Decoder Ring | Mailbag: Drug Names, Cow Abductions, and the “Ass-Intensifier”

Summary

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Decoder Ring Mailbag: Drug Names, Cow Abductions, and the “Ass-Intensifier”

Podcast: Slow Burn (Decoder Ring)
Host: Willa Paskin (Slate Podcasts)
Date: July 16, 2025

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Overview

In this engaging mailbag episode, Willa Paskin and expert guests address three listener questions that unravel quirky corners of language and pop culture:

• The origins and spread of the “ass intensifier” (as in “grown-ass man”)
• The persistent cultural image of aliens abducting cows
• Why modern pharmaceutical drug names sound so strange (“zavpret,” “Skyrizi,” etc.)

The tone is curious, playful, and smart, blending linguistics, history, semiotics, and pop culture analysis.

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Key Segment 1: The “Ass-Intensifier” (00:05–12:07)

What Is It and Why Do We Use It?

• Listener Eric Scheuer noticed phrases like “grown ass man” and wondered about the odd choice of “ass” as an intensifier.
• Willa and guests rapidly riff through examples:
  • “Big ass knife,” “stupid ass face,” “nice ass shirt”
  • “There seems to be no adjective you can't make funnier or more forceful just by dropping an ass on it.” (Willa, 01:46)
• Eric: “It just seems like the word ass intensifies. It’s like, it’s a slightly more risque way of saying ‘very.’” (02:00)

Scholarly Dive

• Dr. Nicole Holliday (UC Berkeley linguist):
  • Confirms the term “ass intensifier” is used in linguistics; she also mentions “anal emphatic.” (03:51)
  • “An intensifier is any word or phrase that emphasizes another word. So, like, ‘she’s a grown ass woman’ means ‘she’s very grown.’” (04:16)

Origins & Spread

• Usage traced back to 1942 with U.S. Marines in WWII (“big-assed Marine”); spoken forms likely predate this. (05:15)
• Possible roots in African American English, possibly spread to wider American dialects via the military. (06:02)

Proliferation & Cultural Shifts

• Relaxation of social norms (less formality, more profanity) has made ass-intensifier usage more common. (06:51)
• Formal, Latinate adjectives (“significant-ass”) don’t work as well; the construction prefers short, informal words. (10:13)

Similar Phenomena in Other Languages & Expressions

• Other English intensifiers: “dead ass” (very, seriously), “butt-ass,” “butt-ugly.”
  • “I was thinking a lot about dead.” (09:10)
• Danish has equivalent (using “rov”); intensifier usage is a cross-linguistic feature. (10:49)

Language Change, Creativity, and Youth

• Children and teenagers reshape language, innovating creatively—even when older generations resist. (11:07)
• “One mandate that children and teenagers have is to change the language...and they’ll do it...in dramatic ways and in subtle ways.” (Nicole, 11:07)

Memorable Quote

• “Because we’re creative and it’s fun.” (Nicole, 04:55)

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Key Segment 2: Why Do Aliens Abduct Cows? (12:07–27:06)

Listener Question Origin

• Stacen Goldman tells the story of solving a video game puzzle by giving a cow to an alien—her son is baffled, but she “just knows” aliens abduct cows. (12:33)

Cultural Omnipresence

• Referenced examples:
  • South Park (aliens deem cows most intelligent)
  • Mars Attacks (Martians set cattle ablaze)
  • Got Milk? alien ads
  • Video games galore

Historical Roots

• Dr. Greg E. Gigian (Penn State, UFO historian):
  • Traces the trope to 1897: Kansas farmer Alexander Hamilton claimed an “airship” stole his cow—later exposed as part of a “Liars Club” contest. (15:06)
  • Despite being debunked, the story stuck and resurfaced in the mid-20th century as flying saucers gained pop-culture traction.
  • “Hamilton’s tall tale lived on for decades,” despite his confession. (17:26)

Modern Myth-Making: The Cattle Mutilation Wave

• 1960s–70s: Thousands of mutilated cattle found in Western states.
  • “Usually an ear, an eye, a tongue, sex organs, udders, rectums.” (18:53, Mike Goleman, historian)
  • Explanations: Scavengers, natural causes, rarely aliens.
  • Ranchers, suffering from economic hardship (“the wreck”), suspected the federal government—shots even fired at BLM helicopters. (21:03–22:17)

From Bureaucratic Blame to Alien Intrigue

• Linda Moulton Howe’s 1980 documentary “A Strange Harvest” connects mutilations to extraterrestrials, embedding the idea in UFO lore. (23:19)
  • Howe: “What...if the mutilations go from animals to human beings?” (23:33)
• Pop culture amplifies the trope: X-Files, merchandise (T-shirts, lamps, mugs), jokes.

Analysis: Why Does It Stick?

• The belief remains fairly fringe even among ufologists.
• Dr. Gigian:
  • “The likeliest explanation is because it’s kind of funny, this image of a cow being sucked up by a beam of light...It’s goofy and silly.” (26:38)
• For cattle owners, the myth has financial and emotional resonance.

Memorable Quotes

• “He said, just trust me. That alien wants a cow.” (Stacen, 12:57)
• “Despite his confession, Hamilton’s tall tale lived on for decades.” (Willa, 17:26)
• “The likeliest explanation is because it’s kind of funny...To see them in the sky is already kind of goofy and silly.” (Greg, 26:38)

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Key Segment 3: Why Drug Names Are So Bonkers (27:06–41:46)

Listener Question Origin

• Amy Goldfine: “Why are prescription drug names so bonkers? ...Looks like someone's cat just walked all over the keyboard.” (27:06)

The Art and Agony of Naming Drugs

• Laurel Sutton (co-founder, Catchword):
  • “Naming pharmaceuticals is a pain in the ass.” (28:39)
  • The process is exhaustive: legal checks, global databases, FDA and EU review, phone tests, unique spelling and sound requirements. (29:42)
  • “The return you get on the amount of work you put into it is sort of not worth it.” (Laurel, 29:42)

Brand vs. Generic Names

• Every drug has a “generic” name (assigned by medical bodies, carries a “stem” with medical info) & a “brand” name (for marketing, must be distinctive, hopefully alludes to drug’s benefits).
• Examples:
  • “Any name ending in ‘triptan’ will treat migraines.” (31:11)
  • “Lipitor” vs. “atorvastatin”
  • “Viagra” (sildenafil): Vibrant, energetic, masculine
  • “Lunesta”: Lulls to sleep, peaceful
  • Rogaine (in U.S.) vs. Regain (elsewhere)—FDA bans names that “overpromise” (34:01)

Creativity Battles Constraints

• “Sometimes there are drug names that actually kind of say what they do.”
  • Zostavax (shingles vaccine for Herpes Zoster)
  • Gardasil (“guards” against squamous intraepithelial lesions) (35:04)
• Name creation narrows as more words are taken—leads to increasingly odd combos:
  • “You gotta go for little used letters...the sequence ‘XELJ’ is very unusual...but it’s available, so it’s a good name.” (Laurel, 37:27)
  • Popular new weird names: “Ozempic” (weight loss drug): “Oz at the beginning is meant to connote...Land of Oz...opening things up.” (38:07)

Listener Favorites Analyzed

• Zavpret:
  • “Zav” = speed (sibilance in English); “pret” in French means “ready.” Ends with a strong ‘T’—impression: works fast, gets it done. (39:39)
• Skyrizi:
  • “Sky” evokes openness, clarity; “Riz”/“Rizi” adds energy and speed. “Lifts you up into the sky...has endless possibilities.” (40:24)

The Future: Are We Running Out of Names?

• Tightening trademark/digital requirements make name generation exponentially harder.
  • “I worry about this a lot...I don’t know where we’re going to end up.” (Laurel, 41:05)

Memorable Quotes

• “Naming pharmaceuticals is a pain in the ass.” (Laurel, 28:39)
• “It has gotten exponentially harder to come up with appropriate and available names since I started doing this.” (Laurel, 41:05)

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Notable Timestamps & Quotes

• Ass-Intensifier Defined (03:51, Nicole Holliday):
  “We actually do call it ass intensifier in the scholarly literature.”
• Ass as Emphasis (02:00, Eric Scheuer):
  “It just seems like the word ass intensifies. It’s like, it’s a slightly more risque way of saying ‘very.’”
• Cow Abductions—Origin Story (15:06, Greg E. Gigian):
  “This idea that aliens like to abduct cows seems to have started in 1897 with a farmer from Kansas...”
• Pop Culture's Cow-UFO Allure (26:38, Greg E. Gigian):
  “The likeliest explanation is because it’s kind of funny, this image of a cow being sucked up by a beam of light...”
• Drug Names: The Struggle is Real (28:39, Laurel Sutton):
  “Naming pharmaceuticals is a pain in the ass.”
• Ozempic: A Productive Name (38:07, Laurel Sutton):
  “People say Ozempic when they mean one of the other drugs...it’s become a word that has produced other words and phrases built on top of it.”

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Conclusion & Takeaways

• "Ass" as an intensifier is both formally studied and rooted in play, creativity, and informality, likely originating in African American English and popularized via the military.
• Aliens abducting cows persists as a humorous, widely-known pop culture reference, originating with a “Liars Club” prank and perpetuated by economic anxieties, conspiracy theory, media, and pure comic imagery.
• Weird pharmaceutical names result from stringent legal, safety, and market pressures squeezing naming possibilities to their strangest, least intuitive edges—though smart branding still manages occasional clarity and charm.

This episode wittily deconstructs the evolution, spread, and staying power of cultural ideas and language quirks, reminding listeners how creativity (and confusion) shape what we all find familiar.

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Transcript

[Willa Paskin]

It has been noted by stoner movies and people with too much time on their hands that if you say a word enough times in a row, you can make it strange. I'm not even talking about the obvious words like arboreal or bureaucracy or water, but even just like cat, cat, cat. Why is that our word for our most self possessed house pet? Sometimes a word doesn't need repetition or narcotics to get weird to you. In fact, in the aughts, a word behaving in a very specific way jumped out to Eric Scheuer, an animator in Portland, Oregon, just in the course of a regular conversation.

[Eric Scheuer]

I definitely remember the first time a friend of mine came to me and said like somebody was talking about her son being a grown ass man. And I've never heard that before.

[Willa Paskin]

Eric couldn't remember hearing or noticing someone drop ass into a phrase for emphasis before either.

[Eric Scheuer]

I'm pretty white, I'm pretty Caucasian, most of my friends are. And I know that slang. By the time that we're using it or me, it is old news by.

[Willa Paskin]

Decades elsewhere, old news or otherwise. He took a shine to it.

[Eric Scheuer]

Somehow to my ears, it made complete sense.

[Willa Paskin]

Immediately after that he couldn't stop hearing it.

[Eric Scheuer]

You know, he's a grown ass man. You're, you know, get your stupid ass face away from me or whatever.

[Nicole Holliday]

Hey, hey, hey, I'm a grown ass man.

[Willa Paskin]

Campbell's soup. It's just wet ass food. I think I wore this nice ass shirt for her today.

[Laurel Sutton]

You know, you got a big ass knife sticking out of you.

[Willa Paskin]

Big ass, nice ass, grown ass, dead ass, hard ass, badass, stupid ass, silly ass, goofy ass, loud ass. There seems to be no adjective you can't make funnier or more forceful just by dropping an ass on it.

[Eric Scheuer]

It just seems like the word ass intensifies. It's like, it's a slightly more risque way of saying very.

[Willa Paskin]

Eric has even come to think of this linguistic quirk by a special name, the ass intensifier. He's now spent years wondering about the ass intensifier and he's accumul a number of questions about it.

[Eric Scheuer]

I'm curious about how the word ask got in there and linguistically, functionally, what it's doing there. I'd like to know, like in English, like historically, what records do we have of it? And then I'd be curious about similar phenomena in other languages. Do other languages have similar things?

[Willa Paskin]

Luckily, he emailed exactly the right people to get him some answers. This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. We're very lucky to get a lot of fascinating questions from our listeners. And so, as we do from time to time, we're opening up our mailbag to try and answer some of them. In addition to looking at the creative ass use of, well, the word asks, we're going to make sense of the seemingly wild world of pharmaceutical names and probe the special relationship between cows and aliens. That's all today on Decoder Ring, thanks to you. So we're going to pick up with Eric's question about the origins of what he calls the ass intensifier, which turns out to be its proper ass name.

[Nicole Holliday]

We actually do call it ass intensifier in the scholarly literature.

[Willa Paskin]

Nicole Holliday is an acting linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

[Nicole Holliday]

There's another, like, wonderful scholar who calls it the anal emphatic, which, like, wow, chef's kiss.

[Willa Paskin]

Nicole explained to me that linguistically, an intensifier is any word or phrase that emphasizes another word.

[Nicole Holliday]

Something that can basically replace anything where you're trying to use, like, very or.

[Willa Paskin]

Extremely so, like, she's a grown ass woman. That's just saying, like, she's very grown.

[Nicole Holliday]

Yes, that is the intensifier.

[Willa Paskin]

And like, similarly, like, I woke up at ass o' clock in the morning. That's just like, I woke up very early in the morning.

[Nicole Holliday]

Right. But it also carries some association of informality, naughtiness, familiarity. Right. I could say I'm very tired, but I could also say I'm ass tired. And then it doesn't just mean, yes, I'm extremely exhausted. It means I'm extremely exhausted.

[Laurel Sutton]

Ha ha.

[Nicole Holliday]

Or we're informal or we're joking, or we're friends.

[Willa Paskin]

And why do we do this?

[Nicole Holliday]

Because we're creative and it's fun.

[Willa Paskin]

A researcher named Wilson J. Miller traced the usage of the ass intensifier back to 1942 and Marines serving in the Second World War. Somewhere in the South Pacific, a powerful task force of United States Marines begins offensive action to retake the strategic Solomon Islands.

[Nicole Holliday]

They had this abbreviation, B a M, bam for big asked Marine, and used it on women. Like women Marines at that time, big assed Marines. And so it's asked, and you can see how you get that as sort of an adjective. Big asked. But then it starts to get dropped, because that sound like a T or a D when it follows an S, like, gets dropped all the time.

[Willa Paskin]

Right.

[Nicole Holliday]

That final sound sort of disappears. So then you see a little bit later, the Marines also calling a plane a big ass bird. So then you get big ass.

[Willa Paskin]

These are the Oldest written examples we have of the ass intensifier, but it was almost surely used in spoken language earlier. And Nicole says it's a real possibility that it came out of one community in particular.

[Nicole Holliday]

It could be African American English that was introduced to white GIs during that time. It wouldn't be surprising. It's very widespread in African American English. But we don't exactly have recordings from pre1940s to know that for sure.

[Willa Paskin]

Whenever exactly it started after the war, it began to spread.

[Nicole Holliday]

The first time that you see it attested outside of this military usage is the Oxford English Dictionary has it in 1945, talking about a police with a nightstick, a big ass nightstick. And it sort of seems to flow out from there into the culture and expand in use for the next 80 years.

[Willa Paskin]

I mean, how many more times am I have to listen to a sad ass pity party? Shit, I can't afford this nice ass car. I swear, I don't know who is the worst between you and that lazy ass brother. Yours. Have we just been using it as much as we use it now for a long time, or do you think we use it more now?

[Nicole Holliday]

I think we use it more now. This is interesting because things like intensifiers are not supposed to be invented, right? They're supposed to be what we call a closed class. So we come up with new nouns every day. Who knew what an Uber was as a noun before 10 years ago, right? So nouns open class. Intensifiers are supposed to be closed class. We don't invent new things like very all the time, but when you get one that starts to function this way, it becomes extremely productive. So words like very are very, very high frequency. We say that word every day, right? So once you see that it can be used like this, it becomes sort of expansive. The other thing is this big ass thing has to occur in an informal register. So we're just less formal. You can see it like in clothes. Nobody's wearing stockings and suits to the office all the time, unless you're like on Wall street or something. So there's some arguments that profanity has become more socially acceptable, especially in the last like 20 years. And so as we've become more accepting of profanity, I think it just allows for this to be used in informal and humorous contexts more often.

[Willa Paskin]

I also just noticed in sort of like big ass marine, big ass bird, big ass nightstick, like a literalism almost in the early examples of it, where it's like an ass can be big, right? Like the Thing on our bodies.

[Nicole Holliday]

Yes.

[Willa Paskin]

Can an ass be crazy? It can't. I'm a miss her crazy ass.

[Laurel Sutton]

Yeah.

[Nicole Holliday]

So ass itself is a really interesting word. So its original meaning is donkey. And it's attested from the 11th century. So that is when we were speaking something like German. That's before the Norman conquest of 1066, when English got all these French words. So it was old, old word as far as English goes. And it was ass, like donkey, which we still use that way, but it's kind of antiquated. Then you start seeing it used as a pejorative in the 13th century. So, like, ass. Like that guy's an. Like an ass. Like a fool or a jerk or something. Right. So for 900 years we have this word as a noun, and then in the 40s, you get it with this kind of usage.

[Willa Paskin]

When did it start to be buts?

[Nicole Holliday]

It looks like ass for but is from the 17th century. So, yes, it's had that meaning since long before we got this big ass.

[Willa Paskin]

Are there other things that behave like this in English?

[Nicole Holliday]

Yes. I was thinking a lot about dead.

[Willa Paskin]

Yeah.

[Nicole Holliday]

So in New York City, you get dead ass.

[Mike Goleman]

Are you serious?

[Willa Paskin]

Dead ass.

[Nicole Holliday]

So, like, it means seriously. Yeah, I'm deadass. Or like, he was dead ass.

[Willa Paskin]

Right.

[Nicole Holliday]

That kind of thing. Right. And you get things like dead tired.

[Willa Paskin]

Yeah, yeah, dead tired. Like, it just never occurred to me until this moment that dead is working as an intensifier. Yeah.

[Nicole Holliday]

You can also be dead broke.

[Greg E. Gigian]

Right, Right.

[Willa Paskin]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Nicole Holliday]

And like, we do this with butt, Right? So like butt ass ugly. Butt, ass, butt, ass ugly. You could also be butt ugly. Yeah, yeah, right. Just like ugly ass or ass ugly. I guess the other thing is, a lot of the examples that we've been talking about are like, stupid, ugly, dumb. Like one and two syllable words. But there have been claims that ass can't attach to words that are longer than three syllables or that people kind of don't like it. You can't say, like, that was a significant ass claim.

[Willa Paskin]

Fantastic ass.

[Nicole Holliday]

Yeah, Fantastic ass argument. Like, maybe, but it doesn't sound as good as ugly ass.

[Willa Paskin]

It's like we just. Something about that sounds wrong to all of us.

[Nicole Holliday]

And the linguist Jeff Pullum says that. That that's actually because it has to be informal. And long words in English tend to come from Latin. All of our fancy words are Latin and they're longer. So that's why you shouldn't get something like articulate ass. Like, he's an articulate ass guy. Like, is it because it's long or is it because it's a fancy word? Like, we don't know.

[Willa Paskin]

Do other languages have things like this? Or do you?

[Nicole Holliday]

I mean. Yes. So I found a paper from 2021 by a Danish guy, Bengston, who says that Danish has ass intensifier.

[Laurel Sutton]

And.

[Nicole Holliday]

And it's rov, R, O, V, O with the, like, slash through it. So it's a vowel we don't have.

[Willa Paskin]

Does that word mean ass?

[Laurel Sutton]

Yes.

[Nicole Holliday]

And it does exactly the same thing.

[Willa Paskin]

That's amazing. It's crazy how much we all just know what everything means, even though we can't articulate it.

[Nicole Holliday]

Yeah. And so because we're all using language all the time, like, we are creative, we make mistakes, we're accidentally hilarious, right? The language is changing. One mandate that children and teenagers have is to change the language. Like, in every society that has ever existed, the children will change the language because they need it to work for them. And they'll do it sometimes in really dramatic ways and sometimes in really subtle ways. And there's this interaction with, like, what's happening in the society and identity and race and culture and gender and all this stuff. But that is why we get so frustrated when the old people complain about language change. It's just like, you did it too. And all of this tells us something about the cognitive ability of humans that is really awesome.

[Willa Paskin]

Right?

[Nicole Holliday]

Like one day submarines were like, hm. Literally, one dude probably was like, big ass marine. And everyone was like, that cooks like we like it this lap.

[Willa Paskin]

When we come back, some cow ass loving aliens. Our next listener question comes from Stacen Goldman in Stowe, Massachusetts. It occurred to her a few months ago when she was watching her son play a video game called Scribblenauts, and.

[Stacen Goldman]

He was very, very frustrated. On the screen was an alien that was telling him, give me what you want and I'll leave in peace. And he looked at me and he said, I don't know what the alien wants. And I looked at the screen and it was a little green man in a ufo. And I said, oh, he wants a cow.

[Willa Paskin]

Stacen's son was baffled.

[Stacen Goldman]

He did not understand why the alien would want a cow. And I said, just trust me. That alien wants a cow.

[Willa Paskin]

So he dutifully typed in the word cow. And then a cow appeared on screen.

[Stacen Goldman]

And the alien took the cow and flew off in peace. And my son was even more confused. He said, why did he want that? How did you know that he wanted that? And I couldn't tell him. I had no idea. But I knew as soon as I saw the alien in the UFO that aliens abduct cows. I have no idea where I got this notion. I don't know where I saw it the first time, but I know that I've seen it around. It's just in the culture. Aliens just abduct cows.

[Willa Paskin]

Stason's right. Aliens particular interest in cows is all over the culture. Moo, moo, moo, moo, moo. It's there in the first episode of south park when aliens determine that cows are the most intelligent beings on planet Earth. Moo, moo, moo, moo. What the hell are they talking about? It's in the opening scene of the movie Mars Attacks when the Martians set a herd of cattle on fire. In a classic Got Milk? Ad from the mid aughts, a couple of aliens are awed by the image of a cow on a dairy barn.

[Laurel Sutton]

Da iri, it is the supreme one.

[Willa Paskin]

Got milk. And yes, cows and aliens also co star in many, many video games. Which brings us to Stason's question.

[Stacen Goldman]

How do we all think this? Why do we all think this?

[Willa Paskin]

As ubiquitous as the idea of cow abducting ETs has become, it didn't originate in movies, TV games or even in the 20th century.

[Greg E. Gigian]

So this idea that aliens like to abduct cows seems to have started in the year 1897 with a farmer from Kansas by the name of Alexander Hamilton.

[Willa Paskin]

Greg E. Gigian is a historian at Penn State University and the author of after the Flying Saucers Came A Global history of the UFO phenomenon.

[Greg E. Gigian]

Alexander Hamilton gets awakened one night. It's about 10:30pm his tenant and his son are also there because they hear this kind of unrest among their cattle.

[Willa Paskin]

His cows are going crazy, making a racket. So he goes outside.

[Greg E. Gigian]

He says what he sees about 600ft in the sky is this massive, massive what he called airshell.

[Willa Paskin]

It's huge, 300ft long and mostly red. And there's a carriage on the underside made of glass so that he can see six alien beings inside. And then he notices something that makes it all even stranger.

[Greg E. Gigian]

There are wires or cables or something along those lines that has a hold of one of his heifers by the neck, lifting this heifer off of the ground. The ship then flies off with the heifer in tow.

[Willa Paskin]

The next day he gets a visit from a local farmer who lives around four miles away who says he's made a gruesome discovery.

[Greg E. Gigian]

I have found the hide, the legs and the head of your heifer. Everything else is Gone. And what's really, really strange is all of those remains were on my farm, but there were no footprints around it. And that's the story Alexander Hamilton told.

[Willa Paskin]

And Hamilton wasn't the only one to report seeing mysterious airships in the sky. For a couple of years in the late 1890s, people around the world were sharing stories of similar sightings. Alexander Hamilton's version caught on so quickly that it didn't seem to matter when he confessed just a month after his initial story ran in a local Kansas newspaper that he had made the whole thing up.

[Greg E. Gigian]

Alexander Hamilton belonged to a community of men called the Liars Club. And the Liars Club was a group of guys who would spend their free time trying to tell the most outlandish story. It was kind of a competitive thing, and so all of this seems have been part of that.

[Willa Paskin]

Despite his confession, Hamilton's tall tale lived on for decades. It was relatively obscure, even among scholars of the supernatural. But then came the atomic age, and with it, the golden era of the flying saucer. They looked something like a pie plate that was cut in half with a sort of a convex triangle in the rear. They appear to be hovering in midair with what I believe to be a spinning action. I believe that the flying saucers are objects from another planet.

[Greg E. Gigian]

In the mid-1960s, when flying saucers are a really, really big thing, some of the very famous really advocates and proponents of flying saucers start to repeat the story as if it is 100% the God's honest truth.

[Willa Paskin]

And then in the 1970s, this notion of aliens abducting cows zoomed into the mainstream, thanks to a phenomenon that at first didn't seem like it had to do with extraterrestrials at all, you start.

[Greg E. Gigian]

To hear these stories of cattle mutilations.

[Willa Paskin]

Thousands of cattle, horses, and other animals have been cut up in strange ways. Today, nearly 15,000 mutilation reports have been received across the country, but especially in the west and southwest. Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado. Ranchers reported coming across dead cows missing some unusual body parts, usually an ear.

[Mike Goleman]

An eye, the tongue, sex organs, udders, rectums.

[Willa Paskin]

It's been a very, very precise surgical type incision. The body, more often than not, has been drained of blood, though no blood has been found on the ground. No tracks of any kind, human or otherwise, led to or from the animals.

[Mike Goleman]

The fear was that they were being mutilated by someone or something.

[Willa Paskin]

Mike Goleman wrote about this wave of cattle mutilations While getting his PhD in history from Mississippi State.

[Mike Goleman]

Initially, when these ranchers are reporting what they're seeing. They're reporting it to the local authorities. And the sheriff is coming there and looks at this dead animal and says, wow, I've never seen anything like this before. Because they literally haven't. Then what starts to happen is reporters come out who really have never seen anything like this before. Ah, have you ever seen anything like this in your life?

[Willa Paskin]

I don't know. The story gets picked up by national news outlets like time magazine, newsweek, even.

[Mike Goleman]

Playboy, and it starts to kind of take a life of its own.

[Willa Paskin]

With all this attention came a flurry of investigations from local and state law enforcement, university researchers, and more. And they all came up empty.

[Mike Goleman]

No one could find any evidence that it was anything but natural scavenger activity and predation.

[Willa Paskin]

The idea of finding a dead cow with its eyes, tongue, genitals, and udders missing might seem strange to those of us who don't deal with cattle with any regularity. But those are actually the soft tissues that scavengers like flies, skunks, and vultures go for first. And what looked like the draining of the animal's blood also had a mundane explanation. The blood most likely pooled and coagulated out of sight. In other words, what was happening with the cattle was in reality, pretty ordinary.

[Mike Goleman]

Unfortunately, yes.

[Willa Paskin]

But for those cattle ranchers, ordinary wouldn't cut it. Every cow they found dead and mutilated was a huge financial hit. So they went looking for someone to blame. And at first, that was not aliens.

[Mike Goleman]

Most of them believed that the federal government had something to do with it.

[Willa Paskin]

Ranchers were already prime the government for their troubles. The peak of these reported cattle mutilations almost exactly overlapped with an economic period so catastrophic for the cattle industry, it became known as the wreck. These cattle are a liability to the men who own them. At today's prices, the cost of raising and feeding them is more than the animals bring on the wholesale market. And the wreck was largely blamed on the federal government. Once you put the government in your cattle business, you're in trouble. They just cannot regulate that business. It just is unbelievable how they can mess it up.

[Mike Goleman]

We start to see their frustrations with the federal government manifest and how they respond to these mutilations that are being reported. Oftentimes, what they reported seeing were helicopters that were hovering in the area either prior to or after a series of mutilations. Now, these helicopters, they probably are federal government helicopters, but they're part of the bureau of land management, who frequently would fly in these areas.

[Willa Paskin]

But many cattle ranchers became convinced that these helicopters had a more nefarious purpose.

[Mike Goleman]

There were several incidents where ranchers, when they would see a helicopter in the sky, they'd shoot at it.

[Willa Paskin]

Conspiracy thinking was also in the zeitgeist, not just for cattle ranchers. Americans were learning just how much they didn't know about the war in Vietnam and the JFK assassination and Watergate.

[Mike Goleman]

The institutions that Americans trusted were no longer being trusted. There was a lot of reasons to not take what was being said at face value.

[Willa Paskin]

So how did a conspiracy theory about the federal government turn into a conspiracy theory about aliens? Mike Goldman credits a Colorado TV reporter named Linda Moulton Howe. Who or what is killing and mutilating these animals? A Strange Harvest Linda Moulton Howe's hour long documentary was first broadcast in May 1980. Could it be cults? Predators? Helicopters? UFOs?

[Mike Goleman]

She had an agenda beyond just reporting about the mutilations themselves. She was involved in the UFO community and very quickly tied these mutilations to extraterrestrial activity.

[Willa Paskin]

If extraterrestrials are the ones mutilating animals, what do you think the implications are then for this planet? All of us involved have been concerned with the possibility of the mutilations going from animals to human beings. Understandably. The movie ends with a long, strange scene in which a woman under hypnosis describes having actually witnessed a cow being abducted and mutilated by aliens.

[Laurel Sutton]

I can see an animal squirming and trying to get free and it's like.

[Willa Paskin]

It'S being sucked up. Linda Moulton Howe won a regional Emmy award for A Strange Harvest. She wrote a book expanding on it, and she became a kind of celebrity in the UFO community.

[Greg E. Gigian]

She really is the key person who bangs this drum of the idea that cattle mutilation represent some kind of escalation of alien contact.

[Willa Paskin]

Again, historian Greg Egigian that the aliens.

[Greg E. Gigian]

Are invested in experimenting with trying to create human alien hybrids, and somehow the cattle are involved.

[Willa Paskin]

And this idea has been remarkably durable. Since the 1980s, cattle mutilations, as well as the more benign and less disgusting cattle abductions have shown up regularly in pop culture. Mulda why would ALIE alien beings travel.

[Laurel Sutton]

Light years to Earth in order to play doctor on cattle?

[Willa Paskin]

For the same reason we cut up frogs and monkeys. Cattle mutilations, possible homicide.

[Mike Goleman]

And here's the fun part. The perp, according to the rancher, is.

[Willa Paskin]

An alien life form. Another cow up another tree.

[Eric Scheuer]

This is, to my mind, some sort of extraterrestrial activity.

[Willa Paskin]

In New Mexico, you can find T shirts and vinyl stickers with an image that looks like the yellow road sign for a cattle crossing. And except above the black silhouette of a cow, there's a flying saucer. The National Museum of the Air Force sells an alien abduction cow T shirt. And there are socks, coffee mugs, toys, and even a table lamp shaped like a UFO beaming up a cow. Ironically, Greg says the belief in cattle abductions is pretty fringe, even among dedicated ufologists. So why is it so sticky? For the rest of us, it's true that believers like Linda Moulton Howe are still out there spreading the Gospel.

[Laurel Sutton]

It's now 2025 February, and nothing has changed.

[Willa Paskin]

The government of the United States has.

[Laurel Sutton]

Still not told people the truth.

[Willa Paskin]

And that every few years there's a new crop of stories about mysterious cattle deaths. Someone is killing cows. 20 so far. The latest just on Monday.

[Mike Goleman]

This ranch in Northeastern Utah lost 14 expensive animals in less than two years. Carved up with surgical precision.

[Eric Scheuer]

Their owner is out of rational explanations, and that has her looking to the sky.

[Willa Paskin]

But for those of us who fret neither about alien visitation nor the health of our herd, the appeal of the alien cow connection may be pretty straightforward.

[Greg E. Gigian]

The likeliest explanation is because it's kind of funny, this image of a cow being sucked up by a beam of light. Cows, you know, have this kind of nonplussed facial expression. They have. They're very large, they're very bulky. So to see them in the sky is already kind of goofy and silly.

[Willa Paskin]

Though maybe not so silly. If you happen to be a cow.

[Greg E. Gigian]

You better pray to the Lord when.

[Willa Paskin]

You see those flying saucers, it may be the coming of the judgment day. It's a sign. There's no doubt of the trouble acts about. So I say, my friends, you'd better start to pray. When we come back, something nearly as strange sounding as cow abductions. Zavzaprat. Our listener, Amy Goldfine lives in Marin County, California, and she called in to ask about something that's been bugging her every time she goes to the pharmacy. Why are prescription drug names so bonkers? I get migraines, and some of the new meds have names that look like someone's cat just walked all over the keyboard. You've got culypta, Viepti, Ubrelvi, and my favorite name, zabspret. Am I saying that right? Honestly, not sure. I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason behind these weird names, but I can't figure it out. Those migraine meds are just the tip of the iceberg. Pharmaceutical names in general have been getting Pretty esoteric. What you may need is Xgeva Discover Gem. Tessa Novage is simple. Cutenza is different. Tyrvaya it's not another drop.

[Laurel Sutton]

I will say at the start, naming pharmaceuticals is a pain in the ass.

[Willa Paskin]

Laurel Sutton is a professional namer, and it turns out, Amy's neighbor.

[Laurel Sutton]

I co founded Catchword, a naming firm here in the Bay Area of California, and I've been doing professional naming for more than 25 years.

[Willa Paskin]

And have you gotten to name any pharmaceuticals?

[Laurel Sutton]

Yes. People tend to think of naming sometimes as a Mad Men effort, where you're sitting around in a bar after work and you're writing stuff down on napkins as you're quaffing your beer. That is not how it works. It's people sitting at their desks, combing through thesauri and all sorts of reference books and online resources to just come up with different ways of finding a word, any word that's pronounceable and spellable. Well, sometimes pharmaceutical names aren't really spellable, but that's because of the availability part of it. It is so much work, and the return that you get on the amount of work you put into it is sort of not worth it. So while I've done it, I don't like doing it.

[Nicole Holliday]

Why not?

[Willa Paskin]

So tell me, why is it such a pain in the butt?

[Laurel Sutton]

When you're coming up with a name for anything, whether it's a product or a service or a company, you need to come up with names that are appropriate. Appropriate for the thing that you're naming, but also available. They have to be legally available as trademarks and sometimes also as domain names. So finding a name that is the intersection of those two things is very difficult for anything. When you start naming pharmaceuticals, they need to pass an additional level of scrutiny that's imposed by the FDA here in the United states and the EU's Medical Approval Board. And that is far more difficult because the names need to be distinct from each other. As you can imagine, if a prescription is written and interpreted incorrectly, you could kill someone by giving them the wrong drug. Part of the testing that they do is things like having people say drug names over the phone. So can you hear it clearly over the phone? Can you read it? If it's written in a doctor's terrible handwriting? So the name has to be unique enough that it will not be confused for anything else. And finding names that have not already been used that are also available as trademarks is asking an awful lot from a creative firm.

[Willa Paskin]

The names that Laurel's talking About the ones a drug company hires a naming firm to generate are called brand names. But every drug also has another name, its generic name.

[Laurel Sutton]

Those names are rarely seen by the public. Sometimes you know when drugs have been around long enough, like Tylenol, for example. The generic name for that is acetaminophen. And people know that now. But when Tylenol was first introduced, nobody knew that it was called acetaminophen. That came later as people learned a little bit more about it.

[Willa Paskin]

A generic name like acetaminophen, ibuprofen, or fluoxtine, the generic name for Prozac is assigned by a consortium of medical and pharmaceutical bodies following strict guidelines. And the generic name's most important quality is that unlike the brand name, it conveys concrete medical information. The part that does this is called the stem, which is usually the syllables at the end of the name. All drugs of the same class will have the same stem. So, for example, any name ending in triptan will treat migraines. Any drug ending in statin tries to lower cholesterol. Generic names also typically include a couple syllables in front of the stem. These prefixes are meant to make each drug sound very different. So there's simvastatin, lovastatin, fluvastatin, and atorvastatin, which you probably know by its brand name, Lipitor. I've been eating healthier, exercising more, and now I'm also taking Lipitor. All right, so there's the drug names, which are mostly, we don't know. Like, Viagra is Sildenafil, like, honestly, no one's ever heard that. Sluanesta, Eschyo, azo pisioni. I'm, like, saying it like it's Italian. I don't know if that's correct or not, but just like, really words we haven't heard. And then there's the brand names, which, theoretically, they should be more accessible, I assume. Like, what are you thinking about when you're trying to name a drug? Like, what's the ideal set of concerns?

[Laurel Sutton]

The ideal situation is when you have a drug and you are trying to name to its benefits. Lunest is a really good example, in my opinion, as a name. Or Lunesta is a great name for that drug because it implies something about what the drug does, which is that it puts you to sleep and it has a. You get a good night's rest. Right. And it's got the loon worse part in it, which is moon, and it has this beautiful soft ending. Lunesta. Right. It sounds peaceful. So It's a really good brand name in that regard.

[Willa Paskin]

There's a land of restful sleep. We can help you go there.

[Laurel Sutton]

On the wings of Lunesta, Viagra is sort of the opposite in tonality. Right. Viagra sounds vigorous. It sounds like Niagara Falls, which brings to mind all sorts of imagery which, you know, I'm not going to talk about that, but you can imagine it just sounds really tough and powerful and manly. And that's absolutely what they were going for.

[Willa Paskin]

This is the age of taking action.

[Laurel Sutton]

Viagra. Talk to your doctor. So both of those names are quite memorable and they imply something about the drug. One of the restrictions about drug names in the United States anyway is that a drug name cannot over promise. So you can't ever say that a drug cures a disease if in fact it doesn't cure a disease. So if you can't guarantee the result of it, you can't say that in the name. And one of the funnest, I will say, stories about drug naming in that regard is the drug Rogaine. In other parts of the world, it's called Regain. And they couldn't name it Regain in the United States because they could not guarantee that it would help you regain your hair. So they had to change one letter and they made it Rogaine instead.

[Willa Paskin]

But even if you're not calling it Regain as an English speaker, that association is sort of there in the way that it is for Lunesta or Viagra. So it's kind of like doing the same thing. It's just not as explicit.

[Laurel Sutton]

Right. You just can't be explicit about it is incredible. But sometimes there are drug names that actually kind of say what they do. And I can give you a few examples.

[Willa Paskin]

Yeah, yeah, please.

[Laurel Sutton]

One of the names that we came up with long, long ago was for Merck, and that was the name for the first shingles vaccine, which they don't do anymore because Shingrix is the new one. But the name that we came up with was Zostavax, which is a vaccine for Herpes Zoster. Zostavax. Pretty obvious. It's good. Like says what it does on the tin. And I like that name. Gardasil, another name. So the guard part is like. It guards. And Sil is the medical name for that type of infection. Right. It's squamous intraepithelial lesions. So it guards against Sil. Gardasil.

[Willa Paskin]

Gardasil.

[Laurel Sutton]

GardasIL, Gardasil, Gardasil.

[Willa Paskin]

With Gardasil, you could be one less.

[Laurel Sutton]

That's a great Name, you know, like, could not be more obvious. And they managed to get it, and it was available and the FDA approved it. That's fantastic. What a success story.

[Willa Paskin]

How does it actually work between a brand and the FDA when they're figuring out if something can be a brand name?

[Laurel Sutton]

It's a collaborative process from the drug company and the fda. So typically, in a naming effort to name a pharmaceutical, thousands and thousands of names are developed. And then the people at the company, like at Pfizer, for example, will go through those thousands and whittle it down to a couple hundred. And then the legal screenings start, and then they will send names to the fda, one by one, their favorite names, and the FDA will either say yes or no. And if they say no, then they got to go back and submit another name. And that process can go on for months and years. Sometimes the Runway for pharmaceutical naming is years. It can be eight years between when you develop a name and when the drug actually launches, because often the drug is still in development and testing while you're doing the naming for it.

[Willa Paskin]

There's sort of these names that I think sort of sound and look like real words, you know, Viagra, Lunesta, Wellbutrin, an antidepressant that has the name. Well, right in there. And then there is lately. Not lately. I mean, for years something that's happened where you have these drug names that look like Scrabble words.

[Laurel Sutton]

Yes.

[Willa Paskin]

Like. Like there's. There's no vowels, Like Viepti, Zaypre. It's gotten very elaborate and sort of strange. Like, do you think that they have gotten stranger names?

[Laurel Sutton]

Oh, definitely. Yeah. Just because of the availability thing, because you gotta go for little used letters. You know, English doesn't use the letter X very much. It didn't used to anyway, and it does now. There's that one drug that's called Xeljans. Right. The sequence of X, E, L, J is very unusual. Like, that does not occur in any English word and probably in very few words in any language. But it's available. So therefore it a good name, even if you got to teach people how to pronounce it, does it?

[Willa Paskin]

I mean, it sort of feels like the good names have been taken.

[Laurel Sutton]

Well, you know, good. What does good mean? Right. Let's take a new name that's on the market which is very popular right now. Ozempic. Is that a good name? I don't know. It's all over the place. People say it all the time. It's become almost the generic name for weight loss Drugs. People will just say ozempic when they mean one of the other drugs, like wegovy. But it's out there. People know it. That might qualify as a good name. It's pronounceable. I think the Oz at the beginning is definitely meant to connote a little bit of Oz, like Land of Oz. You're going into this new place and everybody thinks of the movie where you go from black and white to color. Like it's sort of opening things up in this very beautiful way. But then the name itself has become what we would call productive in that other phrases have been coined off of it. So people will say ozempic face. Right? And there are terms like faux as a name for drugs that aren't ozempic but are trying to mimic it. So it's become a word that has produced other words and phrases built on top of it. And that's pretty successful for a brand name.

[Willa Paskin]

Can I. So I actually realized we got some specific. Like, some listeners specifically wrote in. Can I just ask you about them? Okay, so, so zavpret. Like, what does that make you hear? Like, what do you hear? Zavprat. Like, what are you getting? Anything. What comes through.

[Laurel Sutton]

Oh, I mean. Okay, so it starts with a zav. Makes it sound a little fast. So in English, the S and Z, the sibilance, convey speed. It's just the way English works. The word pret in French means ready, so I don't know if that's what they were trying to go for. Sound wise, it ends with a T, so it's a plosive. That sounds kind of strong. So to me, just from the sound of it, it's like, works fast, gets it done. Sounds kind of strong.

[Greg E. Gigian]

Yeah.

[Laurel Sutton]

I don't know where the name came from, but that would be my impression.

[Willa Paskin]

One of my favorites is Skyrizi. I have moderate to severe plaque psoriasis. Now there's Skyrizi.

[Laurel Sutton]

Things are getting clearer.

[Nicole Holliday]

Yeah, I feel free.

[Laurel Sutton]

Oh, that's a great name. I love that name.

[Nicole Holliday]

Why?

[Laurel Sutton]

Because the sky part is amazing that they were actually able to incorporate that. And, you know, for us in the western world, sky, you know, blue sky opens things up, makes you feel like it's a beautiful day. And then it's got Riz in it, which I'm not sure if they were trying to do Riz, but it's there. And then again, it has those S's and Z sounds. So it sounds like it does something really fast, like it lifts you up into the sky. You know, it has endless possibilities to it. It's a, it's a really good drug name.

[Willa Paskin]

Do you think that there's any danger in it just being, like, too hard to name things and so the names just suck?

[Laurel Sutton]

Yeah. You know, I worry about this a lot. Having done this for so long. I don't, I don't know where we're headed. I don't know if we're going to run out of names. I don't think we will. But it has gotten exponentially harder to come up with appropriate and available names since I started doing this.

[Stacen Goldman]

This.

[Laurel Sutton]

It really, really has the, the addition of requirements, like, you know, we need to have the exact dot com. Well, they're all registered. So it is getting harder and I don't know where we're going to end up.

[Willa Paskin]

This is Decoder. Thank you to everyone who sent us questions. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can please email [e-mail] you can also call us at 347-460-7281. We love to hear any and all of your ideas for the show. If you aren't already a Slate plus member, you can subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try Free at the top of the Decoder Ring show page or visit slate.comdecoder/ to get access. Wherever you listen, Slate+ members get access to our bonus episodes and to hear our show and every other Slate podcast without any ads. And there are so many great Slate podcasts that also take listener questions like Care and feeding. Our show for parenting advice, which recently devoted an episode to a listener. Listeners concern about screen time. Like, for example, does a podcast count as screen time? Will we rot your children's brains? You'll have to listen to Care and Feeding to find out. Don't forget, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try free or visit slate.comdecoderplus to sign up. We'd like to thank Hannah Pullman and Marilyn Ferdinand, who also wrote in asking about pharmaceutical manners. I'm Willa Paskin. Dakota Ring is produced by me, Max Friedman and Katie Shepard. Evan Chung is our supervising producer. Merrick Jacob is senior technical director. We'll see you in two weeks. Picture this. Me, Reese Witherspoon in London ordering fish and chips so often they might start wrapping me in paper. I'm traveling with my Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card, so I earn rewards wherever I book. Travel five times points with hotels, four times with airlines, three times on restaurants and other travel and one point on other purchases. Imagine getting rewarded for eating a toast. Toad in the hole. Wait, what is a toad in a hole?

[Greg E. Gigian]

Visit Wells Fargo.com autographjourney Terms apply.