I’ll take a moment here to talk about a word — a coinage only a few years old — that seems to have entered the mainstream without anyone remembering where it comes from.
That word is “mogging”. It describes the social dominance of an oversized male personality. To be “mogged” is for a man to be cowed, overshadowed, or intimidated by another.
The word comes form an acronym — AMOG — which stands for “Alpha Male Of Group”. To become a verb, it was shortened to “mog”.
I mention this because the word has now entered such common usage that I’ve seen people wondering what it means, and nobody seems to know its origin. (Its etymology has already been so thoroughly lost that I have even seen it applied to bossy females, which is a lexical abomination.)
Thank you. I hope you don’t mind my mansplaining all of this.
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I deployed this word in conversation with my twenty-year-old daughter the other day, eliciting less wondrous amazement than I had hoped for. She told me the word was popularized by Clavicular, an Internet personality also responsible for “looks-maxing.” My sense is that the successful mogger makes companions of his or her own sex feel, as P. G. Wodehouse would say, “like a piece of cheese.” Or, as someone (maybe Wodehouse) once said, “as if their clothes suddenly didn’t fit.”
Your helpful mansplaining of the etymology underlines the fact that the act of mogging and the popularity of the word mog both point to an uptick in the great game of status rivalry. Jacob Burckhardt wrote that the Ancient Greeks were much more openly agonistic than we are, much more brazen, we might say, in their struggle for primacy. Are we, perhaps, reverting to that and discarding the veiled agonism of civilized people?
A visit to any supermarket reveals that many among us have already reverted from veiled to naked eroticism.
At least “mogging” does, roll off the tongue so to speak.
Not so, to my ear, disrespected. I cannot rightly say just when its first dissonant grating assaulted me but I do recall my first *serious arguing over it. Too bad that argument began in the home of a UALR English Professor minutes before I was to drive her to our usual romantic dinner and a … 2005 it was.
Then I was just as certain as I remained until … well mere moments ago:
https://www.dailywritingtips.com/that-annoying-new-verb-%E2%80%9Cdisrespect%E2%80%9D/
Only difference now than my experience of over a decade ago is that I’ll save, at least, a Benjamin. If not the stuff of which dreams are made.