When Your Life Becomes a Verb
LAST Monday night Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of “South Park,” regaled the audience of “Late Show with David Letterman” with a vivid description of their appearance at the Academy Awards ceremony in 2000. They told the audience how they decided to dress in drag that night — their hairy chests scantily covered in silk and taffeta — which they fretted was a mistake even before they left home.
“Then we did some Charlie Sheen-ing and we were fine,” said Mr. Parker, to a roar of laughter. Added Mr. Stone: “We were just sheening our heads off.”
But what, exactly, did that mean? Drinking? A raucous pre-Oscars party involving cocaine and porn stars? Charlie Sheen, whose stints in and out of rehab sparked the street slang “prehab” last year and whose recent tirade against his “Two and a Half Men” bosses has America agog (though maybe not as aghast as one might expect), is back with another pop-culture idiom. “Apparently sheened is the new verb,” wrote a poster on Twitter, where Mr. Sheen now has more than 1.5 million followers.
Unlike other phrases of (false?) bravado recently associated with Mr. Sheen (“Bring it!” “Winning!” “Tiger blood!”), the terms “sheened” and “sheening” clearly connote partying, questionable decision making and public humiliation. It was mentioned this way last year on the Web site Urban Dictionary, soon after Mr. Sheen’s rampage at the Plaza in New York.
On Twitter recently, one J_A_Parker10 suggested that being “sheened” meant getting high on pain pills and sleep aids, while another poster called it “the new name for wasted.”
“I have no doubt that his name will spawn one or more meanings besides getting drunk,” said Bryan A. Garner, a language expert and the editor in chief of Black’s Law Dictionary.
Indeed, Mr. Garner came up with a definition of his own. “To ‘pull a Sheen’ could mean to ridiculously try to defend oneself in the public media,” he offered.
For Derek Sheen, a comedian from Seattle, sharing a last name with the troubled actor has drawbacks. Before last week, the only reference to Charlie Sheen he had heard was when a heckler asked if they were related. (They are not.)
“It makes it hard to be a Sheen right now,” Derek said. As he was about to go onstage at a comedy club last week, the M.C. shouted, “You’re about to get sheened!” The comedian was perplexed: “I had no idea what he was talking about.”
Later that night, Derek learned about the word’s emergence on “Late Show,” which he found oddly discomfiting, given that he, too, has struggled with alcohol and drug abuse. “I hope he gets better,” Derek Sheen said. “We’re still at that point we can make fun of it.”
To do so, perhaps, is to avoid confronting any sense of unease about Charlie Sheen’s problems. Eric Arauz, a mental health consultant who travels the country lecturing about his experience with bipolar disorder, said that Mr. Sheen’s behavior suggests he might suffer from a psychological imbalance as well as drug addiction. (Mr. Arauz is not a doctor.) He suggested that jokes about “sheening” are a technologically distanced attempt to make comedy from personal tragedy.
“It’s rubbernecking in front of a disaster,” Mr. Arauz said. “It’s the ability for television and Twitter to allow for a buffer. People do not feel responsible for what is happening.”
That is because, he added, there “is a failure of language to describe and elucidate the trauma around what is happening to Mr. Sheen.”
The actor is not the first person to have his name appropriated as a verb. Mr. Garner said that “bork,” meaning to reject a nominee (especially for the United States Supreme Court) based on the person’s political and legal beliefs, was included in the ninth edition of Black’s Law Dictionary after the campaign against the appointment of Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987.
That word did not remain long in the public lexicon. Whether this one does — along with Mr. Sheen’s career and future — is an open question.
Source: www.nytimes.com | The New York Times | By Laura M. Holson | Published 4 March 2011
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