Words!

RHYS BOWEN:  Our society is losing many things: civility, culture, empathy but above all WORDS. The young generation communicates with texts. LOL  WTF etc. During Covid my rather shy granddaughter was confined to her room and not doing well.  I suggested she call some friends to chat.  Nobody chats, Nana, she said.

I saw an interview on TV with a juvenile offender. When he spoke he sounded angry all the time and every third sentence was "Know what I mean? Know what I mean?"  The problem was we didn't know what he meant because he lacked the words to  express it.

My grandmother and great aunt had huge vocabularies. They spoke in complete sentences. They read extensively.  Maybe the Victorian era was in some ways the high point of civilization. So many inventions, good literature, a relatively peaceful world.  of course we won't mention colonial domination, awful slums, child labor... but I feel we have gone downhill from there. Two world wars, the rise of technology and, worst of all for us writers, the drop in reading. We are now writing for an elite few, most of them in the older generation. When they are gone will there be anyone else who wants to read as an escape?

My daughter teaches at a fabulous Montessori school, K-8. Their library is open during lunch hour and my daughter says it is always full of kids sprawled on couches and bean bags reading their favorite books. They also have a period every day called DEAR.  Drop Everything And Read. 

If only more schools were like that. But I feel we are all to blame. I notice my own vocabulary is limited these days. "Where did we put that thing? That whatsit?  How are you?  I'm good.  Not I'm well, which is correct.  I am trying to keep or recover some sort of vocabulary.  I subscribe to something called Word Genius that sends me a new word every day. Some days I feel smug because I already know it. Other days it's like today: 

No, I have never used that word in my life! I probably never will, but there are some words I think I know but I don't really. When John was saying that something was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard I commented that he should stop resorting to hyperbole.  That felt good.

But I saw this list the other day. I think I know all of these words.  Do you? And how do you think we can stop this horrible erosion of culture?

So who got a perfect score?

And do you have any suggestions about how we can improve our vocabularies and get kids to read? Harry Potter was amazing as it hooked a whole generation. Maybe we should stop writing for adults and write some more arresting children's lit.

Authentically Merriam Webster

 JENN McKINLAY: I'm sure my etymology professor from university would be shocked (perchance relieved?) to discover that I no longer find the study of words and their origins utterly boring. Eh, I was nineteen when I took that class and much more interested in my social calendar than my studies. 

Anyway, as I've matured into a fully functional adult with a wordy profession, I have developed the habit of checking to see what rando word Merriam-Webster has chosen for their word of the year as well as the runner ups. Incidentally, "rando" is not one of them.

The MW word of the year is "authentic". I found this fascinating because during a recent conversation with a friend of mine, she told me she had been struggling with a toxic work associate, who everyone else seemed to adore. She couldn't understand why. My friend's therapist helped her see that what she was struggling with was the person's lack of authenticity. My friend could sense that the person was full of rubbish behind the winning smile, and she simply couldn't warm up to her.

I then applied this information to a few people that bug me for no explicable reason and lo and behold, yup, that was it. To me, they were very inauthentic sorts of people -- you know the type, the ones who shake your hand but are too busy looking past you to see if there's someone with more clout in the room. Ahem. And yet, everyone else seemed to adore them. I thought I was being petty but I realized, nope. They just weren't authentic...with me.

(MW Online Dictionary Screenshot)

So naturally, I assumed MW picked this word because we're dealing with a world full of shallow people and MW was calling them out, but that wasn't entirely it. The word was actually chosen because as reported by PBS, the definition of authentic was increasingly searched for in 2023. 

“We see in 2023 a kind of crisis of authenticity,” Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, Peter Sokolowski, said in an exclusive interview given to The Associated Press. “What we realize is that when we question authenticity, we value it even more.”

I have to agree. Writers are now adding notes to their books declaring that they weren't written with the help of AI. As a writer and a reader, I can definitely see why authenticity has become a thing.

I did like some of their other highly searched runner up words:

Rizz -- Short for charisma. Cute! I like it! 

Implode -- Because of the Titan submersible which captured the attention of the world after it devastatingly imploded. 

Deepfake -- AI generated a phony ad of Ryan Reynolds pimping Tesla which caused this term to have a searchapalooza of its own. Along with authenticity, I'm seeing a theme...

What about you Reds and Readers, what do you think of authenticity as the word of the year? Do you agree or what would you have chosen instead?

Accidental Word Discovery by Jenn McKinlay

JENN McKINLAY: Recently while sitting at my laptop, slinging words, I accidentally typed “cark” in a sort of car/park mashup. When the little red squiggle line didn’t appear, I thought, 
cark is a word? For real? Yes, for real. 

According to Merriam-Webster, it is both a verb and a noun but in both cases it's not good - it is either carking (vexing) about something or to be beset by cark (trouble). All this time I could have been yelling at the Hub and Hooligans to stop carking my mellow, alas better late than never.

A visual representation of cark!

So, Reds, I ask you, what words have you discovered by accident through writing or reading that surprised you?

HALLIE EPHRON: So, to cark is to kvetch. I like it. 

Traveling has always been a source of word discovery. In the UK I discovered that there's such a thing as a chucker-out. It's the bouncer at your local pub. And from being a grammar geek, INTERROBANG. It's a punctuation mark used at especially at the end of an exclamatory rhetorical question, written as ?! Also PHOSPHENE. It's that luminous explosion you see when you squeeze (and keep) your eyes shut. Mine come in checkerboards.

LUCY BURDETTE: My favorite new word came courtesy of Julia while we were doing a panel for JRW at the Albany Bouchercon. Runneling. A runnel is a brook or a rivulet, so runneling means streaming like a rivulet. I think Julia used this in context of blood runneling down a wall...though my dictionary is not so sure it's a real word, I love it!

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Thank you, Lucy! These days, I'm happy to remember old words. While I was writing recently,  I was searching my memory, looking for a word that meant 'a tent-like shade over a window.' It wasn't until I was driving through Portland and saw one it came flashing back to me - awning! Not an extraordinary word; I don't know why I couldn't pull it out of my hat. Some of my favorite new words have come from looking for non-boring ways to describe the scenery of the farm country around my fictional Millers Kill. Vetch. Silage. Biscuit wood. Byre. It's a challenge for someone as botanically challenged as I am - I tend to look at all things low and green and say "grass," while everything stalky with a blob of color on top is a flower.

Oh, I remember a very new word! Eyot, meaning an island in the middle of a river. Don't you love odd words for geographical features?

RHYS BOWEN: Because my books are set in the past I have great fun using words that have been lost from our current vocabulary. Flummoxed and curmudgeon and many more that will come to me the moment I finish this post. A favorite word to impress others is RIPARIAN... meaning of the river bank. So a riparian stroll is along the edge of the river!

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Ha, Lucy, my favorite new word in my new book is "rill", which is another word for runnel. Although I've used rill in the sense of a deep trench, which might or might not have water at the bottom. 

I love Rhys's flummoxed and curmudgeon, but another of my favorites, too seldom used, is "obstreperous ," resisting control or restraint in a difficult manner; unruly.  So useful!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I was thinking about this, and reading the wonderful new book by Denise Mina called CONVICTION— it is absolutely amazing, by the way – – and came across the word meroculous.  Meroculous?

Have you ever heard that word? I never had. 

The book also had the word “diffident,” which I never use, but should. 

And Rhys, I always say flummoxed! And curmudgeon. Am I living in the wrong time?

Finally, I just got back my second round of copy edits, and the copy editor wanted to know if I really meant “I squinted my ears to hear.” I stetted it.

All right, Readers, what new and dazzling words have you found of late?