Word of the Week: Peaknik

Peaknik: A person who believes that the world's oil reserves will soon peak and that subsequent shortages will devastate civilization. (Word Spy.)

Although peaknik originated with the concept of peak oil, its meaning has lately become more inclusive. In "The Dystopians," published in the Jan. 26, 2009, issue of the New Yorker (registration required), Ben McGrath provides a short list of peaknik theories:

The Malthusian movement has expanded with time into a kind of peaknik diaspora. Peak oil and peak carbon (i.e., global warning) are the heavies, with the most obviously compelling claims on our attention, and the greatest number of advocates; their relative standings swing in rough accordance with the price of gas and the latest hurricane news. Smaller contenders like peak fish and peak dirt have their devotees as well, and are in some ways more pleasing to contemplate, because they are based on the idea that the path to destruction begins not in the Earth's atmosphere or crust but at the surface, with salmon and topsoil mites. The bailouts in the wake of the subprime defaults, however, have arguably thrust a new concern to the front: peak dollars, or the point at which the system breaks down through the simple printing of paper money. (A corollary, peak debt, was coined in 2006 by a former Cisco employee named Jaswant Jain, who calls himself the Prophet of Doom and Gloom, and who first observed the deleterious effects of unrestrained borrowing an a eight-year-old in a village near the city of Jodhpur, where debt-ridden Brahmins appeared worse off than solvent untouchables.)

Peaknik's most obvious antecedent is peacenik, a semi-contemptuous term for a pacifist that dates back to the 1960s or earlier. The -nik suffix comes from a Russian word part meaning "to pertain to or be involved in"; it was familiar to non-Russian speakers from Sputnik, the Soviet satellite launched in October 1957.  (And to speakers of Yiddish and Yinglish from nudnik, "a pest," and nogoodnik, "a worthless person.") Six months after Sputnik ushered in the era of space exploration, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen coined beatnik to describe a member of the Beat generation.

Mark Liberman, writing in Language Log last October, discussed the linguistic construct "Peak X", taking as his jumping-off point the recent coinage "peak wingnut."

According to Word Spy, in the early 1990s a "Peaknik" was a fan of the David Lynch television series "Twin Peaks."

UPDATE for Bay Area readers: Peaknik Dmitry Orlov, who features prominently in Ben McGrath's New Yorker article, will be speaking at San Francisco's Fort Mason Friday, Feb. 13, at 7:30 p.m. The talk is sponsored by the Long Now Foundation; admission is free, but events tend to sell out. To guarantee a seat, buy a $10 ticket.

Comments

[JD (The Engine Room)]

As I recall, 'Sputnik' means in Russian a travelling companion, or a friend made on a journey. A nice word.