Word of the week: GLOAT

Beyond schadenfreude: the acronym of the season.

There has undeniably been gloating in some quarters since May 30, the date on which, after two days of deliberations, a unanimous jury in New York found the 45th president of the United States guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records to protect his 2016 candidacy. (“Hush-money trial” was many media outlets’ shorthand, which minimized the criminal charges. Donald J. Trump, the second “Teflon Don” — the first was mobster John Gotti — is now a convicted felon.)

A bit of gloating on the Grand Lake Theater marquee, May 31, 2024: “TRUMP IS GUILTY. ‘LOCK HIM UP!’” Photo: Nancy Friedman

But I had been planning to write about all-capital-letters GLOAT even before I learned the jury’s decision. That’s because of something one of Trump’s (many) lawyers, Todd Blanche, said in court on May 28 about one of Trump’s (many) former lawyers, the prosecution witness Michael Cohen.

Politico’s Erica Orden reported it:

Todd Blanche asked jurors if they are familiar with the acronym GOAT, which stands for “greatest of all time.”

Michael Cohen, Blanche said, “is the GLOAT: Greatest Liar of All Time.” Upon hearing this, one of the jurors, a young woman, cracked a smile and began laughing softly.

(Cohen parried by calling Blanche the SLOAT: the stupidest lawyer of all time, because apparently neither of these gentlemen has advanced beyond sixth-grade playground taunts.)

Of course jurors and others had heard of the acronym GOAT; it’s been part of the language for more than 30 years. Credit goes to Lonnie Ali, Muhammed Ali’s wife, who incorporated the boxer’s business as G.O.A.T. in September 1992. (Ali had been referring to himself as “the greatest of all time” for years before the incorporation.) Lonnie Ali’s coinage represented a neat inversion of an old term: As the Grammarphobia blog notes, “goat” had been “used in American sports since the early 1900s as a derisive term for a player responsible for a team’s loss.”

Todd Blanche may have considered himself a clever fellow, but he’s not the first to insert an L for “liar” into GOAT. After I posted Blanche’s quote on the American Dialect Society’s listserv, folklore researcher Bonnie Taylor-Blake responded with a link to an October 18, 2021, letter to the editor of The Wisconsin State Journal (Madison) from Mike Fatla of Plymouth. The GLOAT in question? None other than Donald J. Trump. “We the citizens of the United States cannot have Donald Trump succeed with his ‘big lie,’” Fatla wrote. “Surely, he would gloat. If we do let him, he would become the GLOAT, the ‘greatest liar of all time.’” (For more on “big lie,” see my article in American Speech, linked here.)

But GLOAT goes back even further. Another ADS-L contributor, quote investigator Garson O’Toole, shared a lyric from the 2001 album Rip the Jacker (nice title!), in which rapper Canibus responds to fellow rapper L.L. Cool J:

Yo, this be the realest shit I ever wrote
You should change your muthafuckin’ name from G.O.A.T. to G.L.O.A.T.
The Greatest Liar Of All Time that cannot rhyme
That cannot shine as long as I’m alive.

Here are the complete lyrics.

GLOAT works — as, say, SLOAT does not¹ — because lower-case gloat has been a fairly common English word for a very long time. Its origins are obscure, but the OED conjectures that it’s related to Germanic and Nordic words for “to stare,” “to peep,” and “to grin.” In the 16th century it meant “to look at furtively”²; a century later it meant “to cast amorous or admiring glances.” By the 19th century it had settled into its contemporary, largely pejorative sense: “to observe or think about something with triumphant and often malicious satisfaction, gratification, or delight” (Merriam-Webster).

Despite the word’s negative associations —of smug satisfaction, of rejoicing over another’s misfortune — there exists a global company called Gloat Inc., founded in Tel Aviv in 2015. It’s an “internal talent marketplace” that “translates the world of work into the language of skills to give companies unprecedented ability to navigate change, enable more fulfilling and equitable careers for their employees, and dismantle the silos, bureaucracy, and biases that hold people and businesses back.”

Gloat Inc.’s wordmark

Once the dismantling is done, do the companies’ top executives rub their hands and cackle evilly? It would not be wholly out of character.

But wait, there’s more gloating to be found in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database. A company called Truly Beauty has registered trademarks for a product line called GLOAT (“Greatest Lips of All Time”). And something is going on with a New Zealand company, Stylebender, and “Gloat TV.” (Sorry, I didn’t get far with that particular investigation.)

The last laugh, though, may belong to a limited liability company in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, that on April 5, 2024, filed an application to register a trademark for GLOAT. There’s no additional information in the filing about the name, but here’s what I did find: The applicant is called Lawco.

So . . . Greatest Lawyers Of All Time? Paging Messrs. Blanche and Cohen, Esq.

1. Unless you are in San Francisco, where there’s a Sloat Boulevard, a Sloat Garden Center, and a Commodore Sloat School, all named for John D. Sloat, the U.S. naval officer who in 1846 claimed (“claimed”) California for the United States.

2. Giving it kinship with other gl- words related to sight and light: glance, glow, gleam, glimpse, glitter, etc.