Wordpecker 14: Small hot Jimothy
Plus: Name our new lawnmower!
Jimothy | Yuppie chow | MAHA Blast | Big Salad | Large hot Lisa | Mowby Dick
This week in phraseology
What a summer we’re having, what with the unhealthy air and the risky greens. I just wanna gorge myself on summer berries without spending weeks on the toilet, okay? It’s almost as if cutting funding for federal food safety monitoring and allowing megacorps to monopolize huge portions of our food supply are creating a perfect explosive diarrhea storm. Who could have predicted this, besides journalists and public health professionals and anyone with eyes and ears and a functioning brain?
This summer is not all bad; we still have new words and phrases. In this edition of Wordpecker, we have cryptid joy, hot diarrhea lettuce summer, and the chance to name an inanimate object. This is going to be a meme-rich edition, so buckle up.
Let’s get to it!
1. Jimothy
Since I last updated Wordpecker, a round boi in Seattle named Jimothy has captured our collective hearts. If you aren’t as chronically online as I am and have no idea what I’m talking about, an extremely cute Seattle raccoon with a congenital condition called “short spine syndrome” went viral this month.
Here’s the Instagram post that started it all.
Almost immediately, a fast-and-furious flurry of memes and art began. This is the good side of the internet, and why I will likely never completely quit social media. Here are some of my faves:
One of the things I love most about this story is how Seattleites have been keeping an eye out for Jimothy since he was a baby. Here’s a post showing video footage of tiny Jimothy.
2. Yuppie chow
Jermaine Fowler wrote a powerful essay called “The Same Lettuce Is Sold at Whole Foods for Eight Dollars and at Taco Bell for One” about how our food systems have been co-opted by corporations that fool consumers into paying more for perceived value.
It took less than a quarter century to turn a chore people had done for themselves since Egypt, rinse a leaf and tear it, into an aisle. Upscale restaurants had served loose young greens under the French word mesclun, and the growers who supplied them, watching what a French word did to the price, took to calling the product yuppie chow among themselves, the industry’s private name for the thing it sells you as virtue.
Here’s a deep-dive paper (.PDF) into the evolution of yuppie chow.
3. MAHA Blast
Here is a very good joke, courtesy of longtime Wordpecker reader Randal:
4. Big Salad
I often enjoy this joke about monopolies with the power to crush the little guy. Big Salad showed up on an Instagram post by Wired for an article about Taylor Farms, a company whose alleged negligence may or may not be causing thousands of Americans to forcefully shit ourselves for weeks. Huge props to the Wired graphic designer and copy editor for working in this phrase as a fake article category:
According to the article, Taylor Farms “donated more than $3.6 million to conservative groups between 2020 and 2025, including $1 million to the MAGA Inc. super PAC.” This seems fine.
5. Large hot Lisa
When we stopped in our local bookstore this weekend, I heard a barista call out “LARGE HOT LISA!” which was very confusing until I learned they name a coffee drink after their employees. Did I make a “large hot Toni” joke while I was there, mortifying one of my kids in the process? Probably.
6. Mowby Dick
We live on a half-acre lot with so much dumb grass. So much. So dumb. We are not landed gentry! Kentucky bluegrass is non-native! She doesn’t even go here! It takes forever to mow, and so does planting and tending the native perennial gardens we’d prefer to grow. Long story short: my husband and our son’s boyfriend set up our new robot lawn mower. I for one welcome our new robot lawnmower overlord. It’s honestly kind of cool; it has a camera so you can follow its progress while making OM NOM NOM sounds.
Because we love punny names for inanimate objects here at Wordpecker, I’ve decided this beast needs a name. So far I’ve proposed Mowby Dick and Taylor Snips. What would you name it?
If we choose your name, the winner will get a Wordpecker sticker in the mail! (Promises, promises, I know.) I owe so many of you paid subscribers stickers, but one of my biggest executive functioning hurdles is mailing stuff. So yeah. They’re coming!
Some punny names for inanimate objects from previous editions:
Speaking of mailing stuff, I have a question for you:
That’s it for this week! Remember to keep making it weird, and stay furiously curious!