Posts Tagged ‘rock’
“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”*…
In an piece adapted/updated from his recent book, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary, Stefan Fatsis explores process(es) that determine our “Word[s] of the Year”…
Thirty-five years ago, the late English professor Allan Metcalf [see here] had an idea. “I was thinking that Time magazine has its Person of the Year,” he told me, “and why can’t we do for words what Time did for people?”
Metcalf assumed that the language pros at the American Dialect Society, which held the first WOTY vote in 1990, would nominate words “headed straight for our everyday vocabulary and secure places in the dictionaries.” But he misjudged human behavior. Lexicography is sober research committed quietly and alone. Word of the Year is a key party: You can’t be sure who you’ll go home with. The inaugural winner, bushlips, meaning “insincere political rhetoric,” barely lasted a news cycle.
After some eye-rolling, criteria were established: Was the word completely new? Had it been used before in other contexts? Was it “a major focus of human activity or behavior” in the previous year? Did it have staying potential? WOTY could be brand-new or newly popular. But it had to have been used widely and reflect the zeitgeist of the annum gone by.
Today there are around a dozen Words of the Year (Word of the Years?) in English, and WOTY season runs from late fall to early January. Dictionaries duke it out for attention, some touting their scientific methodology for picking a winner, others offering a nebulous alchemy of number-crunching and feel. The dialect society, the WOTY OG, conducts a live popular vote in a hotel ballroom at a language conference, the outcome based more often than not on vibes alone.
No matter the formula, selecting one word to define a year is serious business. It’s about the sharp lines of language and usage, how society adopts and spreads new terminology, and, increasingly, the dramatic ways that social media influence the way we write, talk, and interact. As a culture we’re forever searching for ways to make sense of our big, complicated, confusing world. WOTY neatly boxes up 365 days in a single, simple word (technically a “vocabulary item”; phrases, compounds, and affixes also are eligible). It’s media catnip and hot-take gold.
“It gives people this sense of ownership,” says New York Times Wordplay columnist Sam Corbin, who’s writing a book about what she calls the WOTY-verse. “We have always been exploring new ways to fill gaps in vocabulary but also respond to culture with words. It’s delicious.”
For the dialect society, which crowns a champ last, the job is so weighty that it takes two days to pick a winner—nominations one night, balloting the next. I’ve participated in around a decade’s worth of votes. I check my journalistic objectivity at the door and do my linguistic duty. Every year, a pattern emerges. A few words totally surprise, some a product of Gen Z (or Gen Alpha) or gamer culture that’s bypassed middle-aged me (hello, skibidi, a 2023 nominee). Recency bias is common—as you’d expect in a vote of trending language. So is observer bias, with crowd approval often directly proportional to shock value (the suffix -ussy winning in 2022; rawdog in 2024).
Looking at the victorious words from a distance, you might nod in recognition of a specific event (chad, 2000; bailout, 2008), cringe at terminology that dates you (World Wide Web, 1995), or wonder what the hell people were thinking (to pluto, a verb meaning to demote, as in what happened to Pluto when it was reclassified from full-fledged to dwarf planet, 2006). But that’s the genius of Word of the Year. We’re suckers for media-driven argument engines. It’s a short walk from “LeBron is better than Jordan!” to “They should have picked rizz!”
Since around 2010, when the newsy app defeated the funner nom—as in the onomatopoetic nomnomnom, to connote eating—younger voters (mostly grad students and junior faculty) have tilted the conversation away from dictionary-type words toward social media and online slang. “It’s generally who makes the best argument in the room, and you can’t predict that,” says Ben Zimmer, chair of the society’s New Words Committee.
A couple of votes stand out for me, for linguistic and cultural reasons. One was in Austin, Texas, in January 2017. Donald Trump had just been elected president, and nearly half of the WOTY nominees were related to him: post-truth, basket of deplorables, unpresidented, alt-right, fake news, locker-room banter, yuuuge. But the mood was ominous, not apocalyptic. It was, after all, pre-inauguration, pre-Charlottesville, pre-impeachments, pre-pandemic, pre-2020 election, pre-January 6, pre-felony indictments, pre-felony convictions, pre-assassination attempts, pre-2024 election, pre-ICE raids: pre-everything.
WOTY promised closure, and everyone was down for that. In the middle of the room, Dan Villareal, a linguistics postdoc, stood up. “Okay,” he said. “It’s 2016. Dumpster fire?” Earlier in the evening, the fire emoji, and also the trashcan and fire emojis used together to represent dumpster fire, won the emoji category. One of the older attendees had asked what dumpster fire meant. “It is used to describe an incredibly catastrophic situation,” Zimmer explained. “Like some people think 2016 was one long dumpster fire.”
Normalize, post-truth, and the fire emoji also got WOTY nominations—the first time an emoji had made the final group. So did woke. “Granted it’s been around a while,” cherubic Stanford linguist John Rickford, a titan in the field, said. “But only if you stay woke can you put out the dumpster fire.” The house was brought down, and I figured it was game over. But then another postdoc, Nicole Holliday, lobbied against the word—“because it was appropriated from the Black solidarity movement in the 1960s and I think that we are so late to this game and last year was anything but woke,” she said. Dumpster fire beat woke in a runoff.
The journey of the two words since then demonstrates WOTY’s unpredictability and its historical value. Dumpster fire was relatively new and the WOTY early-warning system worked; Merriam-Webster added it just 14 months later. Woke, by contrast, would take a far more disturbing linguistic ride. The dialect society voters who (literally) snapped their fingers in approval for woke would watch it get twisted by political commentators and a demagogic right-wing into what was tantamount to a slur.
The dialect society’s last two votes also feel, in hindsight, like markers. When the group gathered in New York to pick the 2023 winner, Joe Biden was president and Trump was a long shot to return to power. The Israel-Hamas war drew a nomination of ceasefire, but the Barbie movie, AI, and online slang dominated the discourse. The most spirited debate was over a word that didn’t appear in Sam Corbin’s Times write-up of the event: cunty, “having an audaciously exceptional appearance or attitude.”
The winner straddled the line between serious and fun: enshittification, meaning a gradual deterioration in the quality of internet platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. The word captured the growing frustration with internet subservience and AI overlords. The 2024 vote, in Philadelphia, also was relatively apolitical; maybe we were all terrified about Trump’s impending inauguration. Rawdog was subversive and fun. The runner-up, sanewashing, was doomy, but more of a criticism of how the media handled Trump than of Trump himself.
Kicking off the 2025 WOTY campaign, Dictionary.com eschewed the perilous state of the union and opted for the ubiquitous (and annoying, to adults) Gen Alpha nonsense catchphrase 67 (also written 6-7 or six seven). The British dictionary Collins went with the AI term vibe coding, which it said “captures something fundamental about our evolving relationship with technology.” Other dictionaries are likely to lean into our quick descent into competitive authoritarianism and choose an existing word that was of the moment and looked up a lot: totalitarian, fascism (for which former Dictionary.com editor John Kelly made the case), deportation, crackdown, tariff, shutdown. (Surreal and unprecedented, fyi, have already had a turn; chaos is available.)
For the American Dialect Society voters, current-events words need to capture the seriousness of the political moment, possess some cultural stickiness, and be lexically dynamic. Language writer Nancy Friedman, who tracks potential WOTYs on her Substack, Fritinancy, flagged DOGE as a verb meaning to fire or purge and as a “combining form,” as in DOGEboys or DOGEbags. Various tariff spinoffs—such as tariffied, which has appeared in lots of headlines—also show promise. Other candidates unite the sober and the clever: Kavanaugh stop, broligarchy, trolligarchy, sadopopulism.
Brianne Hughes, a linguist and writer, maintains a running list of 2025 WOTY hopefuls on the alt-dictionary site Wordnik—around 250 of them so far, including #NoKings, Coldplayed, clanker, aura farming, Straw Hat Pirates, Gen Z stare, and chopped unc, a combo of the internet slang chopped and unc. (Some late additions: Young Republicans, in the wake of a Politico story revealing racist banter in a GOP group chat; Trumpstein files; and Gestapo Barbie, a derogative nickname for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.)
“Choosing the Word of the Year is No Easy Feat“- the history of who and how, from @stefanfatsis.bsky.social in @literaryhub.bsky.social
See also Fatsis on the precarious status of the dictionary: “I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”
* Lewis Carroll (Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass)
###
As we contemplate coinage, we might recall that it was on this date in 1964 that The Animals recorded “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” which had been first recorded by Nina Simone earlier that year. It was the first single released from their album Animal Tracks (followed by “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”).
“Sitting with a deck of cards in your hand all day is an obsession”*…
Long-time reader will know of your correspondent’s affection and respect for the late, great Ricky Jay (see. e.g., here and here). The estimable Quentin Hardy (and here), recalls the happy experience of seeing Jay perform his remarkable stage show, “Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants” (“who were, of course, an ordinary deck of cards, serving under his complete domination”) and the realization that it triggered…
… Ricky Jay – it seems absurd to reduce that mellifluous name to its given or surname components, and parodically stuffy to write “Mr. Jay” – was primarily a close magician, moving cards and coins in all sorts of magical ways. He was also renowned as a card thrower, onstage penetrating a watermelon at 10 paces, and tossing a card as far as 190 feet, or at 90 miles per hour. He was an actor, an engaging writer, a bibliophile, and a deeply learned historian of freaks, cons, conjurers, armless calligraphers, and other nonstandard humans.
What I saw of his secret, I believe, illuminated his talent and his other motivating interests.
I don’t remember details of his lacerating onstage game, though it was excellent entertainment for us marks and his audience. After a couple of minutes we were swept off so he could move on to another amazement. But not before I saw his thumb.
Ricky Jay’s thumb was a seemingly unassuming digit, at rest beneath the clever patter, the astonishing cards dancing across the table, and the beautiful fingers controlling the cards’ movements, then recalling them to their correct place in the deck. By chance, I noticed this thumb running alongside the deck in between deals, and even though the magician was talking to me I sensed a sensitive side communication between the thumb and the man.
It was akin to watching wild nature, when an animal’s excellence is at one with its environment. No, it was better: It was wild nature guided by a fierce human intelligence. I saw him talking to the audience, but he was in a side conversation with a thumb that knew by feel where every card was. This knowledge was the outcome of focused years, which had extended the man’s talent beyond his body into the deck of cards. The state would be aspirational, except a dolt such as I (and, sorry, likely you too, dear reader) can hardly imagine this state of perfection.
What was his trick? The trick was training so deep that his thumb knew where every card was, and could say where it needed to go next. While he was talking, he was checking in with it, making sure everything was in its place as he readied himself for the next seamless adventure.
This may sound comical, but I was awed by a moment of man and thumb, and all that had gone into it. I saw hours of work, a pursuit beyond training with the goal of melding oneself with an object, until the practitioner and the object are completely attuned.
There are other examples of this fusion of identity with an action or object. Jimi Hendrix, as he moved from a band guitarist to a phenomenon, practiced leaning against a wall, so he wouldn’t hurt himself when he fell asleep. W.C. Fields, like Ricky Jay the product of a childhood he’d as soon forget, practiced the juggling that made him a vaudeville star over a boardinghouse bed, so he could likewise collapse, then get up and resume. The classical violinist Chee-yun Kim, who fell asleep playing the piano at age 3 (her mother, terrified, moved her to the fiddle), once forgot to eat during a three-day recording session. There are many more examples…
… I think about Ricky Jay’s thumb, and practicing so hard that part of you enters a physical object, when I think of his breakthrough book, “Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women.” A compendium of extraordinary performers in history, it memorializes the high divers, master memorizers, poison drinkers and fire resisters, and the woman who wrote, simultaneously, four different words with her hands and feet. Some performers are mountebanks, but the most moving passages are about people whose circumstances compelled them to will themselves into something superhuman.
It may be necessity, as in the case of the armless pianist who played with his toes. Or it may be pure chance, as befell Leon Rauch, a hallucinating teenage runaway who met a conjuror, and threw himself into close magic and contortionism. He gained worldwide fame as LaRoche, when he trapped himself in a small sphere and shifted his center of gravity sufficiently to roll up a 50-foot vertical spiral, an adult curled up like a fetus, dazzling the world as he climbed far above them. Far from his origins, too. Call it “dedication” or “obsession.” The goal is transformation, and an escape into a new self.
Ricky Jay, and many other extraordinary entertainers, encourage their reputation as hard-edged guys in a hard world. Indeed, both he and his mentor, the magician Dai Vernon, sought out card cheats, con men, fakes, and other scoundrels. They were searching for the mechanics of their treachery on the unwitting. These villains were presumably not interested in transformation, but simply grift.
Over the years. I have given copies of “Learned Pigs” to more than one acquaintance going through a difficult time, and to this day I keep a few spare copies on hand. It works like magic. Until today I have not disclosed Ricky Jay’s secret: There is no secret, there is only the desire and will for transformation that is inside us all…
A great magician, and an estimable escape artist of a different kind: “Ricky Jay’s Thumb.”
* Ricky Jay
###
As we shuffle and cut, we might recall that it was on this date in 1975 that the master tapes of the ELO album, Face the Music, went to the pressing plant. It featured “Strange Magic” and was their first to earn a platinum record.
“If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry'”*…
Alex Abramovich with a dispatch on the headwaters of rock and roll…
‘There are ten thousand freedoms,’ the late Joshua Clover once said, ‘but rock freedom is definitely set – in the first instance – in a car, when it’s late outside. It can be ecstatic, it can be boring, it can be adjectiveless freedom, but you have reached escape velocity, faster miles an hour, you have no particular place to go, and you have the radio on.’
Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybellene’ recently turned seventy. Recorded on 21 May 1955 in a studio on the South Side of Chicago, it tells the story of a man chasing his girlfriend down the highway. He’s in a Ford V8, she’s driving a Cadillac. She’s cheating, the car’s overheating, he’s trying to catch her before she gets away for good. ‘Maybellene’ isn’t Chuck Berry’s best song but it was his first single. Without it there’d be no Bob Dylan. No rock and roll as we know it. It’s a miracle.
There’s a story about the song, too….
Read on: “Escape Velocity” (archived link), from @lrb.co.uk.
* John Lennon
###
As we roll over, we might send tuneful brithday greetings to Steve Young, a musical pioneer who followed Berry (the first singer-songwriter in the new era of popular music, Roy Orbison suggested)… and took a different path; he was born on this date in 1942. A singer, songwriter, and guitarist, known for his song “Seven Bridges Road” (on Young’s albums Rock Salt & Nails & Seven Bridges Road, but probably best known in the version by The Eagles). He was a pioneer of the country rock, Americana, and alternative country sounds– a vital force behind the outlaw movement.
Oh, and in 1979 this was also “‘The Night Disco Died’ — Or Didn’t.”
“That’s why we have the Museum… to remind us of how we came, and why: to start fresh, and begin a new place from what we had learned and carried from the old”*…
Maya Claire has created a virtual museum– and nearly infinite museum– generated from Wikipedia…
You can find exhibits on millions of topics, from the Architecture of Liverpool to Zoroastrianism. Search for the topic you want to learn about, or just wander from topic to topic as your curiosity dictates!
If you have an OpenXR-compatible headset, you can also visit the MoAT in VR! (Currently, the Oculus Quest is not supported)
The breadth of the museum is made possible by downloading text and images from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Every exhibit in the museum corresponds to a Wikipedia article. The walls of the exhibit are covered in images and text from the article, and hallways lead out to other exhibits based on the article’s links.
The museum is greatly inspired by educational videos that I watched as a kid, and the liminal spaces produced by early CGI. I want to recapture the promise that the internet can be a place of endless learning and exploration. I hope you enjoy your time exploring the Museum of All Things!…
Download instructions (and more) at “MoAT: The Museum of All Things,” by @may.as (with help from @wikipedia.org).
###
As we browse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s concert film Pictures at an Exhibition had its US premiere in Los Angeles. Their rock adaptation of the piano suite by Modest Mussorgsky was filmed live in 1970 at the Lyceum Theatre in London.
“Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.”*…
Former Comptroller of the Currency Eugene Ludwig argues that, at least insofar as many (maybe most) Americans are concerned, unemployment is higher, wages are lower, and growth is less robust than government statistics suggest…
Before the presidential election, many Democrats were puzzled by the seeming disconnect between “economic reality” as reflected in various government statistics and the public’s perceptions of the economy on the ground. Many in Washington bristled at the public’s failure to register how strong the economy really was. They charged that right-wing echo chambers were conning voters into believing entirely preposterous narratives about America’s decline.
What they rarely considered was whether something else might be responsible for the disconnect — whether, for instance, government statistics were fundamentally flawed. What if the numbers supporting the case for broad-based prosperity were themselves misrepresentations? What if, in fact, darker assessments of the economy were more authentically tethered to reality?
On some level, I relate to the underlying frustrations. Having served as comptroller of the currency during the 1990s, I‘ve spent substantial chunks of my career exploring the gaps between public perception and economic reality, particularly in the realm of finance. Many of the officials I’ve befriended and advised over the last quarter-century — members of the Federal Reserve, those running regulatory agencies, many leaders in Congress — have told me they consider it their responsibility to set public opinion aside and deal with the economy as it exists by the hard numbers. For them, government statistics are thought to be as reliable as solid facts.
In recent years, however, as my focus has broadened beyond finance to the economy as a whole, the disconnect between “hard” government numbers and popular perception has spurred me to question that faith. I’ve had the benefit of living in two realms that seem rarely to intersect — one as a Washington insider, the other as an adviser to lenders and investors across the country. Toggling between the two has led me to be increasingly skeptical that the government’s measurements properly capture the realities defining unemployment, wage growth and the strength of the economy as a whole.
These numbers have time and again suggested to many in Washington that unemployment is low, that wages are growing for middle America and that, to a greater or lesser degree, economic growth is lifting all boats year upon year. But when traveling the country, I’ve encountered something very different…
… Within the nation’s capital, this gap in perception has had profound implications. For decades, a small cohort of federal agencies have reported many of the same economic statistics, using fundamentally the same methodology or relying on the same sources, at the same appointed times. Rarely has anyone ever asked whether the figures they release hew to reality. Given my newfound skepticism, I decided several years ago to gather a team of researchers under the rubric of the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity to delve deeply into some of the most frequently cited headline statistics.
What we uncovered shocked us. The bottom line is that, for 20 years or more, including the months prior to the election, voter perception was more reflective of reality than the incumbent statistics. Our research revealed that the data collected by the various agencies is largely accurate. Moreover, the people staffing those agencies are talented and well-intentioned. But the filters used to compute the headline statistics are flawed. As a result, they paint a much rosier picture of reality than bears out on the ground.
Take, as a particularly egregious example, what is perhaps the most widely reported economic indicator: unemployment. Known to experts as the U-3, the number misleads in several ways. First, it counts as employed the millions of people who are unwillingly under-employed — that is, people who, for example, work only a few hours each week while searching for a full-time job. Second, it does not take into account many Americans who have been so discouraged that they are no longer trying to get a job. Finally, the prevailing statistic does not account for the meagerness of any individual’s income. Thus you could be homeless on the streets, making an intermittent income and functionally incapable of keeping your family fed, and the government would still count you as “employed.”
I don’t believe those who went into this past election taking pride in the unemployment numbers understood that the near-record low unemployment figures — the figure was a mere 4.2 percent in November — counted homeless people doing occasional work as “employed.” But the implications are powerful. If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today — hardly something to celebrate…
[Ludwig similarly analyzes data on wages, inflation, and GDP, finding them similarlly flawed…]
… Take all of these statistical discrepancies together. What we have here is a collection of economic indicators that all point in the same misleading direction. They all shroud the reality faced by middle- and lower-income households. The problem isn’t that some Americans didn’t come out ahead after four years of Bidenomics. Some did. It’s that, for the most part, those living in more modest circumstances have endured at least 20 years of setbacks, and the last four years did not turn things around enough for the lower 60 percent of American income earners.
To be fair, the prevailing indicators aren’t without merit. It is, for example, useful to know how the wages of full-time employees have evolved. The challenge, quite separate from any quibbling with the talented people working to tell the nation’s economic story, is to provide policymakers with a full picture of the reality faced by the bulk of the population. What we need is to find new ways to provide a more realistic picture of the nation’s underlying economic conditions on a monthly basis. The indicators my colleagues and I have constructed could serve as the basis for or inspiration for government-sponsored alternatives. Regardless, something needs to change.
This should not be a partisan issue — policymakers in both parties would benefit from gleaning a more accurate sense of what’s happening at the ground level of the American economy. In reality, both Democrats and Republicans were vulnerable to being snowed in the 2024 cycle — it just happened that the dissatisfaction during this particular cycle undermined the incumbent party.
In an age where faith in institutions of all sorts is in free fall, Americans are perpetually told, per a classic quote from former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that while we may be entitled to our own opinions, we aren’t entitled to our own facts. That should be right, at least in the realm of economics. But the reality is that, if the prevailing indicators remain misleading, the facts don’t apply. We have it in our grasp to cut through the mirage that led Democrats astray in 2024. The question now is whether we will correct course…
On the need to revise our economic reference statistics: “Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong.” from @LISEP_org in @POLITICOMag. Eminently worth reading in full.
More on (and more-current readings of) the suggested “revised metrics” at the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity.
###
As we muse on measurement and meaning, we might recall that it was on this date in 1979 that The Cars released “Good Times Roll,” the third single from their eponymously-titled debut album.
You must be logged in to post a comment.