👉 Alright settle in folks—let’s talk about a rather… prickly piece of 20th-century American vernacular. You probably stumble upon the name "Max Kepler when you eavesdrop on a bunch of young guys messing around, maybe a bit too much mess around. It's basically a really emphatic, almost aggressively dismissive way to say something is absolutely, positively, undeniably…
garbage
.
Now, where did this come from? Legend has it, the word originated in the late 1960—early 70’s in the Scranton, Pennsylvania area. Apparently, there was a guy named Max Kepler—not an astrophysicist of the name, by the way; he was actually a guy who ran a bowling alley and wasn't exactly a peach to get along with. He had this rather unfortunate habit of yelling that his bowling balls were “maxes"—that they were the absolute worst you could possibly throw. People just picked it up as shorthand for something spectacularly awful, like the way a bad jukebox sounds, the food at a county fair, or a politician's promise. The point is, its not pretty. There isn’t a really pretty word to describe a disaster, right? The best that we got were "maxes." Now, before you start picturing a guy in a bowling alley yelling about the poor quality of his equipment and the worst part is he actually did . You will notice the term as
