The New 'Mansplaining' Is Here -- Behold The 'Hepeat'

There is finally a word for men taking women’s ideas and passing them off as their own

If you are a woman, you’ve likely at some point in your life said something or come up with an idea which was initially ignored until it was repeated back by a man — at which point everyone trips over themselves thanking him for coming up with such an amazing concept.

Well ladies, now there’s a word for it: hepeated.

Nicole Gugliucci, an astronomer and professor, took to Twitter on Friday to explain the new term. “My friends coined a word: hepeated,” Gugliucci tweeted. “For when a woman suggests an idea and it’s ignored, but then a guy says same thing and everyone loves it.”

Hepeating, which spellcheck (who is obviously a man) keeps trying to change to repeating, differs from mansplaining in that a man takes something a woman says and immediately regurgitates it back as if he thought of it himself. Mansplaining, when a man explains something to a woman because we clearly are too dim to understand it ourselves, can be more subtle but equally infuriating.

Gugliucci told HuffPost the word was coined during a group chat with some of her girlfriends (as is every other brilliant idea) who work across multiple industries. “More than once we’ve all run into issues, at work mostly, when we have an idea that doesn’t get any traction until a man says it,” she said.

It’s true; I’ve worked in male dominated environments most of my career and am not easily offended. In fact, one of my old managers used to rearrange his balls throughout most of our meetings. One time, he even used a quarter. I never batted an eye (I actually felt bad for the quarter). But taking a woman’s thought or idea and claiming it as your own is a special kind of maddening, ranking a close second to hearing “OMG, you are so lucky your husband helps with the kids.” It seems others on Twitter agree:

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/911453572646060034https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/911349077111078919

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/912113187851427840

Hepeated is gaining momentum and has already being added to the Urban Dictionary which means we can order it on a mug. At least we can have our coffee while a man steals our ideas, so that’s cool.