“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins.” — H.L. Mencken

Here we go again. With the political conventions of both major parties now out of the way, it seems like a good time to take a look at some of the words and memes that will soon be clogging up much of the space on all of our coveted electronic devices.

First of all, you ask, what’s this “brat” stuff all about anyway?

Well, shortly after Kamala Harris was tapped to replace President Joe Biden as the Democrat’s 2024 presidential candidate, British pop singer Charli XCX tweeted “Kamala is brat” on X. (Before long, the candidate’s campaign had changed the color of her official X page background to brat green — a color described as “neon lime” — like that on the singer’s album cover, and a meme was off and running.)

Harris is a brat? Well, no, at least not a mischievous, trouble-making kid. The word’s current iteration as used by Charli XCX started out as a word that essentially meant a girl who is messy, likes to party, and says stupid things sometimes, then morphed to a “more empowered, reclaimed term for a strong-headed, disobedient woman,” according to linguist Adam Aleksic, and seems to have already moved on to a term that means the “essence of this summer.”

Such is the journey of slang.

As you’d expect, all this sudden attention has led to even more memes and sayings. Because of her surging popularity with younger people, there are things like “Gen Z feels the Kamalove,” “We need a Kamanomenon” and, of course, “Brats for Harris.”

The veep’s fans and supporters are known as the Khive. Why? According to The New York Times, “The online encyclopedia Know Your Meme credits the MSNBC correspondent Joy-Ann Reid with coining the moniker — a play on BeyHive, the name of Beyoncé’s devoted fan base — in a tweet in 2017, when Ms. Harris was a first-term senator from California.”

As was the case with Hillary Clinton, Harris also uses a lot of campaign signs bearing only her first name – except when the last name of her running mate, Tim Walz, appears below her surname.

Kelly Dittmar, an associate professor of politics at Rutgers University, recently told The Washington Post that Clinton used just her first name “to distance and distinguish herself from husband Bill Clinton. For Vice President Kamala Harris,” she says, “(the use of only her first name) gives her something to lean into in terms of her distinct identity.”

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has made a pretty good living from going by his last name. He even sells the rights to it if the price is right. It’s on the side of the Boeing 757 he flies around in.

It’s customary to put the presidential candidate’s name above the vice presidential candidate’s on campaign signs — not on the same line, in other words — but given Trump’s excessive use of his last name, such placement is a foregone conclusion. That said, I find it interesting that the last name of his current running mate and that of his former vice president are so similar. Maybe the campaign could save some money by taking leftover signs from 2020 and simply changing the first two letters from “Pence” to “Vance.”

Then there’s the word “weird,” a term that appears to really have gotten under the skin of Messers Trump and Vance after Walz told an MSNBC interviewer that “These are weird people on the other side.”

Walz’s barb seems to have hit home, says The New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie, because “Republican politicians seem taken aback by the idea that they’re outside the mainstream, by the charge that their interests and priorities are alienating to the average American.”

More terms to keep an ear on?

One of the Republican initiatives this campaign is called “Project 2025,” which, according to Wikipedia, is “a political initiative published by the Heritage Foundation that aims to promote conservative and right-wing policies to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power if Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election.”

Another is Trump’s own “Agenda 47,” which is, again according to Wikipedia, “a collection of formal policy plans of Donald Trump, many of which would rely on executive orders and significantly expanded executive power,” if he’s elected the 47th president of the United States.

Stay tuned – there’s sure to be a lot more “weird” words and terms that need explaining before Nov. 5.

Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at [email protected].