Five Words From … Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz

Welcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books!
Cover of Extremely Online

Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence and Power on the Internet, from technology journalist Taylor Lorenz, explores how social media platforms have changed what it means to create and consume content, who content creators are, and how they’ve used their influence—for good and ill.

broetry
“By 2017, LinkedIn creators posting viral inspirational hustle porn known as ‘broetry’ were gaining massive audiences, forcing the platform to adapt.”

In a 2017 BuzzFeed article about the phenomenon, a top ‘broet’ described his broetry philosophy: “Don’t overestimate your readers’ intelligence. Be known for one or two adverbs.”

ceWEBrities
“She hobnobbed with other online creators, then referred to as ‘ceWEBrities.'”

Other short-lived ‘web’ blends include webize, webliography, weblish, and webutation.

cinemagraphs
“Among the seeds tossed by Tumblr users were GIFs, or short looping images, and cinemagraphs, a type of animated GIF.”

The word ‘cinemagraph’ was coined by New York City-based photographer Jamie Beck and Web designer Kevin Burg.

lifecasting
“She was a journalist who used photos, text, video—every medium available—to invite users into her world and build her brand. She talked about dating and sex in one breath and the trajectory of the tech world in the next. She called it ‘lifecasting.'”

Lifecasting in real-time is called livecasting.

Some pundits tried to create a distinction between ‘lifecasting’ (framed as sharing the minutiae of daily existence) and ‘mindcasting‘ (sharing deeper, more philosophical thoughts alongside, or inspired by, life events).

mamasphere
“As the blogosphere expanded throughout the mid-2000s, so did the “mamasphere.” Mommy bloggers formed loose collaborative groups, cross-linking to other mothers and adding them to their ‘blog roll,’ a list of blogs linked as a list on one side of a website.”

Other internet-related -sphere words include manosphere,
vlogosphere, and wikisphere.

Got a book you’d like to see given the “five words from” treatment? Nominate it through this form, or email us!

Five Words From … Thinking with Your Hands by Susan Goldin-Meadow

Welcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books!

Yellow book cover with two blue hands framing the title

Thinking with Your Hands, from cognitive psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow, will open your eyes to the parallel track of communication that is literally in your hands. Thinking with Your Hands is a fascinating, well-written, and deeply researched book on the importance of gesture that will appeal to Wordniks and other language enthusiasts.

emblems
“When people hear I work on gesture, they immediately assume I’m studying gestures like thumbs-up, okay, and shhhh—conventional gestures, called emblems, that everyone in a particular culture knows.”

(If you’re interested in learning more about emblems in different cultures, you may enjoy Dictionary of Gestures: Expressive Comportments and Movements in Use Around the World. Bonus: this Wordnik list of emblematic gestures.)

homesign
“The hand movements are called homesigns (because they were created in the home) and the children homesigners.”

This video shows a Nicaraguan homesigner.

intensional and extensional
“In an intensional event, the object of the action does not exist at the beginning of the event: ‘I baked a cake,’ ‘I drew a picture’—the event involves creating the object. In contrast, in an extensional event, the object is present at the start: ‘I cut the cake,” ‘I ripped the picture’—the event involves acting on an existing object.”

spatialized
“By using gesture, the children ‘spatialized‘ their thoughts (they literally put them out into space), which, in this instance, helped them take more than one perspective on a moral dilemma.”

teachable moment
“It feels like a ‘teachable moment’—a time when teaching a particular topic or idea is relatively easy, often because the learner is focused on what needs to be learned. The concept of a teachable moment was popularized by Robert Havighurst, then a faculty member in education at the University of Chicago, in his 1952 book Human Development and Education. Havighurst used the phrase to refer to a child’s developmental readiness to learn a particular concept. But is is often used (as I use it here) to refer to a child’s heightened interest in a topic, which makes the child particularly receptive to input that targets the topic.”

Havighurst’s book is available at the Internet Archive.

Got a book you’d like to see given the “five words from” treatment? Nominate it through this form, or email us!

Five Words From … Worn, by Sofi Thanhauser

Welcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books!
Cover of Worn: A People's History of Clothing
Worn: A People’s History of Clothing, by Sofi Thanhauser, is an eye-opening book about dress through the lens of fiber types, covering everything from sheep breeding to labor organizing to the globalization of clothing manufacture.

branks
“Women accused of being scolds were paraded in the streets wearing a new device called a “branks,” an iron muzzle that depressed the tongue.”

If you can’t visualize it, they look like this.

byssus
Byssus is the filament extruded by a mollusk that, when properly processed, can then be spun and woven into a sea silk the color of gold.”

Read about Chiara Vigo, the last “master of byssus”.

fibershed
“One relatively new coinage for the very old concept of making cloth close to home is the “fibershed.” Just as watershed is an area of land that drains rainwater or snow into one stream, lake, or wetland, a fibershed is a geographically circumscribed region in which fiber producers an processors can join their products, skills, and expertise to produce cloth.”

The word ‘watershed’ dates from the 1760s. Other words formed on the model of watershed include airshed, foodshed, and viewshed.

kemp
“What the workers thought were “deer hair” were really the kemp hairs, the outer layer of the fleeces of wild sheep, typical of the fleeces of primitive domestic sheep.”

The word ‘kemp’ is related to an Old Norse word meaning ‘beard’ or even ‘whisker of a cat’.

sliver
“The cotton was combed into a loose thick tube of what is called “sliver,” analogous to wool “roving,” which was piped into the next room where it fell into a row of yellow barrels and coiled itself neatly there, ready to be strung on the plying machine.”

Bonus: Find pongee, smock, grommet, rebozo and 74 other fashion words on the Fashion for Poets list.

Got a book you’d like to see given the “five words from” treatment? Nominate it through this form, or email us!

Beyond Beowulf: Q&A with Hana Videen, author of The Wordhord

Cover of The Wordhord

Hwæt the heck?

Old English is fundamental to the language we speak every day, yet few people outside medievalists and literature scholars know very much about it. Hana Videen is here to change that: in 2013, she started the Wordhord twitter account, posting one Old English word a day. She’s since expanded her efforts: the Old English Wordhord now encompasses a blog, an instagram account, and now a book.

The Wordhord, out this week, is an accessible and engaging lexicon of the language that would become English. Dr. Videen spoke with us about her favorite OE words, Medieval twitter, and how she put together the hord.

Are there any particularly frustrating myths and misconceptions that contemporary English speakers have about Old English? If there were one misconception you could correct, what would it be?

Old English is not Shakespeare … or Chaucer! It’s much older: the language spoken in what’s now England between the mid sixth to the mid twelfth centuries. It looks so much different from the English we know today. For instance, the first lines of Beowulf are:

Hwæt! We gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon…

It’s essentially a foreign language even to fluent modern English speakers. Despite this, it can sometimes look very familiar – Hana is min nama, for instance, looks very much like “Hana is my name.”

Also, the language is Old English, not “Anglo-Saxon”, as it has sometimes been called in the past. And the people who spoke it were englisc, or people of early medieval England. The term “Anglo-Saxon” was rarely used by the people of early medieval England to refer to themselves. “Anglo-Saxon” became popular in the nineteenth century alongside an imperialist, racist concept of a “noble Anglo-Saxon race” destined to conquer the world. Today it’s defended as a neutral and historical term – but it’s not.

Can you talk a little bit about your process selecting Old English “gems” for your Wordhord? Are there any words or categories of words that you wish you could have included?

For the words in The Wordhord I began by going through the “favorites” category on my blog. (These are my favorites – I changed the category to “hord highlights” after the Old English Wordhord app was launched, since people can favorite their own selection of words and that got confusing.) Then I thought about how I might group them in chapters within a book. I eventually decided to have each chapter focus on a different aspect of daily life: eating and drinking, religion, traveling, learning and working, etc. While I wrote the book, I came across other words that were related to the historical content. For instance, heorþ wasn’t in my hoard until I started researching and writing about how to make bread in early medieval England.

There are lots of other words that didn’t make the book, but there is a second book coming! It will focus on animals and animal words.

The Wordhord started as a Word of the Day Twitter account, which is not just a worthy follow but part of an enthusiastic and wonderfully amusing community of Medievalists on twitter. What are some of your favorite Medievalist Twitter accounts? Do you think there’s a particular appeal that Medieval words, art, and culture has to an internet audience?

For medieval manuscript images there are @BLMedieval, @MarginaliaMS, @discarding_imgs, @red_loeb, @melibeus1, @sims_mss, and many others. If you want more Old English content, there are @digitalmappa and @thijsporck. @Medievalists shares articles on a lot of different topics. And there are many scholars on Twitter who share their fascinating work – the best way to find them is using the hashtag #medievaltwitter.

I think that people have been fascinated by the Middle Ages for a long time and that the internet has just provided another way to enjoy learning about this period. And because more libraries are digitizing and sharing their manuscripts, there’s a lot more material available to look at, even without a library membership.

Lots of people’s knowledge of OE begins and ends with Beowulf—where should people start if they want to read more? What do you recommend for the curious (but not necessarily scholarly) reader?

The Word Exchange is a book of Old English poems in translation with each poem translated by a different poet, so that gives you some nice variety. The tenth-century Exeter Book riddles are fascinating (and often humorous), and these are on theriddleages.com, with translations, commentaries and proposed solutions. (The Exeter Book gives no solutions, so scholars can only make guesses.)

What Old English words do you wish would make a comeback?

There are a couple of animal words that I just love. Hreaðe-mus literally means “adorned mouse” and it is Old English for bat (a mouse adorned with wings). Gongel-wæfre literally means “walking-weaver” and it’s an Old English word for a spider.

There are also words that describe things so well that I wish we still used. Uht-cearu is pre-dawn anxiety, the worries that keep you awake at three AM. A morgen-drenc (meaning “morning-drink”) has healing (perhaps even magical) properties, which I think is a great way to describe coffee.

How can you get the Old English word of the day?

You can subscribe for daily emails at oldenglishwordhord.com or follow @OEWordhord (Twitter), @oewordhord (Facebook) and @oldenglishwordhord (Instagram). And if you have an iOS device you can download the free Old English Wordhord app (bit.ly/WordhordApp).

Introducing LEXICON LUNACY 2022!

The month of March is upon us, and with it its attendant madness. College basketball is all well and good, but here at Wordnik we’ll be celebrating the first ever LEXICON LUNACY.

Lexicon Lunacy logoHere’s how it works: 

We’ve taken the 32 most-loved words from 2021 and bracketized them into a single-elimination tournament. Every day this month, you can vote to decide which word goes on to the next round and, eventually, which word will end up the winner.

Some initial observations: 

  • The bracket consists of 18 adjectives, 11 nouns, and two verbs. One word, tatterdemalion, is both a noun and an adjective. 
  • 7 out of the 32 words end in -ous. 
  • Two have also been Wordnik words of the day (ubiquitous on 2011-08-26 and 
  • vespertine on 2016-08-16)
  • The three words with the highest Scrabble scores are conjecture, obsequious, and ubiquitous (tied for 21); the word with the lowest score is susurrus, at 8
  • The word sanguine is included in 538 Wordnik lists; the word accoucheur is on only 16

Head over to Twitter to learn more about the words and vote! 

round two bracket

Eye on the Hog! Nine of our Favorite Winter Olympics Words

opening ceremony of the XXIV Winter Olympic Games in Beijing.

CC BY-4.0, via Wikimedia

The 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing wraps up today. Over the past two weeks, we’ve watched athletes and teams from 91 nations skate, ski, and sleigh their way to Olympic glory (including 25 medals for Team USA!) and learned plenty of new words in the process. Here, our nine favorite Winter Olympics terms and their origins:

Twizzle

Unlike spins, which are stationary, twizzles require rotation while moving across the ice. The synchronized twizzle is one of the most fundamental, and difficult, parts of ice dancing, and definitely the most fun to say. 

Kiss & Cry

The term kiss & cry was coined by Finnish figure skating official Jane Erkko, who popularized the sport in Finland in the 1980s. It’s since been expanded to other sporting events to mean any area where competitors wait to receive their scores. 

Death Spirals

Unlike in aviation, insurance, or life in general, death spirals in figure skating can—if executed correctly—be a good thing. The death spiral is an element of pairs figure skating in which the man, in a low pivot position, rotates the woman low to the ice. The name was apparently inspired by the popularity of air show stunts in the 1920s.

Madison Chock and Evan Bates - 2019 Internationaux de France

CC BY-SA 3.0. By David Carmichael, via Wikimedia

Axel

The axel, one of the seven types of jump in figure skating, has nothing to do with the type of axle around which a wheel rotates; it’s actually an eponym, named after Norwegian figure skater Axel Paulsen. 

Bobsled

Bobsledding, or Bobsleigh, has been a part of the winter Olympic games since their inception in 1924. Unlike with axel, there is no eponymous “Bob”: the sport gets its name from the way early participants bobbed back and forth to increase speed. 

Monobob 

Bobsledding is traditionally performed with teams of either two or four. A one-person bobsled is charmingly deemed a monobob, which is also the name of the newest Winter Olympic sport. Women’s monobob debuted at the 2022 Olympics, where Americans Kaillie Humphreys and Elana Meyers Taylor took the gold and silver, respectively. 

Skeleton

Skeleton involves going headfirst down an ice track on a sled, unlike its sister sport luge, where competitors go feet first. The term skeleton is of uncertain origin: some say it takes its name from the bony appearance of the early metal sleds, while others think it might be a mistransliteration of the Norwegian word kjaelke, meaning toboggan or sled. 

Hog line

Watch a game of curling, and you’ll notice a lot of hog terminology: the hog line is the line by which players have to release the stone. If a rock is hogged, it’s taken out of play. Since the early 2000s, hog line violations have been enforced by an electronic sensor called “eye on the hog.”

Why all the porcine language? According to curling.ca, the phrase derives from Scottish agriculture, where straggling baby lambs and other livestock were called hogs. 

Skijoring

From 1912 to 1992, Olympic Games included demonstration sports: non-medal events meant to popularize new or underappreciated sports with the goal of their eventual inclusion in the Olympics. Some sports, like ice dancing, speed skating, and curling, became full-fledged Winter Olympic events.

One that didn’t is skijoring, a sport that involves skiers being drawn over ice by dogs, vehicles, or—in the case of the Olympic demonstration—horses. Skijoring, which has its roots in Scandinavia, debuted at the 1928 Winter games in St. Moritz, but never returned as a demonstration or medal sport.

"Skijoring": people on skis pulled by a horse, dogs or a motor vehicle. Saint-Moritz, 1928.

Public Domain, via Wikimedia

Got a favorite winter sports word that we missed? Let us know on Twitter!

Five Words From … Matrix, by Lauren Groff

Welcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! 

The hottest Matrix of 2021 had nothing to do with white rabbits, red pills, or Keanu Reeves. This Matrix, Lauren Groff’s latest novel, tells the story of Marie de France as she progresses from ungainly orphan to powerful abbess in 12th-century England.  

Folium 028v from the Psalter of Eleanor of Aquitaine (ca. 1185) from the collection of the Royal Library of the Netherlands. The illumination shows Donor portrait - A noble lady kneeling.

Public domain – via Wikimedia

Colewort 

“The coleworts are the size of three-month babies.”

Colewort, or cole, is the medieval ancestor of the Brassica oleracea species of vegetables, which today encompasses cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, collard greens, and brussels sprouts. Although the colewort of the twelfth century was smaller and more loose-leafed than its contemporary cultivars, it survives today in the word coleslaw

 

Proper

“Temporale, the proper of time, the cycle of Christmas, the cycle of Easter. Sanctorale, the proper of the saints.” 

Proper as a noun (not to be confused with a proper noun) is an ecclesiastical term that refers to the Catholic liturgical calendar: the proper is the portion of the liturgy that corresponds to each season or occasion. The Temporale is the proper of time because it consists of moveable feasts like Easter; the Sanctorale is the cycle of holy days with fixed dates, like Saints’ days and Christmas.

 

Monocerous

“Marie has become a great old monocerous. Hide of iron, single vicious horn, or so she hears.”

Monocerous (more commonly spelled monoceros or monocerus) comes from the Greek roots “monos”, single, and “keros,” horn, making it an etymological sibling to unicorn, which has the same roots, but in Latin. Depending on the context, monocerous can either be a synonym of unicorn or refer to a similar, but related creature. Monocerous far predates its Latin synonym, though: the creature is mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, where he described it as having “the head of the stag, the feet of the elephant, and the tail of the boar… and has a single black horn, which projects from the middle of its forehead, two cubits in length.” 

Today, the word survives in the scientific name for the narwhal, Monodon monoceros. 

Monoceros - Bestiary Harley MS 3244, ff 36r-71v. Late 12th century-Early 13th century.

Public domain – via Wikimedia


Virago 

“The abbess is not unlike a freemartin, that strange genre of virago ox not one thing or the other but both at the same time.”

Groff uses the word virago several times to describe her protagonist, including in Marie’s own thoughts of herself. Virago, literally a woman who behaves like or has the bearing of a man, comes from the Latin root vir, meaning man, from which we also get virile and virtue. The connotation of the word has changed over time: in ancient and early medieval contexts it would have meant a strong female warrior, but by the late middle ages it came to mean a harsh, unattractive and scolding woman.  

The novel gives us a little bit of both senses: it’s negative when Marie reflects self-deprecatingly on her own appearance, but a backhanded compliment when the diocesan addresses her as a “noble virago … exalted above all other exemplars of your sex.” It’s part of the deliberate contradiction that the novel explores: Marie’s self-professed “mannish” nature is the very quality that allows her to attain a position of power from which she can uplift other women. 

 

Matrix

“Without the first matrix, there could be no salvatrix, the greatest matrix of all.” 

One thing you notice in reading Matrix is all of the words ending in -trix or -rix: cantrix, cellatrix, infirmatrix, hostellerix, scrutatrix, and so on. Each of these words, along with a host of -ess words like almoness and prioress, describes a position in the abbey. Groff never lets the reader forget that each of these roles is performed by women. 

The word matrix is itself a -trix word, from the same Latin root that gives us mother. In the novel, it’s used in (at least) two senses: as a personalized seal for inscribing books, and, in the sentence above,  as a now-obscure word for womb. 

 

Bonus: alaunt, spavin, mizzling, and a list of 77 other Matrix words here

 

Got a book you’d like to see given the “five words from” treatment?   Nominate it through this form, or DM us on Twitter!