I’ve come across someone named Jihad before. I imagine he gets stopped at airports a lot.
Lots of people around here are named Jihad. Osama is rarer.
As a very progressive boomer, I have to vote against the appropriation of words that already refer to some people to now serve as an insult. Since we already have “entitled bitch” in the vocabulary we don’t need “Karen” to do double duty; even better, we don’t need the “bitch” in there as an insult specific to women. “Entitled jerk” would be fine – which also fixes the problem that not everybody knows all the code memes.
I guess I must be too close to it - "Karen"s are middle aged, right?- because I don’t get the association at all. Karen was a popular name in my brother’s class (he’s 5 yrs older)but I don’t recall many in my age group. And because it was so ubiquitous at one time, it makes sense there would be a lot of them out there today. Other than that, I don’t get the entitled part. Is it really just short hand for “all women of a certain age are bitches”? Sorry to be dense or overthink it.
Jack Tar
“Judas” is a name you don’t see around much (except as an epithet).
No, it’s more like: we’ve noticed there’s a certain type of bitchy, usually middle-aged woman who likes to complain to management and is just generally rude and entitled. What’s a stereotypical name for someone of her generation, and let’s pick one that has a little “bite” to it. (By “bite” I mean the sound of it. “Karen”‘s got that nice hard “k” in it, that strong "a’, and two syllables to make it punchy. Not that this is something they thought through, but in picking a stereotypical name for a woman of that generation, I think that’s part of the reason it just “sounded right.”)
I don’t like it either, but I don’t expect anything to be done about it except on a personal level.
I used to work (distantly) with a guy who was always a level or two above me in the organizational hierarchy, though never in my “chain of command,” but every time I interacted with him, I felt a little disrespectful calling him by his first name, which everyone did.
It only took me one time calling him “Mr. Bates” to realize why everyone called him by his first name.
Yeah, if we go by peak name popularity, the bulk of real people named Karen in the U.S. are late middle-aged or older. (Karen was a top ten name between the mid 1950s and the mid 1960s, after which it became less popular. I was born in 1960.)
Yet the meme “Karens” seem to be younger. On Reddit, they are often characterized as anti-vaxxer moms.
I wonder if, as a child, he was referred to as master?
The name probably should have been “Catherine” because of my son’s second wife’s tantrums.:eek:
In the '70s it was “Jennifer” and “Scott.”
I recall seeing a single-panel comic of a class photo where the caption said “First Row, L-R: Jennifer, Scott, Scott, Jennifer, Scott, Jennifer, Jennifer…”
A sorta relative announced they were naming their baby boy Lazarus. I think her mom talked her out of it.
Give it time…
I don’t think “Bubba” is offensive when used within the subculture of the Southeastern U.S.
Would “Osama” be more rare than post 1945 “Adolf”?
Sloane is also the girlfriend of “E” on the T.V. show *Entourage * which I admit wasn’t the same level of cultural touchstone.
It’s one of those last-name-as-a-first-name sounding deals, to me.
One of my classmates this term at college was named Osama. He often replied to my posts in the class discussion forum. The name kind of caught my attention but I didn’t dwell on it.
As someone named Scott, who grew up in the '70s, I must object to this.
Quite the contrary, I always thought that being named “Scott” was weird, precisely because I didn’t know, nor had I ever heard of, anyone else with that name.