Fritinancy

November linkfest

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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“Permacrisis”

Let the Word of the Year (WoTY) rumpus begin! Collins Dictionary, based in the UK, has already picked a winner: permacrisis, which I’d been unaware of until I read the announcement last week. (Definition: an extended period of instability and insecurity.) Collins is based in the UK, where the word may have greater currency; the British bias would also explain a couple of runners-up, Carolean (“relating to Charles III of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”) and partygate (a reference to former PM Boris Johnson’s flouting of pandemic restrictions).

July linkfest

I’ve been gradually expanding my newsletter diet to include some lighter (but still substantial) fare. A few recommendations:

The Department of Salad, by Emily Nunn, is, yes, about salad and salad lore, but is also just a very chatty, very funny from an excellent writer. If you haven’t made Spicy Cherry Salad (aka Israeli Cherry Salad), you must do so immediately, before cherry season is over for good.

How Not to F*ck Up Your Face, “philosophical and practical advice for anyone who’s ever looked into a mirror,” is written by Valerie Monroe, who was the beauty editor at O magazine for almost 16 years. She’s on an extended stay in Japan right now, and I’ve been enjoying her reporting on the local scene, from Japanese toilets to “love hotels.”

The Unpublishable, by Jessica DeFino, a freelance beauty journalist. Subtitle: “The beauty industry’s least favorite newsletter.” DeFino covers topics like “how the ‘5-minute face’ became the $5,000 face” and why the words “THAT ACTUALLY WORK” are so common in beauty headlines. (It’s because most beauty products don’t work.)

“Potent, powerful skin care that works”? Probably not. (My photo; Walgreens.)

 

All three of these newsletters are published on the Substack platform, which means you can read them for free but paid subscriptions are what keeps the updates coming. 

June linkfest

“Place names and the stories behind them define how we perceive and connect to landscape. But we live in a world populated by places named for colonizers: Libraries, streets and counties across the country bear names like Washington, Jefferson and Jackson, while ‘San’s and ‘Santa’s dot the Southwest, shadowing California’s coast in missionaries’ cloaks. Can we even see the land underneath those names, in all its complexities? And what is the impact on the mind — especially the Indigenous mind — of a lifetime spent repeating colonizers’ names, invoking their stories?” (Brian Oaster for High Country News)

Trilingual sign in southern Colorado. Photo by Orin Hargraves. See my October 2021 Visual Thesaurus column (no paywall!) for more discussion of place names.

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November linkfest

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate, and happy fourth week of November to everyone else.

My book recommendation this month is The Confidence Men, by Margalit Fox, the riveting true story of two British officers’ escape from an “escape-proof” Turkish POW camp—“the Alcatraz of its day,” Fox writes—toward the end of World War I. What makes their story amazing is how they did it: no tunnels, no violence, no weapons except for a homemade Ouija board and the two men’s skill at psychological manipulation.

 

 

I love a prison-escape story, and Fox tells this tale expertly, and Richard Elfyn, the narrator of the audiobook I listened to, rises to the occasion, switching between accents and occasionally reading passages in Welsh. But just as interesting as the escape itself are the conditions that enabled it. In his paywalled review for the New York Review of Books, Neal Ascherson writes:

Persuading people to like something is a trade. Persuading them to change their minds and like something else is a skill. But inducing them to believe in something that their senses and experience tell them is plainly unreal or untrue—unicorns, papal infallibility, Trump’s assertions, ghosts—requires art and almost manic self-confidence. The “confidence men” of Margalit Fox’s title, two British prisoners of war who planned the most eccentric and devious of all escapes, had plenty of both. But Fox puts their story into a broad historical setting, using it to illustrate the ways in which scientific inventions made possible not only empowerment but also credulity and manipulation.

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June linkfest

“Controversial terms, from ‘abortion’ to ‘Zionism,’ tend to shut down dialog because they mean different things to different people.” The AllSides Red Blue Dictionary defines these hot-button terms across the political spectrum: “Until we fully understand what a term means to someone else, we don't know the issue and can't effectively communicate.”

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I’m enjoying (and learning from) the short essays Susan Orlean publishes on Medium, especially her stories about  the writing craft. Here she is on beginnings and on endings.

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After a four-month hiatus I’m back on Medium myself with some reflections on fifteen years of blogging. (And here’s your annoying-but-obligatory reminder that Medium contributors earn money from their stories only if enough people “clap” for them, and that up to 50 claps per story are allowable, nay, encouraged.)

April linkfest

Journalist, novelist, and author Kurt Andersen (Spy magazine, Fantasyland, Evil Geniuses) wrote about “how an article about genomic sequencing led to an afternoon playing around with AI branding tools.” The names and logos these tools spat out—Dynester, Aerodynamiq, ModernZeal—led Andersen to muse about how real life is increasingly indistinguishable from science fiction.

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Speaking of science fiction, here’s a list of fictional super-metals, from Adamantium to Zortium.

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If you’re a fan of the New York Times Spelling Bee, you’ll want to try Tylogram, a new word-formation game created by William Shunn, the genius behind Spelling Bee Solver. As with the Bee, you’ll create words for points; slide the tiles around the grid to maximize their value. But it’s even trickier than that! (And fun.)

 

March linkfest

On March 13, 2020, Merriam-Webster editor Peter Sokolowski noticed that all of the dictionary’s lookups were pandemic related: coronavirus, quarantine, draconian, lockdown, cancel. For the somber one-year anniversary this month, WGBH looked at how the pandemic has transformed the English language, and whether its impact will endure:

Will people five years from now still say they are “zooming” when they conduct a video meeting online? Will slang terms like “doomscrolling” and “covidiot” make their way into wider use or be little-known relics from a brief moment in time? Will “COVID-19,” in all-caps, be the preferred styling? Or will it be overtaken by “Covid-19,” in lowercase, a styling many news organizations have started using?

(My most recent #coronacoinages post is here.)

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January linkfest

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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August linkfest

I’ve been reading some excellent books—more about them soon—but right now I want to tell you about a couple of interesting podcasts for language lovers.

• Word Matters is “a show for readers, writers, and anyone who ever loved their English class”; it’s hosted by four Merriam-Webster lexicographers: Emily Brewster, Neil Serven, Ammon Shea, and Peter Sokolowski. Episodes have tackled singular kudo, the pronunciation of antennae, and everyone’s favorite bugaboo, irregardless (which is definitely “a word” even though my editing software red-squigglies it. Yes, “red-squigglies” is also a word. Because I said so, that’s why.)
• Science Diction is “a bite-sized podcast about words—and the science stories behind them,” brought to you by the folks at NPR’s “Science Friday” and hosted by Johanna Meyer. Did you know that restaurant originally meant “a medicinal soup”? Do you know “the linguistic reason why ‘Rocky Road’ sounds so dang delicious”? How about the connection between cobalt and German folklore? Lots more like that, too.

The kobold. (Source)