Things I learned while looking up other things, 2023.12.11
Dear friends,
Welcome to what is now the traditional December edition of Things I Learned While Looking Up Other Things! Here again is the link to one of my favorite year-end wrapups, the Said the Gramophone Best Songs of 2023.
And here are eleven of the words I saved in 2023 using the hypothes.is annotation tool.
January: "Hang around the online sewing community for more than a few minutes, and you’ll undoubtedly hear the term “sewjo”—that’s “sewing mojo,” also known as inspiration to sit down at the machine and make stuff."
February: "The term ‘hyperauthorship’ is credited to information scientist Blaise Cronin at Indiana University in Bloomington, who used it in a 2001 publication to describe papers with 100 or more authors."
March: "I particularly enjoy the deployment of the word xenophenomenological — meaning, broadly, the study of things as they would be experienced by a non-human intelligence."
April: "Crawford dubs these made-up sources “hallucitations,” a play on the term “hallucinations,” which describes AI-generated falsehoods and nonsensical speech."
May: "The sondersphere is a realm where every person in an adoptee’s life has a place — where birth parents and adoptive parents and biological aunties and foster parents and adoptive cousins all exist together."
June: "He says he is engaged in a “bitter war” with the Guinness Book of World Records to invalidate what he believes is an illegitimate record from 2002 for running from the village of John o’ Groats in northeastern Scotland to Land’s End in Cornwall — an end-to-end route of the island of Great Britain, colloquially known as the JOGLE."
July: "Joseph Pilates wasn’t so self-centered as to name the training method after himself—he called it “contrology.”"
August: "“Tattourism,“ or traveling for a specific tattoo artist or style, has been on the rise among Gen Z and millennials, the Wall Street Journal reported this month."
September: "I spent more than 100 hours in libraries reading about almost forgotten mythical creatures: about longmas – scaled winged horses from Chinese and Babylonian mythology – and Scottish lavellans, a kind of permanently irate poisonous shrew."
October: "The earliest concise take was probably from author and technologist Cory Doctorow who, in a January essay about why TikTok feels bad now, coined the term “enshittification,” to describe the process of a platform or marketplace getting lazier, dumber, and more closed off."
November: "TESCREAL stands for "transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism (in a very specific context), Effective Altruism, and longtermism."
Last year I promised that in 2023 these citations would finally make their way to Wordnik, and they have! In celebration, here are eleven also-rans, which you can now look up on Wordnik: briggistanes, catasterization, clowncore, dingulator, grandternity, greenwish, howcatchem, neurorights, Novid, psychobiome, supertokenism. If you'd like to join the Wordnik Hypothes.is group and save your own citations, just follow these instructions. (If you'd like to support Wordnik financially, you can always adopt a word! Makes a great gift.)
Here's hoping the waning days of 2023 are kind to you —
Your friend,
Erin