From “Covidiot” to “Gleefreshing,” It Was a Lively Year for Word Creation
As we come to the end of 2020, it’s a good time to take stock of just how playful people got with words this past year. As I observed in my first piece for Beyond Wordplay back in June, “tinkering with words became a common pursuit” this year, driven in large part by people finding themselves stuck at home with time on their hands during the pandemic. Linguistic innovation took many forms, and the creation of new words — neologization to the cognoscenti — was especially prominent, as everybody seemed to be getting into the act of pushing lexical boundaries.
I have a particular interest in tracking novel words and phrases, since — in addition to writing about language for the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, and right here on Beyond Wordplay — I’m chair of the New Words Committee for the American Dialect Society. In this capacity, I oversee the selection of Word of the Year, aka WOTY, which the society has been doing for 30 years now. (Word of the Year in 1990? Bushlips, meaning “insincere political rhetoric,” after George H.W. Bush’s broken promise of “Read my lips: no new taxes.” OK, they can’t all be winners.)
This year, because the ADS can’t meet in person at our annual conference, we’re making the WOTY vote virtual. And it’s going to be a free online event open to all, to be held on Thursday, Dec. 17th at 7 pm EST. If you want to participate in the livestream, you can register here. (If you want to get a preview of the action, you can join me in another online event, a conversation hosted by the good people at Planet Word, on Thursday Dec. 10th at noon ET. Signup details are here.) When you register for WOTY, you can make your own nominations for new and newly noteworthy words and phrases of 2020. We’ve had hundreds of nominations come in already, and the sheer creativity on display is extraordinary.
Of course, when I’m looking over the nominated words, I can’t turn off the wordplay part of my brain. As I noted back in June, when coronavirus became an all-too-familiar word, many word buffs noticed you could anagram it to carnivorous, a rather grim coincidence. And among the words with the most WOTY nominations this year, two share an interesting resemblance. One of them is Karen, a pejorative term for an entitled or demanding person, stereotypically a middle-aged white woman. Karen was actually a runner-up in the 2019 WOTY voting, but it became even more salient this past year with high-profile Karens making their entitlement felt during the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests. But if you double the first letter of Karen and rearrange the letters a bit, you get another frequently nominated word: Kraken. As I wrote last week in my Wall Street Journal column, Kraken has evolved from the name of a mythical Scandinavian sea creature thanks to “Release the Kraken!” memes inspired by the 2010 remake of The Clash of the Titans, and this year it’s taken on a new life both as the name of Seattle’s pro hockey team and as a buzzword among Trump supporters who are still (!) contesting the results of the presidential election. Some might argue that Karen and Kraken share similarities beyond the letters they have in common.
But even without shifting letters around, the lexicon of 2020 is notable for the way that new words have been forged from smashing together old ones. That can take the form of compounding, in which words are simply combined with each other by juxtaposing them. A good example of that is doomscrolling, defined by Vox as “the masochistic practice of compulsively scouring the internet in search of ever more terrible information.” While the word had been used occasionally before this year, after the pandemic hit it exploded in popularity — especially on Twitter, where University of Michigan religious studies professor Ellen Muehlberger got the ball rolling with a tweet on Mar. 14th. (Muehlberger recently posted a fascinating Twitter thread about her role in popularizing the term.)
Another way of forming new lexical items out of preexisting ones is through blending, taking the components of words and fusing them Frankenstein-style. When the presidential election was called for Joe Biden, his supporters were elated enough to come up with happier alternatives to doomscrolling, and Heather Schwedel of Slate coined a great blend: gleefreshing. That works well because the underlying words, glee and refreshing, are obvious even if you’ve never seen the blend before, and it succinctly suggests that refreshing one’s timeline can at times be a gleefully refreshing experience. (If only that feeling would last!)
Indeed, since the beginning of the pandemic, lexical blending has been a primary source of neologisms, creating what Lewis Carroll called “portmanteau” words (like chortle being formed from chuckle and snort). On Twitter, I kept track of some of these pandemic-era blends by using the hashtag #coronacoinages. On Mar. 13th, I spotted quarantini (combining quarantine and martini), and the next day I tweeted about coronials as the name for the coronavirus generation (reminiscent of millennials).
Pretty soon the coronacoinages were coming fast and furious. Another early success was covidiot for someone who, as Nisheeth Sharan defined it in a Mar. 21st tweet, “stubbornly ignores ‘social distancing’ protocol, thus helping to further spread COVID-19.”
Since COVID-19 is itself a kind of acronymic blend (from coronavirus disease 2019), you could think of covidiot as a second-order blend. I’m also partial to a Spanish-language version of covidiot: pandejo, which blends pandemic with the earthy insult pendejo.
There were far too many coronacoinages for me to keep track of by myself, but fortunately there were other word watchers who joined in the hunt. Tony Thorne of King’s College London has collected a huge number of examples of what he calls “coronaspeak” on his Language and Innovation blog. And naming and branding expert Nancy Friedman has shared regular dispatches of coronacoinages on her blog (1, 2, 3, 4). The explosion of new words has received academic attention as well: Antonio Lillo of University of Alicante in Spain collected hundreds of alternative names for the coronavirus on Twitter and analyzed them in a recent issue of the journal Lebende Sprachen (citing some of my findings).
When Dictionary.com announced its own Word of the Year last week (like Merriam-Webster, they went with the obvious choice of pandemic), I was glad to see that among their runners-up they included many coronacoinages, and used my term for them. (I can claim the coinage of coronacoinage? How meta.) For the American Dialect Society’s WOTY selection, besides the overall winner we’ll also be choosing the top new words in other categories as well. One of those categories is Most Creative, and there are so many possibilities this year it will be hard to pick just one. Perhaps we should just give 2020 itself a Most Creative award.
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