Lexicon
from 1ii25

This page is a temporary assembly point for material that may find its way to /lexicon/, its own dedicated Folder at oook.info. The runup to today's beginning seems to start with the 17i25 yellow page entry, and snowball-like then led to the following lexemes being minuted (as relevant to the array of words in play of the present) in the succeeding fortnight of yellow-pad writing:

unseemly
wabi-sabi
Bros (as in 'Techbros')
NPC ('non-playing character')
-ware (nod to Rudy Rucker)
Agency
Tar Baby
Algorithm
Cyber and Cyber-
reprehensible
recrudescence ("...the return of something terrible after a time of reprieve")
affordance
macramé
The Bully Pulpit
sin vergüenza ('without shame', but deeper)
...
(some of those are definitely of Zeitgeist, some are personal fascinations; each could spawn a mini-essay)

And there are phrases that qualify as le mot juste of the moment:

...the dialectic of bullying and toadying... (Neal Ascherson at LRB, 2017)
(I'll keep eyes and ears peeled for more of same)

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A bout of googly due diligence with 'lexicon' makes it evident that mine is a personal use of the term, having to do with words and phrases significant in one's own thought an speech. Among other senses, there is "the lexicon" as a grand collection (e.g. the OED, or lexicons of Greek, or of Biblical material (including Concordances)); and there are lexicons of specialist vocabulary of various sorts; and there's "the lexicon" of words and phrases in play in current discourse (collections of 'keywords' capture a lot of that sense, as below). Here's some of what my google search turned up:

Lexicon Wikipedia

Lexicon wiktionary.org

NYTimes Word of the Day 22ix21 ("This word has appeared in 118 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?")

The Lexicon: An Introduction (Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics) $$$

DHS Lexicon Homeland Security

Sensory Lexicon World Coffee Research

The BGS Lexicon of Named Rock Units British Geological Survey

Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities Duke University Press

Lexicon of Greek Personal Names

Cyber Lexicon Financial Stability Board

Lexicon of Linguistics Utrecht institute of Linguistics

Oxford Phrasal Academic Lexicon Oxford Learner's Dictionaries

Lexicon of Lies Terms for Problematic Information from datasociety.net

Middle English Dictionary ("The world's largest searchable database of Middle English lexicon and usage for the period 1100-1500")

Psycholinguistics/The Mental Lexicon Wikiversity.org

WordNet A Lexical Database for English, Princeton

Mental Lexicon (Psycholinguistics) thoughtco.com

Harry Potter Lexicon

Ayn Rand Lexicon

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I did a series of Dictionary blog entries (which could and should be expanded...) in Spring 2020 [and which ought to be part of an eventual section dedicated to Word Books]:

Words in Time and Place: Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary David Crystal

Words in Time: A social history of the English vocabulary Geoffrey Hughes

Polyglot's Lexicon 1943-1966

Dictionary of foreign terms

Greek and Latin

Indo-European and Germanic

The Joys of Anglo-Indian

The Laws of Indo-European

A toe dipt into Etymologies

Taking Stock: langue & parole

A Survey of Modern English

Lexicon of Musical Invective Nicholas Slonimsky

le mot juste du jour: Sprachgefühl

And 20i25 yellow pad entry has some nice text re:lexicon:

Few lexical items are fixed, unchanging, entire and complete [though one might argue that 'mother' is pretty fixed, but extensible: think "mother of invention" and "motherfucker"]. Most lexemes take on flavors and nuances and relationships and connotations as they are used (viz. the emergence of an ironic use of a word or phrase, in which it means more than first meets the eye). Words and phrases have cultural lives [half-lives?], carrying meaning within speech communities but flexing as the present moment requires. You see that readily with memes and jargon, as they are passed around and put to expressive and descriptive use. Words and phrases have histories, and often seem to be attempting to EXPAND their role in language... but just as often if not so noisily some are sinking toward archaic desuetude. Catchphrases that are bobbled and dropped... Epithets that smell of mothballs (remember mothballs?)...

A couple of words that tipped me over the edge in the last few days:

Mashup Wikipedia

I first encountered the term around 2000 I think, as a sort of musical and digital Burroughsian cut-up, but with a Jamaican jerk flavor. And soon "everything is a mashup" appeared, as a succinct statement of an intellectual ('Copyleft') ideology, and a provocation. See DJ Spooky on remix.

Fantod(s)

fantods sesquiotic.com

howling fantods Hudson Independent

fantods Green's Dictionary of Slang

Edward Gorey's Fantod Pack

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links from site:oook.info lexicon search:

blog items tagged 'lexicon'

on personal infospace (ca. 2005)

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a search of my drives for 'lexicon'

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...and along the way I tripped over Lexicon Valley, a Slate podcast "A podcast about language, from pet peeves to syntax" (which ended in 2021, after 107 episodes)

And so we begin to see the scale of what began as an innocent list of tasty and portentious lexical items, but has turned into another Life's Work...

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Several books that seem especially relevant to work with lexicon:

Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society Raymond Williams, original publication 1976
...words that are critical to understanding the modern world. In these essays, Williams, a renowned cultural critic, demonstrates how these key words take on new meanings and how these changes reflect the political bent and values of our past and current society. He chose words both essential and intangible--words like nature, underprivileged, industry, liberal, violence, to name a few--and, by tracing their etymology and evolution, grounds them in a wider political and cultural framework. The result is an illuminating account of the central vocabulary of ideological debate in English in the modern period.
(Amazon blurb)

(see Wikipedia entry) and The Keywords Project



Collateral Language: A User's Guide to America's New War John Collins and Ross Glover 2002

Terrorism, jihad, fundamentalism, blowback. These and other highly charged terms have saturated news broadcasts and everyday conversation since September 11th. But to keen ears their meanings change depending upon who's doing the talking. So what do these words really mean? And what are people trying to say when they use them?
(Amazon blurb)

Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary The Keywords Project 2018

...updates and extends Raymond Williams's classic work, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. It updates some 40 of Williams's original entries and adds 86 new entries, ranging from access to youth. The book is both a history of English, documenting important semantic change in the language, and a handbook of current political and ideological debate.
(Amazon blurb)


New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society Tony Bennett et al. 2018

...142 signed entries —from art, commodity, and fundamentalism to youth, utopia, the virtual, and the West – that capture the practices, institutions, and debates of contemporary society
(publisher's blurb)

Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism John Patrick Leary 2019

...chronicles the rise of a new vocabulary in the twenty-first century. From Silicon Valley to the White House, from kindergarten to college, and from the factory floor to the church pulpit, we are all called to be innovators and entrepreneurs, to be curators of an ever-expanding roster of competencies, and to become resilient and flexible in the face of the insults and injuries we confront at work. In the midst of increasing inequality, these keywords teach us to thrive by applying the lessons of a competitive marketplace to every sphere of life.
(Amazon blurb)

Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data Nanna Bonde Thylstrup et al. 2021

...arranged glossary style, from from abuse and aggregate to visualization and vulnerability—both challenging conventional usage of such often-used terms as prediction and objectivity and introducing such unfamiliar ones as overfitting and copynorm.
(Amazon blurb)

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4ii25

Email from Bryan Alexander reminded me of the Old Samuel Johnson definition of a lexicographer as "a harmless drudge", and I like the sound of the 'harmless' especially. But Johnson's definition goes on from the drudge:

...A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words
(via the marvelous johnsonsdictionaryonline.com)
The signification. It's a grand challenge to compose/contrive glosses for items that enter the personal lexicon, and for those alive in public discourse of a speech community. Such exegetical texts might summarize historical emergence and sociocultural cross-linkage, but the real point is to capture the significance of the expression: what does it mean below the surface of its dictionary definition?

Some words enter the lexicon (again, personal and societal) as novelties, neologisms. calques, portmanteau words ...that express some nuance of meaning, and so enhance the language as she is spoke. By lexical innovation, a thing is labeled, acknowledged, instantiated. One encounters new (and new-ish) items all the time, and pauses to wonder about them, to consider whether they have a place in the shifting sands of one's personal lexicon. When one is surprised by a lexical encounter, the appropriate thing to do is write it down and then go in pursuit of detailing the signification...

This morning's lexical nubbins under consideration include sortition, pinkwashing, cause-marketing, parasociality vortex, jaapie [thanks Nick!], hunkering (see Hunkerin': America's Most Boring Fad at mentalfloss.com)... and the day has just begun.

It's proper to try to enumerate and visualize my stable of sources and sensors, the sites and persons I rely on and trust the veracity of and will at least deign to listen to (and of course there are other potential sources that I disdain). My lexicon thrives upon the incoming: my eyes and ears are attuned to the Messages —many written, many graphical, many aural— that enter my self-designed bubble of sources of sources through which to view and monitor the rest of humanity (which as an anthropologist, is my remit).

...But meanwhile, some specialist dictionaries by and for sportive lexicographers:

The Superior Person's Book of Words Peter Bowler

The Evasion-English Dictionary

The Logodaedalian's Dictionary of Interesting and Unusual Words George Stone Saussy

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I started thinking about the relationship(s) of lexicon and meme and excavated a delicious list of meme dictionaries and other collations:

Memes: Much Wow at Medium

Memetic Lexicon Principia Cybernetica Web

Memetic Lexicon Chris Abraham

The Incel Lexicon: Deciphering the emergent cryptolect of a global community

Will 'OK Boomer' enter the American lexicon? Quora

Among the New Words American Speech 2011 Benjamin Zimmer and Charles E Carson

Among the New Words American Speech 2024

Internet Meme Lexicon A Way with Words (and a search for 'lexicon' in AWWW transcripts)

Epsilon Lexicon at epsilontheory.com

A Concise Lexicon Of / For the Digital Commons raqs collective (pdf)

The Lebowski Lexicon dudeism.com

The Philosophical Lexicon (updated) at dailynous.com

2019: The Year in Memes Lexiconthai.com

DoggoLingo Wikipedia

The Lexicon poundingtherock.com

Quebec French lexicon Wikipedia

The Fandom Lexicon at duckprintspress.com

Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect Richard Cunliffe

And books (ordered, of course):

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language Gretchen McCulloch

Decoding Gen-Z Slang: Your Guide to Learning, Understanding, and Speaking the Gen-Z Vernacular and Brainrot: The Gen-A Slang Lexicon

Spreading the Word: Language and Dialect in America John McWhorter

Mental Floss: The Curious Compendium of Wonderful Words: A Miscellany of Obscure Terms, Bizarre Phrases & Surprising Etymologies Erin McCarthy

The Great Book of American Idioms: A Dictionary of American Idioms, Sayings, Expressions & Phrases

Slinky Wikipedia

...after meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump told reporters tonight that the U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip," and suggested sending troops to make that happen. We'll own it," he said. "We're going to take over that piece, develop it and create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it will be something the entire Middle East can be proud of." It could become "the Riviera of the Middle East," he said.

Reaction has been swift and incredulous. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, called the plan "deranged" and "nuts." Another Foreign Relations Committee member, Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), said he was "speechless," adding: "That's insane." While MAGA representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) posted in support, "Let's turn Gaza into Mar-a-Lago," Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told NBC News reporters Frank Thorp V and Raquel Coronell Uribe that there were "a few kinks in that slinky," a reference to a spring toy that fails if it gets bent.

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The many meanings and faces of "vernacular" Victor Mair

Word from the hood: The lexicon of African-American vernacular English

Viral Vernacular: The COVID-19 Lexicon

Etymology of vernacular etymonline

The Burning Man dictionary: Playa vernacular that you need to know mixmag.net

Do jargon, argot and vernacular mean the same thing? Well, not really. Thomas Moore Devlin at babbel.com

English idioms, phrasal verbs, and colloquialisms packardcommunications.com

100 Phrasal Verbs Used as Commands engVid.com

Gay talk : formerly entitled The queens' vernacular : a gay lexicon Bruce Rodgers (1979) at Inyternet Archive

The lexical fallacy in emotion research: Mistaking vernacular words for psychological entities Fiske, Alan Page Psychological Review, Vol 127(1), Jan 2020, 95-113

Vernacular lexemes appear self-evident, so we unwittingly reify them. But the words and phrases of natural languages comprise a treacherous basis for identifying valid psychological constructs, as I illustrate in emotion research. Like other vernacular lexemes, the emotion labels in natural languages do not have definite, stable, mutually transparent meanings, and any one vernacular word may be used to denote multiple scientifically distinct entities. In addition, the consequential choice of one lexeme to name a scientific construct rather than any of its partial synonyms is often arbitrary. Furthermore, a given vernacular lexeme from any one of the world's 7000 languages rarely maps one-to-one into an exactly corresponding vernacular lexeme in other languages. Words related to anger in different languages illustrate this. Since each language constitutes a distinct taxonomy of things in the world, most or all languages must fail to cut nature at its joints. In short, it is pernicious to use one language's dictionary as the source of psychological constructs. So scientists need to coin new technical names for scientifically derived constructs—names precisely defined in terms of the constellation of features or components that characterize the constructs they denote. The development of the kama muta construct illustrates one way to go about this. Kama muta is the emotion evoked by sudden intensification of communal sharing—universally experienced but not isomorphic with any vernacular lexeme such as heart warming, moving, touching, collective pride, tender, nostalgic, sentimental, Awww—so cute!.

a place to collect additions to lexicon(s)

Kiddo slang at warp speed Victor Mair at Language Log

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List of contents from New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society Tony Bennett et al. (Blackwell 2005)

List of contents from Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data Nanna Bonde Thylstrup et al. (MIT Press 2021)

Culture Wars

Culture War Wikipedia

History of ethnocultural politics in the United States Wikipedia

Culture Wars: the struggle to define America Wikipedia

Culture Wars: The Struggle To Control The Family, Art, Education, Law, And Politics In America James Davison Hunter 1991

...presents a riveting account of how Christian fundamentalist, Orthodox Jews, and conservative Catholics have joined forces in a fierce battle against their progressive counterparts–secularist, reform Jews, liberal Catholics and Protestants–as each side struggles to gain control over such fields of conflict as the family, art, education, law, and politics. Not since the Civil War has there been such fundamental disagreement over basic assumptions about truth, freedom, and our national identity.
(Culture Wars: The Endgame Nihilism's Grip on American Democracy James Davison Hunter (2024) at Hedgehog Review
...where we used to think that on political matters you could compromise (unlike on issues of moral truth), suddenly politics had become an arena where ultimate values were at stake. Compromise was now impossible, debate interminable.

...Our emerging common culture is chillingly nihilistic.

"Nihilism," according to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, is "not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one's shoulder to the plough; one destroys." A nihilistic culture is defined by the drive to destroy, by the will to power. And that definition now describes the American nation.

Culture wars: How identity became the center of politics in America ABC News 7vii23 and perhaps a bit facile...

The Culture War's Impact on Public Schools National Education Association

...believe in opportunity for all students and in the power of public education to transform lives and create a more just and inclusive society...

...in the midst of political conflicts, students have limited opportunities to engage in learning and respectful dialogue on controversial topics, and it's become harder to address rampant misinformation. The highly charged environment has also led to marked declines in support for teaching about race, racism, and racial and ethnic diversity. Meanwhile, harassment of LGTBQ youth has increased.

...we found that the conflict was most heightened in politically contested or "purple" communities—schools in districts where the vote in the 2020 election was roughly even. They were far more likely to experience community-level conflict than those in blue or red districts.

...Our society usually does not do well in promoting dialogue about race and equity in ways that are meaningful, productive, and respectful. Consequently, it can be exceedingly difficult for educators to facilitate these discussions with their students. This is challenging work that requires creativity, insight, and empathy. These attacks make it harder to lean into this work. They need that support because we don't want public education to back away from its critical role in protecting our democracy.

Everything you wanted to know about the culture wars — but were afraid to ask Andrew Anthony Guardian 13vi2021 (a British perspective)

"There have always been cultural conflicts but it's become much sharper in the last 20 years thanks to declining trust in institutions that were meant to hold together the cohesion of society, some of the growing inequalities, and most of all the proliferation of technology that enables and indeed encourages people to cluster in their cultural groups." Matthew d'Ancona

...symbolic issues and questions of identity occupy a larger and more antagonistic position in the general culture than they did 10 or 20 years ago.

Culture Wars Context, Models and Anthropologists' Accounts Deborah James et al. 2010

The relationship between anthropologists' ethnographic investigations and the lived social worlds in which these originate is a fundamental issue for anthropology. Where some claim that only native voices may offer authentic accounts of culture and hence that ethnographers are only ever interpreters of it, others point out that anthropologists are, themselves, implanted within specific cultural contexts which generate particular kinds of theoretical discussions. The contributors to this volume reject the premise that ethnographer and informant occupy different and incommensurable “cultural worlds.” Instead they investigate the relationship between culture, context, and anthropologists’ models and accounts in new ways.
(publisher's blurb)

Going Meta on Culture Wars Eric Scliesser at Crooked Timber 26iv24

...Now, anything can become a culture war topic. That's because anything can become of symbolic importance and become instrumental in solidifying affective and instrumental ties among people. Don't believe me? Go re-read Swift's Gulliver’s Travels!

...in culture wars ridicule and mockery don't unmask the powerful and bring us back to our senses. Rather, they reinforce the affective ties of the tribe or coalition. And so earnestly (or mockingly) one, thereby, keeps the culture war going rather than (ahh) changing the topic.

The Culture Wars Revisited Gregory Wolfe at Image

The Very Online Culture Wars Matt Stewart at frontporchrepublic.com

...If the national electorate was voting to reject the nihilism of campus infatuation with Hamas, DEI gone wild, Drag Queen Story Hour, and the ridiculous "We Believe . . ." yard signs gracing impeccable lawns in gated communities, I applaud. The last four years have revealed the vacuousness of such posturing, and its apocalypse is well-deserved. Only a dedicated member of the VOL could believe in the real value or durability of these gestures.

...Pretending to ourselves that Trump II represents a culture war victory threatens to render traditionalist accounts of the true, the good, and the beautiful incoherent. Several of the celebrities in the Trump II entourage closely resemble villains from the classical Christian education curriculum that I teach; some are hardly even wolves in sheep's clothing and are just outright wolves.

12ii25 additions, to be integrated :

listicles and Merriam-Webster entry

an article consisting of a series of items presented as a list

Dumpster fire Wikipedia

Urban Dictionary Wikipedia

The year of Karen: how a meme changed the way Americans talked about racism The Guardian

Parsing Wikipedia

Common ground (linguistics) Wikipedia

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Woke

What does 'woke' mean and why are some conservatives using it? ABC News

The Woke Movement and Backlash The First Amendment Encyclopedia

Disrupting the Anti-'Woke' Discourse FrameWorks Institute

What 'Woke' means to Liberals & Conservatives AllSides Red Blue Translator

How Woke Went From "Black" to "Bad": The Meaning of "Woke" NAACP

Reclaiming the Word "Woke" as Part of African American Culture NAACP

Refuse to Say Just What You Mean: Anti- "Woke" Rhetoric As an Exercise in Destructive Abstraction Political Communication: Vol 41 , No 5

Scottsboro Boys lyrics (pdf)

The blues guitarist who invented the phrase "woke" farout magazine

Here's where 'woke' comes from The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Lonely Charts Personals Adam Tooze [lexicon...]

2/12/2025 16:46:58 Exotic asset class (M c.40 ) requires tailored de-risking. NY-LON only.

2/11/2025 11:08:12 Green energy and high-speed rail enthusiast based in Central Luzon, PH (26M, US expat). Seeking a serious partner (20-45F) with intelligence, wisdom and fun to put wind in my turbine blades. American Prospect subscription not essential, but a nice bonus.

2/11/2025 11:09:13 Harried federal government manager (as of now at least) (47, Denver) seeks F30-50 for fun and LTR. Enjoys hiking, biking, and history. Must hate dogs and actively work for their downfall.

...

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What We Feel but Cannot Name Marginalian

temporary 14ii25 collection parked