It’s official: 2022 is the year of “goblin mode,” which at face value, it a lot less scary than it sounds. And like many of us, Stephen King, the master of horror himself, just learned what the phrase meant shortly after it was announced as the Word of the Year this week.
“I learned a new phrase today: going goblin,” King tweeted on Tuesday (close enough), adding that he intends to use it “at every opportunity.”
For the uninitiated, “goblin mode” is essentially the quintessential post-pandemic mood that seems to be here to stay. It encompasses the sort of behavior such as not leaving the house for days at a time, wearing the same pajamas for a questionable stretch, eating junk food, having your living space littered with takeout containers, watching trashy television, endlessly scrolling social media, and dozing off to crumbs in bed.
Although the term has been around since at least 2009, it recently picked up steam for … well, the obvious reasons stated above. It was also foisted into the lexicon by a couple of viral tweets earlier in the year, including one with a fake headline proclaiming that Kanye West essentially ended things with Julia Fox because “he didn’t like it went she went goblin mode.” (Fox later denied ever having used the term in an Instagram story.)
In another, Twitter user Dave McNamee shared a video of a slovenly cat eating with its paws that also went viral around the same time, pointing out that it was basically what people were referring to when they said “goblin mode.”
“Goblin mode is like when you wake up at 2 am and shuffle into the kitchen wearing nothing but a long T-shirt to make a weird snack, like melted cheese on saltines,” McNamee told The Guardian at the time. “It’s about a complete lack of aesthetic. Because why would a goblin care what they look like? Why would a goblin care about presentation?”
Is Stephen King a melted cheese on saltines kind of guy? Or is he secretly a fan of Love is Blind binges and days-old Chinese takeout? In either case, we wholeheartedly anticipate his next horror classic about a girl who takes goblin mode so far that she actually turns into a literal goblin. He can have that idea free of charge.