Gen Z slang invades Dictionary.com for another year: 'Bed rotting,' 'girl dinner,' 'boobne' and more - Yahoo! Voices - Dictionary

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Gen Z slang invades Dictionary.com for another year: 'Bed rotting,' 'girl dinner,' 'boobne' and more  Yahoo! Voices

Review: New International Books in Translation - The New York Times - Translation

Fiston Mwanza Mujila, the award-winning Congolese author of “Tram 83,” writes novels and poetry that move to an infectious, syncopated rhythm. His latest work, THE VILLAIN’S DANCE (Deep Vellum, 279 pp., paperback, $16.95), especially revels in this spirit. In 1990s Zaire, where Mobutu Sese Seko’s reign is on its last legs, survival is itself an elaborate hustle. The Kinshasa nightclubs are packed, the streets teeming with teenage runaways and rumors of insurrection. Just across the border, in an Angola racked by civil war, the diamond mines are a magnet for get-rich dreamers.

All the characters have their own dilemmas to work out: Sanza, who has fallen in with a glue-sniffing street gang; Molakisi, eager to reinvent himself in Angola; Franz, an Austrian writer who spends more time at the Mambo de la Fête than working on his “African” novel. The plots and vendettas zig and zag, eventually intersecting. Throughout, the voices of the children strike some of the book’s most compelling notes. “We had the experience of the street — glue, rivalries with opposing gangs, rain, tangles with soldiers — yet people always insisted on saddling us with the pompous, dreary label of child,” bemoans Sanza.

Mujila’s frenetic energy is captured in rapturous language by Roland Glasser, translating from the French. Recalling the gritty, exuberant novels of the South African Zakes Mda (“Ways of Dying”) and the Congolese Alain Mabanckou (“African Psycho”), Mujila has brought to life a feverish tale of Africa’s underclass, whose demands — like the author’s — are hard to resist. As one character remarks, “We want reality, the mines, the glue, the Villain’s Dance!”

If “The Villain’s Dance” is immersed in Congolese reality, Balsam Karam’s THE SINGULARITY (Feminist Press, 219 pp., paperback, $16.95) — though also concerned with the marginalized and ignored — hovers at a distance from its material.

In an unnamed coastal city, children congregate in sweltering alleyways and abandoned lots, far from the tourists who flock to the seaside cafes. The youths and their families are migrants from an embattled foreign land, unsure how to navigate this new world. Young women are disappearing — possibly abducted — including a girl simply called the Missing One. Her mother desperately looks for her everywhere, while her grandmother quietly keeps vigil: “From here she can see the movement of loss and doesn’t know what to do; she sees it all the time and fears it as she sits there watching over the alley.”

Karam — who is of Kurdish ancestry and moved to Sweden as a young child — has an eye for poignant shifts in perspectives. The story of a mother searching for her daughter runs parallel to that of a visitor, herself a former refugee and soon-to-be mother, wrestling with her own history of displacement. The two narratives refract and then come together in a poetic convergence. There is a haunting, hushed tone to the novel, neatly evoked by Saskia Vogel’s translation from the Swedish, that probes the disorienting effects of exile. As Karam writes of the bereft mother of the Missing One: “The inner distances are greater — between memory and memory and from experience to experience time no longer passes, and the woman does not know where she is or why.”

The Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi’s debut story collection, YOU GLOW IN THE DARK (New Directions, 112 pp., paperback, $14.95), in a lively translation by Chris Andrews, is an eerie mix of the familiar and unreal. The stories take place in prehistoric caves and peasant villages, but also feature nuclear power plants, interstellar travel and drones.

Colanzi writes with a sense of menace about power clashes in a landscape that often resembles the Bolivian Altiplano. Her characters speak versions of Spanish and Aymara, and are preoccupied with threats both real and imagined (radiation, poison, the Devil). The title story, based on a radiological accident in Brazil in 1987, takes on an otherworldly quality in Colanzi’s hands. Local citizens, engulfed by “the glow of death, the phosphorescence of sin,” are left to ponder the existential meaning of this unnatural disaster.

In another story, “The Narrow Way,” teenage sisters dream of escaping their father’s religious cult; they’re held captive in a compound where “beyond the perimeter lies the jungle with its shadows, and beyond that, the city with its illusions.” An “obedience collar” keeps them from crossing a magnetic field that delivers increasingly powerful shocks. Will they ever experience freedom, and what will be its consequences?

Like other Latin American writers such as Samanta Schweblin, Fernanda Melchor and Mónica Ojeda, Colanzi is intent on blending genres (horror, cyberpunk, literary fiction). Her reality is a warped one, shifting between a violent past and frightening future, where the heat and toxic radiation — and the babble of inner voices — combine to create a hallucinatory vision.

The Kashmiri writer Hari Krishna Kaul’s stories, on the other hand, are firmly rooted in his contested homeland in the late 20th century. Kaul, who died in exile in 2009 at the age of 75, left an intricate body of work that amounts to sly, detailed portraits of domestic life set against the backdrop of religious and political tensions.

But even when Kaul’s tales focus on the mundane, fault lines open up. Several stories in his collection FOR NOW, IT IS NIGHT (Archipelago, 205 pp., paperback, $22) involve crushing bouts of loneliness and despair, often prompted by the isolation of curfews and avalanches. “For now, it is night. For now, it is dark. For now, it is cold. In this darkness and this cold, I am alone,” reflects a housebound character in the title story. In “Tomorrow — A Never-Ending Story,” things take a surreal turn as two boys repeat their grade-school class for decades, failing to age as the town around them transforms.

“For Now, It Is Night” is an enthralling — and welcome — reclamation of Kaul’s fiction by a team of four translators (including his niece, Kalpana Raina). Kaul’s work shimmers with questions of reality and illusion, home and exile. “Just like the stalled traffic which had begun to move,” thinks a Kashmiri adrift in Delhi in “A Moment of Madness,” “his stagnant life would be revitalized if he allowed himself to think about Kashmir again.” But, as Kaul reminds us, it’s never that easy. “A person may walk or take a flight,” the character later muses, “but can a destination ever be reached?”

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What We Do in the Shadows: Nandor Finds Peace in Translation - Vulture - Translation

Photo: FX/Hulu

I was in my mid-20s, a few years after moving out of my parents’ home, when I grasped that I was beginning to forget Persian. I grew up speaking the language every day with my family and every weekend with overseas relatives called via prepaid long-distance phone cards, the universal immigrant currency. When I befriended other Iranian Americans in high school and took Iranian literature and film classes in college, I’d slide into Persian then too, gossiping during Middle Eastern Dance Club and discussing paper ideas with my professors. I was always better at understanding the language than speaking it, but I was comfortable with my conversational proficiency — with the certainty that if I ran into a Persian-speaking stranger, I could hold my own. But after graduation, I no longer spoke Persian every day, and the pressures of work and life began pushing certain words out of my brain. The words for “fork” and “knife” begin with similar ch- sounds (changal and chahghou), yet I suddenly couldn’t remember “spoon” (ghashogh). Persian has flowery and formal phrases used as more polite ways to express gratitude, congratulations, and other warm sentiments, and I’d start emphasizing the wrong syllables whenever I tried to say them. My memory was backsliding. Regularly reading chunks of Dariush B. Gilani’s meticulous An English Persian Dictionary helped but didn’t fully reverse the regression.

A decade later, I still feel that exasperation when I reach for a word that doesn’t materialize, that’s on the tip of my tongue or the edge of my brain but refuses to move forward. I still feel the shame of not being better at something that’s supposed to be a part of me, and I still feel elated when I invoke a phrase, term, or expression I thought I had lost. It’s like standing in the overlapped portion of a Venn diagram of diverging lives: a moment of clarity amid confusion, and the relief that a defining element of my cultural identity isn’t totally gone. Maintaining a connection through language to where you’re from originally (without all the xenophobia that normally comes with that question) is a uniquely immigrant experience, explored in films like Minari, The Namesake, and Tigertail and TV series such as Fresh Off the Boat, We Are Lady Parts, Pachinko, and Little America. But I’ve never seen it more beautifully captured than by a perpetually braggadocious, sexually voracious, and luxuriously caped vampire living on Staten Island.

Three of What We Do in the Shadows’ primary vampires are immigrants, and the heritage of Nandor of Al Quolanudar, Nadja of Antipaxos, and Laszlo Cravensworth of, uh, white England roughly align with the ethnic and national backgrounds of actors Kayvan Novak (Iranian British), Natasia Demetriou (Greek Cypriot British), and Matt Berry (British British). That synchronicity allows the actors to cheekily dig into hundreds of years of tropes and stereotypes about their cultures (with the ludicrously affected accents and vocal patterns to match) and means WWDITS can find creative comparisons between the undead experience and those of exodus and diaspora. An expat can be an outcast and an other, and the show maps how that same isolation can apply to a vampire, too. Nandor acutely feels the burden of eternal life: His birthplace, Al Quolanudar, is no more, and unlike the married Nadja and Laszlo, he has no forever partner (despite Guillermo’s endless loyalty). His loneliness is often his defining characteristic.

In the season-one episode “Citizenship,” Nandor learns his former home Al Quolanudar was “dissolved” in 1401 and worries, saying, “What do I have? Nowhere is my home.” (Al Quolanudar is fictional, but Nandor clarifies to Guillermo it would be in modern-day southern Iran; Persian-speaking WWDITS fans theorize the country’s name is itself a pun in the language.) After Nandor fails his American citizenship test, he broods: “I have no country … I have no people. I’m like a little lost duck, floating about in the middle of the ocean.” Guillermo tries to comfort Nandor by reminding him of his vampiric power, but the character’s boastfulness (“I will not bow down to your pathetic bureaucracies! It is you who will bow down to me!”) is persistently revealed as a front. Nandor so craves love and friendship that in the seasons to come, he joins a wellness cult and willingly pulls out his fangs to remain part of that community, commands a genie to bring his 37 wives back from the dead, and regularly defies vampiric tribalism to defend Guillermo despite the familiar’s Van Helsing heritage. Nandor’s wistfulness is born of his bone-deep belief that something is missing from his perpetuity, and these moments emphasize how Nandor being from a place that no longer exists is key to his dispossession.

In season-two episode “Ghosts,” Nandor and his roommates conjure their own ghosts to help them address any unfinished business. Nandor’s, Nadja’s, and Laszlo’s specters appear frozen at the moment when they were transformed into vampires, meaning they’re the most Al Qolnidarese, Antipaxan, and British they’ve been so far. Their ghosts aren’t yet diluted by hundreds of years spent away from their birthplaces, and especially not by decades of inertia in the American suburbs. But Nandor can’t communicate with his ghost because of their language barrier, and WWDITS keeps its English-speaking audience in the dark: Ghost-Nandor’s Al Qolnidarese dialogue (which is actually Persian) goes largely untranslated, and the episode’s closed captions are phonetically inaccurate. The tension builds between Nandor, embarrassed to not remember the language he spoke while mortal, and Ghost-Nandor, irritated at being magicked into this place where no one can talk to him. Ghost-Nandor attacks a lamp; Nandor offers only a paltry sob bekher (“good morning”). Each assesses the other and finds him lacking.

If you don’t understand Persian, you’re absorbed into that disorientation and amused by Novak experimenting with line delivery and body language to play against himself. If you do understand Persian, you glean the insults Ghost-Nandor lobs his counterpart’s way, including comparing him to a donkey. And if you’re like me — an Iranian American who doesn’t speak Persian as well as they should and gets in their feelings about it — the dual-Nandor drama exposes the fragile bonds between heritage, language, and identity, an emotional wallop as profound as Ghost-Nadja is horny.

The two Nandors’ enmity (Nandor ashamed by his lost language, Ghost-Nandor aghast at him for losing it) intensifies until, finally, a moment of shared sentiment: Ghost-Nandor recognizes his horse, Jahan, in one of the many self-portraits lining Nandor’s chambers, and Nandor realizes his ghost’s unfinished task: saying good-bye to the horse they both loved. (Jahan died when Mortal-Nandor, starving during a difficult battle, killed and ate him.) In further demonstration of his dialect displacement, Nandor refers to his most loyal companion, whom he had named Jahan, the Persian word for “world,” as the anglicized “John.” But now that Nandor understands what motivates his ghost and faces the feelings inspired by the language he forgot, he’s able to make peace with his past actions.

After performing a séance to bring John/Jahan to this plane, Nandor thanks the horse who was closer to him “than even members of my own family,” who was always there “when I felt a little sad,” and who sacrificed his flesh so that Nandor could live — and has the grace to let his ghost have a moment alone with Ghost-John/Jahan. As Ghost-Nandor regales their horse with the Al Qolnidarese endearments to which he was accustomed in life — azizam (“my dear”) and asalam (“my sweet”) — Nandor doesn’t interrupt or interfere. He shares the triumph and pleasure of their reunion, and the Nandors’ attention and adoration feeds Ghost-John/Jahan emotionally as the horse once fed them literally. Ghost-Nandor and Ghost-John/Jahan’s departure into the next metaphysical plane symbolizes how it feels to give up parts of ourselves as we age, acquiesce, and assimilate. It also argues that our actions after that loss are what matter most — how we create room for our past alongside our present and future and provide compassion to the person we were for making us the person we are.

Eternal life in What We Do in the Shadows is not only predicated on a parade of death; it provides a space for second chances. A word leaving your vocabulary is like a tiny part of yourself being siphoned off, and a steady drip can become a flood. Nandor speaking his birth language and sharing time with Ghost-John/Jahan, who was such a representation of Nandor’s Al Qolnidarese life, is an opportunity to reverse that flow, to honor the elements that forged him, and to strengthen the roots that grew him. As long as Nandor walks and talks, Al Quolanudar survives in some small way, too. Nandor, Ghost-Nandor, and Ghost-John/Jahan exchanging the Persian for “good morning” as they part could be seen as ironic, since none of them will ever see dawn again. But that greeting, like so much of the series’ wordplay, is less literal than figurative. Sob bekher also implies blessings on a new day. It’s fundamentally a measure of potential to be realized — for unearthing a long-buried aspect of yourself — and that singular colloquialism doesn’t diminish how those opportunities exist in nearly any time, any place, and any language for our vampires to seize. In “Ghosts,” What We Do in the Shadows finds the right words.

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'Girl dinner' and hundreds of other new entries were added to Dictionary.com. How would Philly use them in a sentence? - The Philadelphia Inquirer - Dictionary

“Girl dinner” has its own dictionary entry now. Hopefully that doesn’t give you “the ick,” another new entry.

Dictionary.com announced Tuesday it has added more than 300 new entries to its online portfolio as part of its winter update.

New phrases include: girl dinner, bussin’, the ick, slow fashion, shacket, Barbiecore, bag holder, greedflation, and more.

“The intersection of language, learning, and culture is boundless, and we recognize that words have the power to shape thoughts, bridge gaps, and reflect our ever-evolving society,” Dictionary.com vice president of editorial John Kelly said. “Our semi-annual New Words announcement is meant to support a greater understanding of where language is, where it might go next — and why the constantly expanding universe of words matters for our everyday lives.”

Key themes and words for the winter 2024 update include pop culture and slang, science, fashion, entertainment, and more. The update also includes additions and revised definitions for existing entries, such as “mid,” which in modern slang can mean unimpressive.

Can you use it in a sentence?

Here’s some of Dictionary.com’s newest entries plus a guide to how we’d use the phrases in Philly.

Girl dinner: an often attractively presented collection of snacks that involve little preparation, such as small quantities of cold cuts, cheese, fruit, cherry tomatoes, etc., and often including items of little nutritional value, deemed sufficient to constitute a meal for one: typically the fare of young single women with little time or inclination to cook.

Used in a sentence: I don’t want a real entrée, I’m going to get girl dinner at Wawa tonight featuring Tastykake Krimpets, mac and cheese, and potato chips.

Shacket: a garment in the style of a button-down shirt, made of a thicker fabric and usually worn over other shirts.

Used in a sentence: South Philly wasn’t cold enough for a coat last week, but I still needed a light layer. So I picked up a shacket from August Moon.

Slow fashion: a movement among clothing producers and consumers that emphasizes eco-friendly, well-made clothing, maintenance and repair of garments to extend their lifespan, and a general reduction of one’s consumption of new clothing items.

Used in a sentence: Lobo Mau in Queen Village specializes in slow fashion, working with local factories and silk-screening original textiles in-house. They’re a zero-waste company.

The ick: The ick is a term used in dating to refer to a sudden feeling of disgust or repulsion to a dating partner someone was previously attracted to.

Used in a sentence: When Jason Kelce’s brother, Travis Kelce, started scream-singing “Viva Las Vegas” during his Super Bowl win celebration Sunday night, cameras cut to a shot of what looked like Taylor Swift contracting the ick. But later on, they appeared to remain very much in love.

Bussin’: great; wonderful; amazing.

Used in a sentence: Inquirer readers say the cheesesteaks at Dalessandro’s are bussin’.

Sound bath: an instance of sustained listening to the pleasant sounds emanating from a collection of singing bowls, bells, chimes, etc., used to aid in relaxation or meditation and believed to help restore physical and mental wellness.

Used in a sentence: Several yoga studios and meditation spaces in Philadelphia offer sound baths, including Evolve Yoga and Beyond in Paoli and Formation Sauna + Wellness in Northern Liberties.

Girl dad: a father of a daughter or daughters, especially one with only a daughter or daughters. (Girl mom, boy mom, and boy dad also received new entries)

Used in a sentence: Jason Kelce is the ultimate girl dad with footage of him playing with his three daughters always tugging at Eagles fans’ heartstrings.

See all of Dictionary.com’s new entries by visiting https://ift.tt/V2WdfCl.

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Dictionary.com is adding 327 new entries: Here are 7 you should know - The Hill - Dictionary

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(NEXSTAR) — New words get added to dictionaries often. Just a few months ago, Merriam-Webster added 690 words to its dictionary. Among those were numerous slang terms, like rizz and simp. The newest entries have become common terms in our vernacular in recent years, Merriam-Webster said when justifying the additions. 

On Tuesday, Dictionary.com announced its own big update, including 327 new entries, 173 new definitions, and more than 1,200 revised definitions. 

“It’s 2024, and the pace of language change is as rapid as it has ever been. Our lexicographers are updating the dictionary more frequently than ever, doing the human-scale work of documenting words across the vast spectrum of the always-evolving English language,” the site said in a blog post. 

This builds on an update Dictionary.com did in the fall, which included terms like “shower orange” and “mountweazel.” The latest additions include equally peculiar terms, as well as those that serve to describe “major topics of the day,” like climate, health, science, and economics. 

You can view Dictionary.com’s new terms here, but before you do, here are seven words you should know. 

Greedflation

Not to be confused with ‘shrinkflation,’ greedflation refers to a rise in prices unrelated to market pressure or other organic factors. It is instead “caused by corporate executives or boards of directors, property owners, etc., solely to increase profits that are already healthy or excessive,” according to Dictionary.com.

Beef prices could hit record highs in 2024, experts warn: Here’s why

A watchdog report released in June 2023 found some of the largest general consumer S&P 500 companies were potentially guilty of greedflation as they raised prices simply to boost their own profits, despite efforts by the Fed to control inflation, The Hill reports. The report pointed to companies like General Mills, Tyson Foods, and PepsiCo, who admitted to benefitting from the practice.

Keto flu

You may be able to figure out what this one means, but if not, Dictionary.com defines keto flu as “a temporary feeling of illness or physical unease often experienced by those starting” a keto diet. 

The keto diet has remained popular through the years, but as this term shows, it can cause problems for some. Keto flu has been a documented occurrence for years, with Harvard Health warning about the group of symptoms — fatigue, headache, brain fog, nausea, problems sleeping, irritability, and constipation — since 2018. In that post, Dr. Marcelo Campos explained it isn’t clear why exactly it can occur among those starting a keto diet, but it isn’t uncommon for “undesirable symptoms” to show up “in the first few days after changing what you eat.”

Bed rotting

The TikTok trend of “bed rotting” gained a lot of traction last summer. As negative as it may sound, many view it as a form of self-care. Dictionary.com describes bed rotting as “the practice of spending many hours in bed during the day, often with snacks or an electronic device, as a voluntary retreat from activity or stress.”

Some health experts have urged caution toward it, though. Emily Mudd, PhD, a child psychologist at Cleveland Clinic Children’s, previously said it “can become a problem if you are doing it in the context to avoid something, or you feel like you are not physically or emotionally able to get out of bed.” 

‘Bed rotting’: Some call it self care, but experts urge caution

She warned that spending long periods of time in bed could lead to social isolation, which can in turn be a risk factor for depression and anxiety. 

Girl dinner

Another term to credit TikTok for, “girl dinner” refers to a meal similar to a charcuterie board. More specifically, Dictionary.com lists its definition as “an often attractively presented collection of snacks that involve little preparation, such as small quantities of cold cuts, cheese, fruit, cherry tomatoes, etc., deemed sufficient to constitute a meal for one.”

Even Popeyes jumped on the trend, offering a “Girl Dinner” tab on its menu where customers could order a variety of individual sides, minus the chicken. It’s not to be confused with “girl math,” a different TikTok trend in which users explained how practices like paying with cash is buying an item for free or returning an item equates to gaining money. 

Skiplagging

Travelers may already be familiar with “skiplagging,” or the practice of booking a cheaper flight that has a layover at your destination rather than a more expensive direct flight. So, for example, instead of flying directly from New York to Kansas City, you book a flight from New York to Denver that has a layover in Kansas City. 

My Facebook keeps chirping. How do I get it to stop?

Skiplagging is also known as hidden city ticketing and point beyond ticketing, terms you’ll find in any airline’s conditions of carriage. Last year, a teenager was detained and forced to purchase a new ticket after a gate agent became skeptical of his itinerary, which was booked using a site that helps passengers find skiplagged flights. While not illegal, airlines have been working to crack down on skiplagging for years. 

Range anxiety

If you have an electrical vehicle, you may already be familiar with this term, even if it isn’t in your vernacular. “Range anxiety” refers to the fear that your EV’s “battery will run out of power” before you can reach your destination or a charging station, Dictionary.com explains.

Studies have shown bitter cold temperatures can reduce an EV’s driving range and cause them to recharge slowly, a fact many across the U.S. experienced last month amid a days-long cold snap.

Global boiling

After Earth shattered global annual heat records in 2023, it’s no surprise a term like “global boiling” has entered our lingo. Dictionary.com defines the nonscientific term as being used to “emphasize the trend toward and severity of extreme heat events, especially in regard to public health.” 

A recently released study found that heat waves and wildfires that have become more common in the U.S. can increase bad air days, which could prove detrimental to many, like children and those with chronic illnesses. Even in winter, we’ve seen unprecedented warmth that could impact us in the long run, as January marked the eighth straight month that heat records were broken. 

Goodbye, snowy winters? New climate report offers dry projections

Other terms Dictionary.com has added include kennel cough, the infection dogs can catch; super fog, a combination of wildfire smoke and fog; and Barbicore, an aesthetic or style inspired by last summer’s blockbuster hit, “Barbie.”

Not a fan of these words? You can always suggest them for the list of “Banished Words” Lake Superior State University releases annually. Among the words you shouldn’t use in 2024 are hack, cringe-worthy, slay, and the aforementioned rizz. The university is accepting nominations for its 2025 list until November.

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Dictionary.com adds over 300 new entries, including 'girl dinner' - USA TODAY - Dictionary

It may have started off as a video that exploded into a meme, but "girl dinner" is now one of more than 300 words added to Dictionary.com's lexicon in 2024.

On Tuesday, Dictionary.com announced it was adding 327 new entries, 173 new definitions for existing entries and 1,228 revised definitions to the dictionary. The newly-added terms are broad, stemming from major topics of the day and range from economics and climate to health and wellness and slang.

“The intersection of language, learning, and culture is boundless, and we recognize that words have the power to shape thoughts, bridge gaps, and reflect our ever-evolving society,” John Kelly, vice president of editorial at Dictionary.com said in a release. “Our semi-annual New Words announcement is meant to support a greater understanding of where language is, where it might go next—and why the constantly expanding universe of words matters for our everyday lives.”

Here's a look at just some of the hundreds of words recently added to Dictionary.com, as well as their definitions and the origin behind the term. The full list of new words can be found on Dictionary.com.

Girl dinner

• Noun
• Often attractively presented collection of snacks that involve little preparation, such as small quantities of cold cuts, cheese, fruit, cherry tomatoes, etc., deemed sufficient to constitute a meal for one.
• Girl dinner went viral after TikTok user Olivia Maher used the term in a video in May 2023, possibly shortening an earlier version, hot girl dinner, that often included decadent or youth-maintaining food.

Mid

• Adjective
• Mediocre, unimpressive, or disappointing.

Bussin'

• Adjective
• Great; wonderful; amazing.
• Popular among Gen Z, this term originates in African American culture and is likely based on various senses of bust meaning “to explode,” “to do well,” or “to enjoy.”

The ick

• Noun
• A sudden feeling of disgust or dislike, often in response to the actions of another person.
• This phrase, popular in dating culture and on TikTok, is thought to trace back to the late 1990s TV show Ally McBeal. The ick is also used as an informal term for an illness, especially a cold or flu.

Cheat code

• Noun
• A ploy or technique that bypasses traditional methods or rules in order to improve oneself or one’s success.
• This more recent sense of the term is an extension of its use in the context of video games, in which it refers to a hidden command, code, etc., used to gain an advantage, such as by advancing levels or enhancing a character’s strengths.

Range anxiety

• Noun
• The apprehension or fear that an electric vehicle’s battery will run out of power beforereaching one’s intended destination or a charging station.

Skiplagging

• Noun
• The practice of purchasing an air ticket for a flight with a layover at one’s true destination, getting off at the layover point, and skipping the last leg of the flight: a workaround to avoid paying a higher fare for a direct flight to one’s destination.
• The verb form is skiplag, a compound of skip, “to jump or pass over,” and lag, “an instance of staying behind."

Bed rotting

• Noun
• The practice of spending many hours in bed during the day, often with snacks or an electronic device, as a voluntary retreat from activity or stress.
• Despite the negative connotation of rotting, many use this term in a positive way to refer to what they consider a form of self-care. The verb form is bed rot.

Pretty privilege

• Noun
• An unearned and mostly unacknowledged societal advantage that a person has by fitting into the beauty standards of their culture.
• Pretty privilege uses the same construction as white privilege and similar terms.

Barbiecore

• Noun
• An aesthetic or style featuring playful pink outfits, accessories, decor, etc., celebrating and modeled on the wardrobe of the Barbie doll.
• We’re likely still fully within the trend of using -core to form names for niche aesthetics, such as cottagecore and normcore.

Slow fashion

• Noun
• A movement among clothing producers and consumers that emphasizes eco-friendly, well-made clothing, maintenance and repair of garments to extend their lifespan, and a general reduction of one’s consumption of new clothing items.
• This term is used in contrast with fast fashion. The fast/slow framing is perhaps best known for its use in the distinction between fast food and slow food, but it will likely continue to be applied in other contexts where there is interest in sustainable practices.

Bechdel test

• Noun
• A test of gender stereotyping and inequality in fiction, having a number of variations and used especially with movies, based on whether the work includes at least two fairly important female characters who talk to each other about something besides a man.
• The first recorded uses of the term Bechdel test come from between 2005 and 2010, but the concept was introduced by cartoonist Alison Bechdel in a 1985 comic strip.

Tommy John surgery

• Noun
• An operation to repair a torn ligament on the inner side of the elbow by replacing it with a tendon from elsewhere in the body or from a donor.
• Common among baseball players, the surgery gets its name from pitcher Tommy John, on whom the procedure was first performed in 1974. It is formally called ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction.

Prebiotic

• Noun
• A substance containing dietary fiber that stimulates the growth or activity of beneficial bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract.

Greedflation

• Noun
• A rise in prices, rents, or the like, that is not due to market pressure or any other factor organic to the economy, but is caused by corporate executives or boards of directors, property owners, etc., solely to increase profits that are already healthy or excessive.
• The verb form is greedflate. Other recently added inflation words include shrinkflation and shadow inflation.

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Translating Race: Bruna Dantas Lobato on Jeferson Tenório's The Dark Side of Skin - Literary Hub - Translation

I translated and revised most of Jeferson Tenório’s The Dark Side of Skin while staying with a friend in Brooklyn, New York, for an impromptu residency. I drank too much coffee and typed all afternoon, until I could no longer process the emotions in the book and had to stop for the day.

After dinner, each night, my friend and I walked her dog to the park, and that was my chance to see the cherry blossoms in bloom, people-watch, get some fresh air, and think about something else. Instead, all I did was think about my translation of this book. Bits of dialogue that sounded too stiff, too formal, too dry. Sounds I had yet to capture. Metaphors I hadn’t figured out how to land.

As we walked by the bougie kosher coffee shops in Crown Heights, I talked to my friend about this book she hadn’t read, by an author she didn’t know, in a language she didn’t speak, from a country she’d never visited. From the outside, it might have looked futile, but every time we talked answers came to me.

Translation (and writing) has a way of inserting itself into my daily life: phrases will come to me in the shower, while I wash the dishes, while I chop vegetables for dinner, or sip wine with a friend. My body relaxes and my mind tunes to a character’s voice like a radio.

On one of those nights, while my friend’s dog ran free in the off-leash area, I talked about struggling to find the right translation of the title. The original title “O avesso da pele” sounds almost anatomical to me, the way Kerry James Marshall’s painting “Beauty Examined” manages to be both an aesthetic and sociological experience, a painting of a nude “female blk subject” posing as scientific illustration. It sounds both academic and artistic, both figurative and literal: it evoked the opposite of skin and racism, made me imagine someone with their skin put on inside out.

“The Opposite of Skin” captures one half of the meaning but not the other. Same for “Flipside of the Skin,” “Under the Skin,” “Behind the Skin.” They were all too literal, too easy and insufficient, too light. Earlier that day, before our walk, I’d reread parts of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, I told my friend, looking for a solution, something to do with wearing one’s own skin like a disguise, wearing a Black skin in a white world. Her dog ran back to where we stood and sat by our feet. We watched a tiny chihuahua sniff a stranger’s shoes, a Pitbull walk by in a Knicks dog jersey, a child zoom by on a scooter. It was a lovely spring evening in a quiet corner of the city.

“It sounds like a very dark book,” my friend finally said, and I nodded. And then it hit me: The Dark Side of Skin. It’s further from the original than some of the other options, less literal, more metaphorical (with no “the” before “skin”), and this is exactly what makes it work as a title. It’s as idiomatic in English as “O avesso da pele” is in Portuguese, and it’s just as urgent, unapologetically direct, sure of itself, with the word “dark” carrying more than one meaning. It sets the right tone for the book, gives it the right amount of weight and gravity, and sounds just like something Henrique might have said on my translation radio.

Part of me would love for the issues in this book to be simpler, less painful.

I tried to maintain a similar slow-burning sense of urgency throughout the book as I revised my translation. Black people in Brazil are disproportionately killed by police: in 2020, the year the book was originally published, 78 percent of the people murdered by police in Brazil were Black. In October of that year, George Floyd was murdered in the US. A month later, João Alberto Silveira Freitas was murdered by white security guards at a Carrefour in Porto Alegre, the same city where Henrique lived and died.

Literature has historically replicated this disproportion, indeed, this erasure. According to data collected by the University of Brasília, 90 percent of the books published in Brazil between 1965 and 2014 are by white writers. Only 4.5 percent of the protagonists of all novels published in Brazil between 2004 and 2014 were Black (though they represent 50 percent of the population), and most of them are incarcerated, enslaved, or doing domestic or sex work—or else fully idealized, perfect community members always in service of others, unaffected by social issues, the exception to the rule. Tenório’s Henrique is neither of those extremes.

Instead, he is a regular man, imperfect and beloved, contradictory and misunderstood. His passion for canonical literature, his commitment to teaching, his complicated relationship to women, his struggles with his racial identity, his shortcomings as a father, the good and the bad, only make him all the more human, and therefore all the more needed.

Finally, one last thing kept me up at night and required multiple walks to the park as I revised this book: whether to capitalize “Black,” as is the norm in the US, where I live. The New York Times and major news organizations like the Associated Press have been capitalizing all instances of “Black” in the racial and cultural sense since 2020.

Soon after, Kwame Anthony Appiah published an op-ed in The Atlantic making a case for the capitalization of “White” as an identity rather than a color. US racial terms, with their shifting connotations, don’t always correspond to the racial debate in Brazil. Ultimately, after much back and forth with the editors and author of this book, I decided not to impose these expectations or conventions on the Brazilian text, on the characters’ world and experiences. Their experiences don’t need my intervention.

I told my friend on one of our walks about our decision, my wise and patient friend who housed me and fed me and let me talk her ears off as I worked on this book: “We’re going to honor the racialized language in the original. I don’t want to sanitize it, or make it more palatable to an English-speaking audience for the sake of it.” She asked, “But you wanted to, didn’t you?” I nodded. Yes, I did.

Part of me would love for the issues in this book to be simpler, less painful. Instead, I let the racialized language live in the novel as it ought to, to stand as is. It was the best I could do at this point in time, at this point in history. My greatest hope is that years from now I’d make a different choice.

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From The Dark Side of Skin by Jeferson Tenório, translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato. Copyright © 2024. Available from Charco Press.

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