Nerd Pride Radio

NPR is very taken and charmed with the notion of "goblin mode", a new hip and popular word with those youngins on Twitter and Tiktok now entering the English lexicon. Goblin mode! They were very excited to explore the various things that might be considered goblin mode, like raiding the fridge and eating all the good stuff before your housemates do, or otherwise making tongue-in-cheek reference to acting in a lightly obnoxious and self-aggrandizing manner like a damn goblin. But then they were thinking that maybe laying around the house binge watching TV and eating snacks in your comfortable sweatpants was goblin mode! People, no, that's the Hobbit mode. I don't know if it's NPR or the young who need to be sorted out on this.

I'll wait til Gen Z tells me the correct usage. I keep a couple in the house just for answering questions like this.

Never heard it until I read the article yesterday.

I've heard it used a couple times but didn't think much of it. From context, I took it to be a new variant on "going ham". Although, where going ham seemed to be about pure excess, goblin mode felt like it had more of a selfish quality as well (but in an adorable way). But that may be my own goblin prejudices showing. I grew up in a different era.

A very strange phrase that has been used in the past is "crotch goblin" to mean one's own offspring! I feel about that much the same way I feel about women's use of crude slang terms to describe their own body parts. Like this thing is yours, why are you making it something gross?!