Fritinancy

Word of the week: -ussy

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.”

 

November linkfest

Merriam-Webster chooses its words of the year based on the number of dictionary lookups. The 2022 winner, gaslighting, saw a 1740% increase, “with high interest throughout the year.” Runners-up include omicron, oligarch, and queen consort.

Gaslight (1944): “Strange drama of a captive sweetheart!”

 

And bear in mind Benjamin Dreyer’s sage counsel:

If we’re talking about fucking with someone’s sanity, it’s gaslighted. If we’re talking about a Victorian theater, it’s gaslit.

— Benjamin Dreyer (@BCDreyer) May 26, 2019

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Word of the week: It's giving

Yes, it’s Thanksgiving in the U.S. on November 24. And it’s GivingTuesday—”a global generosity movement unleashing the power of radical generosity”—on November 29. But I haven’t accidentally dropped Thanks or Tuesday. I’m talking instead about “It’s giving [X],” a linguistic happening of its own.

July linkfest

I’ve been gradually expanding my newsletter diet to include some lighter (but still substantial) fare. A few recommendations:

The Department of Salad, by Emily Nunn, is, yes, about salad and salad lore, but is also just a very chatty, very funny from an excellent writer. If you haven’t made Spicy Cherry Salad (aka Israeli Cherry Salad), you must do so immediately, before cherry season is over for good.

How Not to F*ck Up Your Face, “philosophical and practical advice for anyone who’s ever looked into a mirror,” is written by Valerie Monroe, who was the beauty editor at O magazine for almost 16 years. She’s on an extended stay in Japan right now, and I’ve been enjoying her reporting on the local scene, from Japanese toilets to “love hotels.”

The Unpublishable, by Jessica DeFino, a freelance beauty journalist. Subtitle: “The beauty industry’s least favorite newsletter.” DeFino covers topics like “how the ‘5-minute face’ became the $5,000 face” and why the words “THAT ACTUALLY WORK” are so common in beauty headlines. (It’s because most beauty products don’t work.)

“Potent, powerful skin care that works”? Probably not. (My photo; Walgreens.)

 

All three of these newsletters are published on the Substack platform, which means you can read them for free but paid subscriptions are what keeps the updates coming. 

Ambiguity for the win: When two meanings are better than one

Some advertisements are blunt and straightforward: “Save 50%!” “Visit Beautiful Vermont.” Others communicate more indirectly and creatively, using idioms or slang with double meanings.

Here are four recent examples of successful ambiguity in advertising, and one example of unintentional—and unwelcome—ambiguity.

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: Gringo

Last week Gustavo Arellano, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, wrote about a kerfuffle last year in Chula Vista, the second-largest city in San Diego County, between the mayor, Mary Casillas Salas, and a councilmember, John McCann. The two ran into each other in a local Mexican restaurant; after some pleasantries, McCann “admitted that he thought the restaurant’s food was too spicy.” Salas replied: “Oh, John, you’re such a gringo.” And, according to Salas, McCann laughed.

Nine days later, McCann reconsidered. Rather than calling Mayor Salas—his acquaintance of 20 years—and talking it over, he filed a complaint with the city’s human resources department, alleging, Arellano writes, “racial discrimination by the mayor for her ‘gringo’ jab.”

An outside lawyer was brought in. The verdict: “Though Salas’ use of ‘gringo’ was ‘inappropriate,’ it didn’t constitute discrimination.”

Old Gringo (1989), based on Carlos Fuentes’s 1985 novel The Old Gringo (Gringo Viejo). The title refers to the (real) American author Ambrose Bierce, played by Gregory Peck in the film.

Arellano writes: “The Voice of San Diego broke the story last month and also found out how much this combo platter of victimhood cost Chula Vista taxpayers: nearly $16,000.”

Arellano goes on to compare this “weak-salsa Gringogate”—I love that—with a lawsuit, also in San Diego County, over what some public-school parents are calling an “Aztec prayer” (actually a poem) that had been used in the ethnic-studies curriculum. But I want to stick with Gringogate. Where does gringo come from, and what does it signify? And just how offensive is it?

Words of the year 2021: Fritinancy edition

Covid-19 turned into Covid 2021, the U.S. presidency changed hands despite TFG’s efforts to the contrary, and we somehow summoned the energy to invent new words and repurpose old ones. Here are my picks for this year’s keywords; scroll to the bottom for previous years’ lists. And stay tuned for the American Dialect Society’s selection of the word of the year on January 7.

My criteria are the ADS’s: words (or “lexical items”—acronyms and phrases appear here, too) that were new or newly prominent, widely used, and relevant to events of 2021. 

In alphabetical order:

Word of the week: Drip pricing

I’d never encountered the term drip pricing before last week, but I’m familiar withwhat it describes, and you may be, too.

Here’s how Los Angeles Times business columnist David Lazarus defines it: “a stealth price hike in the form of an added fee, rather than … a list price that reflects actual business costs.” In other word, the fees are dripped into the cost, one by one, and after the transaction is complete. Drip pricing is typically found in the travel and hospitality industries—see, for example, “resort fees” at hotels that are not in any way “resorts.”

Drip, drip, drip

On the Visual Thesaurus: The lingo of film noir

For my latest Visual Thesaurus column I’m celebrating Noirvember—the monthlong tribute to film noir—with a lineup of classic noir slang.

The column is paywalled for three months; here’s an excerpt: