Welcome to Word Buzz Wednesday, your go-to place for some of the most interesting words of the week. The latest: an offensive nickname; lipstick courage; and angel hair pasta’s got nothing on this.

chaiwala

“By the end of the day on Oct. 17, #ChaiWala (tea seller) was the top trending item on Twitter Pakistan.”

Harish C. Menon, “A Pakistani tea vendor snapped by a passing photographer has become an internet sensation,” Quartz, October 18, 2016

Chaiwala comes from Urdu. While chai meaning “tea” seems straightforward, the definition of wala seems more complex. According to this forum, the word could refer to a vendor or seller but “also possessor of certain sorts” as well as “the one,” as in, when asking for paratha, a fried flat bread, you could say, “Ghee wala,” the butter one, or “Meetha wala,” the sweet one (which both sound delicious).

Dollies

“The Dollies were stuck in place, consigned by decades of tradition to a secondary role, with little hope of promotion.”

Manuel Roig-Franzia, “How a fed-up group of ‘Good Girls’ beat the ‘Mad Men’-era sexists,” The Washington Post, October 25, 2016

The Dollies was a derogatory nickname for the national researchers at Newsweek magazine in the 1960s, says The Washington Post. The researchers were all women — while the “boys did the writing and got the glory,” the Dollies “did the journalistic spadework and fetched the coffee.”

The moniker is reminiscent of trolley dolly, a British and Australian term for a female flight attendant.

gibbeting

“There were always some who objected to gibbeting for its barbarity, but the courts saw it as a way to prevent crime.”

Andy Wright, “The Incredibly Disturbing Medieval Practice of Gibbeting,” Atlas Obscura, October 11, 2016

Gibbeting, which dates back to medieval times, is also known as “hanging in chains,” says Atlas Obscura, and refers to hanging a body in a body-shaped cage after death. The practice was officially mandated “by the 1752 Murder Act, which required bodies of convicted murderers to be either publicly dissected or gibbeted,” and was “formally abolished in 1834.”

The word gibbet was originally synonymous with gallows, and comes from the Old French gibet, a diminutive of gibe, “staff.”

lipstick effect

“The lipstick effect isn’t just about lipstick, but rather everything from makeup, skincare, and hair products to clothes and shoes.”

Tracy E. Robey, “A Totally Rational, Research-Backed Argument in Favor of Shopping,” Racked, October 11, 2016

With the lipstick index, says Racked, Leonard Lauder of Estee Lauder claimed that during economic recessions, lipstick sales went up because the cosmetic is “an affordable extravagance that women seek when more costly items like vacations and luxury vehicles are no longer within reach.”

The lipstick index was eventually discredited, but what’s being called the lipstick effect suggests a level of strategic thinking “going on in women’s minds when they shop for cosmetics and clothing while worried about money.” One study suggests that when women are concerned about finances, they use makeup “to feel more confident in their ability to find a romantic partner and to get (or keep) a job.”

su filindeu

“In a modest apartment in the town of Nuoro, a slight 62-year-old named Paola Abraini wakes up every day at 7 am to begin making su filindeu – the rarest pasta in the world.”

Eliot Stein, “The secret behind Italy’s rarest pasta,” BBC, October 19, 2016

Su filindeu, which translates as “the threads of God,” comes from Sardo, a language spoken on the island of Sardinia and “the closest living form of Latin,” says the BBC. What makes the pasta so rare is that only three women in the world “still know how to make it,” the recipe and technique having been passed down through the women in this particular family for more than 300 years.

The pasta is also difficult to make. It involves “pulling and folding semolina dough into 256 perfectly even strands with the tips of your fingers, and then stretching the needle-thin wires diagonally across a circular frame in an intricate three-layer pattern.”

The process is so difficult and time-consuming, “the sacred dish has only been served to the faithful who complete a 33km pilgrimage on foot or horseback from Nuoro to the village of Lula for the biannual Feast of San Francesco.”

Welcome to Word Buzz Wednesday, your go-to place for some of the most interesting words of the week. The latest: a cozy Danish concept, the tide is extremely high, and a trove of Trump-manteaus.

hygge

“Unfortunately for native English speakers, the first step to achieving hygge is trying to pronounce it.”

Christina Cauterucci, “A Guide to Hygge, the Danish Concept of Coziness That Basically Means ‘Candlelit Uterus,’” Slate, October 7, 2016

Hygge is a Danish word that means a sort of blissful, cozy contentment. Denmark has hyggelig cafes, says Slate, where hyggelig translates as nice, friendly, cozy, homey, and awesome.

king tide

“If you went for a walk this week on Boston’s Long Wharf and are wondering why your shoes are soaked, they’re called king tides.”

Nik DeCosta-Kilpa, “What’s a king tide and why are they flooding Boston’s waterfront?” Boston.com, October 18, 2016

King tide is a colloquialism, says Boston.com, and refers to the highest tide of the year. King tides occur “when the Earth, sun, and moon are as close to each other as possible in their relative orbits.”

autophagy

“Such products helped Yoshinori Ohsumi claim the prestigious award for his work in what’s known as autophagy, a process by which cells degrade and repair themselves.”

Min Jeong Lee, “Don’t Believe the Hype, Says Japan Bio CEO, as Nobel Lifts Stock,” Bloomberg, October 13, 2016

Autophagy refers to “the process of self-digestion by a cell through the action of enzymes originating within the same cell,” also known as cell cannibalism.

Nobel Prize recipient Yoshinori Ohsumi’s “discoveries could be applied in numerous health-care products, and even help to mitigate damage from cancer,” says Bloomberg.

Trumpkin

“The small but growing craft community has invented the term ‘Trumpkin’ to describe their vegetable homages to the Republican nominee.”

Patrick Evans, “‘Trumpkins’ and Clinton pumpkins keep carvers busy this Halloween,” BBC, October 12, 2016

Trumpkin is a blend of “Trump” and “pumpkin.” Other Trump-manteaus include Trumpmentum (as in, “A certain GOP candidate is losing Trumpmentum”); Trexit, “exit from the U.S. on account of Donald Trump”; and Trumpenfreude, pleasure derived from the Donald’s misfortune.

pussy-bow

“She opted for what’s called a ‘pussy-bow’ blouse—a sartorial reverberation of her husband’s lewd remarks, apparently by Gucci in silk crepe de chine.”

Marc Bain, “Melania Trump’s ‘pussy-bow’ shirt at her husband’s second presidential debate was ‘not intentional,’” Quartz, October 10, 2016

A pussy bow is “a large, floppy bow on an item of clothing.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term is a shortening of pussy-cat bow, “a large floppy bow, usually worn at the neck.”

While the OED’s earliest citations of pussy-cat bow and pussy-bow are, respectively, 1932 and 1946, Grammarphobia antedates both. Pussy-cat bow “first showed up in the late 19^th century” while the first example they’ve seen for “pussy bow” is from a 1908 book called Business and Advertising.

 

Welcome to Word Buzz Wednesday, your go-to place for some of the most interesting words of the week. The latest: an ultra-unreal literary genre, a narcissistic blend, and a fear of the new.

chaohuan

“To help bridge this gap, Beijing-based novelist Ning Ken has created a new literary genre to properly convey the absurdity of modern life in China: chaohuan.”

Adrienne Matel, “A new literary genre critiques the scariest, most unbelievable part of life in China—reality,” Quartz, September 20, 2016

Chaohuan, translating from Chinese to mean “ultra-unreal,” is intended to describe what traditional literary tropes have struggled with, says Quartz.  Mystery, satire, and horror can’t seem capture “China’s day-to-day corruption, warp-speed modernization, supersonic development, and political oppression.” Hence, chaohuan.

Chaohuan is similar to magic realism in that “bizarre events [are] normalized,” but unlike Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s genre of choice, it “focuses on real-life events, not supernatural occurrences.”

coil-curl merger

“This feature, known as the coil-curl merger, is really only heard in New Yorkers born before World War II.”

Dan Nosowitz, “Why Linguists are Fascinated by the American Jewish Accent,” Atlas Obscura, September 26, 2016

The curl-coil vowel merger is particularly associated with now little-heard dialects of New York, New Orleans, and Charleston in the early 20th century. The example Atlas Obscura uses is Mel Brooks as Yoda sendup Yogurt in Spaceballs: “You hoid of me?” instead of “You heard of me?”

creep response

“The research team managed to stabilize a copper alloy microstructure capable of resisting what’s called ‘creep response,’ which refers to how materials lose their form under the stress of very high temperatures.”

Kevin McCaney, “With military research into nanomaterials, the future looks light,” Defense Systems, September 30, 2016

Creep, in materials science, refers to “the tendency of a solid material to move slowly or deform permanently under the influence of mechanical stresses.” The word creep is quite old, originating as a verb in the ninth century, says the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

meflection

“We saw several instances of meflection at the debate, with Trump using just about any issue principally to aggrandize himself and deflect from the actual issue, often by wedging a remark about how great or important or beloved he is into contexts that can’t support them.”

Lili Loofbuorow, “The Trump Glossary,” The Week, September 27, 2016

This narcissistic portmanteau is a blend of me and deflection.

neophobic

“Rats are neophobic – they avoid what they don’t know.”

Jordan Kisner, “Man v rat: could the long war soon be over?” The Guardian, September 20, 2016

According to the OED, the word neophobic originated in 1923 in Science Monthly: “The neophobic patient shows marked aversion and resentment at the sight of anything new.” Neophobia is from an October 1886 issue of Popular Science Monthly: “In the student, curiosity takes the place of neophobia.”

Welcome to Word Buzz Wednesday, your go-to place for some of the most interesting words of the week. The latest: grow up, millennials!; relax, milliennials!; and would you pull the trolley switch?

adulting

“Adulting occurs when someone who is, in fact, an adult manages to complete a basic chore anyone of average competence and circumstances should be able to accomplish without a second thought — and then wants to be praised for it.”

Bonnie Kristian, “How millennials are rewarding their laziness with an absurd participation award,” The Week, September 19, 2016

According to American Speech (by way of TIME), to adult means “to behave in an adult manner; engage in activities associated with adulthood,” or “to make someone behave like an adult; turn someone into an adult.”

In TIME, Katy Steinmetz assume more self-awareness in millennials, suggesting that “to say you are ‘adulting’ [creates] distance between you and what are implied to be actual adults who are adulting 100% of the time and therefore have little reason to acknowledge it.”

work martyr

“Nearly half (48%) of the millennials surveyed said it is a good thing to be seen as a work martyr by the boss, far outpacing the average (39%), Gen Xers (39%), and Baby Boomers (32%).”

Christopher Tkaczyk, “Millennials Are to Blame for America’s Vacation Problem,” Travel and Leisure, August 2016

So are millennials not working enough or too much? Many are work martyrs, according to Travel and Leisure, those who sacrifice vacation, weekends, free time, etc. to put in more hours at the office, often necessarily. Martyr in this case refers to someone “who makes a great show of suffering in order to arouse sympathy.”

The earliest citation we could find for work martyr was from 2003 in Judi James’s book, More Time, Less Stress: How to Create Two Extra Hours Every Day:

It could be that you are a work martyr and that you are only happy when you are handling everyone else’s workload, purely because you enjoy the suffering and the accompanying self-pity it brings.

braconid

“Smitheram triumphed after three rounds when he produced the crucial word braconid, meaning a parasitic wasp.”

“Braconid: Briton wins Scrabble world title with 181-point word,” The Guardian, September 4, 2016

The word braconid may come from the Greek brakhus, meaning “short.”

onion routing

“Onion routing was first developed by the U.S. Naval Research Lab to ensure secure intelligence communication.”

Charles Graeber, “The Man Who Lit the Dark Web,” Popular Science, August 30, 2016

Onion routing, says MakeUseOf, is “like an advanced form of proxy routing.” Instead of “routing through a single unprotected server, it uses a network of nodes that constantly encrypt your data packets at every step.” The “multiple layers of encryption” —resembling the layers of an onion — make it “extremely difficult to trace your information back to you as the source.”

trolley problem

“In a 2014 paper led by Albert Costa, volunteers were presented with a moral dilemma known as the ‘trolley problem.’”

Julie Sedivy, “How Morality Changes in a Foreign Language,” Scientific American, September 14, 2016

In the trolley problem, says Scientific American, you’re asked to imagine:

that a runaway trolley is careening toward a group of five people standing on the tracks, unable to move. You are next to a switch that can shift the trolley to a different set of tracks, thereby sparing the five people, but resulting in the death of one who is standing on the side tracks. Do you pull the switch?

Or do you do something else entirely?

According to How Stuff Works, the trolley problem was first introduced in a 1967 paper by Phillipa Foot, and is an example of consequentialism, a philosophical view that says “morality is defined by the consequences of an action, and that the consequences are all that matter.”

Welcome to Word Buzz Wednesday, your go-to place for some of the most interesting words of the week. This week we honor the conclusion of the games in Rio with a craic-ing Irish expression, an ego of Olympic proportions, and an Olympic oddity.

craic

“In an interview following the medal ceremony, the pair said: ‘What’s the craic? We’re in Rio. The background looks superimposed but it’s real.’”

Nicola Slawson, “Ireland’s O’Donovan brothers become web sensations after medal win,” The Guardian, August 14, 2016

Craic is an Irish term that might refer to “news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation,” says Irish Central. The craic was ninety is the “nirvana of craic” while minus craic is a particularly un-fun night. The word craic might be an alteration of another Irish expression, crack, which means fun or amusement.

dark triad

“Jonason’s research has covered what’s known as the ‘dark triad’—three sets of traits that may go along with a penchant for lying.”

Mallory Locklear, “Lochte Probably Lied for the Same Reason We All Do: It Was Easier,” Slate, August 18, 2016

The term dark triad was coined by psychologists Delroy L. Paulhus and Kevin M. Williams in a 2002 paper. The three sinister factors that make it up are psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism.

repechage

“In others, there’s what’s called a repechage, where those knocked out by the eventual winners are placed in two separate pools, and compete among themselves for one of two bronzes.”

“Rio 2016: 13 lesser-spotted oddities of the Olympics,” BBC, August 18, 2016

Repechage also refers to a “trial heat, especially in rowing, allowing competitors who have already lost a heat another chance to quality for the semifinals.” The word is French in origin, coming from repecher, “to finish up again, to rescue,” where re- means “again” and pecher means “to fish for.”

stringray shuffle

“You don’t have to let the warnings about stingrays ruin your fun day at the beach, all you have to do is what’s called the ‘stingray shuffle.’”

Jenny Dean, “Stingrays injure a dozen swimmers on Clearwater Beach,” 10 News, August 19, 2016

The stingray shuffle refers to movement that keeps stingrays away, namely “vibrations in the sand” which “alert the animals that you’re in the area.”

stridhan

“This is what’s known as stridhan — a portion of a married couple’s wealth that is controlled exclusively by the wife and to which she is entitled, even after separation from her husband.”

Frank Holmes, “Strong Monsoon Season May Flood Indian Gold Market With Buyers,” Forbes, August 18, 2016

The Forbes piece implies that stridhan often takes the form of gold. In India women are “the largest owners” of the precious metal. Pre-wedding gifts of gold jewelry are considered auspicious.

Welcome to Word Buzz Wednesday, your go-to place for some of the most interesting words of the week. The latest: words matter, the salaryman shuffle, carbon-dating sharks.

stochastic terrorism

“In other words, what Trump just did is engage in so-called stochastic terrorism.”

David S. Cohen, “Trump’s Assassination Dog Whistle Was Even Scarier Than You Think,” Rolling Stone, August 9, 2016

Stochastic terrorism, says Rolling Stone, is “using language and other forms of communication ‘to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.’” In Donald Trump’s case, he put out the “dog whistle” for Second Amendment-ers to do “something” to stop Hillary Clinton, knowing that some dog will hear although he doesn’t know which.

The word stochastic refers to statistics involving random variables, chance, or probability, and comes from the Greek stokhastēs, “diviner.”

cupping

“The bruises are minor—and so is the likely positive impact on performance. Cupping might not be helping Olympic athletes prepare for competition as much as they think.”

Kelsey Kennedy, “Cupping is the latest unproven therapy Olympians have turned to in the hope of winning gold,” Quartz, August 8, 2016

Cupping is a traditional Chinese medicinal practice, says Quartz, used for everything from “coughs to shingles.” Glass cups are placed against the skin, using heat or a pump to create “intense suction.” Hence, the circular bruises sported by the likes of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps and actress-cum-Goop-guru Gwyneth Paltrow.

double double

“Bolt is also the first athlete to achieve what’s known as the ‘double double’…which is when an athlete wins both the 100m and 200m titles in back-to-back Olympics, a feat which he accomplished in 2008 and 2012.”

Jeff Smith, “A Brief History of Usain Bolt’s Path to the 2016 Rio Olympics,” Mic, August 13, 2016

Other double doubles include a coffee with two creamers and two sugars, and a double cheeseburger with cheese on each burger.

jinji ido

“No one is safe from the ‘jinji ido’ – some number of bosses, fresh employees, and veterans are all shuffled around every year.”

Scott Wilson, “5 strange Japanese office occurrences,” Japan Today, August 14, 2016

Jinji ido translates from Japanese as “moving people around,” says Japan Today, in which employees are shifted “from department to department.” In a country where people still tend to work for one company their entire lives, jinji ido is a way for “people to develop in their careers and keep from getting stagnant.”

bomb pulse

“Bomb pulse signatures are often used in dating marine animals that are about 60 years old or younger, and in this case the readings were indeed proof that the three shark’s small size was an indicator of youth.”

Jeffrey Kluger, “Scientists Discover Sharks That Can Live for 400 Years,” TIME, August 11, 2016

According to TIME, the term bomb pulse refers to a “period of elevated radioactive isotopes [found in organisms] that corresponded with atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 1960s.” Such a marker was found in the eye lenses of those “too young” sharks.