Hamburger Menus and Smugshrug

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

You know, throughout the year, I share with you and everyone else, Martha, the dribs and drabs of the language that I find in my reading and my word hunting and the slang work that I do when I talk to kids on high school campuses and things like that.

But I wanted to give you like kind of a big lump for once, some stuff that I’ve been looking at, say, the last year and a half.

Okay, a bunch of dribs and drabs. Just a few things. Okay.

For example, I’m heavily involved in the tech scene, at least as an observer. I like to read about the latest advances in tech.

And I came across a word called the hamburger.

The hamburger. The hamburger is short for the hamburger menu. Now, it’s more common on Android phones than it is on iOS phones.

Wait, you can order a hamburger on the phone?

No, no, no. It’s an icon of three parallel lines that are identical, stacked on top of each other, with kind of a rounded corner box. And that is the hamburger.

Oh, the thing right up there in the corner.

Yeah, usually the upper left. You click on it, you’ll see settings or more navigation options or something like that. But it looks vaguely like a hyper-stylized hamburger. Bread with some slices of meat and cheese and tomato, right?

Oh, I had no idea. So that’s called the hamburger menu.

And so when you look at a word like that, you wonder how long it will last. And for this one, we have a pretty good answer. Probably not very long. People will talk about it, but it’ll become archaic pretty quick because user interface design changes rapidly.

In five years, we will only talk about the hamburger menu probably as a thing that was rather than a thing that is.

Okay. Well, I didn’t know that was what it was called.

Yeah. Interesting. But again, you might only know that if you follow tech closely or follow user interface design closely.

Another one is the expression web rooming, W-E-B-R-O-O-M-I-N-G. Web rooming. Now, this is the opposite of showrooming. Now, these might be manufactured terms.

By that, I mean that marketing people come up with them in order to try to prove that they’re on top of shopping trends.

And therefore, you as a company should invest your money with this marketing firm in order to, you know, figure out what’s really happening with consumers.

But I’ll share it with you anyway.

Red grooming is when you are at home on your computer and do tons of research on what you want to buy, say, a new Wi-Fi router or a new mobile phone or even just the blouse or shoes.

But you don’t order it online.

You actually go to the store to get it because you want immediate gratification.

Even 24-hour delivery isn’t enough for you.

You want to get it right away.

And that’s web rooming.

Oh, interesting.

Because there’s also the opposite of that, right?

That’s showrooming.

Showrooming is when you go, let’s say, you want to buy a new television.

But you really want to see how it looks.

Does it feel giant to you?

If you are 11 feet away from it, you know, the distance between your couch and your console, does it feel big enough?

And so you go to Best Buy or wherever and you look at them.

But you don’t buy in the store because you know you can get a better price online.

And it will be delivered to your house so you don’t have to worry about hauling an 85-pound television out to the car.

Exactly. Yeah, I know people who do that with books all the time.

So these two terms probably are going to have some legs,

But they wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago when online commerce basically didn’t exist.

Neither one of these things were a thing.

So this is why they’ve come alive.

We have a new concept that needs a new term, and they will persist in the language as long as we do those behaviors.

Now, another one that’s probably more ephemeral, but I love it so much, is smug shrug.

This is usually presented as one word.

The smug shrug is an emoticon, but it’s a pretty complex one.

It’s a bunch of characters typed into your text line, into your text field,

That look like somebody with a halfway smile, almost like a kind of a wry smile,

And their arms out like they’re going, oh, well, you know, just do that.

You kind of have your hands up, palms facing the sky, head turning the sign,

Kind of like a rise, oh, well, kind of like that.

The smug shrug is just kind of thrown in

Anytime somebody does something that you’re like,

I don’t have a good response to this,

Or there’s nothing I can do about that,

Or I’m just kind of resigned to whatever is taking place.

And you throw in this smug shrug emoticon,

Like, oh, well.

I like the word a lot.

If you want to talk about any aspect of language whatsoever,

Smug shrugs or web rooming or anything else,

Call us 877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.