There were 40 accepted words in the solution to the March 5 New York Times Spelling Bee, and one of them was galoot.
Was it a coincidence that on that very day two contributors to the American Dialect Society listserv discussed the origins of this word?
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For my June Visual Thesaurus column, “Clean Language,” I take a deep dive into three familiar words—words I see regularly in the Dolphin Club locker room, where I spend time before and after swimming in San Francisco Bay. The three words are TOILET, SHOWER, and SAUNA, and they tell interesting (even surprising) stories about the history of the English language.
Full access to the column is paywalled for three months. Here’s an excerpt:
Continue reading "On the Visual Thesaurus: Locker-room talk" »
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One of my favorite word-of-the-year contests is also one of the less widely publicized: the one conducted by Paul Anthony Jones, proprietor of the Haggard Hawks blog and social-media accounts. The winner of this special honor must be “a suitably obscure term, pulled from one of the dustier corners of the dictionary, that somehow sums up the last twelve months.” In 2020 that word was respair—“renewed hope after a period of despair”—which I wrote about in December of that year. The 2021 winner, chosen by popular vote, is more downbeat: overmused, an adjective that means “worn out from thinking too much.”
Image from “The Trap of Overthinking,” Executive Support magazine.
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“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.)
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Around midday last Monday I got an urgent call from my friend C.J.: “Come across the street right away! You’ve got to see this!” I know better than to disobey C.J., so I asked no questions, just shoved my feet into some sandals, grabbed my keys and phone, and dashed out my front door. In the driveway of the house directly opposite mine—a house I’d never once entered during the six and a half years I’ve lived on this street—was a Honda with with a hand-lettered sign taped to its rear window.
“Corpse flower (Amorphophallus titanum) UP DRIVEWAY – Thru Gate. Viewing ===>”
A corpse flower! This was definitely going to be good.
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I thought I knew quite a bit about Amazon. I have, after all, been a customer since September 1997. (My first order: The Cynic’s Dictionary and Idiom Savant: Slang as It Is Slung.) I’ve written about the company and its brands (see here and here, for example). I’ve read two books about the company: Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America (2021) and Brad Stone’s The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2014)*.
But I’ve never worked for Amazon, which may explain my not knowing that the company had a mascot called Peccy.
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Most naming advice in the popular media makes me clutch my head in despair, but this Inc. article by Minda Zetlin is different. Zetlin interviewed experienced name developers Anthony Shore and David Placek—both of whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with—and their real-world examples are smart and helpful. “Avoid names that describe your product” and “Don’t fall in love with one name” are the first tips, and yes, you’ve heard them from me, too. (h/t trademark lawyer Ed Timberlake)
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Steer clear of negative words in your business name? Not necessarily. Read about how Calamityware got its name. (And read my own post on negative names with positive impact.)
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I will probably go to my grave insisting on the distinction between lay and lie, so I got a satisfied chortle out of this table of cat tenses, from a Duolingo chat page. (Via Language Log)
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“I’m tired of talking about Trump,” President Joe Biden said at a CNN town hall meeting in Milwaukee on February 16. “You had the former guy saying that, ‘Well, you know, we’re just going to open things up and that’s all we need to do.’ We said no, you’ve got to deal with the disease before you deal with getting the economy going.”
“The former guy”—not “my predecessor,” not “the 45th president”—is the sort of expression we’ve come to expect from the current guy. Joe Biden is the guy, after all, who’s known for chump and malarkey and C’mon, man, and this is a big fucking deal—folksy, no-BS Joe from Scranton, PA. The former guy: as though he couldn’t be troubled to dredge up the name.
Within 24 hours, New York Times columnist Gail Collins had seized on the dismissive epithet. “I’ve got to say I loved it when Joe Biden described Donald Trump as ‘the former guy,’” she wrote on February 17:
This was at a CNN town hall, and Biden was pursuing his goal of changing the subject from … his predecessor. Part of the strategy seems to be avoiding his actual name.
Excellent agenda. Sitting in disgraced, double-impeached political purgatory, Trump has been trying to retrain the world to refer to him as “the 45th president” during his unwelcome retirement. (If you are lucky enough to get a mass email from him, the return address will be “45 office.”) How cool would it be if he had to sit in front of the TV listening to people talk about “the former guy?”
D.J.T. = T.F.G.
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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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Better late than never: my February column for the Visual Thesaurus is all about the loving origins of amateur. I’d submitted it in time for pre-Valentine’s Day publication, but I’m not in charge of the site and [insert Serenity Prayer]. I wrote about amateur hours (capitalized and generic), amateur nights (ditto), amateur athletes, amateur radio, and amateur musicians.
“Be good or be gone”: The long-running Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem
Full access is restricted to subscribers; here’s an excerpt:
Outside of athletics and communications, there’s been a quiet but growing movement to reclaim amateur from its sullied status. Lolly Lewis, the founder and director of the San Francisco–based Amateur Music Network, told me she has received pushback about the group’s name: “Even some of my biggest supporters felt that ‘amateur’ would drive people away, that amateur meant ‘no good at’ or ‘less than,’” she said. She took it as a challenge: “I want to champion the amateur by rehabilitating the word. Amateur means we love doing it!”
The journalist Tom Vanderbilt probably agrees. In his new book Beginners, he observes that “the idea of undertaking new pursuits, ones that you may never be very good at, seems perverse in this age of single-minded peak performance.” Despite this — or because of it — he spent a year taking up new pursuits at which he wasn’t very good, including singing and open-water swimming, and came to embrace and endorse amateurism.
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