SNP’s word of the day: Pow

Word: Pow

Meaning: An exclamation; the sound of a collision or explosion.

Usage: “That boot is like pow.” As uttered by the singer Mariah Carey in her two-hour appearance on the Home Shopping Network, beginning at midnight Sunday, to promote her line of clothing and costume jewellery.

You should know it because: Mariah said it more than twice, and if Mariah says it, you don’t soon forget it. And if you haven’t already, watch the four-minute video clip of said HSN appearance, compiled by Gawker in a Pulitzer-baiting act of journalism.

The mind of Mariah Carey is a vast, disorienting and untrodden continent, inhabited mostly by butterflies only she can see. And so I can’t tell you what pow means to her. It may be as simple as the sound of another brain cell exploding when she beholds the beauty of a faux-gold button on a $39.99 shoe—the woman is doing God’s work, God’s work I tell you. Or it’s the sound made by two of Mariah’s thoughts, one moment running free as birds with legs, the next smacking bang into each other, understandably startled.

Generally, pow does indicate such explosions and collisions; it often appears in comic books, or if you’re fancy like that, graphic novels. Actually, Pow! was the title of a short-lived ’60s comic strip, which ran for 86 issues before merging with Smash (the things you can learn from britishcomics.com). In the ’50s and ’60s, POW was used mostly as an acronym for Prisoner of War, and POW films were a popular sub-genre of plain old war films. But the exclamatory pow has recently swung back into usage, popularized by musicians as laudable as, er, the Black Eyed Peas and Soulja Boy.

It’s safe to say we’ll be hearing a lot more pow between now and the next time a superstar leaves her PR person at home, so let’s settle on an easy, working definition. Pow: For when wow is not enough.

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