I’m working as a camp counselor this week in MO, and some of the kids are using the term “purple muffin” and not telling myself and one of the other counselors what it means (some other counselors are conspiring against us as well).
The best I can gather is that it works as a general synonym for “lame,” at least some of the time, but it’s apparently a pretty versatile word.
You’re overthinking this. It’s an “in” term these kids are playing around with that means everything and nothing. One of the key attributes of the term is probably precisely that it has no set meaning. Another is that it drives non-“in” people (such as yourself) insane trying to work out what it means. My six year old and his friend currently use the term “spessuraspess” in all manner of confusing ways. When I was a kid, we went through a time when everything was “tishlemack” (which derived from “camelshit” backwards).
The version I knew as a kid was “Purple Feather”. The same shaggy dog thing–how long could you keep the other person half interested in the saga of a person getting in trouble for asking about it, culminating in his getting hit by a car.
And the the ‘punchline’: “And do you know what the moral of that story is?”
Not related to the current usage (I tyhink), but I once made purple muffins for an April Fool’s Day dinner, by judicious use of food coloring. Despite the fact that they were perfectly normal in all other respects, no one ate them.
They didn’t eat the odd-colored mashed potatoes, either.
Make some blueberry muffins from Pilsbury’s blueberry muffin mix. Just don’t drain the can of blueberries but use the juice as a substitute for the water/milk.
It makes 12 purple/blue/green blueberry muffins that look like way too much mold and algae covering them. Turns people off. However, the flavor is wonderful.