TALK OF THE ’10s
More word and phrase origins from the 2010s.
CLICKBAIT
Meaning: A linked image or headline on a web page, designed to entice—and often deceive—the reader into clicking on it
Story: From the same idea as “to bait a fishhook,” this internet term started life as “linkbait” in the early 2000s. According to the website Know Your Memes, linkbait referred to “web content produced to encourage links from other websites for search engine optimization purposes.” Riffing on that word, in 2006 a corporate systems advisor named Jay Geiger coined “clickbait” in a blog post, defining it as “any content or feature within a website that ‘baits’ a viewer to click” the mouse button. “Clickbait” made its way into The Urban Dictionary that year, and into The Oxford English Dictionary in 2014.
Backlash: The word “clickbait” sums up the more cynical aspects of the 2010s in that it describes something that looks flashy and promises a great reward, but ultimately falls short of what was expected. But the practice was so successful at generating ad revenue that it felt like clickbait articles had started to outnumber real ones.
Swooping in to help stem the tide is an organization called “Stop Clickbait,” founded in 2016 by a Colorado college student named Daniel Tuttle. “We’ve reached a point where publishers are creating content for the sole purpose of bringing in clicks,” he complained. So he and a team of volunteers click on clickbait stories and then navigate the host site’s auto-play ads, pop-up windows, lists, surveys, and whatever other hoops they make you jump through to get to the payoff. Then they post the “spoilers” online as a public service for their 200,000 Facebook fans. Twitter users can submit their own spoilers with the hashtag #StopClickbait. Here are a few amusing examples:
| Clickbait: | “Find out what Prince George is Called at Preschool” (People.com) | |
| Spoiler: | “George.” | |
| Clickbait: | “Dogs In Wheelchairs Gather Around Owner. But What They Do NEXT? This Is Incredible…” (Liftable.com) | |
| Spoiler: | “They chase a stick.” | |
| Clickbait: | “He Thought It Was Bigfoot’s Skull, But Then Experts Told Him THIS” (Diply.com) | |
| Spoiler: | “It’s a rock.” | |
| Clickbait: | “Man Swallowed a MicroSD Card and You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!” (The Verge.com) | |
| Spoiler: | “He pooped it out.” |
Carrots and spinach have fewer nutrients in them than they did 40 years ago.
Meaning: A racy dance in which the backside protrudes while shaking at a high rate of speed
Story: This quirky word has had quite a history in the English language. In 1820 a man named Charles Clairmont wrote in a letter to Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, “Really the Germans do allow themselves such twists & twirks of the pen, that it would puzzle any one.” The word was used in the 1840s as “to move something slightly by twitching” (like a cat’s tail), in the 1920s as a variant of “jerk,” and in the 1940s to describe a bad situation that just got worse. And in 1993 New Orleans–based rapper DJ Jubilee wrote in his song “Jubilee All,” “Shake baby, shake baby, shake, shake, shake. Twerk baby, twerk baby, twerk, twerk, twerk.” The modern meaning came out of New Orleans’s bounce music scene, and while the most common theory is that it’s a combination of two words, exactly which two is unclear. It’s either “twitch” and “jerk,” or “twist” and “jerk,” or it’s a variation of “work,” as in “footwork” or “work it.” In New Orleans, where the dance originated, the going consensus is that it’s a contraction of “to work,” as in “t’work,” or “t’werk,” finally morphing into “twerk.”
Backlash: However it shook into being, few people outside of America’s “dirty south” ever heard the word until August 2013, when Miley Cyrus performed the raunchy dance on MTV’s Video Music Awards. By a strange coincidence, the show aired the very same week that Oxford announced the addition of “twerk” to its online dictionary. The timing led some in the media to speculate, as USA Today did, “Did Miley Cyrus help ‘twerk’ land in the dictionary?” No, she didn’t, said Oxford’s Katherine Connor Martin, who assured outraged lexicographers that Oxford had been planning to add the word for several months. (And so far, it’s only in the Oxford Dictionary Online, not the more hallowed Oxford English Dictionary.) Martin said that if you want to blame someone, blame the millions of people who made “twerk” Google’s number-one “What is…” search that year. (It was runner-up for Oxford’s Word of the Year, losing to “selfie.”)
Bonus: Twerk wasn’t the only word added to Oxford that ruffled language-lovers’ feathers. Other controversial additions included srsly, vom, apols, and squee. (In case you require translating, they mean “seriously,” “to vomit,” “my apologies,” and “an expression of great delight.”)
But what word had the biggest impact on the 2010s? To find out, go to page 467. #heres_a_clue
The shade “Indian yellow” was originally made from the urine of cows who ate a lot of mangoes.