Fritinancy

I've changed my mind about the word of the year

Earlier this month, I published a list of word-of-the-year nominees for 2021, and selected insurrection as my top choice.

Upon reflection—and after a lot of reading—I have a better contender.

You can read about my new WotY candidate on Medium.

December linkfest

Happy Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us! When you’ve completed the traditional Feats of Strength you may feel like you deserve a celebratory quaff. There are several Festivus beers and ales; here’s one from Market Garden Brewery in Cleveland. They registered the trademark in October 2015.

There’s also a Festivus Maximus sparkling wine, but it’s only tangentially about the made-up December 23 holiday and “Seinfeld.” It’s actually a Baltimore Ravens story: “Festivus Maximus” was coach Brian Billick’s substitute phrase for “playoffs,” a word he superstitiously wouldn’t allow players to utter in the runup to the 2000 Super Bowl (which Baltimore would go on to win).

And now—drumroll, please—it’s time for the traditional Airing of Grievances. In order from serious to frivolous:

Grievance #1: U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, “Democrat” of West Virginia.
Grievance #2: Punitive abortion laws.
Grievance #3: Expensive, hard-to-find Covid test kits.
Grievance #4: People who still haven’t gotten Covid vaccinations.
Grievance #5: TFG. Enough already.
Grievance #6: Movies that run more than two hours. Looking at you, Nightmare Alley.
Grievance #7: Remakes. See #6.
Grievance #8: Sequels.
Grievance #9: Prequels.
Grievance #10: Holiday promotions that include the phrase “’Tis the Season.”

Read my previous Festivus posts.

Word of the week: Anticipointment

Once again, as in days of yore, I turn to this peerless portmanteau to evoke the spirit of the season: eager anticipation followed by crushing disappointment. This winter it’s not just about boring parties and less-than-satisfying gifts but also about dashed pandemic hopes. (Vaccines—yay! Omicron—oy vey!)

I originally wrote about anticipointment in December 2006. I revisited the word in December 2011, and included a link to an article published on June 6, 1988: the earliest documented citation for the word. I’m still searching for an earlier citation. (I had once heard that the word was invented by an ad agency in the 1960s and used on that agency’s holiday cards.)

I now have two updates:

On the Visual Thesaurus: Brand names of the year for 2021

My annual list of brand names that stood out in 2021 is now live on the Visual Thesaurus. To read the column you’ll have to subscribe—or wait for the three-month paywall to lift and risk being way behind the times.

There’s a little bit of overlap with my Words of the Year list, published yesterday, but plenty of new stuff, too. Here’s a free excerpt from the Entertainment section:

Games were on our minds in 2021. In January, a struggling chain of brick-and-mortar video-game stores called GameStop became famous when a group of mischievous day traders, noticing that big Wall Street hedge funds had shorted the chain’s stock, began buying it and driving up its price, from $4 a share to $150. Even Tesla CEO Elon Musk got in on the fun, punnily tweeting about “Gamestonk.”  (What’s a stonk? Read my explanation.)

A grimmer game caught our attention in November, when Netflix debuted the dystopian Korean drama series “Squid Game.” The title refers to a real-life children’s game popular in South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, in which the playing field resembles the body of a squid. By November, the show had become the streaming network’s most-watched series. The Korean title, “Ojing-eo Geim,” imports geim directly from English; the Japanese translation, Ika gēmu—a candidate for Japanese word of the year for 2021—also borrows the English word.

Read the rest of the column!

Words of the year 2021: Fritinancy edition

Covid-19 turned into Covid 2021, the U.S. presidency changed hands despite TFG’s efforts to the contrary, and we somehow summoned the energy to invent new words and repurpose old ones. Here are my picks for this year’s keywords; scroll to the bottom for previous years’ lists. And stay tuned for the American Dialect Society’s selection of the word of the year on January 7.

My criteria are the ADS’s: words (or “lexical items”—acronyms and phrases appear here, too) that were new or newly prominent, widely used, and relevant to events of 2021. 

In alphabetical order:

Word of the week: Drip pricing

I’d never encountered the term drip pricing before last week, but I’m familiar withwhat it describes, and you may be, too.

Here’s how Los Angeles Times business columnist David Lazarus defines it: “a stealth price hike in the form of an added fee, rather than … a list price that reflects actual business costs.” In other word, the fees are dripped into the cost, one by one, and after the transaction is complete. Drip pricing is typically found in the travel and hospitality industries—see, for example, “resort fees” at hotels that are not in any way “resorts.”

Drip, drip, drip

Don't look!

The “disaster comedy” Don’t Look Up opens December 10 in theaters and comes to Netflix on December 24. Directed by Adam McKay (Vice, The Big Short) it features what Variety, in a pan, calls “a galaxy full of stars” and an all-too-plausible premise: “Two low-level astronomers must go on a giant media tour to warn mankind of an approaching comet that will destroy planet Earth.”

Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Cate Blanchett, Mark Rylance…

 

Does the title have a familiar ring? It should: Hollywood has been fond of “don’t-look” titles for more than half a century. In chronological order:

Word of the week: Balk

I was as surprised as Language Hat (Stephen Dodson) to learn that balk may be acquiring a new meaning that’s pretty much the opposite of the traditional one. (I was not surprised, as he was, that the “l” in balk is silent; I’ve always pronounced the word that way on the very few occasions I’ve used it.)

It turns out there’s a lot about balk that’s interesting. For one thing, it’s spelled baulk in the UK. This was news to me, but not completely surprising, because after all the Brits colorfully and flavorfully insert a u in the center of a lot of words.

Name in the news: Block

Its best-known brand is Square, the payment app that launched in 2009 and whose fortunes soared during the 2020 pandemic as more retailers began accepting cashless payments. But as of December 10 the parent company—whose holdings also include the streaming-music service Tidal and the mysteriously named open developer platform TBD54566975*—will be known as Block. Like Facebook’s Meta and Google’s Alphabet, this is a corporate name change that will not directly affect consumers.

Block’s shape-shifting logo, an oddly shaped cube.

 

CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey, 45, a cryptocurrency enthusiast, had stepped down from his role as Twitter CEO on November 29.

Block will keep the ticker symbol SQ; its URL is block.xyz.

From the Twitter announcement:

Stephen Sondheim, 1930–2021

He lived 91 richly productive years, attended a live theater production eleven days before he died, enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner with friends the day before his death. Who can ask, as the Gershwin song goes, for anything more? But we fans are greedy: The death of the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, on November 26, after a long life of creative brilliance, leaves us wanting still more.

So here’s a little more.

A partial list of Sondheim musicals in chronological order, via Teepublic