Category: Wrestling Linguistics

July 11, 2022 /

Sometimes strangers roll up and ask if they can write something for the Spectacle of Excess. I always say yes, but mostly they don’t deliver. No shade for them, by the way! It’s quite challenging to write something that clicks in the niche of the old Spectacle here. Now, often these submissions need revisions and edits. The English teacher in me says this one could use some tidying and tightening, but the unhinged mystic in…

October 18, 2016 /

If you follow this blog, you know I’ve been making a lazy, extremely unscientific study of the word “machka”, a seemingly humble Bulgarian word that has taken on a heightened significance as Rusev’s rallying cry and chief buzzword. My post a few months ago called On the Progress of Machka and Its Relevance in Wrestling Theory laid out a hodge-podge of graphs and whatnot to show what happened to traffic on this site’s posts about…

May 28, 2016 /

The image is a sign I made for Rusev when I went to a Smackdown in Phoenix last October. Sadly I forgot it in the trunk of my rental car, but at least I took a picture. It has been a wild month here at The Spectacle of Excess. I started this blog two years ago just so I could have a space to shoot my mouth off into the void about wrestling and Shakespeare and Roland Barthes and…