Friday words #272

During the pandemic, people were cooped up for more than a year. Not only could they not go places they wanted to go, they had no place to spend the money they were saving by not going anywhere. But that’s almost over, and people are primed with plans, money, and a YOLO attitude. Result: revenge spending, a new-to-me term that describes people’s “urge to splurge” to make up for the missed opportunities of the last year.

Although we’re experiencing a new bout of revenge spending, or revenge buying as it’s also known, it’s not a new concept. Investopedia notes that this sort of thing happens anytime after people’s normal inclination to spend has been thwarted.

Economists and retailers are hoping for a lot of revenge spending to stimulate economies that could use a shot in the arm. (haha, see what I did there?) On the other hand, money advisors are cautioning people not to go too wild.

When I started looking into revenge spending, search results mostly returned recent articles that all focused on this phenomenon in the wake of the pandemic. However, there is another, somewhat different use of revenge spending, one that seems like a more obvious meaning of the expression. This other usage describes spending money to take revenge on, say, a partner. Your partner has done something to upset you, which might include splurging on something, so you go buy something “in revenge.” This is sometimes tied to the concept of “financial infidelity” in couples (example, example).

The folks at Collins dictionary are tracking the term revenge shopping/revenge spending in their “new word suggestion” database. We’ll see whether dictionaries take up this term (in either sense).  

Origins. We have a few words in English for the process of examining a body to determine how it came to be in a non-living state. There’s postmortem, which comes from Latin for “after” + “death.” This addresses when the examination occurs, but doesn’t reference the what or how.

There’s also necropsy (or necroscopy). This comes from necr-, which refers to non-living tissue, and -opsy, which is a term meaning “inspection.” (Related to words like optics and optical.) We got this word via French. This one is more specific, in that it encompasses both an action and an object.

Then we also have autopsy. This one might seem a bit strange, no? If you take the example of necropsy, one can interpret this as “examine oneself.” Which is not really what happens in a postmortem, since bodies don’t do that?

The meaning apparently has to do with how auto- is interpreted. In this case, it’s not “self” as such, but “for oneself” or “independent.” The term autopsy came to us from late Latin but originates in Greek, where autopsia referred to seeing with one’s own eyes. There are early senses in English were autopsy meant “careful visual inspection,” but since the early 1800s it also has been used specifically to mean a postmortem.

Let’s review:

• postmortem: Focuses on the when.
• necropsy: Focuses on the what.
• autopsy: Focuses on the how.

… sort of.

As an aside, companies occasionally use the word postmortem to refer to an analysis of a project after the project is done.  (Google uses what’s sometimes called a blameless postmortem to figure out how something went wrong.) However, we’ve recently decided to move away from postmortem in favor of a term like retrospective, for reasons that probably are pretty self-evident.

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