This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea. Sign up here.
You can tell a lot about a cultural moment by the words it invents. New phenomena, products, social movements, and moods require new language, and an idea without a name is unlikely to stick. The job of a dictionary is to be responsive—but not too reactive—to these trends, to catalog the new ways people are talking, which of course is the new ways they’re thinking. (Among others this year: generative AI, girlboss, meme stock, doomscroll.) Language conjures moments, but it also creates them.
For about a decade starting in January 1987, this magazine’s back page belonged intermittently to Word Watch, a column by Anne H. Soukhanov. Soukhanov was then an editor of The American Heritage Dictionary, and Word Watch was a catalog of terms the dictionary’s editors were tracking for possible inclusion in upcoming editions, based on mentions in the press and pop culture—a sort of first pass at the linguistic infrastructure of tomorrow, an educated guess at how we might describe the unknowable future.
Now that we’re in the future those editors were guessing about, many of the column’s selections feel inevitable: infomercial, Astroturf, zine, NIMBY, ’roid rage, restorative justice. In January 1987, three and a half decades before we had girl dinner, the inaugural Word Watch had graze: “to eat various appetizers … as a full meal.” In October 1989, Soukhanov described in detail a new game called paintball, “dedicated players” of which were apparently called splatmasters, and in February 1991, she noted the rise of “precious language and luscious photographs used to depict recipes or meals,” which she called gastroporn (close enough). Two months later, a word to watch was canola, as in the seed that makes the oil that is almost definitely sitting in your kitchen right now, but of which, back then, “U.S. farmers [had] yet to commit themselves to extensive planting.”
Other times, Word Watch feels like a museum of bad ideas and forgotten trends, which of course is even more entertaining. In January 1988, Word Watch defined blendo as “a style of interior decoration that mixes hightech, Eurostyle, and antique furnishings into an integrated, individualistic whole.” In June 1989, there was halter-top briefs, which I regret to inform you is “a woman’s sleeveless upper garment constructed from men’s knitted, close-fitting briefs,” and which at least one fashion writer predicted would be soon be “‘seen on streets, in stores, and in shopping malls everywhere.’”
In April 1991, the column noted the possible rise of the washing emporium, “a coin-operated laundry incorporating such features as a bar, a restaurant, entertainment, a fax machine, mailboxes, a photocopier, a snack bar, a dining room, and a study area.” It cited as evidence Rutland, Vermont’s Washbucklers, whose owner was quoted in The Boston Globe and then in Word Watch saying that his business “may prove to be ‘the new social center of the ’90s.’” A personal favorite of mine is Skycar, a car-size aircraft that would purportedly fly at altitudes up to 30,000 feet and take off and land vertically, into a parking spot. It would sell for just under $1 million in 1992 dollars, but, Soukhanov noted, “the price is expected to drop as production volume increases.”
Committing a new word to the dictionary is a pretty strange act, when you think about it. So is making a magazine. Both are an attempt at describing the world at present, with only the evidence currently available, in the face of certain obsolescence. Every dictionary edition and every magazine issue is out of date shortly after it’s published; this is by design. These things are iterative, meant to be replaced by something better and newer, which of course will then be replaced, too—always never catching up. I like Word Watch for the same reason I like The Atlantic’s archives as a whole: It lays bare the messiness of trying to describe this big, weird, changing world. It’s open-minded about what the future might look like. It makes mistakes. It does its best.
Washbucklers, by the way, is still open. It has solar panels now.
No comments:
Post a Comment