Just add... Some Entitlement

What's in a name?

I didn't think I would get onto this subject, what with there being a plethora of comical, communicative ping pong and abrasive interactions that I could reasonably pick upon. It’s an extensive subject and it might cover the above, but it will be over a number of posts so I’m going to try stick to a strict 2500 typed word limit for this one. This subject interests me in a deeper way because I think I can link it to my life, past and possibly future, so I’ll be spending a good portion of the word limit doing that. Sorry not sorry.

When I was a younger person I had noticed that we (by that I mean the group of guys and gals I hung around with – awesome folk, but I was a little late to the party) had been given a name, and our nemeses had been given another. The name was taken from characters in a TV programme (later a film) and used to characterise two different sides of our social coin just as if society was binary between the ages of around 16 to 20. Sometimes, back then, it was.

When using the name we had for those on the other side of the coin, it was accompanied by silly voices and sound bites and general mockery – there was even a type of walk that was hilariously lampooned by a few of the guys, with the one shoulder jutting up and the head tilted towards it, the other shoulder swaying back and forth rigidly in step as they walked around like there was a poll shoved up there butt.

Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce you to: The Kevs and Perrys.

I would say that I have no idea where the idea to name the two opposing forces came from, but, come to think of it, I remember asking a friend once and I’m sure he answered, but I’ll be beggered if I can remember it. As a ‘Perry’, a mixture of skaters, goths/emos, (in my case) metalheads and just those who were open enough to hang around with us and not a k/nob (see previous post), we never actually called ourselves the moniker, but that didn’t stop us from flinging ‘Kev’ around like it was a curse on those that wear it. They would generally be aggressive, short hair/tight shirt types, sometimes homophobic and racist (though, thinking of where we lived, that was almost inescapable) and fairly intolerant of anyone with an alternative lifestyle. We ourselves were far from perfect, but we were inclusive. You didn’t have to adhere to an alternative lifestyle; the passing grade was to not to aspire to be a bit of an egregious pillock.

Still, I was let in. And yeah, most of us can look at the past through rose tinted glasses and judge ourselves as being on the right side, but yeah – you really did have to fit the description to be a ‘Kev’.

I found it funny then, and I find it funny now, that we can use perfectly good name, a name that some could even be christened with, for a group of people with the understanding that the intent is to distance and differentiate them from our own group, even to ridicule them, but also to identify that person or groups of persons as a possible threat. After using the name for a while, the uttering of it would bring into mind the image of the barer and the warning the came with it.

You might be saying to yourself, “Get on with it, you sweet, beautiful fool! What has this got to do with the world of insult? Nice glasses, by the way.” and you’d be right to say so. They are nice. But those 485 words of me lost in a reverie have acted as a set up to how we use actual names as a vehicle for insult. Obviously, the group that I used to hang around with didn’t come up with this concept, but it was the first and only time I have been involved with it. With this in mind, I have decided to look into this newer version of the phenomena with full knowledge that this may be a multi-part saga because not only is it very current, but also seems to be world-wide. If you had not guessed already, I am talking about the sensation that is: the Karen.

Birth of a Monster

We generally don’t dislike people because of the names given to them at birth, or have changed in later life (legally, I one of ‘em), but due to the use of social media and the internet as one big drinking fountain, certain stereotypes of how this person looks, their speech and mannerism, and general attitude now build a mental image when using the name ‘Karen’. Unless I knew this person before the phenomena started, I’m afraid I can’t help it. Feel free to let me know if you also suffer this affliction. I’m going to spend some time with general research (both loose and citable) as well as give responses based on observation, and I may [see: will] occasionally go off piste [see: tangent] throughout the multi-post reflection of this phenomenon. I think it’s best to start with a definition of the name in context the of it being used as an insult.

According to Wikipedia (bad academic form, I know) the term is as thus:

Credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_(slang)

I am going to refrain from using Wikipedia as a reference for the rest of this post (probably not subsequent others) because, though it does have some great stuff, the imaginary voice of one of my old tutors has rolled up a newspaper and is fixing to bop me on the nose. I don’t know about you but the extract above pretty much fits the visual I get when I think of the name ‘Karen’. There is a moment when the image flits to a my old next door neighbour, a young lady of Scottish decent who later served me lunch-time bourbon, but then goes right back to ‘I want to see your manager’ which, if I’m honest, is a term I somehow managed to avoid after coming back from lunch 5 or 6 times a week. Different time, different person.

Stephanie Osmanski, a contributing writer for the website Parade, of the American publication of the same name, show support of the above description in an article and give this very helpful characteristic guide (below) and I’m probably going to spend the rest of this post reflecting on that first paragraph because, as I’ve mentioned before, the evolution of how we use language is becoming more interesting to me. I feel this is especially to case now when it comes to wider public consumption due to the prevalence of the internet.

Credit: https://parade.com/1111328/stephanieosmanski/what-is-a-karen/#where-did-karen-come-from

I mentioned before that I wasn’t quite aware of why the monikers ‘Kev’ and ‘Perry’ were used, and I’ll one day get around to asking my friends again (but after 25 years who would remember?!), but the source material is straight forward. Taken from the sketch Kevin the Teenager from the fantastic series Harry Enfield and Chums, and later the film Kevin & Perry Go Large, I can, by degrees, understand how easily tempered individuals who could give, but never take, an insult might tenuously be connected to a character like Kevin. His brash and argumentative demeanour, the way Enfield physically portrayed with almost cave-man like mannerisms, his snivelling inability to accept the consequences for his actions while repeating “huh?!” or “what?!” all seem to suit the individuals who earned the name (I may sound like I’m being mean, but it was more or less true in my bias memory), but I never thought of our little gang as embodying the attributes of what made Perry other than we tried to be polite to other peoples parents. As far as I know, the “Kevs” versus “Perrys” thing only made it as far as our little town and evolved no further.

Being a “Karen” on the other hand, if only by reading Osmanski’s article, surely would have had a definite route of evolution. Surely there must be an origin story. Like, there must be a singular person with that name who did something so crappy that it stuck.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/karen

Some complaint, some opinion, some belief that made this person so much of an outlier that their name is now read as slang in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

It turns out: not so much.

In the Parade article there several places in recent history where the name in its current cultural use may have came, from the film Mean Girls to the comedian Dane Cook, and then evolved into a pejorative. And okay, I how grown up enough to admit that I enjoyed Mean Girls. It’s hilarious. Even at my grand age of [somewhere south of ninety] I still tell my partner that they’ve done well by saying “You go, Glen Coco”. This film as ace. But I don’t see the connection between the character Karen Smith and the character traits of the individuals now called Karen for all the wrong reasons. She may not be smart, but she was sweet and didn’t go out of her way to cause trouble.

(And listen – to all you fellow metalheads out there out – chill; it’s absolutely fine to like this movie. I could quite happily listen to the Swedish band Shining or some Morbid Angel and then watch this movie, and visa versa. Stop being so not fetch.)

Dane Cook, however, could be the originator. I heard the dudes stand-up comedy in the early 2000s and watched a movie or four that he was in – I’ve checked – and I could see him riffing and arbitrarily giving someone disliked by the general public the name Karen. It seemed to fit, so I did a little digging by giving the oracle the right words. Sure enough, on the 2005 stand-up album Retaliation there is a section on disc 2 called: The Friend Nobody Likes. I’ll leave a link below with a warning: if you’re not up for sweary language then do not click it. The relevant part part goes:

“There is one person, in every group of friends, that nobody ******* likes. You basically keep them there to hate their guts. When that person is not around the rest of your little base camp, your hobby is cutting that person down.Example: "Karen is always a douchebag."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!"”

Hands up if your ever heard someone being call a Karen before 2005. I certainly didn’t. I don’t think I heard it as a judgement on character until over a decade later.

This isn’t very academic, not everything has to be, and I don’t want to drain the fun out of reading my garblings (if that isn’t a real word then it needs to be) but for such a well known trend that has reshaped how we use the word I reckon it deserves some academic research. Luckily, some people better at this than me did just that and I shall be referencing their hard work in future posts on the subject, but for now I will rely on the digital newspapers, magazines, pop media to investigate the pejorative “Karen”.

In the Independent article ‘‘No longer an easy name’: A history of Karen’ Henry Goldblatt states that the names was ‘popular for girls born in the 1960s’. This tracks if we are to believe that a Karen is indeed in her middle ages, late-forties to late-fifties by the time Karen was Dane Cook-ed up. It then states that there was indeed a kind of evolution, but not one that I had heard of. Goldblatt states that ‘while this archetype had previously been called “Permit Patty” or “BBQ Becky,” “Karen” has stuck.’

Well blow me down. Maybe it didn’t start with a single person or a sketch using the name at random. I had no idea about the other names, maybe symptom of avoiding drama and not being terminally online, but after looking into them they basically had the same characteristics of the pain-in-the-backside that I had come to know. Again, these were comically given names for argumentative white women who seem to lack compassion and the ability to read the room. The main difference is the alliteration due to the context of the offence.

Further reading into these cases and descriptions of the now slur, there seems to be a much deeper racial and general bigotry issue and I’ll look further at this in a future post – but I will tackle when I have the talent to handle things with a bit more delicacy than the slap-dash of my normal writing. It is kinda hard to make a joke about bigots in this current climate, but I’m sure I’ll try.

To bring it back to an earlier prediction, the article does indeed cite both Dane Cook’s riff and Mean Girls, but this time noting the character’s ‘Africa’ comment. I personally think the film highlights her simplicity rather than any inherent racism, but I am willing to discuss this.

Hey, I made it this far without having to rely on Reddit. I don’t know if I mentioned it before, but I research and write at the same time. The reason I do this is because I’m documenting my journey and really doing nothing you can’t research yourself. I guess that’s why some of the tenses are messed up, but I try to catch this when I give it a little polish at the end.

A Pause

If you feel that this post has been too much about me the about what a “Karen” is then that’s valid. Past experiences are my base of reference and have found revisiting some of those memories as kinda cathartic. I’ll would try not to make the next post so much about me, but as some of these are fond memories I can’t promise anything. These Karen posts will also not be in a linear sequence as that is not how my interests work, but the next post I do on this will try to address some of Osmanski’s bullet points. There is loads to unpack on this subject and I’ll do some back and forthing – you didn’t read this thinking it was all going to make sense, did you?

Anyway, I’m off to Bloodstock tomorrow, a heavy metal festival five minute from where I live (lucky lil’ me). I will use my time to listen to the worlds finest music, drink well, party hard, see friend long since seen, and, of course, gather some information on the variety of what others consider to be an insult. Maybe even video.

Bloodstock is so fetch.