On ADS-L recently, some discussion of verbings of the noun bro: to bro down, to bro it up, to de-bro. It started on the 27th with Jon Lighter reporting on a recent occurrence of bro down ‘become (male) friends’ on the Fox TV show Sleepy Hollow, in the episode “Heads of State”:
Now that we’re neighbors, we can bro down, hang out, Chill-doh Baggins.
(This is the quote in the official transcript. There’s been some discussion on ADS-L about whether Chill-doh Baggins is an accurate transcription and what the phrase, whatever it is, is supposed to convey. But that’s not relevant to the occurrence of bro down.)
And that gets us to a nice Fuck Yeah! Ryan Gosling quote, directed to a guy (Matt Damon, maybe, or Matthew McConaughey, or more deliciously, Matt Bomer, who’s openly gay):
(On Gosling’s meme play, see my 10/22/11 posting.)
Following up on Lighter’s posting, Larry Horn offered more verbings:
“Bro” also appears as a verb in “bro (it) up” (‘to render more bro-y’, etc.: what you do with your bros after you’ve bro’d down with them) and as the base of the privative verb “de-bro”, as in the headline in the print version of a Times article [from September], “Female voices help de-bro country’s hits”.
Two sightings of bro it up:
Dane Cook to bro it up in Bryan Fuller’s American Gods: … Enthusiastically friendly and ostensibly loyal (but with just a hint of a selfish streak), [the character] Robbie’s everything you’d expect from Cook’s aggressively bro-friendly persona. (link)
‘American Horror Story’ Season 5 News: Evan Peters Wants To ‘Bro It Up’ In ‘Hotel’ With Fellow Male Stars (link)
For privative de-bro in the Times, the verb appeared only in the print headline; the on-line head was
Female voices help de-bro country’s hits
and the verb didn’t appear in the body of the story, which describes a pushback against “the blithe, boozy bangers that seemed to rule the genre — the trend referred to by critics as bro country”.
Yesterday, Garson O’Toole noted that there’s an endless series of bro puns on the webpage “I’d Like To Expand My Brocabulary” from back in September 2008. Well, bro puns or bro portmanteaus (bromanteaus), it’s hard to tell which. Some are entertaining:
Broletariat: a lower class of bros. The Broletariat is that class of society which does not have bro-wnership of the means of broduction
But I’ve posted so much on this kind of language play — see my Page on brocabulary — that I’ve decided to call a moratorium. There’s just too much, and it keeps rolling in.
January 29, 2017 at 12:07 pm |
I’m guessing that “Chill-doh Baggins” is a riff on Bilbo Baggins from Tolkien.
You might also be amused by the cartoon that circulated on Facebook during the holidays (I don’t have a copy at hand, sorry) where Santa Claus observes one of the elves is making good progress on his Gandalf dolls and asks another elf how he’s coming along on his Bilboes, when manifestly he’s been busy making *dildoes* instead.
On another matter, in the airport in Minneapolis on my way back to Seattle on New Years’ Eve, I had a conversation (mostly concerning football and Ohio State football in particular) with a delightful lady who co-taught a course with you when she was in the English department at OSU. I didn’t get her name but she remembers you fondly.
January 30, 2017 at 4:47 am |
1. Well, yes, Tolkien. Pretty much everybody agrees on that much. But is there a dildo reference in there, or Bilbro Baggins, or what?
2. I posted the cartoon, here:
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2015/12/26/the-sounds-dont-quite-match/
3. I co-taught several courses with colleagues in English over the years. The woman was probably Melanie Lusk (whose married name I do not, alas, recall).