Category Archives: five words

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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.”

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Five Words From … There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib

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

Cover of There's Always This Year
Hanif Abdurraqib’s 2024 memoir, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, finds him refusing to separate life from its external influences. Structured as a basketball game with quarters, intermissions, and timeouts, Abdurraqib meditates on basketball, belonging, and the art and function of looking back.

naked

“I propose the difference between being naked and being bare is that in a state of nakedness, the end can be seen even if it hasn’t arrived yet. It has less to do with what one is or isn’t wearing, or showing, and more to do with how poorly one keeps the inevitable hidden.”

Abdurraqib opens with an exploration of male baldness as an exercise in self-discovery and self-worth, framed by both the “Fab Five” 1991 recruits for the University of Michigan Men’s Basketball team, and Abdurraqib’s father. The decision to shave one’s head (and the acceptance of genetics) investigates vulnerabilities and self-truths for the mentioned men.

homecoming

“For all of the reasons I love the hood, the greatest reason is for how we honor our homecomings. The people who will show up to praise your return simply because it is a return. Doesn’t even have to be spectacular, though it often is.”

Abdurraqib remembers his neighbor, high school basketball legend Kenny Gregory, returning from the 1997 McDonald’s All American game, circling the block with his trophies in the front seat before an impromptu parade of neighborhood fans.

miracle

“Miracle is another word for deception. Who or what, can make someone believe anything that would otherwise be unbelievable?….A team is losing until it isn’t, until an architect of the miraculous takes over a game and the deception becomes real.”

Abdurraqib recounts his history of inconsistent prayer, both as a reluctant child and desperate adult, and how miracles are often requested in times of great duress. He witnessed what many Ohioans considered a miracle: the path leading to the Cleveland Cavaliers gaining the first pick in the 2003 NBA draft, where they chose LeBron James.

control

“The people who ignored LeBron’s obvious exit knew they didn’t have any control over what LeBron did or didn’t do, but they were in complete control over when and how their own heartbreak arrived.”

LeBron became a free agent in 2010, forcing locals to process their emotions around their hometown hero leaving. At the same time, Abdurraqib toys with the idea of leaving, as his parole nears completion, for the glimmer of life elsewhere. Here control becomes the basketball court, with awareness and denial being opposing teams.

nostalgia

“Nostalgia is only for the broken-hearted, for the displeased or disaffected, the ones who need to look to the past to give meaning to their present. I’m told there’s nothing in my childhood that will save me from what’s coming, whenever what’s coming arrives…I say I was happier in the past because the pain of the past is a relic. I speak of it, but no longer feel it. I do not know what pain is coming, but I know it is coming.”

Abdurraqib also calls nostalgia “a relentless hustler.” He remembers loved ones and looks ahead to look back on his own death. With clarity and precision, he understands that while nostalgia may honor the death of whole selves and parts of selves, it will never stop the clock from counting down to zero.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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. 

 

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