Friday words #264

By | April 16, 2021

A well-known person dies. Newspapers publish obituaries that announce the death and recount highlights of the person’s life and career. (Latin obitus “departure” plus the -ary suffix that indicates “associated with,” as we saw recently with millionaire.)

On social media, the death sometimes inspires a slightly different take. People mourn the person’s death, but many also post stories about their associations with or encounters with the deceased:

These sorts of posts are not really obituaries, because they’re more about the speaker than about the deceased. Or as I learned this week from FB Friend Michael, they’re egobituaries.

The term seems to have been invented in early 2020 by Aline Brosh McKenna, one of the writers from the TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. In a kind of Möbius-like twist, McKenna was remembering her colleague, the late Adam Schlesinger, and a conversation in which she invented the term while they were talking about how people tell personal stories about people who’ve died.

The term feels vaguely negative to me, perhaps because the ego prefix is often meant disparagingly, as in egocentric and egotist. I guess it depends on one’s attitude toward stories about a brush with celebrity. Is it negative if you apply it to yourself? The animator Erika I. Vega consciously used egobituary in a post on Instagram that was a kind of tribute to the Glee star Naya Rivera:

Morphologically speaking, egobituary splits up the original term—obituary—in a novel way. The constituent parts of obituary are obit+uary, but the new word reanalyzes this as ego+bituary, splitting the o- from obit and treating bituary as its own component. I see that people have done this with annibituary and brobituary, so bituary seems to be a kind of libfix, cool.

Anyway, that’s the new term. Perhaps you can tell us your reaction to the word. 🙂

A variant today for origins. I was reading something the other day that made me realize that we have some words in English that come specifically from the city of Venice (Italy). I did some searching and came up with a longer list than I had anticipated.

Some of the words directly reference something unique to that city. Others are terms that just happened to have strong associations with the city.  Have a look:

  • arsenal. Originally from an Arabic word that meant “workshop,” Venice had a large dock named Arsenal; references to this dock were the first uses of the word in English.
  • doge. A magistrate in medieval Venice or Genoa. This is a Venetian dialectical word that derived from Latin dux (“leader”) and which is also the origin of Il Duce in Italian and duke in English.
  • ducat. A coin originally minted in Venice, later used more generically for other money that aspired to the same soundness as the Venetian monetary unit.
  • gazette. A newspaper originally published in Venice that cost one gazetta, a copper coin. Or possibly from the word gazza (“magpie”) to suggest the bird’s chattering. (Compare Twitter, ha.)
  • ghetto. This comes from the word getto in Italian meaning “foundry.” The first ghetto to mean “place where people are restricted to” was established in Venice in 1516 on or near the site of an old copper foundry. (I should note that the association between a ghetto and “foundry” is not certain.)
  • lagoon. Italian for “pool,” but first taken into English in reference to the waters around Venice.
  • lido. Now used generically to mean a beach resort, derived from the island of Lido between the city of Venice and the Adriatic.
  • quarantine. The forty-day period of isolation was originally imposed in Venice in 1377 to try to keep the plague under control.
  • sequin. Originally a coin from Venice (zecchino), later any small, circular decorative element sewn onto clothes.

There are some others as well, but those are more obscure. Anyway, I hope that you, too, have enjoyed learning about our surprisingly close linguistic history with Venice.

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