by
hugovk
on
blaccent, n.
Unlike other physical executions of blackface (such as by Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder, Sarah Silverman on her own show, Rachel Dolezal, or the authors of AB to Jay-Z) that require physical alternations and usually a change in demeanor (like Iggy Azalea’s “blaccent”), digital blackface is in some ways a more seamless transformation. Digital blackface uses the relative anonymity of online identity to embody blackness. In the case of Mandi Harrington, a white woman who masqueraded as the fictional “LaQueeta Jones,” digital blackface became a means for her to defend musician Ani DiFranco’s decision to host a retreat at a slave plantation. Digital minstrels often operate under stolen profile pictures and butchered AAVE. Quite often it comes in the form of an excessive use of reaction GIFs with images of black people.
blaccent, n.
There’s something that’s linguistically interesting about it. Most Americans know you can usually hear that a person is black even if you can’t see them and even if they’re not using any slang. I sometimes call it the “blaccent.” The blaccent is mostly about the coloring of a few vowels – the “a” in cat and the “o” in hot. It happens that these two vowels are the two in “black bodies.”
chin and forehead, n.
The new phones’ most eye-catching feature is an almost completely bezel-free display, running the full width of the device, even curving around the edge (akin to the screen on Samsung’s Galaxy S7 Edge), and shrinking the chin and forehead of the front screen to tiny slivers. Samsung’s calls this the “infinity display”, and even the home button has been removed, replaced with a pressure-sensitive section at the bottom of the screen.
digital blackface, n.
If you’ve never heard of the term before, “digital blackface” is used to describe various types of minstrel performance that become available in cyberspace. Blackface minstrelsy is a theatrical tradition dating back to the early 19th century, in which performers “blacken” themselves up with costume and behaviors to act as black caricatures. The performances put society’s most racist sensibilities on display and in turn fed them back to audiences to intensify these feelings and disperse them across culture. Many of our most beloved entertainment genres owe at least part of themselves to the minstrel stage, including vaudeville, film, and cartoons. While often associated with Jim Crow–era racism, the tenets of minstrel performance remain alive today in television, movies, music and, in its most advanced iteration, on the Internet.
enby, n.
Elizabeth Sampat, 19 November 2017:
Also: huge love to transmasc people in the closet, butch enbys who are tired of getting grouped in with women, cis dudes who despair of finding the good things about their gender. (You are the good things.) #InternationalMensDay
gaymoji, n.
Gaymoji … is that like gay emoji? Got it in one! Now that the world communicates mostly using little cartoon symbols, the gay dating app Grindr has introduced its own symbols – or “gaymoji” – to represent gay life.
gearheadedness, n.
**“**And real hi-fi, like the best equipment,” Fleming said. “He was such a gearhead.” Reed’s gearheadedness is described wonderfully in a book that Anderson, Fleming, and Stern put together to accompany the huge boxed set of Reed’s RCA and Arista solo albums, remastered by Reed, Hal Willner, and Rob Santos, in the final months of Reed’s life. The book, full of visual and textual amazements, is like a taste of the archive.
ghosting, n.
The Guardian, 16 January 2017:
As for ghosting tech, it’s likely that its full potential will only be seen in a decade or so. As Disney’s swift intervention to clarify the Post’s Cumberbatch story proves, studios are wary of any sense that they are “cheating” their audiences. In light of the Mouse House’s equally rapid rebuttal last week of reports that it is planning to bring the late Carrie Fisher back for Star Wars: Episode IX, it also seems unlikely there will be a repeat, any time soon, of the situation that saw Paul Walker appear posthumously in Fast and Furious 7.
Grinch bot, n.
The Atlantic, 14 December 2017:
he new holiday showdown pits humans against software. It’s not a fair fight. A fleet of bots—software programs that can automate activities like search, chat, and online ordering—have been dispatched by anonymous online scalpers to buy up the most popular children’s toys on the internet. These bots overwhelm retail sites with bulk orders from multiple IP addresses and autofill payment and address information faster than humanly possible. Hence, the apt nickname: Grinch bots.
health attack, n.
The Guardian, 14 September 2017:
The blaring, grinding noise jolted the American diplomat from his bed in a Havana hotel. He moved just a few feet, and there was silence. He climbed back into bed. Inexplicably, the agonizing sound hit him again. It was as if he’d walked through some invisible wall cutting straight through his room. Soon came the hearing loss, and the speech problems, symptoms both similar and altogether different from others among at least 21 US victims in an astonishing international mystery still unfolding in Cuba. The top US diplomat has called them “health attacks”.
microcontent, n.
Nielsen Norman Group, 29 January 2017:
Definition: Microcontent is a type of UX copywriting in the form of short text fragments or phrases, often presented with no additional contextual support. Microcontent usually communicates key messages in a concise form: it can be used to describe an article or long blog post, add clarity to an interface, or encourage a desired behavior.
quarterlife, n.
Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper is stylish, mysterious and very strange. It is a ghost story and suspense thriller, yet also a sympathetically realist portrait of numbed quarterlife loneliness, and it’s all held together by a really outstanding performance from Kristen Stewart who, in her unforced and unaffected normality, gives us a way into the drama, with all its natural and supernatural happenings. Stewart is eligible for next year’s Oscars, but acting like this hardly ever gets prizes. She makes it all look easy.
serpentine queue, n.
The Guardian, 19 February 2017:
The “serpentine queue”, as it is known, solves this problem by making everybody wait in one long line that snakes through a maze of barriers. On reaching the front, you are called to whichever cashier is free next, thus sharing the effect of the mortgage applicant evenly between all customers and ensuring everybody gets served in the order they arrive. Crucially, although they are long, serpentine queues move quickly, which is better for morale. “People get a sense of progress,” Furnham says. Encouragingly, serpentine queues now sometimes form spontaneously, for instance in front of a bank of cash machines.
shitgibbon compound, n.
Daniel Midgley, 16 February 2017:
Discussion in the linguistic world has been swirling of late around a set of peculiar sweary compounds like shitgibbon, wankpuffin, and jizztrumpet. Ben Zimmer reveals their history, Taylor Jones describes their construction, and Gretchen McColloch discusses their constraints. She also proposes the term shitgibbon compounds, which I think is smashing, and I’m going to use it here.
shrinkflation, n.
The Guardian, 13 January 2017:
“There’s also shrinkflation. Shops know customers only want to pay £4 for a pack and so rather than put the price up they make the packet size smaller,” he said.
skip-level, n.
Susan Fowler, 19 February 2017:
In the background, there was a game-of-thrones political war raging within the ranks of upper management in the infrastructure engineering organization. It seemed like every manager was fighting their peers and attempting to undermine their direct supervisor so that they could have their direct supervisor's job. No attempts were made by these managers to hide what they were doing: they boasted about it in meetings, told their direct reports about it, and the like. I remember countless meetings with my managers and skip-levels where I would sit there, not saying anything, and the manager would be boasting about finding favor with their skip-level and that I should expect them to have their manager's job within a quarter or two. I also remember a very disturbing team meeting in which one of the directors boasted to our team that he had withheld business-critical information from one of the executives so that he could curry favor with one of the other executives (and, he told us with a smile on his face, it worked!).
text neck, n.
More and more young people in Finland are developing "text neck" as a result of spending so much time in a slumped position. Experts say that if a person’s posture is compromised, many other health problems can follow.
transmasc, adj.
Elizabeth Sampat, 19 November 2017:
Also: huge love to transmasc people in the closet, butch enbys who are tired of getting grouped in with women, cis dudes who despair of finding the good things about their gender. (You are the good things.) #InternationalMensDay
Trumpcare, n.
Angus Johnston, 13 March 2017:
According to the CBO, Trumpcare isn't just worse than Obamacare at covering Americans. It's worse than repealing Obamacare, too.
Trumpspeak, n.
In Trumpspeak, a speaker can never be accused of lying if he’s simply repeating the statements of others; it is the responsibility of those who make original claims to check for the accuracy and truthfulness of their assertions, not the person who repeats them – even if that person happens to be the most powerful person and speaker on the planet.
tweet zero, n.
Braulio Agnese, 11 April 2017:
This is a good candidate for "tweet zero" re election & "hold my beer" ...
VAR, n.
France twice fell foul of decisions made by a video assistant referee (VAR) in a high-profile example of the new technology during their 2-0 home defeat against Spain.
video assistant referee, n.
France twice fell foul of decisions made by a video assistant referee (VAR) in a high-profile example of the new technology during their 2-0 home defeat against Spain.
wake word, n.
And so to Dallas, Texas, where a six-year-old girl made the mistake of asking Alexa: “Can you play dollhouse with me and get me a dollhouse?” Alexa promptly complied by ordering a (£140) KidKraft doll’s house and, for reasons known only to the virtual assistant, four pounds of sugar cookies. The snafu snowballed when a San Diego TV station reported the story, using the “wake word” Alexa, which is the Amazon Echo equivalent of saying Candyman five times into the mirror. Several viewers called the station to complain that their own Alexa had woken up and ordered more doll’s houses in what turned into a thoroughly 21st-century comedy of consumer errors. And a bonanza day for KidKraft.
winter fingerprints, n.
The Guardian, 20 January 2017:
Happily, there are many possible solutions. One is to use a lot of hand cream, and try to keep your fingertips summery and youthful. Another is to teach your phone the “fingerprints” of your gloves. Indeed, there are gloves made specifically for this purpose. Some people have even found that you can record a nose print instead of a finger, although it is not clear that the skin on your nose is any more resilient. Probably the best solution overall is to install a new set of “winter fingerprints” with your worn fingers, much as you might switch to a winter wardrobe. And just as classy, I’m sure you will agree.