Fritinancy

Word of the week: Bookchella

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, first held in 1996, returned to the USC campus last weekend after a two-year Covid hiatus. Because April 22 through 24 was also the final weekend of this year’s Coachella Music Festival, held 130 miles away in Southern California’s Colorado Desert, someone—maybe the person in charge of the Times’s Twitter feed—decided it would be cute to call the literary festival #Bookchella.

And just like that, -chella became the new -stock: a portable suffix denoting “festival.”

Except it wasn’t exactly “just like that.” And watch your back, LATFOB: the music festival in the desert has a history of refusing to give up its -chella without a legal fight.

I don’t remember anyone calling it #Bookchella in 2019, when I attended, but that already feels like 50 years ago, so who knows.

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.”

November linkfest

It’s Word of the Year season, and two British dictionaries are leading the pack. Collins picked lockdown – a word we threw around here in the US but never experienced the way they did in the UK and elsewhere. (A friend of mine is literally confined to her London apartment after spending a month in France: she can’t go outdoors at all.) And Oxford Languages, publisher of the Oxford dictionaries, chose a phenomenon instead of a single word: the impact of the COVID-19 on language. “What struck the team as most distinctive in 2020 was the sheer scale and scope of change,” Katherine Connor Martin, the company’s head of product, told the New York Times’s Jennifer Schuessler. “This event was experienced globally and by its nature changed the way we express every other thing that happened this year.”

“Social distance”: sign in an Oakland produce-store window, May 2020.

Names in the news: Bamlanivimab and beyond

Yes, there have been other things going on besides the bonkers yet tedious aftermath of the US election.

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Jush and zhuzh and tszuj

A TikTok video by QueenBV59, about her preparations for casting a ballot during early voting, was shared all over Twitter on Thursday. I’ve watched it half a dozen times myself.

SHE READY pic.twitter.com/zLWQbSMljH

— Meena Harris (@meenaharris) October 15, 2020

One repeated word—jush—was new to me and, apparently, to some other viewers as well.

OK, folks, I’m gonna go over here and get my jush

Y’all need to get y’all jush and get y’all vote on

I’m gonna get my damn jush

Jush—rhymes with push—turns out to be a rare slang term that can be traced to a single person. But it isn’t quite as simple as that.

Word of the week: Scourge

I was out on my government-sanctioned neighborhood walk during Sunday’s Rose Garden COVID-19 briefing. When I returned I noticed this tweet from writer and podcaster Bob Cesca.

The president doesn’t know how to pronounce “scourge” yet he keeps repeating it.

— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) March 29, 2020

How does he pronounce scourge? I couldn’t find audio, but I did find other comments indicating that he rhymes it with gorge instead of with urge (the standard pronunciation).

It’s a favorite word of his (or, more likely, of one of his speechwriters), and [skohrj] is his preferred, irregular pronunciation. In his March 23, 2020, COVID-19 briefing he referred to COVID-19 twice as “the invisible scourge”; he’s also called it “this hidden scourge.” (At least he’s stopped calling it the “Chinese coronavirus.”) He talked about “the scourge [skohrj] of anti-Semitism” after the 2018 mass shooting in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, and “the scourge [skohrj] of drug addiction in America” in a March 2018 speech in New Hampshire. He also mentioned “the scourge [skohrj] of drug addiction” in his 2018 State of the Union address. (See comment from “Dagwood” on this Language Log post.)

With all this repetition, you’d think someone would have coached him on the correct pronunciation. On the other hand, this is a man who pronounces “plasma” as “plozma.” (And more: Here’s The Daily Show’s 2019 reel of Trumpian mispronunciations.)

The original meaning of scourge: a whip or lash

Pharmed out

Almost exactly ten years ago I spotted what I thought was the most embarrassing name ever attached to a beauty brand: Sophistry.

It’s still in business under that wildly inappropriate name.

 

Today, however, thanks to Twitter follower Sam C., I met the new contender for the title: Pharmaciopy.

Because science.

 

 

November linkfest

The wildfires have barely been extinguished here in California, but it’s already word-of-the-year season across the pond, where three prominent dictionaries chose words or phrases with a common theme: climate change, or preventing it. Cambridge Dictionary went first, with upcycling: “the activity of making new furniture, objects, etc. out of old or used things or waste material.” Collins Dictionary chose climate strike: “a protest demanding action on climate change.” And Oxford Dictionaries picked climate emergency from an all-environmental shortlist that included “climate action,” “climate denial,” “eco-anxiety,” “extinction” and “flight shame.”

Let the record show that lexicographer Jane Solomon, recently of Dictionary.com, spotted the trend back in September.

So @OxfordWords picked ‘climate emergency’ for their 2019 Word of the year. And @CollinsDict picked ‘climate strike.’

In September I suggested ‘climate crisis.’

Clearly lexicographers are all on the same page about this. https://t.co/75klqC7c6e

— 〰️Jane Solomon〰️ (@janesolomon) November 20, 2019

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Word of the week: Triplex

What does triplex mean to you? And how do you pronounce the word?

Until last week, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to ask those questions. A triplex, I would have told you with full confidence, is any three-unit residence on a single lot. It could be three units in a single building; a “big house” plus a duplex in the back; or three side-by-side units of equal or varying sizes.

My Platonic ideal of a triplex, in the Los Angeles neighborhood where I grew up (Miracle Mile). Big main unit upstairs, two smaller units downstairs.

 

And of course it’s pronounced TRY-plex, from Latin roots meaning “threefold.” The first syllable, I was certain, is the same tri- as in triangle, trinomial, trilateral, tripod, trimester, triathlon, tricycle, trisomy, triad, trisect, and Triceratops. The same long vowel as the du- in duplex, the two-unit variation.

I am not, it turns out, entirely wrong. But in many parts of the US and Canada, I am far from right.

March linkfest

NASA has renamed a facility in West Virginia after Katherine Johnson, the mathematician whose story was told in the book and and subsequent film Hidden Figures. Johnson, who was born in West Virginia, will turn 101 in August.

Katherine Johnson. Source

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You can help name some newly discovered moons of Jupiter, but only you follow some restrictive rules. The name “must be 16 characters or fewer, preferably one word. It can’t be offensive, too commercial, or closely tied to any political, military or religious activities of the past 100 years.” And that’s just the beginning. (Hat tip: Chris Labarthe.)