NTMP 149: Potatotainment
Plus: Exciting news and a request!
New-To-Me Phrases, November 23, 2025
Comfort food chic * Floatato * Remnant prairie * Snifari * Humilitainment * Stroad * Felony footlong
The Phrases, With Context
This week, we have half-baked wearables, potatoes that can kill you (as a little treat), untouched death grasses, overdeveloped Frankenroads, and more. But first . . .
An NTMP announcement and a request for help
Some readers guessed it already, but let’s make it official: I am working on a book proposal for New-To-Me Phrases!
Here’s where you come in: Agents and publishers like to see a healthy subscriber count to show that people might actually be interested in reading your book.
To that end, I’d be really grateful if you’d spread the word about this project with your friends, family, enemies, and random strangers.
Here’s one easy way to share a link - hit that button:
If you have a Substack newsletter and you’d be cool with recommending NTMP using that feature, I’d also really appreciate it.
Thank you! I have more fun stuff planned for the new year, including a new look and paid subscriber perks, so stay tuned!
In the meantime, you came here for phrases, and phrases you shall have. Let’s get to it!
1. Comfort food chic
For some reason, Aldi UK created a jacket that looks like a potato, complete with foil interior.
The press release, which calls the jacket comfort-food chic, artfully describes it as “this summer’s hottest drop which is guaranteed to keep you spud-tacularly snug as the air turns crisp.” ::Picard .GIF clap::
Imagine showing up to a bonfire in this. Would you wear it? I would, but I live in the Midwest and I doubt anyone would even notice.
Also, I know tortilla blankets exist, but what other foods need to become puffies? Roasted marshmallows? Pop-Tarts? Charcuterie boards?
2. Floatato
I hope you’ll forgive me coming to the esteemed Fat Bear Week competition a few weeks late. If you’re unfamiliar, every year, bears in Alaska’s Katmai National Park work hard to bulk up for the winter. Part of their enlargement activities involve fishing for salmon in the Brooks River.
As the website notes, “Fat bears are successful bears.”
New to the competition this year, bear 602 (an ID number given by the National Park Service to track local bears) was nicknamed floatato due to his loungemaxxing tendencies:
He sometimes napped in the river rather than retreating to the seclusion of the forest. He also seemed to enjoy being surrounded by fish. On warm days, his resting phases were punctuated by lounging behaviors that inspired people to call him a “floatato,” and reminded others of Homer Simpson relaxing in a pool.
This is yet another copywriting gig I wish I had, although that last sentence reads to me like an AI summary. Anyway, respect for someone who hangs out where the snacks are without bothering to relocate to a couch or a table.
3. Remnant prairie
In case you were wondering how cool I am, a few weeks ago my husband and one of my kids and I went on a sunrise birdwatching hike across farm fields and prairies. Real “peak elder Illinoisan” shit. Pro tip: If you’re going to walk across uneven ground studded with shoe-piercing plants and postholes, maybe bring a headlamp.
Anyway, we survived, and we got to hear sandhill cranes waking up! As with our parrots at home, there was lots of manic chattering and hot goss about who was flying in for the morning.
This hike allowed us to explore an area that’s not open to the public. Our guide, who had attended a wedding the night before and somehow managed to be both upright and sentient, shared that we’d be hiking through a remnant prairie, meaning it had never been touched by agriculture. 🤓 🌾
Also, I’ve known my husband for almost 30 years and I had no idea that he was a good photographer:
4. Snifari
This phrase was coined by my friend and NTMP stan, Mel. Snifari describes dogs heading outdoors to sniff all of the things. A safari of sniffs! Extremely cute, just like her tiny dog, Miss Marple.
5. Humilitainment
Matt Bernstein’s podcast, A Bit Fruity, recently did an episode called Dr. Phil: From Nice Guy to Nazi with Aubrey Gordon from Maintenance Phase as co-host. Matt used humilitaniment to describe reality and daytime talk TV during the early aughts. I didn’t realize how exploitative and ethically sketchy The Dr. Phil Show was until I listened to this episode, which makes the argument that current friend-of-ICE Dr. Phil was really the same dude all along. Worth a listen!
6. Stroad
My friend Jessica is married to a city planner and therefore knows all sorts of cool weird shit about municipal design and such. She dropped the word stroad into a convo recently (as one does) and I had to look it up.
Stroad is a portmanteau for combining a street and a road, but not in a good way. Coined in 2013 by Strong Towns, a nonprofit org that seeks to reimagine suburban sprawl, they describe stroads as “dangerous, multi-laned thoroughfares you encounter in nearly every city, town, and suburb in America.”
You can see a great example of a stroad in this also-great post by Hamilton Nolan, “Cars Have Fucked Up This Country Bad.” When I drove to the Memphis area a couple of years ago to move my mom into an end-of-life care home, we saw so many stroads in multiple towns along the way. It’s just such a soulless way to live, putting commerce before literally everything else: community—including indie small businesses—accessibility, aesthetics, walkability, ecology. We can and should do better than this.
7. Felony footlong
By now you’ve likely heard of American, uh, hero, Sean Dunn, aka Sandwich Guy, who threw a sub sandwich at a Border Patrol agent Gregory Lairmore in DC. During the trial (a great use of taxpayer funds!) it came out that Lairmore’s esteemed colleagues gifted him a patch that read felony footlong.
I insist you read this play-by-play Bluesky thread covering the trial from HuffPo labor reporter Dave Jamieson - here are some choice excerpts:
‘Now he’s struck me with the sandwich,’ Lairmore says.
“I could smell the onions and mustard.”
“Do you recognize that sandwich?” the attorney asks.
Dunn was acquitted, by the way. That’s the power of the sandwich.
No bonus bits this week; just my gratitude to you for reading. Remember to keep making it weird, and stay furiously curious!
There's now a Fat Squirrel Week in a state park in Texas. I voted for both chonky bears and tubbo squirrels this fall.
I've shared the link.
Thanks for the Bluesky link -- so amusing!