Journalist Alex Wagner on MS NOW a little while ago:
We are so beclowning ourselves
(The intensive Gen-X so is just a bonus; AW was born in 1977, and Gen-X is roughly 1965 through 1980)
That’s beclown ‘make a fool of’ (perhaps clumsily). With a modest number of cites to be found, but uncommon enough to strike many hearers as a colorful coinage.
On the prefix, from Michael Quinion’s Affixes site:
be-: This prefix has been productive in the past, but is rarely used to make new words today.
… Its main function has been to create transitive verbs, ones able to take a direct object, from nouns or adjectives: befoul, befriend, beguile, belittle, besiege, bewitch. [AZ: many items negative in connotation]
And then beclown.
August 28, 2026 at 5:34 am |
Though I am normally aware of that usage of *so*, my Boomer ears usually at first hear it as an insistent reaffirmation of something, in reply to a denial. And I don’t think this has disappeared among younger generations, but has had to make room for the noted intensifier pattern.