Observers were divided this week about whether the practice of milkshaking figures such as Nigel Farage and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson) added to the gaiety of the nation or degraded politics somehow more than those people already have done themselves. Others, with their minds on higher things, were split as to whether we should really accept that “milkshake” can now be a verb.
The answer to that, of course, is that “drink” was a noun before some bright spark decided to use it as a verb, and you’re not complaining about that now. What is potentially more disturbing – at least in the context of political protest – is milkshake’s history of sexiness. The singer Kelis’s milkshake famously brings all the boys to the yard, and it’s better than yours. There is also a “Milkshake Duck”, which is anything the internet enjoys for five minutes before realising it has unacceptable opinions or history.
“Milk shakes” themselves are attested since 1886, but now they are tools of dairy-based fash-baiting it remains to decide how the newly minted verb should be conjugated. Perhaps we need two different past-tense forms: he milkshaked Farage; Farage was milkshaken.
