More WotY action
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From The Washington Post:
The Oxford English Dictionary blew it in The Oxford English Dictionary blew it in anointing “brain rot” as the word of the year.
First off, that’s two words. But the real miss was overlooking the rightful winner, “slop,” which was on the dictionary publisher’s short list for word of the year. That’s like Beyoncé losing the top Grammy award to Harry Styles.
From The Economist:
SOME YEARS it is hard to identify the main event, much less sum it up in a word. This is not the problem in 2024; the return of Donald Trump to the White House after a four-year absence is consequential not only for the world’s most powerful country but also for its neighbours and everywhere else. Which word can capture the mix of surprise, excitement and trepidation people feel as the MAGA movement returns to power?
[…] For the year’s defining word, it helps to look back—a long way. English has a host of political terms derived from Greek, because it got a lot of its political thinking from the likes of Plato and Aristotle. So if you go through the lexicon (itself Greek), a few roots abound. Arche (ruler), for example, is found in monarchy, oligarchy and anarchy (the rule of one, the few and none, respectively).
Greek has another root for “rule”, kratia, which is even more common. It features in democracy, aristocracy, gerontocracy, theocracy and plutocracy, as well as meritocracy (a modern coinage for which Alan Fox, a British sociologist, married a Latin root with a Greek one in 1956). The Oxford English Dictionary is also full of rarer species such as ochlocracy (rule by the mob), gynaecocracy (rule by women) and thalassocracy (mastery of the seas).
Two other “-cracy” words seem appropriate in this election year. One is theatrocracy, or rule by theatre-goers. This sounds as if it might refer to dominance by the media elites writing for the culture sections of newspapers. But the word has its origins in Plato, who described people skilled in fanning the emotions of the crowd at a theatre into a powerful political force. This might, in hindsight, have been a good word of the year for 2016, when a former reality-TV star with a talent for working the crowd was first elected president.
After Mr Trump was re-elected on November 5th, the world watched anxiously as he began filling top jobs. Some picks, such as the sensible Susie Wiles for chief of staff and Marco Rubio, a long-serving senator, for secretary of state, were qualified and competent. But a flurry of nominations in the week ending November 15th led to a spike in people looking up another “-cracy” word on Google.
Matt Gaetz, accused of sex and drug crimes and the subject of a congressional ethics investigation, was nominated to be the country’s highest law-enforcement officer. Robert F. Kennedy junior, a man with crackpot views on vaccines, was to be secretary of health. Tulsi Gabbard, a conspiracy theorist with nice things to say about the despots of Syria and Russia, was to run America’s intelligence services. And Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host sporting tattoos associated with the far right (and who had been accused of sexual assault) was tapped as defence secretary.
So the word everyone was Googling was kakistocracy: the rule of the worst. The first root, kakos, is found in few others in English. “Kakistocracy” is not found in ancient sources; it seems to have been coined in English as an intentional antonym to aristocracy, originally “rule by the best”. Having spiked on Google Trends the day after Mr Trump’s election, kakistocracy jumped a second time in the wake of these nominations. Searches surged a third time on November 21st, when Mr Gaetz announced that he would withdraw from consideration for attorney-general, suggesting that he was seen as the worst of the worst. The term was particularly popular in Democratic strongholds such as Oregon, Massachusetts and Minnesota.
Back in 2011, Geoff Pullum's son suggested a less formal combination with kratia: "The assholocracy", 12/13/2011. Nancy Friedman immediately made the connection — "Late-Breaking Contender for Word of the Year", 12/14/2011:
It’s assholocracy.
Admit it: You love it, too.
I learned about this word only yesterday, when linguist Geoffrey Pullum reported on Language Log about a recent conversation he’d had with his son […].
Assholocracy: “rule by assholes.” A little Anglo-Saxon, the language of bluntness; a little Greek, because that’s where the -cracies come from.
Sure, it could have been a “real” word, kakistocracy, whose dictionary definition is “rule by the least qualified” but whose deeper etymology points to something like “rule by the shitty.” But that would risk going straight over the heads of those who most need to know, i.e., the assholocrats.
Looking into things further, I realized that I've been the victim of a folk etymology that I apparently shared with Nancy. As Wiktionary explains, κᾰ́κῐστος (kákistos) is the superlative degree of κακός (kakós), which means lots of negative things:
As a measure of quality: bad, worthless, useless
As a measure of appearance: ugly, hideous
Of circumstances: injurious, wretched, unhappy
As a measure of character: low, mean, vile, evil
That much I knew. But as for the etymology of κακός , I assumed that it came from (some form of) kaka (in some language) meaning "feces" — which is apparently the least likely (and worst sourced) alternative given by Wiktionary:
Strong's concordance tells us that κᾰ́κῐστος (kákistos) does not occur in the Greek New Testament, but forms of κακός occur 51 time in 46 verses, glossed variously as
1. universally, of a bad nature; not such as it ought to be.
2. (morally, i. e.) of a mode of thinking, feeling, acting; base, wrong, wicked […]
3. troublesome, injurious, pernicious, destructive, baneful […]
The link will take you to all 46 verses, if you want.
Aardvark Cheeselog said,
December 5, 2024 @ 5:44 pm
Quality post on how kakistocracy is not "rule of the shittiest."
It is quality, well-sourced minutiae like these that keep me coming back. Well those and the amusing failures of Chinese->English transliteration.
Jake V. said,
December 6, 2024 @ 8:25 am
Copied from a comment I left on the other WOTY post:
"Looking at the shortlist, I think it's the best choice. Brainrot represents a newly trending word in 2024, and it's probably the most ubiquitous on the list (my impressions as one of the more young users of LLog: demure and romantasy seemed to hit limited communities, slop never really caught on, no normal people talked about dynamic pricing, and lore has been popular for many years).
In my experience, it's always written as "brainrot," so it's interesting that the lexicographers chose the form they did. A brief imprecise Google search indicates that the combined version is four times as common as the separated version."
I honestly had no idea that slop specifically referred to AI generated content until I read the WaPo article (I just thought it referred to general low-quality content). I'm not sure if this can be proven, but I'd suspect that the vast majority of people reading brainrot understand precisely what it refers to (please let me know if you were aware that slop was being describe AI content without some qualifier like "AI generated slop"). I wholeheartedly disagree with the writers at the Washington Post: brainrot is a lot stronger of a world for this year.
Philip Taylor said,
December 6, 2024 @ 9:45 am
Jake — "it's interesting that the lexicographers chose the form they did" — the OED coming from the Oxford University Press ("OUP"), itself based at Oxford University (United Kingdom), the choice probably reflects the different between American and British practice, where the former is more likely to elide two words whilst the latter may keep them as two separate words or hyphenate them. Earlier, "no normal people talked about dynamic pricing" — I believe that I am (reasonably) normal, and "dynamic pricing" is now most certainly within my idiolect, especially in reference to the price of tickets for airlines, events, etc.
JimG said,
December 6, 2024 @ 2:21 pm
I beg to differ with the original post's assumption of a disconnection between κακός (poop or feces) and the modern portmanteau "kakistocracy" (government by the unsuitable).
The ancient word's spread from or to other languages would be expected, given that such words are always among the first foreign words that speakers of any language want to learn.
I have no doubt that French and Spanish and Portuguese and English had borrowed caca centuries before someone dared to use it in writing. I note further that antique "cack-handed" in English has the senses of left-handed or clumsy.
My first awareness of "kakistocracy" in English dates to the late 1960s or the 1970s, used by political scientists and diplomats in referring to government by the unacceptable or unqualified.
Philip Taylor said,
December 6, 2024 @ 2:38 pm
I cannot comment on any possible connection between κακός and "kakistocracy", having never encountered the latter before the advent of this thread, but it had long been my understanding that not only does "cack handed" derive ultimately from the invariable use of the left hand by Muslims for personal hygiene but additionally "khaki" derives from the same source.
J.W. Brewer said,
December 6, 2024 @ 8:44 pm
Pejoratives are of course often bipartisan in their use, albeit with perhaps some predictable alternation depending on which political party is in power versus out of power. A moment's googling reveals a website at http://www.ReformtheKakistocracy.com whose point of view is exemplified by e.g. an April 2023 post titled "Biden Beats [James] Buchanan for TItle 'Worst U.S. President.'" Although the website's name is taken from a 2019-published book by the same writer, so he was already against kakistocracy (and using that label) before Pres. Biden was elected.
TR said,
December 7, 2024 @ 1:00 pm
I've been using "proctocracy" for a while (short for the yet more descriptive plutokleptoproctocracy).
Philip Taylor said,
December 7, 2024 @ 1:41 pm
"The proctocracy" presumably consists of the most eminent proctologists.
J.W. Brewer said,
December 7, 2024 @ 2:05 pm
Via the google books corpus you can sample more than a hundred 19th-century uses of "kakistocracy," although I think some of them are duplicates resulting from the corpus containing multiple editions of the same work. In those days when a higher percentage of the English-speaking world's literati had studied Greek, it would have been the or at least an obvious and transparent antonym for "aristocracy" (if the latter's etymology is taken to dictate its semantics, at least) and might even have been coined anew on more than one occasion rather than learned by each and every new writer to use it.
For example, Volume 2 (published 1893) of the collected _Letters of James Russell Lowell_ contains a letter dated Jan. 19, 1876 in which Lowell frets about various signs that the U.S. is decaying into Kakistocracy (he capitalizes it), which is interesting because even if you think you know the history of the period you will likely need to spend considerable time with wikipedia figuring out the long-forgotten scandals and controversies referenced in the letter that had given rise to Lowell's concern. E.g., "Is not Delano discouraging?" seems likely to be a reference to the now-obscure Columbus Delano (1809-1896), who had been Secretary of the Interior until Pres. Grant had forced his resignation the previous year due to rumors of various sorts of scandal and corruption.
Andrew Usher said,
December 8, 2024 @ 4:26 pm
While the specific scandals may be forgotten, histories do often consider the Grant administration (that time) to be a low point in US government.
It's interesting that everyone seems to assume the spelling with two K's is the only one possible, though Greek words in English usually get kappa rendered as C. There have been exceptions for a few centuries, in particular when it is desired to preserve a hard C (as here; also 'kinetic' and its relatives though the French had no problem with 'cinema') but even there there's inconsistency.
We have 'skeptic' also spelled 'sceptic', and once also skeleton/sceleton, with the hard C preserved anyway. But we have 'kaleidoccope', which could just as well have been spelled using the regular Romanisation calidoscope and the same pronunciation – note that no one tried to use K in the second element!
k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com
Philip Taylor said,
December 9, 2024 @ 5:53 am
Andrew — "we have 'kaleido[s]cope', which could just as well have been spelled using the regular Romanisation calidoscope" — had it been so spelled, I would automatically have assumed that it was to be pronounced /kæ ˈliː də skəʊp/.
Matt McIrvin said,
December 9, 2024 @ 6:34 am
I knew that "slop" referred to AI- generated content, but I'm a bit sad it's dominant because I heard "sludge" used with the same meaning slightly earlier and preferred that one.
Catharine CELLIER-SMART said,
December 9, 2024 @ 7:43 am
For Merriam-Webster the Word of the Year is "Polarization"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year
David Marjanović said,
December 9, 2024 @ 3:32 pm
What's badly sourced is not so much the connection to the baby word as its reconstruction as a PIE root (together with *atta "dad", and I think that's it). That would require that PIE 1) had disyllabic roots, 2) had *a after all, 3) allowed long consonants in them but went to great lengths to avoid them across morpheme boundaries (the opposite of e.g. English), 4) the roots disappeared or lost their long consonant in all those branches that continue to lack consonant length, and 5)… it doesn't account for northern German, where the word begins with /k/ instead of the regular /h/, let alone southern German, where it begins with /g/.
This kind of word is neither immune to borrowing nor to repeated recreation by babies.
Andrew Usher said,
December 9, 2024 @ 7:01 pm
… which is no argument itself against PIE having it, or passing it on; but one could not expect regular sound correspondences to hold. And for the Greek word, that's surely the most likely origin in the absence of any plausible alternative that _does_ obey regular sound change.
Philip Taylor:
I do not know where you'd get '/kæ ˈliː/ – that seems idiosyncratic, the only normal alternative would be /'kæ li/. As we know the coinage of the word exactly, we know the first element is Greek cal(l)- 'beautiful, which has C in every other English word it appears in to my knowledge, and the second is the same -id- as in 'idea', always with a long I. Perhaps Brewster went with Greek 'ei' to make the vowel length clear (cf. 'seismic') and rule out my alternative, but the K remains unexplainable.
The word is also unusual, I just thought, because its original referent is nearly obsolete, yet it abundantly survives through metaphor. No other word like that comes to mind.
JChance4d4 said,
December 10, 2024 @ 1:14 am
It did really break big this year, but I've been seeing "brainrot" for at least two years.
Pedro said,
December 10, 2024 @ 4:43 pm
But why is it kakistocracy with two Ks? Normally Greek kappa becomes an English C, pronounced hard or soft according to the usual rules in English, so I'd expect cacistocracy (pronounced "kassistocracy").
Maybe that's just not toilety enough.
Andrew Usher said,
December 10, 2024 @ 8:00 pm
That's the same point I just made. I imagined that one wanted to keep the second C hard, so K is natural there; but have the two differ as in cakistocracy would look too odd. More English would be cackistocracy but that would read as rule by 'cack', which isn't exactly right.
But if I were the first to anglicise it I'd certainly go with your version and wouldn't consider the 'toilet' aspect important.