Fritinancy

Word of the week: Pandemicene

I’m not sure how I missed this new word when it originally surfaced. An article by Ed Yong, published  in The Atlantic on April 28, 2022, under the headline “We Created the ‘Pandemicene,’” may have been the word’s first appearance in a general-interest publication. (Note the quotation marks, a signal that the word is novel.) But as early as January 2021 the Science and Justice Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz, had launched a Pandemicene Podcast, so it’s possible that UCSC coined the term, a seamless blend of “pandemic” and the -cene combining form that signifies “geological epoch.”

Logo of the Pandemicene Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz

 

What finally got my attention was a “Post-Normal” column in the February 26, 2023, issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine by David Wallace-Wells. The headline in the table of contents is “The Pandemicene Era” (gift link).

On the Strong Language blog: Enshittification

My latest post for Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing, is about two sweary neologisms: enshittify and enshittification. Both were coined within the last year by journalist and author Cory Doctorow, who uses them to describe the current state of certain large internet platforms and e-commerce sites.

Read more about the history and morphology of enshittify and enshittification.

Word of the week: Fae

“Neopronoun with a nod to folklore”: That was the 28-Across clue in the September 23, 2022, New York Times crossword, and until I completed the fill I was stumped.

I was familiar with the term neopronoun: “a category of neologistic English third-person personal pronouns beyond ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘they,’ ‘one,’ and ‘it,’” according to a Wikipedia entry on the topic. I’d even read Dennis Baron’s 2020 book, What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond He and She, which includes a handy chart.

Fae and faer are down at the bottom. Baron does not explain their origin or significance, so I did some more research.

April linkfest

This month I’ve been reading Stiffed: The Roots of Modern Male Rage, by Susan Faludi. Actually, I’ve been re-reading it; the book was originally published in 1999 with the subtitle The Betrayal of the American Man and was reissued in 2019 with a new author’s foreword that adds a Trump-era, #MeToo perspective. Faludi is a superb researcher, interviewer, and writer (and believe me, that’s a tough trifecta), and Stiffed—what a perfect title—holds up shockingly well. Faludi’s mid-1990s reporting took her to Vietnam veterans, diehard Cleveland Browns fans, an Alternatives to Violence group, laid-off defense workers, and meetings of Promise Keepers, a Christian men’s association. She investigates the post-World War II redefinition of masculinity as “something to drape over the body, not draw from inner resources” and to be “displayed, not demonstrated.” I couldn’t help reflecting on Stiffed when I read a recent New York Times roundtable discussion with eight men who described themselves as politically conservative and who repeatedly expressed a wistful longing for days gone by—the same days, some 25 years ago, that Faludi wrote about: a time of layoffs and gang violence and painful domestic rifts. Moral: Beware the nostalgia trap and the Golden Age fallacy; there never were any good old days, except for the ones that seemed good because you were a little kid and didn’t know any better. (You may also be interested in the letters to the editor about that roundtable discussion. I’ve unlocked both links so that nonsubscribers can access them.)

 

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Why A-list names often aren’t A+ clients. (Nora Trice for A Hundred Monkeys)

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Attention, all you skinflints frugal people! Here are some of my Visual Thesaurus columns that are now unlocked and available to non-subscribers: All about the -core suffix; my picks for brand names of the year for 2021; the lingo of film noir. Don’t you wish you’d read them earlier? You can—a subscription is just $19.95 a year! Give a gift to yourself, or to Mom for Mother’s Day!

Word of the week: Illth

If I asked you for a word that’s the opposite of wealth, you’d probably say poverty. But wealth has another antonym that’s both more obscure and a more perfect etymological parallel: illth. 

Illth was coined by the English writer and critic John Ruskin in Unto This Last, a critique of political economy published in 1860. Ruskin put the word between quotation marks toward the end of a nearly 200-word sentence that begins with a long description of wealth and slides into a parenthetical comment that “we ought to have a correspondent term.” Illth it is.

John Ruskin (1819-1900), via the Ruskin Museum

In the news: Metamates and Amazonification

How are the 1,500-pound gorillas of commerce doing these days? Let’s rattle some Facebook and Amazon cages and find out!

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Word of the week: Sewershed

Throughout the pandemic, researchers have been monitoring wastewater to detect levels of coronavirus. Lately, those efforts have yielded a startling find: “cryptic lineages” of the virus. These viral fragments, found in New York City sewers and elsewhere, are “cryptic” because they have “a unique constellation of mutations that had never been reported before in human patients — a potential sign of a new, previously undetected variant,” reported Emily Anthes in a New York Times article published online February 3. Researchers at UC Berkeley “have found similar sequences in one California sewershed.”

It was only the second time sewershed had appeared in the Times. (There’s a Twitter bot that keeps track of such things.) The first time was on January 19, 2022, in a story about wastewater surveillance in several U.S. states, including Missouri. The story quoted Jessica Gilmore, director of the pharmacy department at Hannibal Regional Hospital: “We don’t have the capability to do gene sequencing in real time to know which variants are prevalent. … So the best we have is the sewershed data to help us guide our decision making.”

Sewershed provoked some head-scratching.

Word of the week: Funge

I got such a headache writing about NFTs (non-fungible tokens) in March 2021 that I sincerely hoped never to revisit the subject. But then I saw a tweet that kind of funged me up.

I funged Jimmy Fallon's ape. It's our now. pic.twitter.com/JQ3OmlnsDB

— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) January 28, 2022

Down the rabbit hole, or ape hole, I went. I inferred that funge had something to do with non-fungible, but was funge now a verb with regular conjugations? I know who Jimmy Fallon is—host of “The Tonight Show” since 2014—but … ape?

Word of the week: Spreadneck

I try to stay on top of all the new words that have been inspired by the coronavirus pandemic—see here and here, and links therein—but inevitably a coinage sometimes slips by. That was the case with spreadneck, which emerged in the summer of 2020 as a synonym for covidiot and lately has evolved into something closer to “ignorant or stubborn anti-vaxer.” It finally caught my attention in early August.

On the Visual Thesaurus: Vax vocab

Ever since the pandemic began in early 2020, I’ve kept track of the ways in which COVID-19 has influenced the way we talk and write. In my May column for the Visual Thesaurus I take a look at the latest corona-cabulary trend: vaccination words. From the names of pharmaceutical companies like Moderna—coined not from modern but from modified and RNA—to inventions like vaxhole and Fauci ouchie, we continue to make linguistic lemonade out of pandemic lemons.

Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers for three months; here’s a preview: