The Word(s) of the Year

What is the word of the year for 2022? It depends on who you ask.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary people decided on gaslighting (n.): “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for one’s own advantage.”

How do they decide? In this case, the word, in this “age of misinformation,” had a 1,740% increase in lookups of the word this year. It’s not a new word. The term actually comes from a 1938 play, Gas Light. The 1944 movie version, Gaslight made it more widely used. In that story, a husband manipulates his wife to make her think she’s actually losing her sense of reality so he can commit her to a mental institution and steal her inheritance.

Cambridge Dictionary chose homer (n.): “an informal American English term for a home run in baseball.” Doesn’t everyone know what a homer/home run is already? So why did they see more than 65,000 searches for homer on May 5. Was it Aaron Judge of the NY Yankees going for the season record? No. That was the day it was the answer to that day’s Wordle. Ninety-five percent of the searches were outside North America. Aha! I guess speakers of British English probably weren’t thrilled to see the answer be American slang.

Speaking of which, the word Wordle itself crowned the top spot as Google’s most searched term globally and in the US in 2022.

A strange nominee comes from the Oxford Languages that picked goblin mode (n.): “a type of behavior which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typical in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.”

It is a term I have never heard used. It first appeared on Twitter in 2009 but really spiked in February. They say that it comes from our post-lockdown world where the term captures “the prevailing mood of individuals who rejected the idea of returning to ‘normal life… People are embracing their inner goblin, and voters choosing ‘goblin mode’ as the Word of the Year tells us the concept is likely here to stay.”

I’m not so sure about goblin ode having legs. There were lots of other possibilities for the 2022 word, including oligarch, Omicron, codify, LGBTQIA, sentient, loamy, raid, Queen Consort, truth-telling, spicy cough, bachelor’s handbag, Barbiecore, bossware, brigading, clapter, e-change, gigafire, hidden homeless, nepo baby, orthosomnia, pirate trail, prebunking, quiet quitting, skin hunger, and yassify.

What is your word of the year for 2022?

Hozro and Hiraeth

“Everything is connected. The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his hozro, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him.”
― Tony Hillerman, The Ghostway

Image by daschorsch

I came upon two new words recently that come from very different places and cultures, but both resonated with my state of mind this past week.

Hozro is the Navajo word meaning to be in harmony with one’s environment, at peace with one’s circumstances, and free from anger or anxieties. If that isn’t enough, it means you are walking in harmony, content with the beauty all around him.”

It is about balance; about personal and communal beauty that adds its voice to the whole blended ensemble of creation.

Hozho is about real-world harmony and balance in the trenches of life, not the weekend retreat, ”don’t-worry-be-happy varieties.” In the novel Sacred Clowns, Jim Chee, a Navajo detective, is the way author Tony Hillerman explores what it is like to be born among the Dine’ and live on the reservation through novels of mystery. Chee explains hozho in this way:

“This business of hozho… I’ll use an example. Terrible drought, crops dead, sheep dying. Spring dried out. No water. The Hopi, or the Christian, maybe the Moslem, they pray for rain. The Navajo has the proper ceremony done to restore himself to harmony with the drought. You see what I mean? The system is designed to recognize what’s beyond human power to change, and then to change the human’s attitude to be content with the inevitable.”

In hozho, harmony and balance are real and it is a realistic goal in life. You don’t find this harmony outside or in things. You find in your own heart and mind.

Not everyone I know could accept this philosophy. Some people I know want to change the world. That is not the wrong thing to do. There are things that need changing and some of them you yourself can change or at least help change. You could view hozho as acceptance. “I can’t change the climate so I just accept it.”

Adjusting ourselves to reality is an easier and certainly less stressful way to live. It seems to me that this philosophy is more about the things we can’t change. Unhappy about how the weather has “ruined your plans” this weekend? You can’t change it, so adjust yourself.

There is also a belief in certain inevitabilities in hozho. Certain things are going to happen – aging and death amongst the big ones – and fighting to change these things is harmful. I don’t think it means to ignore your health and habits and “come what may” but to battle aging every day makes what life you have left less enjoyable.

Image by Michal Jarmoluk

On the other side of the world, I found hiraeth, a Welsh word that has no direct English translation. I found it defined as a combination of homesickness, grief, and sadness over the lost or departed. The closest synonyms in English seem to be “longing, yearning, nostalgia, or wistfulness.” For the Welsh, it seems to be those feelings about the Wales of the past, but the concept is not uniquely Welsh.

The etymology is that it is derived from hir and aeth and literally means “long gone.” The word appears in the earliest Welsh records, including early Welsh poetry. This is not a new feeling.

The word came into the English language in the 19th century. Historically, from 1870 to 1914, approximately 40% of Welsh emigrants returned to Wales. Was it hiraeth?

These two words and their larger meanings don’t seem similar to me. In fact, I see them as opposites in a way. That longing for things long gone in hiraeth is a yearning for things that can never return, such as a lost loved one, or the world, real and imagined, of your childhood. Those kinds of feelings certainly would not enhance any harmony or balance in your life. It means an unacceptance of some inevitabilities.

Everything is connected. The past is settled. You have the present to live in. The future is not completely undetermined but you have the ability to change some of it. If you believe in an afterlife, you are determining what it will be today.

 

Autumn or Fall?

Yes, it’s officially winter – but how did we come up with “autumn” and “fall”?
And is one more correct than the other?
Explanation at  whynameitthat.blogspot.com

Image Dietmar Rabich (Derivative work: Sting), CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

So Many Hallows Before the Darker Half of the Year

A cemetery decorated for All Hallows Day which is a religious holiday, but it still looks Halloween creepy here.

Everyone knows Halloween the holiday, but I’m always surprised how few people know the origin of the word itself. It is also written as Hallowe’en and it dates to about 1745. It might have an older Christian origin, though Christian churches often consider this holiday to be not holy day at all and more of a pagan celebration.

The verb, to hallow is “to make holy or sacred, to sanctify or consecrate, to venerate.” The adjective form is hallowed, which appears in “The Lord’s Prayer” (“hallowed be thy name”), means holy, consecrated, sacred, or revered.

The noun form, hallow (as used in Hallowtide) is a synonym for the word saint. The noun is from the Old English adjective hālig, “holy.”

In modern English usage, the noun “hallow” appears mostly in the compounds Hallowtide, Hallowmas, and Halloween.

Hallowtide and Hallowmas are not as well known as Halloween. Hallowtide is a liturgical season that includes Halloween and Hallowmas. The latter is the feast of Allhallows or All Saints’ Day, on November 1.

And now, here are the many hallows that have come to be and confuse us.

Halloween/Hallowe’en is a shortened form of “All Hallow Even(ing),” meaning “All Hallows’ Eve” or “All Saints’ Eve.”

Hallowmas is the day after Halloween and it is shortened from “Hallows’ Mass,” and is also known as “All Hallows’ Day” or “All Saints’ Day.”

So, the word “Hallowe’en” means “Saints’ evening” and it comes from a Scottish term for All Hallows’ Eve. In that case, the word “eve” is “even” which is contracted to e’en or been. Over time, (All) Hallow(s) E(v)en evolved into Hallowe’en.

Call it Halloween, All Hallows’ Eve, or All Saints’ Eve. It is celebrated in many countries on the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows’ Day. It begins the observance of Allhallowtide which is the time in the liturgical year dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, but really all the faithful departed.

The history of all this is not clear. Some historians believe that Halloween traditions were influenced by ancient Celtic harvest festivals. The festival usually mentioned is the Gaelic festival Samhain. which marks the end of the harvest season and beginning of the “darker half” of the year – winter.

Another theory is that Samhain was “Christianized” to bring in pagans as All Hallow’s Day, along with its eve, by the early Church. And others believe that Halloween began solely as a Christian holiday marking the vigil of All Hallow’s Day. This is not uncommon in Christianity and other religions and is probably best known with Christmas Eve.

 

A version of this appeared earlier on one of my other blogs, Why Name It That?

They and the Existential Climate Emergency

There isn’t a single “word of the year” but there are certainly wordS of the year since various sources choose a word or words that they feel were prominent in the past year.

It was a German Wort des Jahres that started things in 1971. The American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year is the oldest English-language version. They wait until after the end of the calendar year to announce just in case something really catches hold in December.

The dictionary folks at Merriam-Webster picked the nonbinary pronoun “they” and added that meaning to their dictionary because it had a 313% boost in lookups.

Dictionary.com went with “existential.” That word was attached to a variety of usages including climate change, gun violence and Joe Biden’s remarks about President Trump as constituting “an existential threat to America.”

Oxford chose a phrase as its word of the year: “climate emergency,” because they found it to be “100 times as common” this year as it was in 2018.

None of these are new words. All are new usages or new definitions of old words.

Existential is my favorite because it is a word I knew well from courses in philosophy and literature. The first definition in most dictionaries is one of those fairly useless definitions: “of or relating to existence.” Not helpful. It came into English in the late 1600s and in that first sense is used when someone or something’s being/existence—is at stake.

I learned the word existential in a classroom where the discussion was about how human existence was determined by the individual’s freely made choices and it had to do with existentialism. That philosophy is one that affirms our individual ability to make meaningful, authentic choices about our lives. We were reading Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche, Kafka, and Kierkegaard. Heavy stuff. This meaning came into usage in the early 1900s

Dictionary.com says that existential describes “a sense of grappling with the survival — literally and figuratively — of our planet, our loved ones, our ways of life.”

Oxford picked “climate emergency” because it felt that it was “the most written about (kind of) emergency by a huge margin.”

The singular gender-neutral pronoun “they” confuses a lot of people – and bother grammar police. Some sites have claimed that all three of these words of 2019 are centered on Gen Z and Millennials. That latter group identifies as LGBTQ at the highest rate in history, and the Gen Z that follow will likely continue the trend.

Time magazine’s Person of the Year, Greta Thunberg, is a Gen Z who has taken on climate change more than the older generations. For her and her comrades, it’s more of a climate emergency now than mere climate change. And Gen Z youth, especially those who have been involved in gun violence in their own schools, have led the way on that issue.

I’ll go with “existential” for 2019 because it covers a number of issues including climate and guns. It is the threat that a lot of us feel every day to our very existence.

I ignore the lists of the “most searched” words because, besides trivial pop culture topics, the others tend to be a topic of the day or week (like polar vortex, stochastic terrorism or exonerate) in the same way that a story in the media is the top news for a week or two and then we don’t hear any followup on it ever again.

Don’t forget that other countries and languages also have their word of the year.  For example, in Australian English for 2019, cancel culture and robodebt get the top prizes.

And if we look back at the American Dialect Society’s words from year’s past, we have a little time capsule of where we were and how much change or lack of change there has been: 2015, Singular they (as a gender-neutral pronoun, especially for non-binary gender identities). 2016, dumpster fire (an exceedingly disastrous or chaotic situation). 2017, fake news (disinformation or falsehoods presented as real news or actual news that is claimed to be untrue). 2018, tender age shelter (a euphemism for facilities in which children of illegal immigrants are detained by government officials).

A Fall of Leaves

The words “autumn” and “fall” meaning the season that begins today in the Northern Hemisphere both originated in Britain, but one is more commonly used there while the other is more common in America. By the mid-1800s, “fall” was considered to be the  American season by lexicographers.

Autumn is the older word. It came into English in the 1300s from the Latin word autumnus.

At one time there was an intermediary season preceding our autumn that was called “harvest.” It seems that autumn came into usage to distinguish between the time when one harvests crops and the actual crop harvest itself.

Writers, especially poets, wrote about the seasonal colors of this time and the phrase “the fall of the leaves” came into more common usage. That phrase was shortened sometime in the 1600s to “fall.” This coincides with English moving across the ocean with explorers and settlers to the New World. But both words must have been used in the New World as they were in Britain because “fall” for the season doesn’t appear until 1755 when Samuel Johnson added it to his Dictionary of the English Language.

Fall is still occasionally used in countries where British English is spoken, but more likely in phrases, like “spring and fall.” American though I may be, I prefer autumn, since it is used to mark the Autumnal Equinox.

 

This post originally appeared on Why Name It That?