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First Words

It’s Easy to Be Called ‘Thirsty’ on Social Media. What About on Capitol Hill?

Credit...Illustration by Javier Jaén

In his 1936 personal-development opus “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” Dale Carnegie quoted the Vienna-born scientist Hans Selye: “As much as we thirst for approval, we dread condemnation.” Not much has changed in this regard, except that now, as much as we thirst for approval, we dread being condemned precisely for being so “thirsty.”

“Thirst,” in recent black and then internet slang, describes a graceless need for approval, affection or attention, one so raw that it creeps people out. It calls to mind the panting tongues, bulging eyeballs, springing hearts and steam-shooting ears of Looney Toons characters. Or those mewling, suggestive, desperate-to-please selfies that people post to social media to elicit precisely that cartoon-wolf reaction — a type of image commonly known as a “thirst trap.”

“Thirst” doesn’t just want something; it makes an unsightly spectacle of a clueless, grasping, gaping need. It encroaches on boundaries and intrudes on others’ space, jostling self-respect and good taste out of the way. The more commonplace the word has become over the past few years, the more it has come to describe a condition that exists on a very wide spectrum. The guy who eagerly favorites your every social post is thirsty. The co-worker who’s always fishing for the boss’s praise is thirsty. The brand that tries very hard to be cool is thirsty. The rally-obsessed, Twitter​-​​incontinent politician is thirsty. The acquaintance who’s always suggesting you get together for brunch is thirsty — or maybe you’re just judgmental and mean.

There’s always been something slightly derogatory about the way we speak of a thirst for wealth, fame, power or attention. The poet William Cowper wrote about “Low ambition and the thirst of praise.” Byron wrote about “A thirst for gold. The beggar’s vice.” Chekhov wrote about “the thirst for powerful sensations,” and Madame de Staël wrote about how “genius inspires this thirst for fame.” At this point, even the modern version of the word has been absorbed into the lexicon so thoroughly that it hardly stands out as slang anymore. Its usage has become barely distinguishable from its classical applications — but now it has an added layer of contempt, suggesting that the condition it describes has only grown worse or that we’ve grown less tolerant of it.

Lately, in fact, the notion of thirst has edged into an inhibiting kind of judgment. It has morphed into a discouraging, feel-bad meme — a potent means of condemning any kind of overreach. Most of that condemnation is richly deserved. In a recent column, Frank Bruni called out the most parched legislator of the moment, Devin Nunes, who was described by a source as “an overeager goofball” and a bumbling brown-noser, oblivious to “the line between ingratiating and stupid,” who jangled John Boehner’s nerves with his “indiscriminate pep” and “constant bumming of his cigarettes.”

Of course, Nunes pales in comparison to the giant sucking sound that is the person whose approval he most thirsts for — our current president, whose every action seems driven by the need to prove to others how smart, powerful, rich and sexy he is. From gold-plating every square inch of his life to bragging to a C-list television personality about sexual assault, from tweeting rancorously about “S.N.L.” at all hours (Paul Krugman: “One look at his Twitter account is enough to show that victory has done nothing to slake his thirst for ego gratification”) to marrying women ever younger than him who choose to live farther and farther from him, Donald Trump is driven by a thirst for approval so powerful and desperate that it has grossed out much of the nation and freaked out much of the world.

“Thirst” was first added to the Urban Dictionary in 2003, but its use hit its first great peak sometime around 2014, the year Diet Coke introduced the thirstiest ad campaign in history. One ad’s tagline seemed to suggest any number of strange things: that drinking soda was like snorting cocaine, that the average Diet Coke drinker was prone to using sex to advance her career, maybe even that she was plainly desperate and needed to be reined in. (“Be ambitious, not thirsty. You’re on Diet Coke.”) That line was the epitome of thirst, flailing haplessly to connect a soda brand to a buzzword. The campaign was roundly mocked and quickly pulled, and it made me wonder if Dos Equis’s long-running “The Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign — “Stay thirsty, my friends” — was sincere or stealthily mocking the least interesting men in the world.

In December 2014, Jezebel posted a list of 100 very thirsty people, moments and things under the headline “The Unquenchable Year,” rooting out clueless desperation wherever it dwelt: Aaron Sorkin, bachelor parties, Kris Jenner, Kim Jong-un, journalism as a discipline. Reading it was like having your third eye pried open while cycling through Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions, only with all the positive feelings grayed out.

Two years later, “thirst” remains with us as the mot juste for these and other people, moments and things — and the evidence of that thirst has only grown more undeniable. It lingers in mirror and car selfies, in Nunes’s midnight White House runs and in Paul Ryan’s Beanie Boo face. (Thirst is not, for the record, partisan: Consider Bernie Sanders’s courting of millennial voters last year.)

And yet, whenever I come across the word, it troubles me longer than it should. Something about it rankles. Why thirst, precisely, and not some other basic human condition resulting from need? Maybe it has something to do with the things we thirst for — things like approval, attention, affection, recognition; all the interdependent needs. The things we deride as being “thirsty” are the things that lack value in the eyes of the macho, leather-faced American individualist, so they invite macho, stone-faced derision. Hunger, for instance, is described as a presence, a motivating fire in the belly, but thirst is derided as a girly lack. Entitlement plays a part, too. We “hunger” for success, because we approve of success. Hunger is associated with desire, whereas thirst is associated with need.

But I also tend to think that it’s because “thirst” gets at an epistemological problem: a crisis of being, or how to be, in the world as it is now. It puts you into an unsettling double bind. It reframes a basic, lower-order need as a moral, social, aesthetic and personal failure. Our strange attachment to the word is hinted at by the fact that a global water crisis is in full flower, the world is increasingly parched, World Water Day was commemorated just last month — and yet the word “thirsty” is doused in judgment. Is it because “thirst” will kill you first?

“Thirsty” is a unisex put-down, but that doesn’t mean it’s not gendered. A man is thirsty when he fails to cloak his libido or his instincts in a perfectly calibrated mix of empathy and chill. A woman is thirsty when she fails to cloak her emotional needs or insecurities behind a posture of detachment. “Thirsty” reinforces gender stereotypes while coolly pretending not to. It expresses our ambivalent relationship with desire — our constant negation of it, our vigilant policing of it. It gets at who is allowed to want things, and in what way we are allowed to want them.

Trump’s arrant thirstiness stands in particularly glaring contrast to Obama’s impeccable chill. This resembles every other time the tyranny of cool has been rebelled against. These things go in cycles: A Romantic eruption of feeling tends to follow in the wake of Classical reserve. Frank emotiveness and sensitivity become culturally sanctioned again, emo comes back and we enter a supposedly more feminine cycle. Only this time, rather than usher in a more frankly emotional phase, we’ve ushered in something suppressive — the total denial of feeling, of experience. It’s not idealism in the air around our leadership or any kind of desire (greed excepted); it’s a lack, a void, a deficit.

I recoil as much as the next person from the narcissistic behaviors “thirst” takes down. But I just as often find myself recoiling from its inhibiting effects. As Anaïs Nin wrote: “Something is always born of excess. Great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” Nothing is born out of deficiency. Nin was reviled throughout her life and afterward for writing candidly about her desires — something few women are allowed to do without being branded an open wound — and was only recently divested of her status as one of the thirstiest women of the 20th century. (Wanting, of course, is the impetus for getting, and we’re still very selective about who gets to do that.) But after decades of enshrining power, greed, lust and other ego-driven desires as the driving forces of American life, our contempt for thirst seems to hint at a thirst for change.

Carina Chocano is the author of “You Play the Girl,” to be published in August. She last wrote a First Words column on why calling yourself “humbled” doesn’t sound as humble as it used to.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 15 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Dry Spell. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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