Karen

Tumblr post from 21 October 2016 featuring an early slang use of “Karen.” Image of a woman bringing a video game console to a party.

16 May 2020

The name Karen has become a byword for a middle-aged, obnoxious woman. Karen was a nominee for the American Dialect Society’s 2019 Word of the Year, although it did not win. The society defined Karen as the “stereotype of a complaining, self-important white woman, typically a member of Generation X.” Why Karen, out of all possible names, was chosen for this honor is something of mystery. This use of the name most likely does not have a single origin incident or inspiration but is rather the result of a confluence of a number of trends.

Finding antedates for a particular context for a common name like Karen is maddeningly difficult, and it’s likely there are earlier examples out there, waiting to be found. But here are the earliest ones I’m aware of.

In 2005, comedian Dane Cook released his album Retaliation that included the routine “The Friend that Nobody Likes,” which has the lines:

Every group has a Karen and she is always a bag of douche. And when she's not around, you just look at each other and say, "God, Karen, she's such a douchebag!"

This is the earliest use of Karen as a generic name for an obnoxious woman that I know of, and the album was immensely popular, debuting at #4 on the Billboard 200 and selling over 1.3 million copies. It appears too early, however, to be a plausible direct inspiration for the meme, which did not start trending until 2016, over ten years later.

But on 20 October 2016 Nintendo released a trailer for its Switch gaming system that featured a woman bringing a Nintendo Switch to a rooftop party. The next day, a certain Joematar posted a screenshot on Tumblr from the trailer with the subtitle:

Oh shit, Karen brought her stupid Nintendo thing to the party again. We’re DRINKING, Karen. We’re having CONVERSATIONS.

This Tumblr post is the first known instance of the Karen meme proper. A year later, on 7 December 2017, the subreddit /r/FuckYouKaren was launched.

And in March 2018, two definitions for Karen were posted to Urbandictionary.com. The first on 13 March 2018:

typically never a name given to a baby but somehow karen always turns up asking to see the manager

Karen "i would like to speak to the manager"

manager "is your name karen"

#karen

And the second a few days later on 18 March 2018:

44. mother of three. blonde. owns a volvo. annoying as hell. wears acrylics 24/7. currently at your workplace speaking to your manager.

watch out for fkn karen. MID AGED WHITE WOMEN WITH BOB CUTS ARE NOT TO BE SPOKEN TO IN ANY SORT OF TONE.

#mom #manage #store #moms #bitch

And on 29 May 2018 Karen hit mainstream media when comedian Franchesca Ransey wrote this on CNN Commentary:

Before I knew it, the comments started filling up with names I'd never seen before. I thought what I'd posted was pretty tame, but the whole conversation spiraled, becoming heated, fast. [...] Then someone named "Karen" (it's *always* a Karen) chimed in with, "Are you really comparing Allison to a slut shamer? WOW."

But why, of all the names, was Karen chosen for this honor? It’s most likely a combination of a number of factors.

First, Karen is a name that is identifiably common among women of a certain age. According to the Social Security Administration, the name Karen reached a peak in popularity in the years 1958–60, when it was the fourth most popular name for girls born in the United States during those years. It remained among the top ten most popular female names until 1969, and among the top one hundred until 1987. So, if, in 2016, one were to pick a generic name for a middle-aged woman, Karen would be among the top contenders.

Second, there is an old comedy truism, going back to Vaudeville, that words with the phoneme /k/ in them are inherently funny. Neil Simon’s 1972 play The Sunshine Boys has these lines, spoken by an aging comedian:

Alka Seltzer is funny. You say “Alka Seltzer” you get a laugh ... Words with “k” in them are funny. Casey Stengel, that's a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny. Cupcake is funny. Tomato is not funny. Cookie is funny. Cucumber is funny. Car keys. Cleveland ... Cleveland is funny. Maryland is not funny. Then, there's chicken. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny. Cab is funny. Cockroach is funny—not if you get 'em, only if you say 'em.

So, if the Vaudeville axiom holds true, people who were aiming for humor about a middle-aged woman, they would naturally gravitate toward the name Karen.

There are also several Karens in popular films that may have influenced the choice of the name. One is the character of Karen Hill, played by Lorraine Bracco, in Martin Scorcese’s 1990 Goodfellas, which features her husband, played by Ray Liotta asking her, after she has flushed a bag of heroin down the toilet during a police raid:

Why did you do that Karen?!

Another suggestion it that it was inspired by the character of Karen Smith, played by Amanda Seyfried, in the 2004 film Mean Girls, which featured the line:

Oh my God, Karen! You can’t just ask someone why they're white.

This line from Mean Girls inspired its own meme in 2010.

While these films, along with the Dane Cook comedy routine, appeared well before the rise of the Karen meme, their overwhelming and continuing popularity and familiarity may have subconsciously brought the name to the fore. The Dane Cook example, in particular, may be an early outlier that didn’t catch on in the public consciousness and become a meme.

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Sources:

American Dialect Society. “2019 Word of the Year” (press release). 3 January 2020.

“FuckYouKaren.” Reddit.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. Karen n.

Know Your Meme, 30 April 2020, s.v. Karen.

Ramsey, Franchesca, “Comedian: When S*** Gets Real, Take It Offline.” CNN Commentary, 29 May 2018. ProQuest: U.S. Newsstream.

Social Security Administration. “Get Ready for Baby.” Accessed 15 May 2020.

Urbandictionary.com, 2020, s.v. Karen.

bandwagon, jump on the

Circus bandwagon, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2009

15 May 2020

To climb on or jump on the bandwagon is to join what is believed will be the winning side in some endeavor. The phrase is moderately derisive; those who jump on the bandwagon are Johnny-come-latelys and fair-weather fans who join only when success is in the offing, if not assured.

Back when I lived in Washington, DC and was a daily reader of the Washington Post, sportswriter Tony Kornheiser would write of the city’s football team, the Redskins, as having a bandwagon of fans when they were winning. Here is an early example from 30 January 1983:

We are now witnessing what Robert Ludlum might call the Bandwagon Mosaic. I know it’s only a few hours before kickoff, but there’s still time to jump on the Washington Redskins’ bandwagon. Sure it’s crowded. You’re going to have to elbow your way past the television anchormen, the editorial writers, the politicians, the syndicated columnists—all the assorted bozos who recently learned the difference between quarterback sack and Dense Pack.

(For those who don’t remember the days of the Reagan-era Cold War, “Dense Pack” was a ludicrous idea that if a country packed its missile silos tightly together, incoming warheads would destroy each other, in what was dubbed “fratricide,” and the missiles on the ground would be protected.)

A bandwagon is originally literally that, a horse-drawn wagon that carries a band, often used to lead parades. Bandwagons were commonly used by circuses, which upon arrival in a town would parade the through the main street with the bandwagon at the fore as a means of advertising their presence. And indeed, the first records we have the word’s use is in reference to circuses. There is this from the American Quarterly, July 1849:

NIAGARA SUSPENSION BRIDGE.—The extensive circus and equestrian troupe of Col. Mann crossed the suspension bridge en route to Canada. The company occupied 22 horse teams, headed by the large four-horse band wagon, together with their baggage and paraphernalia.

And six years later P.T. Barnum included this in his autobiography:

At Vicksburg we sold all our land-conveyances, excepting four horses and the “band wagon;” bought the steamboat “Ceres” for $6000, hired the captain and crew, and proceeded down the river, stopping at desirable points to open our “budget of amusement.”

The earliest use of the metaphorical phrase that I have found is from the 14 June 1895 issue of the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader:

The Republican clubs of Oregon lately refused to declare for free silver and there is a great fight going on between Senator Mitchell and the Portland Oregonian to show whether they represented the Republican sentiment of the state. The clubs no doubt caught the drift of Republican sentiment in the country and determined to get on the bandwagon early.

But a year earlier there is this example of on the bandwagon plan from an article on a proposed Pan-American railway in the Detroit Free Press of 30 April 1894:

During the Harrison administration the bureau was conducted on the bandwagon plan. It made a great deal of music and was industriously paraded as the beginning of what might ultimately prove an all-America federation.

This usage could be a precursor of the phrase we know today, or it could be a one-off phrasing. In any case, it is a metaphor of sound and music that doesn’t amount to anything substantive.

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Sources:

Barnum, P.T. The Life of P.T. Barnum. London: Sampson Low, Son, & Co., 1855.

Evening Argus-Leader, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 14 June 1895, 6.

Kornheiser, Tony, “Enjoy Yourself, It’s Lighter Than You Think.” Washington Post, 30 January 1983, F2.

“New Cape Horn Route.” Detroit Free Press, 30 April 1894, 1.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. band-wagon, n.

“Quarterly Chronicle.” American Quarterly Register and Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 1, Philadelphia,  September 1849, 61.

Photo credit: Anonymous photographer, 2009, public domain image.

yellow journalism

The Yellow Kid, by R.F. Outcault, 1 January 1897

14 May 2020

Yellow journalism denotes lurid and sensationalist news reporting, that which today we would associate with tabloids and click-bait headlines. It’s especially associated with the turn of the twentieth century news reporting and with jingoistic support for the Spanish-American War in 1898. It is epitomized by Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and the papers of his rival, William Randolph Hearst.

But why yellow?

The name is a confluence of two cultural trends, the availability of cheap, popular literature and the newspaper comic strip.

The first trend is the popularity of lurid and sensational novels in the mid-to-late nineteenth century and the moral panic that this literature generated. Such literature and associated panics have been a regular feature in literary history. Every new technological development brings a new wave. In my own lifetime, I’ve seen such panics over comic books, television, Dungeons and Dragons, video games, and the internet. In the eighteenth century, it was the novel that was corrupting people’s, especially young women’s, minds. In the nineteenth century, it was the advent of cheap paper and printing that allowed pulp fiction to be churned out at low cost, often printed with garish yellow and red colors to catch the eye. Yellowback books was a term that was often used.

An early reference to such yellow literature is by poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant and others of the American Copyright Club in 1843:

Cheap literature, scattered through the country, saps the provincial press, and supplants it by degrees in the popular favor: paper after paper decays and withers, breathing a blessing upon its deadliest enemy. The general flood of pamphlets sweeps the land, and puts at nought all petty distinctions of district and neighborhood, and settles down, at its leisure, into a dark, slimy, universal pond. It is for you, the American people, to judge what fruit has grown of this planting. You have seen this crimson and yellow literature triumphant on every hand: bought every where—read every where.

Ten years later, on 3 March 1853, the New York Daily Tribune blamed yellow-covered literature for corrupting the minds of young women and causing them to elope with “adventurers”:

The popular notions on the subject, fomented by the “yellow-covered” literature of the day are exceedingly lax and mistaken. The young Miss who elopes from the parental roof to marry some adventurer who was probably unknown to her last year, is often represented as a girl of rare spirit, who does a remarkably clever and admirable thing. We hold, on the contrary, that, in a great majority of cases, her elopement is unwise, giddy, ungrateful, immodest, and evinces a lascivious appetite and reckless disposition.

And by 4 June 1857, the Chicago Daily Tribune was lamenting that such lurid content had made its way into journalism:

The land is perfectly flooded with yellow-covered literature of the French school, only the yellow covers are left off; the magazine form is abandoned, and it now appears in the more popular and respectable dress of newspapers, embellished with pictures to catch the eye.

And the panic is summed up in a piece in Pennsylvania’s Tyrone Star of 8 March 1859:

An “out and out” sewer of the lowest obscenities [...] whose presence is less safe to family virtue than the foulest “yellow backs” that ever emanated from the “hell-holes” of impurity in a New York or a Paris.

Such complaints about yellow literature persisted into the twentieth century.

The second trend that led to the creation of the phrase yellow journalism is that of the comic strip, or more particularly, one of the first comic strips. In 1895, cartoonist Richard F. Outcault began drawing the first newspaper comic strip, titled Hogan’s Alley, for Pulitzer’s New York World. (See also Hogan’s Goat.) The strip quickly became better known by its iconic character, the Yellow Kid, sort of the Bart Simpson of his day, and was quickly renamed after the character. In 1896, Hearst hired Outcault away from Pulitzer and the strip began appearing in Hearst’s New York Journal American. Since the strip wasn’t copyrighted, Pulitzer continued to publish a competing Yellow Kid strip in the World, drawn by George Luks. So, for a time, two sensationalist New York newspapers used the Yellow Kid to compete with one another.

A 13 December 1896 review of the staider New York Herald in Georgia’s Macon Telegraph sums up the character of Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s papers:

There is no appeal made to low taste; there is no assumption that the average reader is a person of vulgar mind; there is no catering to an alleged “demand” for the spice of lubricity; there is no concession to the “yellow kid” abomination.

And by 1897 we see the term yellow journalism appear. The New York Press ran the headline “Victory for Yellow Journalism” on 31 January 1897. This appears to be the first use of the phrase, although I cannot locate a copy of the article to determine the exact context.

The next month, on 18 February 1897, the New York Tribune referenced the Press’s use of the term in an article on the increasing hostilities between Spain and the United States and how Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s papers were fomenting war fever:

Here, for instance, are the two representatives of what our neighbor, “The New York Press,” so felicitously calls “yellow journalism”; one of them would declare war against Spain because one of its correspondents—who wasn’t doing anything to Spain except maintaining communication and confidential relations with the Cuban insurgents with whom Spain is at war—has been arrested by the Spanish authorities and held for trial; the other would also declare war against Spain because one of the highest-priced, and consequently most trustworthy, correspondents discovered that a woman related to one of the insurgent chiefs was stripped and examined three times in the presence of men by the Spanish authorities, the third time on an American steamer.

And ten days later, the Macon Telegraph ran an editorial on the same subject:

Yellow Journalism and War.

The country has already seen and felt the absurdity of the sand-lot agitation which shook the senate on Thursday. Like an aspen leaf, it trembled with excitement at the touch of yellow journalism.

So, we have a long-standing practice of referring to lurid and sensational literature as yellow, and we have two sensationalist and jingoistic papers, both of which publish versions of the comic strip the Yellow Kid, throw in some patriotic fervor, and yellow journalism emerges.

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Sources:

“Black Mail Editors.” Chicago Daily Tribune. 4 June 1857, 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Bryant, William Cullen, et al. An Address to the People of the United States. New York: American Copyright Club, 1843, 11. Gale Primary Sources: Sabin Americana.

“New and True Journalism.” Macon Telegraph (Georgia). 13 December 1896, 20. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, January 2018, s.v. yellow, adj. and n., yellowback, n.

“Runaway Marriages.” New York Daily Tribune. 3 March 1853, 4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Wise Limitations of the War Power.” New York Tribune. 18 February 1897, 6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Yellow Journalism and War.” Macon Telegraph (Georgia). 28 February 1897, 12. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

q.t., on the

14 May 2020

The phrase on the q.t. means in secret, confidentially. The q.t. is an abbreviation for quiet.

The phrase dates to the late nineteenth century. It’s first clearly attested to in 1885. It appears that year in George Moore’s novel A Mummer’s Wife:

Oh, I'm so glad; for perhaps this time it will be possible to have one spree on the strict q.t.

It also appears in the Sydney Bulletin on 18 July 1885:

Oh, my! what a pious world it is,
And how very good they all seem to be –
But what a ’duffing’ lot you’d find
If you would only raise the blind,
And see ’em on the strict Q.T.

The fact that it appears in both a British and Australian source in the same year, indicates that the phrase was already widespread by the time it first appears in print.

Farmer and Henley’s slang dictionary includes a citation that is supposedly from c. 1870 in the broadside ballad “The Talkative Man from Poplar,” by James McEvoy:

Whatever I tell you is on the Q.T.

But as far as I can tell, that song was not written until 1885, and the copy online at the British Library doesn’t contain the phrase. So, this citation appears to be inaccurate.

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Sources:

Farmer, J.S. and W.E. Henley. Slang and Its Analogues, vol. 5, 1902, s.v. Q.T.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. q.t. n.

McEvoy, James, “The Talkative Man from Poplar,” 1886. London, British Library MS H.1260.g.(41.). 

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2007, s.v. q.t., n.3 and adj.

light at the end of the tunnel

A railway tunnel with sun shining at one end, Bath, UK, 2017.

13 May 2020

The phrase the light at the end of the tunnel is a metaphor used to refer to signs that a long period of adversity is coming to an end. The metaphor, if not exact phrasing, dates to at least 1879 when it appears in a letter by writer George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) about a recent bout with an illness:

On Saturday I had a rather severe relapse and though I am getting out of the tunnel into daylight, this renewal of weakness taken with the dreary prospects of the weather under which nothing ripens and fruits hardly escape rotting, makes it seem as if we should be wiser to defer the visit till the 19th when the promised Rubicon of the 16th will have been passed.

The familiar phrasing is in place by 1891, when this book review criticizing the long-windedness of some nature writing appears in the Saturday Review:

You sentimentalize about autumn in the abstract (200 words), about autumn in Somersetshire (150 words), and about the “orchard-lawns” of Avilion (50 words). This is rather below the mark, so you hurry on to the apple-crop (100 words) and “the story of an apple-orchard” (500 words), throwing in the cricket—that “musician of the autumn”—wasps, and the “unnumbered hosts of other insects” (400 words). You now see light at the end of the tunnel, and a vigorous attack on the hibernation of these insects (250 words) prepares for a final burst on winters of unusual severity (150 words), and the thing is done before you know where you are.

There are earlier appearances of the phrase in various wordings, but all the ones I have found have been quite literal, referring to traveling through a railway tunnel.

In the 1960s, the light at the end of the tunnel became associated with the confidence (to be proven misplaced) that the U.S. would quickly win the Vietnam War. Journalist Joseph Alsop wrote on 13 September 1965:

The importance of this change that is now going on can hardly be exaggerated. It does not mean, alas, that the war is being won now, or will be won later without great effort and sacrifice. But it does mean that at last there is light at the end of the tunnel.

And the next day he penned:

You can see the transformation in the faces of American leaders like General Westmoreland, who looks like a man who suddenly sees light at the end of a very long, very dark tunnel.

The phrase would be picked up by many others writing and speaking about the war.

Of course, the U.S. continued to fight until 1973, and Saigon would fall two years after that. As a result, the phrase took on a cynical connotation, and by 1975 an addition was made to the wording of the phrase. Canadian journalist Richard Gwyn, writing about the economy in March 1975 said:

Today the predictions of U.S. government experts have begun to sound like the “light at the end of the tunnel” promises of Vietnam. Forecasts of “recovery by mid-summer” have changed to “recovery by the end of the year.” Sometimes a light in a tunnel can be that of an oncoming train.”

The light at the end of the tunnel continues to be used to convey optimism, but since the debacle of the Vietnam War its reception has always included a note of pessimism.

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Sources:

Alsop, Joseph. “Big Change in Vietnam.” San Francisco Examiner, 13 September 1965, 32.

Alsop, Joseph. “Light at End of Tunnel in Viet War.” Chillicothe Gazette (Ohio), 14 September 1965, 6.

Fallows, James. “2020 Time Capsule #8: ‘Light at the End of the Tunnel.’” The Atlantic, 25 March 2020.

Gwyn, Richard. “Restraint a ‘Farce,’ Controls a Must.” Vancouver Sun, 8 March 1975, 4.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. tunnel, n.

“The Rambles of a Dominie.” The Saturday Review, 18 July 1891, 93.

Photo credit: Great Western Railway, 2017.