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.
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There are two kinds of people: those for whom the American Dialect Society’s selection of -ussy (and the related ussification) as the 2022 word of the year comes as gratifying vindication; and those who are saying WTF? or words to that effect.
I admit it: When the vote came down—no runoff required—on the evening of January 6, 2023, I was in the latter group.
2022 was, after all, the year of Dobbs, of AI, of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, of the Chinese Olympics, of the Qatari World Cup, of a major breakthrough in fusion ignition. It was the year of the January 6 hearings, for crying out loud! The 200-odd attendees at the American Dialect Society session—a large percentage of them, if the past is any guide, linguistics graduate students or recent PhDs—mostly ignored those world-historic, linguistically productive phenomena in favor of a whimsical, Extremely Online, and slightly smutty word part.
The final ADS vote, by way of Kirby Conrod’s Twitter feed. “Rizz”—also new to me!—is a clipping of “charisma.”
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For my year-end wrap-up I’m letting my pictures do the talking. Pictures with words, that is. My thanks for the inspiration to Nancy Nall, whose blog I’ve enjoyed for many years.
January
Covid boosters became widely available (I got my first booster in September 2021 and my second in March 2022). Humboldt Distillery saw an opportunity to seize the zeitgeist.
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Happy Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us! I don’t have the traditional aluminum pole, and this year I’m sparing you my Airing of Grievances. (But you can air your own grievance on FestivusWeb.) As for the other primary tradition, I discovered this year that there’s a Feats of Strength cocktail, which sounds kind of like a hot toddy. Did you know that English toddy comes from Hindi tari, which means “palm sap”?
“Festivus-infused” maple syrup from family-owned, Vermont-based Runamok. You can buy it at REI.
Read my previous Festivus posts.
And here’s a year-end link roundup:
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I’ve read more books about Trump, Trumpism, and What It All Means than is probably healthy for me, but until I read Thank You for Your Servitude, by Mark Leibovich (Penguin Random House, 2022), I’d never laughed my way through a Trump book. Leibovich, a veteran Washington correspondent (New York Times, The Atlantic), focuses not on “your favorite president” but on the lickspittles and soul-sellers who sought relevance through their obeisance to him, most notably Senators Rubio (R-FL), Cruz (R-TX), and Graham (R-SC), all of whom had been loudly contemptuous about TFG before he became the nominee and they made the bread-butter connection. Leibovich is the rare insider with an outsider’s sense of irony, and he’s a master of the snappy sentence. Here’s one example, about former Republican National Committee Reince Priebus, who became 45’s much-put-upon first chief of staff: “No matter how much Trump had roiled the Republican water, it remained Priebus’s job to carry it.”
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This month I listened to At the Strangers’ Gate (2017) written and narrated by Adam Gopnik, one of my favorite New Yorker writers. (His latest New Yorker essay is about two new biographies of Buster Keaton, one of which—Camera Man, by Dana Stevens—I’ve just begun to read.)
At the Strangers’ Gate covers the 1980s, when Gopnik and his new bride arrived in Manhattan from Montreal and he began his writing career. It’s a decade I’ve been thinking about a lot lately (AIDS, Reagan, Madonna, Bonfire of the Vanities), and Gopnik evokes it with keen observations, especially about the art and literary scenes. You can skip directly to Chapter 9, “Writing,” for Gopnik’s insights into the differences, and occasional overlaps, between those scenes. Here he is on art, writing, and money:
Art world paydays made book world paydays look like no paydays at all. Visual artists hunted for golden tickets, and when they got one, they were set. Good pictures in the art market—a market that has never stopped booming in all the years since—buy estates in the Hamptons. Even large royalties in the literary world (the handful—no, fingerful—of truly “commercial” writers aside) bought small apartments in the upper reaches of West End Avenue, and then in Park Slope—no small or bad thing, but not the same thing.
Gopnik is the rare author who’s also an outstanding narrator; his slightly Canadian inflections and wry line readings make this audiobook a joy. But it’s also a book I want to own in print, on paper, between covers.
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Today’s post is a twofer: a word of the week and a plug for my latest Visual Thesaurus column, a review of John McWhorter’s new book, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever.
Yesterday’s Spelling Bee puzzle gave me the perfect excuse to write about expletive and expletives:
New York Times Spelling Bee (online version), Sunday, August 15, 2021. EXPLETIVE was the pangram: the word that used all seven letters in the hive.
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Join me today if you dare at the Strong Language blog, where I wrote 1,600 words (and could have written more) about HBO Max’s new “dating” show FBOY Island and about what exactly “fboy” means. I’m keeping it clean here, but Strong Language censors nothing.
FBOY Island: “It’s time to separate the men from the bros.”
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I haven’t recommended a book in a while, so this month I’m recommending two, both of them new, both of them about language. (And each one blurbed by the author of the other one, which must be a coincidence, right?)
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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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