A workplace email exchange from 2008:
Alex: Hi Jeff, we’re going to have that planning meeting at 2:00.
Jeff: Grool.
{Five minutes later}
Alex: Jesus Jeff, after I googled Grool, I needed to delete my browser history to stay compliant with our internet usage policy.
I’ll leave it to you to figure out what images popped up on Alex’s screen.
My usage of Grool came from the 2004 movie Mean Girls. Lindsay Lohan’s character, Cady, intimidated by a conversation with her high school’s most popular boy, responds to his invitation for a date with “Grool.”
After the boy walks away, Cady’s friend teases her: “Grool?”
“What? I meant to say ‘cool,’ and then I started to say ‘great.’”
Language is a living species. It grows and evolves, sometimes rapidly, sometimes at the speed of flowing glaciers. The term gaslighting is an example of both. Its etymology stems from a 1938 play where a husband, over time, keeps lowering the gas lights in his home. His wife complains, and as psychological torture, he repeatedly claims nothing has changed. Wikipedia tells me the term has been in use ever since, but it never caught my—or most other people’s—attention until it’s use exploded (often incorrectly) in the mid-twenty-teens.
In another Mean Girls scene, Gretchen Wieners walks down the hall with her two best friends, Regina and Karen. The three of them make up the mean girls of Mean Girls. In their conversation, Gretchen airs a word she’s just made up. “It’s so fetch.”
“What is fetch?”
“Oh, it’s like, slang, from England.”
Later in the movie, Regina admonishes her:
“Gretchen, stop trying to make fetch happen. It’s not going to happen.”
Regina has a point. This isn’t how words catch on. You don’t just start saying them and then expect everyone else to follow suit. In the days prior to mass media, words typically spread through writing. Journalists, novelists or playwrights used a word, other writers copied them, careful readers inserted the new word in conversation, and it slowly gained traction.
Shakespeare is credited with creating over five-hundred new words in his plays and poems. But in the Guardian article How new words are born, Andy Bodle points out that Shakespeare may not have invented those words at all. He may simply have captured in writing the lingo of his day. Of course, now one viral TikTok can amplify a clever new word or phrase all over the world.
In a beautiful bit of irony, fetch did happen. The fetch conversation is one of the funnier bits in a massively popular movie. Fetch, which sprung from the mind of the talented Tina Fey, is now part of our lexicon. From the Urban Dictionary: Fetch is a slang term that means cool or awesome.
Not to be outdone by Tina Fey and Shakespeare, I tried my hand at coining a term of my own. Four months ago, in my blog post Mall Life I introduced fwaneo to the world. In Bodle’s Guardian article, he classifies new words in one of thirteen esoteric categories: Derivation, Eponyms, Compounding, Conversion, etc. Fwaneo belongs in the ‘Abbreviations’ category, which includes acronyms such as scuba and radar.
While writing about the dearth of food-variety in my home town, I began thinking about the term ‘ethnic food.’ Ethnic is defined as belonging to a population group or subgroup made up of people who share a common cultural background or descent. With this definition, all food is ethnic food, even a twinkie or a cheeseburger, because they belong to a distinct group—Americans. When people in America talk about ethnic food, what they really mean is ‘food with a non-European origin.’ Fwaneo became my less Eurocentric way of describing it.
But as far as I can tell, over the past four months, fwaneo hasn’t caught on outside of my family. And they only use it when prompted by me.
Talking today with Sophie:
“I like your word fwaneo, dad, except it reminds me of guano.”
“Oh, right, what’s that, reptile poop?”
“Bat poop, but yeah.”
I’m no Tina Fey, but I stand behind my new term. This is the third time I’ve mentioned fwaneo in writing, so it’s probably time for the word to go viral. Thousands of words get added to our global languages every year, often because someone has found a more accurate way to say something. Fwaneo corrects the Eurocentric English-language blunder of labeling non-European foods as “ethnic.”
In the meantime, maybe what I really need is a mean girl of my own: “Jeff, stop trying to make fwaneo happen. It’s not going to happen.” But it would be oh-so-grool if it did.
The Other Stuff 
I like “fwaneo.” Time will tell if I will start using it or not. I used to know a guy who described certain projects as “fomplicated.” Not just complicated, but three-trips-to-the-hardware-store F—ing complicated. I love fomplicated and I use it when it’s needed. I do wonder if the guy who coined it for me still uses it.
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I like Fomplicated. Another word I coined (in college) is cartusion. It’s when you bump your head and the contusion is so big it belongs in a cartoon. That one I still use.
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Cartusion! Made me LOL. But I hope that doesn’t happen to me, or to you!
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i love Mean Girls! i also like fetch and cartusion. but that word “fwaneo?”– def too fomplicated for me to remember 🙂
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And I worry that no one reads the comments… Once you get used to it, fwaneo rolls off the tongue. Of course, I’m the only person who has gotten used to it.
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Time to think about patenting fwaneo.
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Fwaneo is my gift to the world.
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Fwaneo is brilliant! And “ethnic foods” is most certainly not. I love the irony in it though, that small real estate devoted to the Mexican, the Chinese, the Indian, the kosher as it were…kind of the same variety in most American grocery store chains. Love the idea too that Shakespeare just captured the talk of the day, that’s good.
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Maybe you can work fwaneo into some marketing copy and really get things off the ground. It’s silly how little space is given in the grocery to fwaneo. I’m sure if they expanded the section people would buy whatever they sell. Our nearest Asian grocer is 45 minutes away. Every time we go there, we fill our cart with all kinds of stuff.
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It’s fascinating how slang words can develop differently in different locations. As far as I’m aware, fetch hasn’t caught on in Aotearoa. Instead we use:
choice or neat which mean awesome, cool, or great. Choice can also have the additional meaning of thanks.
And then there’s our ubiquitous phrase sweet as which can also have a similar meaning. Some of it’s more common uses are:
– To express agreement, approval, or gratitude. For example, “Do you want to go to the movies?” “Yeah, sweet as.” Or, “Thanks for helping me with my homework.” “Sweet as, mate.”
– To indicate that something is very good, cool, or awesome. For example, “How was the concert?” “Sweet as, bro. The band rocked.” Or, “Check out my new car.” “Wow, that’s sweet as.”
– To reassure someone that everything is fine, no problem, or all good. For example, “Sorry I’m late, I got stuck in traffic.” “Sweet as, don’t worry about it.” Or, “Are you feeling better today?” “Sweet as, thanks for asking.”
– To compare something to something else that is sweet, usually without finishing the sentence. For example, “She’s sweet as…” (meaning she’s sweet as sugar, honey, pie, etc.) Or, “This cake is sweet as…” (meaning it’s very delicious).
The funny thing is that many American visitors to our shores mistake “sweet as” for “sweet ass” and become quite offended. For example: “I’m in a hurry. Can I have a coffee to go?” “Sure, sweet as”.
Come to think of it, Kiwis often use “as” to finish a sentence as a sort of implied superlative. It is a way of emphasising the adjective or adverb that precedes it. For example, “tired as” means “very tired” or “exhausted”, “fast as” means “very fast” or “impressive”, and “cold as” means “very cold” or “unpleasant”. The use of “as” in this way is a feature of New Zealand English that distinguishes it from other varieties of English
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I’ve picked up a great many slang phrases from Australia through wordpress. You’re my only blogger friend in NZ. I thank you for this revelation. I’d like to add sweet as to my own vocabulary. I think it will spruce it up a bit.
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Love this! From my kiwi friends, I’ve also learned about “chur” and “munted”.
Ending sentences with “as”: I’d never noticed it, but I do hear it often. Irish friends tend to end with “so”, like “Grand, so.” Fascinating.
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I’m curious now as to what grool googling pulls up, but I’m not going to do it! Before I read that it was “great+cool”, I thought it’d be “groovy+cool”.
Also, since your invention of fwaneo, I’ve used it in day to day speech, but then no one knows what I’m talking about..Guess I thought it had more pull at the time.
AND, I did not know the origins of gaslighting, thanks for adding to something I’ve learned today!
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No one knows fwaneo yet but once it’s in common use in whistler it’s going global. Actually reading the origin of gaslighting helped me understand what it is.
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I remember this email exchange! And cannot believe you do.
If I remember correctly, you (and I as your backup) were in charge of our company’s internet policy so my comment was in jest; but it’s fun to re-examine this 15 years later.
I obviously Googled “grool” in 2008 because I was interested in etymology, even though I might not have realized it. I Googled “grool” tonight (on my home PC) and the results I referenced in my 2008 email were much less obvious in 2023 and more geared towards your original “Mean Girls” reference, another sign of how society has changed.
Fifteen years later, I would like to think that I have moved past starting professional emails with “Jesus,” but upon reflection I realize I might have only culled that instinct.
Anyway, to focus on your point, remember Bennifer from 2002-04, the name the media gave to Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez? We were quickly inundated with copycats-and this was before social media!
But who keeps up with this stuff? Curious writers! Keep on being curious, Jeff.
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Strangely, I’ve got all sorts of bits of dialogue stuck in my brain. I actually have no idea if you wrote “Jesus” and I kind of wondered if you would do that, but it seemed right so I went with it. From my limited perspective, societal change is being driven by the two or three youngest generations. My kids are way less offensive than my friends and I were/are. Whenever I joke in a way that might be a bit off-color, they look at me with a mixture of pity and disgust 🙂 Case in point – last year at an all staff meeting when the IT guy was trying to get the projector to work, I told my “siamese twin” joke. My family was aghast. Thank you for this wonderful comment. It was really nice to wake up to it this morning.
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