Merriam-Webster is roughly a year late to the trash panda beat. We’ve been on it since a raccoon broke into an ABC liquor store in Ashland and worked his way through the moonshine, the peanut butter whisky, and the eggnog. The dictionary is only now making it official. Anne Marie leads us off with her loves and leaves from this year’s 1,400 additions, and I’ll cast my vote with hers: trash panda deserves the crown, vibe coding is going to take it. My own quiet objection is to parasocial. Useful word. Bleak that we needed it.
Nathaniel Beach follows with the most on-brand entry of the season — the NFL is back, and so are the emergency room visits that apparently wait politely for the fourth quarter. I’d like to say I don’t recognize the man he describes, announcing “big third down here” to a room that did not ask. I recognize him completely. Saturdays in this house are twelve hours long, and I regret nothing.
Holly McPherson makes her Dez Reads debut with a Lance Oppenheim documentary about a Florida retirement community, ahead of his narrative fiction debut next week. She talks about shot composition the way Beach talks about third downs, and I’m adding it to the list.
Madeline Nagler does something better than another Gen Z rebuttal. She demands credentials from the authors covering the topic before they write another 900-word essay.
And Jennifer Condon brings us home with Callaway cutting ties with Good Good Golf over an ad nobody should have greenlit. As a golfer and a girl dad, I’ll add the communications note: the $1 million commitment and the new review procedures are the right moves, but they’re the moves you make after. Someone read that script before it was filmed. Women and girls are 52% of the game’s growth. Act like it.
Thanks, as always, for reading along with us.
Here we go.
Merriam-Webster ins and outs.
BBC. US dictionary adds 1,400 words, including neckbeard, trash panda and cuffing season.
Every year Merriam-Webster, and other dictionary publishers, add new words and phrases that have permeated the societal lexicon. I loved reading the dictionary as a kid. I still keep a hard copy with arm’s length of my desk. If you love words as much as I do, I encourage you to read the entire list. If you can’t spare a few minutes for the wonderful world of words, let me share my favorites and not so favorites from this year’s additions.
Loves. Trash panda, the best nickname for raccoons. Whack-a-mole, this remains one of my favorite arcade games. Parasocial, the one-sided emotional connections with celebrities, fictional characters or AI chat bots.
Leaves. Cake pop, this feels a decade too late. Meme coin, I’m just sorry this is a part of widely known vernacular. Uncanny valley, a great phrase, but it makes me sad that we need a phrase for something that’s artificial but feels almost human.
Merriam-Webster has yet to release their word of the year for 2026. I for one, am waiting with bated breath. If it were up to me, trash panda would win hands down, but my money is on vibe coding.
– Anne Marie Malecha
No pain, no gain.
Stadium Rant. The NFL Season Is Back And That Means So Are ER Visits After Football Sundays
We are so back.
Thursday night football starts the weekend early. Friday there’s some completely random college game I’ll end up invested in, while making sure everyone around me knows that it’s a “big third down here” a couple dozen times during the game. Saturday is 12 straight hours of college football. Sunday is an all-day NFL shift of armchair quarterbacking as the Steelers provide me an opportunity to scare my cat with my yelling. Then Monday night football gives me one more game before we start talking about Thursday again.
It’s incredible.
I have the privilege of spending the next several months allowing groups of 18 to 42 year-olds (shoutout Aaron Rodgers) who have absolutely no idea I exist to dictate my mental health for an entire week. According to the article, fans have been known to put off going to the ER until the game ends, which is the kind of commitment this sport demands. I love it.
There is always something happening, always something to scream in joy or frustration about. A game I didn’t care about at noon can have my heart rate up by 3:30.
Football season is beautiful. Thank God it’s back.
– Nathaniel Beach
You’ve Heard of Cocaine Bear, I Give You Ecstasy Grandpa.
IMDB. Primetime.
With Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime coming to theaters September 25th, I felt I should spend some time in his filmography.
I was most intrigued to learn that Primetime will be his narrative fiction debut, as the rest of his works are cinematic documentaries. I personally love a good documentary and promptly started with Some Kind of Heaven. In this 2020 film, Oppenheim frames a sybaritic senior-living community in a way that feels surreal and unsettling, but also conveys the mundanity some of its residents feel. Wealthy seniors looking to spend their retirement in paradise live in, as they’d put it, a Disneyworld for adults (This mostly just entails people above the age of 65 pretending they’re still in college). However, much like college, it leaves some feeling lonely even though they’re surrounded by people.
I was in awe with how much Oppenheim can say through visuals – he is a master of shot composition. The scenes feel intensely sensational, but liminal, which I felt perfectly mirrored the emotions of someone desperate to suck the marrow out of life in the years before their passing.
– Holly McPherson
Which Gen Z are you writing about?
WaPo. Gen Z is turning hobbies into work – and missing the point.
I have always considered myself a good girl. Adult approval was my drug of choice, rather than the marijuana my peers dabbled in, and I took great pride in being a licensed dealer. As a teenager, I once left a local playground in tears after being peer pressured to drink a sip of a Monster energy drink. My low point was having to retake algebra.
That’s why I have struggled to recognize the world that this religiously obedient girl has grown up to inherit. Now 25, I find that what may have begun as a distrust of my generation has snowballed into outright contempt. Michelle Obama told me to go to college to change my life, so I did. My life changed in that I have Sallie Mae and her goons threatening my kneecaps with a tire iron once a month, but I still live at home. I’m still considered “failure to launch” by any rational interpretation of the phrase, despite my feverish adherence to the teachings of those who came before me.
So here is my question for whoever writes the next nine hundred words on Gen Z. What did you make, sell, vote for, or approve between 2004 and 2016, and where does it appear in your piece? If the answer is nowhere, you are not writing about my generation. You are writing about yourself, at length, to an audience selected specifically because it does not have the cultural status to respond at the same volume.
– Madeline Nagler
Good Good Golf, bad bad ads.
NYT. Callaway cuts ties with Good Good Golf in wake of controversial ad
I enjoy playing golf and am the parent of a female high school varsity golfer who is far better than I. So, when I watched the Callaway commercial featuring Good Good Golf, I knew it would be received just as poorly as a shanked 7-iron shot going straight into a clubhouse window. It features the co-founder of Good Good Golf tackling a female Division 1 golfer after she tries to retrieve his brand-new Callaway driver, then snarls “Don’t touch my new driver!” This isn’t edgy golf humor. It’s more like who let the unhinged group chat write the script?
Callaway cut ties with Good Good Golf and announced they will implement new review procedures going forward. They also announced a commitment of $1 million to assist organizations that help survivors of domestic violence.
My daughter and her teammates deserve more than to become a punchline in a golf bro marketing campaign. Women and girls account for 52% of all golf growth since the start of the pandemic. Perhaps you should treat them like the fairway and not the hazard.
– Jennifer Condon
