Fritinancy

Word of the week: Thrutopia

“We need a literature of winning,” author and creative-writing professor Aya de León tells California, the alumni magazine of the University of California at Berkeley (my alma mater). The theme of the spring/summer issue is “optimism,” and de León is talking about her new venture, Fighting Chance Books, which will publish books that “inspire you that hope and optimism are not only possible, but critical to changing the ending of our story as human beings.”

There’s a name for this optimistic future, says De León: 

There’s a movement out of the U.K. called “thrutopia.” It’s not dystopian. It’s not utopian. It’s a thrutopia where people fight through the obstacles to get to the future that we want. That’s the idea behind Fighting Chance Books.

I had never heard of thrutopia, so I did some research. A portmanteau of through and utopia the word was coined by the British ecological philosopher and Green Party activist Rupert Read (b. 1966), who wrote about it for Huffpost UK in 2017:

What are desperately needed, but as yet barely exist, are what I term thrutopias. Thrutopias would be about how to get from here to there, where 'there' is far far away in time. How to live and love and vision and carve out a future, through pressed times that will endure. The climate crisis is going to be a long emergency, probably lasting hundreds of years. It is useless to fantasise a shining sheer escape from it to utopia. But it's similarly useless, dangerously defeatist, to wallow around in dystopias. We need ways of seeing, understanding, inhabiting, creating what will be needed for the very long haul. Visioning the politics and ecology of getting through.

Word of the week: Internym

I figured I was pretty well acquainted with the -nym family, from acronym and backronym to mononym and toponym. (If you need a refresher, see Mike Pope’s 2013 column for the Visual Thesaurus, “What’s in a -Nym?”) But last Friday I stumbled upon a new (well, new-to-me) -nym that fills a gap I hadn’t known existed.

Word of the week: Promptography

What should we call images that look like photographs taken with a camera but that were in fact generated by artificial intelligence?

One answer is promptography, a word proposed by Peruvian photographer Christian Vinces and popularized by Berlin-based artist Boris Eldagsen. It’s a portmanteau of prompt—an instruction given by a human to an AI tool—and photography.

Eldagsen has been in the news lately because in March he won, and then rejected, a prestigious Sony World Photography Award for his black-and-white image titled “PSEUDOMNESIA: The Electrician.”

Pseudomnesia: The Electrician (cropped). See full-size image. Eldgasen writes: “Pseudomnesia is the classic Greek term for a pseudo memory, a fake memory, such as a spurious recollection of events that never took place, as opposed to a memory that is merely inaccurate.”

Working words

This post was inspired in large part by Mike Pope’s April 14 “Friday words” post, a big roundup of words “about the changing face of the office”—words like Great Resignation and quiet quitting and everyone’s favorite, bullshit jobs. Within days after I read that post, three other work-focused publications landed in my mailbox: the New York Times Sunday Magazine’s “Future of Work” issue; the May issue of Harper’s, with two stories about “the crisis of work”; and the spring issue of Berkeley Haas, the publication of the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, whose cover story is headlined “How Will Work Evolve?” (I don’t know why I receive Berkeley Haas; I attended UC Berkeley but was never enrolled in the business school.)

And lo, it turns out there are even more new work-related words to write about! Here are some of the words that have caught my attention.

 

New York Times Sunday magazine. Illustration by Brian Rea.

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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