Obamafications

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

One of the questions we get a lot here is whether this or that newly coined word has staying power.

And recently, Grant, you were writing in Forbes magazine about a number of words and their chances for survival.

I did. The editors there contacted me and a bunch of other language people, including Ben Zimmer and John McWhorter, and said, look, we’re doing a package on neologisms. We’d like you to write something.

So I said, well, let me just do a little grading here, and I’ll put up a list of words and tell people how I think they’re going to do in the future.

Okay, and a lot of these words were new to me, like, for example, AFPAC. Tell us about that one.

AFPAC is a mix of the two countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan, because their political issues are so intertwined. They’re often treated together as a single element.

This term became common last year, but it’s really exploded since the Obama administration has taken over and begun to focus its attention on Afghanistan.

So you think this one is around to stay?

I do, yeah. AFPAK, A-F-P-A-K. Sometimes it’s all capitals. Sometimes it’s lowercase. Sometimes it’s hyphenated.

Yeah, I haven’t run into that. I’ll have to watch for it. What about Frugalista?

Frugalista is how I say it, but maybe that’s it. But Frugalista is a woman who is so committed to staying fashionable and stylish that even though she might be out of work or that money might be short, she’s going to desperate ends to browse the discount bins or to go to the used clothing store to stay cool, you know, just to look great.

She’s not going to pull out her ratty jeans or anything like that.

Well, this one sounds sort of like a flash in the pan to me. What do you think?

Frugalista?

Yeah, I think so. It’s definitely gotten a lot of commentary in the press.

It’s what we would call journalese, where the journalists are highly fond of it, but nobody else uses it.

Exactly.

So that’s probably going to go the way of it.

Yeah.

Bye-bye.

Well, I tell you, one other that caught my eye, I have to say, was fang banging.

Oh, naughty, naughty.

Fang banging is sex with a vampire. You know, the Twilight movie came out. The Twilight books were huge.

Even if you can go as far back as the television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, the whole idea that vampires are sexually alluring creatures is endlessly exploited in films and on television.

And so the fans call it fang banging.

There’s something very – I don’t know. The audiences seem to like to see these innocent women with perfectly smooth ivory necks being subdued by these manly vampires.

You sound a little too interested in that, Grant.

But you think that that’s a word that fans will be using and therefore it’ll have a life of its own as opposed to journalists using it?

I called it potentially eternal in the article.

Very good.

Well, we’ll put a link to that article of yours in Forbes magazine on our website.

Yeah, and the whole package as well. There’s a whole bunch of great articles about neologisms there.

Okay.

We’ll put that on our website.

And in the meantime, we’d love to know if you’ve heard a newly coined word that you think has staying power.

You can call us and tell us about it at 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.