Because my words-of-the-year list couldn’t cover the whole territory, here’s a list of upper-case names that stood out over the past year. For a different take, see Namerology’s name-of-the-year post about Volodymyr, which includes a discussion of language, identity, and spelling.
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Continue reading "Names of the year 2022: Fritinancy edition" »
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Some significant historical dates are expressed in numerical shorthand: 7/7, 9/11, 8888. (The last number represents Burma’s People Power Uprising, also known as the 8888 Uprising, which peaked on 8 August 1988.) But the riot at the US Capitol that took place on January 6, 2021, is widely known by a different abbreviation: J6. Where did this unusual contraction come from, and how did it spread?
The source is not an official one. The full name of the governmental entity looking into the insurrection is the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol,; the URL is january6th.house.gov.
Nor did “J6” originate on Twitter, although the abbreviation has proved useful on that 280-character platform, where it pops up across the political spectrum.
One claim I’ve heard ad nauseam from MAGA is that Trump “has been robbed of due process” by these hearings. The J6 committee are not prosecutors conducting a trial. They are an investigative team tasked with uncovering the truth for the American people about January 6th.
— Andrew Wortman ️ (@AmoneyResists) July 25, 2022
105 days until the midterms, and literally, anything can happen in that time - from J6 committee revelations to a big Trump announcement. The Breakdown welcomes Lincoln Project Sr. Advisor @stuartpstevens, to dig into what comes. Tomorrow at 7p ET. pic.twitter.com/0ih3lV4ANq
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 25, 2022
CNN’s @wolfblitzer has a panel of three people who all agree with him - and who all hate Trump.
— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) July 25, 2022
Wolf has no dissenting voices to talk about the J6 Committee (where there are no dissenting voices either).
This is unAmerican.
(By the way, it’s spelled un-American. Thank you, Jonathon Owen.)
Nor did I find any evidence that any media outlet invented “J6.”
Instead, it appears that the “J6” abbreviation originated from within the insurrection.
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The death, on April 30, of the American photographer Ron Galella brought the fun-to-say Italian borrowing paparazzo back into the news. Galella, who was 91, was a “paparazzo extraordinaire,” the Telegraph and the Guardian headlined. “He personified the paparazzi,” the New York Times obituary reported, using the plural form: “brazen and relentless in chasing the famous, particularly Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.”
Galella himself proudly accepted the title of “paparazzo extraordinaire,” appropriating it for the title of his 2012 memoir.
Advertisement for a 2012 book-signing event for Ron Galella: Paparazzo Extraordinaire via New York Gossip Gal.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about celebrity lately. Not because the word has an unexpected etymology: It came straight into Middle English from Latin celebritāt, where it meant “a crowded celebration or festival.” (OK, I do have one fun fact: celebrate was spelled cellybrate in Middle English.) And also not because there’s a topical hook on which to hang this post.
In lieu of any of that, here is some of the wool I’ve been gathering about celebrity over the last week or so:
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The new words are here! The new words are here! Merriam-Webster has added 520 of them to its online word hoard, including coronavirus words (long hauler), identity words (BIPOC, folx), and working words (coworking, makerspace, gig worker).
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Speaking of dictionaries, lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower has compiled a new historical dictionary of science-fiction, and it’s out of this world. Read about it in Wired (Adam Rogers calls Sheidlower “a lexicographical mad scientist”) and in the New York Times (Jennifer Schuessler calls Sheidlower’s 1995 book, The F-Word, “a cheekily learned history of the notorious obscenity”).
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This post was going to be a short riff on a line in that Inauguration poem by Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman—the line about the vine and the fig tree, which got me thinking about figs. Mmmm, figs. But one fig led to another, and next thing you know I was way down a figgy rabbit hole from which there was no escape. Go figure.
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Is an Eataly ad for truffles offensive to Italians and Italian-Americans? (Chicago Tribune)
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I was scrolling through my Twitter timeline last week when I noticed a word that rang a dim bell: verbate.
This. Entire. Verbate....
— Leigh Ann Caldwell (@LACaldwellDC) October 27, 2017
It's what @realDonaldTrump said to children of members of the press pic.twitter.com/6kr0z73bQT
I grasped that it had the sense of verbatim – “word for word” – but the truncated form seemed new. When I dug into it, I realized I’d tweeted about it myself more than a year ago.
"Verbate" is new to me as abbrev for "verbatim." (https://t.co/OgnaYKc9bn is a survey company.) https://t.co/gCCkYr6Z6P
— Nancy Friedman (@Fritinancy) September 17, 2016
When I tweeted about verbate this week, Caldwell, a reporter for NBC, responded: “We use it in broadcast journalism, and yes, a version of verbatim.” She added: “I think it’s a great word and probably overuse it.”
Well, she isn’t alone: verbate – which I’m guessing is pronounced ver-BATE, to reveal its origins in verbatim – has been showing up frequently in broadcast journalists’ Twitter feeds for the last couple of years, mostly as a noun, as Caldwell used it.
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A tweet from @Mededitor last month sent me down the vegan equivalent of a rabbit hole.
@Fritinancy @LouiseHarnby @stronglang @gdoslang You get the sense that FoodKick is channeling the voice of Thug Kitchen: https://t.co/vwtdYlOErT
— Mededitor (@Mededitor) April 11, 2017
I’d written about Thug Kitchen a few years ago, but I hadn’t seen TK’s new cookbook. I couldn’t resist going past “Fast As F*ck” on the book’s cover – the point of Mededitor’s tweet – to the Amazon description, which contains this sentence:
TK holds your hand and explains ingredients from chickpeas to nooch so you'll feel confident knowing exactly what the f*ck you're cooking.
Nooch? It sounded vaguely salacious, which wouldn’t be out of keeping with the TK style guide. (Chapter titles in the new cookbook include “Freshen the Fuck Up” and “Hot Box.”) But it turns out that nooch isn’t nasty or brutish, it’s just short. For nutritional yeast.
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When I discovered that an odd number (in both senses) was being used an even number of times (two) as a company name, my curiosity was naturally piqued.
The odd number in question is four hundred twenty-seven: 427. Does it signify anything to you? Me neither.
Of course, if you scramble the numerals you get 24/7, which does signify something: all day, every day. But that has nothing to do with the two 427 stories that I’m about to tell you.
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