Two more expressions that characterized 2009: El Stiffo and “drive like a Cullen.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Drive Like a Cullen”
Martha, how’s your driving?
It’s not bad.
Not bad. Do you drive like a Cullen?
Like a what?
A Cullen. C-U-L-L-E-N.
There are bumper stickers making their rounds.
This is on my words of the year candidate list.
Drive like a Cullen.
Yeah, to drive like a Cullen is to drive like a bat out of hell, literally.
The Cullen family are the main characters in the Twilight Vampire book series.
Oh, that’s why I didn’t know.
Surely you’ve read them all.
No.
You’ve seen the movies, right?
No, no. I’m not a teenage girl. Come on.
Martha, Martha, Martha.
Drive like a Cullen, huh?
To drive like a Cullen.
I drive like a Cullen.
It means you drive very fast.
I think it’s funny.
Like a bat out of hell.
Nice.
One of my other favorite word of the year candidates, this is kind of new, Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of California.
Goobernator, yeah.
The goofinator.
The goofinator.
Well, they were auctioning some stuff off earlier this year, and he did a video where he’s like, there’s this gigantic knife, then he’s fingering the edge of this knife, and so some people were criticizing him for his behavior in these videos because he’s a star.
Besides being the governor, right?
And if he signs this merchandise, it’s going to sell for a lot of money.
So that’s what he did.
And they auctioned it off and it benefited the state, so on.
And then he got on, he got kind of up in arms because people were complaining that it wasn’t befitting of a governor to be brandishing a knife in a video.
It’s a gigantic knife, too.
You know, it was like my forearm.
It was big.
And he said he wasn’t an El Stiffo, meaning a colorless character.
And so El Stiffo was one of my word of the year candidates.
Yeah, meaning that he wasn’t some, like, cardboard cutout automaton governor.
He was somebody with some life and some color.
And you know what? The man is absolutely right.
As far as a governor goes, he’s a grade A performance.
That’s a five-star A++.
He is no girly man.
He is no girly man.
But, hey, if it raised money, we can use it, right?
Mm—
And if it will raise some more word of the year candidates, that’s great, too.
If you’ve got a word of the year or a word of the decade, and it can be a phrase.
It doesn’t have to be a single word.
It can be a phrase of the year.
Send it along to words@waywordradio.org or give us a ring on the telephone, 1-877-929-9673 or send it to Twitter at username Wayword.
