Slate Blows Huge Opportunity to Promote Use of the Word 'Growlery'

We noted a couple months ago that the word growlery had been pulled from the concise edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and implored all citizens of the Internet to save this word, which means "a place to growl in." This word is self-evidently necessary to the right-functioning of the world.

As such, it is incumbent upon all writers to work the word growlery into any and all works dealing with the topic of dens or man-caves. So it was with grave disappointment that Becca Rosen and I came across "Man-Cave Masculinity" in Slate. It is not just logically possible to use the word in this piece; this story is about growleries and the progressively lamer growls of 20th-century manhood!

Study man-cave utterances ("This is everything and more of what I've ever wanted in a basement") and you begin to see fear. You see confusion. You see men galloping into the adulthood like Leon Lett running toward the end zone in Super Bowl XXVII. That this unsteady manliness would be celebrated with big-screens and kegerators and Golden Tee machines is part of what makes it so touching.

So, shame on you, Slate! Shame. On. You. Everyone has to do his or her part to ensure that the growlery is not lost.

Alexis C. Madrigal

Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Technology channel. He's the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. More

The New York Observer calls Madrigal "for all intents and purposes, the perfect modern reporter." He co-founded Longshot magazine, a high-speed media experiment that garnered attention from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. While at Wired.com, he built Wired Science into one of the most popular blogs in the world. The site was nominated for best magazine blog by the MPA and best science Web site in the 2009 Webby Awards. He also co-founded Haiti ReWired, a groundbreaking community dedicated to the discussion of technology, infrastructure, and the future of Haiti.

He's spoken at Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, SXSW, E3, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and his writing was anthologized in Best Technology Writing 2010 (Yale University Press).

Madrigal is a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley's Office for the History of Science and Technology. Born in Mexico City, he grew up in the exurbs north of Portland, Oregon, and now lives in Oakland.