Word of the week: Stinge-watching
The opposite of binge-watching.
I’d hoped to give Jason Kottke full credit for coining stinge-watching, a useful and memorable term I spotted on his blog, Kottke.org, a few weeks ago, and which he’d first used in a February 2024 post:
The mechanics and economics of streaming media have changed how we watch TV and movies — the binge watch reigns supreme.
But recently, I’ve found myself watching some shows in a much different way. When I find a new show I really like or I’m digging into the newest season of a favorite series, instead of getting hooked and then blasting through all the available episodes, I’ll slow down or even stop watching so as to prolong the pleasure…or to delay the end. I feel like a squirrel, hoarding nuts for the winter. It’s stinge watching instead of binge watching.
Kottke’s posts have definitely popularized the term; he’s got a large audience and a lot of clout. (See also: Cory Doctorow and enshittification.) But unfortunately for my plan, he wasn’t the first to discover it. More than two years before Kottke wrote about it, “chrisryn” published a definition for stinge watch in Urban Dictionary. Here’s the entry, dated November 26, 2021:
To deliberately delay watching multiple episodes of a television series on a streaming service in order to extend the time in which you watch the series and fully enjoy each episode.
I am definitely going to stinge watch the next season of Ted Lasso, it’s so good it has to be savored.
Is there an even earlier usage of stinge-watch or stinge-watching? I’m still searching.
Looking into stinge-watching gave me the opportunity to investigate stinge and stingy and stinge-watching’s rhyming counterpart, binge-watching.
The OED doesn’t know where stingy comes from — maybe from sting (“the act of stinging”). It’s meant “miserly, pecunious” since the 1650s. Several centuries later, someone turned stingy (adjective) into stinge (“a stingy person,” first attested in 1914). There’s also the “rare” verb to stinge, “to behave in a stingy manner”; I was a little surprised to learn that Vita Sackville-West, friend/lover of Virginia Woolf, was the first to used it in this way, in 1937 (“I couldn’t see why a person ready to spend hundreds of pounds should be equally ready to stinge over a stamp or a ball of string”).
Also surprising: binge, which comes from an English dialect word meaning “to drink heavily,” has been in common use only since 1854. Binge-watching is, of course, even more recent: It surged in 2013, when Netflix became the first streaming service to release all episodes of a series (the U.S. remake of House of Cards). “The phenomenon of binge-viewing – a complete 22-episode box set consumed over one weekend – has become anecdotally standard, at least among those free of dependents and distractions,” wrote Mark Lawson in The Guardian on February 6, 2013. In January 2014, the American Dialect Society chose binge-watch — “to consume vast quantities of a single show or series of visual entertainment in one sitting” — as its “most likely to succeed” word of the year, and I think we can agree it has fulfilled its promise.
Speaking of streaming, and returning for a bit to stinge: While doing all this extremely important research I tumbled down an unexpected rabbit hole and discovered a cartoon character called Stingy.
From the Wikipedia entry:
LazyTown (Icelandic: Latibær) is an Icelandic children’s educational musical television series created by aerobics champion Magnús Scheving. Originally produced in English, it has been broadcast in dozens of languages globally. Designed to encourage healthy lifestyles, the series was based on Scheving'\’s stage play Áfram Latibær!, itself adapted from a book that Scheving wrote in 1995.[2]
The series was commissioned by Nickelodeon in early 2003, following the production of two stage plays and a test pilot. Originally performed in English, it was later dubbed into thirty languages and broadcast in over 180 countries. It combines live action, puppetry and computer animation, making it one of the most expensive children’s shows, with the cost per episode being over five times that of the average children’s show.
The character Stingy is “self-centered and possessive.” His Icelandic name is Nenni Níski, which translates to “Nenni cheapskate.”
I have one more binge story, which I need to commit to writing to finally be rid of it.
I used to be a contributing writer for a special-interest magazine targeted at girls and women in their teens and early 20s. My beat was health and fitness; the work was steady, the gig paid well, and my editors usually let me choose my subjects. This was in the print-only era; there was no online edition.
One month I published a serious, feature-length piece on how diets don’t work. I did a lot of research; I interviewed doctors and young women. I was proud of bringing an important subject to an audience that needed to read about it — that is, until I opened my print copy of the issue.
At the bottom of the story was my author bio, which in the past had read “Nancy Friedman is a freelance journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area.” This time, though, it read “When she isn’t writing about health and fitness, Nancy Friedman binges on M&Ms.”
What the what?!
I had neither written nor reviewed this invented “bio,” and I certainly would never have approved it. Where to begin? Here: Nancy Friedman dislikes almost all commercial candy, and she especially dislikes M&Ms. (When I was a kid I would pick the M&Ms out of trick-or-treat bags and discard them.) Moreover, Nancy Friedman is constitutionally disposed to stinge rather than binge. (Exception: Nancy Drew mysteries when I was 11.) Finally, as I’m sure you’ll have inferred, the “binge” line made a mockery of the article, which was, as I said, a serious piece about diet culture. How could it not have occurred to my editor to at least run it by me? I’d been a magazine editor myself; I knew not to mess with authors’ bios without their consent.
When I called my editor to protest, she was not even a little bit contrite. “I thought it was funny!” was her chirpy response. But she did agree to let me have control over my bio on future stories.
So, yes, I’ve been bitter about binge and M&Ms for a long time. But now that I’ve purged myself of the whole candy-coated grudge, I think I can finally move on.
P.S.: Gosh, that bio is awful. How long have we had the "WHEN SHE'S NOT X, SHE'S Y AND Z" cliche in author biographies? I now want to write "When she's not working, Quiara is eating, drinking, sleeping, locomoting, pissing, shitting, or engaging in leisure activities."
I hadn't heard of stinge-watching, but that's what we do, because like Charles we find few things to hold our attention and when we do, we ration them.
It's a good thing you discarded all those M&Ms: the green ones can turn you gay. I share your annoyance with your editor. If I want to be funny I'll do it myself.