TALK OF THE ’10s

Here are some more word and phrase origins from the 2010s. Try not to get triggered, snowflake. (The first part is on page 67.)

BINGE-WATCH

Meaning: “Streaming” several episodes of a TV show in one sitting

Story: In rural England in the 1850s, the act of soaking a wooden vessel until it becomes watertight was known as “bingeing.” From that came a description of anyone who drank too much liquor as being “on a binge.” In the 1910s, the term “binge-drinker” appeared, followed in the 1950s by “binge-eater,” and in the 1990s by “binge-reader.” The term “binge-watcher” showed up around 2003, though who coined it is unknown. The first “binge-watching parties” came about after entire seasons of shows like The X-Files and Sex and the City were released on DVD sets.

But it was in the early 2010s—when Netflix transitioned from renting DVDs by mail to streaming TV shows—that the golden age of binge-watching began. In 2013 the term was voted the word “most likely to succeed” by the American Dialect Society, and two years later, the editors of Collins English Dictionary named it the 2015 Word of the Year, declaring binge-watching “the biggest sea change in our viewing habits since the advent of the video recorder nearly 40 years ago.”

Backlash: Hard to believe, but some people view binge-watching as an unhealthy activity. Indeed, studies have shown that it can negatively affect sleep patterns. But immersing oneself in a story for hours on end is an ancient tradition. “I imagine binge-watching is only a technologically enhanced version of a behavior that has been around, at least in rudimentary form, for at least 50,000 years,” Joseph Carroll, a literature professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, told Mashable in 2019.

Binge-watching is also changing the way TV is being written. Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner isn’t a fan—he prefers the weekly episode experience. “I love the waiting,” he said in 2015. “I love the marination. I think when you watch an entire season of a show in a day, you will definitely dream about it, but it’s not the same as walking around the whole week saying, ‘God, Pete really pissed me off!’ ”

SNOWFLAKE

Meaning: Someone who is easily offended

Story: As we reported in Uncle John’s Actual & Factual Bathroom Reader, Chuck Palahniuk popularized this epithet in his 1996 novel (and subsequent film) Fight Club. While preparing for a terror attack, the main character, Tyler Durden, tells his minions, “You are not special. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.” But using “snowflake” as an insult goes back much further than Fight Club. According to Merriam-Webster, in the 1860s, Southerners who were pro-slavery were called “snowflakes.” The barb resurfaced in the 1970s to describe Caucasians in general, or African Americans who were accused of acting “too white.”

Skunks are immune to yellow jacket venom (but they can die from bee stings).

The positive meaning of “special little snowflake” goes back to the 1960s, but it really came to the fore in the ’80s when the phrase started appearing in self-help, meditation, and teaching manuals—such as this passage from 1983’s Inside America’s Christian Schools by Paul F. Parsons about a teacher who “pointed out that God not only made every snowflake different but that every person is unique, too.”

The 1990s is when savvy social commentators like Palahniuk began using it to mean “overly sensitive,” and “snowflake” was lumped in with phrases like “helicopter parent” and “soccer mom.” The word’s popularity peaked in 2016, when the Guardian called it that year’s “defining insult.” They tracked down Palanhiuk to ask him if he thought “snowflake” is still as relevant 20 years later, and he said it was even more so. “There is a kind of new Victorianism,” he explained. “The modern Left is always reacting to things. Once they get their show on the road culturally, they’ll stop being so offended.” Then he quickly added, “But that’s just my bullsh*t opinion.”

Backlash: In the late teens, the use of “snowflake” expanded from being a political snub thrown at liberals by conservatives to describing anyone—including President Donald Trump—who was accused of being easily “triggered.” One popular meme that made the rounds on Facebook after the 2016 U.S. presidential election: “Liberal Snowflake? Winter is Coming.” (That’s a reference to Game of Thrones.) But British humorist John Cleese had a different take: “I think sociopaths use snowflake in an attempt to discredit the notion of empathy.”

BREXIT

Meaning: The withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, a referendum that a majority of Brits voted in favor of in 2016

Story: This portmanteau of “Britain” and “exit” first showed up in early 2012—albeit in a slightly different form—in a prophetic article in the Economist magazine, entitled “A Brixit Looms.” “Brixit” was inspired by “Grexit,” which was coined that same year by economist Ebrahim Rahbari, about the notion that Greece might leave the EU. The first documented appearance of “Brexit” came from Peter Wilding, founder of the think tank British Influence. His May 15, 2012, blog post was titled “Stumbling towards the Brexit.” But after the Greek crisis quieted down, the word fell into relative obscurity until the Brexit vote approached in 2016. Then it “blew up,” as one linguist described, to become Google’s number-one “What is…?” search of the year.

Backlash: “Brexit” had a competitor: “Bremain,” a combination of “Britain” and “remain.” Unfortunately for the Bremainers (one of whom was Brexit coiner Peter Wilding), that word didn’t quite roll off the tongue as well as “Brexit,” and they became known instead as “anti-Brexiters”…and they lost the vote.

First book published in North America: The Bay Psalm Book (1640).

Bonus: The “-exit” suffix isn’t going anywhere. Like “-gate” before it (from the 1970s Watergate scandal), these are two rare suffixes that have been added to modern English. So be on the lookout for “Calexit,” “Texit,” and “Italexit.”

GHOSTING

Meaning: Abruptly ending a relationship with someone by breaking off all contact, especially on social media and dating sites

Story: Whoever gave life to “ghosting” is lost to history, but this truly is a 21st-century term, first appearing in The Urban Dictionary in 2006 as “the act of disappearing on your friends without notice.” The word’s popularity peaked in the mid-teens when news site after news site ran alarmist articles such as “And Then I Never Heard from Him Again: The Awful Rise of Ghosting,” “Are Dating Apps to Blame for ‘Ghosting’?” and “Ghosting: What to Do if You’ve Been a Victim.” Though the word is modern, as L.A. Magazine wrote in 2019, “Ghosting isn’t a revolutionary concept, it’s just a newish name for something humans have done forever: choosing the path of least resistance out of selfishness or maybe self-preservation.”

Proving there really is more than one way to leave your lover:

•The “slow fade” is incremental ghosting, wherein you try to ease your way out of their life, hoping they don’t notice until you’re gone.

•“Caspering” (named for Casper, the Friendly Ghost) is when you let your partner know you’ll be eliminating them from your life, but in a friendly way.

•“Ghostbusting” is turning the tables on the ghoster by tracking them down and forcing them to acknowledge you.

•And for literature lovers, there’s “Marleying,” when an ex contacts you from out of nowhere during the holidays, just like the recently deceased Jacob Marley did to Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s 1843 ghost story A Christmas Carol.

Bonus: This is one of several modern alternate meanings of “ghost,” which spent most of its thousand-year existence as a noun meaning “spirit of a deceased person” (it comes from the Old English gast). A few examples: There’s ghosting in comment threads (making comments invisible to everyone but the poster), ghosting in digital photography (when a moving object in bracketed exposures shows up blurry), ghosting in identity theft (pretending to be a dead person), ghosting in online gaming (“collaborating with an accomplice in observer mode to view opponents’ positions in order to gain a competitive edge”), and ghost-writing (what you could be reading right now).

For more of the tumultuous teens’ most talked-about terms, stream your way over to page 317.

If you straightened out a French horn, it would be about 20 feet long.