Fritinancy

Word of the week: Boo

Halloween is over, but echoes of boo are still reverberating throughout the land, most notably when the current occupant of the White House ventures out of his safe spaces and into the unfiltered public domain. He was greeted with loud boos and chants of “lock him up” at Nationals Park in Washington during Game 5 of the World Series on October 27.

Meanwhile chants of “boos” & “lock him up” rang out when Trump was shown on the Jumbotron at tonight’s World Series game. Signs that read “Veterans for Impeachment” and “Impeach Trump” were also hung around the stadium by fans pic.twitter.com/Pzjjs4AI4t

— HOT 97 (@HOT97) October 28, 2019

 

And there were more boos at what would seem to have been an even friendlier milieu: an Ultimate Fighting Championship match in Madison Square Garden on November 2.

Trump was loudly booed during his arrival to this UFC fight — the second sports arena to boo him this week pic.twitter.com/Num0v1kiOP

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) November 3, 2019

As historian Kevin Kruse pointed out on Twitter, there is robust precedent for president-booing at sporting events.

And other presidents have been booed at baseball games, in case everyone suddenly forgot.

If I'm remembering correctly, Obama was booed at the All-Star Game in 2009, GWBush was booed at a Nationals game in 2008, and GHWBush was famously booed at the 1992 All-Star Game: pic.twitter.com/spZjEj1vqh

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) October 28, 2019

But enough celebration of our right to free and loud expression. What about that word boo? How did it come to signify disapproval (verb), surprise (interjection), and affection (noun) – and much more?

Word of the week: Cone of uncertainty

The science of predicting tropical storms and hurricanes has improved greatly in recent years, but it still isn’t exact. That’s why storm maps show not a straight-line path of a hurricane’s progress but a tadpole-shaped “cone of uncertainty.” The area inside the cone is the danger zone, and the size of each circle within it “is set so that two-thirds of historical official forecast errors over a 5-year sample fall within the circle,” according to a National Hurricane Center explanation.

The cone of uncertainty was in the news last week as Hurricane Dorian, a Category 5 storm, bore down on the southeastern United States after devastating the Bahamas. On September 1, President Trump tweeted that “in addition to Florida - South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.” Whoops. Alabama had never been included in the forecast, or positioned within many miles of the cone of uncertainty. Trump apparently invented the “prediction.”

The National Weather Service in Birmingham, Alabama, immediately reassured Alabamians that their state would “NOT see any impacts from #Dorian.” The NWS, as its name indicates, is an agency of the federal government. Nevertheless, Trump would not be contradicted. In a move that could have been dictated by Stalin, or Orwell, he made up his own alternative weather facts, and a map to support them.

 

On September 4, President Trump displayed a doctored National Hurricane Center map dated August 29 that depicts Hurricane Dorian’s cone of uncertainty along with a bulbous black-outlined annex of uncertain origin and dubious credibility. Source: Politico

Words of the week: Gundamentalist, ammosexual

Gilroy. El Paso. Dayton.

In these three American cities, at least 32 children and adults were killed by three shooters in a single week, 23 of them within just 13 hours over the weekend of August 3 and 4. While attending a garlic festival. While shopping at Walmart. While socializing in a popular entertainment district.

 

The Onion has run this headline and story at least nine times.

 

I’m exhausted and angry—furious, actually—and can’t think of anything original to say about my compatriots’ sick obsession with firearms. So I’ll refer you to a couple of posts from the Fritinancy archives.

Word of the week: Existential

To be or not to be a stool pigeon? That is the “existential” question facing Hope Hicks, a former communications director at the Trump White House, according to the lede of a May 24 New York Times story:

One of the best-known but least visible former members of President Trump’s White House staff is facing an existential question: whether to comply with a congressional subpoena in the coming weeks.

Print edition: Hicks at night, flanked by reporters and overshadowed by the White House, whose employ she voluntarily left on March 29, 2018, a month after giving nine hours of closed-door testimony to the House Intelligence Committee.

Hold the burger

The headline on this April 4 Guardian story is a little premature.

 

“‘Veggie discs’ to replace veggie burgers”? Not so fast.

 

The “crackdown”—a ban on producers of vegetarian food using nomenclature usually deployed to describe meat, such as “burger,” “steak,” and “sausage”—was in fact passed by the EU parliament’s agriculture committee, but to become law it must be approved the full parliament and then by member states and the European commission. The push “to protect meat-related terms and names ‘exclusively for edible parts of the animals’” has been opposed by some vegetarian-leaning NGOs, including Greenpeace and Birdlife.

“Veggie disc,” noted the Guardian with a soupçon of dry wit, “has emerged as one possible, yet possibly unpalatable, new name for plant-based burgers.”

Still, it’s worth taking a look at the way we talk about and brand plant-based substitutes for meat, which are becoming an increasingly mainstream part of North American and European diets.

Word of the week: Hoax

Welcome to April Fools’ Day, which is what every day has felt like, to me at least, for the last few years. Every day another bit of trumpery (a word related etymologically to French tromper, to deceive). Every day another affront to denizens of the reality-based community, as Karl Rove infamously put it back in 2004.

It’s a good day, as days go, to consider hoax, a word that, appropriately enough, has no clear origins. It was documented first as a verb, in 1796, in Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (“to deceive or take in by inducing to believe an amusing or mischievous fabrication or fiction; to play upon the credulity of”), and a decade later as a noun, in the London publication Sporting Magazine (“a humorous or mischievous deception, usually taking the form of a fabrication of something fictitious or erroneous, told in such a manner as to impose upon the credulity of the victim”). The OED says hoax is “supposed to be a contraction of hocus,” which was a contraction of hocus-pocus, a mock-Latin phrase that originally referred to “a conjuror or juggler.” (Hocus is also partially responsible for hokey, which I wrote about in 2015.)

Word of the week: Invasion

On March 15, a gunman killed at least 50 people and injured another 50 as they gathered in two Christchurch mosques. Minutes before the attacks, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern had been emailed a 74-page document, variously called a “manifesto” and a “screed,” purported to have been written by the gunman. In it, the man – a 28-year-old Australian living in New Zealand – denounced immigrants as “invaders.”

Hours later, Donald Trump held a ceremony at the White House to mark the first veto of his presidential term, overriding the congressional block of the “national emergency” he had declared on the southern border of the U.S. During the event, he explained why he felt the veto was necessary, using language strikingly similar to that of the Christchurch assassin: “People hate the word ‘invasion,’ but that’s what it is,” he said, referring to migrants from Central America and Mexico seeking to come to the United States.

 

I still can't get over the fact that the Christchurch killer's manifesto plainly used the term "invaders" and hours later the President of the United States said "people hate the word ‘invasion,’ but that’s what it is" when talking about the US border.

It's stunning.

— digby (@digby56) March 16, 2019

 

Word of the week: Complexifier

There was salaciousness in “No Thank You, Mr. Pecker,” Jeff Bezos’s statement, published February 7 on Medium, addressed to the National Enquirer’s publisher; there were accusations of extortion and blackmail as well. But the word that incited the most chatter was complexifier, which Bezos used twice:

Here’s a piece of context: My ownership of the Washington Post is a complexifier for me. It’s unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy.

President Trump is one of those people, obvious by his many tweets. Also, The Post’s essential and unrelenting coverage of the murder of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi is undoubtedly unpopular in certain circles.

(Even though The Post is a complexifier for me, I do not at all regret my investment. The Post is a critical institution with a critical mission. My stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life, if I’m lucky enough to live that long, regardless of any complexities it creates for me.)

“It is a real word, just not in English,” wrote the New York Times’s Kevin Granville the following day. He added that it was a French word, which is true; but in French complexifier is a transitive verb, not a noun. It’s also true that complexifier does not (yet) appear in any standard English-language dictionaries, but read on.

Word of the week: Wimp

I never thought I’d say this, but: Mazel tov, Donald J. Trump! You have been officially inducted into the Wimp Hall of Fame.

Good news for George Herbert Walker Bush: As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp ever to serve as President of the United States.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) January 25, 2019

Immigrant-loathing scourge and recurring “Real Time with Bill Maher” guest Ann Coulter was referring, of course, to the president’s agreeing to end the 35-day government shutdown without receiving a single taxpayer dollar for a “beautiful,” “artistically designed” wall on the southern border of the U.S. (the wall that he promised, during his campaign, Mexico would pay for).

Although Trump insisted his cave-in was “in no way a concession,” many of his fellow Republicans begged to differ. A Tea Party founder, Mark Meckler, called Trump’s move “pathetic and disgusting.” Breitbart, the right-wing news outlet, called it a “short-term surrender to the Democrats.”

But the punchy, one-syllable wimp was the epithet that stung – and stuck. It was echoed by Senator Mazie Hirono, Democrat of Hawaii, who called Trump “an amoral, lying person,” and added: “I guess if Ann Coulter yells at him he turns into a wimp.” Ouch!

Wimp even made it into headlines outside the U.S.

 

The Times (UK), January 27, 2019

Words of the year 2018: Fritinancy edition

It’s time to say good riddance to 2018 and to play #WOTY, the word-nerd’s favorite game. The score so far: Dictionary.com has chosen misinformation as its word of the year, with representation, self-made, and backlash) as runners-up; Oxford Dictionaries chose toxic (from a shortlist that included eight other words, one of them a former Fritinancy word of the week, gammon); Collins Dictionary selected single-use (runners-up: VAR, floss, and plogging); and Fresh Air language maven Geoff Nunberg picked nationalist. The Emmett Lee Dickinson Museum, an anonymous internet-based project, has been counting down the month of December with a daily WOTY; contenders so far have included thoughts and prayers, amorality, and, yes, flossing. (It’s a dance, in case you hadn’t known.) UPDATE: Mike Pope has posted his own very comprehensive list, which includes donugs, testilying, and TEDsplaining.

Here are my own candidates for #WOTY18, in alphabetical order.