Came here to say this and to note the 1970s kids' books about "Mog, the Forgetful Cat" -- there may still be a copy lurking (or moldering) on our shelves.
Lots to think about here but I need to respond to the cereal. At some point my son started calling cereal “boy kibble” which I thought was perfect. When he was about 8, a restaurant called Flake opened in our neighborhood. They specialized in cereal! I gave my son and his friends money to walk over and buy themselves breakfast or snacks. They quickly figured out that they could buy a whole box of cereal and a carton of milk at the corner market, thus tripling their boy kibble haul. (A box of cereal does not go very far.)
Oh my. I don’t venture into the manosphere by intent, so mogging is new to me. But it figures that Nick Fuentes is hosting this interview. We all have insecurities about something but this is next-level.
I always learn something new from you, Nancy! And cereal with balls—little round bits? Too funny!
And here I thought "mogging" was just a shortened version of "transmogrifying," something World of Warcraft players do by changing the armor on our in-game characters. (Yes, in my 70s, I do play.) So another relatively innocent term (I first came across "transmogrify" in the Calvin & Hobbes comics) is co-opted by people on society's fringes, and somehow turns them into celebs.
On a different tangent, I am reminded once again of the aptness of the term “rabbit hole” in the internet age. We have all experienced it, especially while reading one of Nancy’s posts.
Fun fact for the day: The figurative sense of "rabbit hole" -- "passage into a strange, surreal, or nonsensical situation or environment" -- dates back only to 1938, although it's a reference to the rabbit hole in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865). And the first place it appeared with that figurative sense is, of all places, the Yale Law Journal ("It is the Rabbit-Hole down which we fell into the Law, and to him who has gone down it, no queer performance is strange").
I think that in the internet age, the term has developed a new, slightly different sense, that of getting lost in a labyrinth. From Wiktionary: (by extension) A time-consuming tangent or detour, often one from which it is difficult to extricate oneself.
Synonym: wild-goose chase
Near-synonym: rabbit trail (regiolectic)
“I’m also a fan of a really obscure book series, but that's a rabbit hole that we won't get into.”
“While writing my paper, my research went down several rabbit holes that were only marginally related and wasted a lot of my time.”
The footnote on "distaff" is the quiet MVP of this post. A 15th-century metonym for women derived from the tool they all worked with — now buried in phrases like "distaff side" that most people use without knowing the origin. The "spear side" counterpart is even more obscure.
The journey of "mog" from AMOG acronym to verbified slang follows the same compression pattern we see in internet language generally: take a multi-word concept, squeeze it into a monosyllable, then morph it into whatever part of speech you need. Chad went through similar evolution — from Virgin vs. Chad meme to adjective to lifestyle category.
What's interesting is how these terms leak into mainstream discourse once journalists need words for phenomena they're covering. Helen Lewis using "moggs" in The Atlantic is the linguistic equivalent of a word getting its passport stamped.
The unnecessary double-X in maxx is very curious to me as well, on two grounds:
1) it clearly predates our current xxxxtreme!!!1 moment, as evidenced by very un-extreme celebrities Jim Fixx and Redd Foxx
2) when asked to pick a bigram associated with peak "biological" manhood, I think quite possibly the only WRONG answer would be "XX" ...
I'm sure you know that Slate used to have a women's vertical called The XX Factor.
In the UK, a "moggy" is a domestic pussycat. (Apparently a mutt, non-breed cat - I never looked it up before.) So, take that, man balls.
😂
So what is the origin of feline moggy? It predates the mog you describe here.
“Probably a variation of Maggie”— OED. A moggy or moggie was originally (17th c) a young girl, then an untidily dressed woman.
Came here to say this and to note the 1970s kids' books about "Mog, the Forgetful Cat" -- there may still be a copy lurking (or moldering) on our shelves.
Lots to think about here but I need to respond to the cereal. At some point my son started calling cereal “boy kibble” which I thought was perfect. When he was about 8, a restaurant called Flake opened in our neighborhood. They specialized in cereal! I gave my son and his friends money to walk over and buy themselves breakfast or snacks. They quickly figured out that they could buy a whole box of cereal and a carton of milk at the corner market, thus tripling their boy kibble haul. (A box of cereal does not go very far.)
Oh my. I don’t venture into the manosphere by intent, so mogging is new to me. But it figures that Nick Fuentes is hosting this interview. We all have insecurities about something but this is next-level.
I always learn something new from you, Nancy! And cereal with balls—little round bits? Too funny!
"Silly rabbit, Trix are for grown-up men!"
And here I thought "mogging" was just a shortened version of "transmogrifying," something World of Warcraft players do by changing the armor on our in-game characters. (Yes, in my 70s, I do play.) So another relatively innocent term (I first came across "transmogrify" in the Calvin & Hobbes comics) is co-opted by people on society's fringes, and somehow turns them into celebs.
On a different tangent, I am reminded once again of the aptness of the term “rabbit hole” in the internet age. We have all experienced it, especially while reading one of Nancy’s posts.
Fun fact for the day: The figurative sense of "rabbit hole" -- "passage into a strange, surreal, or nonsensical situation or environment" -- dates back only to 1938, although it's a reference to the rabbit hole in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865). And the first place it appeared with that figurative sense is, of all places, the Yale Law Journal ("It is the Rabbit-Hole down which we fell into the Law, and to him who has gone down it, no queer performance is strange").
I think that in the internet age, the term has developed a new, slightly different sense, that of getting lost in a labyrinth. From Wiktionary: (by extension) A time-consuming tangent or detour, often one from which it is difficult to extricate oneself.
Synonym: wild-goose chase
Near-synonym: rabbit trail (regiolectic)
“I’m also a fan of a really obscure book series, but that's a rabbit hole that we won't get into.”
“While writing my paper, my research went down several rabbit holes that were only marginally related and wasted a lot of my time.”
The footnote on "distaff" is the quiet MVP of this post. A 15th-century metonym for women derived from the tool they all worked with — now buried in phrases like "distaff side" that most people use without knowing the origin. The "spear side" counterpart is even more obscure.
The journey of "mog" from AMOG acronym to verbified slang follows the same compression pattern we see in internet language generally: take a multi-word concept, squeeze it into a monosyllable, then morph it into whatever part of speech you need. Chad went through similar evolution — from Virgin vs. Chad meme to adjective to lifestyle category.
What's interesting is how these terms leak into mainstream discourse once journalists need words for phenomena they're covering. Helen Lewis using "moggs" in The Atlantic is the linguistic equivalent of a word getting its passport stamped.
Always enjoy your stuff.
But sometimes the things you uncover make me barff.