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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 While the American Dialect Society has chosen a Word of the Year for three decades now, the selection for 2020 was—to use a currently popu- lar word—unprecedented. The deliberations were moved online, and in the first-ever virtual vote, held on Thursday, December 17, 2020, the win- ner of the Word of the Year honors was Covid. It was a highly appropriate choice, given how Covid—short for COVID-19, the name given by the World Health Organization for the disease caused by a novel coronavirus—has become a stand-in for the pandemic and all the ways it has shaped our lives. With the ADS unable to meet in person for its annual conference, the Word of the Year was transformed into a virtual event that was open to all who were interested in participating. Holding the WOTY vote as a free- standing event held over a livestream meant that the date could be moved up to December, rather than waiting until early January when the ADS typi- cally meets in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America. The ear- lier date put the proceedings squarely in the mix of what has become the Word of the Year season, as dictionary publishers and other groups make their selections at year’s end. As part of the registration process for this year’s virtual event, nomina- tions were fielded for words that attendees would want to see in contention. The ADS New Words Committee sifted through hundreds of nominations to create finalists for Word of the Year and various other secondary cat- egories. Organized as a Zoom webinar, the WOTY livestream was hosted by Duke University Press, publisher of American Speech (Zimmer 2020a). Ultimately, the livestream went off without a hitch, as more than three hundred participants were able to join in a lively debate over which words should be recognized as best capturing the zeitgeist of 2020. Voting was open to all in attendance, using Zoom’s in-meeting polling feature. The entire live-stream has been archived on the American Dialect Society’s YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeYGRd1uQM0). American Speech, Vol. 96, No. 2, May 2021 doi 10.1215/00031283-9089600 Copyright 2021 by the American Dialect Society 217 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/2/217/921324/0960217.pdf by guest
218 americ an speech 96.2 (2021) The winners for 2020 in the various categories are listed below, with the runners-up included in parentheses in the order of votes cast: political word of the year: abolish/defund (dissent collar; freedumb ; petromas- culilnity; red mirage/blue shift ) digital word of the year: doomscrolling (#BlackInTheIvory; fancam; sus; Tiktoked) zoom-related word of the year (special 2020 category): you’re muted (oysge- zoomt; Zoombombing ; Zoom fatigue; zumping) pandemic-related word of the year (special 2020 category): social distanc- ing (contact tracing; coronials; Covid; flattening the curve; moronavirus) most useful: Before Times (Blursday; bubble/pod; PPE; superspreader) most likely to succeed: antiracism (BIPOC; contactless; curbside; gigafire; Zoomer) slang/informal word of the year: the rona (covidiot; girls, gays, and theys; poggers; WAP ) most creativem combining form: quaran- (corona- ; Covid- ; fatigue; mask-; Zoom- ) euphemism of the year: essential (workers, labor, businesses) (everything is cake; freedom seeds; humaning ; Toobin, v.) emoji of the year: ( ✍ ; ; ; ; ) word of the year: Covid (2020; antiracism; Before Times; BIPOC ; doomscrolling ; pandemic; social distancing; unprecedented) Details of the voting and lists of past winners are available at the ADS web- site (https://www.americandialect.org/2020-word-of-the-year-is-covid). The results for the WOTY votes from 2020 are also included as supplementary materials in the electronic version of this article. For ATNW, we will consider a selection of nominated words in the American Dialect Society’s 2020 WOTY proceedings in two installments, with the first one covering the alphabetic range from abolish to humaning. Despite—or perhaps because of—the hardships of the past year, it was a vibrant time for the creation of new words, especially in the arena of “coronacoinages” (Dictionary.com 2020; Zimmer 2020c). While Covid, a word that was unknown to anyone at the beginning of the year, may best encompass the shared experience of 2020, it represents only the tip of the iceberg in terms of how the pandemic has transformed the lexicon. The diverse set of nominated words provides ample evidence for this flurry of linguistic activity in a year like no other. Major dictionary publishers have made a special effort to keep up with these lexical developments. Merriam-Webster was quick out of the gate, adding Covid-19 (and other coronavirus-related terms) in an online update on March 16, 2020, a little over a month after the World Health Organization coined the term (Fatsis 2020). The Oxford English Dictionary was not far behind, with its first batch of coronavirus terms published in Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/2/217/921324/0960217.pdf by guest
Among the New Words 219 April followed by a second update in July (Paton 2020; Stewart 2020). OED editors used corpus analysis to track not only new pandemic-related terms but to determine shifts of usage in items already in the lexicon (OED Editorial 2020a, 2020b; Oxford Languages 2020). Because of these nimble responses by lexicographers, it is not necessary for us to provide treatments here for terms that are already covered by Merriam-Webster, the OED, Dictionary.com, and other major dictionaries, such as Covid, Covid-19, con- tact tracing, and flattening the curve. Here we continue the new approach to ATNW that we introduced in the February 2021 installment, where each headword is provided with a dis- cursive assessment, rather than focusing on citational paragraphs as in past years. As before, full lexicographical treatments with citational evidence will be included in the online supplement for the electronic form of the jour- nal. Supplementary material for this article is available at https://doi.org/ 10.1215/00031283-9089600. The new presentation of ATNW allows us to continue our efforts to encompass a wider array of voices in the evaluation of lexical items. As with our previous installment, the contributions of the coeditors of ATNW are identified by their initials: Benjamin Zimmer [BZ], Kelly E. Wright [KW], and Charles E. Carson [CC]. We have also called on additional contribu- tors to provide coverage of some terms, based on their participation in the WOTY discussions. We are pleased to include write-ups below from Sonja Lanehart of the University of Arizona (for antiracism and #BlackInTheIvory), Nicole Holliday of the University of Pennsylvania (for BIPOC ), Dominique Canning of the University of Michigan (for fancam), and independent scholar Mark Peters (for humaning). We hope that this variety of perspec- tives makes ATNW a more enriching experience, and we will be looking for additional opportunities to expand the pool of contributors to the feature in future installments. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the assistance of Kate Whitcomb in the preparation of this article. THE WORDS abolish. Abolish, combined with defund for voting purposes, won Political Word of the Year at the 2020 WOTYs. Because these words have separate histories, we will treat them as separate entries in this issue. Abolish entered the English language in the mid-fifteenth century, meaning ‘to efface, cause to die out, or annihilate’, and typically refers to a custom, such as usury, or an instition, such as slavery (Online Etymological Dictionary). Recently, abolish Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/2/217/921324/0960217.pdf by guest
220 americ an speech 96.2 (2021) has seen three search spikes on Google Trends: following the 2016 elec- tion, Americans began calling for abolition of the electoral college (see 2016 Nov. 9 quot.); relating to protests against ICE, as covered in The Atlantic; “The calls to abolish the agency began in earnest in early summer, at the peak of the public outcry against the Trump administration’s ‘zero tolerance’ immigration policy that resulted in the separation of families at the United States–Mexico border” (see 2018 July 11 quot.); and after an October 19, 2019, Bernie Sanders rally where the senator called for the abolition of cash bail, mandatory minimum sentences, and for-profit pris- ons (see 2019 May 16), as Twitter user @hasanthehun exemplifies: “bernie said abolish prisons and disarm the police” (see 2019 Oct. 19 quot.). The verb came to the fore in 2020 after the May 25 murder of George Floyd, who suffocated when Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. In the ensuing global uprising for Black Lives, abolish became a rallying cry against police bru- tality at many protests over the summer of 2020. A tweet from user @jun- audaalma encapsulates the feelings of activists: “My city fired the police from the schools today and this brings joy! This moment is yielding actual change. Let’s keep the momentum and abolish the police and hire heal- ers and therapists and first responders that aren’t trigger and lynching happy. #MinneapolisUprising” (see 2020 May 29 quot.). In response to these protests, abolish was also used hyperbolically, as its definition on Urban Dictionary reflects (see 2020 June 9 quot.). Finally, as the many citations we’ve included in the supplementary material will demonstrate, abolish and defund are not synonymous. During the summer, many well-meaning onlookers and would-be allies balked at the word abolition emerging from activist collectives and suggested using softer language like defund or reform to confront bald, unchecked police brutality. We will pick up this conversa- tion in the defund entry in this issue, but I’ll leave you with this tweet from @cursivebones: “abolish the police means police should not exist. as long as there have been blk people, there have been abolitionists. do not insult them by using abolish & reform interchangeably” (see 2020 June 8 quot.). [KW] antiracism. While dictionaries label anti-racism, or antiracism, which origi- nated in the 1930s, as a noun, the 2020s version describes an action. Anti- racism took off in 2020 with the emergence of Freedom Summer after the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and the continu- ing murders of Black people at the hands of law enforcement and oth- ers who believe they are modern-day “slave patrols” with no accountability. Anti-racism entails an action because it is not something you simply are; it is something you do. Saying you are anti-racist means nothing if you are not Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/2/217/921324/0960217.pdf by guest
Among the New Words 221 doing something to acknowledge and eliminate institutionalized, systemic racism. In other words, you have to be about that life. As Marlon James (2016) says, if you replace the c with a p and declare yourself “anti-rapist,” what does that do about stopping rape in society because you are not a rapist? Nothing. So, when you say you are anti-racist but still live comfort- ably in your privileges that are denied to Black and other minoritized and marginalized peoples, what do you really mean? How does being nonracist change racist systems and dismantle racism? Anti-racism is the embodiment of JEDI—justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. What anti-racism looks like is paying essential workers, who are disproportionately BIPOC, as if they really are essential and not dependent on the benevolence of masters; writing and rewriting laws and policies to redress institutionalized racism; remaking government to include and represent all the people and not just the wealthy and historically entitled; and reparations for Native Americans and African Americans whose ancestors were enslaved and taken from their lands. Anti-racism means realizing that we are not all equal as exhibited by government and institutional laws, policies, and procedures that were designed and sustained to only benefit White people at the expense of Black people and then working to change those systems. Anti-racism means rec- ognizing and then dismantling systemic, institutionalized racism so that we can live up to the words “liberty and justice for all” because “all [humans] are created equal” as opposed to the Orwellian “some are more equal than others.” [Sonja Lanehart] before times. Before Times won the Most Useful category in the 2020 WOTYs voting, and the appeal of the term is immediately obvious. As soon as everyone’s lives changed irrevocably with the coronavirus pandemic in the spring of 2020, it became necessary to refer to the prepandemic era in retronymic fashion. Before Times (or Before Time) fit the bill perfectly with its evocation of dystopian science fiction. Indeed, the term owes its roots to a beloved science-fiction television series: the original Star Trek of the 1960s. In the episode “Miri,” written by Adrian Spies and first aired on October 27, 1966, the crew of the USS Enterprise beam down to a planet where the only inhabitants are children who have survived a lethal plague. The titular char- acter Miri, a young girl played by Kim Darby, explains the disappearance of the planet’s grown-ups, known as “Grups”: “That was when they started to get sick in the Before Time. We hid, then they were gone” (Zimmer 2020b). While the science fiction trope of a character recalling life before an apocalyptic event goes as far back as Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man, it was the Star Trek formulation that worked its way into popular cul- ture, repurposed as a conscious homage in the 2000 South Park episode “The Wacky Molestation Adventure”: “That was in the Before Time, in the Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/2/217/921324/0960217.pdf by guest
222 americ an speech 96.2 (2021) Long Long Ago.” While beforetime and beforetimes both had earlier usage in English as adverbs meaning “previously,” the Covid-era application of the term was tinged with an ironic sense that we’re living through our own dys- topian narrative, coupled with a nostalgia for what the world used to look like not so long ago. The counterpart of Before Times, the After Times, has also been offered as a hopeful beacon for a future post-pandemic era. [BZ] bipoc. The newly prominent term BIPOC, originating in Canada and first circulating among musicians and artists, is frequently used to describe peo- ple of color and has at least two competing definitions at present. According to an article in the New York Times, BIPOC stands for “black, Indigenous, and people of color” (see 2020 June 17 quot.). A September 2020 episode of NPR’s podcast Code Switch features a listener, Kaylee Arnold, who previ- ously thought BIPOC stood for “Black and Indigenous people of color” but now understands it to have the meaning used in the New York Times, to her dismay (see 2020 Sept. 30 quot.). This debate over the very meaning of the new term reflects many of the issues that led to its emergence in the first place. While people of color (POC) has long been used in mainstream discourses to describe non-White folks, some speakers disprefer the term because they feel that it erases the particular racialized issues facing their specific group. Still other speakers find BIPOC to be a useful innovation because it has the breadth of people of color while still highlighting the spe- cific experiences of groups who may be especially marginalized in particu- lar contexts. In this way, English speakers are grappling with how to talk about marginalized individuals and groups without necessarily collapsing disparate issues under the same umbrella. However, as BIPOC itself is a new cover term with ambiguous meaning for some users, it may fall into some of the same issues as POC, somehow being either too broad or too narrow in many contexts. [Nicole Holliday] #blackintheivory. The hashtag #Blackintheivory is used to link posts of first-person accounts of Black scholars and was first tweeted by Joy Melody Woods in collaboration with Shardé M. Davis in June 2020 (see 2020 June 6 quot.). The idea was essentially, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired” and I will not be silent any longer (Diep 2020). #BlackInTheIvory unleashed the rage, frustration, bitterness, pain, harm, inequities, inequalities, gas- lighting, invisibility, and silence of Black people in the academy. It allowed Black scholars to say “yea, that’s right” or “uh huh” or “preach” as we shared our collective pain with each other. #BlackInTheIvory allowed the lie to be exposed that it is us. It is not us. We are not the problem. It is not because we are not good enough. It is not because of how we speak or dress or wear our hair. It is not because we graduated from an HBCU or did not graduate Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/2/217/921324/0960217.pdf by guest
Among the New Words 223 from an Ivy League. #BlackInTheIvory acknowledges that the academy was not meant for us, and it will not and cannot love us back. It is everything about us and nothing about us all at the same time. It is because we are Black and society has constructed a lack of value to Blackness. Their White, privileged value always trumps ours (pun intended). #BlackInTheIvory allowed Black folks to come out of the closet of Imposter Syndrome we are implicitly and explicitly told to inhabit. It was the manifestation of debunk- ing the lie of respectability politics and exceptionalism. #BlackInTheIvory exposed the skewing of society, history, legislation, institutions, politics, and policies. #BlackInTheIvory was “for us by us” in critique of the White gaze, White oppression, and White supremacy that every day says we own noth- ing, we did nothing, we are nothing even though we built it, we developed it, and we are everything. Those are the lies #BlackInTheIvory do not and will not believe because it is not about us, but we are going to be about us as we continue the march of Freedom Summer to espousing and support- ing #AllBlackLivesMatter. We will be Black AF in our excellence. [Sonja Lanehart] blue shift. In the Political Word of the Year category for 2020, blue shift was nominated alongside red mirage, which we will consider in the next issue. The phenomenon labeled blue shift was first identified by Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University, in a 2013 paper for the Journal of Law and Politics, “A Big Blue Shift: Measuring an Asymmetrically Increasing Margin of Litigation.” Foley noted that in presidential elections since 2004, there has been an increasingly common scenario in which “a Democratic candidate could come from behind during the canvass to over- take a Republican lead at the end of Election Night” (see 2013 Nov. 12 quot.). While Foley initially dubbed this a “Big Blue Shift,” he shortened the expression to blue shift in a subsequent paper he coauthored with MIT political scientist Charles Stewart III (see 2015 Sept. 12 quot.). In that form, it entered the vocabulary of political pundits in the 2018 midterm election and especially the 2020 presidential election. In advance of the general election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, David A. Graham of The Atlantic predicted that “the ‘blue shift’ will decide the election” (see 2020 Aug. 10 quot.). On the tumultuous election night, the blue shift phenom- enon was borne out on the presidential level in several swing states, where early Republican leads dissipated as more Democratic-leaning votes were counted, often when early or mail-in votes were tabulated later. But the blue shift was not so evident in Congressional races, where many states saw a countervailing red shift that resulted in Republican pickups in the House of Representatives. [BZ] Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/2/217/921324/0960217.pdf by guest
224 americ an speech 96.2 (2021) blursday. Nominated in the Most Useful category in the 2020 WOTYs vot- ing, Blursday seemed to capture just how unmoored from time people felt after the coronavirus pandemic disrupted their usual routines. Especially for those working from home, days seemed to blend into each other to the extent that it no longer felt possible to remember what day of the week it was. Thus, to answer the question of what day it is, Blursday served as the perfectly blurry response. As a name for a day indistinguishable from any other, Blursday in fact has a history going back well before the pandemic era. As word sleuth Barry Popik (2020) has noted, the blend of blur and Thursday is attested in newspaper sources going back to 1986. Even earlier than that, it shows up as a fanciful day of the week in Ken Nordine’s 1979 “word jazz” song, “Seven Ways of the Meek.” But it took the advent of the pandemic for Blursday to catch on widely. As one widely memed witticism put it, “For those who have lost track, today is Blursday the fortyteenth of Maprilay” (see 2020 Mar. 27 quot.). [BZ] bubble. Along with pod (to be considered in the next issue), bubble was nominated in the Most Useful category as a term for the group with which one remains in quarantine in order to minimize exposure and reduce the chances of infection. It is one of many terms in the WOTYs voting that reflect the drastic changes that the coronavirus pandemic has caused to our everyday social interaction. Many people started trying to figure out how to form small social bubbles early on in the pandemic, and by May 2020 there were various articles dispensing bubble advice, with headlines like “A guide to negotiating a covid ‘bubble’ with other people” (see 2020 May 9 quot.), “I have a ‘quarantine bubble’ with people outside my house. You should too” (see 2020 May 19 quot.), and “Is it safe to have family or friends in your Covid-19 ‘bubble’? What you need to know” (see 2020 June 29 quot.). Fellow members of one’s bubble could be called bubblemates, with which you bubble up (or bubble down). But as the months wore on, the boundaries of the bubble became less clear. As Rachel Gutman of The Atlantic wrote in a November article titled “Sorry to Burst Your Quarantine Bubble,” what many people called bubbles did not in fact consist of closed networks: “The leakiness might be even more dangerous when bubble buddies don’t real- ize it’s a problem” (see 2020 Nov. 30 quot.). [BZ] contactless. Merriam-Webster cites the first known usage of contactless from 1861 as meaning “not involving contact.” Contactless was runner up in the Most Likely to Succeed category of WOTY 2020 after its uptake as an adjec- tive used to describe a transaction requiring no physical contact. The truth is that contactless has already succeeded in the U.K., where such methods of payment were much more common prepandemy. This form of payment Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/2/217/921324/0960217.pdf by guest
Among the New Words 225 has been touted by credit card companies for over a decade (Latge 2020). Since the global embrace of chip-based card transactions in 2005, “it seems Brits have welcomed contactless with open arms,” boasting “50% of all in- store purchases under £30 being completed with the technology” (Square 2017). This quotation features contactless used as a noun, which was also a popular construction before pandemic-related mobility and contact restric- tions, as exemplified on Twitter: “paid for our drinks with contactless, and donned our masks.” (see 2020 Mar. 20 quot.). As borders closed and curfews began in Europe and Asia, we see usages popping up from retailers notify- ing their customers of transactional changes, like in this tweet from Café Marius in Cork, Ireland: “Good evening, in order to minimize #COVID19 spread, we are going to encourage contactless payment only to avoid the manipulation of notes and coins” (see 2020 Mar. 9 quot.). Soon retailers across the United States began adopting contactless payments to serve a population at home. The first email I have from Domino’s Pizza about con- tactless delivery is from March 14, announcing the introduction of a new procedure with single quotation marks around the usage: “a ‘contactless’ delivery where your store’s delivery expert will leave your order safely at your front door.” By March 21 those quotation marks had been dropped. We also see the bright yet brief flame of non-contact (see Mar. 6 quot.), but usage rapidly defaulted to the established term. Turns out, people really like not having to see anyone ever when they order stuff, as @nursekateeRN reflects on Twitter: “All food delivery orders should be contactless from now on. Please put my food on my doorstep and leave because I’m not dressed and don’t want to socialize with you anyways” (see June 6 quot.)! So contactless—as an adjective and a noun—is likely here to stay. [KW] corona- + coronials. The term coronavirus first appeared in a 1968 Nature article, in which a team of virologists identified a new group of viruses and gave them a name because the fringe around the virus, viewed through an electron microscope, resembles the sun’s corona. And while lethal strains of coronavirus have spread before, like SARS and MERS, it was the novel coro- navirus first identified in China in 2019 that will likely forever be linked to the term in the public imagination. As the virus spread to pandemic levels, the corona- element of coronavirus soon combined with many other words in a flurry of neologization. At-home haircuts, for instance, were dubbed coronacuts. With in-person classes canceled, students thought they’d be able to enjoy a coronacation. People found they suffered from a special kind of insomnia, coronasomnia, while the whole emotional rollercoaster of the pan- demic was called a coronacoaster. The corona- combining form also inspired a generational name: coronials (modeled on millennials), for the hypothetical baby boom from coronababies conceived during the pandemic lockdown. It Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/2/217/921324/0960217.pdf by guest
226 americ an speech 96.2 (2021) remains to be seen whether any of these coronacoinages survive past 2020, but they were enough to merit a nomination for corona- in the Most Creative Combining Form category in the WOTY voting, with coronials nominated for Pandemic-Related Word of the Year. [BZ] covid- + covidiot. The acronym Covid, short for Covid-19 (in turn short for coronavirus disease 2019) was the overall winner of the ADS’s 2020 Word of the Year, and it also quickly found its way into dictionaries such as Merriam- Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary. But the use of Covid went beyond its function as a standalone lexical item, as it became a combining form as well, much like corona-. Thus, during the pandemic, one might sport a Covid beard or Covid hair, suffer from Covid fatigue, or take up Covid baking. Beyond those compounds, Covid could also serve as a blend component. One of the more popular coronacoinages was covidiot, blending Covid with idiot. In a tweet from March 21, 2020, Nisheeth Sharan offered a quasi- dictionary definition of covidiot: “a stupid person who stubbornly ignores ‘social distancing’ protocols, thus helping to further spread COVID-19,” or, alternately, “a stupid person who hoards groceries, needlessly spread- ing COVID-19 fears and depriving others of vital supplies.” In the 2020 WOTY voting, Covid- was nominated for Most Creative Combining Form, while covidiot was in the running for Slang/Informal Word of the Year. [BZ] defund. The verb defund, combined with abolish for voting purposes, won Political Word of the Year at the 2020 WOTYs. Defund, meaning ‘prevent from continuing to receive funds’, has been around for a long time, as it is common for lawmakers to defund institutions they oppose. For example, Politico in 2011 reported on then-Representative Mike Pence’s successful amendment defunding Planned Parenthood (see 2011 Feb. 18 quot.). Another example comes from NPR in 2014, covering the defunding of Oklahoma state parks: “The agency, like many, has had its budget cut over the past four years, but the decision to defund state parks is about more than money” (see 2014 Aug. 7 quot.). Defunding as a practice is rather well established, despite expressed confusions about the term’s meaning from people on both sides of the Black Lives Matter movement last sum- mer. Let’s address, then, why defund was newly prominent in 2020 by first asking what defunding the police is and why it’s necessary. Well, police reforms fail. Since the death of Michael Brown in 2014, the call for defund- ing police departments has been raised consistently. Many cities have turned to reform efforts instead, and almost none of them are successful; Sam Levin (2020) reports a list of studies detailing just how badly they fail. These underwhelming data cover only the few reforms that have actually Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/2/217/921324/0960217.pdf by guest
Among the New Words 227 been implemented. In 2019, a police union blocked Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey’s reforms banning a “warrior-style” training program that was implicated in the 2016 officer-involved shooting death of Philando Castile, a Minneapolis man who was shot in his vehicle while his child and her mother watched (Rybak 2020). George Floyd would die, calling for his mother with his last, gasping utterance, face pressed into a Minneapolis street, underneath the knee of Officer Chauvin, less than a year after the training reforms were blocked. The call to defund police departments is about redistributing state and federal monies away from police depart- ments—some of whom use them to buy tanks and riot gear—and using the funds instead to shore up the social safety net through investment in hous- ing, community health, and other lacking or nonexistent services (see 2020 June 9 quot.). Weeks after Floyd’s death, kente-clad Democrats knelt in the Capitol before revealing a toothless reform bill, and then-presidential- candidate Joe Biden rejected calls for defunding the police (Martin, Burns, and Kaplan 2020). The refrain of defund the police was the loudest after these events and following the funeral of George Floyd, as exemplified by this a tweet by Shantel Buggs: “excuse me for not trusting that police will be held accountable for using chokeholds because there’s an act now. / we want y’all to defund not just put limitations on how they’re allowed go kill people” (see 2020 June 11 quot.). Defund, already long-lived in English usage, will remain in our parlance as language of resistance to state-sanc- tioned violence against Black Lives until substantive progress toward equity and justice are realized. [KW] dissent collar. The dissent collar is an accessory associated with one par- ticular person: the Notorious RBG, the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. As part of her courtroom attire, Ginsburg was known to wear ruffles, or “jabots,” on the front of her black robes, and she wore dif- ferent ones for different occasions. She had a “majority opinion collar” for when she was speaking for the majority. But given the ideological makeup of the court, she was better known for her dissenting opinions. Her choice of dissent collar was in fact a necklace on a black band made by Banana Republic that was part of a “swag bag” when she was named a Glamour Woman of the Year in 2012. The dissent collar got more attention when the 2018 documentary RGB was released. When Ginsburg died in September 2020, Banana Republic reissued the collar in her honor, with proceeds going to charity. It became a potent symbol for Ginsburg’s fiercely indepen- dent streak, and for that reason it was nominated in the Political Word of the Year category in the 2020 WOTY voting. [BZ] Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/2/217/921324/0960217.pdf by guest
228 americ an speech 96.2 (2021) doomscrolling. Doomscrolling, winner of the Digital Word of the Year category in the 2020 WOTY proceedings, was also a strong contender for overall Word of the Year, as to many voters it seemed to capture the fore- boding feeling of trying to keep up with an endless stream of terrible news. With the Covid pandemic keeping people cooped up at home, scrolling through grim updates on one’s devices became a new anxiety-producing pastime. While the neologism doomscrolling was an early lexical success of the pandemic, it actually dates back a few years earlier on social media. On October 7, 2018, Calla Mounkes (aka Callamity) said on Twitter, “Taking a break from doomscrolling and being inundated with things and stuff.” And just a day later, Ashik Siddique responded to a friend by tweeting, “thank u for breaking the spell of my doom-scrolling down my feed.” But it wasn’t until lockdown orders went into place in March 2020 that doomscroll- ing came into its own. On March 14, University of Michigan historian Ellen Muehlberger tweeted that the study of ancient languages might be a good way to deal with Covid-related stress: “Do you want to keep nervously doom- scrolling #onhere or do you want to brush up on that language you keep saying you want to work on?” Soon enough, doomscrolling (and to a lesser extent doomsurfing ) surged in popularity online among those who ruefully recognized the behavior. By the end of the year, however, it was time for more hopeful coinages, such as the antonym of doomscrolling suggested by Slate’s Heather Schwedel: gleefreshing (see 2020 Nov. 6 quot.). [BZ] everything is cake. Nominated for Euphemism of the Year, everything is cake comes from a wave of memes that arose in the 2020 summer after a viral video from Buzzfeed’s @tasty appeared on Twitter, featur- ing a Croc shoe being sliced into by Turkish chef Tuba Geçkil to reveal the cake inside (see 2020 July 8 quot.). This was so 2020: contemporary hyperrealism, reality distortion, post-structuralist punk mimicry, next- level cake art. As we all settled in to quarantine summer, soaked in the uncertainty of constant contradictory messaging and insolvent lead- ership, it is no wonder this craze took over and folks around the world began experimenting with creating their own disguised cakes. My favor- ite (and arguably most unsettling) is the raw chicken cake by Ben Cullen, aka The BakeKing (see 2020 Mar. 10 quot.), and this fantastic response to its repost on Twitter: “the hand holding the raw chicken cake is also CAKE” (see 2020 July 14 quot.). Many people reported feeling trig- gered by all the slicing deceit, as reflected in Newsweek’s coverage of the challenge trend (Watts 2020), which quotes a host of tweets wondering if everything *is* actually cake (see 2020 July 13 quot.). This question got too deep too fast, with users questioning if they themselves were cake, and oth- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/2/217/921324/0960217.pdf by guest
Among the New Words 229 ers cautioning folks not to “check” by slicing off body parts. This smacks of the 2007 Portal video game catchphrase “the cake is a lie,” which was an in- game warning to players that their promised reward would never manifest. This smacks of the 2007 Portal video game’s catchphrase “the cake is a lie,” an in-game warning to players that their promised reward for completing the tasks would never manifest. Memetically, everything is cake has become an expression of extreme distrust, with many iterations exposing the under- lying cake in classic memes, like this excellent example from Twitter: look- ing at a cross-section of the earth, “Wait, it’s all cake?” “Always has been” (see 2020 July 12 quot.). Everything is cake has likely seen its heyday in con- temporary usage, but within meme culture, anything can be revived. [KW] fancam. Nominated for 2020 Digital Word of the Year, fancam is not a new word. Its earliest entry on Urban Dictionary dates back to March 2010 and defines a fancam as “Footage of a celebrity taken by a fan. Most likely to be of low quality” (see 2010 Mar. 31 quot.). Fancams and their primary cre- ators (K-pop stans) were a well-known nuisance, known for overwhelming or flooding unrelated Twitter tags with videos of their favorite K-pop idols. Urban Dictionary shows a huge spike in activity for fancam in June 2020. Both Medium (Sang 2020) and Insider (Haasch 2020) published articles about K-pop fans and activism at the beginning of June (see 2020 June 4 and 2020 June 6 quots.), which correlates with the Black Lives Matter protests surrounding the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. The protests gained national (and global) attention, and Twitter was no excep- tion. I nominated fancam this past year, not because it was a new word or concept, but because its purpose changed dramatically. Instead of flooding tags about other celebrities, fancammers began flooding tags celebrating racism and bigotry. When police departments began asking for videos to identify protestors, they got thousands of fancams instead (see 2020 June 1 quot.) to the point that some apps and websites were taken offline (Yeo 2000; see 2020 June 1 quot.). While many discuss the internet as a place radicalizing young white men, there’s much less discussion surrounding the internet’s effects on the politics of other young people, especially those “annoying teenage girls” obsessed with K-pop. The events of last summer showed that there are different ways to be politically active, and for some that means weaponizing fancams against racists. [Dominique Canning] freedom seeds. Freedom seeds was nominated in the Most Euphemistic cat- egory at the 2020 WOTYs. The oldest usage I came across was from user CommackBoy on Long Island Firearms’ forum from June 7, 2015, depict- ing an image of bullets with the text “These aren’t bullets, they’re freedom Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/2/217/921324/0960217.pdf by guest
230 americ an speech 96.2 (2021) seeds.” This image and other related applications have since become com- monplace in the online ammosexual community, adorning patches for riot gear and decals for ammo boxes. In an example from Facebook, the Brazos Bullet Company post “Freedom seeds / When I hear that phrase I imme- diately think of this 115gr 9mm profile. The no groove profile comes out flawless. We love cranking these through the machines,” with two images attached: a bucket full of bullets and a gloved hand holding a pile of said bullets for a close up (see 2019 Apr. 7 quot). Another popular image that has made the rounds contains the entire death stick family of euphemisms: titled “Components of a Freedom Dispenser,” it shows a SIG 516 semiau- tomatic rifle with a silencer; the trigger is labeled “let freedom ring,” the clip labeled “to hold a maximum amount of freedom seeds,” and so on (see 2018 Nov. 26 quot.). Freedom seeds has been in popular, jocular usage among gun enthusiasts for some time, an example of a community embrac- ing one of the oldest applications of euphemism—the softening of language to redirect attention from unsavory activity. A tweet from the NRA brought this euphemism into prominence; it reads “Ammo Sales SURGE 139% / That’s a lot of freedom seeds. ” (see 2020 Sept. 21 quot.). Marty Kelley on Wonkette likened the “new” usage to something out of Zardoz, a truly wild 1974 Sean Connery movie featuring an excessive amount of gun worship (see 2020 Sept. 23 quot.). In a response to a posted link to Kelley’s article on imgur, the not-so-newness of freedom seeds was bemoaned: “you know a meme is old when they fogeys at NRA get a hold of it” with this “Anatomy of a Pew” attached—pew being another euphemism for a bullet (see 2018 Oct. 23 quot.). It should be men- tioned, just for everyone’s safety, that freedom seeds can also refer to sperm. I’ll spare you the textual description of those uses, but we’ll include them in the supplementary citations. [KW] freedumb. Blending freedom with dumb to create freedumb, nominated for 2020 Political Word of the Year, is not exactly a novel bit of word coin- age. The skate punk band Suicidal Tendencies released an album called Freedumb in 1999, for instance. Over the years, freedumb has served as a satirical label for those whose concept of freedom is considered dumbed- down. In 2003, the comic strip artist Lalo Alcaraz fashioned an image of George W. Bush in the style of Che Guevara, with the caption “Freedumb Fighter” (see 2003 Dec. quot.). Laura Penny, in her 2010 book More Money Than Brains, equated freedumb with “the ideology of idiocracy,” a trivializa- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/2/217/921324/0960217.pdf by guest
Among the New Words 231 tion of the tenets of freedom (see 2010 Apr. 20 quot.). In 2020, with the advent of the coronavirus pandemic, freedumb took on new political and social contexts. In particular, it was applied to those who recklessly refuse to wear masks, in the name of “freedom.” A May anti-mask rally in Kentucky led Louisville Courier-Journal columnist Joseph Gerth to muse, “So this is the hill the ‘freedumb’ fighters have come to die on” (see 2020 May 3 quot.). For CityWatch Los Angeles, Umair Haque wrote an opinion piece titled “How Freedom Became Free-dumb in America” (see 2020 May 7 quot.). As Haque defines it, freedumb is “freedom as the absence of any kind of obliga- tion or responsibility to anything greater than narrow, immediate, infantile self-satisfaction,” and the type of behavior described by Haque was on full display among those who flouted social-distancing restrictions and mask mandates out of a misguided sense of personal liberty. [BZ] gigafire. In October 2020, California’s August Complex fire, which had been raging for more than two months, became the first wildfire on record to burn more than a million acres. News reports dubbed this unfortunate milestone a gigafire. The terminology was confusing, because the giga- met- ric prefix is technically used for expressing one billion, not one million. The prefix for one million, mega-, had already been used by wildfire track- ers, however, since a megafire was deemed to be one that burned more than 100,000 acres of land. It seems that megafire used the prefix in a more gen- eral way to mean “very large,” and thus the million-acre wildfire needed an even larger prefix, even if the nomenclature rankled sticklers for the International System of Units. According to Bill Gabbert (2000), editor of the online publication Wildfire Today, megafire was coined by someone work- ing for the U.S. Forest Service. Gabbert remarked on the term megafire in a 2017 Wildfire Today article and asked what a million-acre fire should be called. A reader suggested gigafire, and Gabbert adopted it in his own writ- ing. From its appearance in Wildfire Today, the term gigafire then got picked up by other news outlets. (One might even say it spread like wildfire.) In the 2020 WOTYs voting, gigafire was ruefully nominated in the Most Likely to Succeed category, with the expectation that the climate crisis will lead to more gigafires in the future. [BZ] girls, gays, and theys. Nominated in the Slang/Informal category for the 2020 WOTYs, the phrase girls, gays, and theys denotes a group, often one’s fan base or intended audience, that includes everyone except straight cis men. It is an extension of the older alliterative expression girls and gays that appeared in the 1980s and 1990s, when gay men went from being social outcasts to a recognized, sometimes-sought demographic. The addition of Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/2/217/921324/0960217.pdf by guest
232 americ an speech 96.2 (2021) rhyming theys in 2018 represents a similar acknowledgment, welcoming trans and nonbinary folks as a valued part of one’s audience by using the third-person pronoun adopted by some. The phrase is often used as a form of address, akin to ladies and gentlemen, especially by social media person- alities on services like TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube. The phrase is also available online on all kinds of merch, including T-shirts, pins, mugs, socks, and face masks (see 2020 Dec. 2 quot.), often in the form “I do it for the girls, the gays, and the theys, that’s it,” which adds theys to a viral lyric from Ayesha Erotic’s 2017 single “Yummy” (see 2017 Dec. 13 quot.). The future of the phrase will depend in part on whether theys is eventually embraced as inclusive enough to stand in for the increasingly diverse cline of identi- ties. However, keeping it short and more symbolic might prove more useful than the ever-lengthening initialism LGBTQIA2+, which oddly risks exclud- ing folks with its specificity (no one wants to be represented by a plus sign). But one TikToker has already added to the phrase: “girls, gays, theys, and nonbinary babes” (see 2020 Dec. 12 quot.). [CC] humaning. In a word birth reminiscent of PETA’s rebranding of fish as sea kittens, on November 11, 2020, Chicago food company Mondelēz International, purveyor of Oreos and Ritz crackers, served up a dish hard to swallow. Their marketers rebranded marketing: Humaning is a unique, consumer-centric approach to marketing that cre- ates real, human connections with purpose, moving Mondelēz International beyond cautious, data-driven tactics, and uncovering what unites us all. We are no longer marketing to consumers, but creating connections with humans. [see 2020 Nov. 11 quot.] Marketing jargon has never been accused of being straightforward, but this term is so obtuse it may be proof that Mondelēz is staffed by space aliens, who would at least have cause to label their targets with the same terminology as a space zoo. The term was dunked on with the force of prime Shaquille O’Neal on social media, and why not. Verbings are often panned—think how many folks still gripe about impact as a verb—and this coinage is tantamount to a confession that previous marketing efforts have been inhuman. Humaning seems destined to die a Darwinian death, only surviving as a joke and item in worst-jargon-ever collections, but an unre- lated meaning of the same term may be one to watch. On social media at least, humaning is being used as a term similar to adulting, but with more sincerity. This sense of humaning refers to just being a human being, a task even more precarious in the age of Covid. We’re all trying to human, and we sure don’t need to be humaned to. [Mark Peters] Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/2/217/921324/0960217.pdf by guest
Among the New Words 233 R EFER EN C E S References to dated quotations (e.g., “see 2018 Sept. 9 quot.”) refer to cita- tions in the full lexicographical treatments, available online as supplemen- tal material (https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9089600). Dictionary.com. 2020. “New Words We Created because of Coronavirus.” Nov. 10, 2020. https://www.dictionary.com/e/s/new-words-we-created-because-of -coronavirus/. Diep, Francie. 2020. “‘I Was Fed Up’: How #BlackInTheIvory Got Started, and What Its Founders Want to See Next.” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 9, 2020. https://www.chronicle.com/article/i-was-fed-up-how-blackintheiveory-got -started-and-what-its-founders-want-to-see-next. Fatsis, Stefan. 2020. “How COVID-19 Led Merriam-Webster to Make Its Fastest Update Ever.” Slate, Mar. 26, 2020. https://slate.com/culture/2020/03/corona virus-merriam-webster-emergency-update.html. Gabbert, Bill. 2017. “Elephant Hill Fire in British Columbia Grows to 194,000 Acres.” Wildfire Today, July 31, 2017. https://wildfiretoday.com/2017/07/31/ elephant-hill-fire-in-british-columbia-grows-to-194000-acres/. Gabbert, Bill. 2020. “Where Did the Term ‘gigafire’ Originate.” Wildfire Today, Oct. 7, 2020. https://wildfiretoday.com/2020/10/07/where-did-the-term-giga fire-originate/. Haasch, Palmer. 2020. “K-Pop Stans Are Using Short Videos Called Fancams to Drown Out Racists Online: This Is How the Movement Started.” Insider, June 6, 2020. https://www.insider.com/kpop-fancams-explained-stan-twitter-history -whitelivesmatter-police-app-2020-6. James, Marlon. 2016. “Are You Racist? ‘No’ Isn’t a Good Enough Answer.” Comment Is Free (YouTube channel), Guardian, Jan. 13, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=jm5DWa2bpbs. Latge, Bastien. 2020. “Contactless Payments: How EMVCo Supports Seamless and Secure Acceptance.” EMVCo, July 13, 2020. https://www.emvco.com/emv _insights_post/contactless-payments-how-emvco-supports-seamless-and-secure -acceptance/. Levin, Sam. 2020. “‘It’s Not about Bad Apples’: How US Police Reforms Have Failed to Stop Brutality and Violence.” Guardian, June 16, 2020. https://www.the guardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/16/its-not-about-bad-apples-how-us-police- reforms-have-failed-to-stop-brutality-and-violence. Martin, Jonathan, Alexander Burns, and Thomas Kaplan. 2020. “Biden Walks a Cautious Line as He Opposes Defunding the Police.” New York Times, June 8, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/us/politics/biden-defund-the -police.html. Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. 1996–. Merriam-Webster. Accessed Feb. 19, 2021. https://www.merriam-webster.com. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/2/217/921324/0960217.pdf by guest
234 americ an speech 96.2 (2021) OED Editorial. 2020a. “Corpus Analysis of the Language of Covid-19.” OED blog, Apr. 15, 2020. Oxford University Press. https://public.oed.com/blog/corpus- analysis-of-the-language-of-covid-19/. OED Editorial. 2020b. “Using Corpora to Track the Language of Covid-19: Update 2.” OED blog, July 15, 2020. Oxford University Press. https://public.oed.com/ blog/using-corpora-to-track-the-language-of-covid-19-update-2/. Online Etymological Dictionary. 2001–. Edited by Douglas Harper. Accessed Feb. 19, 2021. https://www.etymonline.com. Oxford English Dictionary. 2000–. Online ed. Oxford University Press. Accessed Feb. 19, 2021. https://www.oed.com/. Oxford Languages. 2020. “Words of an Unprecedented Year.” Report. Oxford University Press. https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2020/. Paton, Bernadette. 2020. “Social Change and Linguistic Change: The Language of Covid-19.” OED blog, Apr. 9, 2020. Oxford University Press. https://public .oed.com/blog/the-language-of-covid-19/. Popik, Barry. 2020. “Blursday (blurs + day).” Big Apple (blog), Apr. 23, 2020. https:// www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/blursday/. Rybak, R. T. 2020. “I Was Mayor of Minneapolis. I Know Why Police Reforms Fail.” Atlantic, June 18, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/ 06/i-know-why-police-reforms-fail/613189/. Sang, Elliot. 2020. “The Revolution Will Look Like a K-Pop Fandom.” Medium, June 4, 2020. https://medium.com/@elliotjoaquinsangestevez/the-revolution -will-look-like-a-k-pop-fandom-2444604aa64. Square. 2017. “The Rise of Contactless Payments in the UK.” Town Square (blog), July 4, 2017. https://squareup.com/gb/en/townsquare/contactless-payments -on-the-rise. Stewart, Trish. “July 2020 Update: Scientific Terminology of Covid-19.” OED blog, July 15, 2020. Oxford University Press. https://public.oed.com/blog/july-2020 -update-scientific-terminology-of-covid-19/. Watts, Marina. 2020. “The ‘Everything Is a Cake’ Meme, Explained through Jokes.” Newsweek, July 13, 2020. https://www.newsweek.com/everything-cake-meme -explained-through-jokes-1517441. Yeo, Amanda. 2020. “K-Pop Fans Spam Dallas Police ‘Snitch’ App with Videos and Memes to Support Protesters.” Mashable, June 1, 2020. https://mashable.com/ article/dallas-police-app-iwatch-spam-kpop-fancams-protests-black-lives-matter/. Zimmer, Ben. 2020a. “American Dialect Society Names ‘Covid’ the 2020 Word of the Year.” News from Duke University Press (blog), Dec. 21, 2020. https://dukeu press.wordpress.com/2020/12/21/. Zimmer, Ben. 2020b. “‘The Before Time’: A Sci-Fi Idea That Has Made Its Way to Real Life.” Wall Street Journal, June 19, 2020. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the -before-time-a-sci-fi-idea-that-has-made-its-way-to-real-life-11592580133. Zimmer, Ben. 2020c. “From ‘Covidiot’ to ‘Gleefreshing,’ It Was a Lively Year for Word Creation.” Beyond Wordplay, Dec. 7, 2020. https://beyondwordplay.com/ from-covidiot-to-gleefreshing-it-was-a-lively-year-for-word-creation-2cf92a8 d57c7. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/96/2/217/921324/0960217.pdf by guest
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