Fritinancy

Word of the week: Catch-22

You don’t need me to explain catch-22: It’s been part of our vocabulary for more than 60 years. A catch-22 is “a paradoxical situation from which an individual can’t escape because of contradictory rules or limitations.”

Catch-22 comes from Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel of the same name, published in 1961 and set during World War II; it was made into a 1970 movie (directed by Mike Nichols) and a 2019 miniseries (starring, among others, George Clooney). The novel has never been out of print.

In the novel, Doc Daneeka, an army psychiatrist, explains that “anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy” and therefore can’t plead mental illness as grounds for discharge:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.

My article on "the Big Lie" is now in "American Speech"

My short article about Big Lie for American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society, is now available online. You can read it by clicking the “PDF” button here.

The entry appears in the “Among the New Words” section, edited by Ben Zimmer, Kelly E. Wright, Brianne Hughes, and Charles E. Carson. This quarter’s new words were drawn from the nominations for 2021 Word of the Year, held January 7, 2022, via Zoom. (The overall winner was insurrection.)

The issue is dated May 2022, but the print edition was delivered in June and the online version was posted within the last couple of weeks. (For a while I was checking every day, but then I slacked off and voilà—there it was.)

My thanks to Ben Zimmer for inviting me to contribute—it’s my first-ever publication in an academic journal! I’ll have another entry in the August issue; I’ll let you know when it appears online.

Read the full Among the New Words article, which includes antiwork, no bones day, -core, and other noteworthy additions to the lexicon. (Read my Visual Thesaurus column on -core.)

On the Visual Thesaurus: The tales behind the Best Picture titles

For my March column for the Visual Thesaurus I take a look at the titles of this year’s Best Picture nominees, each of which represents a distinct style, from acronym to slogan to Biblical quote.

Full access to the column is paywalled for three months. Here’s an excerpt:

 

Don't look!

The “disaster comedy” Don’t Look Up opens December 10 in theaters and comes to Netflix on December 24. Directed by Adam McKay (Vice, The Big Short) it features what Variety, in a pan, calls “a galaxy full of stars” and an all-too-plausible premise: “Two low-level astronomers must go on a giant media tour to warn mankind of an approaching comet that will destroy planet Earth.”

Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Cate Blanchett, Mark Rylance…

 

Does the title have a familiar ring? It should: Hollywood has been fond of “don’t-look” titles for more than half a century. In chronological order:

Forever words

On October 18, the Biden administration announced plans to regulate “a group of long-lasting, human-made chemicals that pose health risks to millions of Americans, even as they continue to be used in an array of products such as cosmetics, dental floss, food packaging, clothing and cleaning supplies.” The polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are “more commonly known as ‘forever chemicals,’ which do not break down naturally and have turned up in the water supplies of communities across the country,” the Washington Post reported.

Certain chemicals have been tagged as “forever” for a while—I found a 2019 article about them, and the usage is probably older than that. But forever hasn’t been an adjective forever, and that’s what interests me here: not just forever chemicals but forever homes, forever stamps, forever cars, forever sneakers, and much more.

The Forever Purge (2021), a horror-action film directed by Everardo Gout, is the fifth film in the Purge series.

Adverbial forever, meaning “always,” first appeared in print around 1275. Adjectival forever, meaning “permanent” or “for the foreseeable future,” is a relative newcomer. The OED’s earliest citation is from an 1879 article in a Quaker magazine, The Friend, published in London: “He..would sign himself, ‘Your most humble servant, and to be your future and forever friend in the spiritual world.’”

We don’t see “forever friend” much now; it’s been superseded by Best Friends Forever, I guess. Here are the forevers that linger:

“Dear” in the headlights

Earlier this week I received a fundraising email whose salutation was “Look,” which seemed just a little … testy. But what do I know; I was schooled in the “Dear Sir or Madam” era. It made me wonder which forms of address are acceptable in 2021, which are a little edgy, and which are too quaint to be taken seriously.

“Dear ___,” it goes without saying, now falls into the third category—in correspondence, anyway. When traveling grammar advisor Ellen Jovin conducted a Twitter poll last year, the “Dear ___” salutation received zero votes. 

What percentage of your work emails begin with the word "Dear"?

— Ellen is at the Grammar Table (@GrammarTable) October 10, 2020

Click through to see additional polls.

In the titles of books, movies, and plays, though, “Dear” practically de rigueur. Maybe it’s ironic. Maybe it’s nostalgic. But there’s no denying it’s popular.

Last last last last last call

I’d planned to do a roundup of books with identical titles, just to show you that copyright law doesn’t protect a title. (Some titles are protected by trademark, though. Consider the For Dummies and Chicken Soup for the Soul series.) I had Word by Word by Kory Stamper (2018) and Word by Word by Anne Lamott (2004); Great Expectations (1980) by Landon Y. Jones—popularizer of “Baby Boom”—and Great Expectations by that British guy (1861). The contemporary American author Elif Batuman has built her publishing career on titles intentionally borrowed from Dostoevsky: The Idiot, The Possessed

Next on my list was Last Call, the title of a true-crime book by Elon Green, published in March 2021, about a serial killer who preyed on gay men in 1990s New York.

And also the title of Daniel Okrent’s 2010 history of Prohibition. 

(Read my post about Okrent’s book, which was the basis of a Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary series for PBS that originally aired in 2011.)

But that turned out not to be the last word on books titled Last Call. Far from it.

Here’s what I discovered.

What’s its pronoun?

A new Amazon Original anthology series, Them, comes to Prime Video on April 9. If the title sounds familiar, it may be because you still have nightmares from the original (and unrelated) Them! (1954). Or maybe you’ve just been seeing a lot of pronouns in movie titles lately. What do they have in common? Horror, thrills, monsters, a dystopian present or future. In reverse chronological order:

Book-title mini-trend: The declarative sentence

As I’ve noted here frequently, book and movie titles, like brand names, follow fashions and formulas. One of the longest-running contemporary trends is the “girl” title, a favorite for at least six years now. New examples (all published, or slated for publication, in 2021) include The Girls I’ve Been, Girl A, Black Girl Call Home, The Other Black Girl, Girlhood, Sunshine Girl, and The Girls with No Names.

The Declarative Sentence trend is more of a rising star, not yet overwhelming the best-seller lists but already inspiring imitations. The formula is: [Personal Name] + [Form of the Verb ‘To Be’] + [Phrase or Phrasal Verb]. The three examples that caught my attention—all novels written by women—use the present tense of to be.

Choosy

As if the pandemic hasn’t already tested all of us in countless ways, now even our entertainment comes in the form of a multiple-choice exam.