snowclone
The description snowclone was coined in 2004 as a neologism to describe fill-in-the-blank alterations of stock phrases like “X considered harmful” or “Wake up babe, new Y just dropped”. It was judged the best entry from a request for name suggestions in a post on linguistics blog Language Log. The word references the then-popular misconception that Inuit languages had fifty words for snow.
I find that misconception extra interesting to think about, because if there was one language that had fifty words for a concept, it would probably be English. Our long tradition of promiscuous borrowing gives us rich distinctions between words as similar as “saunter”, “amble”, “sidle”, “meander”, and “wander”.
If you combine this with the tendency for many different words to arise around euphemisms, it leads me to wonder if I could actually come up with fifty different English terms for shit. Here’s a go at it:
(Colorful language/breakfast warning!)
shit, crap, poop, poo, poopoo, poopie, doo-doo, doody, dookie, whoopsie, potty, number two, caca, cack, kak, jobbie, chod, thost, dump, merde (excuse my French), ordure, egesta, feces, feculence, fecal matter, anal leakage, defecation, evacuation, stool, bowel, refuse, organic matter, effluent, effluvia, excrement, excreta, dross, leavings, night soil, bodily waste, doings, sewage, runoff, discharge, wastewater, bilge, dreck, muck, filth, slops, sludge, slurry, blackwater, coprolite, fecalith, dung, droppings, scat, spoor, manure, mulch, compost, pellets, bull, horse puckey, horse apples, guano, cowpie, cow-flop, cowplop, cow patty, dog mess, cat litter, castings, winnet, dingleberry, log, deuce, turds, fudge, chocolate hot dog, bum rope, hershey squirts, diarrhea, santorum
I intentionally left off all the simple animal prefixes but found it interesting to consider their differences in meaning: bullshit, horseshit, dogshit, chickenshit, batshit, apeshit
yeet
The word yeet first rose to popularity as the name of a viral dance on social short video platform Vine in February 2014. It looks like the word started getting used as a general interjection of excitement in the next two months, including two viral videos involving throwing things while yelling “yeet”. The second, uploaded in April 2014 (archived on YouTube here), looks to be what solidified the association with throwing.
Unusually, the word died down along with Vine itself before experiencing a resurgence (not along with Vine itself) in 2018, now more established as a verb for “throw suddenly”. Google Trends
Jurassic
I’ve always been mildly curious about the origins of the era names we use for Deep Time like Jurassic and Cretaceous. In particular, I often mix up the more recent ones. I finally laid them out spatially in a spreadsheet to try to wrap my head around it and wanted to share what I learned. At a high level, it’s pretty amazing how difficult of a problem naming eras is. Like with elements, when you discover one, you know very little about it and the name is very difficult to change even hundreds of years later.
Eons: Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic, Phanerozoic. These are all Greek and mean roughly “hellish”, “ancient”, “earlier life”, and “visible life”. Hundreds of years later we have evidence of life in the Archean, but we certainly didn’t at the time.
Most recent eras: Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic. These are all Greek and mean roughly “old life”, “middle life”, and “new life”. They’re all subdivisions of the Phanerozoic eon, which we of course now also have evidence for life existing before.
Most recent periods: Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Paleogene, Neogene, Quaternary. Everything before Paleogene is mostly named for the place where it was first discovered. Paleogene and Neogene are of course Greek, meaning roughly “old birth” and “new birth” (“gene” as in “genesis”). Quaternary is actually the usually quite rare English word for “fourth”, the term after primary, secondary, tertiary.
Most recent epochs: Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, Holocene (and Anthropocene, which is currently in proposal phase). These were discovered out of order and out of context and are retrospectively an incredible feat of naming. They’re all Greek, meaning roughly “old new”, “dawn new”, “few new”, “less new”, “more new”, “most new”, “all new”, and “human new”.
| Eon | Era | Period | Epoch | Start (Mya) | End (Mya) | Greek Gloss | Place Name |
| Hadean | 4567 | 4031 | hellish | ||||
| Archean | 4031 | 2500 | ancient | ||||
| Eoarchean | 4031 | 3600 | dawn ancient | ||||
| Paleoarchean | 3600 | 3200 | old ancient | ||||
| Mesoarchean | 3200 | 2800 | middle ancient | ||||
| Neoarchean | 2800 | 2500 | new ancient | ||||
| Proterozoic | 2500 | 539 | earlier life | ||||
| Paleoproterozoic | 2500 | 1600 | old earlier life | ||||
| Siderian | 2500 | 2300 | iron | ||||
| Rhyacian | 2300 | 2050 | stream of lava | ||||
| Orosirian | 2050 | 1800 | mountain range | ||||
| Statherian | 1800 | 1600 | stable | ||||
| Mesoproterozoic | 1600 | 1000 | middle earlier life | ||||
| Calymmian | 1600 | 1400 | cover | ||||
| Ectasian | 1400 | 1200 | extension | ||||
| Stenian | 1200 | 1000 | narrow | ||||
| Neoproterozoic | 1000 | 539 | new earlier life | ||||
| Tonian | 1000 | 720 | stretch | ||||
| Cryogenian | 720 | 635 | cold birth | ||||
| Ediacaran | 635 | 539 | Ediacara Hills, Australia | ||||
| Phanerozoic | 539 | 0 | visible life | ||||
| Paleozoic | 539 | 252 | old life | ||||
| Cambrian | 539 | 485 | Cymru (Wales) | ||||
| Terreneuvian | 539 | 521 | Terre-Neuve (Newfoundland) | ||||
| (unnamed) | 521 | 509 | |||||
| Miaolingian | 509 | 497 | Miao Ling, China | ||||
| Furongian | 497 | 485 | lotus (Mandarin) | ||||
| Ordovician | 485 | 444 | Ordovices (Celtic tribe) | ||||
| Silurian | 444 | 419 | Silures (Celtic tribe) | ||||
| Llandovery | 444 | 433 | Llandovery, Wales | ||||
| Wenlock | 433 | 427 | Wenlock Edge, England | ||||
| Ludlow | 427 | 423 | Ludlow, England | ||||
| Pridoli | 423 | 419 | Přídolí, Czechia | ||||
| Devonian | 419 | 359 | Devon, England | ||||
| Carboniferous | 359 | 300 | coal-bearing (Latin) | ||||
| Mississippian | 359 | 323 | Mississippi, USA | ||||
| Pennsylvanian | 323 | 300 | Pennsylvania, USA | ||||
| Permian | 300 | 252 | Perm, Russia | ||||
| Cisuralian | 300 | 273 | Ural Mountains (Russia/Kazakhstan) | ||||
| Guadalupian | 273 | 260 | Guadalupe Mountains, USA | ||||
| Lopingian | 260 | 252 | Loping, China | ||||
| Mesozoic | 252 | 66 | middle life | ||||
| Triassic | 252 | 201 | triad (Latin) | ||||
| Jurassic | 201 | 145 | Jura Mountains (France/Switzerland) | ||||
| Cretaceous | 145 | 66 | chalk (Latin) | ||||
| Cenozoic | 66 | 0 | new life | ||||
| Paleogene | 66 | 23 | old birth | ||||
| Paleocene | 66 | 56 | old new | ||||
| Eocene | 56 | 33.9 | dawn new | ||||
| Oligocene | 33.9 | 23 | few new | ||||
| Neogene | 23 | 2.58 | new birth | ||||
| Miocene | 23 | 5.33 | less new | ||||
| Pliocene | 5.33 | 2.58 | more new | ||||
| Quaternary | 2.58 | 0 | fourth (English) | ||||
| Pleistocene | 2.58 | 0.012 | most new | ||||
| Holocene | 0.012 | 0 | all new | ||||
| Anthropocene* | 0 | 0 | human new |
yoink
The interjection yoink is probably not in even the top three words coined by The Simpsons, even though it’s likely the most commonly used now. It’s first heard in the 1993 episode Duffless, but quickly becomes a signature sound effect for the series. It was created by series writer George Meyer, possibly as an onomatopoeia for a rising violin sound effect that accompanied snatching something in old comedies. Series writer Bill Oakley instead claims it was taken from Jughead comics, but I wasn’t able to find a searchable archive.
Truly the Shakespeare of our time.
helicopter
The machine helicopter is a borrowing from “hélicoptère”, first named in French in 1861 by Gustave de Ponton d’Amécourt. His machine did not fly; the first nontrivial helicopter flight would not be completed until 1923, but the name stuck. Hélicoptère was a novel compound of the Ancient Greek words ἕλιξ (hélix, “spiral”) and πτερόν (pterón, “wing”). Some other derivations from those Greek words include, well, “helix”, and “pterodactyl”.
In the intervening time, people reinterpreted the compound as heli- + -copter rather than helico- + -pter. Both rebracketed affixes are productive in English! For example, “helipad” is first attested in 1960, not too long after the first commercially viable helicopter started production in 1942. “Quadcopter” is first attested in 2004 as the media term for what researchers had been calling “quadrotors”. (I delight in linguistic frankensteins, so folks insisting it should be “tetrapter” instead since “quad” is Latin are a fun side note to me.)
More recently, “helicopter parent” became a common phrase in the early 2000s, but the metaphor is a bit older, first seeing print in 1989.