. And that's funny.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:40:02]**
And just recognizing the performativity and the inherent intentionality behind posting something where it's like, well, if you really didn't want people to see this about you, if it weren't really part of your message about who you are, you wouldn't have posted it. So, yeah, people are thinking about that a lot. I think it's all -- aura farming. Hey, that's coming up. Hang on.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:40:36]**
It is relevant, but unfortunately, my slide order is not that smart. So next we have "erm, what the sigma." Which, Savi, I had "what the sigma" and I was like, I thought this was an old thing, but it turns out, if you put "erm" in front of it, it's new again. So what's happening here? Don't know.
At some point on a recording, some kid said, "Erm, what the sigma?" and everybody was like, "That kid sounds like Squidward." That became hilarious. And then it was just a thing for a while that people would say, I guess. So you can see a big spike, but it is around 2024, I think, which is interesting, but people are still enjoying it. So that's fun.
**Daniel Midgley [00:41:18]**
And I had my youngsters singing at the house: "Last Christmas, I gave you my heart, but the very next day, you sold it on eBay." Where'd they get that from this year? "Save me from tears, I'll give it to someone sigma."
**Caitlin M. Green [00:41:32]**
Oh, amazing. Yeah, the whole "S tier" thing, that's become, I think, a staple. Sigma is like the best possible thing that you can have. And I love that. It's delightful.
Okay, "Group Seven." I don't know if you guys saw people referring to Group Seven for a while. I would see these posts about, "How I feel knowing I'm in Group Seven," and I would just be like, "Yeah, okay, whatever. I don't know what that is, but I also don't care." And then I finally was like, I gotta add it and look it up.
So it turned out it was a musician who was posting her new song on TikTok, and she was like, "I don't understand the algorithm at all. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna post it seven different times with a number in the corner, and I want you to tell me which number you saw," basically, just to get some feedback from the audience. And that in itself was an excellent content strategy, because then everybody was like, "Well, what number are you? What number are you?" And for some reason, the seventh video got way more views than any of the other ones.
One theory is that that was the final one, and it was the one in which she verbally described the group system, as opposed to putting it in the caption. And so it's possible that that one had something to it, content-wise, that made TikTok think, "I should push this out to more people."
Hard to say, but yeah, more people were in Group Seven than any other group, and then they would go around bragging to other people, like, "I'm in Group Seven. Look at me."
I saw somebody accuse it of being a very millennial meme, because we just love being sorted. We just really like it when people tell us that we're a Gryffindor or whatever, or ENTJ or whatever it is. So yeah, which I get. I do get it. It's fine.
So that's Group Seven. Do you feel better, Trent? Now you know what it is?
**Trent R. Nelson [00:43:36]**
I absolutely do. I am Group Seven.
**Daniel Midgley [00:43:39]**
It's the most ordinary group. It's the one that everybody's in. Why would that be special? But no, we should be bragging about it, right?
**Savithry Namboodiripad [00:43:52]**
There was some group tribalism happening, where people were like, "Oh, when the groups meet," and, you know, "when you meet a Group Six or whatever." So random sorting created the difference.
**Trent R. Nelson [00:44:11]**
Oh, very nice. The kids are gonna crush us when they see this. They could be like, "Look at all those weirdos, 678, old people. They don't know." It's so November.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [00:44:28]**
Well, my niece and nephew definitely were like, "Six seven's over, because you guys are talking about it."
**Caitlin M. Green [00:44:33]**
Yeah, that's right. No, that's absolutely right. That's the cycle. We killed it by knowing about it. Basically.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [00:44:39]**
What millennials actually killed was six seven.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:44:44]**
Yeah. Oh, finally, it wasn't the housing market. Much less of a loss, I think.
But my favorite thing is, right, my kid, she's six years old, and she's like, "Mom, do you know about six seven?" And I'm like, "Well, yes, actually, I've done extensive research into it." And then she's like, "No, Mom, you don't know."
**Daniel Midgley [00:45:03]**
Because it's different now.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:45:04]**
Like, you're literally six years old. You're not even seven.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:45:13]**
Anyway, I feel that "lore" had kind of a moment. People enjoyed, especially combined, the phrase "lore drop" -- just dropping a bunch of information. So in one sense, it was like TV shows -- an episode would have a lore drop in it where it has a bunch of backstory. So people were talking about Stranger Things Season Four having a big lore drop, because it goes back into where Eleven was.
And then, yeah, there are a couple other ones where somebody posted, "When the lore drop is so big, you have to make a presentation with all the receipts for your friends," and then it shows them in Google Slides with screenshots of texts to show their friends about what happened to them. Somebody else posted, "When I'm lore-dropping and realize none of that was normal for a 10- to 12-year-old." So she's telling stories about her childhood, and then people are just going, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry that happened," and she has to suddenly recontextualize.
So, yeah, telling information about your past is essentially lore-dropping.
**Daniel Midgley [00:46:19]**
That's a much better term than "exposition." Because you can't do exposition on your life. It's a movie term. So exposition in your life is a lore drop. Love it.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:46:36]**
"Unk." We've used this one before. Yep, this one's -- I loved this Snapchat. It just goes, "Unk thought he was slick." And it's this old guy with a goatee with a camera, and he is going, "I'm recording you. How do you feel about that?" But the camera is turned on himself, so it's just showing his own face. Yeah. He doesn't know about technology.
And then, "unk status" was a big phrase. This person, this video that I watched about signs that you've reached unk status, was very clearly made for children. It was very annoying to watch. Very silly acting. And anyway, it was things like grunting when you're sitting down. And a lot of them didn't even make sense, but they're all like, you know, you're just getting older, so you're reaching unk status, right?
I didn't put a graph of this one, because if you Google "unk," the internet just thinks you're looking for UNC, for University of North Carolina. Well, that's not going to help.
**Daniel Midgley [00:47:38]**
I will also say that "unk" is not always derogatory. I've seen references to, for example, David Byrne, formerly of Talking Heads, is touring again. His team is in their blue jumpsuits, doing great work. And somebody posted a clip with the caption, "Unk still got it."
**Trent R. Nelson [00:48:01]**
Well, yeah, "unk" has been for a long time sort of a term of endearment for an older person as well. I mean, you graduate from Big Bro to unk, and then after unk, you hit old head, which I don't know if we'll get to. But yeah, these are just the phases of life, Caitlin. These are just, you know, getting old.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [00:48:29]**
"Unk" and "old head" are definitely from African American Language. So those ones have new prominence, maybe in different ways, especially "unk status." But those have been around for a long, long time.
**Daniel Midgley [00:48:49]**
Oh, "allegations." There we go.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:48:53]**
Yeah, definitely. And there's "unk allegations." You cannot beat the unk allegations as well.
"Chopped," meaning ugly, that one I've seen a lot. And in fact, when people are talking about young people language, they'll use "chopped" and "unk" together, like "I'm chopped and unk." Ugly.
This guy that is in our visual aids, he uses the word "chopped" a lot, and I don't like it. Actually, I think there's something wrong with this guy. He's, well, he's a content creator, and that's the main thing, and again, for young people. And I just -- the whole thing gives me icky feelings.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:49:31]**
Now the "uzz" suffix, highly productive. This year, we had "huzz" for hoes. We had "chuzz" for chopped hoes, real nice. And then we had "bruzz" for bros. And to me, it feels adjacent to "-izzle." I don't know if you feel that way.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [00:49:51]**
Yeah. Again, another way to really kill it is to compare it to -izzle, but absolutely, yeah.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:50:02]**
Right, that's what I'm here for. I'm just here to puncture. It's just got a little bit of vowel modification, a little bit of centrality. That "O" -- drop it back. Very California, actually.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [00:50:21]**
It feels Kesha-coded to me, again as a millennial. Yeah.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:50:27]**
Well, again, very bless-coasty. I'm really proud of this. This is a photo I took myself at a bar in Portland called Honeybees, where I found -- they put out those sheets to color in, and then you put them on the board. And so one of them put their age as 67 and then they had the bee in the picture go "huzz." And so I was like, a two-for. I was out with a friend. We were doing holiday cocktail week, where we were going from bar to bar and sampling the different holiday cocktails that each one had. And so you would go like a crawl. And when I got there and we sat down, and I saw it, I was like, "Hang on one sec," and I had to go take a picture. She's like, "What is happening?" And I was like, "I don't want to explain, it's so embarrassing." But here we are, and I'm not embarrassed. I'm proud I found this in the wild.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:51:26]**
"Goon cave" had a moment for some reason. It was coined in 2022 -- thank you, @dril -- who posted, "I have saved $53,000 by claiming the home office tax deduction on my goon cave."
I looked up, like, why? Did gooning have any particular big spikes? It didn't. It was kind of last year, the discussion about gooning was. But it's just funny to talk about, right? It's masturbating. That's hilarious. Everybody wants to talk about that and laugh about that. And so here we are with "goon cave." It's the place where you do your gooning. The end. Moving on.
Here's the slide for "beating the allegations," because we already talked about the unk allegations. And so I had some examples, like --
**Trent R. Nelson [00:52:19]**
That's a top, top internet term, "beating the allegations." You're not beating the allegations, Caitlin.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:52:32]**
You're not beating the allegations. I know I've used it before. I'm not beating the "beating the allegations" allegations.
So we have Slate who posted, "Tech bros are not beating the never-read-an-entire-book allegations," because of this new product called Sauron, which is a high-end home security startup.
**Trent R. Nelson [00:52:47]**
They are telling us something. Let's pay attention to it. Palantir and Sauron. I mean, holy shit.
**Daniel Midgley [00:52:56]**
Don't build the torment nexus. I told you not to build the torment nexus.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:52:59]**
This is very "torment nexus" hours. But the thing about it is, the main thing that happens to Sauron is that he cannot prevent a small, hairy-footed guy from destroying the one thing he needs to secure his future. So why is this the name of your security system, when Sauron's security system was bad? Notoriously so.
**Daniel Midgley [00:53:27]**
Because they've never read an entire book. They did write a book, right? Several.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:53:35]**
That's right. I'm now gonna start my own home defense company, and I'm gonna call it "Smaug's Soft Underbelly," because apparently that's what we're doing.
And then we have Jamelle Bouie, friend of the institution of Liberal Currents, who wrote, "Kavanaugh not beating the allegations that he's a dumb ass," which is perennial, but it was true of this week, because he had a really hard time remembering what he thinks about what ICE should be able to do. And so, yeah, he kind of realized about the whole Kavanaugh stop situation that there was a problem and that he had maybe been the cause of it. So yeah, not beating the allegations for sure.
**Daniel Midgley [00:54:14]**
And now he can't wash off the stink. No, absolutely not.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:54:24]**
Okay. That was the "kids today" words. Can you believe it? Here we are on words related to social phenomena.
This one we could do a whole podcast about, right? Performative males. There's been a lot of back and forth about whether it's even okay to accuse this kind of guy of being performative, because what makes you a "performative male" is that you're overtly signaling that you're sensitive, that you're soft, that you are a feminist, that you love the kind of music that girls love, and that you like fashion and that you have good hygiene. That's all kind of the performative male thing, and it's there to say, "Hey, I'm not like a toxic male. I'm a different kind of male."
I'm not like the other boys. And so what happens is some of us feel a feeling that feels bad when we see too much of that performance of, "Look at me. I'm a nice boy," because we have experienced extreme torture at the hands of the nice guy. And so we get nervous because we're like, are you doing this because that's how you feel, and you're just like this? Or is this something you're doing to manipulate me?
And so that kind of suspicion then taints the whole thing, and then people get upset, and then the discourse explodes. And, yeah. I mean, I myself have been mistreated by men with guitars in my time. Who among us, right? Like, it is a thing that happens.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [00:56:10]**
This haircut, the ice cream haircut, it was dangerous.
**Daniel Midgley [00:56:12]**
Guys who are into Sarah McLachlan will break your heart. Been true for as long as Sarah McLachlan has existed, absolutely.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:56:32]**
So there is this whole back and forth of, is being a performative male just another kind of toxic trait, or are we now policing the kinds of male that you can be and making it harder for people to get away from the toxic male paradigm? Are we being too mean to the boys again? That's always a whole conversation.
Because the patriarchy is a trap, and it has many different kind of claws. And now look, we found another kind, I guess, is what it looks like.
But I put some photos in from the Toronto performative male contest, which was very fun because it injects a little silliness into it, a little self-awareness. And so men would come dressed as their idea of a performative male, and they were competing to see who was the most. And it always involved a book of some kind that was leftist literature or feminist literature. Bonus points if it's intersectional. It was so good. And their big headphones playing girly music, and their tote bags and their matcha tea, just having a good time and laughing with each other. So that's kind of nice.
**Daniel Midgley [00:57:06]**
Okay, you know what? Let them coalesce onto a few signifiers, and then the rest of us performative males can just get on with it, undetected.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:57:44]**
Exactly.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:58:03]**
Yeah, no, there's only two kinds of guy you can be now, and that's Andrew Tate, or this, apparently. So pick your lane.
**Daniel Midgley [00:58:11]**
So there's three genders. What, two male genders? No, no, there are two genders: male and political. That's what's really going on.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:58:28]**
That's right. Yeah.
So that's performative males. It definitely was a phrase that got used a lot, especially in the second half of this year, actually exclusively in the second half of this year, right? Seriously, yeah.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:58:41]**
The Rapture got a moment. That was fun. We had this weird vacation in late September. Let's all talk about the Rapture for a minute. And it was because a South African preacher went on a podcast and was like, "Yeah, no, it's totally happening. I know it for sure. It's going to be September 21st or 22nd or whatever." And then the day came, and nobody got raptured.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [00:59:12]**
And you know, this is again bringing us back to 2010, 2012. I feel like we had rapture parties.
**Daniel Midgley [00:59:24]**
And Harold Camping way back 20 years ago. So good. I haven't had a good rapture since then. I've lived through so many, but none like that.
**Caitlin M. Green [00:59:32]**
Yeah, this one was exciting because it involved TikTok, and there were a lot of, like, mostly white women who were giving you rapture tips on what to wear on the day and what kinds of things to leave behind. One of them had ordered a bunch of Bibles and was putting notes on them that were like, "It's not too late for you." And just scattering them all over town for all the people like me who are left behind, so that we would have some hope. Which is kind. Thank you.
**Trent R. Nelson [01:00:06]**
But does anybody think -- I feel like the Rapture is one of these things where nobody doesn't think that they're going. Anybody who believes that it's coming is going. There's nobody who's like, "I can't wait till everyone else is gone, right, so I can have all these Bibles." It's a strange phenomenon.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:00:31]**
Yeah, if you really believe the Rapture is coming, well, there was a whole thing where people who were ex-evangelical or were in the process of deconstructing were having to deal with extreme feelings of anxiety and guilt and fear, and all kinds of stuff was just coming back to them. Feelings that they had felt as children being raised in that culture. And even though they knew in their brain that they don't really believe in this anymore, those kinds of feelings are still there. So when something like this happens, it all just comes back, and they have to call their therapist and friends and cope with all those feelings that get brought up again.
**Trent R. Nelson [01:01:04]**
Rapture sounds a lot like Calvin's elect, right? Everybody who believes in this is part of the elect. And so therefore, they are going. And that is a somewhat reassuring belief system, that the Rapture is coming, and luckily, I'm part of it. Hey, cool. And so is everyone else who believes what I believe. And this is reassuring. For sure, everybody from my church is gonna go. We're all gonna fly.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:01:49]**
Well, it gave me a chance to revisit one of my favorite TV series, which was The Leftovers from HBO, which is a good show. So that was a good time, with a really disturbing theme song. At least the first season did this. The final season had a different theme song, and I didn't like it. But the first season was this beautiful, haunting instrumental piece, and it just panned along a painting of people being raptured, and the people on the earth reaching for them. And it really filled me with a cold, deep dread every time. And it was so effective. Such a good show.
**Daniel Midgley [01:02:33]**
So anyway, why would they have dressing tips on what to wear for the Rapture? Because you're just going to be sailing right out of those clothes as soon as it happens, right?
**Caitlin M. Green [01:02:40]**
Apparently, some of these people really felt like you were going to keep your clothes on, and you should wear pants so that when the people who are left on the ground look up, they don't see anything they don't want to see. You don't want to surprise anybody with an upskirt. So you should wear pants on Rapture Day, so that everyone is -- yeah.
**Daniel Midgley [01:02:59]**
They're still thinking about us. They're still thinking about us.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:03:06]**
Which is really kind. I noticed the word "glazing" having a moment. That's just like complimenting too much, or unnecessarily. That's a good one.
**Trent R. Nelson [01:03:23]**
I liked that. The amount of glazing that Isaac Newton got for saying that things fall is one of my favorite uses of this meme for sure.
**Daniel Midgley [01:03:33]**
What's the original context for glazing? What's the original context, please?
**Caitlin M. Green [01:03:38]**
That's a good question. I'm not actually sure where it came from.
**Daniel Midgley [01:03:43]**
My understanding was that it was a sexual term, and I now will read my list of words that never should have escaped their sexual context: glazing, raw-dogging flights, and so on. Circle jerk. Money shot. Fluffer. And sloppy seconds. We should just have corralled those into the sexual domain and never let them escape. But now here they are, everywhere.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:04:07]**
I love every single one of those. And so, right, the American Dialect Society did "raw-dogging" as one of their words last year, and I had so diligently made this beautiful thread of all the possible candidates of words and explaining what they were, putting up the Google Trends results for them. And then when it won, I made a post where I was like, "This is what raw-dogging is used to mean today." And I got the best internet response, which was a bunch of people being like, "This dumb bitch doesn't know that it's a sex word." And I was like, obviously I know what it is. I'm just saying what people are using it for this year. But so many people got to be so smug about it, to be like, "Oh, she's so clueless. She's so old and so clueless." I was like, oh my God, do I waste the energy being like, "Excuse me, internet, I do actually know that it's about sex." Anyway, it was a fun time.
So yeah, glazing. That makes sense. It's a sexy thing, because, of course, that translates to just like, "You're so great."
**Caitlin M. Green [01:05:34]**
Anyway, the Epstein files. People enjoyed talking about those. I very much enjoyed perusing J-Mail. I don't know if you guys went on there, but it was like a simulator for, imagine that you're Jeffrey Epstein logging into his own email account on, like, August 15, 2019. And so it just has his inbox. And so you can be like, you can search, "What did Dershowitz say to me?" Or, "What did Noam Chomsky say?"
**Daniel Midgley [01:06:02]**
What did Noam Chomsky say? What did Noam say? Oh, my God. You know what, guys? I'm a little bit tired of our intellectual thought leaders being literally in contact with a pedophilic cabal. I'm just tired.
**Trent R. Nelson [01:06:17]**
Brave words, Daniel. Brave words.
**Daniel Midgley [01:06:25]**
By the way, not imputing any wrongdoing to old Noam. But, you know, I didn't become friends with Epstein after his conviction. So what do I know?
**Caitlin M. Green [01:06:35]**
Right? You didn't write him a lovely little happy birthday note, you know, years after he was convicted for enticing minors across state lines. So weird.
**Daniel Midgley [01:06:41]**
He never asked. Yeah, the nerve. Odd.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:06:48]**
Here's a really political-sciency one: "glonzo." I don't know if you guys heard about this one. I don't think it made much of a ripple outside of essentially Bluesky, but people use it all the time there. Basically, it was opinion-haver William F. Buckley who coined it, and who said, "If 25% of the population believed that a creature called Glonzo caused high power prices by chewing through transmission lines, any competent politician would be negligent in not trying to find a way to exploit this. This doesn't mean that these people wouldn't be" -- and then there's a word about being unintelligent.
And yeah, so it became this thing of, even though something might not be true, if everybody's freaking out about it, shouldn't you use it to your advantage? And so for one example, it was the sex-trafficking cabal that the QAnon people assumed was happening. And people were saying, "Shouldn't you be taking all of that QAnon energy and being like, 'Oh my God, we did it. We found it. It's Trump,' right?" Like, wouldn't that be a good use of that energy?
And so that's what the discussion was about: do you do a glonzo thing? And then the phrase "glonzo hunt" came about, where people would say, "Well, if you really want to energize people, you should propose a glonzo hunt."
**Trent R. Nelson [01:08:04]**
So it's the opposite of saying that everything is a distraction. It's being like, "Oh, are you upset about something? Let's freak out about it. But in the way that my directionality suggests that you should."
**Caitlin M. Green [01:08:37]**
There we go. I finally got to "aura farming."
That's a good candidate. I think it's got a really strong spike in 2025. My first interaction with it was that Indonesian kid on the boat. I don't know if you guys remember him, but it was a rowing competition. The way that these particular boats work is you have the rowers, and then you have a guy on the front who's a child, because he needs to be light and short. So he's on there, and he's doing a dance. And to the outsiders, people were just like, "I'm not sure if this is just for vibes or if he's communicating information to the guys." But whatever it is, the dance he's doing looks so cool. And he's got his fresh outfit on, he's got his sunglasses on because it's a rowing competition on a river in the summer. But he's doing this thing, and there's a cycle motion and hands, and it looks amazing. And everybody just got obsessed with this kid. He became part of the brain-rot sphere. You can get 3D-printed figurines of him now. He's the Indonesian boat-racing kid.
But in that case, it was effortless cool, caught on film and propagated so that you just have this. But for a lot of examples of aura farming that I found, it seemed like it was a try-hard thing, like inauthentic trying to get attention. And so for my other example, I put Benson Boone. Can't stop doing backflips on stage. And people got sick of it, and they're like, "Just enough aura farming. We get it, you can do a backflip. Do something else."
**Trent R. Nelson [01:10:22]**
In the historical communities, aura farming is oftentimes brought up when they show, like, Edward the Black Prince's black suit of armor, or Charles the Fifth's super-duper engraved suit of armor, right? This sort of effortless coolness that we don't always associate with the past. So yeah, it's show-offy. It's attention-getting.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:10:53]**
And yeah, I think it is, again, with performativity, right? People are really concerned about performativity. That's a big one.
Okay, labubus and lefus.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:11:06]**
So they are these little dolls. I cannot get behind them. I hate them a lot, actually. But they have a little vinyl face and vinyl feet, and then fuzzy bodies. They have little bunny ears, and they come from this thing called The Monsters, which is a Scandinavian thing.
Anyway, they're these little dolls. And apparently everybody's just glommed on, specifically to Labubu, which is one of the characters from The Monsters. I don't get out much, but I was recently in Tokyo, and I saw a lot of Labubu keychains on a lot of backpacks for sure. And that was a thing in Tokyo that I very much enjoyed, actually. Everybody's belt loops, backpacks, bags, whatever, had little plushes on them. And I got myself a Totoro one. It's very fun. I'm enjoying wearing it around. It gives me joy. But yeah, Labubus were certainly a category of that you could have there.
And then lefus -- they are fakes.
**Trent R. Nelson [01:12:12]**
I wish that I could be around in 100 years so that I could see all of the people doing exactly what we do to dolls that are 100 years old. Like, "Oh my God, these are scary. Haunted dolls." This is a terrifying thing. This is not a pleasant-looking thing. We just know it through the context that it's a fun Scandinavian deal, but the future is gonna be like, "This is creepy."
**Caitlin M. Green [01:12:31]**
But anyway, there's a lot of discussion about how to tell the difference between a Labubu and a lefu, which is a counterfeit Labubu. And I read them all very dutifully, and then immediately forgot everything, because I was like, I don't actually care about this at all.
But they were like, "Oh, you're gonna find some imperfections." But then I read one that was like, obviously real Labubus have imperfections, but lefus have worse ones. And I was like, well, you've already lost me. If I find an imperfection -- but one of the main points, they were like, "Well, if it seems like it's a really good price, then it's not real." And I was like, cool, that's so fun.
And that's why I included a screenshot of the Pop Mart website, where you can see that one of these dolls is $115. Because I think that's important to know. And you can get the keychain mini version for like $35 or something. So if you don't want to break the bank, you can get the small one.
The one thing that I think really made Labubus go totally off, out into the stratosphere, is they engage in the blind box trend, which is, if you're a Pokemon fan, you'll be very familiar with the blind box. You don't know which Labubu is in the packaging. So it's an opaque box. You pay the money, you bring it home, you unbox it, perhaps for content, perhaps you've bought many of these boxes, and you can unbox them all for content. And then, of course, it's like that thing that always happens with the Pokemon cards too: "I already have this one. I was looking for a different one. Better go back and get more."
**Trent R. Nelson [01:14:30]**
I just got rage-baited something fierce, because I hate the unboxing trend. Oh my God, I hate it so much. It is just the most absolutely smarmy, grotesque capitalism that one can imagine. Watch me buy something and open it and enjoy it. You're not doing it. I mean, it is just so crass. I hate it, and I hate it, and I hate it.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [01:14:57]**
I want to point out that I love that "lefu" is fake Labubu. It's not "temu Labubu." And so we do have, again, sort of this off-brand market. It's beautiful.
**Daniel Midgley [01:15:24]**
And you can always tell the Lanikis because they're spiky.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:15:23]**
Oh my gosh, linguist joke, everybody look out.
Very nice. So yeah, Labubus, they were very trendy. Good job.
This is kind of a mean-spirited one, but it did have a moment, and that's "Mar-a-Lago face," which is the idea that, especially for the women, but I put Matt Gaetz in there too, because for some of the men as well, there's a particular way that when you're doing modifications to your face, you will end up looking very similar to your compatriots in the MAGA movement. It's like a lot of them are actually just going to the same person to get their procedures done. But also, there's just an aesthetic, right? And so you need kind of long, wavy hair, you need full lips, you need big fillers in your cheekbones, you need to get tan.
But then, if you ask them in a vulnerable moment, "What are you doing exactly?" they will say there's a way Trump likes us to look. Which made me kind of sad to think about.
**Trent R. Nelson [01:16:38]**
Gender-affirming care.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:16:47]**
Well, yeah. And then the other thing is that if you go too far, if you look like too -- Laura Loomer suffered this. There were actually rumors in the White House that Trump stopped wanting to hang out with her, not because she was too out there or too ideologically wild, but because her plastic surgery looked bad and he didn't want to look at her anymore.
**Daniel Midgley [01:17:14]**
Which is -- it's such a metaphor for the whole age, because these people are wrecking themselves on the rocks of this guy, and he's not going to be around forever, but they still will live on, and they'll have these choices. It's really metaphorical.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [01:17:33]**
I'm also thinking about the authenticity-inauthenticity theme, and I know folks have written about this with Mar-a-Lago face in particular, but it's like reveling in the inauthenticity. The idea is not to look like yourself, but more or smoother or extra, but it's to look a way that is a few steps removed.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:17:50]**
So, and if you remember that Vanity Fair photo shoot that happened very recently, it was very intentional. I think that it was -- was it Karoline Leavitt? The photo of her was so zoomed in that you could see the injection sites from her filler. And I was like, you know, there were so many ways to not have that happen. Even an opaque lip color would have covered that up. But the photographer wanted that there, because it's part of the culture of being in the movement, you know, all of this body discipline that you're doing to yourself.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:18:47]**
All right, this one was a fairly recent one, but the idea of "going no contact" went really viral in late November when Oprah did a podcast episode about going no contact. Because what happens when you talk about this is that you get the people who have -- they're adults who can't talk to their parents for whatever reason, because the parents have been abusive. They've realized that there's no fruitful way to be in contact with their parents. So they will come out and be like, "Here's my story of why I have gone no contact and why that's been right for me."
And then you also get a bunch of parents who are unable to accept those reasons, who go out and are like, "My ungrateful children have been torturing me for no reason. All I did was love them." And then that is actually such a huge rage bait content opportunity, where everybody's engaging with that and people are getting in fights in the comments.
And one of the reasons why the Oprah episode in particular was especially a powder keg was that she had on a panel of therapists and experts, one of whom was a guy who -- oh, Dr. Joshua Coleman -- was on the panel of experts talking about how kids today are too quick to go no contact with their parents, and that there are real abusive situations where it's the right thing to do, but there are also a lot of times where it's actually really damaging, and that there is a positive way forward. Come to find out, his daughter is no contact with him.
And so his whole brand is about figuring out ways for adult children and their parents to not be no contact, and highlighting kind of the pain of these estranged parents. And so I looked around and I found that there's actually a lot of organizations like that. There's Parents of Estranged Adult Children, and there's PEAC, and PEAK is a different one -- Parents of Estranged Adult Kids. There's just a bunch of these, and it's all about the pain. They're support groups of parents who have experienced no contact with their children and are either trying to come to terms with it or are trying to brainstorm ways to circumvent it.
So yeah, people really wanted to talk about being no contact, which I get.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:21:35]**
Okay, category three: language of the fash.
So Trump had fun with tariffs. You can see on the Google Trends graph a bunch of spikes, which all correspond to times when the tariffs were supposed to kick in. And everyone was like, "Wait, what is this going to mean for us? What is this actually going to do?" It's been a mess. Everybody hates it. It's been going very badly. Even a lot of Trump allies are like, "Why is this happening to us? Why are we having to deal with this?"
**Trent R. Nelson [01:22:11]**
Not beating the allegations of having never read any economic literature at all.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:22:18]**
Well, they used AI a lot of the time to figure out what the tariff rate should be, but they were asking it really silly questions. Like, "How much do we buy from them? Okay, let's make that into a percent. Now that's the tariff." It was like, that math doesn't make any sense. So yeah, Trump went up and he put up this big poster of reciprocal tariffs, and it's just full of numbers that make no sense. So good job, Trump.
OpSec had a moment. It had a real moment. I enjoyed OpSec. And so, yeah, that's the time when Jeffrey Goldberg accidentally got added into a Signal chat of defense -- yeah, Signal Gate -- where they were discussing the strike, the Houthi strike. Small chat, small group. And yeah, he got to watch them in real time, and then later on truly realized, "Oh yeah, these were actual strikes that happened that they were planning right in front of me."
And so in this Signal chat, while they had a journalist accidentally added into it, Pete Hegseth wrote, "More to follow per timeline. We are currently clean on OpSec. Godspeed to our warriors." So OpSec, short for operational security. They were not currently clean on OpSec, actually, as it turned out.
**Daniel Midgley [01:23:50]**
I'm really fond of this style of shortening. It's very Soviet, isn't it? Instead of taking an acronym, you take the first syllable of relevant words, like Comintern or Komintern, or things like that. I love it.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:24:04]**
Yeah, it's really fun. So honorable mention for the emoji combination of the fist and the American flag and the fire, which Michael Waltz put in after they did an airstrike.
**Daniel Midgley [01:24:20]**
Just very unserious people. These people are 12. Everybody is 12, theory vindicated yet again.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:24:28]**
Okay, here's a super fascist idea: the concept of the "Heritage American."
And I have a couple of related terms with this, but basically, "Heritage American" is a phrase that was developed to differentiate "real" Americans -- by which we mean white, Christian, Anglo-Saxon Americans -- from "paperwork Americans," which are people who earned their citizenship through the citizenship process. Or "hyphenated Americans," which are like Irish Americans, Greek Americans, Italian Americans, Asian Americans -- the "not real ones."
And if you look at who's talking about Heritage Americans, it's straight-up fascists, obviously. But they also don't always agree on what a Heritage American is. So the one that Ragnar Lifthrasir, the Substack guy, his idea of a Heritage American is like, were you a Puritan? Were you among the very first generation of Anglo-Saxon immigrants to America? And if not, you don't count.
**Daniel Midgley [01:25:44]**
Hey, Caitlin, is by any chance speaking English sometimes considered in that definition?
**Caitlin M. Green [01:25:52]**
Yeah, you have to be an English-speaking American.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [01:25:59]**
I think that's too broad. That's not enough. Speaking English is not enough.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:26:04]**
No, like, you literally can't even be Celtic. You can't be Irish, you can't be Scottish, you can't be German. Weirdly, even though, where did the English come from anyway? Not important.
And yeah, but for him, it's like you have to have been among the very first Protestant people who first set foot on American soil. But for a lot of these other guys, it's like, have you been here since the 1800s? That's good enough to be a Heritage American.
But this guy, he had a bunch of different types of Americans. So you could be a Heritage American -- great. You could be a hyphenated American -- very bad, because you have a "dual loyalty." And we all know what's meant by "dual loyalty." And in fact, yes, indeed, the word "Jewish" is present several times in this essay by this guy about what a Heritage American is, because if you're at all aware of your origins not being British, that makes you suspect, because you're actually also loyal to that old country, but not the British one. The British one's fine.
And then there's something called "ally Americans," which are people who fall in these other bad categories, but they are white supremacists, so it's okay. So that's somebody like Stephen Miller, who is a Jewish American, and so he can't actually be a Heritage American, but he's doing great things for the movement. So, let's be friends with him. He's an "ally American."
**Savithry Namboodiripad [01:27:40]**
We'll see how long Kash Patel or Vivek or whoever can stay in that category. Oh, right. Yeah, I think they probably could get kicked out of being an ally American.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:27:52]**
Well, and that's the thing, is they're all contingently allowed, and at arm's length. Yeah, provisional status.
So yeah, the first version of this that I saw was "paperwork Americans" versus "Christian Americans," which is a weird dichotomy, because, of course, there's a lot of Christians that are not from America. But I was with my mom at the time, and I was like, "Paperwork Americans." And she was like, "But that's me."
**Trent R. Nelson [01:28:20]**
Yeah. Shout out to your mom. Shout out to my grandma. These are just simple paperwork Americans. No big deal. Not real ones, actually.
**Daniel Midgley [01:28:36]**
The use of the word "heritage" is interesting, because, you know, heritage, inherit. It's like you didn't do anything to earn it. You simply inherited it. And people often squander their inheritance as well. So that's interesting.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:28:50]**
Yeah, I would say these guys are in that group, absolutely. And it brings to mind that idea of being so proud of something that somebody before you in your bloodline did, and it's like, okay, but what have you done? How about you contribute to society? "Well, I don't have to. I have a Substack about why my race is better than the other races."
**Caitlin M. Green [01:29:15]**
DOGE. That's from the first half of the year, and everyone's now forgotten about DOGE.
A moment of respect and apology for the actual doge, which was a sweet little Shiba Inu from Japan who belonged to a kindergarten teacher who put a photo of her on her blog, and people just really liked the way that the dog was looking to the side, and it was so cute. And it became a meme. That dog lived to 18 years old and only died last year, so she was well-loved and taken care of. I know. What a sweet baby.
And unfortunately, Elon Musk, who has "become meme" as he will tell you, decided that he was going to create the Department of Government Efficiency, which is an acronym to DOGE, and he was going to do whatever he was going to do.
**Trent R. Nelson [01:30:16]**
There was a time when the doge was in Venice, and now it's all over the internet.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:30:24]**
You're right. I said the dog was the original, but really it's -- yeah, that's why we have a historian.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [01:30:33]**
I'm spending the year in DC, and people have been using the term, "Oh, did you get DOGEd?" or "No, don't worry, I didn't get DOGEd," to figure out if they still have their jobs or not. So I wanted to share that.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:30:47]**
That's so good. Love it. So that's a little bit of conversion right now -- we have a noun into a verb. So that's great. So yeah, a lot of people got DOGEd, but as it turns out, recently revealed, they saved negative money. So that's really cool.
**Daniel Midgley [01:31:10]**
It was always a con.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:31:12]**
They just disrupted so much and messed up a bunch of people's lives and made a bunch of things not work anymore. Yeah, and it cost more than they cut.
**Trent R. Nelson [01:31:23]**
And it killed people. It killed thousands, hundreds of thousands, continuing to, right? The USAID cuts, the NIH cuts, the public health -- all of that has just obscene human life costs. Blood is on his hands. It is so wild that he was out there at CPAC with a red chainsaw when, literally, he is a mass murderer.
**Trent R. Nelson [01:31:56]**
The textbooks are going to be lit. I know that's not a word that we use anymore, but they're going to be fantastic when the children get to read -- like, we got to read about how the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers, right? But they never brought a red chainsaw on stage and performatively destroyed things.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:32:21]**
Did they ever wear their son like a human shield around their head? No.
**Daniel Midgley [01:32:28]**
I'm looking forward to the Wokenberg Trials. They're going to be great.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:32:33]**
Great time anyway. "Groyper" became a thing for a minute there. This actually really makes me mad. If you look at the Google Trends, there's a huge spike in late September, and that's because when Charlie Kirk was assassinated, there was a bunch of speculation that the person who did it might have been a groyper. There were a bunch of articles, "What is a groyper?" We actually did a podcast episode, right, describing what a groyper is, while also saying that's not who it was, right?
And Daniel, first on Because Language, you guys talked about groyper because it was a word that was of great interest. What I'm mad about is the fact that that spike is just a spike, and it goes back to flat at the end of that moment of speculation, because the groypers and Nick Fuentes and the white supremacist young person's movement that he represents continues to be a threat to this country. And so I wish that we had figured out a way to have more momentum after that peak of interest, because it still bears discussion, right? And we had Nick Fuentes talking to Tucker Carlson and getting mainstreamed and normalized in that way. It's dangerous. And he is looking to grow his audience, and it's working. So I hate all of that.
**Trent R. Nelson [01:33:50]**
Joe Rogan and Shane Gillis were just talking about him the other day. They were saying, "You know this kid, you know, right now, you couldn't imagine him running for office. But give it 20 years, right?" And that is horrifying, terrifying. This is a Nazi. This is a Nazi, plain and simple.
And they are -- well, they are acting in bad faith, I think it's easy to say, but they are certainly not aiding society in any way. That's for sure. We could have some real discussions about groypers, as we did with Amanda, as we did, I believe, with Marissa as well. But instead, I suspect we'll get another spike when something else dreadful happens instead.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:34:47]**
Yep. The object permanence is not strong, so that's unfortunate.
"Great Replacement" was getting discussed in big ways. Hang on one sec.
Anyway, "Great Replacement" had a moment. "White genocide" had a moment, especially when Grok, for some reason, wouldn't stop talking about the Boers and South Africa. You could just say hi to him and he'd be like, "You know something about this reminds me of the white genocide."
**Daniel Midgley [01:35:20]**
Oh, wow. "Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white." That's funny, because I thought "anti-woke" was a code word for anti-Black. I wonder which one's more correct.
**Trent R. Nelson [01:35:30]**
What a world we live in.
**Daniel Midgley [01:35:33]**
This part's no fun, man.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:35:35]**
I know. This section is the worst. Sorry, guys.
**Daniel Midgley [01:35:39]**
Let's lighten it up.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:35:43]**
Oh no, we're not going to. In fact, we're going to make things worse, because the R-slur was under discussion a lot.
**Daniel Midgley [01:35:55]**
It's made a comeback. Coming back. Yeah, we had one. I had an episode of Talk the Talk on this back in 2010, and at the time it was struggling to come back, but a lot of people were successful at pressing it down. And there were campaigns saying, "Don't use that." So there was some kind of consensus forming, and it was disappearing. But now it's coming back with a vengeance.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:36:14]**
So yeah, I read a paper that said that after January 5th of this year, which is when Elon Musk used it as a comeback when he got insulted, the usage of the R-slur tripled on Twitter in the aftermath of him using it. So he's definitely part of normalizing it.
We've got Matthew Yglesias saying, "Because he won, I can say --" This behavior makes them all look like -- and he used the word. Right.
**Trent R. Nelson [01:36:57]**
Why don't we have some honor? How about that? How about, instead of "because he won, I can do this," how about, "Because I have a sense of moral certainty that we just shouldn't use language like this to describe people?"
**Daniel Midgley [01:37:11]**
Well, because, Trent, empathy is an exploit. Come on, get with the program.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:37:16]**
You're right. "Empathy is an exploit," etc., etc. So I talked to Constance Grady from Vox because she was writing an article about the resurgence of this word, and one of the things that I wanted to tell her, that I have noticed from looking at the political discourse, is that it is a really quick and effective signal that you can use to say, "I am not woke. I am not PC. I am cool and dangerous and edgy." And so that's why you get people who are supposed to be on the left using it too, to be like, "No, no, I'm not one of those cringing, scolding woke people. I'm cool, actually."
And that's just so gross.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [01:38:01]**
And I think the fact that we had this term that was used very widely when we were younger, and then I teach a class called Language Discrimination -- I've taught it for a little less than 10 years -- and during that time is when it was really not used anymore. People started saying "R-slur." That was not happening 15 or 20 years ago, as we've indicated already. And then there's this nostalgia, I feel, for about 10 or 15 years ago. And I think we're seeing that in a lot of these trendy things, and the echoes of that.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:38:43]**
Yep, this would be a great one to have die. Let's not brook any of that. We don't need to truck any of that.
**Trent R. Nelson [01:38:51]**
To your point, Savi, I brought this up before, specifically, actually, to Caitlin, that our generation, this was a more widely used word when we were younger. And it seems to me that probably between 2010 and 2015, there was a concerted effort to sort of banish the use of this word. And I kind of have drawn a line to that and the woke/anti-woke backlash, right? People who use the word are the types of people who used to use the word and then got frustrated that other people stopped using it, or said that it was no longer reasonable to use. And so this is sort of the revenge of the Sith, in so many ways.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [01:39:34]**
Right. And when we taught about this word, we would use it as sort of an example of, well, this was a successful case of a community coming together, and we all decided, "Not doing this anymore. We can demonstrate that this is harmful. We can stop doing it." Right? So it's like changing the Washington football team. There are some of these cases that have happened during the time that I've taught this course of, "Oh, the change gets made."
And I know folks have written about this with the backlash to "woke" being basically like, oh, people were mad that they had to do a DEI training. Or, no one's actually stopping anyone from saying these things. People just decided that that was not something that we wanted to say. We all decided. No one told you you can't say that. People just didn't say it. And there was this narrative that we were all told, "Can't say this anymore," and now we're asserting our freedom to be terrible.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:40:49]**
And just like with the sort of cancel culture panic, it's this idea that not only should you be allowed to say it, but nobody's actually allowed to think less of you for saying it. That's right.
**Trent R. Nelson [01:41:10]**
So often, freedom of speech in our current context means freedom from being judged by others. And that is simply a freedom that I don't think has ever existed, nor could it. How could it? "Suspend what you think of me, and I'll just say whatever I want, and then you say whatever you want." And of course, I'm not going to suspend what I think of you. I'm going to call you woke, right?
So it's unfortunate that we live in the time we live in. But I suspect that if we closed our eyes and went back 200 years, we'd see an analogous situation to some degree. There's always somebody frustrated that we're not doing it like we used to do, we're not able to talk the way we used to talk or say the thing we used to say.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [01:42:02]**
But the very basis of fascism is going back to an imagined, homogenized past that never existed, when everything was cool, right?
**Trent R. Nelson [01:42:09]**
Everybody used to do the thing I did, and now they do different stuff, and I don't like it. And that shouldn't be allowed, actually, because I believe in freedom, and so other people shouldn't be allowed to do stuff that I don't think is cool.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:42:25]**
Awesome. All right, so let's get to category four, which I called "language of the resistance" -- the kind of things that people who don't like Trump were saying. So the phrase "leopards eating faces" had a resurgence, which was coined in 2015 from a post by Adrian Bott that says, "I never thought leopards would eat my face," sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.
And yeah, it's an all-timer, really. And so the idea that leopards will eat your face -- the thing you voted for will happen to you -- has become really huge. So a really recent one is Marjorie Taylor Greene keeps coming out and being like, "Do you know what? I think the GOP is pretty misogynist." And people being like, "Yeah. You helped."
**Daniel Midgley [01:43:16]**
It finally affected you. It finally affected you.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:43:18]**
Yeah, exactly. There were some less than savory uses of "leopards eating faces" this year. Like, when people in the American South experienced the consequences of the Trump presidency, people would be like, "Well, that's just leopards eating your face." And then other people had to come in and say, "Hey, just a reminder, there's a lot of people in the South that did not vote for this. It is not okay to be smug about them having a really bad time."
So yeah, there was a lot of leopards eating faces discussion, meta-discussion.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:43:58]**
The use of "egg" as a mass noun was so fun. A lot of, like, "Trump take egg. Trump make egg cost more." Shiv Ramdas was like, "I gave some democracy to get more egg, and now I have no democracy and no egg."
People were taking photos of the empty shelves at the grocery store, the egg shortage. It was wild. Trump take egg.
**Trent R. Nelson [01:44:27]**
I like that one. Yeah, the leopards ate my eggs.
**Daniel Midgley [01:44:30]**
The lion does not concern himself with how many there are and how much they cost.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:44:36]**
"Masterful gambit, sir" has become a phrase that you can use to mock Elon Musk for doing something unfathomably silly. So that comes from 2022. Timmy C wrote, "Elon Musk slams dick in car door. Musk fans: Masterful gambit, sir." Because they will just compliment him for whatever. And so there's a bunch of examples of just him being silly, or him losing his companies a lot of money, or him doing horrible things to the government, and then people being like, "Wow, 5D chess, am I right, you guys?"
**Savithry Namboodiripad [01:45:15]**
5D chess.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:45:18]**
He's so impressive, actually. And maybe what he's doing, on the surface, looks very stupid, but what you have to remember is that he's a genius. And so there you go. All done.
So yeah, when he told somebody that they have tiny testicles, instead of actually arguing back against their point: masterful gambit, sir.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:45:48]**
Why not talk about the Kavanaugh stop? That's a phrase that was created in order to draw the parallel from Brett Kavanaugh and his assenting argument and his ridiculous claim that if you are a citizen of the United States and a CBP or ICE agent comes to you and accuses you of not being a citizen, that it will not be much of a burden or a problem for you to just show him that you are a citizen and go about your day and nothing bad will happen to you.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [01:46:25]**
Over and over and over and over. Moreover, predicated on the fact that if you look Hispanic, are speaking Spanish in public, then you don't get to do that. You don't have the freedom to do that. You are able to be stopped.
**Daniel Midgley [01:46:46]**
It's the new Santorum. It's tied it to him. I love this.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:46:53]**
Absolutely. And there's a lot of evidence that actually he is aware and upset about the fact that his name has been tied to this. And that's great. I love that. Love that for him.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [01:47:09]**
Wonderful. You signed it, buddy. You signed your opinion. So yeah, it's in the record.
**Daniel Midgley [01:47:10]**
Gigantic document. Maybe he shouldn't have written a gigantic document.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:47:13]**
The word "concentration camp" has been of interest to people. Unfortunately, there are some spikes there, because I think people are literally Googling, "Do we have those? Is that happening?" And the answer is, yeah, a little bit. Definitely.
And the expose on CECOT definitely got people talking about it as well. And so that's why one of the most popular Onion headlines this year was "Historians Quibbling Over Exact Definition of Concentration Camp Sign of Healthy Society." Because, yeah, unfortunately, we do have people being like, "Well, it's not really. It's like a processing center, actually." Or, "It's a holding cell for really bad dudes. So it's okay."
**Trent R. Nelson [01:48:05]**
Yeah, that's what the Nazis said, too. Absolutely. And yeah, all the same language, just back, redecorated in new bows and stuff.
**Daniel Midgley [01:48:12]**
Reminds me of the first Trump term when Kellyanne Conway had to defend the administration, because AOC had called the "tender age care facilities" concentration camps. And she had to go on and defend it. And I loved it, because every day that you have to explain why what you're doing is not a concentration camp, every day you have to do that is a day you're not winning.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:48:45]**
Yeah, absolutely. And that was really true at the time. She was getting no end of flak for that. So that's great.
On the theme of calling a spade a spade: "eugenics." People got interested in whether something was eugenics or not. Amazing, because a lot of what was happening was eugenics. So I put for my visual aid the annoying glasses couple, the pronatalists, the Collinses, and their whole ideology that we should be outbreeding the other "undesirables," basically.
And then JD Vance, at the March for Life, he gave this really disturbing speech about saving Western civilization through breeding. And, yeah, outbreeding the woke and everything. And that's so gross. And people were like, "Hey, I think that might be eugenics." And, yeah, you're right. Correct.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [01:49:36]**
And not surprising that we also had the R-slur in the same year.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:49:42]**
Incredible stuff, right? Yeah, absolutely. Great Replacement, white genocide, the R-slur all together. What do we have? Eugenics.
TACO was big. It was "Trump Always Chickens Out." The libs were making a bunch of AI slop about it. I picked one to show you guys, which is Trump in a chicken suit. There's a lot where his head is melting uncomfortably into a taco shell. It was really weird to look at. But yeah, there's a lot of AI slop of that.
A reminder that my buddy Jack, who has been protesting at the Portland ICE facility, the reason why he's dressed as a chicken is because, initially, he was dressed up for a TACO protest, and he picked a chicken suit because Trump Always Chickens Out. But it was really about tariffs originally -- that he won't actually do it, because he's such a chicken. And it turned out, when he learned that people were saying TACO at him, he got real mad. And again, we love it when we make him sad. Yeah, nastiest question, he said.
**Daniel Midgley [01:50:48]**
And of course, the investment community got into "TACO trades" where he said he was going to do a thing, but you knew he wasn't going to do it. So you could -- when the market dumped on advance news -- bet on it not happening, load up, and then it'll pop again. So those were TACO trades.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:51:05]**
Amazing. You're short-selling the President's bravery, basically. Perfect.
Antifa. Everyone wanted to talk about Antifa. There was a roundtable on Antifa. Andy Ngo got to go on TV again, which is a crime. He got to talk all about his book *Unmasked*, all about how bad and yucky Antifa is and how they tried to kill him with milkshakes. See our episode on Andy Ngo with the Posting Through It guys for more information.
Nick Sortor, who is exactly as off-putting as you might think in person, was on TV a bunch talking about it because he fell in a hole one time. That's Antifa's fault.
**Daniel Midgley [01:51:57]**
Masterful gambit, sir.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:52:03]**
I think I showed Trent, but I found a video of Nick Shirley, who's another one of these far-right influencers. He was doing a video at the Portland ICE facility, and he panned around and I found myself in the background. I hadn't even realized he was there. I didn't know he was there until I found myself in the background of one of his videos. I was like, yep, so I was that close to him, and I had no clue.
So, yeah, Antifa. Everyone wants to talk about Antifa. Similarly, the Antifascist Frog had a moment. People wanted to talk about that, the inflatable movement. We love that. The Antifa Frog has now blossomed into a -- what's a group of frogs called?
**Trent R. Nelson [01:53:13]**
A group of frogs is an army.
**Daniel Midgley [01:53:21]**
Yeah, and there's also a knot of frogs. There's a bunch -- it's appeared different ways. Let's see. I like "frog congregation." Let us congregate. Did you know that I was Antifa Frog for Halloween? I was.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [01:53:36]**
I was too, and my husband dressed up as Toad, which is the girlfriend event. If you remember, they said they caught the girlfriend of the leader of Antifa.
**Daniel Midgley [01:53:48]**
Nice job. Nice job. That's delightful. Handed out candy with my little amphibian hands.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:53:59]**
Oh my gosh. It's not easy, if you're inflatable, to grasp.
This is one of our favorites: "stove touching." So this is the tendency to do the thing that's gonna hurt everybody, just to see if you get away with it, basically. So yeah, friend of the show Ned Resnikoff wrote, "We're doing it, folks," about a major stock market tumble in anticipation of a bunch of tariffs. And yeah, he says, "I prefer this burner to the one labeled 'major war.' Hopefully, by placing both hands on this one, we can avoid that one."
**Trent R. Nelson [01:54:26]**
Earlier in our Half the Answer lifetime, we did say "touch grass or touch the stove." Make a choice.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:54:48]**
Yeah, absolutely. Touching the stove. Yikes.
"The horrors" became a cute way to refer generally to 2025 and what it is like. And yeah, I really appreciated this post from Molly Templeton, who, on Bluesky, said, "I have a little plea, and it's this: please keep posting about things that aren't the horrors. I am not saying to not look at or be informed about the horrors. What I am saying, what I am genuinely kind of begging you to do, is keep posting about books and movies and sunsets and pets and joy, please." Which, yeah, we on Bluesky do have a tendency to get bogged down in the horrors and forget that there's other things about life. And we need the mood boost to keep our energy up to continue to contend with the horrors.
**Trent R. Nelson [01:55:40]**
"The horrors" is super-duper British and Irish Islands, right? "The Troubles." Like, straight -- the Troubles.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:55:52]**
"No Kings." Yeah, the Google Trends results were so funny because it's just two huge spikes around the weekends that the two major No Kings protests happened. They were huge. They were so huge, and everybody wanted to talk about them. And they made Trump so mad that he posted an AI-generated video of him dropping poop on us, which I think is a win.
Yeah, even his closest allies were embarrassed about that.
**Daniel Midgley [01:56:15]**
But there is no embarrassment. I mean, it's what he does. It's classic Trump. If he's losing control of the discourse, which he did at that time, just do something outrageous. Roll around, fall off the stage, do anything, and get the attention back on you. Because attention is power. We need to learn this. Act wild in some way and see if you can get the attention back. Hey, rage bait, right?
**Caitlin M. Green [01:56:48]**
You can never go too far, right?
And then the Canadian version of, "We are resisting," was, of course, "elbows up," which is a hockey term. It's a defensive posture that's also a little bit offensive. And it's maybe a little questionable rules-wise. But if you feel like you really need to, you gotta put those elbows up. Elbows up.
And so Mike Myers got to say it on SNL at the very end. And so that is kind of why the US Americans kind of paid attention to it. And yeah, it was really huge at the beginning of the year because of the whole tariffs thing. But I believe people are saying it more and more still. I don't think it's over.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [01:57:42]**
Hockey's back. Everyone wants to talk about sexy hockey. So sexy elbows up is coming.
**Caitlin M. Green [01:57:55]**
Great. And then, just an honorable mention for all of the words that might cause you to lose your NIH or NSF grant money.
I have the whole list here. It's remarkable. Obviously, stuff like "affirming care" is going to get you kicked off, of course, because that's ideologically unacceptable. If you happen to say the phrase "assigned at birth" or "assigned female at birth" or "assigned male at birth," that puts you at risk. If you say "at risk," that puts you at risk. If you say "barrier" or "belong" or "bias," that can put you in danger. If you put the phrase "breastfeed" next to the concept of a "person," that can put you in danger of losing your funding. If you say "chest feed," that's very bad. Don't ever do that. "Pregnant person" -- again, you can't do that. That would be gender-inclusive, and so therefore, you're in danger.
**Trent R. Nelson [01:59:04]**
I was so confused about "pregnant person." I absolutely could not understand it, until I realized that it's like, oh, "pregnant woman." You have to say "woman."
**Caitlin M. Green [01:59:14]**
Yeah, because there's no other kind of person who can be pregnant, obviously. And if you act like there is, then you're actually a monster.
**Daniel Midgley [01:59:24]**
They really are afraid of words. They really are, right? Words must be powerful. They must be, because apparently there's a whole thing where you can't use them if they're too woke.
**Trent R. Nelson [01:59:37]**
Well, it seems to me that they're afraid of -- as was noted earlier in this discussion -- but I think literally everybody's language is changing constantly. Constant evolution. From week to week, from month to month, from year to year. And this seems like something that somehow they are frustrated about.
**Caitlin M. Green [02:00:00]**
Yeah, they don't like it. And they have this whole thing about freedom of speech and ideological freedom and diversity of thought and viewpoint diversity, etc. But then, as it turns out, there's this whole list of so many words that they do not want to see in your science grant applications. And a lot of those words have to do with gender, race, wealth, and social issues that they just really actually want to prevent being researched.
**Daniel Midgley [02:00:19]**
I have a cheat code, and that is just add "for us" to everything they say. "We want freedom of speech -- for us." "We want to Make America Great Again -- for us." "This wokeism is going to destroy society -- the one that's been created for us." I just mentally add that, and it works every time. It's beautiful. It's so effective.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [02:00:57]**
Good. Yeah, I will say, I had the great experience of writing a final report for my NSF grant on January 30th. It ended right in time, but I couldn't use any of those terms. And even before that, the year when I was awarded it, I had to have a special meeting to remove the word "collective" from the title, because that could be something that would have caused, potentially, Republican congressmen to dox us. So we already had to do that during the previous administration. And then I got to write a lot about "accuracy" and trying to not use any of those words to describe what we used our money for. So it was a great example of my freedom of speech, right, at work. And scientific accuracy at work.
**Caitlin M. Green [02:01:51]**
Listen, we don't like Trump. He sometimes says things that are fun to repeat, and it's very annoying. So category five is "Trumpisms."
The first one being: "everything's computer." So good. Basically, I don't even know if you remember, but he did what essentially amounted to a Tesla ad at the White House, where he went and looked at a bunch of Teslas, and was like, "Wow." And he gets in there, and if you get in a Tesla, it's essentially just an iPad in there as your console. And so he was like, "Wow, everything's computer."
And "everything is computer," right? It just is.
"Transgender for everybody" -- for some reason he keeps saying that, and it's like, sir, what do you mean? But it's just a phrase that comes pre-packaged in his brain. He loves to say it.
"It can only good happen" was also fun. It was about pregnant people not being allowed to take Tylenol. And he was like, "Just don't worry. Nothing bad can happen. It can only good happen." And people just love saying that. Poor guy.
And then, early on in April, he made up a word, and it's called "pannikin." I don't know if you remember this one. It had no staying power. Boy, it did not make it.
**Daniel Midgley [02:03:20]**
This was one of our Words of the Week of the Year, and it was the least popular. Nobody wanted it.
**Caitlin M. Green [02:03:24]**
Yeah, because it didn't stick. It didn't have the juice. So yeah, he Truth Social-ed: "The United States has a chance to do something that should have been done decades ago. Don't be weak. Don't be stupid. Don't be a pannikin. A new party based on weak and stupid people. Be strong, courageous and patient, and greatness will be the result." It's like something a toddler would say. It makes no sense.
**Daniel Midgley [02:03:51]**
They can't all be bangers, can they?
**Caitlin M. Green [02:03:55]**
No. Not everything's computer, unfortunately.
All right, this one, I wasn't able to make the slide because the power went out at my house a bunch of times. So that's fun, but I'm alive, and that's okay.
But I love the American Dialect Society's category of "Euphemism of the Year." I think that is so fun, to be like, what are some of the things that people said that they were clearly trying not to say the thing that it is? I just love that. So I created a little list of euphemisms. Hang on one sec. And I'm just going to have to read it from my own list, and then I think we have to wrap it up, because it's late. Sorry, guys.
Okay, first thing we had was the phrase "awkward gesture." I don't know if you remember the awkward gesture. But that was when Elon Musk was up on the stage, and he did what can only be described as a Nazi salute. The Anti-Defamation League called it an "awkward gesture," which was very upsetting, but it's because Elon Musk was an ideological ally of theirs, and so they were like, "Well, we can't just call it for what it is. We're going to call it an awkward gesture." And then after that, of course, a bunch of different gross Nazi people took the opportunity to do the same gesture and be like, "Oh, I'm just doing a Roman salute. I'm just -- it's like my heart. I'm throwing my heart out to the audience."
**Trent R. Nelson [02:05:41]**
Oh my God, the Roman salute excuse was the funniest shit in the world, because I'm sitting here thinking, "My brothers, did you not know that's what the Nazis were saying?" They were doing it too. Where do you think they got it from?
**Caitlin M. Green [02:05:57]**
Just an awkward gesture. It was just awkward. He's so awkward, actually. Don't you remember? He's very strange, and that's because he's a genius, not any other reasons.
Another one that came up early on was the phrase "rapid unscheduled disassembly," which is kind of a joke term. It's fairly old, actually, from various engineering fields, but it's what you say when your thing breaks. You're like, "Oh, it experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly." And so SpaceX tweeted, "Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn." And when you look at the video, it's like, yeah. It fell apart. Is what it did.
**Daniel Midgley [02:06:39]**
First applied to rifles, way back when.
**Caitlin M. Green [02:06:43]**
Oh yeah. Because if you messed up with your rifle and it just went -- oh, "rapid unscheduled disassembly" of my rifle. Yeah, I loved that one.
RFK Jr. suggested that we should have something called an "Accountability Center," which, when described, turned out to be essentially a prison camp for mentally ill people and people with addictions. So that's where the accountability comes from: we're going to lock you up because you're addicted to something, or if you're homeless, that's another reason for you to need accountability. So that's pretty disgusting.
**Daniel Midgley [02:07:48]**
Have a little nap.
**Caitlin M. Green [02:07:50]**
Ahead, trying to get ahead of some headlines about the labor market being really, really bad, White House economic advisor Hassett suggested that there could be "a little bit of almost quiet time in the labor market," which I really loved. "Quiet time." That's what you do when your child gets overstimulated. You let them have a little quiet time. That's not what our labor market was doing, actually.
And then my favorite euphemism, that's been a euphemism forever, is to just refer to somebody as "controversial" when they were -- Brigitte Bardot, for example, when they were an extreme racist. "A controversial figure." In fact, "a complicated legacy." And "divisive." Yeah, just like, opinions are divided on whether the things she believed were okay or not. I love that one so much.
**Caitlin M. Green [02:08:34]**
So yeah, I didn't get to all of my categories. I'm so sorry, but that is all we have time for today. There were a bunch of other AI ones, but I feel like slop is probably the most appropriate one. Also, "AI psychosis" has been in the news a lot. People have been talking to the chatbot and getting convinced of some kind of grandiose belief, or getting talked into going through with something that's self-destructive, falling in love with and blowing up their family because of falling in love with the chatbot. These are all phenomena that have made the headlines this year, and so that's another one that I think is probably a good contender for a winner.
So the American Dialect Society is going to vote on what they think should be the Word of the Year in a week-ish, right? Are you guys going to be there?
**Daniel Midgley [02:09:38]**
If it's online, then I will be. I have been to one of those in person a couple of times, and they are wild. They're so much fun.
**Caitlin M. Green [02:09:48]**
It's like a conference room, and there's a bunch of people in there, and they're all fighting for their favorites. And then it's grouped into categories, and there's big votes, and it is lots of fun. People do get very worked up. It's very exciting. And so we will, of course, report on what the winner is from that one.
What do you guys think should win this year?
**Daniel Midgley [02:10:13]**
Probably slop.
**Savithry Namboodiripad [02:10:20]**
Slop, yeah, because it was close last year, just didn't quite make it. The more we talk about it, just because there's so many things that are related to slop, like six seven and temu and things like that. So slop feels like something that brings those things together. So I wasn't -- I didn't come in with slop. I was kind of side-angle slop starting out. But I think, yeah, we've detected some patterns. So I think slop is a good one.
**Caitlin M. Green [02:10:51]**
I will feel so vindicated if that's the one this year.
So yeah, I want to thank you guys for discussing with me, because it's one of my favorite things to do at the end of the year. It feels like such a good bookend for the year to just look back on the trends and the conversations. And I hope you guys have an excellent new year, and I hope that slop wins, and we will see you guys in 2026.
**Caitlin M. Green [02:11:15]**
This has been – what is it called? – Half the Answer, where understanding a question is half the answer. Thank you guys so much.
Read next
Sovereign Citizens with Badges? (Neon Liberalism #84, with Jessica Pishko)
So-called "constitutional sheriffs" are spreading across the country, declaring that they have the right to nullify federal
Lindsey Graham: "Corporal," Senator, Hypocrite (Half the Answer #96, with Maya Rupert)
South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham has somehow jumped the queue, passing Mitch McConnell on the way to the place where
You Can't Decommodify Housing If You Have No Housing (The Editors' Chat #16)
The Editors' Chat is a monthly, freewheeling discussion among the editors of Liberal Currents. In today's episode,
Gender and Gender Anxiety (Neon Liberalism #83, with Katherine Cross)
So much of our politics today is driven by gender.