Fritinancy

Word of the week: Yeet

At the American Dialect Society’s annual Word of the Year vote, held Friday, January 4 in New York City, the overall winner was tender-age shelter. (Here’s my column about tender-age shelter for the Visual Thesaurus; subscription required for full access.) The runner-up word, yeet, was less topical and less transparent, especially if you’re older than, say, 19. I keep a running list of potential words of the year, and yeet — which was voted the Slang/Informal Word of the Year for 2018, and which won the first-round vote for overall WOTY — had completely escaped my attention. So I looked into it.  

 

Via @frozenpandaman. According to the American Dialect Society’s live Twitter feed, “voting occurred to many shouts of ‘yeet!’ in the room.”

November linkfest

This month we give thanks for WOTY, dictionaries, diet jargon, naming advice, and more.

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Word-of-the-year season kicks off in traditional fashion with the Oxford Dictionaries selection. This year it’s toxic, as in toxic masculinity and toxic chemical. Interestingly, toxic derives from the Greek term for word for “poisoned arrow,” but only the “arrow” part. Toxic won out over other words on the shortlist, including incel, gaslighting, big dick energy, and gammon, the last of which was a Fritinancy word of the week in May. Oxford’s word of the year is “a word of expression that is judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year, and have lasting potential as a term of cultural significance.” Read more.

 

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Big dict energy: The stupendously useful Green’s Dictionary of Slang – which was published in three volumes in the UK in 2010 and which moved online in 2016 – is now free to all users. Read more in Ben Yagoda’s post on Lingua Franca, and follow Jonathon Green on Twitter.

 

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This tweet is good, and the thread that follows (click on the date stamp) is even better.

Trump cereals:
- Total Witch Hunt
- Golden Shower Grahams
- Leerios
- ICE Krispies
- Porn Flakes
- Racism Bran
- Special KKK
- Your Votes Don’t Count Chocula
- Honeycombover

— The Volatile Mermaid (@OhNoSheTwitnt) November 15, 2018

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Word of the week: Stunt

Have you ever noticed a certain word a couple of times within a short period of time, and then started seeing it everywhere? The Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky calls this the frequency illusion*, and I was afflicted by it last week. The word I kept seeing was stunt, the noun, and the more I looked into it the more it seemed to multiply. What was particularly striking was how it was implemented across the political spectrum to comment on recent events. I even discovered a new-to-me slang definition of the verb to stunt.

The Stunt Man (1980). Delightful movie. Its Spanish title, by the way, is El Especialista.

September linkfest

Mountain Dew, the neon-yellow-green soft drink brand owned by PepsiCo, evidently failed to consult anyone in Scotland before it introduced its new ad slogan, “Epic thrills start with a chug.” If it had, it would have learned that chug is Scottish slang for masturbate. (Jelisa Castrodale for Vice, via Language Log)

 

That word: It does not mean what you think it means. Not in Scotland, anyway. (Via @jaysebro)

Word of the week: Henchman

This was the front page of the New York Daily News on August 22, 2018:

 

“All the President’s Henchmen”

 

The line puts a spin on the title of the most famous book (and movie) to come out of the Watergate scandal, which broke 45 years ago this month.

 

All the President’s Men (1974)

 

And that title was inspired by Robert Penn Warren’s political novel All the King’s Men, which won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1947 and was made into a 1949 movie starring Broderick Crawford (which won the Best Picture Oscar) and a 2006 movie starring Sean Penn (which has a miserable 11% rating on Rotten Tomatoes).

All the King’s Men (1946)

Word of the week: Bawbag

Do insults sound funnier with a Scottish inflection? They do to many Americans, and even to Brits. As evidence, I direct you to Saturday’s events in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and the Trump golf properties in Turnberry and Aberdeenshire, where crowds turned out to mock and protest the visit of the American president, whose ties to Caledonia go beyond real estate: his mother was born in the Outer Hebrides and emigrated to the U.S. in 1930.

Some of the epithets sent Americans like me to our Scottish slang dictionaries. Bawbag, for example, has a familiar ring, but what does it really mean?

pic.twitter.com/xI2UshCEAU

— Empirecookie (@Empirecookie) July 14, 2018

 

Welcome to Scotland ya giant tangerine bawbag in a wig#TrumpProtest #ScotlandAgainstTrump #TrumpVisitsUK pic.twitter.com/akaxXb7tjl

— Bigkenny (@bigkenny1975) July 13, 2018

 

May linkfest

Hotels.com registered the longest URL in internet history “to prove it has more than hotels.” (Adweek)

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“One very recent scandal in immigration politics in Britain was, improbably, named after a ship that sank decades ago.” (Lingua Franca) .

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Kim Kardashian’s decision to name her new lingerie line “Kimono Intimates” has provoked charges of cultural appropriation. But all Jezebel – and I – could think of was a 30-year-old condom brand.

 

Word of the week: Rhino

You know it as a shorter, simpler way to say “rhinoceros.” But in the 17th and 18th centuries rhino was slang for “money,” and the related adjective rhinocerical was slang for “wealthy.” And no one is sure why.

These are not the rhinos you’re looking for. (But they sure are cool in Black Panther.)

 

Rhinoceros, from Greek roots meaning “nose-horned,” entered English around 1300; it referred to the herbivorous odd-toed ungulate, two species of which are found in Africa and three in Southern Asia. Rhino- also appears in combination forms such as rhinoplasty (plastic surgery of the nose; first appearance in print: 1828); rhinolaryngitis (1891); and rhinovirus (1961). As the shortened form of the animal name, the word first appeared in print in 1870. But nearly two centuries earlier it was popularly used in England to mean “cash,” and by 1697 the idiom “ready rhino” (or “ready rino”) was in circulation.

 

Word of the week: Sicko

On February 22 – the birthday of America’s first president, George Washington – @RealDonaldTrump rose early and poked out a farrago of tweets – seven in all – proffering his theories about guns, schools, and a “GREAT DETERRENT” (his capitalization) to massacres like the one that occurred on Valentine’s Day at Marjory Stoneman Davis High School in Parkland, Florida. Scattered within those tweets like so much buckshot were three occurrences of the word sicko. 

....immediately fire back if a savage sicko came to a school with bad intentions. Highly trained teachers would also serve as a deterrent to the cowards that do this. Far more assets at much less cost than guards. A “gun free” school is a magnet for bad people. ATTACKS WOULD END!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2018

....If a potential “sicko shooter” knows that a school has a large number of very weapons talented teachers (and others) who will be instantly shooting, the sicko will NEVER attack that school. Cowards won’t go there...problem solved. Must be offensive, defense alone won’t work!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2018

 

Word of the week: Self-own

In the digital world, ownership – or ownage, is it’s often called – is an intangible quality. The tech-jargon sense of to own originated among hackers in the 1990s, who used it to mean “taking control of someone else’s computer”; it was picked up by gamers, for whom it means “to defeat.” (The variant pwn, which originated as a misspelling in the game WarCraft, is sometimes substituted for humorous effect.) To self-own, then, is to confidently blunder into a self-defeating backfire, usually because you’ve unwittingly revealed something embarrassing or incriminating about yourself.