During the last month or so I’ve tracked more than a dozen stories about San Francisco’s retail “doom loop,” and spotted many others stories about other doom loops—in climate, banking, politics, procrastination—elsewhere in the US and the rest of the world.
Top four “doom loop” stories in Google News, May 13, 2023
The word often paired with “doom loop” is “spiral.” Sometimes the term is “death spiral”—and the editors are not referring to figure skating.
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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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The story so far: Collins Dictionary chose permacrisis, Merriam-Webster ;picked gaslighting, The Economist selected hybrid work, and Oxford Languages—the home of the Oxford dictionaries—for the first time left the deciding up to vox populi, with a result that baffled many of us: goblin mode (“a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations”). Apparently it went viral in February 2022? News to me.
Linguist Lynne Murphy compared the Oxford process to the 2016 poll that yielded Boaty McBoatface as the name of a polar research vessel.
#WotY McWotFace: @OxLanguages asked the public to vote for Word of the Year & what they got is 'goblin mode' https://t.co/qy1XA4NIQ1
— Lynne Murphy (@lynneguist) December 5, 2022
Lynne, by the way, is accepting nominations in her own annual WotY contest, which picks the most successful UK-to-US and US-to-UK imports. Submit your suggestions here, where you can also see Lynne’s defense of homer, Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year.
And over at TheDickinson.net, Jim Asher is counting down the month with a WotY every day. He’s included some fun ones: lesbian dance theory, anyone?
Still to come: the American Dialect Society’s annual WotY selection, which will take place January 6 (a significant date; see below) during the ADS’s annual conference, in Denver. (You can submit your own nominations to the ADS until 5 p.m. ET December 28.)
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Here’s my own contribution to the festivities. As in the past—this is my fourteenth WotY list—I’m not limiting myself to a single word: this year’s list includes sixteen candidates. Also as in the past, I’m following the American Dialect Society’s selection criteria: words (or “lexical items”—acronyms and phrases appear here, too) that were new or newly prominent, widely used, and relevant to events of 2022.
In alphabetical order:
AI. The abbreviation for artificial intelligence—“the capacity of computers or other machines to exhibit or simulate intelligent behavior”—has been around since the early 1960s, according to the OED (artificial intelligence first appeared in print in 1955). But 2022 was the year AI began “taking over almost every industry,” according to TechCrunch’s Katie Park. In particular, 2022 was “the year of generative AI” (source: VentureBeat): technology that “learns from existing content artifacts to generate new, realistic artifacts that reflect the characteristics of the training data, but do not repeat it” (source: Gartner). We saw generative AI in action with image-creation tools like DALL-E Mini (see my July 2022 post) and image-retouching tools like Lensa’s “Magic Avatar.” AI also stars in language-creation tools like ChatGPT, which can take a prompt like “Write a history of crosswords in the style of a conspiracy theorist”—something Ben Zimmer actually did—and turn it into a remarkably cogent essay. (Fun fact: In the mid-20th century, AI stood for “artificial insemination.” Less-fun fact: the GPT in ChatGPT stands for “generative pre-trained transformer.” Someone could use some naming help!)
Hey, come to think of it, aren't we all generative pre-trained transformers?
— Kurt Andersen (@KBAndersen) December 12, 2022
Bivalent. Chances are you didn’t have a reason to use this word—which literally means “formed in pairs”—until 2022, when the new bivalent Covid vaccines became widely available. Here’s how the FDA explains it: “The bivalent COVID-19 vaccines include a component of the original virus strain to provide broad protection against COVID-19 and a component of the omicron variant to provide better protection against COVID-19 caused by the omicron variant.”
Camping. After the June 2022 Supreme Court decision that reversed a half-century of abortion rights throughout the United States, many states rushed to enact laws that severely limited abortion access. Just as swiftly, informal networks sprang up to circumvent those laws; some even anticipated the decision by a month or more. To avoid prosecution, many of those networks substituted camping as a euphemism for abortion, as in ““If you are a person who suddenly finds yourself with a need to go camping in another state, a state friendly towards camping, just know that I will happily drive you, support you, and not talk about the camping trip to anyone ever.” For more on camping, see my July 2022 post.
Coastal grandmother. Sometime in early spring, TikToker Lex Nicoleta announced the arrival of a new trend. “What is coastal grandmother?” she asked her 157,000 followers. It’s an aesthetic: “If you love Nancy Meyers movies, coastal vibes, recipes and cooking, Ina Garten, cozy interiors … there’s a good chance you might be a coastal grandmother.” You don’t have to be a grandmother to be a coastal grandmother; you just have to have the look and live the lifestyle, which includes Spotify playlists. By April 6, coastal grandmother (sometimes abbreviated to gran) had become a story on the “Today” show; by May “Good Morning America” was offering how-tos. By August style blogger Emily Wackerman was calling CG “the 2022 fashion trend for everyone.”
Fashion muse Diane Keaton embodying the CG aesthetic in Something’s Gotta Give (2003), directed by Nancy Meyers
Dopamine dressing. Not into coastal grandmother? Go for its polar opposite: clothing that energizes rather than lulls, releasing (maybe) a little chemical bump that boosts your mood. “If the [designer runway] shows are anything to go by,” British Vogue predicted in June, “then tangy orange, hot pink and lemon yellow could well be the new black.” For more, see my February 2022 blog post.
Fusion. On December 13, the US Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced that scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) had achieved fusion ignition—“a major scientific breakthrough decades in the making that will pave the way for advancements in national defense and the future of clean power,” as the press release put it. Scientists had had a theoretical understanding of fusion for more than a century, but achieving it had proved elusive until now. The press conference announcing the accomplishment was historic for another reason: It was conducted by three women--DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm, LLNL Laboratory Director Kim Budil, and DOE Under Secretary for National Security and Administrator for the NNSA Jill Hruby.
Ghutra. The unofficial fashion statement of the 2022 World Cup was the ghutra, the headdress—also called a keffiyah—worn by men throughout the Emirates. It wasn’t only Qataris who sported ghutras this year: enterprising merchants created and sold them in the colors of almost all the competing teams. Bonus link: how to wear a ghutra.
Argentina World Cup ghutra. Source.
Grooming. Why were so many conservatives obsessed with grooming in 2022? They weren’t worried about their dogs’ fur or about doing a little manscaping. The grooming panic was about children and the manufactured fear that books, schools, librarians, and people with left-of-center leanings were turning kids into sex objects. Grooming, wrote Kaleigh Rogers in April for FiveThirtyEight, “is a term that neatly draws together both modern conspiracy theories and old homophobic stereotypes, while comfortably shielding itself under the guise of protecting children.” Read more.
J6. The two-character shorthand for “the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol that very nearly destroyed the Republic” proved useful in headlines about the public hearings that were conducted between June and October 2022. Unlike other such abbreviations—December 7, 8888, 9/11—it combines an initial and a numeral. And it was invented not by government officials or newspaper editors but rather by the organizers of the insurrection. Read more.
Long Covid. If you’ve recovered from Covid, don’t feel too smug: you may be susceptible to long Covid, also known as long-haul Covid or chronic Covid. (The World Health Organization’s official term is post-Covid-19 condition.) Symptoms may include fatigue, shortness of breath, and cognitive problems. In 2022, researchers determined that repeated Covid infections increase the risk of long Covid, as do more-severe infections. According to an economist writing for Bloomberg and the Washington Post, “The Covid-19 pandemic’s biggest impact on the US labor market will be as a mass disability event” as an estimated one in four Covid patients experience symptoms lasting months.
Monkeypox/Mpox/MPX. What to call the viral disease that resurfaced in May 2022 in Europe and North America, where the disease is not endemic, and afflicted mostly the Black and Hispanic communities, and gay and bisexual men? Since 1958, when it was first identified in monkeys in a Copenhagen lab, it had been called “monkeypox.” But that name proved problematic this year: “Some people argue that the name is racist and disparages an entire continent,” the Los Angeles Times reported in August. “Others view it as offensive to gay men. And then there are those who fear it could lead to indiscriminate killing of monkeys, as happened in Brazil.” In late November, the World Health Organization announced an official name change to Mpox. The state of California had been using Mpox or MPX since August.
Quiet quitting. We RTW (returned to work) after two years of WFH (working from home), and it’s not exactly paradise. So some of us—maybe a lot of us—are quiet quitting: doing the bare minimum. Quiet quitting surfaced in a July 2022 TikTok that got more than 8 million views: “You’re still doing your job, but you’re no longer subscribing to the hustle-culture mentality that work has to be your life,” said TikToker Zaid Khan.. (More on hustle here.) There was a lot of discussion in the media about whether quiet quitting was the right thing to call it; maybe it’s just “setting boundaries,” NPR mused. By November, the tide had turned and CNBC was proclaiming, “After the Great Resignation and quiet quitting, loud layoffs are here.” Welcome to Late Stage Capitalism.
Roevember. As I wrote in November, just before the midterm elections: “After the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, ending federal protections for abortion, American women showed their disapproval in many ways: by publicly protesting, by publishing opinion pieces, and by registering to vote in often unprecedented numbers. The collective impact of these actions may result in what is optimistically being called Roevember: a rejection in the November 8 state and federal election of elected officials who opposed women’s right to privacy and autonomy.” The actions were largely effective.
Sewershed. Coined in imitation of watershed, a sewershed is the area of land where all the sewers flow to an end point. The word made its first and second appearances in the New York Times in early 2022 in stories about efforts to monitor wastewater for traces of Covid-19 virus. See my February 2022 post.
Sportswashing. The term, which means “laundering one’s reputation through sports,” was coined in 2015 but flourished, alas, in 2022. (The concept goes much further back, at least to Adolf Hitler’s reasons for hosting the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.) This year we saw China hosting the Winter Olympic Games, Qatar hosting the World Cup, and Saudi Arabia buying its way into the upper echelons of professional golf. For more, see my May 2022 post.
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Finally, here’s a local WotY for my fellow San Francisco Bay Area residents:
Killer robots. In late November, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors gave local police the right to use explosives-laden remote-controlled robots to “when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option available,” according to the draft policy. On December 6, after a week of public protest, the supes voted unanimously to overturn the proposal. “The people of San Francisco have spoken loud and clear: There is no place for killer police robots in our city,” said Supervisor Dean Preston.
Photo: Jeff Chiu/AP, via the New Yorker
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Don’t see your favorite 2022 word? Leave a comment! And come back next week-ish for my Names of the Year list, which will include some key capital-letter terms.
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My previous WoTY lists;
2021 (boosted, insurrection, shacket, and more)
2020 (Before Time, doomscrolling, pandemic, and more)
2019 (hamberder, OK boomer, squad, and more)
2018 (shithole, white caller crime, tender age shelter, and more)
2017 (reckoning, pussyhat, #MeToo, and more)
2016 (bigly, deplorables, woke, and more)
2015 (refugee, Mx., ghosting, and more)
2014 (Ebola, precariat, budtender, and more)
2013 (Obamacare, binge-watching, selfie, and more)
2012 (fiscal cliff, stockist, unskew, and more)
2011 (Arab spring, curate, planking, and more)
2010 (cannabiz, hashtag, vuvuzela, and more)
2009 (app, death panel, zombie, and more)
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Ms. magazine, which launched 50 years ago this summer, wasn’t destined to be called Ms. In a roundtable interview about the magazine’s founding, published this week in the New York Times Sunday Review, Letty Cottin Pogrebin recalls that one name she and her co-founders considered was Sisters. Another was Sojourner, in honor of the 19th-century African American activist Sojourner Truth. And at one point, co-founder Gloria Steinem suggested Bimbo. “She meant it as an ironic appropriation,” Pogrebin told the Times, “but in those years, we didn’t have the luxury of irony.”
This wasn’t the only bimbo-drop in the June 19 Sunday Review: On the very same spread as the Ms. story is an essay about “BimboTok,” a “sex-positive and sex-work-positive” subset of TikTok where “comedians and creators mix makeup tips with articulations of left-leaning politics” while “talking about how hot and dumb” they are. “BimboTok came about at a time when the girlboss had more or less faded as a trendy cultural type,” writes the author, Sophie Haigney. “Bimboism offers an opposing and, to some, refreshing premise: Value me, look at me, not because I’m smart and diligent, but for the fact that I’m not.”
Neither of these stories troubles to define bimbo; both seem to take it for granted that we know what it means: An unserious young woman with what used to be called loose morals. An airhead. A floozy.
But bimbo wasn’t always an insult. It didn’t even always refer to a woman. Originally a masculine Italian diminutive, the word migrated a century ago into American slang, where it changed its sex and its sense.
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Throwback Thursday! Remember when I first wrote about an ad that used the catchphrase “… said no one ever”? It was in February 2016; here’s the link. Five years later, said no one is still being said by almost everyone, ad nauseam. As proof, I bring you two companies and two outdoor ads currently installed at opposite ends of San Francisco.
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I spotted this truck a couple of weeks ago at the foot of Van Ness Avenue, near San Francisco’s Municipal Pier.
“HODL FUEL: Coffee For the Crypto Masses. #PayWithLiteCoin.” Note: Because it lacks calories, coffee is not technically a fuel.
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San Francisco’s new Transbay Transit Center, a 1.2-million-square-foot hub for four Bay Area counties’ bus systems plus intercity Greyhound buses (and light rail, too, eventually), officially opened on August 11 to huge crowds. I skipped the festivities but heard rave reports from friends who'd gone, and so on August 13 I took an AC Transit bus from Oakland to San Francisco to see it for myself. I was not disappointed. Indeed, I was elated by the light-filled Grand Hall, the clear signage, the well-integrated public art, the pristine restrooms (every fixture is touchless), and the astonishing 5.4-acre rooftop garden, officially called Salesforce Park. (The software company bought the naming rights to the park and transit center in 2017; the adjacent 1,070-foot-tall Salesforce Tower, which opened earlier this year, is the tallest building in San Francisco.)
During the eight years of construction, I’d frequently driven beneath a filigreed white overpass that marked one of the center’s boundaries. While researching the completed center I learned that the filigree’s distinctive pattern has a name: Penrose tiling. And it’s not merely some designer’s fanciful grace note: it’s a mathematical marvel discovered in the 1970s and defended in a famous lawsuit.
Filigreed Penrose tiling outside the new transit center.
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I had a little extra time before meeting a friend at SFMOMA to see the “Soundtracks” exhibit (highly recommended), so I took a detour through for the food court of the Westfield San Francisco Centre on Market Street, looking for interesting brands.
I scored right away. “Interesting” doesn’t even begin to describe Loving Hut.
There is a lot going on here.
This all-vegan fast-food café had just opened for the day and there was already a long line of customers. I stood to the side and marveled at the weird name – a cousin of Pizza Hut, maybe? – and that fantastically hideous logo.
Continue reading "Names in the wild: Westfield San Francisco Centre food court (and beyond)" »
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It’s rare that a nonce word – a word invented for a single situation, also called an occasionalism – takes root in the language and continues to thrive centuries after its original use. But that’s the case with defenestration, which was created from Latin roots meaning “out the window” and which first appeared in English in 1619, a year after the Second Defenestration of Prague, in which “a group of Protestant Bohemian protestors threw two Catholic imperial officials and their secretary out of a window in Prague Castle, thus helping to precipitate the Thirty Years’ War” (source: OED).
The Second Defenestration of Prague, from a 1618 pamphlet. Source: Coins Weekly.
That’s right: the second defenestration. There have been three famous defenestrations in Prague, a city that is to window-ejecting as Paris is to guillotining. The first took place in 1419; the third, of the liberal Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk, was in 1948. (Masaryk’s death was officially ruled a suicide, but its circumstances remain suspicious. As the bitter joke had it: “Jan Masaryk was a very tidy man. He was such a tidy man that when he jumped he shut the window after himself.”)
A Czech poster advertising the 590th anniversary of the first Defenestration of Prague in 1419.
For more than three hundred years, defenestration was reserved for historical discussions and the odd open-window murder. Then, around 1955, defenestration began to be used figuratively, much like dethrone, to describe “the dismissal or removal of a person from a position of power or authority” (OED again). And that – with one striking exception – is how we’ve been seeing it during the last month or so.
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In the last two and a half years, Thumbtack, which matches customers with local service professionals, has raised $255 million in funding. If the company had spent the merest fraction of that sum on a professional copywriter with an elementary understanding of how advertising works, it could have come up with something more effective than this existential shrug of a billboard.
“We don’t know.” <Shrug> 8th and Harrison streets, San Francisco
It’s not that I don’t get the tiny, unconvincing joke, O Hipster Ad Agency. Nothing rhymes with orange. Haha.
Here’s the thing (and it pains me to have to point this out):
Billboards are meant to grab your attention in a split-second. They’re not supposed to be convoluted in-jokes. They’re supposed to sell.
And they’re supposed to sell your stuff. Not roses, not “this billboard,” not even florists or poets. If you’re Thumbtack, you want people who see your ad to grok the glories of Thumbtack.
At the risk of repeating myself: We don’t know? Are you effing kidding me? Your website says you’re “reshaping local economies.” You’re “getting things done.” If you don’t know, who does?
And finally: Why is the most important message – “Hire skilled pros for absolutely everything” – in the tiniest type?
A good ad should make you smile in instant recognition. It should be memorable and motivational. It should leave you with a positive impression of the advertiser.
It shouldn’t make you feel like your soul’s been sucked out of your body and sacrificed to the gods of snark.
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Previously in Bad Advertising of the Bay Area:
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