chat

The plural, of course, is karens rather than *karener, because we need to add new irregular plurals at every opportunity.

Likewise, the pronunciation, of course, is a Norwegian approximation of the English pronunciation, because we need to add new irregular spellings at every opportunity, too.

And the meaning, of course, is the watered-down sense of the word which has already proliferated across the Anglosphere, and is not only a far cry from the original meaning of the term rooted in the lived experience of New Afrikans... But is also entirely redundant except to repackage misogyny for a new generation.

The best part is that karen and karens are (in spelling) already words in Norwegian, meaning "the guy" and "the guy's" respectively. Because more homographs is exactly what we need in the language where the N word and "to negate" are spelled the same.

God help us all.

Note: The earliest uses of karen in Norwegian were years ago. A country that's like 90% extremely-high-proficiency ESL speakers is naturally going to soak up L2 slang basically as quickly as it emerges. Yet I have somehow managed to avoid actually running into karen in any Norwegian texts in the wild until just now, which probably says something about just how little I read in Norwegian compared to English.