Things I learned while looking up other things, 2021.12.11
Dear friends,
A few days ago we celebrated one of my favorite secular holidays, the day that Said The Gramophone posts their favorite songs of the past year. I don't have any illusions of producing anything nearly as epic as that retrospective, but here, as I did last year, are eleven of the words I saved in 2021 using the hypothes.is annotation tool.
January had SPAC, (a word I am heartily sick of by now): "Startups that a year or two ago were struggling to keep the lights on have merged with shell corporations called special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), giving them a quick and easy way to the stock market without any of the hassle that comes with an IPO."
February brought me facticity: "Facticity means a thing can only take on the feature of being a fact, of being real, of being truth or a part of reality when it has been pinpointed to the linear timeline and assigned a date."
March: zooterina: "Young ladies who wore zoot suits were called zooterinas."
In April, the NYT picked up cheugy, and most people promptly put it back down again: "Cheugy (pronounced chew-gee) can be used, broadly, to describe someone who is out of date or trying too hard."
May: what Wordniks call a "sweet tooth fairy" this cartoonist calls a streptonym: "So, I've come up with my own name for a sequential mashup of unrelated phrases: streptonym."
June: metronormativity: "While metronormativity posits that “rural culture and rural people are backward” subjects who must be “saved” by “internet, technology, and media literacy,” Wang’s travels show the centrality of China’s countryside to global life."
July: airglow: "It's dark enough here that when there's no moon, you may be able to see a phenomenon called 'airglow': the blue luminescence given off by cosmic ray strikes and chemical reactions in the atmosphere itself."
August: ultrastructure: "We can commit to developing the technologies and building out new infrastructural systems that are flexible and sustainable, but we have the same urgency and unparalleled opportunity to transform our ultrastructure, the social systems that surround and shape them."
September: polywork: "The professional workforce, particularly millennials (aged between 25 and 40 years old) and Gen Z (up to 24 years old), is increasingly rejecting the concept of a full-time job and a single boss in favor of something that’s being dubbed “polywork,” or having multiple jobs at once."
October: hellmaxxing: "The fake version of the article claimed that TikTok users were “hellmaxxing,” which was purportedly a viral trend where users tried to commit enough sins to not be able to get into heaven anymore."
November: bezzle: "Take 'bezzle' – JK Galbraith's term for “the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.”"
So far in the past eleven days I've saved at least one word per day, including grandmillennials, friluftsliv, nutriette, effeminophobia, transcreation, hypebae, gusanos, Corruptistan, carnism, and metasurface. (Finding citations for these is left as an exercise for the reader.)
(If you'd like to save interesting words you've come across and maybe have your citations show up on Wordnik (one day soon!), feel free to join the Wordnik group using these instructions.)
Here's hoping the waning days of 2021 are peaceful—
Your friend,
Erin
A few days ago we celebrated one of my favorite secular holidays, the day that Said The Gramophone posts their favorite songs of the past year. I don't have any illusions of producing anything nearly as epic as that retrospective, but here, as I did last year, are eleven of the words I saved in 2021 using the hypothes.is annotation tool.
January had SPAC, (a word I am heartily sick of by now): "Startups that a year or two ago were struggling to keep the lights on have merged with shell corporations called special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), giving them a quick and easy way to the stock market without any of the hassle that comes with an IPO."
February brought me facticity: "Facticity means a thing can only take on the feature of being a fact, of being real, of being truth or a part of reality when it has been pinpointed to the linear timeline and assigned a date."
March: zooterina: "Young ladies who wore zoot suits were called zooterinas."
In April, the NYT picked up cheugy, and most people promptly put it back down again: "Cheugy (pronounced chew-gee) can be used, broadly, to describe someone who is out of date or trying too hard."
May: what Wordniks call a "sweet tooth fairy" this cartoonist calls a streptonym: "So, I've come up with my own name for a sequential mashup of unrelated phrases: streptonym."
June: metronormativity: "While metronormativity posits that “rural culture and rural people are backward” subjects who must be “saved” by “internet, technology, and media literacy,” Wang’s travels show the centrality of China’s countryside to global life."
July: airglow: "It's dark enough here that when there's no moon, you may be able to see a phenomenon called 'airglow': the blue luminescence given off by cosmic ray strikes and chemical reactions in the atmosphere itself."
August: ultrastructure: "We can commit to developing the technologies and building out new infrastructural systems that are flexible and sustainable, but we have the same urgency and unparalleled opportunity to transform our ultrastructure, the social systems that surround and shape them."
September: polywork: "The professional workforce, particularly millennials (aged between 25 and 40 years old) and Gen Z (up to 24 years old), is increasingly rejecting the concept of a full-time job and a single boss in favor of something that’s being dubbed “polywork,” or having multiple jobs at once."
October: hellmaxxing: "The fake version of the article claimed that TikTok users were “hellmaxxing,” which was purportedly a viral trend where users tried to commit enough sins to not be able to get into heaven anymore."
November: bezzle: "Take 'bezzle' – JK Galbraith's term for “the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.”"
So far in the past eleven days I've saved at least one word per day, including grandmillennials, friluftsliv, nutriette, effeminophobia, transcreation, hypebae, gusanos, Corruptistan, carnism, and metasurface. (Finding citations for these is left as an exercise for the reader.)
(If you'd like to save interesting words you've come across and maybe have your citations show up on Wordnik (one day soon!), feel free to join the Wordnik group using these instructions.)
Here's hoping the waning days of 2021 are peaceful—
Your friend,
Erin
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