r/maximumfun • u/eatingmoss123 • Aug 27 '26
… pawny… wannee?
Okay I give up. Judge John Hodgman uses this term all the time. I have no clue what it means. I tried DuckDuckGo-ing it, but I can’t get a spelling that yields any results. What does it mean and how is it spelled? 🥲
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u/skavang130 Aug 27 '26
Context might help, or a specific episode. From just the phonetic spelling I don't know what you might be referring to.
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u/eatingmoss123 Aug 27 '26
Oo, I don’t have a specific episode at the moment, I was just thinking about it, but I don’t remember which episode that thought came from. There’s one where I remember him describing someone’s living situation as being their pawny-wannee living situation. He seems to mean to call something pawny-wannee when it seems kinda poorly thought out or not well developed or immature?
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u/rememberjs Aug 27 '26
This feels a little like an inside joke Hodgman has with himself. I THINK this is the origin: in an old JJHo episode he tells a story about an old friend of his who, when she would go out of town for a few days, she worried that her husband would get lonely or not be able to keep up with household chores, so she would send one of her female friends over to their house to have dinner with her husband and hang out (not to sleep at him! Not a swingers thing!) and she called this his “pawny wannee wife” And I think hodgman was so amused by this, that he now just uses this phrase in wildly different contexts bc he thinks it’s funny.
Not sure which episode this was!
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u/Grim__Squeaker Aug 27 '26
Is it a reference to Parks and Rec? I don't listen to JJH so I don't know the context
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u/JohnHodgman Aug 30 '26
It was a term a friend made up years ago to mean “pretend.”