Tyler on Labubus: Hype or Gripe

There’s a word floating around my head this morning as I sip coffee and stare out across the harbor. Labubus. Don’t ask me where it came from. Could’ve been a half forgotten dream, could’ve been something a man said after three bourbons last night at the club. But the word stuck with me, rolling around my mind like a golf ball on fast greens.

Labubus feels like a Charleston word, even if it’s not real. It sounds like something you’d whisper over oysters at a long lunch on King Street. It sounds like an old carriage horse clopping down Broad Street on a Sunday, or maybe a forgotten Latin motto etched into the bricks of an SEC stadium.

If I’m honest, labubus is whatever you want it to be. For me it’s the rhythm of the weekend. Golf in the morning, bourbon in the afternoon, football by night. That flow, that cadence, that sense that you’ve cracked the code of Southern living. That’s labubus.

Football fans know the feeling. That electricity in the air when an SEC Saturday looms. The pageantry, the madness, the certainty that heartbreak is around the corner but joy might be too. That’s labubus, distilled down to four syllables and lived out in real time.

Maybe labubus is nonsense. Maybe it’s just a hangover word stuck in my head from last night’s conversations. But here’s what I know. If you’re in Charleston, if you’ve got a glass in your hand, friends by your side, and a game about to kick off on the screen, then you’re living labubus whether you can define it or not.