Fritinancy

Names of the year 2017

On January 5, at its annual meeting in Salt Lake City, the American Name Society will select its names of the year for 2017. Names of the year are those “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.” I won’t be attending this year, but I’ve made my own list and checked it at least twice. Feel like playing? I invite you to submit your own nominations in the four official categories.

December linkfest

The last linkfest of 2017! Let’s exorcise this miserable year with some amusing and edumacational links. And have yourselves a merry little Festivus.

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Drew Magary is back with the 2017 edition of his Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma catalog: “More than any reindeer parable or silly children’s rhyme, it is THIS catalog and its splendidly useless items wherein you and I can discover the TRUE meaning of Christmas, which is that it delays the pain and horrors of this shit world at least until after New Year’s.”

“You listen to me, Williams-Sonoma: There will NEVER be a fondueassaince. Ever.”

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Word of the week: Prance

“One well-chosen verb” gave Doug Jones, the victorious Democrat in last week’s contest for a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, the rhetorical advantage over his opponent “Judge” Roy Moore*, writes David Litt in The Daily Beast. At a campaign event a week before the election, Jones

reminded voters of the time Moore had pulled out a pistol at one of his events. “I’m a supporter of the Second Amendment,” Jones declared. “When you see me with a gun, folks, I’ll be climbing in and out of a deer stand or a turkey blind, not prancing around on a stage in a cowboy suit.”

“Judge” Roy Moore ostentatiously prancing to the voting booth on his horse Sassy, who looks skeptical and a little peeved.

Words of the year 2017: Fritinancy edition

With December half gone, we’re already deep into Word of the Year season. Dictionary.com has chosen “complicit”; Merriam-Webster chose “feminism”; Collins Dictionary offered “fake news.” Oxford University Press selected “Trump” as its Children’s Word of the Year for 2017, while Oxford Dictionaries picked youthquake, which last was popular in the 1960s, although for different reasons. (The word was coined in 1965 by Vogue editor Diana Vreeland.) Cambridge Dictionary picked “populism.” On NPR’s “Fresh Air,” Geoff Nunberg made the case for “tribal” (although on Twitter, he made another suggestion); on Twitter, John Kelly nominated “bot,” and on the Oxford Dictionaries blog he rounded up an assortment of WOTYs, including, from Switzerland, harcèlement, or “harassment.” And the pseudonymous Emmet Lee Dickinson has been counting down December with a daily WOTY.

To appropriate a phrase: me too. As in the past, my choices for 2017 follow the guidelines of the American Dialect Society, which will choose its own WOTYs on January 5, 2018, at its annual meeting in Salt Lake City. (If you happen to be in the vicinity, the vote is open to the public. Go!) Nominated words don’t have to be brand new, but they do need to “show widespread usage by a large number of people in a variety of contexts and situations, and which reflect important events, people, places, ideas, or preoccupations of English-speakers in North America in 2017.” They don’t have to be single words, by the way: any “lexical item” qualifies, including hashtags and short phrases.

My WOTY, however, is a single word: reckoning, an old word given new relevance and significance by current events. Details below.

Here’s my full list of notable words of the year, in alphabetical order. Some links go to my original Word of the Week posts.

Yes, it's the season. We get it.

Dear copywriters, editors, and reporters: Do you really think you’re being clever with your “’Tis the season” line? Trust us: you are not. I refer you to that wise man John McIntyre, of the Baltimore Sun, reminding us to beware holiday clichés:

“’Tis the season”: Not in copy, not in headlines, not at all. Never, never, never, never, never. You cannot make this fresh. Do not attempt it.

And yet, and yet. So much ’tis, so little seasoning.

The evidence:

 

A mailing from West Elm that I received October 5, when ’twasn’t the season for much of anything.

 

On the Visual Thesaurus: Brand names of the year 2017

It’s my yearly roundup of brand names that made headlines and were linguistically interesting, including a few I’ve written about here: Velar, Keurig, Oath. Access is restricted to subscribers for three months (give yourself a gift!); here’s an excerpt.

Bonobos. Founded in 2007 as an e-commerce site, the menswear company Bonobos grew into the largest U.S. clothing brand built on the web. This year, it was bought by Walmart for $310 million in cash, an acquisition that was called more significant in terms of retail disruption than the Amazon–Whole Foods deal, also finalized this year. The Bonobos name is a nod to the endangered ape native to the region south of the Congo River. It's a curious choice for a company that sells only men's clothing: Lower-case bonobos live in female-led groups and are notable for their altruism, empathy, and peaceful behavior. The bonobo name was first used in 1954 by two European scientists who may have misspelled Bolobo, the name of a town near where the first specimens were collected.

 

Other names that made my list: Juicero, Gothamist, Mattress Mack, Pepsi, RompHim, Shero. Read the full column.

Goodness!

Pretty much everywhere you look, things are bad. Sexual predators in Hollywood, Washington, Alabama, and between and beyond. Wildfires in Los Angeles and Ventura counties – in December! (As someone observed on Twitter this week, there’s no such thing as “fire season” any more.) The rapacious tax bill. The shrinking of public lands. Reckless, cynical legislation designed to make it easier to carry concealed weapons anywhere you damn want.

But don’t give up quite yet: On TV, badness takes a holiday, and it’s all Good. I counted five Good titles in the current lineup, one coming soon, one in production, and two more that ended recently and are still viewable on demand.

Word of the week: Self-own

In the digital world, ownership – or ownage, is it’s often called – is an intangible quality. The tech-jargon sense of to own originated among hackers in the 1990s, who used it to mean “taking control of someone else’s computer”; it was picked up by gamers, for whom it means “to defeat.” (The variant pwn, which originated as a misspelling in the game WarCraft, is sometimes substituted for humorous effect.) To self-own, then, is to confidently blunder into a self-defeating backfire, usually because you’ve unwittingly revealed something embarrassing or incriminating about yourself.