Friday words #254

By | January 29, 2021

I have only the vaguest notions about the world of multi-level marketing (MLM) sales. I know, or think I know, that they generally are not big money-makers for the “downline” people—that is, the people who are doing direct sales and are not distributors. I also am aware that a stereotype of people involved in MLM is that they are constantly in sales mode, as illustrated in this clip from the movie Garden State:

Therefore, I had not encountered the word hunbot until I saw it in an article in The Atlantic recently. This is a term—not a nice one, as we’ll get to in a sec—for people who do MLM hustling in email and on social media. The first part, hun, is short for honey. This references a cliched type of opening on a post or email: “hey, hun.” The bot part alludes to the bot-like behavior (in the internet sense of bot) of the overuse of words like hun or girl in fake-personalized messages. As one blogger says, a hunbot is a “direct sales or MLM enthusiast who calls everyone hun.” The blogger, “S.R.”, has this example of one of these types of social media posts:

Screenshot of a social media post that begins "Hey hun, I have a few spots open and was wondering if you would be interested in one."

Back to the issue of tone. It’s clear that calling anyone a name that involves bot is going to be disparaging. Adding hun- to the term doesn’t help, of course. For example, I suspect that if someone in our household were involved in MLM, we wouldn’t call them hunbot in person.

The blogger S.R. addresses this issue in her blog post by trying to get behind the disparagement of the term. As she says, hunbot is “is a slur designed to ridicule women who are desperate for a better life for themselves and their families,” also noting “I really empathize with women who are looking for an opportunity to improve their family’s finances without adding daycare costs or other issues to the mix.” This is the allure of MLM, even if it rarely works out for the people involved.

I’m pleased to have learned the term so that I know about it. And I’m pleased to have read the blog post that provides context so that I don’t use the term unthinkingly.

Ok, origins. This week’s fun origin comes from Friend Kim on Facebook, who posted something that taught me a new etymology. The term is bogus, which I’ve known for decades but whose origins I never once thought about.

The word has been around since the early 1800s to mean “fake” (“that’s a bogus story”). It enjoyed a period starting in the 1970s as a general term of disapproval (“pointless, stupid”). Probably because a lot of computer people came of age around then, bogus entered the hacker lexicon to mean things like “useless,” “false,” “incorrect,” and “unbelievable.” In that subculture (as perhaps elsewhere), it spawned fun derivatives like bogosity (“the degree to which something is bogus”), bogon (“the elementary particle of bogosity”), and bogometer (“A notional instrument for measuring bogosity”).

But where did it come from? The surprising part is that it was originally a noun. A bogus was a machine for making counterfeit coins, recorded as early as 1827. A coin that was made in a bogus machine was therefore a bogus coin, so you can see how bogus would easily be interpreted as an adjective. And from there it came to be applied generally to anything that was “counterfeit, spurious, fictitious, sham.”

What’s not clear is why the machine was called a bogus in the first place. One theory is that it’s a shortened form of an old New England (Vermont) term tantrabogus, which was applied “to any ill-looking object.” But there was also a regional term in England trantrabobs that referred to the devil. If you squint really hard, bogus might therefore be related to the word bogy/bogey, as in bogey man. But these are all theories and speculation, and no one seems to know for sure. Well, I suppose people are pretty confident that it didn’t come from Latin. In spite of that nice -us ending, haha.

To close the loop, so to speak, I should tell you how exactly I ran across this. Friend Kim posted on Facebook a question from the TV show Jeopardy! that addressed this very question.

This wouldn’t be the first time I’ve learned something from that show.

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