Friday words #252

By | January 15, 2021

Where we live, the city doesn’t require us to sort different types of recycling; we can toss paper and glass and metal into the same bins. However, we periodically get flyers in the mail that remind of us what can and can’t be recycled:

Excerpt from a flyer about recycling that lists paper, cardboard, jars and bottles, and metal. A note says "NO food, liquid, and plastic bag"

But a lot of people don’t pay much attention to these exhortations and they toss all sorts of stuff into the bins. I tend to have dark thoughts about this approach to recycling. But the generous interpretation of what they’re doing is the new-to-me word this week: wishcycling.

In wishcycling, people throw things into the recycle container with the hope (the wish) that the thing they’re disposing of can be recycled. Greasy pizza boxes, batteries, old furniture, clothes, construction debris—they don’t want to just throw those things away, so they put them in the blue bins. As a post on Medium says, “they toss whatever they wish could be recycled into the recycling bin, hoping that the trash fairy will ensure that it gets recaptured and magically turned into something useful again.”

The problem is not just that these things aren’t recyclable; some of the things that people wishcycle harm the recycle effort. In places where they want you to sort your own recycling, mixing recyclables can make an entire load unsortable. In all recycle streams, food waste contaminates material intended for recycling. Plastic bags clog machines at the sorting facility. The folks at Outagamie County (WI) put out a TikTok that tries in a funny (but very pointed) way to illustrate how strings of “recycled” Christmas lights screw up the machines:

Anyway, don’t wishcycle. Know what you can put in the bin.

Ok, that was about half new word and half public service announcement, sorry. Let’s move on to origins. Why is Stonehenge called Stonehenge? The stone part seems clear—hey, it’s made of stone—but what’s a henge? I wondered about this because I was reading an article about other henges in the UK, and I don’t think I’d ever seen henge used as a standalone word.

In earlier times there were forms like Stanenges and Stanheng. Sure enough, the first part relates to stone. It’s not certain what the henge part means, but it seems likely that it’s related to hang. Perhaps the pillar-and-lintel construction reminded people of gallows. But the henge part might be closer to the word hinge, in a sense meaning “that on which something is conceived to hang or be supported and to turn.” (OED) Perhaps “hanging stone.” The word hinge derives from hang, so it’s a question of in what sense henge relates to hang.

As for other henges, the word henge is back-formation based on the name Stonehenge. Archeologists use the term to describe other monuments that consist of a circular bank with a ditch inside and one or more entrances. Many apparently included structures made from wood, but the wood has long since disappeared, leaving only the outlines of the circles. By the archeological definition of a henge, Stonehenge isn’t even technically a henge, which seems a bit ironic.

I suppose I should note that Stonehenge is an English name for something that was sitting on Salisbury Plain for a few thousand years before the Saxons set foot on the island. We have no idea what the creators called Stonehenge back in Neolithic times, or even what language they spoke. There are some words that we will just never know, sad.

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