June 1, 2021: May Selectiveroundup (I Made That Word Up) -

A year ago, June 1, 2020, I listed a bunch of words that had been caught by the New New York Times bot. Said bot searches the NYT and flags any word appearing for the first time there (not for the first time anywhere, but we'll take it). 

I was struck, in mid-2020, by a bunch of new words that had appeared during the month of May, many of them words that related to the pandemic: doomscrolling, virusphere, cyberbabysitting, overmoderate (the verb, to moderate too much), quarancut (the hairstyle), boondocked. 

So here we are a year later. I have not listed all the newly-appearing words from May, 2021, just my favorites. But what I want to celebrate is that the words this past month are wide-ranging, some relating to the pandemic and/or the waning of same, some related to the storming of the capital on January 6, but a good many words from articles on various interesting topics. Our horizons have, at least for now, widened a bit. Herewith some favorites:

greynaissance

semirobotic

minicures

friendscape (from an article on How to Rearrange Your Post-Pandemic Friendscape, which defines "foreground," and "background" friends. Articles like this one discuss pruning your friendships (as in the illustration), and like the illustration, they unnerve me a bit.)

friendwatching

tropetastic

relitigations

quaranteams (how is this first appearing now?)

insurrected

nontreasonous

undeceased

climatarians

reducetarians

ecoscore

tolerableness

postpolicy

subjudgements

overforaging

cryptoeconomy

cryptoartist

memecoin

cispatriarchy

noncheating

overtimegranny

I'm an undertimegranny who hopes someday to have her hours increased (even for just a couple of weeks during a site visit), And I'm drawn to the understated words above: noncheating, tolerableness, undeceased. I especially like undeceased - it feels like such a nice, low bar, the very opposite of a stretch goal, and I always hated those damn stretch goals.