Last month, the Denver Post ran a headline featuring the word “gooning,” and, as we approach nearly five years of writing this column for Rooster, we can’t help but feel that the true absurdist news was the headlines we read along the way.
So if you don’t know, “gooning” is an internet slang term used to refer to frequent or constant masturbation. The article itself references a sexual assault, and there’s nothing funny about that.
However, as people who grew up idolizing journalists like Ernest Hemingway and Dan Rather, there is something incredibly funny in seeing an internet slang term like “gooning” ran seriously in a Denver Post headline, in the same way that it’s funny to watch American culture nosedive into the ground as an empire with a technology-related dopamine problem collapses in on itself.
To watch a publication that you were once so smitten with due to its various press-related accolades and awards use a word like “gooning” in its headline is the equivalent to being an adolescent and seeing the toothless man inside of the Chuck E. Cheese costume ripping a crack pipe.
As we continue to watch a world that we grew up in cease to exist, where people who went to college to learn how to write quality journalism use a younger generation’s vernacular only found on the internet, we can’t help but feel like this is a giant L for mankind, absolute cheeks, and we’re forced to wonder things like “Are we, as a nation and as Americans, totally chopped, bruh?”
Anyway, speaking of gooning…