Style Conversational Week 1299: The wordie’s feast
The Empress dishes about the 50 new Scrabble words in this week’s
Style Invitational
Chyron fail. “Chyron,” a video caption, is one of 50 new Scrabble words
we’ll be using in this week’s Style Invitational (Screen image)
Chyron fail. “Chyron,” a video caption, is one of 50 new Scrabble words
we’ll be using in this week’s Style Invitational (Screen image)
By
Pat Myers
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Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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September 27, 2018 at 3:32 p.m. EDT
We were delighted that Merriam-Webster gave the Empress a list of 40
(and upon request, 10 more) of the new words in the Scrabble dictionary,
which I know you’ll all put to good use this week in our Week 1299
word chain contest. Less so that the MWers —
let’s call them Emwers — didn’t tell us how to find the hundreds of
other new entries, even though they’ve all been lurking in the listings
at scrabble.merriam.com for some time.
Even Loser Edward Gordon, who regularly plays tournament Scrabble,
couldn’t get his hands on a list. (He says the new words are not yet
acceptable for tournaments, which use a different word list.)
For the purposes of our Week 1299 word chain contest, here’s a glossary
of the 50 words we’re using. Definitions are lifted from the m-w.com,
dictionary, occasional other Internet sources, and my
own wildly edifying commentary.
*Aquafaba: *The liquid
that results when beans are cooked in water. Aquafaba is used especially
in vegan cooking as an egg white substitute.
Arancini: An appetizer of
deep-fried rice balls stuffed with savory fillings. Yum.
Beatdown: A literal
violent beating, or an overwhelming defeat.
Bestie: Best friend.
Bibimbap: A Korean dish of
rice with cooked vegetables, usually meat, and often a raw or fried egg.
It’s often served in aspecial stone bowl
. Delicious.
Bitcoin: What
cool/foolhardy people use for money.
Bizjet: A small plane used
by corporate executives.
Bokeh : Coming from the
Japanese word for “blur,” it’s the aesthetic quality of the blurry
background in some photos that contrasts with the sharp focus on the
subject. Like this gorgeous one
.
Botnet: A network of
computers that have been linked together by malware, hacking, etc. First
used in 2003, according to Merriam-Webster; we’ve been bedeviled for
quite a while now.
Cankle : Cankles are thick
ankles; it’s a portmanteau of calves + ankles. Mean.
Captcha: The computer
security technology requiring Web page visitors to look at one or more
pictures and answer a question to prove that they’re human and not
computer bots. When you fill out The Style Invitational’s entry form,
such asthis week’s, you’re likely to
be asked to check off which of nine photos contain a picture of a
vehicle, etc. And yes, of course,the bots are figuring it out.
Capcom: Capsule
communicator, the person responsible for communicating via radio with
the crew of a space mission. The government luvvvs portmanteaux.
Chyron: Pronounced “ky-ron,”
it’s the caption that runs under video clips, as on the news, and named
for a 1970s manufacturer.
Conlang: Constructed +
language, a language that’s purposely invented, such as Esperanto or
Klingon, rather than one that develops organically. My guess is that
conlangs tend to have a lot of portmanteau words, like /conlang./
Cotija: A hard, white,
crumbly Mexican cheese, described as resembling a cross between feta and
parmesan.
It
doesn’t melt.
Emoji: Well, you know what
that is. But did you know that the name doesn’t come from “emotion,” as
“emoticon” does? According to M-W, it’s a Japanese portmanteau: “e” for
“picture”; “moji” for “letter” or “character.” Also, it says, the plural
may be either /emoji / or /emojis./
Ew: Non-tournament Scrabble
players are surely not turning up their noses at this immensely helpful
addition to the two-letter-word list.
Exome: Pronounced EX-ome,
it’s another portmanteau, /exon + genome./ The exome is the portion of
the genome known to encode proteins; sequencing the exome rather than
the entire genome is less costly but still yields useful data.
Facepalm: A noun or a verb
referring to covering your face in dismay
.
Farro: Alarge-grained kind of
wheat that is
nutritious and delicious. (You may notice that I seem to find every kind
of food delicious. This is not quite true: I can’t learn to like Asian
bitter melon, and, well, Peeps and candy corn aren’t food, so they don’t
count.)
Frowny: M-W lists it as a
noun as well as an adjective. So: Does it really take more muscles to
frown than to smile, as your aunt’s favorite chain email insists? Snopes
determines it “unproven,” but does supply an amusing variety of muscle
counts.
Gamify: It does /not/ mean
to make something smell like roadkill; it’s adding games to training
programs to make them more interesting and understandable.
/Gamification/ is the noun.
Hivemind: The one-word
variant of /hive mind, / “the collective thoughts, ideas, and opinions
of a group of people (such as Internet users) regarded as functioning
together as a single mind,” as a hive of bees does. I wouldn’t say the
Loser Community is “a single mind,” opinion-wise, but it’s a heck of a
collective repository of knowledge and source of wit.
Judgy: Pejorative for the
already-by-now pejorative /judgmental./
Listicle : /List +
article, / an “information”
format popular with those who tend not to read two paragraphs in a row.
Macaron: A little French
meringue sandwich cookie
.
It is, needless to say, delicious. Not the same as /macaroon / or Macron
.
Mulloway: “A large,
silvery fish /(Argyrosomus japonicus synonym A. hololepidotus)/ of
chiefly coastal waters from Africa to Australia that is valued as a food
and sport fish. I have never had this fish, but I am sure that it is
delicious.
Nutjob: Choose your own example.
Nubber: In baseball, a
weakly hit grounder.
OK: Added for the two-letter
spelling. M-W dates it back to 1839, and says it was a joke-spelling
abbreviation for “all correct.”
Onboard: As an adjective,
describing what’s carried in a vehicle, etc. Huh, I see that M-W does
not yet acknowledge its corporate-speak use as a verb: to introduce and
integrate a new employee into the workforce. Nor does it say it’s an
adverb, as in “the new passengers came onboard.” I guess /aboard / still
lives.
Papasan: A bowl-shaped
chair on a cylindrical base, usually wicker or rattan. What you get at
Pier 1 .
Pizzazz: That fourth Z adds
that much more ... flair and panache!
Puggle: Pug x beagle
, yet another
portmanteau crossbreed.
Rootkit : A malicious piece
of software that grants a remote operator complete access to a computer
system.
Santoku: A Japanese chef’s
knife
whose
top curves downward at the tip.
Schneid: A losing streak.
It derives in some complicated way from a German idiom for /tailor/ that
was used in card games.
Sheeple: “People who are
docile, compliant, or easily influenced : people likened to sheep.”
Sho: An archaic monetary unit
once used in Tibet — and surely included now only to provide a
strategically useful three-letter Scrabble word.
Sriracha: Now-ubiquitous
red hot sauce
(not a trademark!). It is delicious but not my favorite red hot sauce,
which is this.
Substorm: A localized
disturbance of the earth’s magnetic field in high latitudes, typically
manifested as an aurora.
Truther: M-W defines it as
“one who believes that the truth about an important subject or event is
being concealed from the public by a powerful conspiracy.” In actual
use, it’s a disparaging term to describe someone who’s taken in by
crackpot claims and theories.
Twerk: Twerking: Sexually
suggestive dancing characterized by rapid, repeated hip thrusts and
shaking of the buttocks especially while squatting. First known use:
2001. So think of all the years when the word existed but you /didn’t /
have to read about it. But have you tried doing it
?
Upcycle: To recycle into a
product more valuable than the original, as to make expensive shoes from
plastic bags.
Vape: To inhale an electronic
cigarette.
Wayback: The area in the
very back of a van or SUV, the equivalent of the trunk of a sedan.
Wordie: Someone who’s
fascinated by words and language. I don’t know anyone like that.
Yowza: Interjection “used to
express surprise or amazement.”
Zen: A Buddhist sect, or,
lowercase, “a state of calm attentiveness in which one’s actions are
guided by intuition rather than by conscious effort.” Another
long-overdue and direly needed addition to the three-letter Scrabble
list. Not to mention the list of Z-words.
Zomboid The adjectival form
of /zombie./ While the zomboid form of /adjective/ would be
/aaaaaad-jehhhhhhhc-tivvvvvvvve./
So how about the word chain part of the Week 1299 contest? The idea is
to be funny and witty and entertaining to a reader — /not/ to force
people to solve a puzzle at every step. To be sure, getting a subtle
joke is rewarding to a reader, but it shouldn’t become work.
Over the years, we’ve had several name-chain contests, in which
someone’s name was the beginning and end of the chain, with up to 25
“links” of other names. Several times over, as I struggled to figure out
what entry after entry was getting at, I swore never to judge another
one. But this time, the chains will be smaller — 6 to 14 links total —
and won’t be all names. Use the example I provide at the top of the
column as guidance for the various types of links you can use — content,
synonyms, wordplay. Any phrases you use you should be very brief.
*Please don’t submit your chains as a vertical list. * I’ll be running
the chains as in the example, with arrows between the links. It turns
out that the arrow symbol I used online in a recent contest ( → ), and
use in today’s online example, does not work in the print version of our
publishing system — the arrow just turns into white space. So in print
we’ll have something that looks like a fat greater-than sign. So you can
use anything that makes it clear when one link ends and the next begins,
and that I can easily replace with the symbol we’ll be using.
*REALLY, WHATS TO SAY ABOUT WEEK 1295?*
Well, that the bad-news/worse news jokes were fun and zingy, and that
the 31 entries (eight appear only online, since the Week 1299 word list
took up space) are spread out among 24 Losers; no one got more than two
blots of ink this week. I should find lots of material to use as Style
Invitational Ink of the Day graphics.
Meanwhile! My computer crashed, and it’s too long a column anyway! So
that’s all we’re saying about Week 1295! Congrats to expat Brit Parisian
Brian Allgar on his second Invite win, and his fifth ink “above the
fold” in only 31 blots, and to all the other Losers.