The Idiosyncratic Words of the Year

by David Benjamin

“As our Word of the Year process started and this data was opened up, it quickly became apparent that 2020 is not a year that could neatly be accommodated in one single ‘word of the year’…”

— Oxford English Dictionary

MADISON, Wis. — Really? The Oxford English Dictionary chickened out on Word of the Year? 

It’s not that I disapprove. The OED’s annual word pageant has a spotty record. Among the dictionary’s past WOY winners were trendy bleats like “youthquake” (which beat out the prophetic “kompromat”) in 2015, “squeezed middle” in 2011 and “hypermiling” — a term I’ve never heard uttered — in 2008. Such misfires suggest that a year is too long and complicated to capsulize in one popular but often evanescent word.

I like to think I have some authority on this front because my word-hunt habit dates back to ninth grade when I started buying paperbacks and underlining passages. In my Bantam Pathfinder edition of Dandelion Wine, there are 56-year-old circles around words that sent me to Merriam-Webster to look up and memorize. Among my favorite lexical treasures using this method are “eleemosynary,” “rodomontade” (which I use  to test dictionaries), and “Benjamin’s Mess” (which you could look up in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable).

For about 18 years, I’ve been keeping a lexical computer file labeled “Wordwatch.” I pull words mostly from the news — where many of them die before the end of the year — but also from books, magazines, calendars and conversation. 

So, based on “Wordwatch 2020,” here’s an idiosyncratic selection, in a dozen categories, of the most interesting, provocative or pleasingly esoteric words I came across last year — with my “Wordwatch” remarks. 

COVID: My obvious first category is “Covidwords,” with finalists that include “oimmedam” (Pima for “wandering sickness”), “micromort” and “strenuous flu.” But the winner is “accident of the soul.” 

My notes: During the Black Death, as noted by John Kelly in The Great Mortality, the medical masters of Paris wrote the Compendium de epidemia per Collegium Facultatis Medicorum Parisius, which posited that emotional upset, which they termed “accidents of the soul,” could trigger or exacerbate physical disease. Examples: fear, worry, weeping, speaking ill of others, excessive cogitation and wrath. In short, thinking bad thoughts just might kill you.

SOCIETY: Among “social words” that cropped up in 2020 were the Trump-inspired “ornamental manhood,” plus “velvet rope economy” and “ecoanxiety.” But the one that got under my skin was “Latinx.” 

My notes: The political wing in almost every “minority,” particularly in America, keeps conjuring new nomenclature for its members — without, as far as I can tell, the consent of the members. Lately, the folks who used to be generally called “Latin” or “Latino,” “Latin-American” or “Hispanic,” or, specifically, “Mexican,” “Puerto-Rican,” “Honduran,” etc. are now hung with an extra letter at the end of their designation: “Latinx.” Since I read it before I heard it, I thought it rhymes with “lynx” and “Sphinx.” Nope. It’s pronounced “Latin Ex,” which could be read as “formerly Latin.” It also brings to mind household products, like Windex and Rid-X. There is, I’m sure, an explanation but I suspect the “x” will detach and die before most Latins figure out why it was there in the first place.

POLITICS: Among 2020’s trove of political usages were Michelle Goldberg dropping “autogolpe” in the Times and Defense Secretary Mark Esper referring to the streets of Washington as a battlespace,” not to mention the emergence of the “blue shift” and the “red mirage.” But my preference for the word of the year under this rubric derives from George F. Will. 

I noted: In the Post, Will captured the essence of Donald Trump’s vague ideology of personal victimhood at the hands of the press and a thousand phantom enemies as “crybaby conservatism.”

CONSPIRACISM: Among the rich sources of weird politicalspeak is the fevered vocabulary of the conspiracist movement, whom we can credit for terms like “groyper,” “Q” (stolen from James Bond?), “accelerationist,” “prepping” and “Day X.” But I thought the spirit of this paranoid demimonde is expressed best by its German wing, in a delicious consonant feast, “Reichsburger.” 

No, not a Nazi sandwich, a “Reichsburger” — translated as “Reich citizen,” is an ultra-wingnut who repudiates the authority of the federal government. The U.S. parallel is the “sovereign citizen” survivalist faction. The Times quoted Miro Dittrich, who monitors the lunatic fringe in Germany: “They tend to be older people, often isolated, who are completely cut off from reality.”

TRUMP: Of course, nearest and dearest to America’s Reichsburgers is Donald Trump, for whom my chosen pet name is “Chuckles” (cf., A Thousand Clowns). He’s a veritable fount of neologism, from “Bible photo op” and “satanic pregnancy” to “pardonpalooza” and “lickspittlery” (coined by Paul Waldman in the Post). But the Trumpword that most tickled my fancy in 2020 was “free chicken.” 

Cited by Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, interviewed by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, “free chicken” is one of those vivid Army terms meaning something you don’t have to work for. It just comes to you. Vindman: “This is what the Russians have in Trump: free chicken.”

FOREIGNISMS: English is a permissive tongue that adopts foreign phrases willy-nilly. Among alien terms cycled through the news in 2020 were “ensauvagement” from the French right wing and a Japanese food word, “hebogohan,” for “deep-fried giant hornet” (really!). The one that best, for me, encapsulates the year’s passions was another German import, “berufsmensch.” 

Cited in a NY Review of Books piece on Max Weber, who was one, a “berufsmensch” is someone dedicated to a vocation — a zealot, in a sense, who’s on a mission from God (cf., The Blues Brothers).

TECHNOLOGY: As husband of a technology journalist, I read — and instantly forget — hundreds of techno-words every week. One rare technology term stuck in my head and fired my imagination because it solved an espionage conundrum that had befuddled the entire U.S. intelligence community for years. Think of Don Cheadle triggering a “pinch” in Ocean’s Eleven. 

My notes: According to the Times, the cause of dizziness, nausea and other symptoms at the U.S. consulate in Cuba, called the “Havana syndrome,” was a form of projected microwave called “pulsed radiofrequency energy.” How it was sent and who dunnit remains a mystery.

COINAGES: Each year seeds a garden of neologisms, most of which brown and perish within months. Among the 2020 crop that might survive are the U.S. Weather Service’s “unsurvivable,” as well as “manspreading” and “tweetstorm.” But my favorite was an ironic Irish device, “begrudgery.” 

Coined by Irish Times critic Padraig O’Morain and cited by Jennifer Finney Boylan in the New York Times, “begrudgery,” in O’Morain’s explanation, is defined as “the unexamined and unspoken assumption that there is only so much happiness to go around. And guess what? The others have too much and I have too little.”

MISUSES: Public figures mangle words and torture clichés at rates that beggar the virulence of Covid-19. Among these abuses was Lindsey Graham’s nostalgia for “the good old days of segregation.” More offensive, however, was the mangling of a classic metaphor by a heartland politician who should know better.

My notes: Leave it to a Republican to screw up a vivid folk idiom. The mayor of Sioux Falls, Paul TenKaken, alarmed by the spread of Covid-19, said, “You can swing a cat and hit” someone infected. Say what? The cliché for which His Honor was groping is: “You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting” someone. Above all, the cat has to be dead. Mr. Mayor, if you tried this with a live cat, Pussy would scratch your eyes out.

ACRONYMS: We’ve been seeing the QAnon code, “WWG1WGA” all over and too much. So, screw it. This year, I also found out what “VICAP” is. I’m tempted to elect Damon Young’s “SCAR” (Serious Conversation About Racism). But for me, the most significant abbreviation that surfaced in 2020 was “TRAP.” 

Noted by legal analyst Linda Greenhouse in the Times, “TRAP” is an anti-abortion acronym that stands for “targeted regulation of abortion providers,” signifying laws designed to circumscribe the broad reach of Roe v. Wade, bit by bit, until a state has no abortion providers and precious few reproductive health resources for women of limited means.

EUPHEMISMS: I’m always on the lookout for the year’s most cowardly and evasive euphemism. My near winner was Alan Dershowitz’s depiction of Chuckles’ high crimes and misdemeanors as “crime-like,” which eerily echoes Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness.” But I chose instead a press-born euphemism, seemingly mundane, but insidiously reflective of how police treat Black folks and other minorities: “baton.” 

Somehow, the weighted black bludgeon that cops have carried around for centuries has been quietly re-christened by the squeamish media. It’s now called a “baton,” like those rubber-tipped things majorettes twirl and toss in front of the marching band, or those aluminum tubes that runners pass to one another in a relay race. Forgotten are more accurate and earthy terms that better convey the fearsomeness of this police tool: “nightstick,” “billy club,” “cudgel,” “truncheon.”

FUN WORDS: Sometimes I collect words just for kicks. Among my finds this year were “dumsquizzled” (Robert Coover), “black mayonnaise,” “technicolor noir,” and “quacksalvery.” I also came across a reminder of Jack Lemmon — in Some Like It Hot — immortalizing Marilyn Monroe’s wondrous walk as “Jell-O on springs.” My winner, though, for both its source and its imagery, was “dark seven.”

My notes: Scriptwriters for “77 Sunset Strip” gave the ultra-cool character of Kookie (Gerald Lloyd Kookson) a unique slanginess that included untranslatable compliments like “ginchy.” One Kookieism worth preserving, revived in Margalit Fox’s obit of Edd Byrnes, who played Kookie, was “a dark seven,” which translates as “a depressing week.”