Things I learned while looking up other things, 2020.12.11
Dear friends,
I should write something about how 2020 has been a long year, with roughly thirty-seven months jammed edgewise into the calendar since March, and also something about how grateful and lucky I am to be safe and healthy, comparatively. (Both of those things are true, but neither of them are particularly interesting.)
Next Thursday is the American Dialect Society's annual Word of the Year event—held, as you might expect, on Zoom. I don't have any nominations in mind, but here are eleven words that I saved this year (using the hypothes.is annotation tool):
January had Veganuary: "When I’ve done Veganuary before, it wasn’t the lamb steak I missed, the hunk of cheddar or a fried egg, but what the Japanese call “kokumi”, which loosely translates to a sense of richness, thickness or mouthfeel—something easy to find in the world of animal products."
February: If you live near a pig megafarm (or CAFO, 'concentrated animal feeding operation') (and I hope you don't), I don't think it makes it any easier to know that shust is a portmanteau of 'sh*t' and 'dust'.
In March I found some suggestions for what to call a blend of portmanteau words: " ... metaportmanteau, which isn’t quite right, and even progénituremanteau—literally a portmanteau of portmanteau and progéniture."
April saw the first trickle of coronacabulary: "As someone commented when the media published a photo of Mike Pence and his then all-male Coronavirus Taskforce praying, ‘it must be a mandemic’."
May: "Gunk is a Northern Irish term meaning “a shock of disappointment”.
June: "One interesting and useful way is to use the “micromort” – a one-in-a-million chance of death – as a unit of risk to help with comparisons between risky events."
July: "The various versions were all forms of the syuzhet: the poesis or making, the telling of a tale whose original existed nowhere, but which could always somehow be reconstructed."
August: "He especially enjoyed collecting and poring over oryctics, or “things dug from the earth,” and he had hired some neighborhood boys to bring him interesting chunks of rock from the nearby Mount Eibelstadt."
September: "The press dubbed the phenomenon "rinkomania", but the healthy exercise that Plimpton had boasted of was not all that attracted the young "rinkers"."
October: "This lovely rarity occurred last week, when writer Sarah Hollowell unearthed a stern message from the admin of a Crock-Pot Facebook group admonishing self-proclaimed masters of the craft for judging themselves above the noble masses of struggling “new crockstars.”"
November: "Uunsi is often burned in a dabqaad, a burner pot that is usually made of white clay."
December isn't over quite yet! I'll send a word from this month in next month's newsletter. In the meantime, I hope you have a happy new year!
Your friend,
Erin
I should write something about how 2020 has been a long year, with roughly thirty-seven months jammed edgewise into the calendar since March, and also something about how grateful and lucky I am to be safe and healthy, comparatively. (Both of those things are true, but neither of them are particularly interesting.)
Next Thursday is the American Dialect Society's annual Word of the Year event—held, as you might expect, on Zoom. I don't have any nominations in mind, but here are eleven words that I saved this year (using the hypothes.is annotation tool):
January had Veganuary: "When I’ve done Veganuary before, it wasn’t the lamb steak I missed, the hunk of cheddar or a fried egg, but what the Japanese call “kokumi”, which loosely translates to a sense of richness, thickness or mouthfeel—something easy to find in the world of animal products."
February: If you live near a pig megafarm (or CAFO, 'concentrated animal feeding operation') (and I hope you don't), I don't think it makes it any easier to know that shust is a portmanteau of 'sh*t' and 'dust'.
In March I found some suggestions for what to call a blend of portmanteau words: " ... metaportmanteau, which isn’t quite right, and even progénituremanteau—literally a portmanteau of portmanteau and progéniture."
April saw the first trickle of coronacabulary: "As someone commented when the media published a photo of Mike Pence and his then all-male Coronavirus Taskforce praying, ‘it must be a mandemic’."
May: "Gunk is a Northern Irish term meaning “a shock of disappointment”.
June: "One interesting and useful way is to use the “micromort” – a one-in-a-million chance of death – as a unit of risk to help with comparisons between risky events."
July: "The various versions were all forms of the syuzhet: the poesis or making, the telling of a tale whose original existed nowhere, but which could always somehow be reconstructed."
August: "He especially enjoyed collecting and poring over oryctics, or “things dug from the earth,” and he had hired some neighborhood boys to bring him interesting chunks of rock from the nearby Mount Eibelstadt."
September: "The press dubbed the phenomenon "rinkomania", but the healthy exercise that Plimpton had boasted of was not all that attracted the young "rinkers"."
October: "This lovely rarity occurred last week, when writer Sarah Hollowell unearthed a stern message from the admin of a Crock-Pot Facebook group admonishing self-proclaimed masters of the craft for judging themselves above the noble masses of struggling “new crockstars.”"
November: "Uunsi is often burned in a dabqaad, a burner pot that is usually made of white clay."
December isn't over quite yet! I'll send a word from this month in next month's newsletter. In the meantime, I hope you have a happy new year!
Your friend,
Erin
Don't miss what's next. Subscribe to Things Learned While Looking Up Other Things: