Karen what does it mean
Karen what does it mean
Karen
Karen sues the local city council after they installed a new STOP sign that hides the sun from her window for two minutes a day. The sign was installed after a school boy on his bicycle was hit by a speeding driver and died.
Karen refuses to wear a face mask for her 5 minute trip to the supermarket during a pandemic. She harasses the workers, asks to see the manager and threatens to sue.
Karen complains that her favorite parking spot was replaced by a ramp for wheel chairs. She parks her car in the old spot anyway and shoots a vlog about it.
Karen
The middle aged white mother, responsible for the existence of the ‘live, laugh, love’ sign industry. Karens like to spend their time drinking wine and driving their SUV.
Karen
A pejorative name associated with uptight, middl-class, do-gooder types of white women.
A Karen gets the wrong end of the stick, believing to be the victim of any given situation due to an overly inflated sense of entitlement. Karens cannot be reasoned with, and often expose themselves to widespread ridicule due to outlandish behaviour, usually leading to the explosion of a trivial issue into something unnecessarily large.
Person parking car
Karen: YOU CANT PARK HERE!
Person: Why not? It’s an open bay with no restrictions.
Karen: HOW DARE YOU SPEAK TO ME LIKE THAT! MY HUBAND’S A COP.
Person: But I ju.
Karen: SOMEBODY CALL SECURITY! THIS PERSON IS TRYING TO (incompressible screeching; the language of the Nazgul, perhaps?) SECURITY!
Karen
Friend1: Look! That woman over there who speaks to the manager. Her name must be Karen
Friend2: Yeah, 100%. I bet she owns a volvo and has 3 kids.
Karen
Karen
Karen
It’s extremely rare to find a nice, graceful, polite Karen, but when you do find a nice Karen think of it as a gift.
The reason why everyone probably associate Karen’s with rude, bitchy, and downright angry and annoying people is because most people who act like that are named Karen and a group of them fucked it up for every other Karen including the nice ones.
1. Guy 1: I just had to deal with a rude ass person.
Guy 2: What was their name?
2. Guy 1: I just met the nicest person I’ve ever met.
Karen
[ kair-in ]
What does Karen mean?
Karen is a pejorative slang term for an obnoxious, angry, entitled, and often racist middle-aged white woman who uses her privilege to get her way or police other people’s behaviors.
In 2020, Karen spread as a label used to call out white women who were captured in viral videos engaging in what are widely seen as racist acts.
Karen was one of the top trends in 2020. Read our 2020 Word of The Year article to see why.
Related words
Where does Karen come from?
Karen joins a trend on the internet in the 2010s of using a first name to make fun of certain kinds of people. A Becky, for example, is a stereotype for a “basic” young, white woman, while a Chad, in other corners of the internet, stands in for a cocky, young “dudebro.”
But, why the name Karen? Karen has widely been credited to Black Twitter in the 2010s. Another suggestion is that it comes from a 2005 bit by Dane Cook called “The Friend Nobody Likes.” (The friend was named Karen.) An additional explanation is that it comes from the character Karen in the 2004 film Mean Girls, who’s the subject of the popular quote: “Oh my God, Karen, you can’t just ask someone why they’re white.” It’s even been put forth that Karen comes from the even earlier 1990 film Goodfellas, in which one of the characters is named Karen.
Whatever the origin of the slang, the name Karen, apparently, is popularly thought of as a generic-seeming name for a middle-aged white woman of a certain generation. According to Social Security data, Karen was indeed the fourth most popular name for newborn girls in the 1960s, peaking at #3 in 1965.
Record of the insult Karen appears as early as September 2016 when a Tumblr user, joematar, made fun of a promo for Nintendo Switch in which a white woman (appearing to be in her late 20s or early 30s) brings the gaming device to a party. The user refers to this supposed kill-joy as Karen: “Oh shit, Karen brought her stupid Nintendo thing to the party again. We’re DRINKING, Karen. We’re having CONVERSATIONS.”
The character was further developed in December 2017 thanks to a subreddit dedicated to mocking the imagined Karen (somewhat like Cook’s “The Friend Nobody Likes” bit). Tropes that developed about Karen here were that she is an annoying (and always annoyed) middle-aged, suburban, minivan-driving white, divorced mother of poorly behaved boys (of whom she has custody) who has a so-called “speak to the manager” haircut.
This haircut is a short, angled blonde bob, sometimes called a “mom haircut.” “Speak to the manager” refers to escalating complaints or demands from retail or restaurant workers to their managers—a stereotypical behavior of Karen. The “Speak to the Manager Haircut” meme has been around since 2014. In September 2018, the “Speak to the Manager” haircut meme merged with Karen when it was uploaded to the Karen subreddit by user vidoardes.
Beginning in at least 2017, Karens have been closely associated with Baby Boomers. Some millennials and members of Generation Z have called out boomers for being close-minded and behind-the-times, especially when it comes to unprogressive views on such things as gender, sexuality, and youth culture more generally (such as the viral “Kidz Bop Karen” woman video videotaped in a road confrontation).
Spreading online in early November 2019 was a joke that Generation X is the Karen Generation (the name being associated with people born between 1964–85). This came on the heels of OK boomer, a slang phrase (and viral phenomenon) dismissing opinions and attitudes associated with Baby Boomers (especially white male members of this generation). This prompted some reporters to investigate intergenerational conflict on social media further. BuzzFeed ran a piece on November 14, called “Gen Z is Calling Gen X ‘The Karen Generation’,” citing some activity on Twitter and TikTok.
Me: For the last time, I’m Gen X. Your insults have no power over me.
That was a bit low.
Karen further spread in 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic and protests for racial justice. White women in viral videos—engaging in what was criticized as selfish or racist behavior—were shamed as Karens. The mayor of Las Vegas, for example, was called a Karen when, in a TV interview, she pushed to reopen casinos without social distancing despite warnings otherwise. Another notable instance was “Central Park Karen,” the epithet for a white woman who called the police on a Black man who was birdwatching in the Manhattan park, falsely accusing him of threatening her.
Also in 2020, popular discussions online considered the name for a male Karen. Many people put forth similarly generic white male names associated with Baby Boomers or Generation X, such as Richard, Kevin, and Ken. On the one hand, that no male name has quite taken hold (male Karens being called male Karens) suggests that, while Karen calls out racism, some misogyny is always at work in the slang. Due to these misogynistic dimensions of Karen, on the other hand, a related topic was whether Karen was a slur—a concern that many dismissed as it erases white privilege and systemic racism from the social equation. Karen is indeed a very loaded, complex slang term that continues to evolve.
And if you’re curious, in 1965, the year Karen reached its peak popularity as the third-most popular girls name in the US? The male counterpart was David.
Karen
Karen sues the local city council after they installed a new STOP sign that hides the sun from her window for two minutes a day. The sign was installed after a school boy on his bicycle was hit by a speeding driver and died.
Karen refuses to wear a face mask for her 5 minute trip to the supermarket during a pandemic. She harasses the workers, asks to see the manager and threatens to sue.
Karen complains that her favorite parking spot was replaced by a ramp for wheel chairs. She parks her car in the old spot anyway and shoots a vlog about it.
Karen
The middle aged white mother, responsible for the existence of the ‘live, laugh, love’ sign industry. Karens like to spend their time drinking wine and driving their SUV.
Karen
A pejorative name associated with uptight, middl-class, do-gooder types of white women.
A Karen gets the wrong end of the stick, believing to be the victim of any given situation due to an overly inflated sense of entitlement. Karens cannot be reasoned with, and often expose themselves to widespread ridicule due to outlandish behaviour, usually leading to the explosion of a trivial issue into something unnecessarily large.
Person parking car
Karen: YOU CANT PARK HERE!
Person: Why not? It’s an open bay with no restrictions.
Karen: HOW DARE YOU SPEAK TO ME LIKE THAT! MY HUBAND’S A COP.
Person: But I ju.
Karen: SOMEBODY CALL SECURITY! THIS PERSON IS TRYING TO (incompressible screeching; the language of the Nazgul, perhaps?) SECURITY!
Karen
Friend1: Look! That woman over there who speaks to the manager. Her name must be Karen
Friend2: Yeah, 100%. I bet she owns a volvo and has 3 kids.
Karen
Karen
Karen
It’s extremely rare to find a nice, graceful, polite Karen, but when you do find a nice Karen think of it as a gift.
The reason why everyone probably associate Karen’s with rude, bitchy, and downright angry and annoying people is because most people who act like that are named Karen and a group of them fucked it up for every other Karen including the nice ones.
1. Guy 1: I just had to deal with a rude ass person.
Guy 2: What was their name?
2. Guy 1: I just met the nicest person I’ve ever met.
How the name ‘Karen’ became a stand-in for problematic white women and a hugely popular meme
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Before the public learned the name of a white woman who called the police on a Black man in Central Park on May 25, she could easily be identified by a moniker. The internet agreed with certainty that Amy Cooper was a «Karen.»
Days later, another woman went viral for leaning on a car in a parking lot to prevent the driver from getting their desired parking spot. The internet agreed she too was a Karen.
In the weeks since, the internet has been entranced by viral videos labeling women «Karens,» including «coughing Karen,» who coughed on patrons at a New York City bagel shop, and a woman who, with her husband, called the police on her neighbor for writing «Black Lives Matter» with chalk on his own property.
The Karen meme, which has become so ubiquitous it’s been used as a Halloween costume, burst on to the scene in the past couple of years to describe white women perceived as acting entitled in public.
Now, it’s used as a moniker for any white woman who’s thought to be acting inappropriately, rudely, or in an entitled manner.
«It’s usually used as a pejorative for middle-aged white women,» Matt Schimkowitz, a senior editor at Know Your Meme, an online meme encyclopedia, said.
«It’s almost like they have an entitlement, where they’re kind of lording their privilege over another.»
Before Karen, there was the ‘speak to the manager’ haircut
The «speak to the manager» haircut became its own meme before the Karen character took hold online.
According to Know Your Meme, the joke was first posted on Reddit in 2014. Between 2016 and 2017, that idea began to spread throughout Reddit and spawned other images, including «starter pack» memes.
The best, and most infamous, example of the haircut in real life was worn by Kate Gosselin of the popular mid-2000s reality show «Jon & Kate Plus 8,» which followed a married couple rearing eight children.
The haircut is a side-swept bob in the front with spikey and much shorter hair in the back.
Vice wrote about the «often-maligned haircut» in October 2018, arguing that the hair style is actually iconic and a «a socially necessary style object.»
«It’s a very easy, recognizable thing to meme,» Schimkowitz said, adding that just a name itself is hard to make memes out of, and the haircut imagery helped contribute to the Karen character. «All of these elements kind of blend together.»
The origin is hard to pin down
While there are many origin stories for the Karen meme, it’s not totally clear where it came from, as is the case with many memes.
«The origins of Karen are kind of really hard to pin down,» Schimkowitz said.
Schimkowitz said the most convincing theory is that the character originated from a Dane Cook comedy special that aired in 2005.
«Every group has a Karen, and she is always a bag of douche,» Cook said in the routine. «And when she’s not around, you just look at each other and say, ‘God, Karen, she’s such a douchebag!'»
Many associate the use of Karen in a pejorative sense with «Mean Girls,» which came out a year earlier, in 2004.
The movie’s line «Oh, my God, Karen — you can’t just ask people why they’re white» has been used as a meme over the years.
Still, the Karen meme wouldn’t become popular until a decade later.
Jay Pharoah joked about women named Karen in his 2015 comedy special, «Can I Be Me?» In an October 2020 interview with PeopleTV, Pharoah said that he didn’t know about Cook’s special at the time, but that he’d been making the Karen joke for years.
The subreddit r/F—YouKaren was created in 2017, according to Know Your Meme, where it has amassed more than 600,000 members.
The page’s description says it’s «dedicated to the hatred of Karen» and its profile picture is of Gosselin.
Also in 2018, memes about Karen being an ex-wife who wanted to take the kids in the divorce began circulating online, Know Your Meme said.
Gosselin and her husband divorced in 2009, which spawned a 10-year custody battle over their kids.
The name has come to be associated with white women who call the police on Black people
There’s a wide array of «white cop-caller nicknames» used in cases like Cooper’s, Schimkowitz said, where a white person calls the cops on a Black person or group of people out of entitlement.
In May 2018, a woman named Jennifer Schulte, in Oakland, California, earned the nickname «Barbecue Becky» for calling the police on black men using a charcoal grill in a park for their barbecue.
Similarly, the alliterative nicknames «Permit Patty» and «Cornerstore Caroline» have also been given to other white women who have called the police on Black Americans.
But somehow Karen is the name that stuck.
«The Karen meme just blew up in such a way that it just kind of took over all forms of criticism towards white women online,» Schimkowitz said.
«It just became the de facto insult to log a woman who is exerting their entitlement or their privilege.»
Use of viral nicknames such as ‘Karen’ has been criticized
While many women who are memed and called Karen are doing things in public perceived to be rude, others — like Cooper — are known for exerting power dynamics in a dangerous way.
«Usually, the meme is associated with lower-stakes situations, like a person at an Applebee’s who got the wrong meal — not serious questions of racial justice and silence and privilege,» Schimkowitz said.
There’s a big difference in what happened with Cooper in Central Park — who explicitly threatened a Black man with the police by invoking his race — and the other viral Karens who have done things like try to reserve parking spots.
David Dennis Jr., a journalist who has written about the pitfalls of assigning nicknames to women who do nefarious things, told Insider that calling women like Cooper by a false name grants them a level of anonymity and belittles what they’ve done.
«It seems like [Cooper] used his race and wanted the police to either arrest him or beat him up or kill him,» Dennis said. «And I think that’s something that we can’t forget, that all of these women are doing.
«They’re calling to put Black people’s lives in jeopardy.»
He said when Karens commit racist acts, the public needs to remember their real names to ensure that they can be held accountable in some way.
«These people go out into the world, they have jobs, they do things that impact people,» he said. «We need to remove them from those positions.»
In Cooper’s case, she was fired from her job, and her dog was temporarily taken away. Dennis said he’s glad this incident turned out in a positive way, but doesn’t always happen like that.
«I understand what [the Karen meme is] doing as a function of making fun of these women who are doing these things. But, also, we can get so sucked into it — that we feel like that’s enough,» he said.
Still, Dennis sees a clear connection between the stereotyped Karen who asks for the manager and those who call the cops on Black folks.
«It ties into this audacity that white women are showing, especially now, that they’re owed something by the world — that they are to be served — especially when it comes to marginalized people or people who they feel are below them, like working-class people or essential workers,» he said.
Even President Donald Trump has continued to deny the importance of using face masks to slow the virus’ spread.
«There is a connection there between the racism of calling the police on a Black person,» Dennis said, «and feeling as though you are there to be served.»
A Brief History of ‘Karen’
In 1965, it was the third-most-popular baby name in the United States. In 2018, it was the 635th — and today it’s even less popular. How did Karens fall so far?
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By Henry Goldblatt
Ask a woman named Karen what she used to think of her name and you’ll hear phrases like “generic,” “perfectly serviceable” and “an easy name.”
In 2020, Karen is no longer “an easy name.” Once popular for girls born in the 1960s, it then became a pseudonym for a middle-aged busybody with a blond choppy bob who asks to speak to the manager. Now, the moniker has most recently morphed into a symbol of racism and white privilege.
A “Karen” now roams restaurants and stores, often without a mask during this coronavirus era, spewing venom and calling the authorities to tattle, usually on people of color and often putting them in dangerous situations. And while this archetype had previously been called “Permit Patty” or “BBQ Becky,” “Karen” has stuck.
In fact, many news reports don’t even bother to use a woman’s actual given name. Whitefish Karen (named for her town in Montana) coughed on a couple when they called her out for not wearing a mask inside a grocery store. Kroger Karen, named after the supermarket chain, blocked an African-American mother’s car so the woman couldn’t leave the market’s parking lot. San Francisco Karen called the police on a Filipino man stenciling “Black Lives Matter” on his own property.
And, of course, the Queen of Karens — Amy Cooper, also known as Central Park Karen — threatened and fabricated accusations against a Black man after he politely asked her to put her dog on a leash, as park rules stated.
For some women with the name Karen, these videos have made them outraged, of course, but also, at times, ashamed.
“I remember hearing about names like Becky and thinking, ‘What if this was my name, how would it feel?’” said Karen Scholl, a 47-year-old writer in Columbus, Ohio, with whom I worked at a college newspaper more than 20 years ago. “It’s just so embarrassing, honestly. But I can’t get bent out of shape. I have no control over it. There are people losing their lives every day. If it’s the only thing I have to be upset about in this world, then good for me.”
Karen Chang, a Bay Area resident who works in business management, had shrugged off early memes, but then the Amy Cooper video changed everything for her.
“It was very upsetting, but I would sacrifice my name for the visibility and awareness that incident generated,” said Ms. Chang, who is Asian-American. Indeed, she may do just that. She said she’s considering changing her name to “KC” after she and her fiancé eventually wed. “It has always been a term of endearment.”
Ms. Chang may be able to change her name, but if one San Francisco Board of Supervisors member, Shamann Walton, has his way, a version of “Karen” will be immortalized into city law.
In early July, Mr. Walton introduced the CAREN (Caution Against Racially Exploitative Non-Emergencies) Act (presumably he couldn’t come up with a suitable word that began with K). The bill would change the city’s code to punish people who call 911 and file false, racially biased complaints.
That’s a step too far for Karen Ortiz-Orband, a Boston-area nurse who is of Puerto Rican and Dominican descent. She supports the contents of the proposal, but emailed Mr. Walton’s office urging him to reconsider its title.
“I asked him to be mindful of the fact that there are women named Karen and people aren’t differentiating between the two. And by naming this bill as he has, he’s doing exactly what the metaphorical Karen is doing — creating an opportunity for discrimination,” said Ms. Ortiz-Orband, who is in her late 40s.
And before you think, “that’s so Karen to complain about CAREN,” Ms. Ortiz-Orband asks you to imagine if it were your name: “It’s one thing to make memes,” she said. “It’s another when you start applying it to laws. You’re villainizing a name that people actually have and you’re putting these people at risk. When a woman acts like that name, you should use her correct name.”
Karen Gormandy, a literary agent and arts studio manager in New York City, said she doesn’t take it personally when she hears her name used in these contexts, “because I assign that meme to white people. I’m totally disconnected from it. I’m on the receiving end of this misbehavior.” Ms. Gormandy, 61, said, “I feel as a person of color I don’t need to apologize and explain my name.”
Yet she said people sometimes avoid using her name when speaking to her: “Some people use Becky instead,” she said, laughing.
The Origins of ‘Karen’
But why the name Karen?
Robin Queen, the chairwoman of the linguistics department at University of Michigan, has looked closely at this question and her exploration led her to, of all people, Dane Cook.
His 2005 comedy album contains a riff called “The Friend Nobody Likes”: “There is one person in a group of friends that nobody likes,” Mr. Cook says, using an expletive to emphasize how much they are, in fact, disliked. “They basically keep them there to hate their guts. When that person is not around the rest of your little base camp, your hobby is cutting that person down.” As an “example” of this person, he describes a woman named Karen.
Other antecedents include Amanda Seyfried’s vacant Karen in “Mean Girls,” who racistly spouts to Lindsay Lohan’s Cady: “If you’re from Africa, why are you white?” A parody account on Reddit from late 2017 based on the rants of a spurned husband is also often cited as an early driver, and highlights the sexism of the “Karen” trope.
Karen Grigsby Bates, the senior correspondent for the “Code Switch” podcast on NPR, said Karen’s roots are anchored deep in American folklore. Ms. Bates — who embarked on this research not because of her name, but because the phenomenon was “a convergence of gender, race, class, social upheaval and social media in this great big tornado” — pointed to the term “Miss Ann” from the antebellum and Jim Crow periods.
African-Americans used the term as code “to refer to these unreasonable white women,” Ms. Bates said. She described Miss Ann as “a woman who knew her place in society, was complicit in maintaining it, and who was at the upper end of the hierarchy. Even if she was a nice Miss Ann, she was still upholding this system that said: ‘White womanhood above all else, except white manhood.’”
Researchers also point to the demographic characteristics of the name Karen. According to Social Security data, Karen soared in popularity in the 1960s, peaking as the third-most-popular baby name of 1965, but never had a resurgence. The archetype is meant to evoke a woman of a certain age, but then again Linda, Cynthia or Susan would, too.
That’s where the Karen theories get geekily fascinating. Miriam Eckert, who has a Ph.D. in linguistics and lives in Boulder, Colo., said that the word “Karen” contains what’s known as a “voiceless plosive.”
“That’s the K sound at the beginning of the word,” Ms. Eckert said. “When you say some consonants, like K or a T, there’s a complete blockage of airflow and a sudden release — whereas a name like Cynthia has no stops at all. Karen is kind of a harsh sound that you can really spit out. And that aligns with the kind of person we are thinking of when we talk about a ‘Karen.’”
The Future of ‘Karen’
But will it always? In 2018 — the latest year for which data is available — Karen ranked as the 635th most popular girl’s name, alongside Elaine and Dallas. “Nobody is going to name their kid this now,” Ms. Gormandy said. “It’s just going to disappear and then somebody not knowing the history of any of this might decide it’s a cool name.”
Dr. Queen, the linguistics expert, agreed. “Maybe in 50 years or so it might come back.”
In the meantime, she thinks it could at some point fade from the lexicon. “The meaning gets so broad that it’s going to stop having the same power to make a particular critique,” she said, pointing to examples like “basic,” “hot mess” and “Negative Nancy” that faded from the lexicon.
As a moniker, she said, “I would be surprised to find it around a decade from now.”