Word Spy

shtick lit

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:39:31 EST

shtick lit

n. A writing genre in which the author undertakes an odd or stuntlike project with the intention of writing about the experience. Also: schtick lit, shtik lit.

Example Citations:

Now, in his third book, he spends two years eating, exercising and researching his way to becoming "the healthiest man in the world."...

A.J. Jacobs remains the current heavyweight champion of shtick lit.
—Douglas Bell, "The king of shtick lit strikes again," The Globe and Mail, April 24, 2012

It's not a bad idea — surely the Middle East could benefit from some ingenuity — even if the book is a prime example of the sub-genre that's come to be known as "shtick lit."
—Eryn Loeb, "Time to Get Out of Your Apartment," The Jewish Daily Forward, November 17, 2010

Earliest Citation:

STEVE INSKEEP: I have in front of me a stack of books, which have this in common — many of them include in the title or subtitle the words My Year of or A Year of or "A Year Without Made in China," "Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously."...

STEVE ALMOND:...Part of the reason that this genre, which I'm going to call, kind of informally schtick lit, has propagated so many books is because a few of them had been very successful.
—Steve Inskeep and Steve Almond, "A Year for 'Year Of' Books," NPR, December 26, 2007

Notes:

My definition hews closely to the just-so definition provided by the writer and academic Ben Yagoda in his book Memoir: A History: "[B]ooks perpetrated by people who undertook an unusual project with the express purpose of writing about it."

Here's an even earlier cite, although in this case the writer is talking about books that consist of a series of jokes or gags:

No offense, Dennis, babe, but don't...you think it's time standup comedians stopped hauling down big-bucks advances just for typing up their old routines? Jerry Seinfeld popularized this literary subgenre (let's call it shtick lit) with his 1993 bestseller Seinlanguage, a flimsy collection of bits.
—"Picks and Pans," People, April 1, 1996

Categories:

Books and Magazines
Writing
Insults

Posted on April 25, 2012

Permalink: http://www.wordspy.com/words/shticklit.asp

tweet seats

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 09:39:43 EST

tweet seats

n. A section in a theater set aside for people who want to tweet during a performance. Also: tweet seat, tweeting seating.

Example Citations:

"Tweeting is so natural for theater," said Michael Yawney, an associate professor of theater at Florida International University. ...That's one of the reasons why the Palm Beach Opera began offering tweet seats in December for a performance of "Madama Butterfly" at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach.
—Johnny Diaz, "South Florida arts lovers can tweet from their theater seats," Florida Sun Sentinel, February 20, 2012

More and more arts troupes across the nation are setting aside "tweet seats" where patrons are invited to dish out their 140-character missives during the performance. From the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra to New York's Public Theater, Twitter is stealing the spotlight.
—Karen D'Souza, "The arts meet tweets," The San Jose Mercury News, January 31, 2012

Earliest Citation:

Although most theatergoers are accustomed to pre-show announcements instructing them to turn off their cell phones, the Nov. 15 performance will be an exception. Twenty-dollar Tweet Seats will be available for opera fans in a special section, where they will receive exclusive content from artistic director Ward Holmquist, who will tweet throughout the performance....

When I saw Tosca, the woman next to me was texting (during the performance), and I hated it, Luskin said. But then we thought there are people who like to do this. It s a new generation. So we thought what if we put all those people together?
—Robert Trussell, "Lyric Opera adds matinee performance of 'H.M.S. Pinafore'," The Kansas City Star, October 18, 2009

Notes:

A near miss on the earliest citation is the Guardian headline Welcome to the tweet seats: Twitter at the theatre, which uses the phrase tweet seats but isn't referring directly to a special section set aside for tweeting.

Categories:

Social Networking
Culture (General)
Music

Posted on April 24, 2012

Permalink: http://www.wordspy.com/words/tweetseats.asp

diarrheaist

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 06:14:50 EST

diarrheaist

n. A person who shares too much online, particularly personal information. Also: diarrhea-ist.

Example Citations:

Rock music's most prolific social media diarrheaist apparently failed at her last attempt to verify @CourtneyLoveUK.
—Maureen O'Connor, "Courtney Love Fails at Quest for Verified Twitter Account," Gawker, March 4, 2010

Dan, I was thinking "The Wine Diarrheaist", unless that impinges upon Mike's intellectual property rights.
—Bill Klapp, "License to Swill? (comment)," Wine Diarist, June 12, 2011

Earliest Citation:

These are the folks who have never heard the expression "brevity is the soul of wit!" Every e-mail is a mini-novel, a life story, or government report on farm subsidies.
—Pete Blackshaw, "Personalities: The 'Digital Diarrheaist'," Email by Machiavelli, August 14, 2004

Notes:

A blog named Diarrheaist News ("Bringing you the most revolting, self-indulgent bits of the online community for your self-indulgent pleasure") had a brief and, until now, unmemorable run back in July 2002.

Categories:

Social Networking
Insults
People

Posted on April 12, 2012

Permalink: http://www.wordspy.com/words/diarrheaist.asp

success disaster

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 10:12:22 EST

success disaster

n. Massive problems created when a person or company is unable to handle an overwhelming success.

Example Citations:

By the time Sandberg left Google, there were no more doubts about that company's ability to turn Web traffic into cash. The achievement was so emphatic that Sandberg and her colleagues used to worry about the other extreme, which they called "success disaster," a fairly common fate among tech start-ups.
—Kevin Conley, "Sheryl Sandberg: What She Saw at The Revolution," Vogue, May 1, 2010

To avoid a "success disaster" scenario, the unified media software platform should scale to fit capacity requirements as small as a few hundred simultaneous subscribers up to much larger audiences.
—Alex Dobrushin, "Multiscreen delivery," Broadcast Engineering, August 15, 2011

Earliest Citation:

The MBone has been regarded as one of the Internet's "success disasters": an experiment that has rapidly outgrown the confines of the lab or the testbed, using prototype software that was never meant to operate at the scale that is being demanded by its users.
—Ajit S. Thyagarajan et al., "Making the MBone Real," ISOC, May 10, 1995

Notes:

Related Words:

black swan
Slashdot effect

Categories:

Business (General)
Technology (General)

Posted on April 11, 2012

Permalink: http://www.wordspy.com/words/successdisaster.asp

hackerazzi

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 08:09:13 EST

hackerazzi

n. A person who breaks into a celebrity's email account or computer. [Hacker + paparazzi]

Example Citations:

With his head hung low, Jacksonville's so-called Kackerazzi admits he hacked into the email accounts of celebrities. Christopher Chaney faces up to 60 years in prison after pleading guilty to wiretapping and unauthorized access to a computer.
—Rich Jones, "Hate crimes claim," Morning News Recap (WOKV), March 27, 2012

Sorry, there'll be no full frontal nudity for LINDSAY LOHAN's Playboy celebrity photo shoot when it makes its debut on the January/February 2012 issue. So much for your anticipation, you aren't getting a single glimpse of Lindsay fully uncovered unless some hackerazzi goes and infiltrates her email account.
—"Sorry, No Full Frontal Nudity For LINDSAY LOHAN's Playboy Celebrity Photo Shoot," Anything Hollywood, November 13, 2011

Earliest Citation:

A man accused of targeting individuals associated with the entertainment industry by hacking into personal e-mail accounts was arrested today after being charged with a range of cyber-related crimes.
—"Florida Man Arrested in 'Operation Hackerazzi' for Targeting Celebrities with Computer Intrusion, Wiretapping, and Identity Theft," The Federal Bureau of Investigation, October 12, 2011

Notes:

Yes, I know hackerazzi is a plural term (hackerazzo would be the singular form), but that's not how writers — even professional ones — are using the word, so (proud descriptivist that I am), the definition here is singular. H/t to KH for spying this term.

Categories:

Hacking and Hackers
Celebrity
People
Crime

Posted on April 5, 2012

Permalink: http://www.wordspy.com/words/hackerazzi.asp

hashtag activism

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 07:32:30 EST

hashtag activism

n. Activism that uses a Twitter hashtag to promote a project or cause, particularly when it requires no other action from people.
—hashtag activist n.

Example Citations:

The advent of "hashtag activism" has been greeted with breathless claims about the birth of a new form of technology-based social movement. While such technologies can be extremely useful tools, they do not represent alternatives to the exhausting, age-old work of meeting people where they are, hearing their concerns, reaching common ground, building trust and convincing them that it is in their interests to act politically to change their circumstances.
—Eric Augenbraun, "Occupy Wall Street and the limits of spontaneous street protest," The Guardian, September 29, 2011

As a reporter, I don't sign up for various causes, but as someone who lives — far too much — in the world of social media, I can feel the pull of digital activism. And I have to admit I'm starting to experience a kind of "favoriting" fatigue — meaning that the digital causes of the day or week are all starting to blend together. Another week, another hashtag, and with it, a question about what is actually being accomplished.
—David Carr, "Hashtag Activism, and Its Limits," The New York Times, March 25, 2012

Earliest Citation:

Tracy and I wouldn't have devoted as much time and energy to hashtag activism in general and #p2 in particularly if we didn't understand what's at stake here.
—Jon Pincus, "The Great Hashtag Debate of 2009" (comment), Odd Time Signatures, May 3, 2009

Notes:

To learn more about Twitter hashtags, see Word Spy's bashtag entry.

Categories:

Social Networking
Insults
Activism

Posted on March 30, 2012

Permalink: http://www.wordspy.com/words/hashtagactivism.asp

pink slime

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 08:07:16 EST

pink slime

n. An industrial meat byproduct consisting of compressed low quality beef trimmings treated with ammonia gas and used as a filler for ground beef.

Example Citations:

"Pink slime" will be off the menu this fall for schools in the National School Lunch Program that don't want byproducts containing what's known officially as "lean finely textured beef," the U.S. Department of Agriculture has decided....

Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University who wrote the book Safe Food, says the USDA is trying to manage a public relations problem, not a health concern: "pink slime may be safe, nutritious, and cheap, but it's yucky. It's kind of like pet food."
—Elizabeth Weise, "USDA: Schools can decide if 'pink slime' is used in lunches," USA Today, March 14, 2012

Baghai believes the market for "fresh and healthy" will only grow in the years ahead, especially with things such as "pink slime" now making ghastly headlines. (Pink slime is the meat filler sprayed with ammonia that is widely used in the U.S. as an unlabelled ingredient in ground beef.)
—Vinay Menon, "Shane Baghai, real estate mogul turned farmer, charges into Toronto's Burger War," The Toronto Star, March 12, 2012

Earliest Citation:

Another department microbiologist, Gerald Zirnstein, called the processed beef "pink slime" in a 2002 e-mail message to colleagues and said, "I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling."
—Michael Moss, "Company's Record on Treatment of Beef Is Called Into Question," The New York Times, December 31, 2009

Notes:

Categories:

Food and Drink
Insults

Posted on March 28, 2012

Permalink: http://www.wordspy.com/words/pinkslime.asp

expenditure cascade

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:00:13 EST

expenditure cascade

n. A cascade of spending that results from consumption by the wealthy, which triggers emulative spending by the next lower class, which triggers spending by the class below that, and so on.

Example Citations:

The United States has experienced a four decade long "expenditure cascade". An expenditure cascade occurs when the rapid income growth of top earners fuels additional spending by the lower earner wannabes. The cascade begins among top earners, which encourages the middle class to spend more which, in turn, encourages the lower class to spend more. Ultimately, these expenditure cascades reduce the amount that each family saves, as there is less money available to save due to extra spending on frivolous discretionary items. Expenditure cascades are triggered by consumption. The consumption of the wealthy triggers increased spending in the class directly below them and the chain continues down to the bottom.
—Jim Quinn, "Peacock Syndrome — America's Fatal Disease," Nolan Chart, July 24, 2011

The increase in two-earner households explains only part of it. The climb in the toil index was also driven by the easy credit that fueled the housing bubble, as well as by an expenditure cascade in housing caused by growing income disparities.
—Richard H. Thaler, "I Just Got Here, but I Know Trouble When I See It," The New York Times, December 31, 2011

Earliest Citation:

Increased expenditures by top earners may thus launch what I call an "expenditure cascade" that results in increased expenditures even among those whose incomes have not risen.
—Robert Frank, "Are Positional Externalities Different from Other Externalities?," The Brookings Institution, June 4, 2003

Notes:

Categories:

Economics
Money
Retail

Posted on March 23, 2012

Permalink: http://www.wordspy.com/words/expenditurecascade.asp

cisgender

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 09:58:21 EST

cisgender

adj. Identifying with one's physical gender. Also: cis-gender, cisgendered.

Example Citations:

"We don't call being cisgender — which is when our bodies match up with our internal sense of gender — a personal choice. Both are about being who you are," she said.
—Lauren La Rose, "'Dancing' star Bono carries transgender flag," The Hamilton Spectator, September 21, 2011

But when you have a term for one group of people, you need a word for the rest, and the one they've come up with is "cisgender". So the huge majority of us are now, "members of the cisgender community".
—Simon Hoggart, "Simon Hoggart's week: Changing the gender agenda," The Guardian, June 25, 2011

Earliest Citation:

Issues of interest are transphobia, hostility, general knowledge and understanding, attitudes of the queer community and cisgendered people, etc.
—Dana Leland Defosse, "transgender research," alt.tansgendered, May 25, 1994

Notes:

This term combines the Latin prefix cis-, "the same side as," and gender to create an antonym for the more common term transgender, "identifying with aspects of both the male and female genders." Similar terms are cissexual, cisman, ciswoman, and cisperson.

Category:

Gay and Lesbian

Posted on March 20, 2012

Permalink: http://www.wordspy.com/words/cisgender.asp

piem

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 10:47:31 EST

piem

n. A poem in which the length of each word corresponds to a digit in the decimal expansion of the mathematical constant pi. [Pi + poem.]

Example Citations:

People have devised any number of methods to help them remember well more than ten digits. There is a form of poetry known as a piem, in which pi's digits are represented by the number of letters in each word. The best-known piem renders the first fifteen digits of pi as "How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy chapters involving quantum mechanics."
—Calvin Trillin, "Try to remember," The New Yorker, April 4, 2011

If calculating decimal places isn't your idea of fun, you can always memorize them. The current unofficial world record belongs to Japan's Akira Haraguchi, who rattled off 100,000 decimal places in 2006. People who need help remembering digits often fall back on memorizing a "piem," a poem in which the number of letters in each word corresponds to pi's digits.
—Ethan Trex, "10 Interesting Numbers in American Culture (Plus or Minus a Few)", Mental Floss, June 1, 2011

Earliest Citation:

There are lots of ways to remember pi, including things called piems, poems where the length of each word represents a digit.
—Alok Jha, "Pi-eyed," The Guardian, March 14, 2006

Notes:

I post this term in honor of Pi Day, which occurs every March 14. What's so special about that date? In countries that use the m/dd date format, March 14 is 3/14, and the decimal expansion of Pi begins with 3.14. Easy as, well, Pi.

Categories:

Writing
Science (General)

Posted on March 14, 2012

Permalink: http://www.wordspy.com/words/piem.asp