Reader Meet Author

One of the things that makes language a challenging (and interesting) topic of study is the fact that many words or phrases have various meanings depending on the context, era, or sociological/cultural perspective of the person using it. For instance, if I were to ask if you were “mad” in the States, most people would assume I was asking if they were angry. Across the ocean in the Motherland, if I were to ask you if you were “mad” you would assume I was asking if you were crazy. In 2006, if I referred to someone as “gay”, some might think I was talking about sexual orientation… whereas I’d be calling someone happy if I called them “gay” fifty years ago.

As time goes on, slang is moving from it’s underground, youthful medium and becoming more mainstream. Most people know what getting “capped” means. They know how to “dis” someone. And they know what’s about to happen when someone else is “fixin” to “bitchslap” them.

And over my vacation, I learned that there is more than one meaning for the phrase “muffin top”.

Let me break it down, pictorially. This is a muffin:

This is the top of a muffin, or simply… a muffin top: In the post I wrote a few days ago I made reference to the phrase “muffin top”. A couple of difference comments were posted, each with a different take on the phrase. Dagny referred to Elaine (which I assume is a Seinfeld reference). In that episode, the muffin top depicted above is the subject of discussion. It’s the literal top to a muffin. The “stump” has been removed as if were the top of a mushroom. Until a week ago, I would have assumed this definition for the phrase “muffin top”. If someone had said they’d seen a muffin top, I’d have figured they saw the top of a muffin… perhaps at a bakery… or even a decapitated muffin like the ones in the Seinfeld episode.

In fact, when I was told to “check out that muffin top” I was looking for a edible, bread-like substance.

I didn’t see one.

But hey… muffins are small, even when they are intact. So, naturally, if you remove the “stump” and leave only the muffin top, it would be even smaller and, thus, more difficult to see. I didn’t spend a lot of time straining to see what I thought would be the top of a blueberry muffin. Maybe it would have been banana nut. Whatever the style, I wasn’t hard pressed to search it out. I figured the only thing I was missing was a mutilated piece of bread. So I thought nothing of the phrase “muffin top” at the time.

It wasn’t until I heard the phrase used again that I began to question the traditional definition of “muffin top”. I’m sure I looked funny trying to process what had just been said to me. The person I was talking to asked me if I could “see her muffin top” and, just as before, I began to look for baked goods. I thought maybe she’d tried to sneak a muffin out of the bakery, but because her pockets were small (or because the muffin was big), she’d only been able to sneak out the top. I started looking at her waist… to see if the muffin top I assumed she’d stolen was showing through her pockets.

Again… I didn’t see one. But I wanted to see it. I wondered what was so great about these muffin tops that was making everyone but me have them. So I asked if I could try her muffin top… or at least see it. She looked at me in the most peculiar of ways. And then she did something I wasn’t expecting.

She grabbed her love handles, shook them up and down, and said “there… see? happy? I’m not sure how you’d try it, but be my guest!”

Apparently, she was talking about THIS kind of muffin top:

See it? See the muffin top? Right at the place where her pants meet her stomach? According to the Urban Dictionary, “muffin top” is defined as:

A word coined by Australian comediennes Kath and Kim, meaning when a woman wears a pair of tight jeans that makes her flab spill out over the waistband, just like the top of a muffin sits over the edge of the paper case.

Imagine my surprise to find out that I had not in fact been missing the top of an actual muffin, but instead, the aforementioned rollover affect. I don’t think I’ve laughed as hard as I did at that moment in years. Whoever came up with this meaning for “muffin top” is a genius. I mean, seriously… who would think to equate extra body bulge with the top of a muffin?

It’s quite possible that I am the last person on the planet to know about the “muffin top”. Melissa knew about it. I think Richard knew about (even though he expressed it in a very old-man-like way). I’m sure Dagny knew about this meaning, too. My sister knew. As usual, I’m the last to find these things out.

I guess the moral of the story is not to assume you know what something means. Just when you think you’re about to sink your teeth into a warm, delicious baked good… you could end up with a waistful of flab…