Last Friday the American Dialect Society held its annual vote for Word of the Year on Zoom. This event is fun because anyone can show up and vote. (No dialecticals required.) The word insurrection won this year. You can see all the categories and nominated words.
Perhaps partly due to my age, some of the nominations each year are new to me. This year’s crop included horny jail, bussin’, yassify, and copium. Another new-to-me term that particularly grabbed my attention was the word parasocial. This is not a new word at all, but per the guidelines for WotY nominations, it “show[s] widespread usage by a large number of people in a variety of contexts and situations, and which reflect important events, people, places, ideas, or preoccupations of English-speakers in North America in 2021.” More on that in a sec.
The word parasocial refers to having a kind of relationship in your mind with someone you “know” only through “mediated encounters.” We all have parasocial relationships: we feel like we know certain actors or other celebrities based on what we’ve seen and read about them. Many people look up to media figures as role models and adopt behaviors or attitudes from them.
The term parasocial interaction was coined in the 1950s by some sociologists. The social part is clear, obviously, but what about para? The Dictionary.com site explains: “The para- in parasocial is commonly used in modern scientific terms to designate an object or activity auxiliary to or derivative of the one denoted by the base word, especially when it’s considered abnormal or defective (as in paranoia).”
At the time that the word was coined, the mediated encounters took place through radio and TV. These days, of course, people can have mediated encounters in social media. You can follow the Twitter and Instagram accounts of actors, models, politicians, and “influencers,” and you can interact with those accounts by leaving comments or responses to a post.
But parasocial relationships can become unhealthy. For example, some people start to think that the parasocial relationship is reciprocal. That K-Pop star has 4 million followers, but some of them imagine that they are a special friend of the star. Some people might decide they prefer parasocial relationships to real relationships, since they have control over these imaginary relationships.[1] (We can reflect on to what extent parasocial relationships have influenced politics in the last decade or so.)
Why did parasocial trend recently? It seems to be due to a single celebrity. In 2021, the actor and comedian John Mulaney left his wife for the actor Olivia Munn and shortly thereafter the couple had a baby. Some people felt strongly like they’d been deceived about the difference between his persona—the person they had a parasocial relationship with—and what his real life was like. This event, at least according to some people, brought the word parasocial into the spotlight again. As evidence, the linked article shows a huge spike in interest in the word parasocial in September, when the news broke about the baby.
In any event, the word parasocial seems useful and I’m glad that I learned it from my many close personal friends in the language community. Haha.
Origins. Over the holidays we ended up watching the movie My Fair Lady. It’s all about accents, of course, specifically British ones. As a kind of linguistic establishment shot, some of the characters occasionally say “Blimey!”[2] While Liza Doolittle was having her initial verbal duels with Henry Higgins, I looked up where that expression came from.
This turns out to be a shortened form of “Blind me!” When I looked this up, I was a little surprised to see that this has variously been written as Bli’ me, Blime, and in a few other ways that make it a little clearer that this is indeed a shortened form.
Who’s doing the blinding? Blime seems to be a truncated form of “God blind me!”, as evidenced by the variant form Gorblimey.
The expressions Blimey and Gorblimey are usually glossed as interjections that show surprise or dismay. As such, I think they’re equivalent to something like I’ll be damned in an exchange like this: “Did you hear that the Seahawks finally won a game?” “I’ll be damned.” (If you turn the vulgar up to 11, you can also use the expression fuck me here.)
I haven’t been successful in finding a deeper explanation of why someone would want to be blinded (or damned). We can view these expressions as having a kind of hanging if (“Blind me [if]” or “I’ll be damned [if]”). But even then, it’s not clear to me what that condition is, exactly. If you have an explanation, by all means let me know!
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
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[1] You could argue that the expression “Never meet your heroes” is a commentary on how real relationships often fail in ways that parasocial relationships (by definition) don’t. [^]
[2] I checked the original—Shaw’s Pygmalion—and as far as I can tell, these color-adding Blimey!s are an innovation of whoever wrote the script for My Fair Lady (Alan Lerner of Lerner and Loewe, I guess?). [^]
Parasocial is a very covid-era world. When you’re alone for long enough, you start to feel like all your relationships are parasocial.