underpants gnome
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.74 in modern English
21
Scrabble Score
15
Letters
4
Syllables
12
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Someone who makes incomplete plans with missing steps; someone who plans unsuccessfully.
Derogatory; Slang
Example Sentences
- "2. ? 3. Profit! Do you think their plan is missing something? They know Success in Programming 53 There Is No Try It's a Question of Passion Don't Plan Like an Underpants Gnome."
- "... an underpants gnome! Any time you read an inspiring news story, watch a YouTube video of somebody doing something amazing, or read a book like this one that encourages you to make changes in your life, you are collecting underpants."
- "Don't be an underpants gnome. Have a clear Step Two. You clearly need to make some profit, to be financially stable during your retirement, and you know how to do something, if only how to collect underpants. And you may have some more ..."
- "Like the rest of Trump World, Page brought a kind of Underpants Gnome theory to his bromance with Team Putin. Through some unknown alchemy, he expected to benefit Trump and gain influence and profit from his Russia foray."
- "[…] is the Underpants Gnome theory of politics. It doesn't work. What works is a move from A to B, not A to Q to G to T to X to B. In 2008, desperate to reset a flailing campaign and find some way, any way, to interrupt the narrative […]"
Etymology
Named for the Underpants Gnomes, characters in the South Park episode “Gnomes” (1998) who stole underpants from children as part of a plan to make a profit, but their plan lacked the means by which that profit was to be made.