Fritinancy

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: Scrollytelling

There ought to be a word for “a familiar phenomenon you didn’t know had a name.” I’d been thinking about the concept for a few weeks, ever since two friends, on separate occasions, expressed puzzlement over the word paywall. Sure, they’d encountered subscriber-only websites or articles. But they hadn’t known there was a special word to describe the “pay or leave” block. (For the record, paywall has been documented in print since at least 2004, according to the OED. It was coined in imitation of firewall.)

I had my own “There’s a word for that?” moment last week when my copyeditor pal Andy Behr asked me whether I’d heard of scrollytelling, a word that had come up in a staff meeting she’d attended (virtually, of course). “I think it has something to do with those fancy online stories where nifty bells and whistles unfold as you scroll down,” Andy said. 

A facsimile of one of the Dead Sea Scrolls (408 BCE - 318 CE). Image via Facsimile Editions

On the Visual Thesaurus: The character of our content

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at content, a ubiquitous word with a long history and some specific contemporary senses.

Full access is restricted to subscribers; here’s an excerpt:

What are you reading right here, right now? A sentence? A paragraph? An article? Yes, yes, and yes, but think more globally and generally. In the universe of 21st-century media and marketing, these words on this website, and the image that accompanies them, are content.

And not only here on the Visual Thesaurus: content is all around. As the old dishwashing-liquid ad used to tell us, we’re soaking in it. Blog posts are content. YouTube videos are content. For the cookware retailer Williams-Sonoma, recipes are content. For General Electric and thousands of other companies, Instagram posts are content. White papers, graphs, podcasts, webinars, e-books: all content.

Content is produced by content creators and content providers, some of whom toil in content farms or content factories. It's distributed through content management systems and shaped by content strategists who may report to a chief content officer for whom content marketing is — as the business author Seth Godin put it in 2008 — “the only marketing that’s left.”

Read the rest of “The Character of Our Content.”

Word of the week: Hyperlexia

Hyperlexia: “The online-induced inability to stop reading.” (New Republic) Coined from hyper- (over, beyond) and -lexia (words).

Hyperlexia is the term journalist and author Virginia Heffernan uses in her new book, Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art, to describe “the plague of our time”:

It’s hyperlexia that keeps people’s eyes fixed on their phones and not on nature, art, friends, mates, children, or work. And it’s hyperlexia that leads to fatalities in driving-while-texting accidents. We have become so compulsively unwilling to stop reading (Facebook, Tinder, WhatsApp) that we will risk our lives, livelihoods, and certainly marriages to keep at it.

That assessment may come as a surprise to “the keepers of the canon of media,” as Heffernan puts it, who “are hesitant to legitimize digital reading and often blind themselves to it.” They may not even recognize the activity as reading. But even amid a deluge of pictographs (emoji) and images (Instagram), we remain constant readers:

As Michael Pollan has memorably chronicled in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, America in the age of rye surplus used to be a nation of drunks, then the overproduction of corn turned us into overeaters. I’d add that, as words have proliferated hypertrophically on the Internet, we’ve become a population of overreaders, of hyperlexics.

Heffernan didn’t coin hyperlexia; she repurposed it from the language of child psychology, where it refers to a child’s precocious ability to read, often combined with difficulties in communication. (It can be understood as the opposite of dyslexia.) According to one researcher, between 5 and 10 percent of children with autism are hyperlexic; according to another, there are three discrete types of childhood hyperlexia, including one type that comprises children who “simply learn to read very early.”

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos doesn’t like calling his customers “consumers”; he prefers “readers,” writes Heffernan:

As Jeff Bezos has observed, when you “consume” nonperishables like books, newspapers, electronics, and even the copy-dense megasite that is Amazon.com, you’re reading. You’re not eating, not consuming. In fact the signature pastime of the American consumer is now the mental act of processing digital, symbolic data: watching videos, graphics, maps, and images; listening to music and sound cues; and above all reading.

 I could quote from Heffernan’s beautifully written, idea-rich book all day, but instead, I’ll just recommend that you add it to your own hyperlexic to-do list.

Word of the Week: Godwin’s Law

Godwin’s Law: “As an online discussion becomes longer, the probability of a comparison invoking Hitler or Nazis approaches one.” In other words, in any online discussion, regardless of topic or scope, someone will inevitably make a comparison to Hitler or Nazis. Also called Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies.

Godwin’s Law was formulated by Mike Godwin, an American lawyer with a long career in computer law; he was the first staff counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, and has been a contributing editor at Reason magazine for nearly 20 years. In a 1994 article for Wired magazine, Godwin told the origin story of Godwin’s Law:

It was back in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I’d decided, had gotten out of hand - in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or their ideas as “similar to the Nazis” or “Hitler-like” was a recurrent and often predictable event. …

So, I set out to conduct an experiment - to build a counter-meme designed to make discussion participants see how they are acting as vectors to a particularly silly and offensive meme...and perhaps to curtail the glib Nazi comparisons.

I developed Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

I seeded Godwin's Law in any newsgroup or topic where I saw a gratuitous Nazi reference. Soon, to my surprise, other people were citing it - the counter-meme was reproducing on its own!

Since then, it has been a tradition in some online discussions that once the Hitler/Nazi comparison is invoked, the thread is finished and the invoker has automatically lost the debate.

Godwin’s Law manifests itself frequently in discussions of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (“the right to keep and bear arms”). See, for example, last Friday’s column by lexicographer Orin Hargraves for Visual Thesaurus, “Up in Arms”—paid subscriber content—in which Ben Zimmer, the executive producer, cited Godwin’s Law as justification for removing some uncivil comments.

Godwin’s Law is so familiar to some audiences that it can be reduced to shorthand and expanded beyond the original Hitler/Nazi meme, as in this headline last week on the Little Green Footballs blog:

“TeaParty.org Goes Godwin for Dough”

There’s no link to the quoted content, but you can find it by searching for the phrase “Someday, your children will thank you for saving their future from Obama’s Soviet-Style Socialist State.”

See also Cunningham’s Law and Dunning-Kruger Effect. For more Internet jargon, see The Jargon File.

Word of the Week: Copypasta

Copypasta: Text or data (such as lines of code) copied and pasted from one website to another. Also a verb: to copy text or code from one site and paste it into another. Coined from copy plus paste; “pasta” is pronounced like the Italian food. Possibly influenced by spaghetti code, a term from the early days of programming that describes a hard-to-understand mass of code. (See this 2008 Urban Dictionary entry.) According to Know Your Meme, copypasta “shares some characteristics with spam in the sense they’re both unsolicited (and often considered a nuisance),” but “copypastas are mainly spread through human operators whereas the latter is automatically generated by electronic messaging systems.”

Copypasta is documented in the Winter 2011 installment of “Among the New Words” in American Speech, a linguistic quarterly (subscription or article fee required). The theme of the article, by Ben Zimmer and Charles E. Carson, is descriptors for Internet memes.

The earliest citation Zimmer and Carson found for copypasta is an August 2006 post on the Wasted Talent forum:

Then proceeded to spam the number for HOURS with memes and copypasta (large ridiculous stories that are copied and pasted (hence copypasta) over and over again)…

Copypasta was eventually picked up for non-Internet references, as in this 2009 article in the automotive blog Speed:Sport:Life about BMW designer Christopher Bangle:

He has saved BMW from a Jaguar-esque retro-fate, re-imagined the way cars are styled in the twenty-first century, and lived to see his critics either dwindle into irrelevance or voluntarily engage in shameless “copypasta” of his ideas.

Since then, references to copypasta have dispensed with definitions and quotation marks. Here’s a BoingBoing post dated April 21, 2012:

A Washington Post blogger resigned after plagiarizing others’ work on two separate occasions. The copypasta, however, was done under working conditions that make the newspaper look worse than her.

Other terms in the “memes” edition of “Among the New Words” include honey badger, rickroll, Advice Animal, manbaby, Teabonics, and Swede. Two have been featured previously here at Fritinancy: Droste effect and photobomb.

(Hat tip to Dustbury, who introduced me to the copypasta concept.)

Take This, Ray-Ban

From a full-page ad on page 127 in the December issue of Esquire:

 

 

Let’s take that phrase literally, as it’s punctuated: “Take that physics” (Newtonian, say) as opposed to “this physics” (quantum).

I don’t think so. The sentence needs a comma of direct address, also known as the Donner Party comma: “Take that, physics.”

It gets no better on the website, where we find another “Take that physics” as well as this:

 

“Tecnology”? And down there in the reverse type, “whilst”? This is the USA version of the website, Ray-Ban: we’re while folk on this side of the pond.

Word of the Week: Glurge

Glurge: Cloyingly sentimental stories, testimonials, and object lessons frequently sent as email or chain letters. (Source: WiseGeek.) Rhymes with “purge.”

Glurge was invented in 1998 by Patricia Chapin, a member of the urban legends discussion mailing list run in conjunction with Snopes.com, the website that fact-checks urban legends. According to the Snopes glossary, Ms. Chapin, “at a loss for words to describe the retching sensation this then-unnamed category of stories subjected her to, … fashioned a word that simultaneously named the genre and described its effect.”

Glurge can be applied to any one story or to the genre as a whole. On the Snopes home page, Glurge is given its own section, along with other categories such as 9/11, Fraud & Scams, and Cokelore. The introduction to the Glurge Gallery begins:

What is glurge? Think of it as chicken soup with a cup of sugar mixed in: It’s supposed to be a method of delivering a remedy for what ails you by adding sweetening to make the cure more appealing, but the result is more often a sickly-sweet concoction that induces hyperglycemic fits.

Examples include the story of the poem “Daddy’s Day,” supposedly written in response to the September 11 attacks (false), the tale of the pastor who encountered a stranger who hands out bibles (true), and the parable of the ant that “fortuitously retrieves a contact lens lost by a hiker” (classified as having “multiple truth values”).

“Many of us,” Snopes concludes, “cannot overcome the urge to glurge.”

According to Word Spy, glurge first appeared in the press in 2000, in a review of the movie Anywhere But Here, starring Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman, in The Australian. “Thankfully,” wrote reviewer Kerrie Murphy, “it’s not as glurge-ridden as it could have been, but it’s a pretty soulless piece, saved from a fate worse than mediocrity by the good performances of the leads.”

My thanks to Panavia999, whose comment on my post about Snopes.com last month sparked my investigation into glurge.

Word of the Week: Cunningham’s Law

Cunningham’s Law: “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.”

Submitted by Stephen McGeady of Portland, OR, in response to a Schott’s Vocab competition in which readers were invited to formulate novel eponymous laws.

McGeady went on to say that the law is named after Ward Cunningham, a colleague of McGeady’s at Tektronix:

This was his advice to me in the early 1980s with reference to what was later dubbed USENET, but since generalized to the Web and the Internet as a whole. Ward is now famous as the inventor of the Wiki. Ironically, Wikipedia is now perhaps the most widely-known proof of Cunningham's Law.

By the way, if you enjoy the Schott’s Vocab blog as much as I do, you’ll want to listen to “Saying the World,” the most recent program of To the Best of Our Knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio. The eponymous Ben Schott is the segment’s first interviewee; he talks about how he discovers his “miscellany of modern words and phrases,” mostly on the Internet.

That Word

It does not mean what they think it means:

Click to embiggen.
 

I've seen all kinds of passion, but "unrequited"? That's a new one. And so very sad in so many ways. Poor Mother, the lonely little brand agency. No one's returning your calls?

On the bright side: they spelled genealogy right. Not as easy as you might think.

Elsewhere in the That Word files: Sophistry.

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P.S. Yes, that's a watermark on the stock photo. I'm happy to see that Mother L.A. paid up before launching the website. Their passion, alas, remains unrequited.

P.P.S. Where the title of this post comes from.