The latest nightmare of Trump 2.0? Our new brocabulary

“Guess who just got back today? Them wild-eyed boys that had been away. Haven’t changed, had much to say, but man, I still think them cats are crazy.” Lyrics from 50 years ago, the opener of Thin Lizzy’s The Boys Are Back in Town, spookily predicting the hoop-la in Washington last month.

Instead of Thin Lizzy, the Village People were there, at least the redux version of the original sextet, the bikie and the construction hunk swapped out by avatars. YMCA, America’s new anthem, morphed into MAGA as president-elect Donald Trump did his hot-potato shuffle, golf-swinging and fist-flossing. Inauguration, baby. Or inauguration, the sequel: The Trumpire Strikes Back.

Amid Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the new broligarchy, “bro” is shaping as the prefix of the moment.Credit: AP

Better still, make that The Omen – as inauguration stems from augurare, Latin for predict, whether that’s via rooster entrails or scratching America’s name from the Paris climate agreement. The party included the who’s who of tech suits, the so-called broligarchy from Bezos to Zuckerberg. Elon Musk, of course, First Buddy to the President, and his “Dr Strangelove spasm”, as Guardian columnist Marina Hyde depicted that Nazi wave. In fact, the only bloke missing was Al Fresco, as DC’s freeze forced the jamboree indoors.

Songs and oaths followed. Benedictions and invocations. Speeches, dances and a rigorous test of Trump’s penmanship. From soup to nuts, the Silicon Valley fraternity swayed to the beat, the plutocrat chorus line behind the throne. The whole “broccasion” marked Chapter One of the Broman Empire, sealed with an executive squiggle.

Chapter One of a wordy year too, with bro- shaping as prefix of the moment. Early this millennium, we swooned over bromance – the Affleck/Damon sort of thing. Heals and Warnie. Scomo and Widodo. The hybrid term bro-created offshoots, the incipient “brocabulary” of bro-hugs, stepbro and bro-science (alias bodybuilding). Feel free to add POTUS (45 and 47) to the equation since bro- is bound to grow.

Tony Thorne, director of the Slang and New Language Archive at King’s College London, has already called broligarchy – the new US regime – as the word of last year. So too Nancy Friedman (a California-based name-developer and brand critic), writing on her Fritinancy site. Beyond that, as X’s Elon and Meta’s Mark bolster the White House posse, the prefix is set to skyrocket.

Curiously, etymologist Dave Wilton, at wordorigins.org, dates broligarchy to 2009, the word emerging on Twitter, now Musk’s baby. The fusion blends the Y-chromosome with oligarchy, Greek for “rule of the few” – and even fewer women. Urban Dictionary jumped aboard in 2011, defining the word as “a small cadre of bros who snatch control of any scenario”. Mainstream media adopted the neologism soon after, as more opportunistic men, mostly tech bros, joined the hot-potato dance.

Bro-code, dude bros and bro-economy have since boosted the “bronacular”. In 2002, a New York Times restaurant review coined “bromakase” – a larding of omakase (“chef’s choice” in Japanese). Traditionally, this practice sees a diner surrender control to the chef, entrusting the house to determine the dishes. In contract, bromakase sees a “young male patron … acting like the cretin on Billions” and calling the shots.

Eerily, as Phil Lynott foresaw in 1976, again from his Thin Lizzy ballad: “Friday night, they’ll be dressed to kill, down at Dino’s Bar ‘n’ Grill…” Or Japanese eatery in this case, the entire sausage party stealing the room’s oxygen, the new brohemian push, drunk on bubbles and power. 2025 has landed – all hail the broligarchs.

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