I was scrolling through my feed this morning, coffee in hand, minding my own business, when I saw a grown adult get ratioed into oblivion for typing the word "remain" in a comment about a sandwich. A sandwich. We are officially a nation that has turned a nine-dollar turkey club into a geopolitical loyalty test.
Let me back up for the uninitiated, which is apparently anyone with a functioning social life. "Remain" used to be a perfectly innocent verb. You remained at the party too long. You remained seated during the applause. It was the linguistic equivalent of beige. Then Brexit happened, "Remain" became a political identity overseas, and now the word has apparently crossed the Atlantic like a bad cold and infected every corner of American discourse.
Here's how it works now. You say you're going to remain at your job. Someone in the replies accuses you of being a globalist. You say the leftovers remain in the fridge. Boom, you're a shill for Big Brussels. I once texted my mom "remaining at gate B12" and my uncle responded with a three-paragraph rant about sovereignty. Sir, I am trying to get to Orlando.
The algorithm loves this, obviously. Nothing drives engagement like a word that means "stay" getting treated like a secret handshake for the Davos crowd. Every niche community has claimed it. Sports fans remain loyal. Crypto bros remain bullish. Your ex remains a problem. Suddenly everyone's a linguist with a vendetta and a podcast.
What kills me is that the word itself is aggressively boring. It has no swagger. "Resist" gets a fist. "Persist" gets a motivational poster. "Remain" gets a guy in a cardigan politely not leaving. And yet here we are, building entire personalities around six letters that describe standing still. We took the most passive verb in the English language and made it a hill to die on, which is ironically the opposite of remaining anywhere.
The real victims are the English teachers. Imagine grading essays right now. "The protagonist remains conflicted." Congratulations, you've just radicalized a sophomore. Kids are learning to avoid the word entirely, swapping in "stays," "lingers," "persists," anything to dodge the discourse. We are literally degrading our own vocabulary to avoid a fight nobody asked for.
And it's not stopping. I give it six months before "stay" gets dragged into it, then "left," and then we're just a country of people grunting at each other because every syllable has been claimed by a faction. The dictionary is becoming a battlefield and the only casualty is my ability to order soup without an incident report.
Look, I don't have a solution. I'm not a linguist, a diplomat, or anyone's therapist. I'm just a guy who wants to say "I remain unconvinced" about a movie without being drafted into a culture war I never signed up for. But apparently that's too much to ask in a country where even the most neutral word gets a criminal record.
So here's my closing thought. If you're the type to start a fight over a verb that means "to stay put," maybe you're the one who needs to log off and remain somewhere quiet. Preferably off the internet. Preferably for a while. The rest of us are just trying to eat our sandwiches in peace.