No offense to the Frugal Dad and others like him, I just hate the word. Say it out loud, “FRUGAL.” Words that contain the letters ‘F’ and ‘R’ next to each other are linguistically difficulty to say. This is because you essentially must exhale to say it. That’s not fun. Then there is the “ugal” part. Unless you are Google, anything sounding like “ugal” is simply not fun. The point I’m trying to make is that the word is ugly.
So frugal and The Weakonomist are not off to a good start, and we haven’t even talked about what it means. Wiktionary has the best definition I found :
Avoiding unnecessary expenditure either of money or of anything else which is to be used or consumed; avoiding waste
That is a fantastic definition and describe the ethos of the “frugal lifestyle” many personal finance bloggers and readers try to emulate. But like any micro-culture in the United States, the term is blown out of proportion and the originators are branded as extremists.
Don’t think so? What do you think of when I say “Hippie?” a Pot-smoking, long-haired, Grateful Dead worshiping, dead-beat, tree hugging environmentalist, flower child with odd political views and probably says “man” a lot. The guy below, in essence. The original hippies were just a group of beatniks from San-Francisco that opposed materialism. There was no political agenda, they wore shoes, and pot wasn’t a religious experience.
Like any movement, frugality is slowly taking on a more extremist definition. It’s moved from a collection of ways to save money, to a lifestyle of minimalism. Nowadays I picture a frugal person as splitting the time between reading frugal blogs and making their own cement to re-do the driveway. There is a line of obsession that is crossed where a person ceases to be frugal, and becomes a franatic (hey a new word!). They take the “frugal” brand with them.
So now those of us that desire to be frugal, risk being classified as the weird frugal-hippies. Not so bad you say? How would you feel if someone called you a hippie simply because you bought a Prius and don’t drink bottled water.
Now granted in the grand scheme of things this is all un-important. But the human mind organizes thoughts by classification. This leads us astray and the end result is prejudice. “Oh there’s no point in inviting him out to lunch, he’s doing some ‘frugal’ thing.” In the business world, you ALWAYS want to be invited to lunch.
I could easily ignore all these thoughts going on in my head (the voices too) but it’s better to just ignore the word “frugal”. Because it plays games with my mind and leads to the extremist prejudice, and because it wastes my time having to think about it, I’m left to conclude that I hate the word “frugal.”
Instead, I’m cheap. I’ll tell you why cheap is better tomorrow.
 By The Weakonomist |
The Weakonomist is the founder of Weakonomics. Clicking the picture of the puppy will tell you more about him. If you like what you're reading consider subscribing to the blog, following him on Twitter, and checking out the related posts below. Please consider a donation if you really enjoy Weakonomics. |
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Said,
Funny that you mentioned the lunch thing. I pack a lunch every day because it’s cheaper, healthier and convenient. While my co-workers don’t use the word frugal or cheap to describe me, they do avoid asking me to lunch. I feel a bit alienated.
Maybe it’s just my worn out tie die shirt and hemp necklace that I wear every day. I kid, I kid!
Stupidly Yours,
Matt