WP 07: Beanmaxxing
Introducing the Wordpecker Speed Round
Leguminous wave | Phylogeny | Lawslop | Taco wizards | Cybertruck for your face | Soil seed bank
This week in phraseology
Welcome to another edition of Wordpecker! In this edition, we have bean fiends, content slop of the week (it’s slop all the way down these days), cool nature stuff, and more.
Let’s get to it!
1. Leguminous wave
I hadn’t covered this trend yet, but last fall I’d saved fibermaxxing1 as a word to write about here and as a coming trend for 2026. And here we are: Yasmin Tayag artfully writes about “One Food All Americans Can Agree On” for the Atlantic. In this piece, Tayag takes readers through an engaging exploration of the cultural perceptions, nutritional benefits, and rising popularity of beans among MAHA strivers, coupon cutters, and word-of-mouth marketing by beanfluencer superfans of Rancho Gordo heirloom beans, which we’ve explored here previously.
Bean producers are “riding this legumnious wave” of popularity and introducing new twists on old standbys, including prepackaged lunches with Asian- and Mediterranean-inspired flavors.
The article is rife with beany phrase goodness, including the Lentiful brand (co-founded by someone named Ben Bacon), bean innovation, and bean novitiates. I’d also like to note for the record that bean is an objectively great word that’s fun to say.
2. Phylogeny
For all the biology courses I took in college, I’m surprised I’ve not encountered phylogeny, which refers broadly to the connections between organisms based on ancestry. Maybe I did but have since forgotten!
Cornell Lab of Ornithology (I’m a big fan) recently released an interactive Phylogeny Explorer tool, where you can map the ancestry of any bird species. According to the press release, keeping track of the taxonomy for 11,000 bird species is a daunting task. The Phylogeny Explorer aims to support for scientific research or just for funsies.
3. Lawslop
I discovered another circle of AI slop hell via Craig Silverman at Indicator: lawslop. People are creating YouTube accounts with huge viewer counts that show either deepfakes of public figures—like former special counsel Jack Smith issuing warnings about Trump—or fake court proceedings featuring fake people, all presented as if they’re real.
Here’s a thing about AI slop that grinds my gears: It’s not just mid, but it’s unnecessary. The world is full of abundant wonders and interesting stories—we don’t need fake cute animal videos to keep us entertained. Cute animals exist in abundance! As do court cases! We don’t need any of this fleetingly entertaining, mediocre garbage!
4. Taco wizards
When you order from Taco Bell online, the app informs you that taco wizards are busy working on your delicious meal. If I worked at Taco Bell, I would add Taco Wizard to my resume AND LinkedIn profile. Honestly, nothing is stopping me from doing this now.
Confidential to the overlords at the Taco Bell coven: a title like Taco Wizard should command a living wage, don’t you think?
5. Cybertruck for your face
As Meta glasses are becoming more of a thing, stories are emerging of men using them to film women without their consent, a gross loser behavior Meta doesn’t seem bothered by at all. This is unsurprising given that the company’s founder started Facebook as a way to rate the physical appearance of women on college campuses. Oh, and speaking of gross loser behavior, they also want to add facial recognition to Meta glasses.
Instead of banning these creepshot glasses, Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day proposes making them socially uncool by calling them a Cybertruck for your face:
Meta’s business is data and they get that data, largely for free, from users by calling it content creation. They don’t care if “content creation” . . . means terrorizing random women on the street as long as the footage helps their AI understand what that street looks like. In fact, one could argue that by facilitating extremely predatory and aggressive behavior they get the data they want even faster because they are offering their users a perfect excuse to act like complete and utter freaks. And so, the only off-ramp here has to be people pushing back against Meta Ray-Ban users. If we don’t want to be surveilled, we have to start making these things feel like a Cybertruck you wear on your face. And make people feel like the fucking losers they are for walking around with Mark Zuckerberg’s personal spyglass strapped to their heads.
It’s worth a try.
6. Soil seed bank
Have you caught the images of the wildflower superbloom happening in Death Valley, aka the driest place in North America? According to Tiffany Pereira, an ecologist and research scientist at the Desert Research Institute, desert plants are adept at storing energy when water is scarce. Seeds are able to go dormant and wait for the right amount of rainfall to bloom, which happened with a rainier winter this year. The NYT has a good explainer of desert plant ecology with great photos, too.
New! 🌪️ Let’s do a Wordpecker Speed Round 🏃🏻♀️
Here’s an occasional Wordpecker segment for words and phrases that don’t require a lot of explanation but are still novel, delightful, and share-worthy.
Ebesneezer - My husband’s nickname for Yoshi, our parakeet who sneezes a lot 😷
Diet Cokemon - I found this extremely funny, but maybe you had to be there. While discussing Pokemon (as one does), my husband announced he was going to get a Diet Coke . . . emon. 🥤
Catsy - A word that came to me in a dream, with no other context. Is it Etsy, but for cats? 🐈
Big gay IKEA bag - As they say in the law, res ipsa loquitur, or the thing (aka STORSTOMMA) speaks for itself - courtesy of my oldest kid 🏳️🌈
More muscles, more problems - Something my personal trainer says every time we increase weights or reps (he is very mean) 💪🏻
Soot Yourself - A local chimney sweep company 🏠
That’s it for this week! Remember to keep making it weird and stay furiously curious!
At what point will we maxx out on this things to take to the “maxx”? The future is unknowable but the trend seems to be continuing. See also: looksmaxxing, frictionmaxxing.