Category Archives: books

by

Five Words From … More, Please: On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing, and the Lust for Enough by Emma Specter

cover of More PleaseWelcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this book, Vogue culture writer Emma Specter writes about her struggles around diet culture, eating disorders, and learning self-acceptance doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

Night Eating Syndrome

“Night Eating Syndrome (NES) is classified as its own eating disorder, one that affects about one in ten people who have obesity.”

NES as an eating disorder that can be comorbid with anxiety, depression, and insomnia in adult men and women. More information and help can be found on the Sleep Foundation’s website: Night Eating Syndrome: Symptoms, Causes, and Treatments.

SMILF

“Frankie Shaw’s SMILF ran for two seasons on Showtime, and while the series wasn’t perfect on screen or off … the story that endeavored to tell about women parenting, class, addiction, and food was profoundly ambitious.”

Slang for “single mom I’d like to fuck,” though in some cases the “S” stands for “step” or “soccer”. In the context of the television show, the “S” represents South Boston.

fat icon

“Yes, today’s teenagers have fat icons like Paloma Elsesser, Barbie Ferreira, and Aidy Bryant to look up to, but representation can go only so far and do only so much.”

Specter posits that a handful of representatives have little influence against the global institutions selling the idea that weight loss and thinness are the only routes to happiness.

meta-shame

“I now know that what I was experiencing was what Sonia Renee Taylor refers to in her 2018 book The Body Is Not An Apology as meta-shame, or the state of feeling shame for feeling shame about our bodies.”

Specter shares that the roots of body-shaming have been difficult to eradicate, especially when she hasn’t felt she has been able to find self-acceptance in the “correct” way.

terror management

“In times of stress or fear, people focus more than usual on the things they believe they can control, this is called terror management.”

Specter discusses that during the COVID pandemic, quarantine allowed people to scrutinize their eating and food consumption (often in disordered ways) as a means to feel agency in their own lives.

by

Five Words From … How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World by Deb Chachra

cover of How Infrastructure WorksWelcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this book, Deb Chachra, Professor of Engineering at Olin College of Engineering, helps us explore the hidden beauty and complexity of the infrastructure we take for granted, and outlines how we can transform and rebuild it to be not just functional but also equitable, resilient, and sustainable.

bioswale

“It also likely means unbuilding structures, whether that’s relocating buildings away from shorelines facing sea-level rise and higher storm surges, or taking up the concrete around urban river and replacing it with bioswales, vegetated channels that absorb stormwater, preventing floods while removing pollutants.”

The Portland Nursery offers a PDF listing plants you can use to create bioswales (or rain gardens) in your own yard.

exogenous

“A graph of the total exogenous energy usage of humanity (that is, energy from all sources outside our own bodies) over time is flat until about 1800, after which it becomes roughly exponential, starting slowly and then rising more and more steeply.”

The word ‘exogenous’ comes ultimately from Greek roots meaning ‘born’ and ‘outside’.

externality

“Externalities, to economists, are values or costs that aren’t accounted for by the market, because they accrue to someone who isn’t part of the transaction and therefore often has no choice in whether it happens or not.”

This sense of the word ‘externality’ was first used by Alfred Marshall, a British economist, in Principles of Economics, published in 1890.

ultrastructure

“While talking through what we had seen over the course of that weekend, Charlie and I landed on the term “ultrastructure” to describe this web of social structures, all of the cultural, political, regulatory, and other systems that shape and govern infrastructure.”

Chachra talks in more depth about the idea of ‘ultrastructure’ in this interview in the excellent Scope of Work newsletter.

veneriforming

“If terraforming is taking an uninhabitable planet like Mars and changing the atmosphere to make an ecosystem capable of supporting life, we are instead taking our perfectly habitable planet and veneriforming it, transforming our terrestrial home into our other planetary next-door neighbor, suffocatingly hot Venus.”

The word ‘veneriform‘ exists in another Venus-related sense: having the shape of the shell of the Venus clam.

by

Five Words From … Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns

cover of Limitarianism, showing a distortedly large pink piggybank Welcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this book, Ingrid Robeyns, the Chair in Ethics of Institutions at the Ethics Institute of Utrecht University, outlines the principle she calls limitarianism—the need to limit extreme wealth.

stagflation

The story that most economics professors will tell is that, in the early 1970s, Keynesian economics lost ground when the world’s developed economies experienced stagflation—a combination of high unemployment, slow economic growth (stagnation), and rising prices (inflation).

kleptocracy

“Kleptocracy literally means “rule by thieves” (from the Greek kleptes, ‘thief’, and kratia, ‘power’ or ‘rule’)—we’re talking here about heads of state and political leaders who loot their own countries.”

chumocracy

“Putin’s Russia and Berluconi’s Italy are two particularly memorable examples, but we would be prudent not to assume that widespread state corruption only happens somewhere else—just think of the UK’s ‘chumocracy’ scandal in 2020 or of Donald Trump’s attempt to rig the 202 presidential election in the US.”

degrowth

“Still other proposals for a new economic system argue that we should start by replacing our obsession with GDP growth with an ambition for sustainable prosperity, sometimes known as ‘degrowth’.”

affluenza

“As the granddaughter of a former president of General Motors, [Jessie] O’Neill is herself from the third generation of a wealthy family, and has also worked as a therapist. She coined the term ‘affluenza’ to denote the harmful psychological effects of extreme wealth, especially on children.”

by

Five Words From … White Supremacy is All Around by Dr. Akilah Cadet

Welcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books!
Cover showing a Black woman in a long striped skirt, using a cane

In White Supremacy is All Around: Notes from a Black Disabled Woman in a White World, Dr. Akilah Cadet shares her life and teachings to show the shadow structures in the United States (and beyond) that continue to give white, non-disabled, cis people advantages at the cost of others. Embracing the adage “when you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression,” she provides an actionable framework to label and dismantle white supremacy.

accomplice
“An accomplice is someone who uses their privilege to dismantle racism, oppression, and white supremacy … An accomplice uses their privilege as a road map to know how to show up for others. They are unafraid of what their fellow white peers will say as they embrace being the odd one out.”

Dr. Cadet illustrates the difference between an accomplice and an ally. For her, being an ally is a fair-weather state of being. An accomplice is the person creating daily habits and actions to call out oppression, with or without self-promotion.

intersectionality
“A term coined by Kimberle Crenshaw, intersectionality means the inner sections of our identities, who and what we are.”

“Where ethnicity, class, gender, and characteristics intersect.”

Depending on the situation, a white woman can choose to be seen as white or a woman. Being a Black, disabled woman, Dr. Cadet’s experiences are shaped by being unable to separate these identities; she is not given the opportunity to self-label when living in white dominant culture.

For more on intersectionality, see Kimberlé Crenshaw: The urgency of intersectionality and Intersectionality, explained: meet Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term.

intent
“The intent was not to harm but the outcome was just that.”
“‘That wasn’t my intent’ is an excuse to not do what you said you would do or evade accountability for harm or impact.”

When someone says something that offends another person, Dr. Cadet explains that the speaker’s intent may not have been to harm—but if it did, the speaker still needs to acknowledge accountability for unknowingly causing harm. When speakers refuse to recognize the impact of their words, it may be a way for them to hide behind bias and miss an opportunity to be an accomplice.

white centering
“When white people change the narrative of the story, situation, and harm caused to them–not the BIPOC person.”

Dr. Cadet meets a white woman who openly says the N-word during a presentation on the wine industry. Though Dr. Cadet asks her not to use it, the white woman still does. When confronted about it later, the white lady called the situation a “deeply emotional experience for me,” negating the experience and emotions of Dr. Cadet and instead placing herself and her feelings as the center of the story.

white supremacy
“White supremacy is a structure, system, process, policy approach, benefit and VIP club only for white people. It is the overt and covert racism that Black people experience, the feeling white people have of being superior and feeling like the best. Simultaneously, it is the feeling of resistance when being held accountable.”

Dr. Cadet acknowledges that people born into white privilege can have difficulty seeing and stepping away from it. No one loves the feeling of realizing they may have been wrong about something, or had advantages they weren’t fully aware of; Dr. Cadet stresses that the ability to learn and unlearn personal and systemic bias is key for those with various forms of privilege.

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

by

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!

by

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!

by

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).