Fritinancy

Word of the week: Pessimism

What, you were expecting something upbeat to kick off the new year? How little you know me.

Word of the week: Longtermism

What do we mean when we talk about “the future”? Next year? The next election cycle? The next generation? Or do we stretch our imaginations to conceive of “the next 10,000 years,” as Stewart Brand did when he created the Long Now Foundation in 1996?

Brand’s foundation is dedicated to the principle of longtermism, a philosophy, as the British author Richard Fisher wrote in 2020, that “allows the mind to transcend the stresses of the present, and travel to other times. In times of difficulty, it tells you ‘this will pass’, providing perspective; in times of uncertainty, it can offer a set of secular guiding principles for navigating the world.”

A visualization of “now,” “nowadays,” and “the long now” via the Long Now Foundation.

Word of the week: Revision

What are the odds? Whether through coincidence or cosmic convergence, two new novels with nearly identical titles—The Revisioners and The Revisionaries—are being published within a single 30-day period this autumn.

The Revisioners, by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton (November 5, 2019). Read the New York Times review.

 

The Revisionaries, by A.R. Moxon (December 3, 2019). Read the publisher’s synopsis.

 

I haven’t yet read either of the books, but I am interested in title trends (read my Medium story about book titles here), and this one is especially intriguing. Sexton’s book is about women, race, and the stories told in families; Moxon’s is about a street preacher, a mental patient, and a religious cult. (And yes, I noted the other coincidence: both authors have an X in their surnames.) What is it, I wonder, about revision that appeals so strongly right now to two writers with such different interests and approaches? And not just those two writers: I see revisionist and revisionary cropping up regularly in popular culture.

Word of the week: Workism

“The religion of workism is making Americans miserable,” writes Derek Thompson in The Atlantic, coining a word and then defining it as “the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.”

Workism is not to be confused with an older coinage, workerism, “a political theory that emphasizes the importance of, or glorifies, the working class.” (Workerism first appeared in English in the 1950s, following parallel coinages in French and Italian.) Workism, by contrast, started with “the moneyed elite but,” Thompson writes, “the ethos is spreading—across gender and age”:

Even as Americans worship workism, its leaders consecrate it from the marble daises of Congress and enshrine it in law. Most advanced countries give new parents paid leave; but the United States guarantees no such thing. Many advanced countries ease the burden of parenthood with national policies; but U.S. public spending on child care and early education is near the bottom of international rankings. In most advanced countries, citizens are guaranteed access to health care by their government; but the majority of insured Americans get health care through—where else?—their workplace.

“Workers of the World Unite!” (1943)

Three acronyms and an ism

The acronyms aren’t new, just new to me – as in last-two-weeks new. The ism appears to be a recent (and helpful) coinage.  

Word of the week: Cronyism

Cronyism comes from crony, a bit of 17th-century Cambridge student slang whose oldest meaning is “a close friend or companion of long standing.” Crony may have come from Greek chronios (long-lasting), which in turn comes from chronos (time).

When cronyism came along, in the mid-19th century, it had the innocuous meaning of “friendship” or “the ability or desire to make friends.” It wasn’t until around 1950 that it acquired a new, sinister, and chiefly American sense of “the appointment of friends to important positions, regardless of ability.” The oldest usage in the New York Times is in a March 13, 1952, editorial about “the graft-cronyism of the Truman Administration.”

Cronyism has been in the news during the last couple of months, often in connection with the incoming Trump administration.

 

The Nation, December 9, 2016

Word of the week: Miserabilism

Miserabilism: A pessimistic philosophy; a consistently miserable outlook. From miserable combined with the philosophical suffix -ism.

I recently heard miserabilism in an unexpected context: the annual awards lunch hosted by the Oakland Chamber of Commerce. (I attended as the guest of a client.) Before we got to the awards, we were treated, or subjected, to a long state-of-the-city presentation by an economist from Los Angeles, which is 370 miles south of Oakland. As it happens, Dan Cohen was in the audience, too.

Prez of Beacon Economics told crowd at @OaklandChamber lunch to chill on #Brexit and not succumb to "Miserabilism" pic.twitter.com/3ymxnprPXf

— (((Dan Cohen))) (@dcstpaul) June 24, 2016

 

Word of the Week: Whataboutism

Whataboutism: A rhetorical defense that imputes hypocrisy to the accuser. Said to have been coined by western journalists and public officials to describe a Cold War-era tactic of their Soviet counterparts; popularized by writers at The Economist. Also known as the tu quoque fallacy (to quoque is Latin for “you, too”) or “the pot calling the kettle black.”

Behind the Iron Curtain, whataboutism was frequently summed up by the phrase “And you are lynching Negroes!”—the bleak punchline of a joke that circulated throughout the Soviet bloc. Here’s a 1962 version:

An American and a Soviet car salesman argue which country makes better cars. Finally, the American asks: “How many decades does it take an average Soviet man to earn enough money to buy a Soviet car?” After a thoughtful pause, the Soviet replies: “And you are lynching Negroes!”

(From Wikipedia.)

I couldn’t pinpoint the original usage of whataboutism—it isn’t in the OED or other standard references—but it’s had a robust and well-documented post-Soviet life. Here, from August 2013, is Olga Khazan in The Atlantic on “The Soviet-Era Strategy That Explains What Russia Is Doing with Snowden”:

In [Edward] Snowden, Russia has found the ultimate whataboutism mascot. By granting him asylum, Russia casts itself, even if momentarily, as a defender of human rights, and the U.S. as the oppressor.

And here is “Whataboutism,” from the January 31, 2008, Economist:

Soviet propagandists during the cold war were trained in a tactic that their western interlocutors nicknamed “whataboutism”. Any criticism of the Soviet Union (Afghanistan, martial law in Poland, imprisonment of dissidents, censorship) was met with a “What about...” (apartheid South Africa, jailed trade-unionists, the Contras in Nicaragua, and so forth). … Whataboutism seemed to have died a natural death at the end of the cold war. But now it seems to be making a comeback.

I also found an early nonpolitical usage, in the 1990 book Educating the Intelligent Child, by UK-born Victor Serebriakoff (who was the grandson of Russian émigrés, which may or may not be relevant):

However, we have to beware of what I call ‘But-what-about?-ism’. There is an absurd concept of morality which says that no good thing shall be done for anyone unless it can be done for everyone.

There is, of course, a whataboutism hashtag on Twitter.

The variant whataboutery has a meaning identical to whataboutism, but without the Soviet/Russian overtones—for good reason, since it originated in Northern Ireland. (It’s honored with a Wiktionary definition.) In a 2010 book, Beauty and Atrocity: People, Politics, and Ireland’s Fight for Peace, Joshua Levine provides some background:

There is a Northern Ireland neologism, ‘Whataboutery’, that is used to describe the bouts of accusation-slinging that characterize local politics. When a politician from one side charges the other side with some wrongdoing, the matter will rarely be discussed rationally. Instead it will be answered with a corresponding accusation: ‘What about such and such injustice?’ Whataboutery is symptomatic of the chasm in the interpretation of history that exists between the communities.

The earliest citation I found for whataboutery, from 2000, credits a BBC Ulster program, “Talk Back,” a daily current-affairs call-in show that launched in 1986, with the coinage.

Whataboutery turns up on Twitter, too, but rarely from so distinguished an author as this one:

Whataboutery: Don't let "X is bad" distract from "Y is appalling." But sometimes "Stop whining about X, look at appalling Y" is justified.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) November 13, 2013

Word of the Week: Marxish

Marxish: Resembling Marxist philosophy, but adapted for contemporary conditions.

The novelist and essayist Benjamin Kunkel introduces “Marxish” in the introduction to his new book, Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis:

The essays attempt no original contribution to Marxist, or what you might call Marxish, thought. They simply offer basic introductions, with some critical comments, to a handful of contemporary thinkers on the left…

Kyle Chayka, in a review of Kunkel’s book published in Pacific Standard*, likes “Marxish,” which he calls “a good way of referring to this next-generation critical political thought being put into practice by the left, a kind of functional Marxism”:

Marxish dumps Marx’s difficult teleology in which socialism inevitably triumphs over capitalism, or “capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation.” Instead, thinkers like Kunkel and his subjects are using Marxism as a tool to deconstruct and mitigate the destructive effects of capitalism as we see them occurring in the world today.

Kunkel doesn’t name his sources, but it’s clear he did not coin “Marxish.” Screening out usages like “Groucho Marx-ish eyebrows,” and mal-scanned instances of “Marxist” or “Marxism,” I found several earlier references. There’s the Marxish Academy in Seattle, a “startup anti-capitalist venture,” whose only blog post is dated February 2013. “Well, you have to admit, she is rather Marxish,”

There are three “marxish” (lower-case) references in Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past, by Patricia M. Pelley, published in 2002. Here’s the first one:

The ultimate origin of “Marxish” may be French marxisant: “tending toward Marxism” or, less neutrally, “faux-radical.” I found a citation in “Lecturing to the Lefties,” published in the October 11, 1991, issue of the Catholic Herald (UK):

[I]t seems to me the Marxist, or. I should say, in that useful French word Marxisant, or Marx-ish, influence runs pretty deep in academia.

Of course, ish has multiple meanings. As a suffix, it showed up earlier this year in anonymish, a descriptor for Wut, Secret, and other semi-anonymous apps; and it’s often used humorously (see Oaklandish).

I discovered “Marxish” via an Andrew Sullivan post titled “The New Marxishism.”

UPDATE: For more on the “rather promiscuous”spread of the ish suffix, see Gretchen McCulloch’s June 9 Lexicon Valley column, “Ish: How a Suffix Became a Word.”

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* Pacific Standard is a newish magazine (founded 2008), with print and online editions, that publishes thoughtful essays and articles on science, culture, and society.

Word of the Week: Said-Bookism

Said-bookism: A verb used in place of “said” – almost always a needless distraction. From “said book,” a pamphlet of synonyms for “said.” Said-bookism is a subspecies of “the elegant variation,” the term coined by H.W. Fowler (1858–1933) to describe a substitution of one word for another for the sake of variety.¹

Although I was trained early in my editing career to purge manuscripts of fancy synonyms for “said,” I learned only recently that there was a name for the writing sin I’d been correcting. Stephen Dodson, in his Language Hat blog, educated me:

I don’t know if there ever was such a thing as a “said book” listing innumerable substitutes for the simple and useful verb “said,” but that concept is the basis of the term “said-bookism,” known to most professional writers as something to avoid as a sure sign of amateurism.

Said-bookism comes from the Turkey City Lexicon, a collection of terms used in discussing science-fiction writing. The lexicon was developed by the Turkey City Writer’s Workshop, a workshop for professional science-fiction writers founded in Texas in 1973. The full lexicon – which includes wonderful entries like Phildickian, nowism, and ficelle character – has been published on the Science Fiction Writers of America website; it’s useful for writers of other genres (and nonfiction).

Television writers, for example. Here’s how the peerless TV Tropes website begins its entry on said-bookism:

“Said Bookism?” Alice interrogated. “What’s that?”

“Well,” Bob exposited, “it’s a variety of Purple Prose in which the writer goes out of their² way to avoid the word said.”

“Why would they do this?” ejaculated Alice.

“Because,” explicated Bob, “it was the fashion at one point. There were even ‘said books’ you could get mail order with lists of the words that can be used instead of said as saying said was discredited during that time. That's where the name of the trope comes from,” he further proclaimed.

Some Tom Swifties rely on said-bookisms for their humor – “‘I used to be a paratrooper,’ Tom explained” – although most use adverbs to drive home the pun. (“‘We have no oranges,’ Tom said fruitlessly.”) The Twilight books are flagrant perpetrators of self-bookisms, as the Reasoning with Vampires Tumblr makes painfully evident.

In a more serious vein (sorry, Twilight fans; this sort of thing is infectious), here’s the Letter Go blog on “What’s Wrong with Using a Said Bookism?”:

The very thing that editors love about the word ‘said’ is the thing that makes some writers shun it. ‘Said’ is unremarkable, unadorned, invisible. It blends into the background, allowing the dialogue to dominate the sentence and the reader’s eye to skip along unimpeded by the writer’s clever turn of phrase.

Remember that the writer’s job isn’t to wow the reader with beautiful prose and punchy word choice. The writer’s job is to tell a story so real that the reader lives it. The action, dialogue and internal dialogue are the stars of the show. The adverbs, adjectives and said bookisms are the special effects – too much and the reader either becomes jaded or pays more attention to them than to the story.

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¹ The most famous example of an elegant variation is “elongated yellow fruit” for “banana.” As Ben Yagoda observes – um, says – sportswriters are especially productive generators of elegant variations.

² Yes, singular “they” can be kosher. I refer skeptics to Baltimore Sun copyeditor John McIntyre.