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Children mark each year by the number of teeth lost, knees skinned, centimetres grown. For teens, it’s more about memes, crushes, exam crams. Yet live a few more years and the seasons overlap, the years blur: which is where words can help.
If I say Princess Diana, you’ll recall the day you heard the news. Same for tsunami, or Cathy Freeman’s run in Sydney. Big news stories can preserve a moment, with related words a close second. Potentially. There’s no guarantee to this lexical retrieval method since one supermoon will morph into another supermoon if you live enough nights. Ditto for Wimbledon winners, Oscar movies, prime ministers. So-called momentous events can lose their notch on the timeline.
Sydney’s Sweeney’s American Eagle Outfitters ad saw a spike in searches for the word “eugenic”.
Unless you have a wordy bent, a trick I’ve realised while rummaging the look-up lists in the Merriam-Webster archives. Banked for posterity are the nouns and neologisms, the slang and legalese that drew the biggest search numbers in a given week.
Deploy, say, was a hot verb recently, thanks to Donald Trump deploying federal troops in Seattle. Acetaminophen, the lab name for Panadol, was another buzzword aligned to the 47th President, due to his errant remarks about the analgesic capable of triggering autism in the womb. Okay, so maybe two Trumpish examples don’t nail any day. Rather the monomania only adds to the murk, just as covfefe (the man’s 2017 brain-fade on Twitter) has faded within the presidential vaudeville.
So let’s escape the White House. Let’s skip oligarchy and doge, filibuster and gerrymander, or the Posse Comitatus Act (five more big look-ups), and find a few memory-joggers away from POTUS. Sabbath, say, was a top of the pops in July, owing to Ozzy Osbourne’s death, just as heel (a wrestling villain) signalled Hulk Hogan’s passing. More recently, Taylor Swift made showgirl a searcher’s fave (due to her album title). Less cheerily, Sydney Sweeney’s off-key jeans ad boosted eugenic.
Beyond America, the wider world has also been distilled by the dictionary. Funicular (noun: a cabled tramway, from Latin funiculus, a small rope) awakens the Lisbon carnage of September. Flotilla (noun: small fleet, via Spanish) salvages the humanitarian bid to ferry aid to Gaza. Just as camerlengo (noun: the proxy cardinal between popes, from the Italian for chamberlain or honorary official) might summon the pontiff’s passing as effectively as those Vatican plumes of black smoke.
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Space nuts will know about the stripy rock the Mars rover found last year, just as I learnt the sci-fi blend of biosignature emerging from the discovery. In a neural sense, each look-up word is the news story’s proxy, its nominee representing the event itself. Take allision, say. Once the jargon exclusive to naval salts, the term for a vessel’s striking a fixed object is now a prompt for the Francis Scott Key Bridge buckling into the Patapsco in March 2024.
Closer to home, words like strollout and Karen persist as our COVID flag-bearers, just as pangolin and wet market wield that magic further afield. A mouthful like pyrocumulonimbus (the angry gout that clusters above intense heat) will mentally revive Black Summer’s hellfires.
Words for wordy types boast that evocative power, a mnemonic distillation of the whole messy shebang, just as pictures can help the visual, or scabby elbows remind the tweenager. Though much like the rapture, another hot look-up last month, one believer’s prediction of a vivid manifestation stands to be another agnostic’s brain-fog.
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