Fritinancy

Nicely named: Gateway

What’s so special about “Gateway”? Not much, at first appraisal. The word appears in more than 600 trademarks, including that of a pioneering U.S. computer company founded in 1985 in Sioux City, Iowa. (That company, whose original name was Gateway 2000, used a Holstein cow as its mascot; it was bought in 2007 by Taiwan-based Acer, which also acquired Gateway.com and which now produces computers under the Gateway brand.)

“Gateway” names abound in the San Francisco Bay Area thanks to the region’s association with the Golden Gate and the bridge that spans it. There are Gateway apartments, a Gateway Bank, a Golden Gateway hotel, and a long-planned Gateway Park at the foot of (confusingly) the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge.

But the Gateway I want to praise here is Oakland-based Gateway Incubator, which is named for a different sort of gateway.

On the Visual Thesaurus: A 'journey' of a thousand similes

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at the many ways in which journey has become a dominant metaphor in English-speaking culture.

Words of the Year 2015: Fritinancy Edition

The WOTY party has begun, and I’m arriving fashionably (or maybe just breathlessly) late. Back in early November, Allan Metcalf nominated basic for the honor; a couple of weeks later Dennis Baron, aka Dr. Grammar, anointed singular they and Oxford Dictionaries selected an emoji, “Face with Tears of Joy.” Merriam-Webster, which chooses its WOTY based on volume of online lookups, selected -ism. The spoofy Emmett Lee Dickinson Museum (named after “Emily’s third cousin, twice removed – at her request”) has been posting one WOTY candidate every day in December, along with runners-up. (I confess I’d never heard of Dick Poop, but I like it.) And over at the Visual Thesaurus (where I’m a contributing writer), Ben Zimmer has nominated a couple dozen notable words that surfaced this year in science, business, news, and pop culture.

My turn now. To compile my Words of the Year list, I followed the American Dialect Society's criteria for selection:

• demonstrably new or newly popular in 2015
• widely and/or prominently used in 2015
• indicative or reflective of the popular discourse
• not a peeve or a complaint about overuse or misuse.

Word of the year: Refugee

Most useful: Mx.

Most likely to succeed: Ghosting

Least likely to succeed: Left shark

Euphemism of the year: Netflix and chill

Most creative: Shipping

Most outrageous: Measles party, schlonged (tie – it was an outrageous year!)

Most unnecessary: Microaggression

Most productive: -shaming

Read on for the full WOTY list – 20 words in all – and brief definitions. Words previously featured on this blog are linked to the relevant posts. And follow the American Dialect Society for news of its WOTY vote on January 8.

Word of the Week: Adulting

Adulting: “Acting like an adult or engaging in activities usually associated with adulthood—often responsible or boring tasks.” Definition via Mignon Fogarty (Grammar Girl). A verbing of adult, which comes from Latin adultus, “full-grown, mature, firmly established”; English managed quite well without the word until the early 17th century.

Last December Fogarty anointed adulting as the 2014 word of the year. “It’s a new word that I think will catch on,” she wrote:

Adulting isn’t in any mainstream dictionary that I checked, and it wasn’t even added to the Urban Dictionary until June of 2014. Yet today, it shows up about 100 times a day on Twitter and there are many websites and Tumblrs with adulting in their name. It’s clearly in wide use on social media, yet it also hasn’t quite gone mainstream. When I mentioned it to my graduate students at UNR [University of Nevada, Reno], none of them had heard it—but they all seemed to like it.

Adulting “fills a void,” Fogarty wrote. My own inference is that it fills a void because the traditional accoutrements of adulthood (marriage, children, home-owning, full-time work) seem increasingly elusive for people in their post-teen years.

One of the earliest and most prominent adulting blogs is called, simply, AdultingBlog. Launched in July 2011 by Kelly Williams Brown, it’s subtitled “How to Become a Grownup in 468 Easy(ish) Steps”*; in May 2013 the blog’s tips were published in book form (Adulting). But the earliest use of adulting, Fogarty found, was a May 2010 tweet by Daniel Kroft:

Tonight @queenbroadway really made me feel like an adult. #adulting

— Mr. Diggy (@DanielKroft) May 22, 2010

 

Adulting echoes the contemporary structure and sense of parenting, which was originally a noun referring to the physical act of begetting; in the last 40 or so years it has also been used as a verb (“acting like a parent”). A best-selling 1970 advice book by Fitzhugh Dodson, How to Parent, may have helped boost the verb’s popularity. (Dodson later published How to Father and How to Grandparent.) So did an explosion of verbing in the 1990s; the list, according to Rosemarie Ostler, author of Dewdroppers, Waldos, and Slackers: A Decade-by-Decade Guide to the Vanishing Vocabulary of the Twentieth Century, includes to effort, to journal, to no-hit, to multitask, to privilege, and to keynote.

Adulting thrives as a hashtag on social media. Here’s a representative sampling of tweets, some serious and some ironic, posted on a single day (and yes, most #adulting tweets are from young women):

 

Going out to a fancy dinner to celebrate being 100% debt free except for our mortgage. #adulting

— Kruella (@KruellaKraken) September 20, 2015

Please please please remember to register to vote... #Adulting #Seriously

— Wendy (@pikaqiuu) September 20, 2015

Did laundry AND got approved for a credit card today #adulting

— Andrea (@x19blakey93x) September 20, 2015

Successfully got a rental car and drove on the highway in Florida this weekend #adulting

— Caroline McCarthy (@cemccarthy1) September 20, 2015

Okay it's happening. I'm using a power drill. Dear Lord help me not to destroy this house. Or injure myself. #adulting

— Ellie Keller (@eleanor_graham) September 20, 2015

 

Adult and adulting are not, by the way, related to adultery. The latter word has a different Latin root and is related to adulterate, “to make impure; to debase.”

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* For more on this trendy use of the -ish suffix, see my October 2014 column for the Visual Thesaurus.

Let's Family! Let's Museum!

Verbifying a noun is a popular (lazy) way for ad copywriters to say “Look at how creative and action packed we are!” Two current marketing efforts, from Tylenol and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, perpetuate the trope.

Word of the Week: Yuccie

Yuccie: A Young Urban Creative, as defined and described by David Infante, “a 26-year-old writer who lives in a gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn,” in an article for Mashable published on June 10. Infante calls yuccies “a slice of Generation Y, borne [sic] of suburban comfort, indoctrinated with the transcendent power of education, and infected by the conviction that not only do we deserve to pursue our dreams; we should profit from them.”

“I am the yuccie,” Infante writes. “And it sounds sort of, well, yucky.”

Word of the Week: Promposal

Promposal: A staged invitation to a school dance. A portmanteau of prom and proposal.

Promposal isn’t new on the American scene—Urban Dictionary’s earliest citation is dated January 22, 2006—but it’s become a more elaborate, more breathlessly reported phenomenon each year. During the week of April 20, 2015, for example, U.S. news outlets reported that Ibrahim Ahmad, a high school senior in La Center, Washington, was suspended for strapping a fake bomb to his waist while asking his date to the prom. (“The girl said yes. The principal said no,” was the lede on NBCNews.com.) About a week later, USA Today reported that teens are spending one-third of their prom budgets—an average of $324—just on the promposal. Over-the-top efforts have involved 1,500 helium balloons; a breakdancing flash mob; a re-creation of an Old Spice ad; and an elaborate light display. (More here.) Creating a video of the promposal is de rigueur; teens who feel creatively challenged can get inspiration (or “inspo”) from @ThePromposal, a Twitter account. Promposals “exploded on the scene” in Canada in 2011, according to a May 2011 story in the Globe and Mail, which noted that “there are even pre-promposals, with hopefuls posting popular promposal videos, with a wish.” (For the dark side of promposals, see Seventeen magazine’s “Awecomely Hilarious Promposal Fails.”)

The promposal-palooza may be influenced by elaborate (and expensive) marriage proposals, which have been proliferating at least since the advent of YouTube in 2005. (“Crazy Marriage Proposal--Guy Falls Off Building,” posted in July 2011, has more than 10 million views to date.)

Prom—“a ball or formal dance at a school or college, typically held for the members of a single (typically senior) class near the end of the school year,” according to the OED—emerged in the late 19th century as a shortened form of promenade, which since the mid-16th century had meant “a leisurely walk.” Promenades, usually shortened to Proms, was adopted in early-19th-century Britain to refer to “promenade concerts,” events at which audience members could sit, stand, or walk around. But dancing prom has always been American. The OED’s earliest citation, dated December 5, 1879, is from the Yale Courant, and shows prom as an abbreviation (“the Junior Prom. Com.”). In 1890, the Harvard Crimson signaled the word’s relative novelty by placing it between quotation marks: “T.L. McClung is chairman of the ‘Prom’ committee at Yale.” For decades, prom took a definite article: the senior prom, an invitation to the prom. Then, around 2000 or possibly earlier, the article vanished. “And, yeah, I needed a date for senior prom,” the author Robert B. Parker had a character say in his 2001 crime novel Death in Paradise.*

Stephen Colbert spoofed the promposal trend on his May 7, 2013, show. He defined the word as “a combo of the word pro and mposal,” and then brought on a guest—former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky—to raise the stakes.

 

 

 

The Colbert Report
Colbert Report Episode Guide,  More Colbert Report Videos,  Comedy Central Full Episodes

 

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* The disappearance of the the remains something of a mystery: Americans often retain the in places—the hospital, the flu—where Britons drop it. See this comment on a 2012 Language Log post.

Word of the Week: Sugar Dating

Sugar dating: “Pay-for-play relationships between older, wealthy adults (sugar daddies/mommas) and attractive young women and men (sugar babies).” (Source: Newsweek, September 9, 2014)

“Sugar” has been slang for “money” since at least the mid-nineteenth century; “sugar daddy” (an older man who lavishes gifts on a young woman) was originally American slang from the 1920s. “Sugar dating” is much more recent: the earliest reference I found was in a 2011 interview on SheKnows.com with Brandon Wade, the founder and CEO of Seeking Arrangement (a business founded in 2006 for the purpose of creating “mutually beneficial arrangements,” according to Wade).

The July 2014 arrest of Alix Tichelman, 26, in the death of a married 51-year-old Google executive, Forrest Timothy Hayes, whom she met through Seeking Arrangement, brought new attention to the site and others like it. Early reports used the term “sugar daddy website,” but in recent months the term has been streamlined to “sugar dating,” possibly influenced by other “___ dating” compounds such as speed dating, online dating, and blind dating.

Inevitably, discussions about sugar dating invoke the question of its legal status. “Is sugar dating just a genteel form of prostitution, the latest incarnation of an age-old pay-to-play tradition?” asked Lauren Smiley, author of “I’m Rich, You’re Hot: The Cool Mathematics of Sugar Dating,” in the November 2014 San Francisco magazine. “Or is it a form of erotic efficiency, a cut-to-the-chase innovation in a supercharged culture with no time for the dance of courtship?” The Seeking Arrangement website has an explainer page, “Four Differences Between Sugar and Prostitution.” Seeking Arrangement’s PR manager, Angela Jacob Bermudo, told the New York Post in February 2014 that “[p]rostitution is black and white … On Seeking Arrangement, people are coming to find their ideal relationship.”

Not so fast, wrote law student Jacqueline Motyl in a 2012 Pennsylvania State University Law Review article, “Trading Sex for College Tuition: How Sugar Daddy “Dating” Sites May Be Sugar Coating Prostitution.” Motyl concludes that

current civil and criminal laws are insufficient to ensure that prostitution is not taking place within sugar arrangements and suggests
that law enforcement infiltrate sugar daddy dating sites to guard against online prostitution.

Word of the Week: Budtender

Budtender: A worker at a dispensary of medical or recreational marijuana who helps customers with their selections. Formed from bud (of marijuana) and bartender.

As of July 2014, 23 states and the District of Columbia had laws legalizing the sale and use of marijuana. Two of them, Washington and Colorado, have made marijuana legal for recreational as well as medical use, and Oregon voters will decide in November whether to legalize adult use of marijuana. With the changing legal climate come new additions to an already fragrant lexicon of cannabis use.

Last month, for example, New York Times reporter Lois Smith Brady—who created the paper’s “Vows” feature back in 1992—wrote about some new wedding rites in Colorado and Washington.

Today, there are “budtenders” (think sommeliers, only they work with cannabis instead of wine) in every dispensary, to help couples who are so inclined find the ideal strains for their weddings. Bec Koop just opened a business, Buds and Blossoms in Alma, Colo., to advise those who want to include marijuana in their centerpieces, dinner salads, bouquets and boutonnieres (or “bud-tonnieres,” as she calls them).

Brady cautioned not to read too much into such enterprises:

It is hard to predict if pot will become more or less popular at weddings in the future. Mark Buddemeyer, a Colorado budtender whose nickname is actually Bud, expressed doubts that marijuana would ever become widely acceptable at weddings.

“We’ve got to get to the point where smoking is classier than drinking,” he said. “A bride blowing out a big cloud of smoke is not necessarily attractive.”

Eating cannabis-infused cake—referred to as a “medible” in the article, a contraction of “medicinal edible”—may find more favor.

Legal marijuana has also spawned many new business names, including several mentioned by Brady: Get High Getaways, a bed-bud-and-breakfast in Denver; Green Life Consulting, “an advisory firm for those who want to start marijuana-based businesses”; and 710 Labs, “which manufactures concentrates like hash oil.” (Why “710”? When you turn the digits upside down they spell “OIL.”)

The earliest citation for budtender in Urban Dictionary is dated April 7, 2010: “a barista that can’t pass a drug test.” A July 4, 2011, definition includes this personal aside:

These are also some of the luckiest motherfuckers on the face of the earth. Despite that, you should still tip them as heavily as you can possibly afford to.

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Related: my posts on Tweed and ganja-preneur.

Word of the Week: Homago

Homago: Acronym for Hang(ing) Out, Mess(ing) Around, Geek(ing) Out. Also spelled HOMAGO.

The homago acronym evolved from “Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Learning and Living with New Media,” an influential 2008 Digital Youth Project report, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, that summarized the findings of “a massive ethnographic investigation into the place of new communications and media technologies in the lives of American young people.” (The copyright date on the PDF is 2010, but USC communications professor Henry Jenkins wrote about it in a November 2008 blog post, which I quote in the previous sentence.)

The report did not abbreviate the title, but by early 2012 the condensed form was appearing in the writings of educators and librarians. “The gist,” wrote New York Hall of Science’s Eric Siegel in February 2012, “is that kids learn along this kind of axis or overlapping venn diagram that includes the most casual (Hanging Out), proceeds to a more active and engaged, if still very diffuse mode (Messing Around), to a more focused and productive mode (Geeking Out.)” YOUmedia (“Youth-powered 21st century learning”), in five Chicago public library branches, was funded in part by the MacArthur Foundation “as a next step in the HOMAGO campaign,” as Siegel put it.

YOUmedia, Chicago. Image via The Works at NYSCI.

 

Other libraries have followed suit. In “Breaking Out of the Library Mold, in Boston and Beyond,” published March 8 in the print edition of the New York Times, reporter Katharine Q. Seelye writes:

Libraries have long facilitated the “finding” of information, [Nevada library consultant Joe Murphy] said. “Now they are facilitating the creating of information.”

That will be evident at the Boston library’s new section for teenagers. Teen Central is to become what is known as “homago” space — where teenagers can “hang out, mess around and geek out.” It will include lounges, restaurant booths, game rooms and digital labs, as well as software and equipment to record music and create comic books. The vibe will be that of an industrial loft, with exposed pipes and polished concrete floors, what [Boston Public Library president Amy] Ryan called “eco-urban chic.”

Watch a video of cultural anthropologist Mizuko (Mimi) Ito, one of the original Digital Youth Project researchers, talking about homago.