Fritinancy

Word of the week: Backbencher

It’s been six years since Ben Yagoda first noticed a spike in the U.S. usage of backbencher, a term with a specific meaning in British parliamentary politics – MPs who hold no ministerial or shadow-ministerial offices and therefore are consigned to the back benches of their respective houses – and none in U.S. government, where representatives and senators sit wherever they please on their party-defined sides of the aisle. In December 2015, Ben’s UK counterpart, Lynne Murphy, anointed backbencher the UK-to-US import of the year; one of the nominators said she’d noticed that backbencher was being used in print (and some TV) “to refer to the members of a certain congressional caucus who were first elected in the elections of 2010/2012/2014, and so at this point can't all be referred to as ‘freshmen’, the usual term for first termers.”

Backbenches in Canada’s Parliament, via the very lively Parli, the Dictionary of Canadian Politics. which includes the category “Scandals, Crises, and Bon Mots”

 

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.

Word of the week: Bawbag

Do insults sound funnier with a Scottish inflection? They do to many Americans, and even to Brits. As evidence, I direct you to Saturday’s events in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and the Trump golf properties in Turnberry and Aberdeenshire, where crowds turned out to mock and protest the visit of the American president, whose ties to Caledonia go beyond real estate: his mother was born in the Outer Hebrides and emigrated to the U.S. in 1930.

Some of the epithets sent Americans like me to our Scottish slang dictionaries. Bawbag, for example, has a familiar ring, but what does it really mean?

pic.twitter.com/xI2UshCEAU

— Empirecookie (@Empirecookie) July 14, 2018

 

Welcome to Scotland ya giant tangerine bawbag in a wig#TrumpProtest #ScotlandAgainstTrump #TrumpVisitsUK pic.twitter.com/akaxXb7tjl

— Bigkenny (@bigkenny1975) July 13, 2018

 

Word of the week: Gammon

Another week, another epithet. Last week we had a look at soy boy, although I’d considered shining a spotlight on incel instead. (For an analysis of this insult, a portmanteau of involuntary and celibate, see Ben Zimmer’s essay for Politico.) This week we have another way to dis (white) men, this one instigated by our cousins across the pond: gammon.

Fooled you! Today’s gammon is unrelated to backgammon.

Word of the week: Soy boy

Settle in with a nice tofu sandwich and some edamame as I tell you about soy boy and how it became the insult of choice among alt-right troglodytes – the sort of chuckleheads who call Trump “god emperor.” 

 

Via Reddit/The_Donald. Note pussy hat.

Word of the week: Jabroni

The word may be unfamiliar to you – it was to me, until a few weeks ago – but you undoubtedly know a jabroni or two. We all do. He – it’s always a he – isn’t mean enough to be called a jerk. He’s annoying, but not as obnoxious as a douchebag. He’s not as contemptible as an asshole, an epithet Geoffrey Nunberg defines, in his 2012 book The Ascent of the A-Word, as having at its heart “a culpable obtuseness—about one’s own importance, about the needs of others and the way one is perceived by them.” *

To call someone a jabroni, by contrast, is to mock rather than to condemn. The very sound of jabroni – a coined word with an Italianate flair – evokes ridiculousness and loserdom. Unlike jerk, asshole, and douchebag, the word doesn’t originate in obscenity; it comes instead from the colorful, carnival-influenced world of professional wrestling.

 

Wrestler-turned-actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, credited with popularizing “jabroni.”

Word of the week: Popinjay

The perfectly calibrated insult is a rara avis nowadays – ass- and douche- compounds don’t really count – so when someone resurrects an elegant 16th-century epithet, attention must be paid.

So: Scaramucci will be fine working with Reince. Even if Reince continues to loathe the popinjay.

— Felix Salmon (@felixsalmon) July 22, 2017

The reference is, of course, to the former hedge-fund manager (and former supporter of liberal causes like gun control) Anthony Scaramucci, who last week was appointed White House communications director despite, or because of, having no experience with media or communications other than having granted interviews to reporters. He’s known familiarly, if not always approvingly, as “the Mooch.” “Reince” is White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, formerly the chair of the Republican National Committee.

Anthony Scaramucci, July 21, 2017: “I love the president and I’m very, very loyal to the president.” In 2015 he called Trump a “hack” and a “bully.” Via Business Insider.

 

Popinjay is a wonderful old word and a memorable descriptor for the slick, effusive Scaramucci. For the last 500 years or so it’s meant “a vain, conceited, shallow, talkative person,” although its original definition was neutral and zoological.

Word of the week: Vainglorious

Certain adjectives fit certain public figures so perfectly that they become Homeric epithets. The Anglo-Saxon king Æthelred (966–1016) is known to us commoners as The Unready, a mistranslation of an Old English word meaning “ill advised.” President Obama was frequently tagged with aloof – disregarding his deeply empathetic side, beautifully revealed in this recent New York Times Sunday Magazine article about the Office of Presidential Correspondence. The engine of paranoia, fury, and malign intelligence that drove the 37th U.S. president eventually gave rise to its own adjective: Nixonian.

The current occupant of the White House has spent only a little more than two weeks on the job. Yet already one word is appearing so often in connection with him that it merits close attention: vainglorious.

I have to say, this administration has certainly given the word "vainglorious" a workout.

— Kyrie O'Connor (@KyrieMeMo) February 2, 2017

Word of the week: Mountebank

Mountebank: A charlatan; a seller of quack medicines who attracts customers with stories, jokes, or tricks; a con artist. From Italian monta im banco, one who gets up on a bench (to speak). Pronounced with three syllables.

I’m imagining the members of the New York Times editorial board debating which of several synonyms to use in the lead editorial of September 16, headlined “Donald Trump’s Latest Birther Lie” – “Mr. Trump’s Birther Nonsense” in the print edition – before settling on mountebank.

The midday bulletin arrived as another bizarre moment in the absurdist presidential campaign of Donald Trump: News Alert: Trump admits Obama was born in the United States.

What? It read like some variation on “Trump Finds the Earth No Longer Flat.” But no, Mr. Trump, the ultimate mountebank, was at it again, altering but not abandoning the Big Lie campaign that first made him the darling of wing nuts and racists five years ago: his vicious insistence that President Obama was not born a legitimate American citizen.

(Emphasis added.)