OK Boomer

3 December 2025

Ok Boomer is a dismissive reply by a young person directed at a Baby Boomer (or Gen Xer—the traditional generational boundaries are not always observed in the wild). The phrase is rather disrespectful of their elders, but after years of being blamed for not getting “real” jobs when the only available ones are at Starbucks or driving for Uber; for not buying houses while being saddled with crippling, student-loan debt; for the demise of various and sundry industries because they spend what little money they have on avocado toast; and for being selfish and self-absorbed while dying on foreign battlefields in the longest wars in America’s history, which were, incidentally, started by Baby Boomers, can one really fault Millennials and Gen Zers for being dismissive? OK Boomer, in two words, sums up the sentiment that Boomers have been a privileged and coddled generation who never faced tough times like today’s younger generations do and are thus out of touch and not worth listening to.

(Full disclosure: I’m a Boomer. But having been born in 1963, at the tail-end of the generation, I identify more with Gen Xers.)

Like most such memes and slang, finding the exact origin is impossible. The earliest usage I’m aware of is from 2 September 2015 when the following exchange between anonymous poster appeared on 4chan:

Who else cucked by student loans here? Pls no shitposting, Eurofriends

Maybe you should have gone to a school within your means and worked to support yourself

Lol ok boomer :)

After this, the phrase appeared sporadically on various internet discussion boards and social media until 14 January 2019 when an anonymous meme creator uploaded a meme that paired the phrase with the iconic Doge image (see the above image).

The phrase got its first entry in Urbandictionary.com on 17 September 2019:

Ok boomer

When a baby boomer says some dumb shit and you can't even begin to explain why he's wrong because that would be deconstructing decades of misinformation and ignorance so you just brush it off and say okay.

Boomer: Kids nowadays are so allergic back in my day we just ate bees and wiped our asses with poison ivy.

Non-boomer: Ok boomer

One can still hear the phrase, but its incidence of use dropped precipitously after 2020.

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Sources:

Anonymous. 4chan/r9k/, 2 September 2015. Desuarchive.org.

Davies, Mark. Corpus of News on the Web (NOW), accessed 4 November 2025.

Sami Nozomi and LiterallyAustin. “OK Boomer.” Knowyourmeme.com, 30 December 2024.

Urbandictionary.com, 17 September 2019, s.v. Ok boomer.

turkey (bird)

A tom turkey, Meleagris gallopovo, displaying during mating season

23 November 2020

Through a series of mistaken identities, Meleagris gallopovo, which graces many an American Thanksgiving table, shares the name turkey with its cousin species Meleagris ocellata. The common turkey ranges from Mexico to southeastern Canada, while the oscellated turkey is confined to the Yucatan in Mexico.

The name turkey comes from a conflation with another bird of the of Galliformes order, the guineafowl. That bird, which is native to Africa and hence its name, comprises a number of species in the family Numididae. Although they are rather distant cousins, the guineafowl and the turkey resemble one another and can be easily confused by laypeople.

It is commonly thought that guineafowls were given the name turkey because the bird was introduced to Western Europe by Turkish merchants in the mid sixteenth century, although there is little evidence to support this. Regardless, in the sixteenth century Europeans associated the bird with that country for some reason or another. In 1541, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer promulgated a protocol on what should be served at official meals which refers to turkey cocks, a probable reference to guineafowl:

It was also provided, that of the greater fyshes or fowles there should be but one in a dishe, as crane, swan, turkeycocke, hadocke, pyke, tench; and of lesse sortes but two, viz. capons two, pheasantes two, conies two, wodcockes two.

A few years later, in 1542, the second edition of Thomas Elyot’s Bibliotheca Eliotae makes an unambiguous reference to guineafowl as turkeys:

Meleagrides, byrdes, whiche we doo call hennes of Genny, or Turkie hennes.

A helmeted guineafowl, Numida meleagris, at Serengeti National Park, Tanzania

When European explorers encountered the North American bird, they gave it the name of the similar-looking bird they were familiar with. There are two references to turkeys in Richard Eden’s 1555 translation of Peter Martyr d'Anghiera’s Latin Decadas del nuevo mundo (Decades of the New World). Both of these references occur in the marginalia. The first of these is a reference to the birds found along the shores of the Gulf of Paria, in what is now Venezuela. The text reads:

With the golde and frankensence whiche the presented to owre men, they gaue them also a greate multitude of theyr peacockes,bothe cockes and hennes, deade and alyue, aswell to satisfie theyr present necessitie, as also to cary with theym into Spayne for encrease.

And in margin is printed:

Peacockes which wee caule Turkye cockes.

And later, describing an incident near Cozumel in the Yucatan, Eden writes:

Owre men wente and they came accordynge to their promisse and brought with them eyght of their hennes beynge as bygge as peacockes, of brownyshe coloure, and not inferiour to peacockes in pleasaunte tast.

And again, there is a marginal note which here reads:

Turky hens

In both cases, d’Anghiera’s original Latin uses pavo or peacock—like the peacock, the turkey has multi-colored feathers and a fanned tail, so there is a vague resemblance. Eden does a word-for-word translation in the main text but adds the marginal notes to indicate that it is actually a different bird. But just as d’Anghiera conflated the newly discovered bird with the peacock, Eden conflated it with the guineafowl.

That’s how a series of mistakes led to us eating turkey on Thanksgiving.

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Sources:

Anghiera, Pietro Martire. De rebus oceanicis & orbe nouo decades tres. Basil: Ioannem Bebelium, 1533, 38, 72. Archive.org.

Constitutio Thomae Cranmeri (1541), in Wilkins, David. Concilia magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, vol. 3 of 4. London: R. Gosling, 1737, 862. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Eden, Rycharde. The Decades of the New Worlde. London: William Powell, 1555, 79r, 158v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Elyot, Thomas. Bibliotheca Eliotae, second edition. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1552. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1989, s.v. turkey, n.2, turkey-hen, n., turkey-cock, n.

Image credit: Turkey: unknown photographer, c. 2009, public domain image; guineafowl: unknown photographer 2007, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

hairbag (slang)

An 1899 New York City policeman giving directions to three men

1 December 2025 [Edit, same day: added 1958 NYT example]

What is a hairbag? And is it a bad thing?

The term has been New York City police slang for a veteran officer since at least 1958, when it was recorded in two glossaries of police slang. The first appears in a New York Times Magazine piece on 14 March 1958:

Hair bag—A veteran policeman, especially knowledgeable about the inner workings of the Police Department.

The second glossary is in the October issue of Spring 3100, a New York Police Department magazine. That glossary defines a hair bag as “a veteran policeman.” And a New York Times article from 15 February 1970 defines it as “a veteran patrolman, also a patrolman with backbone.”

While these early definitions are positive, the term has subsequently generally been a negative one. For instance, Edward Droge’s 1973 The Patrolman: A Cop’s Story says:

My partner that night, a lethargic old ‘hairbag’ (old-timer) who could not be aroused by Raquel Welch.

And William Heffernan’s 2003 novel A Time Gone By has this:

Donahue was a sergeant closing in on his thirty years—an old hairbag in department lexicon, a term used to describe an aging and often useless cop who was just biding his time until he could get out.

A 9 November 2019 New York Times article has this to say about the term:

For as long as anyone can remember, younger officers in the New York Police Department have referred to their elders as “hairbags”—usually behind their backs.

It’s an archaic bit of slang with obscure origins. In police parlance, “the bag” means “the uniform.” So some officers believe “hairbag” is a riff on a longtime officer’s uniform—so old it has become hairy—and describes veterans who know what the police call “The Job” inside out.

Others think the phrase is an insult that comes from the practice, perhaps apocryphal, of officers using a haircut as an excuse for leaving their posts. This theory holds that sergeants used to demand a bag of hair trimmings as proof, and eventually burned-out officers who shirked work came to be known as “hairbags.”

It’s questionable whether either of these explanations are true. The one about haircuts is especially suspect.

And of course, hairbag can also mean a bag for holding and storing a wig or a bag made out of hair, but the etymology of those senses is obvious.

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Sources:

Burnham, David. “Police (Cops?) Have Slanguage of Own.” New York Times, 15 Feb 1970, 65/4. ProQuest Newspapers.

Goldstein, Joseph and Ali Watkins. “Before There was ‘O.K. Boomer,’ the City’s Police Had ‘Hairbag.’” New York Times, 9 Nov 2019, A21/1. ProQuest Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 2 November 2025, s. v. hair, n.

Heffernan, William. A Time Gone By. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003, 27. Archive.org.

Lighter, J. E., ed. Historical Dictionary of American Slang (HDAS), vol. 2 of 2. New York: Random House, 1997, s.v. hairbag, n.

“Police Cant…Oh Yes They Can!” Spring 3100, October 1958, 5–10 at 9/1. John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Lloyd Sealy Library Digital Collections.

Wells, George V. “Station House Slang.”  New York Times Magazine, 14 March 1958, 14. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: unknown photographer, 1899. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain photo.

meme

28 November 2025

Most of us are familiar with memes, those images with varying text that propagate, often virally, through the internet, but where does the word meme come from?

It may be surprising to many, but the word meme was coined by biologist and famed promoter of atheism Richard Dawkins in 1976. Dawkins was trying to label those bits of culture that spread and become iconic. He considered these bits of culture to be analogous to biological genes. From his book The Selfish Gene:

The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. “Mimeme” comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like “gene.” I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to “memory,” or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with “cream.”

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.

It wasn’t until around 1998 that meme was applied to the internet images we know today. While this is a more specific application of Dawkins’s original sense, it is true to general principles: they are cultural units; they spread, with successful ones outcompeting less prolific ones; and, like biological genes, they can mutate (the changing text that overlays the images).

Determining what was the first internet meme is an impossible task, but the first citation in this newer, more specific, sense in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is from the CNN program Science and Technology Week of 24 January 1998, in reference to the computer-generated animation of a dancing baby that had appeared on the television show Ally McBeal that month:

GREG LEFERVE, CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Who is this tyke, slashing his air guitar, dancing the boogaloo (ph) and haunting "Ally McBeal?" He's a figment of Michael Girard's imagination.

MICHAEL GIRARD, UNREAL PICTURES: The dancing baby actually goes actually goes back to an initial cha-cha motion that I created as a demo file years ago.

LEFERVE: Girard created the baby to show off his animation software. It worked. Now, zillions of the copies of the diapered dancer animate computer screens across the Internet.

JANELLE BROWN, WIRED NEWS: And the next thing you know, his friends have forwarded it on and it's become a net meme.

LEFERVE: Net meme -- the Wired Style guide calls a meme a "contagious idea." Right, like the kids of the South Park Comedy Series, Japan's "Real Idol" and Max Headroom before them. Hollywood seized on the baby as a plot device in the "Ally Mcbeal" show.

The Dancing Baby was certainly a graphic image propagated over the internet, but it was not what most people mean today when they refer to a meme, that is a recognizable image with new text overlaid on top. Memes as we know them today started gaining traction in 2007 with the Lolcat “I can has cheezburger?” meme. This probably wasn’t the first meme in this format, but the explosion of this type of meme on the internet dates to its appearance and spread.

From Richard Dawkins to Ally McBeal to internet phenomenon, not a bad start for a short, little word.

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Sources:

Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene (1976), Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. 219. Archive.org.

Lefevre, Greg and Ann Kellan. “Dancing Baby on the Internet.” CNN Science and Technology Week, 24 January 1998. Nexis Uni.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, June 2001, s.v. meme, n.; March 2002, s.v. mimesis, n.

Image credits: Boromir: “One does not simply create a meme”, David Wilton, 2019, generated with imgflip.com; “I can has cheezberger?”, 11 January 2007, icanhas.cheezburger.com. Fair use of copyrighted images to illustrate the topic under discussion.

smoot

Measuring Harvard Bridge in smoots

26 November 2025

I usually don’t write up novelty words, but smoot has a neat ironic twist that is impossible to ignore. A smoot is a unit of linear measure equal to 1.7018 meters (5 feet, 7 inches). It is named after Oliver Reed Smoot, Jr. (b. 1940).

The smoot grew out of a university fraternity prank. In October 1958, members of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) used Smoot, who was one of their pledges, as a measuring stick to determine the length of the Harvard Bridge over the Charles River, which connects the MIT campus in Cambridge to Boston. Smoot was required to lay down while his fellow pledges marked each increment with chalk. (They had planned to use a length of string, ten smoots long, for the measurement, but a fraternity brother required they actually use Smoot himself.) The bridge measures 364.4 smoots, plus or minus one εar (properly spelled with an epsilon to indicate possible error in the measurement). To this day, undergraduates at MIT maintain marks on the bridge that indicate the length in ten smoot increments.

The ironic twist is that Smoot would go on to become the chair of the American National Standards Institute (2001–02) and president of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO, 2003–04).

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2022, s.v. smoot, n.

Durant, Elizabeth. “Smoot’s Legacy.” MIT Technology Review, 23 June 2008.

Gillooly, Patrick. “Smoot Reflects on His Measurement Feat as 50th Anniversary Nears.” MIT News, 24 September 2008.

Photo credit: Unknown Photographer, 1958. MIT Museum. Fair use of a copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.