Word of the week: Coconut
And other entries in the Kamala Harris lexicon.
Are you coconut-pilled? A Coconut Head? A member of Team Coconut or the Coconut Army?
Or did you just fall out of a coconut tree and have no idea what I’m talking about?
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Cuckoo for “coconut”
Coconut has been propagating throughout the mediaverse ever since Vice President Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. The source of the memes and the merch is an anecdote Harris related in a May 2023 speech at a White House event for advancing opportunities for Hispanic Americans. “None of us just live in a silo,” she told the audience. “Everything is in context.”
And then she quoted her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who had immigrated to the U.S. from India:
My mother used to — she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” (Laughs.)
You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.
A clip of this part of the speech began circulating on X in February 2024 (“This video is literally like medicine to me”) and gained momentum in the summer. NPR’s “All Things Considered” reported last week that “in the weeks before President Biden announced he would not be seeking reelection, some Democrats online rallied behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the party’s new nominee. And their symbol became the coconut tree.”
After Biden’s announcement, Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, reduced the meme to three emoji:
And Harris’s supporters began calling themselves coconut-pilled, grafting a modish suffix onto the tree. (See my November 2023 newsletter, “So Many Ways to Be Pilled,” for a definition and more examples.) To take a recent example, here’s New York Times opinion columnist Lydia Polgreen, on July 27: “And so it has taken me quite by surprise to find that I have become coconut-pilled. That’s the new nomenclature for converts to the Harris 2024 fold . . .” (Gift link to full column.)
A tree, a fruit, and a funny word
A coconut is not a nut — it’s a drupe, just like apricots, olives, cherries, and mangoes — and the tree on which it grows (Cocos nucifera) is a member of the palm tree family. According to a Wikipedia entry, “The name coconut is derived from the 16th-century Portuguese word coco, meaning ‘head’ or ‘skull’ after the three indentations on the coconut shell that resemble facial features.”
Coconut used to have an alternate spelling, cocoanut, which still survives in some place names (or their memories, such as the Cocoanut Grove nightclubs in Los Angeles and Boston). That spelling “is rarely used in contemporary texts,” says Merriam-Webster, “the shift to coconut prompted possibly by a need to distinguish the word from an entirely different plant product, the cocoa nut.”
Sorry, Marx Brothers.
And sorry, Danny Kaye.
The coconut is a seriously useful fruit — it can slake your thirst, satisfy your hunger, clothe you, shelter you, even entertain you as a percussion instrument — but it’s also funny (those facial features!). And coconut is a fun-to-say word. You might even call it an inherently funny word, thanks to the reduplication of coco and the innate hilariousness of k sounds. (“Words with a k in it are funny. Alka-Seltzer is funny. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny. All with a k. Ls are not funny. Ms are not funny.” — Neil Simon, The Sunshine Boys, 1972. “K, for some occult reason, has always appealed to the oafish risibles of the American plain people, and its presence in the names of many ... places has helped to make them joke towns ... for example, Kankakee, Kalamazoo, Hoboken, Hohokus, Yonkers, Squeedunk, ‘Stinktown’ and Brooklyn.” — H.L. Mencken in The New Yorker, 1936.)
More Kamala lingo, in alphabetical order
AKA: Alpha Kappa Alpha, the historically black sorority to which VP Harris belonged during her undergraduate years at Howard University, an HBCU (historically black college/university). Other AKA members have included Maya Angelou, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King.
Brat: Two memes in one! It’s Brat Summer, and the Kamala HQ account on X appropriated the acid-puke-slime-green color and blurry sans-serif typeface of Charli XCX’s hot album-of-the-season, Brat. The singer defines a brat as “a woman who is a little messy who enjoys to party.” USA Today put it this way: “Harris campaign going full Gen Z with memes.”
Comma-la: Roughly how you should be pronouncing Harris’s first name, although Scaachi Koul, writing for Slate, says it’s a little more nuanced than that. (Try “com’la.”) The comma mnemonic has been inspiring memes since at least Harris’s tenure in the U.S. Senate, when her staffers played softball wearing “Oxford Kamalas” T-shirts.1 Alas, that punctuation-nerd’s dream of a tee does not appear to be available to the public, but other “Comma La” shirts are selling briskly here, here, and here, among other places. Substacker
, author of the newsletter, has created his own version, which includes “24.”
KHive (or K-Hive): A group of online supporters of Vice President Harris that first coalesced during Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign. The term, a play on Beyoncé’s “BeyHive” fandom, was coined by MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid in 2017, when Harris was a U.S. senator. More on KHive here (unlocked New York Times article).
Lotus: “In Sanskrit, Kamala means lotus,” wrote Rashmee Roshan Lall last week. “In America, Kamala means POTUS.”
So far, Kamala just means VPOTUS. But don’t worry, that’s been taken care of, too, in a 2021 children’s book titled “Lotus the Vice POTUS.”
MALA: A truncation of Kamala (or Momala) and an acronym for Make America Laugh Again — a laughing rebuff to Donald Trump’s anger-fueled Make America Great Again.
Momala: The nickname Harris’s stepchildren use for her. It’s a blend of mom and Kamala — accent on the first syllable — as well as a homophone of the Yiddish diminutive mamaleh, literally “little mother.” (Harris’s husband, Douglas Emhoff, is Jewish.)
If you’re drawing a blank, see this explanation of the Oxford comma, also known as the serial comma.
In New Zealand, 'coconut' is sometimes heard as an insult to describe someone from the Pacific Islands. It's been around since at least the 1970s and, happily, is not nearly as prevalent today as it was back then. A lot of PI performers have worked the word into their acts as well, in the same way that other minority groups do for words intended to diminish them. Auckland now has the largest PI population of any city in the world and is richer and more vibrant for it.
I admit to being a bit surprised that the most prominent Indian-American politician has so thoroughly embraced the "coconut" label, because I am mostly familiar with it as a racial pejorative in the vein of "Oreo" or "Twinkie" - "brown on the outside, white on the inside." For a politician who's struggled a lot with "authenticity," it's a bit of an odd symbol, I think!