During the last month or so I’ve tracked more than a dozen stories about San Francisco’s retail “doom loop,” and spotted many others stories about other doom loops—in climate, banking, politics, procrastination—elsewhere in the US and the rest of the world.
Top four “doom loop” stories in Google News, May 13, 2023
The word often paired with “doom loop” is “spiral.” Sometimes the term is “death spiral”—and the editors are not referring to figure skating.
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If I asked you for a word that’s the opposite of wealth, you’d probably say poverty. But wealth has another antonym that’s both more obscure and a more perfect etymological parallel: illth.
Illth was coined by the English writer and critic John Ruskin in Unto This Last, a critique of political economy published in 1860. Ruskin put the word between quotation marks toward the end of a nearly 200-word sentence that begins with a long description of wealth and slides into a parenthetical comment that “we ought to have a correspondent term.” Illth it is.
John Ruskin (1819-1900), via the Ruskin Museum
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I’d never encountered the term drip pricing before last week, but I’m familiar withwhat it describes, and you may be, too.
Here’s how Los Angeles Times business columnist David Lazarus defines it: “a stealth price hike in the form of an added fee, rather than … a list price that reflects actual business costs.” In other word, the fees are dripped into the cost, one by one, and after the transaction is complete. Drip pricing is typically found in the travel and hospitality industries—see, for example, “resort fees” at hotels that are not in any way “resorts.”
Drip, drip, drip
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The economic downturn that followed the 2008 financial crisis became known as a mancession: a recession that disproportionately affected men. (I wrote about it in August 2009.) The COVID-19 recession, by contrast, is having a disproportionate impact on women, but no one’s calling it a womancession.
“‘Shecession’ hits women’s finances”: Los Angeles Times, May 9, 2021, Page A1
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In a few weeks, members of the American Dialect Society (and of the word-loving public) will gather in New Orleans and vote on the words of the year and the decade. Ten years ago, the American Dialect Society picked google as its overall winner; my own list back then included blog, Ground Zero, terrorism, and PTSD.
New decade, new list. As before, I’m following ADS criteria. To qualify for my list, a word must be:
I confess a bias toward my interests in technology, business, and social media (just as the ADS has a bias toward words of specifically linguistic interest).
I welcome your own nominations in the comments. You can also submit words of the year and decade to ADS: [email protected].
As for WOTY, I’ll post my own nominations soon—see last year’s list here—and have already posted my choices for brand names of the decade.
Continue reading "Words of the decade 2010–2019: Fritinancy edition" »
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I’ve known, and written about, HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), Turkers (people who perform HITs), the sharing economy (exemplified by Uber and Airbnb), and the precariat (“people whose lives are precarious because they have little or no job security”) for years now. What I hadn’t known was the word that’s often used to describe workers in the “global gig economy”: the human cloud.
Part-time data entry, done by residents of places such as Kibera, Kenya, is “arguably the fastest-growing part of the global gig economy, known as the human cloud.” Source
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NEET: Acronym for “Not in Education, Employment or Training” – or, as Wall Street Journal contributor Nicholas Eberstadt put it in a September 1 op-ed, “Neither Employed nor in Education or Training”:
Labor Day is an appropriate moment to reflect on a quiet catastrophe: the collapse, over two generations, of work for American men. During the past half-century, work rates for U.S. males spiraled relentlessly downward. America is now home to a vast army of jobless men who are no longer even looking for work—roughly seven million of them age 25 to 54, the traditional prime of working life. … What do unworking men do with their free time? Sadly, not much that’s constructive. About a tenth are students trying to improve their circumstances. But the overwhelming majority are what the British call NEET: “neither employed nor in education or training.”
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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:
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.
Continue reading "Words of the Year 2015: Fritinancy Edition" »
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My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at the term “sharing economy” and the evolution of share from Old English—where it was a noun meaning “a cutting” or “a shearing”—to its use as a verb in 12-step meetings and beyond.
Access is free this month! Here’s an excerpt I’m pleased to share:
These activities—“ride booking,” chore marketplaces, textbook lending, short-term lodging rentals—have become known collectively as the sharing economy. The sharing economy is a growing sector of the U.S. and global economy as a whole, and its name represents the latest twist in the evolution of share, a word that’s practically inescapable in the social-media-dominated 21st century. Share appears in company names (SlideShare, ShareThis, Shareable, City CarShare) and product names (Sharewhat, Leafshare, Authentishare, ScholarShare); in advertising campaigns (“Share a Coke,” the 2014 program credited with reversing the soft-drink manufacturer’s decade-long decline in sales) and website prompts (“Share on Facebook,” “Share your thoughts”). It has even inspired at least one new word blend: sharewashing (softening the capitalistic edges of an enterprise by calling its activities “sharing”).
Read the rest of “Thanks for Sharing.”
Blog bonus, courtesy of the Care Bears:
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The main headline in the business section of Sunday’s New York Times was “When Cannabis Goes Corporate”; the story centered on Tweed Marijuana, one of 20 companies officially licensed to grow marijuana in Canada.
Tweed Marijuana logo. Lovely typeface.
There are no precise equivalents to Tweed outside Canada, where marijuana cultivation and sale are federally regulated.* But even without direct comparison, the Tweed name stands out as multilayered and highly distinctive.
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