Learned a new word today.
“Kayfabe” helps me get a better handle on what’s happening with folks who know that we have a white supremacist terror problem in our federal, state, and local governments and who know that Reality Winner has been cruelly and unusually punished and who know that the climate crisis is real but who haven’t figured out how they can publicly acknowledge these matters while maintaining the status and approval they’ve come to mistake for their actual lives. All the world’s a stage.
Kayfabe also helps me understand why “Man On The Moon,” which places Andy Kaufman alongside Moses and Darwin as artisans of the possible, pioneers of human seriousness, if you will, is sometimes my favorite song in the earth’s long chronicle. It’s all there, as the saying goes. Thanks, R.E.M.
And thank you, Gregory Thornbury, for setting me straight. Mind your kayfabe, y’all.
And for a bit more on that: https://ewrestling.fandom.com/wiki/Kayfabe
My curiosity resulted in this little etymological bit: Pro wrestling can trace some of its stylistic origins back to carnivals and Catch Wrestling, where the term "kayfabe" is thought to have originated as carny slang for "protecting the secrets of the business." The term "kayfabe" itself may ultimately originate from the Pig Latin form of "fake" ("ake-fay") or the phrase "be fake."
Kayfabe may also derive from another trick used by traveling carnival workers. With money tight, a carny would call home collect and ask for "Kay Fabian." This was code letting the people at home know they had made it safely to the next town without paying for the cost of a phone call.