Some words about words

Kirk Ericson | Feb 10, 20220

My brain summons images of people when I read or hear particular words. Maybe this happens to you too.

The word “accommodate” conjures a millisecond image of Dan Shaw, former city editor for the Bellingham Herald, while he taught a journalism class I was in at Western Washington University. He taught us how to remember how to spell accommodate: “Two C’s, two M’s.”

The word “primer,” in reference to a short piece of explanatory writing, summons Bettz Pitcher, a long-gone Olympian copy editor who corrected me after I pronounced “primer” as rhyming with “climber.” It’s pronounced “prim” with an “-er” at the end.

When someone misuses the word “irony,” I see comedian George Carlin. He wrote the following in his book “Brain Droppings:”

“Irony deals with opposites; it has nothing to do with coincidence,” Carlin wrote. “If two baseball players from the same hometown, on different teams, receive the same uniform number, it is not ironic. It is a coincidence. … Irony is ‘a state of affairs that is the reverse of what was to be expected; a result opposite to and in mockery of the appropriate result.’ … If a diabetic, on his way to buy insulin, is killed by a runaway truck, he is the victim of an accident. If the truck was delivering sugar, he is the victim of an oddly poetic coincidence. But if the truck was delivering insulin, ah! Then he is the victim of an irony.”

Here are some words I invented that should be added to the language:

■ Vacciliate, verb: Injecting people with misinformation about vaccinations.

■ Jiggeritis, noun: This word refers to the moments we make when we’re nearing a person who is mirroring our attempts to avoid a collision. Jiggeritis often happens in hallways, sidewalks and stairwells.

■ Malinteruptum, noun: This condition occurs when you’re in a group and you’re interrupted by someone who makes the precise comment you intended to make.

Here are some words that have recently joined our American vocabulary:

■ Fourth trimester, noun: The three-month recovery period immediately following childbirth.

■ Mentionitis, noun: From Lexico.com: “A tendency toward repeatedly or habitually mentioning something, especially the name of a person one is attracted to or infatuated with, regardless of its relevance to the topic of conversation.”

■ Infomania: From dictionary.com: “An obsessive need to constantly check emails, social media, online news, etc.”

Here are some irritating words and phrases I wish irritated more people:

■ The team is in control of its destiny. Destiny is beyond any earthling’s control. You can’t control your destiny any more than you can control a well-fed cat.

■ Global pandemic: A pandemic is an epidemic that has gone global. “Global pandemic” is redundant. Maybe people say “global pandemic” because it makes COVID-19 sound twice as bad.

■ Set a new record: If you set a record, the record is new. It’s redundant.

■ Spike: A spike, when referring to an increase, is a change that has a sharp rise and fall. However, you can’t say, for instance, that prices spiked this month because you don’t know what will happen next month. If prices go up and stay up, what you have is not a spike but a plateau (or mesa, depending on where you’re from.) A spike is only clear by looking backward.

■ Iteration: It’s business-babble. Iteration is a word former Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld used a lot while pretending he knew how many U.S. troops it would take to invade and occupy Iraq. Turns out Rumsfeld didn’t iterate right.

■ Upskill: To give someone, such as an employee, added skills through education and training. Upskill is the type of word people use so they can fit in with other people who use that word.

■ Reach out. Exactly what did you do? Did you send an email? Phone? Text? Holler? When I hear, “I reached out,” I assume the person didn’t try all that hard to contact someone.

■ Friction: I became aware of this word while I had a gig editing a project for Mastercard. See whether you can figure out what “friction” means from the following: “Unlike government-issued currencies, virtual or digital currencies are operated by decentralized authorities, theoretically reducing many frictions in current systems. … Built on a growing platform of AI interfaces, the merchant Point of Interaction (POI) is moving beyond frictionless to a world that is both invisible and autonomous. Far beyond frictionless, commerce becomes more intelligent and payments fade to the background.” Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

■ Surfacing, as a verb: While working for the McClatchy-owned newspapers in Olympia and Tacoma, I got an email in late 2018 from some dipwad in corporate headquarters in Sacramento that encouraged me to respond to a survey designed to gauge employee morale. Our goal, the email read, is to “establish benchmark metrics across key areas — employee morale, satisfaction and engagement. Surface skilled leaders who engage their teams in a positive way.” In a related development, McClatchy declared bankruptcy in 2020.

■ Email Kirk Ericson at [email protected]