June 1, 2020: Nothing New Here

English has a bunch of “open” word classes. English speakers are used to encountering new words in the open word classes. Nouns, for instance. You can make up a new noun any time you like.

I’ll make one up (easy, lazy example, but we’ll get to real ones later). New noun: Goombook! (Goombook is a social network and search engine combined!) I built Goombook, and I work at Goombook, so “Goombook” in those phrases is a noun.

You have built something like Goombook, but far superior. Your creation is Goombookish, only better. “Goombookish” is a brand new adjective.

Let’s say Goombook is truly terrible – it neither searches nor networks, AND – bonus! - it blows all the fuses in your house if you log on. People who suffer this fate can commiserate about getting Goombooked. New verb!

I was thinking about what first occurrences might say about us.

There is a Twitter account called New New York Times, and while a person runs it, mostly it is just a list of the findings of a little program. The program knows the entire archive of words ever used in the NYT. Each day, it compares all the words in today’s NYT to that existing archive, and it lists words that are occurring for the first time. I went poking around.

Some of the first occurrences are just mistakes. It’s a machine. It’s doing a machine thing. It reports that “coroanvirus” or “pademic” appeared, and then some dolt comments that they went to the article cited and the word isn’t there! Why not?? Because it was a typo, dummy, and they fixed it. Sheesh.

Some first occurrences are people waxing poetic, words like “melllllllting,” or they are derivations like “livestreamings” which yeah, was no doubt new to the NYT that day, but the more interesting moment would have been when “livestreaming” (as noun, adjective, or verb) showed up. But New New York Times is spitting out whatever it finds.

It finds a lot. Here are some of my favorites since the first of May, and I know, okay, they may not be new words, but they were new to the New York Times, so I’m going to savor them. They are far better than Goombook, and only two are (I believe) related to a brand name: Zoombinos, and Zumigos. Here’s my curated list:

Doomscrolling

Overbrew

Unnegative

Overtouching

Counterinterests

Hypermelodicism

Cyberbabysitting

Lichenizing

Bioeconomies

Overmoderate

Causticness

Virusphere

Virucide

Beforetimes

Masklessness

Quarancut

Zoombinos

Zumigos

Dystopically

Suckage

Nonpandemic

Boondocked

(I would like to applaud the spellchecker on my laptop right now, which has dutifully argued with me about all but one of the above. It was fine with “causticness.”  Also, at one time, “spellcheck” was a new word. Just think.)

So here’s what struck me about this exploration. For all the reporting that has been done, I found only one new-to-the-NYT word in the past week that was from an article about the terrible death of George Floyd and the protests happening across America. That word was “reholsters.” (I did check. Although they had the potential to be from protest-related reporting, “suckage” was about “time suckage” from playing Words with Friends, and “dystopically” was about food bank waiting lines.)

What I thought, when I saw “reholsters,” was that it was maybe new to the NYT, but reholstering one’s gun isn’t new. And in fact, that’s the striking thing. As the demonstrators are trying to make clear, there is nothing new about racial inequity and injustice in American society. Nothing at all.