Happy New Year! This is episode #250 of the Friday words, and it’s 2021. These milestones seem significant, somehow, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to do a roundup of my favorite Friday words from 2020, using categories that I made up as I was doing this.
New-to-me words
Each episode sees a new-to-me word. (As I keep noting, these are rarely new-new words, just new to me.) Here are my favorites from 2020.
Most fun
Hamsterkauf. A legit German word that means “panic purchase,” with the verb form hamsterkaufen for “to panic-buy.” In the early days of lockdowns, there were episodes of hamsterkaufing in which people cleared the shelves of toilet paper, hand sanitizer, bleach, and many other supplies deemed necessary for surviving the virus.
Runner-up: eyebombing, which involves sticking googly eyes onto things in public places. Not only do I like the word, I like how it shows -bombing as an emerging morpheme.
Most useful
washlet. A bidet-type fixture that can be added to your toilet. Some are quite fancy, with temperature controls and an air-drying feature. The name Washlet is a trademark, but people also use it generically for any such device. Not surprisingly, when toilet paper became scarce, washlets did too. But once you’ve got a washlet, your need for toilet paper goes way down, so there’s that. I think that we’ll be seeing this word more in the future.
Runners-up: nosocomial, which refers to illness that’s spread in hospitals, as was happening at times with the virus, and wet signature, which is a retronym that refers to signing a document using a pen and ink as opposed to e-signing it.
Most unusual
dolos. A concrete structure that looks like a giant knucklebone; dolosse are piled around jettys and other structures to buffer them against wave action. I learned about this word by seeing some dolosse in Crescent City, California and wondering what the heck those things were.
Cleverest
I think that most of the new-new words I encounter are clever, but per the rules that I invented for myself, I have to pick one word to be the cleverest. So …
bardcore. This combination of the word bard (“poet”) and the particle -core (hardcore, normcore, cottagcore) describes modern pop music played in a medieval style on medieval instruments. There’s nothing like hearing “Jolene” played on krumhorn.
Runner-up: risonym, a word invented by the linguist Arnold Zwicky to describe a word that just sounds funny, like cattywumpus, discombobulated, flummoxed, and squelch.
Fun or surprising origins
Among the origins I discovered, these were the ones I liked best this year.
Most interesting
garlic. This comes from an Old English/Saxon word gar, which means “spear,” and the word leek, basically. I had no idea that this word, which is so associated with Mediterranean cuisine, had such a purely Germanic name.
Most obvious (in retrospect)
flu. The full version of this word—influenza—should be a pretty good indication of where it comes from, at least if you think in terms of astrology. The original meaning was an illness that was due to the influence (get it?) of the planets and stars. Words with similar origins are malaria (“bad air”), distemper (“derangement of the humors”), and cholera (“excess of choler,” i.e., yellow bile).
Most fun to research
draft. Friend Melanie asked why we call it a first draft. Looking into that question led me into a rewarding journey through the many senses of draft (more than 50, per my count). Examples include draft beer, a bank draft, the military draft, a draft of cold air, and drafting (as in drawing), all of which in some way go back to the original sense of “pull.”
Most surprising
Almost all the origins I look into seem surprising in some way, but if I have to pick one …
clue. First, I had no idea that clue referred to a ball of yarn. Then I was additionally surprised to discover that the clue in a detective mystery comes metaphorically from Greek mythology—that sense of clue references the ball of yarn that Theseus used to find his way out of the Labyrinth after slaying the Minotaur.
We don’t know what 2021 will bring, but I can be pretty sure that there will be plenty of new-to-me words and surprising etymologies.
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