Nancy Friedman is a naming and branding expert with a fantastic newsletter about language, Fritinancy which recently covered the neologism stinge-watching. It’s the opposite of binge-watching, and refers to the act of spacing out viewings of a favorite TV show or streaming series to savor it over a longer period of time. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Stinge-Watching”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
And you know, Grant, I always look forward to each new edition of the newsletter from name developer Nancy Friedman.
It’s called Fritta Nancy.
And Nancy writes about names and brands and the language of commerce.
And I learned a new term from her the other day, which is stinge watching.
Oh, stinge watching.
Can I make some guesses or are you just going to tell me?
Oh, go ahead.
Make some guesses.
I love when you do that.
Just watching how cheap the next people at the table in the restaurant are.
Like they’re on a date and you just know he can’t really afford what she’s ordering.
Oh, that’s a good guess, but that’s not right.
What is it?
What’s stinge watching?
You’re going to appreciate this.
I have adopted this word because stinge watching is when you find a TV series that you really like
And you love it so much that instead of binge watching the whole season in a few days, you slow way down and you space out your viewing sessions to drag out the pleasure as long as possible.
Unfortunately, that means I sometimes never get to whole shows.
I know.
I stinge watch Orange is the New Black to such a degree that I never watched it.
Oh, really?
Because I set it aside because people were talking too much about it.
And I was like, there’s just too much chatter.
I don’t want them to ruin it.
Let me just put this aside for, you know, a month or something.
And then I never got back to it.
Oh, see, in our household, we still have episodes of Black-ish that we haven’t watched.
Because we don’t want to see the kids grow up.
We don’t want to see Rainbow and Dre, you know, send their kids off to college.
I can see that.
So they’re sort of in suspended animation for now.
Sting watching.
You enjoy a show so much that you don’t want to consume it all too fast.
That’s fantastic.
We’ll post the link to Nancy Friedman’s fantastic newsletter on our website.
But we would love to hear the new language that you’ve come across.
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