Things I learned while looking up other things, 2024.12.11
Dear friends,
Welcome to what is now the traditional December edition of Things I Learned While Looking Up Other Things!
Here are eleven of the words I saved this past year using the Hypothes.is annotation tool (if you, too, would like to hunt example sentences in the wild for display at Wordnik, follow the instructions here).
January: “I started to think through the ethics of extreme wealth concentration in a systematic way, and after a decade I became convinced that we must create a world in which no one is super-rich — that there must be a cap on the amount of wealth any one person can have. I call this limitarianism.”
February: “Like lots of Geoff’s videos, I find I never cared about these small details of people’s accents until I see a video of his with dozens of fascinating examples and intriguing asides, like Prince Charles saying ‘heute[r]Abend’ in German, and the concept of ‘grapholatry’, the worship of written spelling.”
March: “Lambert held a seminar on aphantasia—a term coined in 2015 by a British neurologist named Adam Zeman to describe an inability to call up visual images in the mind.”
April: “You point out the significant ways that the passion principle fosters and justifies inequality and segregation in the workplace by shifting the focus of a structural phenomenon to individual-level decisions and preferences, a process you call ‘choicewashing.’”
May: “Joseph Thacker asked what a good name would be for the equivalent subset of spam—spam that was generated with AI tools. I propose ‘slom’.”
June: “A new word emerged from the carnage in Gaza this week: ‘scholasticide’ – the systematic destruction by Israeli forces of centres of education dear to Palestinian society, as the ministry of education was bombed, the infrastructure of teaching destroyed, and schools across the Gaza strip targeted for attack by the air, sea and ground offensives.“
July: “Agathonicity is usually described as the property of objects getting better with use.”
August: “The point was that you could invent a new verb you had never heard before (outgorbachev) and the verb might sound different from all the verbs you had encountered (hence it was an outlier) and yet your rule based system could apply perfectly, without depending on the idiosyncracies of related training data.”
September: “Calzada is one of several women I spoke with who, upon turning 50, chose to celebrate a cincuentañera—a remixed version of the quinceañera that’s become more popular in recent years.”
October: “Why is the person who suggested an industry based on the idea of burying people with seeds, which they termed ‘morticulture’ (xenzag, August 2 2006), not a millionaire?!”
November: “In the world of children’s literature, peritext is loosely defined as all of the “extras” outside the published text itself – found on the end papers of books and/or an Author’s or Illustrator’s Note in the back of the story, as examples.”
If you want to see more words with recent examples, a selection is added more-or-less weekly to this Wordnik word list.
Some other favorite year-end things: the Said the Gramophone Best Songs of 2024, reading (or listening to!) The Dark is Rising on December 20, and cooking cinnamon rolls in a waffle maker.
And lastly, since supposedly every newsletter now also has to be a gift guide, if you’d like to support Wordnik financially, you can always adopt a word! Makes a great gift.
Stay well!
Your friend,
Erin