Last March, in the balmy and faraway days of the late Biden administration, I reported back to you from a college visit in North Carolina and Virginia, for the edification of readers over the age of 20, with a definition of a new word in the teenage lexicon: rizz. That word, “rizz,” has become so common in the months since that I do not need to define it again here; we live in a reductive information system in which the same tidbits of language trend or mini-knowledge are shared by everyone, from the council flats of Glasgow to the Cape of Good Hope, and no one, even those above 50, needs to hear anything more about “skibidi” or “rizz” or “Ohio” in January 2025. But I’ve recently become aware of a new linguistic habit of the Kids These Days, and I thought you readers might find it germane.
It’s a new usage for the word “cope.”
Have you heard about “coping” and “copium”?
Last year’s Oxford Word of the Year was “brain rot.” I nominate “copium” for the Word of the Year 2025!
A “cope” in teenspeak is a noun. It’s apparently especially popular among gamers and it’s usually a retort. Someone on the internet posts something about themself — a brag or confession, a justification of behavior or a political explanation — and someone else calls it “cope” as a quick, kicky way to denigrate their self-belief or point out weaknesses in their argument.
For example, if someone were to say something like, “I seriously would have passed my driver’s test on the first try if it hadn’t been for the stupid way the dumb driving instructor’s briefcase kept bumping my elbow when I was at the wheel!,” a stranger on the internet might reply with, “Sounds like cope to me” or “This is what cope looks like.”
Or if someone else were to say, “I realize it’s bad news that there are ongoing purges of a Maoist magnitude this week in Washington, and that dozens of violent convicts who vowed to maim and/or murder the political opponents of their dear authoritarian leader were released from prison because, like all authoritarian leaders, ours wouldn’t mind having a violent thug squad on his side, but, hey, it’s only four years and John Fetterman is looking good!,” then a stranger on the internet might respond with “Cope harder.”
“Cope” comes into the conversation nonstop these days in virtual spaces where groups of strangers or groups of friends chat about a specific topic, like, say, on the Ivy League admissions pages of Reddit or those apps like Discord where strangers wrestling each other on Grand Theft Auto V, or shooting each other, or whatever they do, engage in banter and chitchat.
You employ the words “cope,” “coping,” or “copium,” typically, when the other person has expressed feelings and desires clearly but you think their actual argument is feeble. Using “cope” is a dismissal: “You just don’t wanna deal with reality, dude.”
The word “cope” is often paired with the word “seethe,” and is “cope and seethe.” If someone tells you to “cope and seethe” they’re telling you to shut up and deal with it.
Welp. How have you been coping these last two weeks, dear reader?
I’ve been coping with the end of the American Republic, and the hegemony of the trolligarchy, in two simple but, for me, effective ways.
My number-one copium is that I have delved far too obsessively and deeply into my new hobby: college admissions. My new hobby, like all good coping mechanisms, provides endless depths of information to disappear into (podcasts, Forbes articles, The Journal of Higher Education) and endless opportunities for numbers crunching, much in the way baseball obsessives used to future-cast and crunch the stats of the upcoming season of Major League Baseball. If anyone out there wants an amateur hot take on their high school junior’s chances at the College of William and Mary next year, give me a jingle.
My cope number two is having switched out all reading of decent media and reliable news for a random inbox full of stupid media. I’ve gone full ostrich. If you look up an ostrich in the dictionary, you’ll see an illustration of me with a super-long pink neck and a foolish expression in my big, sleepy ostrich eyes. My media consumption these days is strictly idiotic.
How did I end up on the receiving end of daily newsletters from The Telegraph, from the U.K., for example? (I think I accidentally ended up on The Telegraph newsletter list because the otherwise demonstrably horrible Telegraph publishes good luxury-hotel reviews and my third-runner-up copium is planning elaborate holidays I will never take to places I will never see, and this requires lengthy, late-night price comparisons for La Mamounia in Marrakesh versus the Villa des Orangers. It’s a slippery slope.)
Here is an example of an actual headline that arrived in my inbox the other morning courtesy of The Telegraph: “Keep dogs on leads or risk them being swept away, Met Office warns.”
That’s right, The Telegraph led the headline news on Jan. 22 — the day the president of the United States invoked the National Emergencies Act to order the U.S. military down to the southern border — with a warning to beach-walking Brits in Barbour jackets that “dogs could be swept away” if, while out for a blithe winter stroll, their boobish owners failed to heed or notice the “powerful waves” crashing beside them, pushed inland by Storm Eowyn, an extratropical cyclone that left thousands in Ireland and Northern England without power this weekend.
See? Stupid media. Stupid media is the copium of the masses. I’m also excited — mildly, mildly — for the first episode of “The Bachelor” this week on ABC.
It’s also possible I ate a blondie for dinner just now.
Cope and seethe.