Fritinancy

Words of the Year 2015: Fritinancy Edition

The WOTY party has begun, and I’m arriving fashionably (or maybe just breathlessly) late. Back in early November, Allan Metcalf nominated basic for the honor; a couple of weeks later Dennis Baron, aka Dr. Grammar, anointed singular they and Oxford Dictionaries selected an emoji, “Face with Tears of Joy.” Merriam-Webster, which chooses its WOTY based on volume of online lookups, selected -ism. The spoofy Emmett Lee Dickinson Museum (named after “Emily’s third cousin, twice removed – at her request”) has been posting one WOTY candidate every day in December, along with runners-up. (I confess I’d never heard of Dick Poop, but I like it.) And over at the Visual Thesaurus (where I’m a contributing writer), Ben Zimmer has nominated a couple dozen notable words that surfaced this year in science, business, news, and pop culture.

My turn now. To compile my Words of the Year list, I followed the American Dialect Society's criteria for selection:

• demonstrably new or newly popular in 2015
• widely and/or prominently used in 2015
• indicative or reflective of the popular discourse
• not a peeve or a complaint about overuse or misuse.

Word of the year: Refugee

Most useful: Mx.

Most likely to succeed: Ghosting

Least likely to succeed: Left shark

Euphemism of the year: Netflix and chill

Most creative: Shipping

Most outrageous: Measles party, schlonged (tie – it was an outrageous year!)

Most unnecessary: Microaggression

Most productive: -shaming

Read on for the full WOTY list – 20 words in all – and brief definitions. Words previously featured on this blog are linked to the relevant posts. And follow the American Dialect Society for news of its WOTY vote on January 8.

Word of the Week: Janopause

Janopause: “An annual challenge to abstain from drinking during the month of January.” Source: Eatymology: The Dictionary of Modern Gastronomy, by Josh Friedland, published in 2015 by Sourcebooks.

The Airing of Grievances

Today is Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us made famous and beloved by “Seinfeld.” This year, a Florida man named Chad Stevens designed a rainbow-hued Festivus pole that he hopes to display –according to a story in Slate – “in Republican-dominated states—Arkansas, Oklahoma, Florida, Georgia, Michigan—as a protest against what he views as their support for laws respecting an establishment of religion.” Three cheers for Chad! 

The Festivus tradition closest to my own heart is, of course, the Airing of Grievances. This is the seventh year of my public kvetchings about preventable errors committed in the name of commerce and journalism. Read ’em and weep.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Festivus mug from Zazzle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Festivus mug from Zazzle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Festivus mug from Zazzle.

 

On the Visual Thesaurus: Brand Names of the Year

My new column for the Visual Thesaurus is a year-end list of the most interesting and significant brand names of 2015 – not necessarily the coolest or the richest, but the newsiest and most onomastically compelling ... in my estimation, anyway.

Access is restricted to subscribers, UPDATE: No longer paywalled! (But buy a subscription anyway.) 

Here’s an appetizer:

Corinthian Colleges. The bankruptcy filing of Corinthian Colleges, in April, marked the largest shutdown of a for-profit college in U.S. history, and it called into question the practices of for-profit higher education generally. Sixteen thousand students were “displaced,” as official reports put it. (One hundred of the students petitioned the federal government to forgive their student debt.) Corinthian — an adjective meaning “of Corinth,” a city of fabled wealth in ancient Greece – has had many figurative meanings in English since the 16th century, including “elegantly or elaborately ornate” and, as a noun, “a luxury-loving person.” Corinthian columns are heavily decorated with acanthus leaves; in Christianity, Corinthians is the name of two chapters of the New Testament. (And currants derive their name from “raisins of Corinth.”) Corinthian leather was coined in 1974 by a copywriter at the advertising agency responsible for marketing Chrysler luxury vehicles; most of the leather came from a factory in much more prosaic Newark, New Jersey.

Read the rest of my Brand Names of the Year for 2015.

Previously: Notable brands of 2014 (and scroll down for links to past years’ lists).

Word of the Week: Birthmas

Birthmas: A birthday that falls on or near Christmas (sometimes expanded to the entire month of December). A portmanteau of birthday and Christmas, without the religious overtones of -mas (a shortening of mass, the eucharistic service).

December Linkfest

Into the final weeks of 2015 with one final link roundup!

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Lucy Kellaway, who writes about language and writing for the Financial Times, has created Guffipedia, “a repository for the worst jargon I’ve seen over the years.” All the devils are here: onboard more resource, flex-pon-sive, diverse hairdos, etc. ad nauseam. “The point of Guffipedia,” writes Kellaway, “is not just for you to admire the extent of my guff collection, but to help me curate it going forward, as they say in Guffish.” Good point of entry: the many Guffish euphemisms for you’re fired. (Hat tip: Molly Walker.)

’Tis Away, ’Tis Away, ’Tis Away All!

Like snowflakes, the ’tis the season headlines at first seem pretty, harmless, and unique.

And then the flurry turns into a sodden blizzard.

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Word of the Week: Hot Take

Hot take: Journalism term used derisively to describe a provocative or controversial commentary, hastily written with little research, on an otherwise pedestrian story.

Names of the Year 2015

The American Name Society is accepting nominations for Names of the Year, with the winners to be announced at the society’s annual meeting in Washington, DC, on January 8, 2016. Anyone can play; submit your nominations before January 5.

Here are my own nominations in the categories established by ANS – names “that best illustrate, through their creation and/or use during the past 12 months, important trends in the culture of the United States and Canada.” My top picks are *starred.

To Name a Hawk

Helen Macdonald’s extraordinary memoir, H Is for Hawk, is on nearly every best-books-of-2015 list, and for good reason. I’m not generally a memoir fan myself, but I picked up the audiobook at my local library and have been listening to it, enthralled, for the last week. The audio version is read by Macdonald herself; most authors aren’t very good audiobook narrators, but Macdonald is a brilliant exception: her reading is rich, supple, expressive, and perfectly paced, and she makes tiny but effective modulations from her native British accent to portray the characters in the book.