Fritinancy

Words of the year 2019: Fritinancy edition

Goodnight decade! Goodnight year! Goodnight words that made us cheer—or jeer—and which summed up the stories of 2019.

So far, Oxford Dictionaries has selected climate emergency as its #WOTY19, Collins Dictionary—clearly tapping into the same zeitgeist—picked climate strike, and Cambridge Dictionary chose upcycling. In Australia, Macquarie Dictionary singled out cancel culture from a longlist of 75 words (see my own take on canceled below). Here in the US, Dictionary.com chose existential (as in existential threat and existential choice) while Merriam-Webster picked they (the singular gender-neutral or nonbinary pronoun). “What do these words tell us?” asked CNN’s Samantha Allen. “That it’s Generation Z’s world now—and if it’s not already, then it should be soon.”

One of my favorite non-dictionary WOTY lists is posted each year as a countdown from December 1 to 31 by “The Emmett Lee Dickinson Museum” in “Washerst, PA.” As of this writing, the Dickinson has given us constitutional crisis, perfect, Green New Deal, infested, and other 2019-isms. Meanwhile, on Twitter, John Cunningham proposed plant-based, a non-judgmental alternative to fake meat.

On Friday, January 3, the American Dialect Society—the progenitor of all these WOTY contests—will vote on its own Word of the Year at the society’s annual meeting in New Orleans. If you’re in the neighborhood, you may want to drop by; the voting is free, open to the public, and hella fun. You may also submit nominations by email.

My list follows ADS guidelines, which say that a WOTY must be

— demonstrably new or newly popular in the year in question
— widely and/or prominently used in the year in question
— indicative or reflective of the popular discourse
— not a peeve or a complaint about overuse or misuse

In alphabetical order:

December linkfest

The Namerology blog picks the defining baby names of the last decade—“The names that were not just hugely popular from 2010-19, but vastly more popular than in decades past…and future. They’re flying high, yet as the ’10s draw to a close they’re already starting to decline from their dizzying popularity peaks.”

*

Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn combed his newspaper’s archives for the first mentions of products, technologies, ideas, and terms that have become part of life since late 2009. His chronological list goes from A (Angry Birds) to Y (YOLO), and includes a bunch of words and brands you read about here first, including showrooming, FOMO, trigger warning, and antifa.

Word of the week: Tinsel

“Is Tinsel Canceled?” asks a headline in the December 19 New York Times Style section. The verdict: “Glitter, tinsel and shiny wrapping paper are now signs of the apocalypse, judging by the #zerowasteholidays and similar hashtags that are blooming on Instagram.”

That may be an overstatement: Tinsel tours and tinsel trails still thrive in various US municipalities, and mirror-bright strips adorn plenty of wreaths and trees. So let’s table the eco-arguments aside and get to the question at hand: What is this stuff called tinsel, and where does that word come from?

 

Tinsel, a Christmas-themed pop-up bar in Philadelphia. Via Philadelphia magazine.

 

Names of the year 2019

Each year at its annual meeting, held in early January, the American Name Society announces the most notable names of the previous year. I’ve already picked my brands of the year, but names of the year are selected by different criteria. So here’s my ANS-qualified list, which uses ANS categories and criteria: linguistic innovation, potential to influence language use, and ability to capture national attention. “Popularity or notoriety is not deemed important,” says the ANS.

Before I present my own list, I want to recommend the Namerology blog’s recent post, “The 2019 Name of the Year Is Karen.” In case you hadn’t heard, Karen is being used as a mocking slur against a certain type of Generation X white woman—insensitive, self-absorbed, even racist and/or homophobic. “The use of a given name as a slur for a demographic group is simultaneously more general and more personal,” writes Namerology author Laura Wattenberg. “It invalidates people wholly and indiscriminately.” Curiously, Karen peaked in popularity not during Gen X but years earlier, during the peak Baby Boom years. As Wattenberg notes, “Gen X can’t seem to step free of the baby boom’s shadow, even to be insulted.”

Here’s my own NotY list:

Brands of the year: Fritinancy edition

My year-end list of notable brands is viewable only by Visual Thesaurus subscribers, which can mean only one thing: It’s time to give yourself the gift of a subscription—still under $20 a year—or to give a subscription to someone else who loves words and language.

Wondering whether it’s worth it? Here’s one of the brands on my list:

Pharmed out

Almost exactly ten years ago I spotted what I thought was the most embarrassing name ever attached to a beauty brand: Sophistry.

It’s still in business under that wildly inappropriate name.

 

Today, however, thanks to Twitter follower Sam C., I met the new contender for the title: Pharmaciopy.

Because science.

 

 

Word of the week: Democracy grief

What’s your grief, and how are you coping with it? Perhaps you suffer from climate grief, a term that may have been coined in 2007, by the authors of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, to describe the despair and depression people experience when they contemplate the climate crisis. Maybe you console yourself by eating, which may result in what Germans call kummerspeck (literally “grief fat”).

Or maybe you, like New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg, are experiencing democracy grief: not merely “anxiety and anger” but also “a demoralizing degree of fear, even depression” that—as one psychologist put it to Goldberg—“the institutions that we rely on to protect us from a dangerous individual might fail.”

 

How Democracies Die (2018). by Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who warn of the “gradual chipping away of democratic institutions” that makes it “harder and harder to dislodge the incumbent [elected official] by democratic means.”

Words of the decade 2010–2019: Fritinancy edition

In a few weeks, members of the American Dialect Society (and of the word-loving public) will gather in New Orleans and vote on the words of the year and the decade. Ten years ago, the American Dialect Society picked google as its overall winner; my own list back then included blog, Ground Zero, terrorism, and PTSD.

New decade, new list. As before, I’m following ADS criteria. To qualify for my list, a word must be:

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

I confess a bias toward my interests in technology, business, and social media (just as the ADS has a bias toward words of specifically linguistic interest).

I welcome your own nominations in the comments. You can also submit words of the year and decade to ADS: [email protected].

As for WOTY, I’ll post my own nominations soon—see last year’s list here—and have already posted my choices for brand names of the decade.

Word of the week: Secondhand

There was a time, not so long ago, when brands avoided the word secondhand, with its overtones of “second class” and its toxic whiff of “secondhand smoke.” If they had to broach the subject of non-newness, they used tech-sounding words like upcycling—Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year for 2019—or coy circumlocutions like nearly new. Or they opted, as Stan Carey noted in a 2011 blog post, for euphemisms like preloved or even experienced—as in “experienced cars,” the winner of William Safire’s 1979 Language Prettification and Avoidance of Ugly Reality Award.

Lately, though, plain-spoken secondhand (sometimes spelled second-hand) has been reclaimed with something like pride. “As the secondhand apparel market booms, used clothing is becoming an acceptable holiday gift,” reads a November 27, 2019, headline on CNBC.com. In the UK, the Oxfam charity promoted #secondhandseptember. In the US, the giant online reseller thredUP—whose tagline is “Secondhand clothes. Firsthand fun”—is behind the catchy hashtag #secondhandfirst. (More than 170,000 Instagram posts use that hashtag.) In August, thredUP announced partnerships with JCPenney and Macy’s to sell secondhand fashion in the department stores.

Secondhand is even the title of a new book by Adam Minter with the subtitle “Travels in the New Global Garage Sale.” (Listen to or read a Fresh Air interview with Minter here.)

 

Brands of the decade: 2010–2019

Ten years ago, when social media and blogging were still new and a rational person was in the White House, I did something ambitious and presumptuous: I published a list of the Brands of the Decade.*

And now it’s time to do it again.

To qualify for my highly subjective top-12 list, a brand had to meet these guidelines:

• Founded during the second decade of the 21st century or shortly before or
• Had a significant impact on the way we do business or live our lives during this decade or
• Consistently made headlines during the decade (for better or worse).

Because I’m a name developer, I gave a little extra weight to brands with interesting or influential names.

A message to sticklers: Yes, I know that actually a decade begins in a year ending in 1, not 0. SORRY.

In alphabetical order, then: