Fritinancy

Word of the week: Meteotsunami

It’s always something here on the West Coast, isn’t it? If it isn’t wildfires—thankfully not a major problem last year—it’s flooding, if it isn’t flooding it’s earthquakes, and if it isn’t earthquakes it’s … a volcanic eruption? Not here, but close enough—5,300 miles away, off the coast of Tonga, one mile below the ocean surface. It was massive enough to trigger tsunami advisories throughout coastal California and to cause surges in places like Santa Cruz and Pacifica.

 

 

One of many permanent tsunami signs in San Francisco.

On the extremely micro level, that meant canceling my scheduled swim in San Francisco Bay. Not that I’m complaining: I may be crazy to swim in 51°F water, but at least I’m not the sort of idiot who thinks, “Oooh, a tsunami! Surf’s up!”

Stuck on high ground, I did some research into the language of tsunamis, and soon discovered the word of the week, meteotsunami, which was new to me. More about this word a little later. First, though, about tsunami. The word is, of course, borrowed from Japanese; its deceptively mild literal meaning is “harbor waves.” I learned from the OED that the transliterated word first appeared in an English-language text in 1897, in a collection of stories by Lafcadio Hearn titled Gleanings in Buddha-Fields: “‘Tsunami!’ shrieked the people; and then all shrieks and all sounds and all power to hear sounds were annihilated by a nameless shock … as the colossal swell smote the shore with a weight that sent a shudder through the hills.”

Words of the year 2021: Fritinancy edition

Covid-19 turned into Covid 2021, the U.S. presidency changed hands despite TFG’s efforts to the contrary, and we somehow summoned the energy to invent new words and repurpose old ones. Here are my picks for this year’s keywords; scroll to the bottom for previous years’ lists. And stay tuned for the American Dialect Society’s selection of the word of the year on January 7.

My criteria are the ADS’s: words (or “lexical items”—acronyms and phrases appear here, too) that were new or newly prominent, widely used, and relevant to events of 2021. 

In alphabetical order:

Word of the week: Omicron

Were you one of the thousands of people who, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, decided to learn a new language? Well, congratulations: You’re now learning Greek! Or at least the Greek alphabet.

The highly contagious Delta variant, named after the fourth letter of that alphabet, was first identified in India in October 2020 and quickly spread around the globe. And we learned last week that yet another troubling Covid variant had emerged in South Africa. It was named after the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet: Omicron.

How did we jump from fourth letter to fifteenth? The New York Times explains:

Word of the week: Oneiric

During the first year of the Covid pandemic, some people took up sourdough baking, others began studying a new language or learning to play an instrument. My preferred pastime was, and remains, film noir. Over the last eighteen months I’ve watched more than 100 noirs, many of them more than once, from The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, from 1958, is often considered the last true film noir; I saw it once in a theater, years ago, and plan to see it again soon, after I’ve crossed a few never-watched titles off my list—Decoy (1946), Railroaded! (1947), and The Chase (1946) currently top the queue. I just can’t seem to get enough of corrupt cops, washed-up boxers, double-crossing dames, and hard-boiled shamuses.

I’ve been supplementing my screenings with books, articles, and videos about noir. (For a partial list, as well as ways to stream film noirs, see the end of this post.) It was in one of those books, Film Noir: A Very Short Introduction*, by James Naremore, that I came across this week’s word, oneiric, which sent me to a dictionary. It’s pronounced with a long-I sound in the middle—oh-NIGH-rick—and it comes from a Greek source, although relatively recently. It means “related to dreams.”

Word of the week: Arum

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. 

Word of the week: Choropleth

File this one under “Unfamiliar Words for Familiar Concepts,” “Words That Are Missing from the Big Dictionaries,” and “Fun with Greek.”

I know a few cartographic categories: topographic, thematic, political, economic, and so on. But I’d never encountered choropleth until last week, when I came across it on Twitter.

First genuinely surprising choropleth I’ve seen in a long time. pic.twitter.com/YmBT9pUMYQ

— Dr. Brian Keegan (@bkeegan) May 20, 2021

I couldn’t find choropleth in the OED, or in Merriam-Webster online, or in Wordnik. It isn’t even in my massive Webster’s Third New International (1986), which does include a related word, chorography: “the art of describing a particular region of district.”

Wikipedia to the rescue:

Word of the week: Obelisk

Tom Cotton, the junior US senator from Arkansas, is an army veteran, but these days his preferred incendiary devices are words. A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times published an op-ed he wrote urging the Trump administration to “Send in the Troops” to put down the protests taking place in many cities, which Cotton called “riots” perpetrated by “bands of miscreants.” There was outrage and outcry in response to the op-ed, and the Times backpedaled, a little, by tacking on a five-paragraph explanation/apology about insufficient fact-checking. A few days later, the editor of the editorial-page section, James Bennett, resigned.

You can read more that particular drama in this New Yorker essay, if you like. My subject today, however, is a phrase Cotton dropped on June 11 during remarks on the Senate floor about calls, once again, to remove statues and monuments that celebrate the Confederacy (which, you probably don’t need to be reminded, was the losing side of the Civil War). Cotton, from the Land of Cotton, was having none of it.

Sen. Tom Cotton: "Are we going to tear the Washington Monument down? Are we going to rename it the Obelisk of Wokeness?" pic.twitter.com/gPTACs2Ep6

— The Hill (@thehill) June 11, 2020

"Just up the mall is the Washington Monument,” he said, after demanding that his colleagues “end the madness” of “cancel culture.” “Are we going to tear the Washington Monument down? Are we going to rename it the Obelisk of Wokeness?”

Word of the week: Allostatic load

“Allostatic Load Is the Psychological Reason for Our Pandemic Brain Fog” reads the headline on an April 27 story by Emily Baron Cadloff for Vice. The language may seem abstruse, but Cadloff quickly translates it into plain English: “I’m doing so much less than I’m used to, and I’m so tired.” She’s far from alone during this period of isolation and anxiety.

Allostatic load diagram via ResearchGate

Word of the week: Draconian

How much are you suffering under your locality’s COVID-19 restrictions? If you’re reading this, I assume you aren’t running a fever or hooked up to a ventilator but are instead working from home or, if you’re fortunate, collecting unemployment. (Or, if you’re not fortunate, not collecting unemployment because you were self-employed or minimally employed.) Your gym/golf course/favorite restaurant has been closed for weeks; graduations, proms, and sports have been canceled; you can shop only for essentials, you’ve learned how to create makeshift face masks; and you’re washing your hands more than you’d ever dreamed possible.

Maybe you’d call this situation inconvenient. Or stressful. Or tough but necessary if we’re going to flatten the curve and save the lives of our fellow citizens.

On the other hand, maybe you self-identify as a member of the hard-core-individualist, expert-scorning, no-patience-with-patience slice of the Don’t-Tread-on-Me American populace. In that case, maybe you’re mad as hell and you’re not going to take any more government interference in your God-given liberties, not for any damn virus, nosiree. You’re calling the situation draconian.

Word of the week: Epistocracy

Aristocracy, as you know, is government by the “best” or the “noblest” citizens. Kakistocracy is the opposite: government by the worst (or, more literally, the shittiest). Idiocracy was invented by director Mike Judge to serve as the title and theme of his 2006 dystopian comedy, set in the year 2505, when a professional wrestler and porn star occupies the White House. (In what passes for the real world, it took only 10 years for a WWE Hall of Famer and porn-star diddler to win the presidency; in a 2017 interview, Judge admitted that in the age of Trump, his film now seems “optimistic.”)

Until now, I hadn’t noticed the idiotic phonetic explainer. Intentional, I hope.

 

And epistocracy, our word of the week? It’s a recent coinage, created about 16 years ago by Brown University political philosophy professor David Estlund, that means “government by the knowledgeable.” The episto- part is related to other words about knowledge, including epistemology (the study of knowledge systems) and epistemic closure (an information cocoon). (I wrote about epistemic closure in 2012.)