Even Billionaires are Toadies
Well, one unexpected gift the election gave me was opportunity for a little fun with wordplay, always an exercise to be prized, and this episode of wordy, wordy, what’s the wordy, stars a favorite of mine.
Toady. Now there’s a word.
You’ll find varying definitions, but for today’s purposes let’s just use Merriam-Websters: One who flatters in hopes of gaining favors.
Toady’s origin goes back to the 17th century, so we human beings have been perfecting this skill for centuries. Its origin story varies by which source you consult, in this case these from Claude AI or ChatGPT. While differing, each is quite entertaining.
What I love about this word is that it’s so descriptive and visual, like onomatopoeia, but for the eyes. When you call someone a toady it packs a punch far above its weight.
And it anchors a universe of entertaining words that orbit around it.
Some of the nouns:
- Sycophant
- Suck-up
- Bootlicker
- Brown noser
And the adjectives and verbs: Fawning, servile, obsequious, compliant, kowtowing.
Ingratiating, never a great badge of a word to wear, falls into the same camp though hardly seems to compare with the visuals and sounds conjured by its cousins.
As a Certified Wordsmith*, I’d like to propose, post-election, adding a new word to this cluster:
Bezos.
As in: Look at the way he grovels to get into the good graces of that buffoon. He’s such a “Bezos.”
Yes, the world’s third-richest man sucked up majestically to Donald J. Trump after the election, proving that even billionaires can be toadies. And sure, while other tech leaders, both billionaires and those headed for B status, conveyed congratulatory wishes to the new president-elect, it seemed as if Jeff Bezos was a little exuberant in his messaging.
It’s no surprise, I guess. He telegraphed his toadiness when he kiboshed the Washington Post’s presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris. (Kibosh, now there’s a word. Along with kowtow, it seems the K’s have it.)
He’s proven quite publicly that his values are those of convenience, and that they are singular rather than plural: value = money. Indeed, his net worth climbed to an all-time high in the days after the election fueled by the stock-market performance of Amazon.
Now, this isn't an anti-billionaire screed. It's more about what really surprised me in Bezos's actions: I assumed he had accumulated, at $283 billion, what is referred to longingly by many as “Fuck You Money,” or perhaps even better what Mark Cuban describes as “Fuck Everyone Money.”
So, for all of us clambering around as thousandaires in ship’s steerage, be gone ye dreams of FU Money – it’s just not a thing.
In addition to contributing a new word to our vernacular, I’d like to nominate toady as Time’s Person of the Year, which would make this the Year of the Toady.
(Unfortunately, it might be a toady mini-epoch of sorts measured by four <gulp> years.)
It brings to mind of one of my all-time fave reads, Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner. I first read it 30+ years ago, and I still think about it on the regular. He said something that stuck with me: “Water flows uphill to money.”
If that’s the case, and I believe it is, we’re in for a toady time of it as we have a President elect who just picked up the Mississippi River and put it in his mouth.
Time to wind up my rantola, I guess, but not before I leave you with this – a song my son turned me on to a few years back that can be a bit of an earworm. It’s by the musical comedian Bo Burnham and only requires 58 seconds of your time. It’s title? Bezos I.
Godspeed, friends.
Russ
*Certified Wordsmith – there is no such thing.
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