Have a hankering for some buzzworthy words? You’re in luck: it’s Word Buzz Wednesday! This week: funny money; a football scandal; and reading — or not reading — piles of books.

altcoin

“That’s led to a glut of hundreds, if not thousands, of so-called altcoins. Who can keep track of them all?”

“Your complete A-Z guide to cryptocurrencies,” The Kernel, January 11, 2015

An altcoin is an alternative to Bitcoin, a type of cryptocurrency, or digital currency that is encrypted. Cryptocurrency is an alternative currency, or any currency used instead of that of the dominant system.

Because Bitcoin is open source — that is, its source code is open to the public — this means, as The Kernel says, that “anyone can tinker with it, slap a new own name on top, and create their own version.” This has resulted in an influx of altcoins.

deflategate

“For Tom Brady, the Deflate-Gate accusations are ‘ridiculous.’”

Josh Sanchez, “Tom Brady calls the Deflate-Gate accusations ridiculous,” Fansided, January 19, 2015

Deflategate refers to recent accusations against the New England Patriots — sometimes referred to as the Cheatriots due to a 2007 cheating scandal — of letting “air out of some footballs to increase their grip on the ball in the wet weather.”

The suffix –gate indicates a scandal or controversy, and comes from the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s.

flashbang

“Dukes had been hit by a flashbang, a $50 device used by the police to disorient suspects, often during drug raids.”

Julia Angwin and Abbie Nehring, “Hotter Than Lava,” The Atlantic, January 12, 2015

A flashbang is “a hand grenade that produces a very bright flash and a loud explosion, but no shrapnel and minimal explosive force, to disorient the target.”

According to The Atlantic, the device was first designed “nearly 40 years ago to help military special forces rescue hostages.” It’s supposed to have “minimal explosive force,” but because its flash powder “burns hotter than lava,” when they explode in direct contact, “they can cause severe injury or death.”

Flashbangs have become more aggressively used under “today’s militarized police forces,” and while “police argue that flashbangs save lives because they stun criminals who might otherwise shoot,” they have also “severed hands and fingers, induced heart attacks, burned down homes, and killed pets.”

See also whizbang.

genetic sexual attraction

“In the late ’80s, the founder of a support group for adopted children who had recently reconnected with their biological relatives coined the term ‘Genetic Sexual Attraction’ (GSA) to describe the intense romantic and sexual feelings that she observed occurring in many of these reunions.”

Alexa Tsoulis-Reay, “What It’s Like to Date Your Dad,” New York Magazine, January 15, 2015

Genetic sexual atraction, or GSA, could be thought of as ultimate assortative mating, or pairing up with others more like ourselves. GSA is thought to occur when genetic relatives meet as adults, “typically as a consequence of adoption.” While it’s an apparently rare consequence, because adoptive reunions have become more common in recent years, GSA might affect more people.

Reverse sexual imprinting occurs between those who are “raised together in early childhood” and become desensitized to sexual attraction. Also known as the Westermarck effect, it’s thought to have “evolved to prevent inbreeding.”

See also Gyllencest.

tsundoku

“In the literature of a language that even has a word for piles of unread books that accumulate on shelves and bedside tables — tsundoku — it can be hard to know where to start.”

Nick Van Osdol, “The Lit List: Writing from Japan,” The Huffington Post, January 12, 2015

Tsundoku translates from Japanese as the “buying of books and not reading them; letting books pile up unread on shelves or floors or nightstands.” The word breaks down as tsumu, “to pile up,” and doku, “to read,” and is also a pun of tsundeoku, “to leave piled up.”

[Photo via Flickr: “Untitled,” CC BY 2.0 by jvoves]

What better way to kick off 2015 than with a fresh batch of buzzworthy words? This week: a mutant flu virus, another kind of coffee, and an anonymous vigilante group, care of Harry Potter.

drifted virus

“Pharmacologist and Forbes.com writer David Kroll argues that the worry about ‘drifted viruses’ is overblown.”

Scott Pham, “The Nation is in Flu Epidemic But California is Doing OK,” NBC Bay Area, January 2, 2015

A drifted virus is a virus that has gone through genetic drift, or “random fluctuations in the frequency of the appearance of a gene in a small isolated population” due to chance rather than natural selection.

There has been concern recently about flu strains that have mutated and become resistant to this year’s vaccine. However, according to the CDC, “vaccination can still provide protection and might reduce severe outcomes such as hospitalization and death.” In addition, only 305 out of about 28,000 available samples have been tested and categorized, says Kroll, “a relatively small sample of viruses.”

flat white

“Starbucks is trying to win you over with its new offering, the ‘flat white,’ a foam-topped concoction that originated in Australia.”

Danielle Kurtzleben, “What is a ‘flat white,’ and why is Starbucks selling it?” Vox, January 2, 2015

A flat white is, to put it simply, espresso and hot milk “with a bit of foam on top.” Its Wikipedia entry claims that it originated in Australia and New Zealand in the 1980s, although the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation is from 1971: “Bob: I asked her if she’d have a coffee with me… So we went to an expresso in South Ken. Ted: And held hands over two flat whites?”

So what’s the difference between a flat white and a latte or cappuccino? Vox says a flat white is similar to a latte in that it’s a combination of steamed milk and espresso, but that it’s “less milky,” like a cappuccino. The real distinction, however, seems to be the foam. In Australia, the flat white is set apart by microfoam, “a smoother, less-dry foam than Aussies tend to serve on a cappuccino,” which is “more evenly distributed through the drink.”

For even more coffee terminology, check out our caffeinated blog post.

mouseburger

“Brown, who fought her own way up from a childhood of poverty in the Ozarks, tailored her advice to ‘mouseburgers’ like her: women who are ‘not prepossessing, not pretty, don’t have a particularly high I.Q., a decent education, good family background or other noticeable assets.’”

Jennifer Szalai, “The Complicated Origins of ‘Having It All,’” The New York Times, January 2, 2015

Mouseburger, “a woman of no particular intellect or attractiveness,” was coined by Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Helen Gurley Brown in 1970: “If you’re a little mouseburger, come with me. I was a mouseburger and I will help you.”

The OED describes a mouseburger as someone who, despite her unexceptionalness, can “achieve professional and personal success through determination.”

Mouseburger is a play on mousy, “quiet; timid; shy,” which originated around 1812. The combining form –burger refers to hamburger variations (eg, turkeyburger, veggieburger, etc.) or to people (eg, nothingburger, cheerfulburger, psychoburger).

Operation Death Eaters

“Cases such as those levied against Epstein are central to a growing response by online activists, who under the banner ‘Operation Death Eaters’ seek to expose ‘pedosadistic’ men of influence and the political powers activists claim help shield them from prosecution.”

Dell Cameron, “Prince Andrew and the rise of Operation Death Eaters,” The Daily Dot, January 2, 2015

Operation Death Eaters is an anonymous online group that “hunts down pedophiles.” The name originates from  the Harry Potter universe in which the Death Eaters were followers of Lord Voldemort, as well as “radical pure blood supremacists, who practised the Dark Arts with reckless abandon.”

Death Eaters were so-called perhaps because of Voldemort’s mission to achieve immortality. Operation Death Eaters might be named with the idea of taking down powerful evil men, like Voldemort and his followers.

positive assortative mating

“Scientists have a term for this: positive assortative mating. (It’s negative assortative mating when opposites attract.)”

Matthew Huston, “You’re Just Like Me!” The Atlantic, December 28, 2014

Positive assortative mating refers to selecting a partner similar to oneself. In a recent study with 291 newlyweds, spouses were found “to be closer in values, religiosity, and political attitudes than would be predicted by chance.”

Among animals, the purpose of this mating strategy may be to “increase genetic relatedness, which can facilitate communication and altruism,” while negative assortative mating “reduces genetic relatedness between family members.”

[Photo via Flickr, “Flat White Coffee,” CC BY 2.0 by Russell James Smith]

An iguana and kitten get kleptothermic.

Happy (almost) New Year! We’re closing out 2014 with our latest favorite buzzworthy words. This week: appropriating culture; the darkness of anonymity; and one way to get toasty this winter.

Columbusing

“Columbusing is a word that can be used to describe the reappropriation or perhaps misappropriation of African-American culture — for instance, various slang terms that get appropriated by a white mainstream audience.”

“Die-In, Vortex, Selfie Stick: What’s The Word Of 2014?” NPR, December 28, 2014

“You guys, I discovered an incredible new dish: it’s called ramen!”

Such is an example of Columbusing, the “discovery” of “something that’s existed forever,” says NPR, the way that Christopher Columbus “discovered” America although it existed long before he set foot on its shores.

While the term mainly applies to the “discovery” of something outside one’s own culture, nationality, race, or neighborhood, we’d argue Columbusing could be applied to the “discovery” of anything not new (eg, “Have you guys heard of this show called The Walking Dead?”).

cousin planet

“Mars is our brother planet and Venus is our sister planet, but what the heck is a cousin planet? Hint: we don’t have one, because our Sun is an only child.”

Becky Ferreira, “Astronomers Found Jupiter-Sized ‘Cousin’ Planets for the First Time,” Motherboard, October 1, 2014

Cousin planets are, according to WIRED, “a pair of planets each orbiting a different twin star.” For example, WASP-94A and WASP94B are twin stars, or a binary-star system, around which two Jupiter-sized extrasolar cousin planets orbit.

The Earth doesn’t have a a true cousin planet (an Earth “cousin” that was discovered earlier this year is referred to as such because of its similarity to Earth) since the Sun is an “only child,” as Motherboard says, and doesn’t have a twin.

dark money

“Advocates of undisclosed ‘dark money’ spending, concerned that they are losing ground, are falsely representing themselves as the voice of mainstream business, hoping to sway companies away from their better instincts.”

Bruce F. Freed and Charles E.M. Kolb, “U.S. companies shine sunlight on ‘dark money,’” The Washington Post, December 29, 2014

According to The Washington Post, dark money refers to “anonymous political donations from individuals or companies.”

Such a practice can be harmful in a number of ways. It could damage a company’s reputation “if a political payment is exposed as conflicting with its stated values or business objectives”; if donations are secret, “a politician can quietly shake down a company”; and when a company “‘outsources’ its politics through payments to a third-party advocacy organization, it can lose control over the funding.”

dark web

“It’s referred to as the ‘Wild West’ of the Internet: Underground websites—often called the ‘dark web’—that sell illegal drugs, guns and stolen credit cards.”

Josh Lipton, “’Dark Web’ Market for Illegal Guns and Drugs Grows,” NBC News, December 18, 2014

The dark web, according to BBC, refers to “anonymous, virtually untraceable global networks used by political activists and criminals alike.” It seems to part of the Deep Web, a general term for “the portion of World Wide Web content that is not indexed by standard search engines.”

While some deem much of the content of the Deep Web to be “innocuous,” a recent study found that over 80 percent of visits to the dark web relate to pedophilia.

Dark web and Deep Web seem to differ from yet another term, Dark Internet, which “refers to any or all network hosts on the Internet that no-one can reach.”

kleptothermy

“There’s a specific term for this warmth-sucking behavior – kleptothermy.”

Brian Switek, “Science Word of the Day: Kleptothermy,” National Geographic, December 29, 2014

Sure, that iguana and kitty snuggling together is darned cute, but the ectothermic iguana might have an ulterior motive: stealing the kitty’s heat.

Kleptothermy is when an animal cuddles up to another animal to take its warmth. For instance, says National Geographic, a cold-blooded snake may curl up in a seabird burrow, and as a result raise its temperature from a chilly 89 degrees to a toasty 99.

The word kleptothermy comes from the Greek word kleptein, “to steal,” and the Greek thermos, “hot, warm.”

(H/t Matt Baldwin.)

[Photo via National Geographic]