Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Precariat

Precariat: “People whose lives are precarious because they have little or no job security.” (Source: Word Spy.) A portmanteau of precarious and proletariat.

Precariat was first used in Europe in the late 1980s to describe “predominantly nonunionized clerical and service employees, the partially employed, and the unemployed” (Socialist Review: Volume 20). In 2011, the British economist Guy Standing (his actual title: professor of economic security at the University of Bath, England) made it the subject of his book The Precariat: The Dangerous New Class. In the first chapter, Standing describes the growth of the precariat as a result of globalization:

Millions of people, in affluent and emerging market economies, entered the precariat, a new phenomenon even if it had shades of the past. The precariat was not part of the ‘working class’ or the ‘proletariat’. The latter terms suggest a society consisting mostly of workers in long-term, stable, fixed-hour jobs with established routes of advancement, subject to unionisation and collective agreements, with job titles their fathers and mothers would have understood, facing local employers whose names and features they were familiar with.

The term has crossed the Atlantic. New York Times columnist David Brooks used it in a February 11, 2014, op-ed:

Thirty years ago, a vast majority of Americans identified as members of the middle class. But since 1988, the percentage of Americans who call themselves members of the “have-nots” has doubled. Today’s young people are more likely to believe success is a matter of luck, not effort, than earlier generations.

These pessimistic views bring to mind a concept that’s been floating around Europe: the Precariat. According to the British academic Guy Standing, the Precariat is the growing class of people living with short-term and part-time work with precarious living standards and “without a narrative of occupational development.” They live with multiple forms of insecurity and are liable to join protest movements across the political spectrum.

One of precariat’s source words, “precarious,” entered the English lexicon around 1640, when it was a legal term meaning “held or enjoyed by the favor of and at the pleasure of another person.” A French Catholic monk, Léonce Crenier (1888-1963), promoted a theological concept he called “precarity”—a condition of existence without predicability; the term was adopted in the early 1950s by the American Catholic activist Dorothy Day.

Proletariat was back-formed from proletarian—“a member of the lowest class” (the meaning of proletarius in Latin)—which had entered English in the mid-17th century. Proletariat took another 200 years to appear; in 1856, it came to mean “indigent wage earners.” Karl Marx used it to describe wage-earners whose only source of wealth is their labor.

The precariat has a patron saint, San Precario, created in February 2004 by Italian “post-socialists.” The feast day of San Precario is February 29.

Effigy of San Precario, 2006 EuroMayDay parade.

 

December Linkfest

A new language quarterly, aptly called Babel, brings linguistics to a general audience without dumbing down the subject. Published at the University of Huddersfield (UK), the magazine covers “issues relating to many different human languages” – and some non-human ones, including, in the first issue, Venusian. I’m already looking forward to the second issue, which will include an article about “the secret linguistic history of brand names.”

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At Word Routes, Ben Zimmer recaps the year in words and picks his word of the year. (Surprise – it isn’t fiscal cliff.) I published my own list earlier this week.

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Do not ask science-fiction author John Scalzi to write for free. No, really – don’t even think about it.

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In the 1920s, when TV was still in its infancy, retailers used fake television broadcasts to trick customers into entering stores. Smithsonian magazine’s Paleofuture blog explains how it was done. 

Faked TV demonstration from 1926, via Smithsonian.

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From caucus to urbane: the words that spiked each week this year in look-ups at Merriam-Webster online.

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Catalog love: Your L.L. Bean Boyfriend. He’ll “build you a table and then have sex with you on it.” (Via Girls of a Certain Age.)

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From Jen Doll at The Atlantic Wire, the best (worst) typos, mistakes, and correrctions [sic] of 2012.

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Holly Buchanan of Marketing to Women Online picks the  commercials that did the best job of marketing women in 2012. She has strict criteria:

In order to pass The Buchanan Test a commercial must do three things. It must feature women who:

1. Are outside of the home
2. Are in a role other than that of "mother"
3. Are NOT doing yoga

(For comparison, see Bechdel Test.)

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“So it looks like the New Orleans Hornets are going to change their name to become the Pelicans.” A defense of the new team name by Barry Petchesky at Deadspin. (Naughty language advisory.)

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From my favorite info-viz site, Muckety (“Mapping the paths of power and influence”): The Trump Fund for the Gutting of Red Herrings and other think tanks we’d like to see in 2013.

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I grew up in Los Angeles and always wondered why the Ralphs supermarket chain didn’t have an apostrophe in its name. Now, thanks to Los Angeles magazine, I know: the business was founded (in 1873, at Fifth and Hill streets) by George Ralphs.

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“Twitter is a machine for continual self-reinvention”: Matt Haughey on why he loves Twitter and hates Facebook.

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Something to play with while you’re waiting in line to see The Hobbit, which opens in theaters today: the hobbit name generator and the Elvish name generator. (Via @Wordnik.)

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Like it or not, the “fiscal cliff” metaphor is here to stay. Linguist George Lakoff explains why.

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“I sculpt baby names from love, from hatred, from the reality of this hellhole of a world that you’re forcing an innocent life to endure.” Bob Powers, artisanal baby namer, at McSweeney’s. Yes, he jests. Mostly. (Via Karen Wise.)

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Over at The Atlantic, sociology professor Philip Cohen asks: Why don’t parents name their daughters Mary anymore? (Also via Karen Wise.)

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From Copyranter: The best men’s underwear commercial ever.

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According to Helen Sword, author of a column for the New York Times and creator of something called the Writer’sDiet test, a “zombie noun” is any noun (proliferation, formation, indication) that “cannibalizes” a verb. Now linguistics grad student Josef Fruehwald, blogging at Val Systems, delivers an incisive counterpoint. “Ain’t nothing like exploiting the collective dysmorphia of a nation to push your quarter-baked usage decrees,” says he.

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Via the brilliant Maria Popova at Brain Pickings: Alice in Wonderland as a subway map.

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And to all a good night.

Words of the Year 2012: Fritinancy Edition

Politics and economics made 2012 a target-rich environment for us word-of-the-year trackers. Republican presidential-primary candidate Rick Santorum alone gave us blah, guillotine, snob, and non-faith. (Santorum’s surname has achieved its own scandalous notoriety.) From the Mitt Romney campaign we picked up tithing, retroactively, wazzock, Romneyshambles, and binders. Vice President Joe Biden made malarkey memorable, President Obama spoke sharply of bayonets, and the Republican convention spawned Eastwooding, from actor Clint Eastwood’s surreal dialogue with an empty chair.

Meanwhile, we struggled to remember the fiscal definition of sequestration – not to be confused with jury sequestration – and marveled at all the people looking up socialism and capitalism in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. We shopped for tribal prints and smoking slippers and earnestly practiced chewdaism. We worried about the Rampture and distracted ourselves by GIF-ing compulsively. “YOLO,” we said, shrugging.

But enough runners-up. My list of 14 WOTY nominees follows the jump. I limited my list to U.S. usages, and I adhered to the American Dialect Society’s criteria for selection, which stipulate that nominees be:

• demonstrably new or newly popular in 2012
• widely and/or prominently used in 2012
• indicative or reflective of the popular discourse

In addition, a nominated word can’t be “a peeve or complaint about overuse or misuse.”

In alphabetical order, then:

 

Word of the Week: Kabuki Dance

Kabuki dance: Political posturing; a performance that’s all style, no substance. Sometimes seen as Kabuki theater. “Kabuki” may be capitalized or lower case.

This sense of kabuki dance is found primarily in the U.S. It’s come up in coverage of the Congressional budget impasse (aka the fiscal cliff); the image of “dancing on a cliff” seems to be irresistible to reporters and pundits:

There will be a Kabuki dance when everyone comes to the White House next week for a meeting on the fiscal cliff. – Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post, November 9, 2012

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“Bloomberg’s Al Hunt discusses the dangerous fiscal-cliff kabuki dance.” (Video, November 14, 2012)

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“We go through this little kabuki dance every time the debt ceiling comes around,” [Bill] Frezza said. – Newsmax, November 30, 2012

 

The Japanese popular-theater form Kabuki literally means “art of song and dance”; the word Kabuki was adopted into English in the late 19th century during a flurry of Western interest in Japanese culture. (See, for example, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado.) It became more widespread in English-speaking countries after World War II, when Japanese theater companies toured the West.

To a culturally aware Japanese audience, traditional Kabuki is anything but empty posturing: every gesture is, on the contrary, packed with significance. “The quintessential Kabuki moment (known as a kata) is colorful and ruthlessly concise, packing meaning into a single gesture,” wrote Jon Lackman in an April 2010 article for Slate, “It’s Time to Retire Kabuki”:

It is synecdoche, synopsis, and metaphor rolled together—as when, in one Kabuki play, a gardener expecting a visit from the emperor cuts down all his chrysanthemums except one, the perfect one. And in contrast with our own shortsighted politics, Kabuki concerns not the present so much as a “dreamlike time shrouded in mist but ever present in the subconscious,” to quote critic Shuichi Kato.

But in American political jargon, the opposite holds true: Kabuki is always derogatory and condescending, connoting a lot of huffing and puffing without results. Lackman traces this meaning back to a 1961 article in the Los Angeles Times about a State Department plan to revise its security measures. “[By] finally dismissing Chester Bowles as undersecretary of state at the moment he did, the President unhitched the plan’s kingpin in this shoddy piece of left-wing kabuki,” wrote Henry J. Taylor.

(Lackman doesn’t mention it, but Taylor had served as US ambassador to Switzerland in the Eisenhower administration; in 1961 he was beginning a 20-year stint as columnist for the United Feature Syndicate.)

“Six months later, Taylor struck again,” Lackman writes. The quote: “Agriculture Secretary Freeman announced he has discussed Billie Sol Estes’ political corruption kabuki with Robert F. Kennedy and ‘had mentioned it informally to the president’.”

(Did you know that Billie Sol Estes is still alive and a free man?)

Lackman notes that kabuki usage increases “whenever Japan is in the news for disingenuous behavior” and “whenever fakery seems particularly rife in American politics.” He cites a July 2009 Wall Street Journal article headlined “The Supreme Court Kabuki Dance.”

Why do reporters and pundits relish kabuki? Lackman suggests it’s because “they and everyone else have only a hazy idea of the word’s true meaning.” Moreover:

1) It sounds funny.
2) It sounds childish.
3) It sounds foreign.
4) It sounds incomprehensible. …
5) It sounds Japanese.

And for a 400-year-old word, it also sounds trendy. As baby-name maven Laura Wattenberg has observed: “If any letter defines modern American name style, K is it."

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Hat tip: MJF

November Linkfest

The leaves are falling, the turkey’s defrosting: It must be time for the first Word of the Year 2012 announcement! Oxford Dictionaries, the traditional early bird, picked one WOTY for the US, GIF (the verb), and one for the UK, omnishambles. For background on omnishambles—which made a brief appearance in the US this year as well—see my post on “wazzock.” And for background on how Oxford chose GIF, see this hilariously be-GIFed blog post. 

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Turducken: chicken stuffed inside duck stuffed inside turkey. Cherpumple: cherry, pumpkin, and apple pies stuffed inside cake. Now online dictionary Wordnik invites readers to invent a new Thanksgiving-related Franken-word (portmanteau). “It could be a (horrific) new food, a feeling, or a phenomenon. The only rules are that they combine two or more words, and that they have to do with turkey-day.” Tweet your nominations with the hashtag #turkeyword.

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This one goes out to all you graphic designers and creative directors: horrible client feedback turned into hilarious works of art. (Full gallery at SharpSuits.net.)

“I’ll know what I want when I see it.” – Clients everywhere

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Astronomy and space startup Uwingu – that’s oo-WING-oo, the Swahili word for “sky” – is building “a baby book of names” for newly discovered planets. For 99 cents per nomination, you can submit a name to the database; for another 99 cents, you can vote for your favorite name on the list. The money goes to a good cause, of course. According to the Bad Astronomy blog, “The folks in charge are professional astronomers and space scientists at the tops of their fields, people like Alan Stern and Pamela Gay.”

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Cast your vote for the name of the year at Baby Name Wizard. The NOTY “isn't necessarily the most popular baby name,” writes BNW’s Laura Wattenberg. “It’s a name that changed during the course of the year, and points to more changes around us. It’s a one-name time capsule that reminds us of how names are woven into our lives, connecting to and reflecting everything that goes on in our culture.” The 2011 winner was Siri.

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Do we need a new name for the fiscal cliff? The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein proposes “austerity crisis”; his readers have their own suggestions, including Policy Meltdown, Lemmings Moment, Fiscal Spliff, and Mole Hill. (What’s the fiscal cliff, you ask? Here you go.)

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Corporate tagline or university motto? Take the quiz (it’s tougher than you’d think).

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Minor hockey (not to be confused with minor-league hockey) is divided into narrow age ranges, and the names for those ranges vary wildly and whimsically around the world. In Canada the 9-10 age group is called “Atom”; in France the 10-11 group is called Poussins (“young chickens”). More minor hockey lore at (where else?) Wikipedia. Hat tip: Bruce Fulton.

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Remember Cuil, the search engine that was supposed to be a Google-killer? It died in 2011, possibly of pronunciation failure. “You might think that making a pronounceable name is a no brainer,” writes Andrew Hennigan on his blog about communications, “but there are actually several separate issues you need to think about, and Cuil got all three wrong.” (Hat tip: FussFactory.)

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Green-suiter, Yuk, 2% Club and other West Point slang: a lexicon.

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What does the “signature” mean in “signature burrito”? Lexicographer Orin Hargraves, writing for the Macmillan Dictionary blog, says “signature” has been “so diluted by modern usage as to become meaningless.”

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Speaking of meaningless, William Germano has had it with passion. He writes in Lingua Franca: “In its new, overexposed phase, passion has come to mean something else. I’d hazard the definition ‘an outsized, all-consuming enthusiasm that leads to achievement.’ That seems to be where passion is drifting in our outcome-driven society: It’s become a word signifying the precondition of success.” I’ve written about passion overload a number of times myself, starting with a 2006 post, “Our Passion Is Your Problem.”

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The Romney campaign named its (badly botched) get-out-the-vote program Project ORCA, but why? Language Log’s Mark Liberman goes fishing: “It would be a little weird, in my opinion, to name a GOTV program after a boat used to hunt a fictional monster shark. Clearly the shark would be Obama, or perhaps Obama’s appeal — but in that metaphor, where are the Romney voters?”

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After Hurricane Sandy struck, New York City gained a new neighborhood: SoPo, for “South of Power.” As The Atlantic Wire’s Jen Doll tells it, “New York City has a history with this sort of name.” (Hat tip: @nextmoon.)

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From the public-radio show A Way With Words, hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette, here’s an excellent list of reference resources for writers and word lovers. A good place to start your holiday shopping!

Nail-omics

This week has brought sightings of Ryanomics and Zombie Reaganomics. It also brought this:

 

Stylenomics, a new nail color from Essie, is “a wealthy, rich and opulent dark green.” It’s featured in a full-page ad in the mammoth September issue of Vogue.

I last wrote about Essie’s fanciful color names in May 2011. The current season’s palette includes Recessionista, No Place Like Chrome, and Don’t Sweater It.

I wrote about the very productive (and brandable) -omics suffix—Freakonomics, Geckonomics, Vespanomics, et al.—in April 2011. Since then, I’ve learned about someone even more obsessed with omics than I am: Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist who teaches at UC Davis. The omics suffix is “a language parasite,” Eisen told the Wall Street Journal last week. (A chart accompanying the article is titled “Increasingomics.”) In his blog, The Tree of Life, Eisen documents the “bad omics word of the day”; past honorees have included culturomics, museomics, circomics, and circadiomics. Eisen’s Twitter handle, by the way, is @phylogenomics.

UPDATE: Read Ben Zimmer’s Word Routes column about the distinction between omics and nomics.

Word of the Week: Dunning-Kruger Effect

Dunning-Kruger Effect: A cognitive bias that causes unskilled people to mistakenly rate their ability as much higher than average. As Charles Darwin wrote in 1871 in The Descent of Man: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

The effect is named for David Dunning and Justin Kruger, social psychologists at Cornell University, who co-authored  “Unskilled and Unaware of It,” published in the December 1999 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

From the abstract:

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. … Paradoxically, improving the skills of the participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

Dunning got the idea to do this research from a news item he wrote read about a bank robber who believed that rubbing lemon juice on his face would render him invisible to surveillance cameras. (At least, that’s what he told the cops after his arrest.)

For their work in this area, Dunning and Kruger were awarded the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in psychology. The Ig Nobel Prizes have been presented each year since 1991 “to honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.”

The Dunning-Kruger effect is occasionally invoked in political contexts. (“Dunning-Kruger Sarah Palin” yields many examples.) The term came up just last week in the New York Times blog of economist Paul Krugman, in which Krugman discussed the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center’s report on presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s tax plan. He concluded that the plan was “a Dooh Nibor—that is, a reverse Robin Hood.” The Romney campaign, Krugman wrote in an update, “responded with deep voodoo, invoking the supposed fabulous growth effects from his tax cuts.”

That provoked a comment from “Doug”:

I’m becoming more and more convinced that, not only can the average Tea Partier not understand any of the math that goes into budget analysis, they deny that anybody ELSE can either -- even (especially?) experts with advanced degrees like Dr. K. These people really, honestly believe that math DOESN’T WORK; that nobody can know just how ridiculous Romney's numbers are. They assume we’re just being as politically motivated and as ignorant as they are themselves. …

It’s the Dunning Kruger effect, pure and simple. They assume, since the numbers have no meaning to them, that the numbers simply have no meaning at all. No amount of cogent analysis is ever going to pierce that veil.

(Emphasis added.)

Errol Morris, the documentary filmmaker, interviewed David Dunning in 2010 for a New York Times Opinionator blog post about anosognosia, the condition of being unaware of one’s own disability. Dunning said he’d been interested in former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s famous “unknown unknowns” quote, delivered in a 2002 NATO press conference. Dunning told Morris:

Put simply, people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of. In that way, ignorance profoundly channels the course we take in life. And unknown unknowns constitute a grand swath of everybody’s field of ignorance.

Previous posts about eponymous effects: Streisand effect, Bradley effect, and a slew of others.

Word of the Week: Dark Money

Dark money: Pools of unregulated political contributions whose sources and fundraisers are anonymous (“dark”).

“Dark money” is a new twist on “soft money”—unrestricted political contributions used by political parties to elect candidates. (“Hard money,” by contrast, is regulated by the Federal Election Commission and limited to $5,000 per year per contributor.) This sense of “soft money” has been around since at least the early 1990s. The first usage I found of “dark money” is in an October 2010 report by the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to government transparency. The report, “Follow the Dark Money,” was published just before the midterm elections. It asserted in its first paragraph:

As much as $110 million has been pumped into the elections so far by political groups that have yet to disclose their donors, reports submitted to the Federal Election Commission show, and this “dark money” from unknown contributors has impacted 168 congressional races across the country.

That money flood was the direct consequence of a pair of 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decisions—Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission—that rewrote campaign-finance law to allow unlimited contributions from individuals, unions, and corporations as long as those expenditures were “independent” (not directly connected to a candidate or party).

The majority opinion in Citizens United stressed the importance of “prompt disclosure of expenditures” to “provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters.” In practice, however, disclosure has been notably absent.

Mother Jones, the nonprofit investigative magazine familiarly called MoJo, picked up the “dark money” tag in 2011 and in April 2012 turned it into a regular beat covered by reporter Andy Kroll. Another reporter, Gavin Aronsen, writes the “This Week in Dark Money” post for the magazine’s Political Mojo blog. Mother Jones has devoted two issues, including the current one, to the dark-money theme.

 

Mother Jones, July-August 2012, page 17.

 

MoJo’s co-editors, Clara Jeffery and Monika Bauerlein, talked about dark money in a recent interview with Bill Moyers. At about 3:58, Moyers asked about the origins of “dark money.”

Moyers: What were you after there? Why that term?

Jeffery: We were searching around for a metaphor, and we had some celestial inspiration, as it were. Because like dark matter, which is something that’s in the universe and we know is very powerful but we don’t really understand it and we can’t really see it and we’re only beginning to be able to measure it– that’s true of dark money. Especially since Citizens United, there’s just so much unregulated, undisclosed money flowing through SuperPACs and their 501cs. To paraphrase [Arizona Senator] John McCain, very often we don’t know where the money’s coming from, who it’s going to, what its purpose is—it’s just out there. We can see the effects of it later, but we don’t know in anything close to real time what’s being raised and spent.

Dark money is “two-thirds to three-quarters Republican,” Bauerlein told Moyers. “Both sides can play this game,” she said, “but Republicans have an inherent advantage in that their natural constituency has a lot more money.”

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For more on 2012 campaign lingo, see my Visual Thesaurus columns published May 16 and May 23. 

Word of the Week: Wantologist

Wantologist: A coach who sells his or her assistance to people unclear about what they want. A blend of want and -ologist (“specialist”). Derived from Want-ology, a trademark registered in 2008 to Dr. Kevin B. Kreitman, “cybernetician & Renaissance woman.” (“That’s Kevin—just like the man’s name. And yes, I am female.”)

Here’s how the Want-ology website explains it:

To get what you really want, you have to know what you really want. Feel really secure that your dream job won't trap you in a nightmare. And feel confident that you can avoid jumping “out of the frying pan into the fire” when you decide to go for it.

Want-ology^TM is the fundamental course that will focus you on what you truly want in a way that will enable you to make your dreams come true.

In a new book, The Outsourced Life: Intimate Life in Market Times, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild examines wantologists and their kin: dating coaches, wedding planners, Rent-a-Grandmas, photo-album assemblers, nameologists (who will name your baby for a fee), and so on. This passage comes from an excerpt published in yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Review:

After a 20-year career as a psychologist, Ms. [Katherine] Ziegler expanded her practice to include executive coaching, life coaching and wantology. Originally intended to help business managers make purchasing decisions, wantology is the brainchild of Kevin Kreitman, an industrial engineer who set up a two-day class to train life coaches to apply this method to individuals in private life. Ms. Ziegler took the course and was promptly certified in the new field.

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Ms. Ziegler explains that the first step in thinking about a “want,” is to ask your client, “ ‘Are you floating or navigating toward your goal?’ A lot of people float. Then you ask, ‘What do you want to feel like once you have what you want?’ ”

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Ms. Ziegler provided a service — albeit one with a wacky name — for a fee. Still, the mere existence of a paid wantologist indicates just how far the market has penetrated our intimate lives. Can it be that we are no longer confident to identify even our most ordinary desires without a professional to guide us?

Hochschild wonders whether wantology represents “the tail end of a larger story”:

Consider some recent shifts in language. Care of family and friends is increasingly referred to as “lay care.” The act of meeting a romantic partner at a flesh-and-blood gathering rather than online is disparaged by some dating coaches as “dating in the wild.”

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The very ease with which we reach for market services may help prevent us from noticing the remarkable degree to which the market has come to dominate our very ideas about what can or should be for sale or rent, and who should be included in the dramatic cast — buyers, branders, sellers — that we imagine as part of our personal life. It may even prevent us from noticing how we devalue what we don’t or can’t buy.

Hochschild is not the only author asking these questions. Michael J. Sandel, a professor of government at Harvard, has just published What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, which is also about what money can buy—a prison-cell upgrade and the right to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, to name just two examples. An excerpt from Sandel’s book appeared in the April issue of the Atlantic.

Word of the Week: Uppertendom

Uppertendom: The upper classes; the richest people in a city. From “upper ten thousand.”

This excellent word was coined in the 1840s, but I discovered it only recently in Speaking American: A History of English in the United States, Richard W. Bailey’s account of American English from 1600 through 2000. In the middle of the 19th century, Bailey writes, slang “rose into the usage of New York’s upperten—a shortened form of uppertendom—for the richest ten thousand citizens.”

 

The New-York Daily Times, June 1, 1853.

 

According to the OED, upperten came first, in 1846 (“Major Peyton Florence was held in great reverence by the ‘upper ten’”—A. J. H. Duganne, Daguerreotype Miniature). Uppertendom (originally spelled Upper Ten-dom) first appeared in print in 1848. The journalist and humorist Mortimer Johnson, who used the pseudonym Q. K. P. Doesticks*, took it one step further in a piece published in an 1855 collection: “I did go to a ball for the benefit of the poor—a two-dollar commingling of upper-tendom with lower-twentydom.”

The OED’s final citation for uppertendom is dated 1887. I say it’s time for a revival. Uppertendom is more accurate than “the 1 percent”—the greatest wealth in the United States is concentrated in the top tenth of 1 percent—and it’s more fun to say.

A few additional tidbits from Speaking American:

• Clout, in the political sense, originated in Chicago in the early years of the 20th century.
• Language purists who deplore contemporary clippings like “totes” (for totally) and “adorbs” (adorable) may cease their whining when they learn that “sucesh” was a popular abbreviation for “secessionist” before the Civil War.
• “Alaska divorce” definition: “liberating oneself from marriage by murdering the spouse.”

For more, read John McWhorter’s review of Speaking American in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. It contains this delightful sentence: “Bailey ventures peculiar conclusions that may be traceable to his having died last year, before he had the chance to polish his text.” Editing’s a little slapdash, too: I caught one instance of “flower” that should have been “flour.” But don’t let that keep you from reading the book.

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* “Q.K.” stood for “Queer Kritter.” Not unlike our current era, the mid-1800s were a boom time for playful spellings and abbreviations, the most famous of which remains “OK,” shortened from “oll korrect.” I wrote about the history of “OK” here.