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AMONG THE NEW WORDS BENJAMIN ZIMMER KELLY E. WRIGHT Wall Street Journal University of Michigan CHARLES E. CARSON Duke University Press Send newly found words to atnw@americandialect.org We are delighted to bring “Among the New Words” back to the pages of American Speech after an extended hiatus. Since the feature last appeared in the journal, we have taken the time to rethink how “ATNW” can best serve readers, including teachers and students who may be using it as a pedagogical resource, and we have accordingly made changes to the pre- sentation and format that we think will make “ATNW” significantly more accessible and engaging than in previous years. In the November 2016 issue of American Speech, the special edition of “Seventy-Five Years Among the New Words” provided an opportunity to look back on the history of “ATNW” since Dwight Bolinger first brought the feature to American Speech in 1941 (Zimmer, Carson, and Solomon 2016; Zimmer and Carson 2018). In the text of the 75th anniversary retrospective, we adapted the traditional format of “ATNW” to treat each headword with a more discursive assessment, rather than focusing on citational paragraphs as in years past. After hearing positive feedback about the presentational style, we have decided to adopt it for “ATNW” going forward, beginning with this installment. We will also continue to provide detailed lexicograph- ical treatments with citational evidence in the feature’s traditional style, but these will be available only as supplemental material to the online version of the article. For this installment of “ATNW,” supplemental materials are available at https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-3442150. The change in presentation also allows us to provide a more individu- alized approach to the treatment of headwords. Readers will find that the write-up for each headword is followed by the initials of the coauthor who worked on it. In this article, those initials are for Benjamin Zimmer [BZ], Charles E. Carson [CC], and our newest contributor, Kelly E. Wright [KW], a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan researching linguistic dis- crimination. For this installment of “ATNW,” we offer a selection of nominated words in the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year voting from 2017 American Speech, Vol. 96, No. 1, February 2021 doi 10.1215/00031283-3442150 Copyright 2021 by the American Dialect Society 105 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/1/105/851521/0960105.pdf by guest
106 americ an speech 96.1 (2021) to 2019, with a particular focus on those from the 2019 WOTY proceed- ings, held at the society’s annual meeting in New Orleans on January 3, 2020. The winners for 2017–19 in the various categories are listed below, with the runners-up included in parentheses in the order of votes cast: 2017 word of the year: fake news (#MeToo; take a knee; alternative facts; persisterhood, persister; milkshake duck; whomst ) political word of the year: take a knee (persisterhood, persister ; antifa) digital word of the year: shitpost (rogue; ratio; initial coin offering ; get the zucc; emergency podcast; digital blackface; blockchain) slang/informal word of the year: wypipo (snatched; skooketh; RIP ) most useful: die by suicide (-burger ; angry react, sad react; millennial pink) most likely to succeed: fake news (unicorn; stan v.) most creative: broflake (askhole; milkshake duck; caucacity) euphemism of the year: alternative facts (avocado toast; Internet freedom; problem- atic) wtf word of the year: covfefe (raw water ; Oh hi Mark; procrastination nanny) hashtag of the year: #MeToo (#ReclaimingMyTime; #NeverthelessShePersisted; #Resist) emoji of the year: ( ; im ; ) 2018 word of the year: tender-age shelter/camp/facility (yeet; white-caller crime; (the) wall; —— strong; Individual 1) political word of the year: (the) wall (nationist; blue wave; caravan; lodestar) digital word of the year: techlash (blackfishing ; demontize; deepfake; finsta) slang/informal word of the year: yeet (weird flex but ok; big dick energy (BDE); canceled; mood, big mood) most useful: Voldemorting (orbiting; self-care; himpathy; situationship; preferred pro- noun) most likely to succeed: climate grief (single-use; cli-fi; hothouse Earth) most creative: white-caller crime (today days old; procrasti- ; girther ; treasonweasel ) euphemism of the year: racially charged (tender-age shelter/camp/facility; Individ ual 1; executive time) wtf word of the year: deleted family unit (incel; shithole countries; emotional sup- port peacock; soy boy) hashtag of the year: #nottheonion (#neveragain; #timesup; #thankunext) emoji of the year: ( ; ; ) 2019 word of the year: (my) pronouns (ok boomer ; Karen; cancel ) political word of the year: quid pro quo (#IMPOTUS ; squad; Trumpschmerz) most useful/likely to succeed: ok boomer (plant-based; stan; zoomer) slang/informal word of the year: and I oop (hot girl summer ; zaddy) most creative: nobody: (sksksk; -curious; gerrymeandering ) Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/1/105/851521/0960105.pdf by guest
Among the New Words 107 euphemism of the year: people of means (freedom gas/molecules of U.S. freedom; self-partnered; Heckboy) digital word of the year: im (VSCO Girl; ) word of the decade (2010–19): they, sing. (meme ; climate ; #BlackLivesMatter ; woke; #MeToo ; emoji; opioid crisis; selfie) Lists of past winners, definitions, and details of the voting are available at the ADS website (https://www.americandialect.org/woty) and as sup- plemental materials to the electronic version of this article (https://doi .org/10.1215/00031283-3442150). As noted above, the 2019 WOTY proceedings included a vote for the overall Word of the Decade for 2010–19. The winner for Word of the Decade was they used as a singular third-person pronoun, which was previ- ously the ADS’s choice for 2015 Word of the Year. For further discussion of singular they, see “ATNW” in the February and March 2016 issues (AS 91, nos. 1 and 2), recapping the 2015 ADS WOTY vote. Note, references made in the text to the evidentiary quotations in the online-only treatments are cited by date (e.g., “see 2018 Sept. 9 quot.”). Also, a speaker icon ( ) in the article indicates that the online PDF con- tains an embedded audio clip that will play when the icon is clicked on. (This feature may not be supported by all PDF viewers; if you are unable to access the audio clip using your current viewer, open the PDF in Adobe’s free Acrobat Reader or other Acrobat product [http://get.adobe.com/ reader/].) Finally, we would like to acknowledge the assistance of Dominique Canning and Kate Whitcomb in the preparation of this installment. THE WORDS and i oop. The phrase and I oop, voted ADS’s Slang/Informal Word of the Year for 2019, is an interjection used to indicate that the speaker was ren- dered speechless by surprise, shock, or pain. Its origin dates back to a 2015 YouTube video by Jasmine Masters, the drag persona of Martell Robinson, during which the former Ru Paul’s Drag Race contestant abruptly stops mid- sentence during a rant about her friends’ drinking habits. The cause—well, I’ll let her explain: ’Cause I didn’t want to get fucked up and drive– you know– be driving while I’m already fucked up. So, bitch, I crash in my back seat for a couple of hours, and I oop– [long pause, heavy sigh] Mmm, I just hit my balls. [see 2015 Oct. 28 quot. ( )] Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/1/105/851521/0960105.pdf by guest
108 americ an speech 96.1 (2021) It was not until March 2019 that it showed up again, now as a 4-second video GIF of Masters saying just the phrase, used in responses to posts, the speaker’s own or others’, that had metaphorically rendered the user speech- less. (GIPHY [2019] would later crown it the #1 GIF of 2019.) Within days, the video of Masters was dropped, and the phrase, now written out and I oop, was picked up by several Twitter communities. Eventually, it underwent some bleaching, both semantic and demographic, to become an empty tag to mark the user’s identity as a White tweenage VSCO girl (see also sksksk). And finally, as is the cycle for many internet memes, the phrase started appearing on T-shirts and other merchandise, spawned a number of songs and remixes using Masters’s original audio, and is mostly used now ironi- cally—though it could always resurface, rediscovered by the next online generation. [CC] cancel; cancel culture. The transitive sense of cancel has a long history in English: speakers have been able, according to the OED, to cancel obliga- tions since the sixteenth century; one has been able, according to Rodgers and Hammerstein, to break up with one’s boyfriend by canceling that man since the late 1940s (“I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair,” South Pacific, 1949 [ ]); since the mid 1990s, a crime boss can cancel the competition “permanently”; in the late aughts, one can cancel a politician by voting them out of office or jocularly pronounce the end of something faddish as canceled. The sense nominated for the 2019 Word of the Year involves the speaker publicly withdrawing support for a public figure in response to actions deemed problematic or offensive, a common practice starting in the mid-2010s as an attempt to hold people accountable in the midst of the #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and Transgender Pride move- ments. This withdrawal of the speaker or the respective group to which the speaker belongs is usually proclaimed online and involves a boycott of the offender’s work and a refusal to amplify (i.e., signal boost) their negative message or behavior by socially isolating them online, thus limiting their power and influence in the attention economy that is social media. The ori- gin of both the usage and phenomenon are often credited to Black users of Twitter. Canceling as social censure is viewed variously as warranted social justice and activism, overzealous public shaming and persecution in which the punishment is often disproportionate to the offence, or a schaden- freude-motivated sport. The term cancel(ed) culture first appeared in late 2016 and is used primarily by critics of canceling, arguing in part that ostra- cizing too readily those you don’t agree with is counterproductive. [CC] caucacity. Nominated for Most Creative Word of 2017, caucacity refers to the specific audacity associated with White people (aka Caucasians) or Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/1/105/851521/0960105.pdf by guest
Among the New Words 109 White Privilege. The first instantiation of the term I found was in a 2012 music review by The Kid Mero (see 2012 Nov quot. 1), followed mere hours by a tweet from @Riz_Venura giving the components of this cre- ative portmanteau, “Audacity + Caucasian = Caucacity” (see 2012 Nov. 22 quot. 2). Caucacity’s rise began around 2015 as a label for things associated with White people (as opposed to their actions), exemplified by Donnie Kwak’s caption of a Desus vs. Mero podcast video: “the wonderful world of artisanal cheese, fancy bicycles, and pumpkin patch protests. And Caitlyn Jenner. Caucacity, people. Caucacity” (see 2015 Jan. 2 quot.). Caucacity centers on the audaciousness of the actions some White people take on a daily basis, like conspicuous consumption or skydiving, but it is also used to mark outright racist actions, like sporting an “All Lives Matter” bumper sticker or general Karenic behaviors (see karen). Caucacity was defined in Macmillian’s crowdsourced Open Dictionary as “behaving in a manner that disregards or refuses to acknowledge one’s white privilege” (see 2020 Sept. 8 quot.), but I would argue that caucacity is less agentive than this definition seems to indicate. An action is particularly caucacious, in my well-formed opinion granted by a lifetime of observing “White people White,” when the person in question couldn’t have taken the action at all if they were even the slightest bit aware of themselves as a racialized person. Consider, for example, the Jamaican accent Chet Hanks, the White California-born son of Tom Hanks, has been affecting of late, which prompted Twitter user @eridanus_orphia to respond, “What in the caucacity is this?” (see 2020 Jan. 6 quot.). Ann Althouse asks in the title of a blog post, “Does the word ‘Caucacity’ […] express the idea of whiteness as a problem?” (see 2018 Jan. 31 quot.). To which I respond, caucacity is really about marking the full spectrum of White behaviors for White audiences, thus helping them to see and then adjust their privileges. But more importantly, it helps them to recognize what it means to act White so they can become more aware that White culture is just that—a racially defined culture in its own right, not a default or normal way of being. [KW] im ; im ment. The peach emoji ( ) was introduced as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010, but since then it has frequently appeared with meanings unre- lated to the fruit. A 2016 survey of Twitter usage by Emojipedia found that the most common usage was as “a shorthand for butt,” based on the visual resemblance of the emoji to plump buttocks (Azhar 2016). But another kind of playful application of the emoji was popularized in 2019: using as a rebus to spell out impeach as im or impeachment as im ment. On September 24, 2019, the day that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the launching of a formal impeachment inquiry against President Donald Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/1/105/851521/0960105.pdf by guest
110 americ an speech 96.1 (2021) Trump, the entertainer Lizzo reacted on Twitter with “IM MENT,” in a tweet that received nearly 120,000 likes (see 2019 Sept. 24 quot.). Lizzo had previously announced that was her favorite emoji for more ana- tomical reasons, but after Trump faced impeachment, she combined the two connotations (Solomon 2020). As captured in an Instagram post the next day, Lizzo spelled out the rebus in concert by saying, “Im-peach-ment” while slapping her behind (see 2019 Sept. 25 quot.). Thanks to Lizzo and others, im was recognized as 2019 Digital Word of the Year in the ADS voting. (Previous years had featured an Emoji of the Year category in the WOTY proceedings, as well as Hashtag of the Year, but for 2019, emojis and hashtags were subsumed into the Digital category.) As the Trump impeach- ment drama began to unfold, the rebus interpretation of led to some concerns that the emoji was too ambiguous given its longstanding reading as ‘butt’ (Schwedel 2019), but as with so many emoji, it could take on mul- tiple meanings that readers could navigate according to context. Both im and im ment became less relevant after the Republican-controlled Senate acquitted Trump on the impeachment charges introduced by House Democrats in February 2020. But playful emoji rebuses have continued to flourish on social media, as well as other types of wordplay such as emoji acrostics (Kuney 2020). [BZ] karen. Given its nomination for Word of the Year in 2019, you might be asking, who is this Karen person anyway? The stereotypical Karen is a White mom in her 30s or 40s with a blond shaggy bob with side-swept bangs and an attitude—picture an angry Kate Gosselin from Jon and Kate Plus 8 circa 2008—though as online videos have shown, Karens come in many shapes and sizes, but she is always White. While the trope has changed somewhat over time to include more and more aberrant beliefs and behaviors, a con- sistent theme throughout is entitlement, whether it is held over the work- ing class (e.g., Can I speak to your manager? ), minorities (Police! Help! There’s a Black person, and I feel threatened), science (Vaccines cause autism! ), or soci- ety at large. She feels empowered to bully the world into one of her lik- ing and lacks the self-awareness to recognize her privilege. That said, it should be noted that not all Karens are bullies; some are just “basic,” dis- playing traits associated with this slightly older pejorative meaning ‘unorigi- nal, mainstream’ (see 2018 Apr. 7 quot. from Saturday Night Live). So how did the name Karen get attached to these characteristics? The name has appeared frequently in prior comedic contexts, including on television (e.g., Karen Walker from NBC’s Will and Grace), movies (e.g., Mean Girls; see 2004 quot.), standup comedy (see 2005 and 2014 quots.), and internet memes (see 2016 Oct. 20 quot.). While these depictions are mostly unflat- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/1/105/851521/0960105.pdf by guest
Among the New Words 111 tering, there’s no direct link to this new sense. Burton (2020) suggests that the name is strongly associated with middle-aged women, pointing out that Karen was consistently in the top 10 of girls’ names in the 1950s and 1960s but as of 2018 ranks 637th, but why Karen and not Mary or Susan? The answer might be the /k/, which along with its voiced counterpart /g/ have been shown to be more frequent in “semantic domains of deroga- tion” (Wescott 1971). There’s something about a velar consonant that adds power to a punch. Right, Becky?! [CC] mood; big mood; a whole mood. Nominated for the Slang/Informal Word of 2018, mood is used to mark some type of relatable content, as in the tweet “Eazy E is always my mood” (see 2017 Sept. 30 quot.). Today, mood functions as an interjection and is used to indicate agreement. A user on r/NoStupidQuestions explains that mood means “this is exactly how I am feeling right now” (see 2019 Jan. 1 quot.). Mood is essentially a meme tagger, marking any occurrence as relatable content and filling the arti- fact with human emotion. Because of this, mood is incredibly flexible, being attached to anything: a nice purse, a plate of bagel bites, a kitten running headlong into a plate glass window, a glacier crumbling into the sea. Mood, and its related usages big mood and a whole mood, join the ever-growing pan- theon of Black Americanisms that have emerged into mainstream U.S. English, being adopted into wider usage culture. The early example of big mood comes from Twitter user @SJ_Brown11, speaking about their excite- ment for the approaching fall season: “big mood rn is to ditch summer for cold weather, football, bonfires, sweatshirts, Halloween, ” (see 2018 July 25 quot.). Big mood is the more emphatic cousin of mood, amplifying the already exaggerated interjection. The big mood construction implies less of the agreement of mood and more of the memetic sarcasm mood came to imply over time, illustrated beautifully in this tweet from @mayybaee: “Therapist: ‘and what do we say when we over hear someone saying they want to die?’ / Me: ‘big mood’ / Therapist: ‘…no’” (see 2019 July 22 quot.). The a whole mood construction can take on a slightly more personal vibe. Uses of this construction can be found all the way back to 2016, with Twitter user @johnsonaaron569: “I need money in my hand fuck a whole mood ” (see 2016 Apr. 8 quot.). In her new visual album Black Is King, Beyoncé includes a powerful song “Mood 4 Eva” in which she refers to her- self as a whole mood (Walsh 2020): “I be like soul food, I am a whole mood” (see 2019 July 19 quot. [ ]). This work from Beyoncé, and other usages of the mood family of terms, reveal that the ability to mark examples of what it feels like to be Black with a shared construction, and to live in such a way that embraces and celebrates that Blackness, is incredibly powerful. [KW] Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/1/105/851521/0960105.pdf by guest
112 americ an speech 96.1 (2021) ok boomer. The intergenerational putdown ok boomer —best represented in lower-case with no punctuation, befitting its initial circulation in casual online use—won the Most Useful category in ADS’s 2019 WOTY session and finished second in the voting for the overall Word of the Year. Its strong showing was no surprise, given how prevalent the phrase had become by the end of the year, especially after NBC News (Rosenblatt 2019) and the New York Times (Lorenz 2019) provided mainstream media coverage of its spread in late October. While boomer had been applied to members of the post–World War II Baby Boom generation since the 1970s, the latter-day use of ok boomer targeted not so much a specific generation as a stodgy mindset (Zimmer 2019a). As embraced by Generation Z, ok boomer became a mocking retort to any older person who displayed condescension or lack of awareness toward young people and their concerns. Before it gained widespread media exposure, the phrase had been spreading virally on video-sharing platforms like TikTok. Its international impact was felt when Chlöe Swarbrick, a 25-year-old member of New Zealand’s Parliament, used ok boomer to respond to a heckler while she was delivering a speech about climate change in early November (McGinn 2019 [ ]). In the inevitable backlash against ok boomer, various comebacks to the comeback emerged, including ok zoomer, using zoomer as a snarky designation for Generation Z (see zoomer below). But the generational warfare over the phrase was short-lived, as ok boomer had already lost much of its slang cachet among Gen Z-ers by early 2020. [BZ] (my) pronoun; preferred pronoun. “Pronouns are suddenly sexy,” writes Dennis Baron in the introduction to his 2020 book What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond He and She. “People are asking each other, ‘What’s your pronoun?’— it’s the new ‘Hello, my name is _____.’ And sometimes they don’t even wait to be asked. They introduce themselves with ‘I’m Alex. My pronouns are they, them, their.’ Or ‘Ze, hir, hirs’” (Baron 2020, 1). On social media pro- files and conference badges, too, it has become more and more common to see people specify their personal pronouns, as in “Pronouns: she/her.” Recognizing how this personal expression of gender identity has grown in a wide variety of discursive contexts, the American Dialect Society selected (my) pronouns as the 2019 Word of the Year. At the same time, the ADS chose “singular they” as Word of the Decade for 2010–19, having previously recognized it as Word of the Year for 2015 (see “ATNW,” AS 91, no. 2 [May 2016]). Both selections reflect trends in the use of personal pronouns for self-identification, particularly for queer or transgender identities that may not conform to the traditional binaries of he and she. The set of third-person pronouns with which a person identifies has, in the past, been referred to by some as preferred pronouns or preferred gender pronouns (PGP for short). Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/1/105/851521/0960105.pdf by guest
Among the New Words 113 Indeed, preferred pronoun was nominated in the Most Useful category in the 2018 WOTY vote. However, this term has received increasing criticism: “In the last few years, we realized that pronouns aren’t ‘preferred’ but simply correct or incorrect for someone’s identity” (Levin 2018). Likewise, Baron (2020, 136) notes that “calling pronouns ‘preferred’ suggests that gender is an option, not an essence, and there’s a growing movement to drop pre- ferred.” Simply stating one’s pronouns, rather than one’s “preferred” pro- nouns, has become increasingly the norm as the national discourse has focused on gender inclusivity and the recognition of nonbinary and gen- der-nonconforming identities. [BZ] ratio. The word ratio—in Twitter parlance, the proportion of replies a tweet garners to its retweets and likes—saw a sudden increase in usage on Twitter in 2017, the year in which it was nominated as Digital Word of the Year. The trend began in March of that year, when Twitter user @85mf posted a screenshot of a tweet by House Oversight Committee chair Jason Chaffetz that had generated many critical replies: “Nothing on this site makes me happier than reply-to-RT ratios like this. That is the ratio of someone who fuuuuucked up” (see 2017 Mar. 7 quot.). As Luke O’Neil explained in a piece for Esquire in April, “The lengthier the conversation, the surer it is that someone royally messed up. It’s a phenomenon known as The Ratio” (O’Neil 2017a). He followed that up with another Esquire article that singled out tweets with particularly egregious ratios, such as one from Virginia gubernatorial candidate Corey Stewart with “an alarming ratio of 694 retweets to 8,500 responses” (O’Neil 2017b). Soon enough, ratio was such a common shorthand on Twitter that it could be used as a verb, with a badly received tweet (or the person responsible for the tweet) said to be ratioed or ratio’d (Merriam-Webster 2017). By November 2017, Stan Carey observed on his Sentence First blog that “ratio as a verb is currently used a few dozen times a day on Twitter” (Carey 2017). By 2020, ratioing could even appear in the title of a scholarly article, with a team of researchers at the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab publishing, “Ratioing the President: An Exploration of Public Engagement with Obama and Trump on Twitter” (Minot et al. 2020). [BZ] shitpost. Winner in the Digital Word of the Year category in 2017, shitpost could be defined as a particularly worthless post on an online discussion platform. More specifically, a shitpost or the act of shitposting tends to entail posting irrelevant content that is intended to derail a conversation or to provoke others. The origins of the term go back to the mid-1990s in Usenet newsgroups, where shitpost was used to decry the troll-like behavior of dis- ruptive participants in discussions, which could often descend into “flame Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/1/105/851521/0960105.pdf by guest
114 americ an speech 96.1 (2021) wars” when exchanges got heated. The expression was further popular- ized on the Something Awful forums in 2007, making its way to Urban Dictionary the following year (Carey 2018). During the 2016 presidential campaign season, shitposting became increasingly associated with politi- cal discussions on social media, particularly among supporters of Donald Trump circulating memes that were often vulgar and demeaning to Hillary Clinton (Griffin 2016). One pro-Trump group sought to get memes “shit- posted across America,” thus expanding shitposting to encompass “online and offline paid advertisements, and memes with a political message” (Horwitz 2016). The recognition of shitpost as 2017 Digital Word of the Year was viewed as illustrating “how people used the internet in a year that made clear just how powerfully the glut of online information can be weap- onized against democracy” (Purtill 2018). [BZ] sksksk. Nominated as Most Creative for 2019, sksksk rose to prominence because of its heavy association with VSCO (/'vIsko/) girls, an online subcul- ture of tween- and teenage girls oft-maligned as vapid, vain, and unoriginal (named after the photo-editing and -sharing app VSCO). While sksksk has been seen before in both written and spoken forms—as a signoff to phone- based text communication for the deaf (‘stop keying’) and as a phonetic representation of animal calls and ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) stimulus—the coinage of this latest incarnation, used to indicate a keyboard smash made in frustration or because of some other intense emotion, has been claimed by various online slang-wielding groups, includ- ing Brazilian Portuguese speakers, the African American and LGBT com- munities, and “Stans” (groups of obsessive fans, self-named after a crazed, murderous fan in the Eminem song “Stan”). The earliest Twitter example I uncovered is from 2009, by Marcus Beecham of Memphis, Tennessee: fol- lowing a link to a picture of camo-print boat shoes in a shopping cart, he writes, “the only houseshoes walmart had in my size ajksns skakmsns sksks” (see 2009 Jan. 15 quot.). Based on his Twitter profile and history of posts, he does not fall readily into any of these communities, though this may be a coincidental use given the extended string of key-smashed characters appearing before. By July 2009, however, sksksk had appeared in Twitter posts by members of all these communities (except by the later-appearing Stans). Among VSCO girls, as with and i oop, sksksk has been reduced to a semantically empty identity tag used to denote group membership. [CC] soy boy. Soy boy, nominated in the WTF category for 2018, came into usage in late 2015–early 2016 referring to a vegan or hipster male, typically used in a derogatory sense. Being a soy boy implies a weakness and shamefulness gained by choosing not to eat meat and other animal products or doing Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/1/105/851521/0960105.pdf by guest
Among the New Words 115 something so unthinkably emasculating as ascribing to Feminist philoso- phies (read the sarcasam folks). This meaning likely derives from (widely debunked) reports that the regular consumption of soy-based products can overproduce estrogen in the body, causing male-presenting folks to become physiologically feminized. Thoroughly overgeneralized, soy boy is now semi- synonymous with snowflake and is commonly lobbed at liberals by Trump supporters. As happens with other such hate-filled labels, soy boy is now enjoying a period of reclamation, with vegan and left-leaning men begin- ning to apply the term to themselves. The origins of soy boy are unclear, with several sources quoted as taking ownership of the term, including known White Supremacist YouTuber James Allsup (Hosie 2020). This leading alt- right commentator even dubbed himself a leader of the #MilkParty in early 2017, turning consuming dairy milk into a marker of good breeding. The connection of milk drinking to White Supremacy is not new: “By declaring milk perfect, white northern Europeans announced their own perfection” (DuPuis 2002, 11). “The nutritionally ‘perfect’ white drink was symboli- cally linked to the white-skinned bodies that were better able to digest it due to a genetic mutation known as lactase persistence” (Gambert and Linné 2018). The widespread usage of the term soy boy as a derogation soon followed the uprising of #MilkTwitter, although there is convincing evidence that just like many other alt-right, dogwhistling neologisims, this usage of soy boy originated on 4Chan (Caldwell 2017). Hate it for ya, James Allsup. [KW] take a knee, #takeaknee. The American Dialect Society’s selection for the 2017 Political Word of the Year, which was also nominated for Hashtag of the Year as well as overall Word of the Year, was the phrasal verb take a knee or in hashtag form #takeaknee. While take a knee has long been used for the act of kneeling down on one knee, particularly in sporting and athletic contexts, it exploded in usage in 2016 and 2017 due to protests against racial injustice and police brutality spearheaded by Colin Kaepernick, then a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers. Kaepernick first knelt in protest on the sideline during the national anthem in a 2016 preseason game, which eventually led to a wider movement even after Kaepernick opted out of his contract with the 49ers when he was told they planned on releasing him. President Trump injected himself into the controversy in November 2017 when he called on the NFL to fire players who took a knee. When Kaepernick and other NFL players made their silent protest, they were drawing on a long tradition of knee-taking in football. The expression take a knee appeared as early as 1960 to refer to players kneeling for prayer or a moment of silence. In the 1970s and 1980s, taking a knee could be used for other kinds of kneeling, such as for taking a rest or expressing team solidar- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/1/105/851521/0960105.pdf by guest
116 americ an speech 96.1 (2021) ity. Within the game itself, football players are said to “take a knee” when downing the ball or running out the clock (Zimmer 2017). But Kaepernick was also inspired by “taking a knee” in military contexts (Kelly 2017). As stated by his teammate Eric Reid, who was the first to join him in protest, they decided to kneel during the anthem after Nate Boyer, a retired Green Beret and former NFL player, suggested it as a peaceful and respectful form of protest (Reid 2017). “Taking a knee” would return to the national con- versation after the widespread demonstrations against police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020. [BZ] techlash. Winner of the 2018 Digital Word of the Year, techlash described a growing reaction against major technology companies, particularly regarding concerns over monopolistic practices, potential election manip- ulation, and infringements of privacy. As a portmanteau combining tech with backlash, techlash was first attested in a November 2013 editorial in The Economist warning of “the coming tech-lash” (Wooldridge 2013). As is com- mon with such neologistic blends, tech-lash originally had a hyphen before settling into its current unhyphenated state. The Economist continued pro- moting the term in a special issue on “The World in 2018,” published in November 2017, which predicted a “techlash” against companies such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon, “saddling them with fines, regulation and a tougher interpretation of competition rules” (Beddoes 2017). The maga- zine’s prediction has proved accurate. Techlash works as a blend because the -lash component is interpretable as a shortened form of backlash. Following Zwicky (2010), we could call -lash a “libfix,” a “liberated” word-part that yields new word-forming elements. The libfixation of -lash can be traced to the 1960s, when the civil rights struggle brought about the coinage of both blacklash and whitelash. That was followed by further neologizing, such as Vietlash for backlash against those protesting the war in Vietnam (Zimmer 2019b). Tech, as a stressed monosyllable ending in /k/, like back, is particu- larly amenable to blending, since the echo of backlash is still phonetically recognizable in techlash. [BZ] tender-age shelter/camp/facility. On June 19, 2018, the Associated Press (Burke 2018) revealed the existence of “tender age” shelters, detain- ment centers holding immigrant children under the age of 13, some infants and toddlers, who were forcibly separated from their families as part of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy toward those entering the United States unlawfully (Sessions 2018). Reports about these centers spread quickly to most news outlets, rekindling widespread criticism of the policy of family separation enacted in May and leading the ADS to vote the Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/1/105/851521/0960105.pdf by guest
Among the New Words 117 phrase and its variants with facility and camp as Word of the Year for 2018 (they had been nominated earlier in the WOTY process as Euphemism of the Year but lost to racially charged ‘rascist’). According to government records obtained by the ACLU in September 2019, approximately 5,500 children were separated from their parents (Aguilera 2019) and even now 666 have yet to be reunited with them because their deported parents can- not be located (Soboroff and Ainsley 2020). Similar facilities, referred to as unaccompanied children shelters, had been set up by the Obama administra- tion in 2014, when there was a surge of minors crossing the border without their parents, but forced separations were not taking place then. Of the three variants, tender-age camp is used by the most passionate critics of the family separate policy, perhaps rhetorically referencing the camp in intern- ment camp or concentration camp; tender-age shelter was used in the initial news cycles and the following months, but given that the U.S. government is still detaining immigrant children two years later, shelter ’s implication as ‘tem- porary’ may be a stretch, thus tender-age facility is most common now. [CC] today years old. The today years old construction is all about register- ing mind blowing facts that one has learned just this moment. Sometimes these facts are learned surprisingly late in life, like this 2018 tweet captur- ing the first viral usage of the term: “I was today years old when I found out the ‘L’ in ‘Staples’ in [sic] really a half open staple,” accompanying a picture of a Staples storefront (see 2018 June 17 quot.). Occasionally we feel these things need to be shared with the world, like when Meaghan Dowling retweeted a picture of the underbelly of a beluga whale in 2018 with the caption “I was today years old when I found out that Beluga Whales have knees” (see 2018 June 6 quot.), which is apparently one reason these creatures were historically mistaken for mermaids. (Please note, whales do not, in fact, have knees, only rolls of shapely blubber.) Nominated in the Most Creative category in 2018, today years old is still enjoying wide usage as a fun way to mark your individual ignorance on a subject or discovery of an interesting fact. The need for this kind of construction is revealed by its wide usage, especially among online communities interested in sharing trivia, as exemplified in the retweet about whale knees above. Today years old became its own Twitter account (@todayyearsoldig) in 2018, which is a page dedicated to sharing such trivia as which would spark the desired today years old reaction from its audience. As noted on r/OutOfTheLoop, many who encounter today years old for the first time believe it to be a typo, given that it breaks some usage rules (see 2019 Feb. 20 quot.). To that I say, wel- come to the internet, boomers! Recently, today years old has been enjoying a resurgence on TikTok, accompanying several how-to trends. [KW] Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/1/105/851521/0960105.pdf by guest
118 americ an speech 96.1 (2021) voldemorting. Voldemorting, winner in the Most Useful category in 2018, is a term that was brand-new to that year, since it had been coined by Emily van der Nagel in a scholarly paper that June in Media International Australia. Van der Nagel (2018, 82) defined Voldemorting as “not mentioning words or names in order to avoid a forced connection” on social media. The term evidently first appeared in a comment on the site for the podcast Dongtini in 2013. The podcast episode suggested a boycott of “trash celebrities,” depriving them of social-media oxygen by not mentioning their names. In response, a commenter named Eugene proposed calling this prac- tice Voldemorting and defined it as “The act of never speaking the name of someone truly terrible. Eg ‘Don’t bother sending me those links, I’m Voldemorting those losers!’” (see 2013 Jan. 31 quot.). Voldemorting takes the name Voldemort from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels and turns it into a verbal noun. In the Harry Potter universe, Lord Voldemort is superstitiously referred to as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” or “You-Know-Who” in the wizarding community, since people fear that merely saying his name may summon him. In an article for Wired, Gretchen McCulloch (2018) notes that the online practice of Voldemorting is far more productive than the limited set of euphemistic monikers in the Potter-verse. “Internet Voldemorting is often playful and cycles through infinite variations of newly coined words,” McCulloch writes. Twitter may be called birdhell, birdsite, or birdworld, while Donald Trump may go by such appellations as Cheeto or 45. These substitu- tions are intended to foil keyword searches that might lead to unwanted attention, McCulloch observes, and “it’s also a way of marking out a particu- lar name or concept as objectionable.” [BZ] yeet. Yeet, the winner in the Slang/Informal category in 2018 (and the run- ner-up in the overall WOTY), has led a varied lexical life as an interjection, verb, and noun. The word has often been linked to dance moves and throw- ing objects, but in various youth subcultures yeet has been embraced as a general exclamation of enthusiasm, surprise, or excitement. The earliest Urban Dictionary entries for yeet or yeet yeet as an interjection date back to 2008, though the expression did not start to spread more widely until 2014, when it was used in conjunction with dance videos circulating on Black social media. Early examples of the “Yeet Dance,” often involving rhythmic shoulder dips, were uploaded to YouTube and Vine by such users as Milik Fullilove, MarQuis Trill, and especially a teenager from Dallas dubbed Lil Meatball (Anwar 2015). While these dance videos achieved viral success in 2014, another video from that year helped cultivate a different trajectory for the term. In a video clip shared on Vine, a high school girl is handed a soda can and exclaims, “This bitch empty!” before hurling it into a hallway full of fellow students as she yells, “Yeet!” The can-hurling video inspired Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/1/105/851521/0960105.pdf by guest
Among the New Words 119 various imitations and memes, and by 2018 yeet had achieved widespread success as a slang term. Yeet could be used as a verb for throwing something over a long distance or some other sudden, forceful motion, with yote as a humorous past-tense form (Ritzen 2018). Video gamers (such as those playing Fortnite) adopted yeet for their own purposes, typically for certain powerful moves leading to the defeat of an opponent. Yeet may, however, be reaching the end of its slang trajectory, descending like a quickly tossed soda can. [BZ] zaddy. Go on, zaddy! I see you nominated in the Slang/Informal category for 2019! Zaddy is a term for an attractive man, who could be a dad (not required) that you see being all sexy and you want to let him know about it. A zaddy is a provider, a man who shows in his stature and bearing that he knows how to take care of himself and could very well end up taking care of you. While the earliest usage is attributed to Blac Chyna on Instagram (Merriam-Webster 2018), zaddy gained popular appeal in 2016 after Ty Dolla $ign released a track by the same name, which expanded the defini- tion from a well-dressed provider to a sexual svengali: “Hey, Zaddy gon’ pull up and he gon’ fuck you all night / Hey, you know zaddy there, you got that act right / Hey, she got zaddy runnin’ up a budget” (see 2016 Aug. 25 quot. [ ]). After the release of this song, the usage of zaddy really blew up, with many twitter users retweeting photos of male celebrities and tagging them with these lyrics. The construction gained even wider popular appeal in 2018 when 2 Dope Queens podcast hosts Phoebe Robinson and Jessica Williams appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert—the host himself being an absolute zaddy—and in discussing zaddy’s meaning, Robinson gave the qualification that “I wore this suit for you. I wanted to look good for you. I wanted you to question your marriage,” which is the energy that zaddy is consistently bringing as a label (see 2018 Jan. 30 quot.). Zaddy is about a reclamation of sexual energy in the female-bodied speech com- munity, interjecting their desires by essentially cat-calling attractive men, recognizing the effort he has made to come correct, and making it known that women want to see more. Clover Hope, writing for Jezebel in 2017, cap- tures the je ne sais quoi of zaddy: “A zaddy is a guy you look at and think, zamn, zaddy… Immediately, you know in your heart who’s not a zaddy. It’s an instinctual response that’s not worth explaining in depth because you’re supposed to just feel it. The subject is not merely conventionally ‘hot’—he’s a zaddy. In other words, there’s an inner zaddiness.” [KW] zoomer. The Boomer shortening of Baby Boomer has spawned all manner of rhyming generational labels. Zoomer first got applied to particularly active members of the Baby Boomer generation, in usage dating at least as far Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/1/105/851521/0960105.pdf by guest
120 americ an speech 96.1 (2021) back as 2003 (Merriam-Webster 2020). When the post-Millennial cohort, with birth years starting in the mid-to-late 1990s, began to be dubbed Generation Z, it was perhaps inevitable that the Z would be attached to -oomer to form Zoomer as an alternative name for a Gen Z-er. Then, when the ok boomer retort grew into a meme in late 2019, zoomer got pressed into ser- vice as a retort to the retort, in the form ok zoomer (Landesman 2019). As with ok boomer itself, the popularity of ok zoomer proved to be evanescent. But Zoomer as a standalone generational name has been sturdier, validating its status as a nominee in the WOTY Most Useful category for 2019 (a category won by ok boomer ). Zoomer was joined by other rhyming designations for young people, such as Doomer, Gloomer, and Bloomer, all of which circulated on 4chan message boards accompanied by crude cartoonish caricatures of personality types (Tiffany 2020). And when the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 forced many students to switch to remote learning, typically via the video conferencing service Zoom, Zoomer took on another layer of aptness, serving as “an acknowledgment of the dramatic shift to remote communica- tion that will shape the interactions of this generation” (Gerhardt 2020). [BZ] R EFERE N CE S References to dated quotations (e.g., “see 2018 Sept. 9 quot.”) refer to cita- tions in the full lexicographical treatments, available online in the supple- mental materials (https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-3442150). Aguilera, Jasmine. 2019. “Here’s What to Know About the Status of Family Separation at the U.S. Border, Which Isn’t Nearly Over.” Time, Sept. 20, 2019. https://time.com/5678313/trump-administration-family-separation-lawsuits/. Anwar, Mehak. 2015. “Here’s Why People Are Suddenly Saying ‘Yeet.’” Bustle, Aug. 14, 2015. https://www.bustle.com/articles/103093-what-does-yeet-mean-how-do -you-use-it-heres-the-backstory-on-the-dance. Azhar, Hamdan. 2016. “How We Really Use the Peach.” Emojipedia, Dec. 16, 2016. https://blog.emojipedia.org/how-we-really-use-the-peach/. Baron, Dennis. 2020. What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond He and She. New York: Liveright. Beddoes, Zanny Milton. 2017. “The Pendulum of Power Swings Back towards the State.” The Economist, Nov. 7, 2017. https://theworldin.economist.com/edition/ 2018/article/14387/pendulum-power-swings-back-towards-state. Burke, Garance. 2018. “Youngest Migrants Held in ‘Tender Age’ Shelters.” AP News, June 19, 2018. https://apnews.com/article/cbc8092296c84b89ad38d5e7879 0a62e. Burton, Sarah. 2020. “The Origin of the Karen Meme.” BuzzFeedVideo, Sept. 23, 2020. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSXoBtmtypg. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/1/105/851521/0960105.pdf by guest
Among the New Words 121 Caldwell, Don. 2017. “Soy Boy.” Know Your Meme, Nov. 3, 2017. https://knowyour meme.com/memes/soy-boy. Carey, Stan. 2017. “Getting Ratioed for Your Bad Take.” Sentence First, Nov. 16, 2017. https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2017/11/16/getting-ratioed-for-your -bad-take/. ———. 2018. “‘Shitpost’ Is the Digital Word of the Year.” Strong Language, Jan. 6, 2018. https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2018/01/06/shitpost-is-the-digital -word-of-the-year/. DuPuis, E. Melanie. 2002. Nature’s Perfect Food: How Milk Became America’s Drink. New York: New York University Press. Gambert, Iselin, and Tobias Linné. 2018. “How the Alt-Right Use Milk to Promote White Supremacy.” The Conversation, Apr. 26, 2018. https://theconversation .com/how-the-alt-right-uses-milk-to-promote-white-supremacy-94854. Gerhardt, Megan. 2020. “Coronavirus and Zoom Have Marked a Generation. Let’s Call Them Zoomers.” Think, NBC News, June 7, 2020. https://www.nbcnews .com/think/opinion/coronavirus-zoom-have-marked-generation-let-s-call-them -zoomers-ncna1226241. GIPHY. 2019. “GIPHY ’s Top 25 GIFs of 2019.” Dec. 4, 2019. https://giphy.medium .com/giphy-2019-year-in-review-c2fd75c703b8. Griffin, Andrew. 2016. “Shitposting: What Is the Bizarre Online Behaviour That Could Win Donald Trump the Election?” Independent, Sept. 23, 2016. https:// www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/what-shitposting -donald-trump-us-election-2016-palmer-luckey-a7326111.html. Hope, Clover. 2017. “A List of Zaddys.” Jezebel, June 17, 2017. https://jezebel.com/ a-list-of-zaddys-1796062207. Horwitz, Josh. 2016. “The Founder of Oculus Is Funding a Group that ‘Shitposts’ Anti–Hillary Clinton Memes.” Quartz, Sept. 23, 2016. https://qz.com/789359/ palmer-luckey-sold-oculus-to-facebook-fb-for-2-billion-now-hes-funding-a -group-that-shitposts-anti-hillary-clinton-memes/. Hosie, Rachel. 2020. “Soy Boy: What Does This Online Insult Mean?” Independent, Sept. 30, 2020. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/soy-boy-insult-what -definition-far-right-men-masculinity-women-a8027816.html. Kelly, John. 2017. “‘Taking a Knee’: Simple Phrase, Powerful—and Changing— Meaning.” Mashed Radish, Sept. 25, 2017. https://mashedradish.com/2017/ 09/25/taking-a-knee-simple-phrase-powerful-and-changing-meaning/. Kuney, Allegra. 2020. “Do I Have to It Out for You?” Beyond Wordplay, Oct. 12, 2020. https://beyondwordplay.com/do-i-have-to-it-out-for-you-1650cf 5a0f07. Landesman, Cosmo. 2019. “OK Zoomer, Is That Really the Best You’ve Got?” Spectator, Nov. 16, 2019. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ok-zoomer-is-that -really-the-best-you-ve-got-. Levin, Rachel N. 2018. “The Problem with Pronouns.” Inside Higher Ed, Sept. 19, 2018. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/09/19/why-asking-students -their-preferred-pronoun-not-good-idea-opinion. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/1/105/851521/0960105.pdf by guest
122 americ an speech 96.1 (2021) Lorenz, Taylor. 2019. “‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations.” New York Times, Oct. 29, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/ 10/29/style/ok-boomer.html. McCulloch, Gretchen. 2018. “Welcome to Voldemorting, the Ultimate SEO Dis.” Wired, Oct. 9, 2018. https://www.wired.com/story/voldemorting-ultimate-seo -diss-resident-linguist/. McGinn, Miyo. 2019. “‘OK, Boomer’: The Perfect Response to a Generation That Failed on Climate.” Grist, Nov. 6, 2019. https://grist.org/article/ok-boomer-the -perfect-response-to-a-generation-that-failed-on-climate/. Merriam-Webster. 2017. “Words We’re Watching: ‘Ratioed’: A Quantitative Measure of How Little They Like Your Take.” Words We’re Watching, Dec. 15, 2017. https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/words-were-watching-ratio -ratioed-ratioing. ———. 2018. “The ‘Zaddy’ of All Words: When He’s So Fine It Makes You Say ‘Zamn.’” Words We’re Watching, July 9, 2018. https://www.merriam-webster.com/ words-at-play/zaddy-daddy-origin-meaning-rap. ———. 2020. “Words We’re Watching: ‘Zoomer’: OK? Ok.” Words We’re Watching, Jan. 13, 2020. https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/words-were -watching-zoomer-gen-z. Minot, Joshua R., Michael V. Arnold, Thayer Alshaabi, Christopher M. Danforth, and Peter Sheridan Dodds. 2020. “Ratioing the President: An Exploration of Public Engagement with Obama and Trump on Twitter.” June 8, 2020. Unpublished manuscript. https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.03526. OED. Oxford English Dictionary. 2000–. Online ed. Oxford University Press. http:// oed.com. O’Neil, Luke. 2017a. “How to Know If You’ve Sent a Horrible Tweet: A Deep Dive into The Ratio.” Esquire, April 11, 2017. https://www.esquire.com/news -politics/news/a54440/twitter-ratio-reply/. ———. 2017b. “RatioWatch: An Exclusive Interview with Some People Who Retweeted a Bad Tweet about Ivanka.” Esquire, Apr. 26, 2017. https://www .esquire.com/news-politics/news/a54750/ratio-watch/. Purtill, Corinne. 2018. “It’s Official: ‘Shitpost’ Is the Word that Best Describes the Internet in 2017.” Quartz, Jan. 7, 2018. https://qz.com/1173819/shitpost-is -the-2017-digital-word-of-the-year/. Reid, Eric. 2017. “Why Colin Kaepernick and I Decided to Take a Knee.” New York Times, Sept. 25, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/opinion/colin -kaepernick-football-protests.html. Ritzen, Stacey. 2018. “What Does ‘Yeet’ Mean—and How Did It Become a Meme?” Daily Dot, Sept. 13, 2018. https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/what-does-yeet -mean/. Rosenblatt, Kalhan. 2019. “Teens Use ‘OK Boomer’ to Fire Back at Older Gener ations’ Criticisms.” NBC News, Oct. 29, 2019. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/ social-media/teens-use-ok-boomer-fire-back-older-generations-criticisms-n107 3331. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/1/105/851521/0960105.pdf by guest
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