Merriam-Webster chooses its words of the year based on the number of dictionary lookups. The 2022 winner, gaslighting, saw a 1740% increase, “with high interest throughout the year.” Runners-up include omicron, oligarch, and queen consort.
Gaslight (1944): “Strange drama of a captive sweetheart!”
And bear in mind Benjamin Dreyer’s sage counsel:
If we’re talking about fucking with someone’s sanity, it’s gaslighted. If we’re talking about a Victorian theater, it’s gaslit.
— Benjamin Dreyer (@BCDreyer) May 26, 2019
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I’ve been spending some time rereading favorite books—most recently Howard Mittlemark’s dark and hilarious Written Out (2019) and Richard Russo’s rambling Nobody’s Fool (1993)—so I appreciated a roundup by New Yorker writers of the books they’d been rereading. I’m sad to say I haven’t read any of the books on the list even once, although I did get several chapters into Anna Karenina a few times.
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One author I have read multiple times, with great pleasure, is Mick Herron, author of the Slough House spy series (and much else). I loved Jill Lepore’s profile of him, also for the New Yorker, in which I learned that he (a) used to be a copy editor and (b) doesn’t own a smartphone. “People say write what you know,” Herron told Lepore. “So I wrote about people who are failures.”
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If I were picking words of the year—and I will, sometime next month—I might include newsletter, because newsletter is the new blog. A few new newsletters from writers I admire:
Mister Slang, by Jonathon Green, compiler of the invaluable Green’s Dictionary of Slang
Word Origins, by Dave Wilton, who so far has investigated “Black Friday,” “Cyber Monday,” “Michigander,” and much else.
Separated by a Common Newsletter, by Lynne Murphy, author of The Prodigal Tongue and the long-running Separated by a Common Language blog. Lynne’s subject is the Englishes spoken by Americans and Brits; in the newsletter’s first issue she talks about “homer,” which was the Cambridge Dictionary word of the year for 2022.
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I’m thrilled that Avery Trufelman has revived “Articles of Interest,” her podcast about what we wear and why. This season her topic is “American Ivy,” and it takes some unexpected directions, from Jewish tailors to Japanese iconoclasts. It’s about the style of clothing we now call “preppy,” but, as Trufelman puts it, “The story is long and ramifying and extremely revealing about American notions of taste, class and democracy.” You can find the podcast in the usual podcast places, like Stitcher and Apple Podcasts, and there’s—yes!—a newsletter, too.
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Stefan Fatsis on the new Scrabble dictionary: “The new words in the latest OSPD update come only from Merriam, and were culled from more than 4,300 words added online from 2018 through 2021. Why the solo effort? Partly because there are no standard North American dictionaries left untapped.” (Slate classifies Fatsis’s story under the “Sports” heading, by the way. Go, team!)
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“Let me make my position clear: most branding color psychology is bullshit, despite the popularity of the subject. It’s an oversimplification. The scientific evidence is sparse and in some cases contradictory. Without nuance and proper analysis, color psychology in branding is worthless to companies and their consumers.” – Zulie Rane for How Brands Are Built.
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New from me on Medium:
The five types of brand names (a spruced-up version of an old blog post)
The bird and the elephant (on Twitter and Mastodon—not as services but as brand names)
Remember, if you enjoy a story of mine you can “clap” up to 50 times for it. A tiny effort for you,, a modest revenue stream for me.
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Two good reads from the ZinZin blog:
Robin Hood: A brand name for the ages (“What other brand name can be traced back to the 13th century?”)
American brand names and indigenous cultures: Changing the narrative (Cherokee beer, the Jeep Cherokee, and much more)
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If you miss the serendipitous discoveries of the early internet, Clive Thompson has a treat for you. The Ooh! Directory is a hand curated “old-school blog index” that’s “not even remotely attempting to be comprehensive. It’s totally idiosyncratic.” Thompson’s article, on Medium, may be paywalled; here’s an excerpt:
- in the “typography” section of “design” inside “arts & design”, I stumbled across “Biketype”, a blog devoted to finding examples of awesome design in bike tech, ranging from old-school logos to see-through helmets with cardboard interiors to a cool triangular wooden bike-rack that mounts onto a wall
- a blog devoted to “Pulp covers”, billed as “The Best of the Worst” — i.e. the lurid, dashed-off (but often wildly fascinating) covers of pulp novels of the early 20th century
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New units of measure coming your way (via Nature):
Representatives from governments worldwide, meeting at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) outside Paris on 18 November, voted to introduce four new prefixes to the International System of Units (SI) with immediate effect. The prefixes ronna and quetta represent 1027 and 1030, and ronto and quecto signify 10−27 and 10−30. Earth weighs around one ronnagram, and an electron’s mass is about one quectogram.
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