“We should all be goblins.”
asked last week. Once I figured out what the hell this even meant—per the paper, it’s a state defined by never getting out of bed, never changing into real clothes, eating crap, binge-watching, doom-scrolling, and other familiar pandemic behaviors—I had another question: Who says goblins are so grimy and lazy? Is this not goblin slander? To get some answers, I called up Merrill Kaplan, a professor at the Ohio State University with a specialty in, you guessed it, goblins.
Since there isn’t a canonical goblin—and we can’t run out to the zoo and measure this use of goblin against the goblin that they’ve got in a cage—what a goblin is is a moving target. At the moment, for some people, enough of them that it’s become what the kids call “a thing,” enough people are thinking that goblinness is being unshaven in your apartment and it sounds like cave-dwelling.