The user refers to this supposed kill-joy as Karen: “Oh shit, Karen brought her stupid Nintendo thing to the party again. Record of the insult Karen appears as early as September 2016 when a Tumblr user, joematar, made fun of a promo for Nintendo Switch in which a white woman (appearing to be in her late 20s or early 30s) brings the gaming device to a party. According to Social Security data, Karen was indeed the fourth most popular name for newborn girls in the 1960s, peaking at #3 in 1965.

Whatever the origin of the slang, the name Karen, apparently, is popularly thought of as a generic-seeming name for a middle-aged white woman of a certain generation. Another suggestion is that it comes from a 2005 bit by Dane Cook called “The Friend Nobody Likes.” (The friend was named Karen.) An additional explanation is that it comes from the character Karen in the 2004 film Mean Girls, who’s the subject of the popular quote: “Oh my God, Karen, you can’t just ask someone why they’re white.” It’s even been put forth that Karen comes from the even earlier 1990 film Goodfellas, in which one of the characters is named Karen. A Becky, for example, is a stereotype for a “basic” young, white woman, while a Chad, in other corners of the internet, stands in for a cocky, young “dudebro.”īut, why the name Karen? Karen has widely been credited to Black Twitter in the 2010s. Karen joins a trend on the internet in the 2010s of using a first name to make fun of certain kinds of people.

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