Headspace ... The Sunday Scaries (or Sunday blues, as they're sometimes called) are feelings of anxiety or dread that happen the day before heading back to work....Cleveland Clinic ... “The Sunday scaries are feelings of intense anxiety and dread that routinely occur every Sunday. They often start in the late afternoon...The Sunday Scaries Podcast ... The Sunday Scaries are the anxiety that sets in on Sunday nights with the impending return to the office, school, or work….The Atlantic ... “I think the Sunday scaries are about feeling an overwhelming sense of pressure”—to perform well at work and thus pursue or maintain financial ...CNN.com ... One of the most effective ways of getting rid of the Sunday scaries is to prevent them from happening to begin with. This means trying to finish ...
I understand the feeling a Monday-Friday worker feels on Sunday, I'm just surprised that a baby-talk phrase is being used to express it and to create a sense of community around it.
Let's just look at one of the articles: "The 'Sunday Scaries' and the Anxiety of Modern Work" by Joe Pinsker in The Atlantic (published February 9, 2020, that is, just before the lockdown radically changed the circumstances of going back to the workplace).
The not-exactly-clinical diagnosis for this late-weekend malaise is the Sunday scaries, a term that has risen to prominence in the past decade or so....
How did I fail to notice?
It is not altogether surprising that the transition from weekend to workweek is, and likely has always been, unpleasant. But despite the fact that the contours of the standard workweek haven’t changed for the better part of a century, there is something distinctly modern about [the feeling the word describes, which] is responsible for the Sunday scaries–branded vegan CBD gummies, the how-to videos outlining “productive” Sunday routines for preparing for the workweek, and—perhaps most troublingly—the tweets from brands such as Starbucks, Mary Kay, and Malibu Rum about warding off the Sunday scaries.
Yeah, I didn't mention it before, but the first link that comes up when you google "Sunday scaries" goes to a place to buy those CBD gummies. Talk about childish. We take drugs in the form of candy and the candy has a babyish name ("gummies"). We don't examine our anxiety, we numb it with soporific drugs, and we don't call it fear or dread, we use a word so juvenile we should be embarrassed: "scaries."
Pinsker has this quote from the lexicographer Kory Stamper:
“For some reason, we have a great whack of words that sound silly but describe unpleasant feelings or negative emotions: the heebie-jeebies, the screaming meemies, the collywobbles, the jitters, the creeps, a case of the Mondays, boo-hoo”...
Am I wrong to be irritated by "Sunday scaries"? Do these silly words in fact deserve immense respect?
Posts
22 comments:
Reading Sunday Comics kept away Sunday Scaires until late afternoon.
And Sunday Scaries deserves no respect as a descriptor.
Sounds British to me. I have never heard it, or read it, even once.
It's another of the millennial neologisms I learned from my daughter. My favorite is bedgasm.
I don't know about the rest of you, but this Monday monkey lives for the weekend.
The "Sunday Scaries" does sound childish and imprecise. Are people actually scared of Monday? Probably not. Isn't it more like dread?
"Sunday Scaries" reminds me of people saying, "That's not okay" when referring to something that is untenable or objectionable.
Are you speaking to a child, dotard or pet?
Novelty songs were made for fun. "Jeepers creepers, where'd you get those peepers" had no purpose but to make people laugh, which is not a popular idea right now.
Sunday Scaries
Manic Monday
Taco Tuesday
Wacky Wednesday
What about Thursday?
Susanna Hoffs is just as beautiful today at age 64 as she was in 1986. How is that possible?
I've got to believe that it's good to be Susanna Hoffs.
One the great secrets of retirement life is the way that Sunday nights lighten up. The rest is just scripting. Weekends mean a lot when you're on the grind, so it's like the reverse of Friday night.
When I was a child, “Sunday Scaries“ was the name of the weekly Sunday afternoon creature feature on the local UHF channel.
- Rafe
Invariably triggered, in my childhood, by the start of the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday night at 8:00 pm. In more iconoclastic families, it was probably the Steve Allen Show or Maverick. But it was usually less a sense of being scared than of an eternal and dreary childhood cycle starting up again too soon. As the Boomtown Rats had it many years later (in a very different context), "I Don't Like Mondays."
Is it an evolving neologism in modern English to use nouns as modifying adjectives or adverbs? e.g. a Ford pickup truck? For folks trained in Latin, ancient Greek, Sanskrit, there is a little twinge of sadness at the loss of clear attribution of modifiers in modern English. One might launch a movement to avert the decline of highly articulated English language, such as the French Academie Francaise? Or is that elitist, racist, bigoted?
"Invariably triggered, in my childhood..."
For me it was the TICTICTICTIC intro for Sixty Minutes.
Friday funnies. Saturday scaries. Sunday suicides. Monday is a survivor's manic trip.
Geez. Let's dig ourselves a hole and then jump in.
Be grateful instead.
We live in Huxley’s Brave New World. It’s as simple as that.
Maybe it's a generation-based language transition. I used to get the Monday Blues or Blahs; they get the Sunday Scaries. Blues v. Scaries. The blues were a kind of music; the scaries refer to horror shows. Some say that there is a kind of apocalyptic dread hanging about in the spirit of the youngest generation, that there's real fear that climate change will actually dry up the land and burn down the world. And some say that underlying this acceptance of a proven falsehood is apocalyptic fear such as often occurs during social changes and at the end of a society. Kipling, for example, "celebrated" Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee with poem called "Recessional." He didn't celebrate the long reign; he looked forward with dread to the end of a way of life. "Far called our navies melt away/ On dune and headland sink the fire./ Lo, all our pomp of yesteryear/ Is one with Nineveh and with Tyre." I'm in the grandfather generation. We wanted to be adults and we wanted to be the kind of adults that liked the blues, that identified with workers and the poor and the blacks, all of whom we thought could be lifted out of poverty and segregation by efforts we were ready to make. Social collapse, which the young adults face, lets in the bad guys and the fears. So they want to go back the primary school where Halloween was a party and the scaries weren't real.
It just shows what people really think about cancel culture and working under the "anti-racist" DEI regime. It gives you the scaries because you know it's not about anti-racism or equity, it's about getting ahead by using accusations and piling on rather than by competence and tolerance. And meanwhile things that need to be done are going undone and it's these young adults who will pay the bill. As they seem to know. In this situation in Poland, John Paul II said: "Be not afraid." There are reasons for hope.
You mean that feeling of dread on Monday morning logging in at the kitchen table?
I googled Ann Althouse and got 410,000 hits. Then googled myself and got 718,000, googled a college acquaintance and got 156,000, which is odd since she was/is far more newsworthy than I. Googled an author whose work I like, 1,440,000, again a person far more famous than I, I expected more. I don't know how valid all those hits are, but one million seems like a pretty easy number to hit if you have an active and public internet presence.
Wacky Wednesday?
I always thought Wednesday was Hump Day
In my neighborhood, Tuesday is referred to as Belgium. It's the mid-week night that friends meet at the local pub to tell lies to each other. Early-on someone recalled the ancient travel comedy film, If it's Tuesday, it must be Belgium and it stuck.
Lilly, a dog said...
"Susanna Hoffs is just as beautiful today at age 64 as she was in 1986. How is that possible?"
Dorian Gray had a picture hanging in his attic that aged instead of him. I imagine Susanna has a VCR in her attic on an endless loop playing a video of "Walk Like an Egyptian" performed by what (today) appears to be the Golden Girls.
Susanna is Jewish, so she must have been blessed with the kosher version of the "Ageless Mediterranean Looks" gene. I have a half-Sicilian cousin who is 80; she has been told she looks great for 55.
Bob Wilson said...
"Is it an evolving neologism in modern English to use nouns as modifying adjectives or adverbs? e.g. a Ford pickup truck? For folks trained in Latin, ancient Greek, Sanskrit, there is a little twinge of sadness at the loss of clear attribution of modifiers in modern English."
It seems to be happening across a lot of modern languages, not just English.
Since I have a basic understanding of German grammar, I ran "Ford Pickup Truck" through Google Translate. It just gave up and gave me the loan word "Ford-Pickup-Truck". Several other West Germanic languages did the same, although Icelandic gave me "Ford pallbill". So Icelandic seems to be doing the same in using Ford as an adjective.
Next, I tried Italian(*), expecting something like "Camion di Ford" for "Truck of Ford". But it gave me "Camioncino Ford", indicating Italian was using Ford as an adjective as well. (Camioncino is a diminutive of Camion that is used to indicate a pickup truck). Same for other Romance languages Spanish, Portuguese, and French.
* - You have a separate option for the Sardinian language, but not one for Sicilian? Really, Google Translate?
I had never seen 'Sunday scaries' before a couple of months ago in the Guardian.
I laughed when I noticed that at the NYT earlier today below news of Cormac McCarthy's death there was a link to Six Great Movies to Stream (or something like that) if you wanted a taste of McCarthy's work.
They, the G. and the NYT, are just up-market, reliably 'progressivist' versions of the Daily Mail these days. The DM is much more amusing, and less expensive.
Post a Comment