Word of the week: Brunchlord

A new word pulls up a seat at the table.

Where do new words come from? Sometimes they imitate a sound: buzz, tweet, didgeridoo. Sometimes they’re imported from one language into another to fill a semantic gap: karaoke, safari, enchilada, graffiti. Sometimes they’re proper names so emblematic of a genre or a personality that they become adjectives: Kafkaesque, Churchillian, quixotic. Sometimes they’re brand names that have become genericized: elevator, heroin, tabloid. Sometimes old words take on new meanings (web, scroll, tablet) or shift their parts of speech (yes, gift can be a verb).

Then there are the words that are deliberately coined. Neologisms like these, wrote Allan Metcalf in Predicting New Words (2002), “are like acorns, not many of which grow into oaks.” Cleverness is rarely enough: Who today remembers bushlips, which the American Dialect Society selected as its word of the year for 1990? What happened to shuicide bomber (2001), a terrorist with a bomb in his shoes? How about heaven-o (1997), a replacement for “hello”?

Every so often, though, a newly coined word makes enough sense and reaches enough people to beat the odds, often because it’s created from two or more existing words.¹ Metcalf created a handy mnemonic to measure a new word’s success: Frequency of use, Unobtrusiveness, Diversity of users and situations, Generation of other forms and meanings, and Endurance. The initials spell FUDGE — itself a word that is, perhaps fittingly, of unknown origin.

That brings us to brunchlord, a recently coined word with a known inventor and — so far, at least — a promising start in life.

A brunch board fit for a brunchlord. Source: The Thirsty Feast

Brunchlord was coined by Karl Bode, a regular contributor to TechDirt and an active BlueSky user (@karlbode.com). His earliest use of the term, to the best of my knowledge, was in an August 3, 2023, post on Bluesky:

“Some hustlebro fail upwards MBA brunchlord.” Could benefit from some hyphenation, but the context is clear enough.

(I was thrilled to see “hustlebro” in Bode’s post, because I think I may have coined that word in April 2020. I can’t link to my original tweet because I’ve deleted my Twitter account, but Mike Pope kindly preserved it in his blog.)

Bode has worked hard at the F element of FUDGE, hammering away at brunchlord with impressive Frequency. Most of the brunchlord instances on Bluesky have been Bode’s, but within several months of his original post other users had also picked it up. The word was gaining Diversity and Endurance.

Bluesky post from Connor Anderson. You remember enshittification, right? It was the American Dialect Society’s 2023 word of the year.

On February 2, 2024, Bode introduced brunchlord to his TechDirt readers with a story headlined “‘The Messenger’ Implosion Once Again Shows The Real Problem With U.S. Journalism Is Shitty Management By Visionless, Fail-Upward Brunchlords.” Between February and October he would go on to use brunchlord an additional seven times in his TechDirt reporting. On February 27, user “tech98” (Bode himself, perhaps?) entered a definition in the Urban Dictionary:

Incompetent and overpaid corporate executive usually coming from a background of family wealth.

Man, my company is run by a bunch of brunchlords who have no understanding of the product or market.

On November 29, in an exchange with “Lisa” on Bluesky, Bode expanded on the definition:

In other words, a brunchlord embodies the Peter Principle, which holds that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to the level of their incompetence.

A lot of people were tickled by brunchlord. In July, commenter “Bobson,” writing on an

Unpopular Front

post about VP nominee JD Vance, called brunchlord “the most delicious epithet for the tech bro/VC/private equity nexus.” But the word also has its detractors, notably Liz Henry, who griped in August 2024 that “running down the concept of brunch [is] homophobic and so it must be reclaimed, ASAP!”

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No disrespect to Liz Henry, but I find brunchlord both apt and amusing. There’s something appealing about the bunching up of those two elements: lord from Old English (and itself a blend of two words that meant loaf and keeper) and brunch from late-19th-century British university slang, a portmanteau of breakfast and lunch. Breakfast-lunch loaf-keeper! It’s silly in its pomposity — a perfect reflection of what it’s describing.

Because both parts of brunchlord are already in our lexicon, the new word doesn’t require a lot of brainwork. It’s Unobtrusive, to borrow Allan Metcalf’s term. Think of all the other -lord compounds we already know: overlord (since the late 12th century), landlord (early 15th century), warlord (1856), slumlord (1899), and the newest compound, edgelord, first documented in 2015 and added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2023 with the definition “someone who makes wildly dark and exaggerated statements (as on an internet forum) with the intent of shocking others.”

But brunchlord doesn’t resonate only with Anglophones. It turns out the Germans have a similar word, which Karl Bode shared with his Threads followers:

Posts on Threads by Karl Bode, July 13, 2024. “Frühstücksdirektor”: a male person who holds a higher position in a company or institution but has no decisive powers or significant influence.

The difference between the English and German words? A Frühstücksdirektor has an important title but little influence. A brunchlord may be incompetent, but he has a surfeit of unearned influence.

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1. One of the most successful such neologisms of the last century is scofflaw, invented (twice!) as submissions in a Prohibition-era contest. Read my 2011 blog post about scofflaw’s history.