At the risk of being seen as a fuddy duddy "get off my lawn" type, a confession...

[ismnotwasm]

127. Also for those interested

A history of the Karen phenomena

https://www.vox.com/2020/2/5/21079162/karen-name-insult-meme-manager

On one level, we’ve seen all of this before: After all, resentment toward the upper middle class — what we might call “bourgeoisophobia” — has been around since the middle class itself, often coming most strongly from members of that very middle class. What has changed are Karen’s specific offensive traits: Like all bourgeoisie stereotypes before her, she’s snobbish, prudish, and hypocritical. But now, she’s against science on principle, which is definitely a new twist to the traditional bourgeois model. And the chief way she manifests her class consciousness is not by, say, being a patron of the arts, but by being aggressively rude to the help.

“Karen” isn’t alone in receiving this treatment. We’ve increasingly seen a lot of “basic white names” — commonly associated, rightly or wrongly, with Middle American white Protestants — being used in mocking memes that portray them as archetypes rather than individuals. Consider such examples as: “They’re lesbians, Harold,” “Talkback Tammy,” “they’re good dogs Brent,” and, of course, “Becky with the good hair.” White people seem just as likely to make fun of these names as everyone else, especially when it comes to men making fun of women; in the predominantly white men’s rights movement, “Chads,” “Stacys,” and “Beckys” are used to embody and mock people who conform to mainstream gender norms and beauty standards.

This trend might have also gotten a boost from social media, according to Dr. I.M. Nick, a nomenclature scholar and former president of the American Name Society. “The general tendency which social media users have been shown to manifest is a high frequency of shortenings and abbreviations,” she said in an email, though she hesitated to speculate on how this tendency might apply to specific names. Combined with what seems to be an underground but culturally established association of “Karen” with rude entitlement — more on that in a minute — it’s possible that social media shorthand could also be one potential origin point for the meme.

Oxford Karen told me she’d seen the meme applied to other names like “Susan” and “Zach”— what she describes as “basic white people names.” She compared the meme to the famous Key & Peele “Substitute Teacher” sketch, which inverts/calls out the tendency white people have to stigmatize and mock “ethnic” names by applying that mentality to white names. “I taught at a school with predominantly children of color,” she said, “and that Key & Peele sketch hit home.” In other words, she suggested, there’s potentially an element of reclamation in this trend — payback for decades of “black names” being pejoratively stereotyped, as the sketch highlights: