Fritinancy

Word of the week: Elevated

Suddenly, it seems, elevated is everywhere all at once.

Word of the week: Galoot

There were 40 accepted words in the solution to the March 5 New York Times Spelling Bee, and one of them was galoot.

Was it a coincidence that on that very day two contributors to the American Dialect Society listserv discussed the origins of this word?

Word of the week: Pandemicene

I’m not sure how I missed this new word when it originally surfaced. An article by Ed Yong, published  in The Atlantic on April 28, 2022, under the headline “We Created the ‘Pandemicene,’” may have been the word’s first appearance in a general-interest publication. (Note the quotation marks, a signal that the word is novel.) But as early as January 2021 the Science and Justice Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz, had launched a Pandemicene Podcast, so it’s possible that UCSC coined the term, a seamless blend of “pandemic” and the -cene combining form that signifies “geological epoch.”

Logo of the Pandemicene Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz

 

What finally got my attention was a “Post-Normal” column in the February 26, 2023, issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine by David Wallace-Wells. The headline in the table of contents is “The Pandemicene Era” (gift link).

Word of the week: Hallucination

Do chatbots dream of human sweethearts?

That’s one of the many questions a reader asks herself after scrolling through the transcript of a conversation—there’s no other word for it—between a New York Times technology columnist and the new release of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. New Bing differs from Old Bing in that it’s powered by artificial intelligence software from OpenAI, the same folks who brought us ChatGPT. And therein lies all the difference.

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Word of the week: Bard

Google has a new AI-assisted chatbot, and—surprise!—it isn’t called GoogleAI. It’s called Bard, which is an excellent name and not, I’m told on good authority, an acronym, a backronym, or an eponym.

Image via Tom’s Guide

 

Too bad about Bard’s snafu* last week when it attempted to answer a question about NASA’s** James Webb Space Telescope. But I’m here to praise Bard, not to bury it in smarty-pants ridicule.

The Bard of Avon, aka William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon

 

Word of the week: Prompt

Last week I was introduced to a new sense of the old word prompt, which comes from Latin promere (to bring forth) and has a long history in English, from its 15th-century beginnings as a verb (to urge, to incite to action) and modifier (immediate, without delay) to its extended senses in theater (noun: a reminder to an actor) and particle physics (adjective: emitted within a very short time interval). The novel usage—not just to me, but to the world at large—is prompt engineer and prompt engineering, new job descriptions within the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Prompt engineers aren’t gearheads who show up on time; they’re a new breed of communication professionals.

Word of the week: Crixa

Happy Lunar New Year! It’s the Year of the Rabbit, so I’m digging deep into the archives to bring you a bunny-related* word I originally wrote about 15 years ago.

Watership Down, by Richard Adams (1972)

Word of the week: Vegemite

The other morning, as I was spreading Vegemite on my toast like scores* of my fellow Americans, I took a closer look at the label and made a happy discovery: This year marks the centennial (or centenary**) of Vegemite yeast extract, as much an Australian national symbol as koalas and kangaroos. It’s a milestone that will be cheered by many of us and strenuously ignored by others.

“Proudly made in Australia since 1923”

 

To call Vegemite—a thick black paste made from brewer’s yeast—controversial is to put it mildly, and “mild” is a word you can never use with Vegemite. I happen to love the stuff, because I love anything that combines salty and umami flavors, but here in North America I find myself in a lonely minority. And it’s not just North Americans: Vegemite is one of three foods that represent Australia in the Disgusting Food Museum in Malmö, Sweden. (The others are wichetty grubs, which are insects; and musk sticks, which are a kind of perfume-y candy and are unassociated with the current owner of Twitter and other businesses.)

My photo of a jar of Vegemite at the pop-up Disgusting Food Museum in Los Angeles, January 2019. The last sentence on the card reads: “In 2011, President Obama angered Australians by saying that he found vegemite [sic] to be ‘horrible.” When Australian prime minister Julia Gillard described the product, Obama said, “So, it's like a quasi-vegetable by-product paste that you smear on your toast for breakfast – sounds good, doesn’t it?” Yes, Mr. Obama, it sounds good. And it’s good for you, too.

A little background to whet your appetite:

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.”

 

Word of the week: Pessimism

What, you were expecting something upbeat to kick off the new year? How little you know me.