Dictionary.com released its list of popular terms added for 2024. This year, Gen Z slang dominated the entries, along with a few revisions.
Gen Z members — sometimes called zoomers — were born between 1997 and 2012.
“It’s 2024, and the pace of language change is as rapid as it has ever been,” said Dictionary.com “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. And wow, the variety is real.”
Not only were there 327 new entries but also 173 new definitions and 1,228 revised definitions.
Here are 10 words inspired by Gen Z you might not have heard and definitions Dictionary.com gave them.
The ick: Noun. A sudden feeling of disgust or dislike, often in response to the actions of another person.
Mid: Adjective. Mediocre, unimpressive or disappointing.
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.
Boobne: Noun. Informal. Pimples or a rash in the area of the breasts or on the upper back, caused by a bra that chafes, is not clean or is made of material that is allergenic or not breathable.
Pretty privilege: Noun. An unearned and mostly unacknowledged societal advantage a person has by fitting into the beauty standards of their culture.
Greedflation: Noun. A rise in prices, rents or the like that is not because of 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.
Barbiecore: Noun. An aesthetic or style featuring playful pink outfits, accessories, decor, etc., celebrating and modeled on the wardrobe of the Barbie doll.
Bussin’: Adjective. Great; wonderful; amazing.
Squish: Noun. An intense feeling of infatuation that is not romantic or sexual in nature — a platonic crush.
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.
While these terms are new to the outlet, it’s not always new to the language, as slang is forever changing and sometimes generational. Some other terms added have been referenced and used over the years, like the turf toe, cheat code, girl dad and high-intensity interval training.
Ebony Williams
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In The Irish Times tomorrow. Derek Scally reports from Berlin on the premiere of the adaptation of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These starring Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh. Anna Carey writes about how she turned her book The Making of Mollie into a play, which opens at Dublin’s The Ark next week. There is also a Q&A with Chris Agee, poet and founder of the Irish Pages literary journal.
Reviews are Chris Kissane on They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence by Lauren Benton; Sinéad Gleeson on After a Dance by Bridget O’Connor; Lucy Sweeney-Byrne on The Real Thing by Terry Eagleton; Claire Hennessy on the best new YA fiction; Stephen Walker on Empireworld by Sathnam Sanghera; Ray Burke on Infectious Generosity by Chris Anderson; Pat Carty on A Hundred to One by Pat Sheedy; Neil Hegarty on James and John: A True Story of Prejudice and Murder by Chris Bryant; Eamon Maher on John McGahern: Ways of Looking by John Singleton; Brian Maye on Every Branch of the Healing Art: A History of the RCSI by Ronan Kelly; Paul Clements on local history books; and Sarah Gilmartin on The Lodgers by Holly Pester.
This week’s Irish Times Eason book offer is Old God’s Time, the Booker Prize longlisted novel by Sebastian Barry. You can buy it in any store with your paper for €5.99, a €5 saving.
Eason offer
The Ambassadors of the Francophonie in Ireland, working in partnership with Literature Ireland, have announced their 2024 shortlist for their annual literature prize, the Prix Littéraire des Ambassadeurs de la Francophonie en Irlande.
A prize of €1,500 is awarded by the ambassadors to the winning Irish author, and a visit to Ireland is arranged by Literature Ireland for the translator. The aim of the prize is to promote French language and culture, and to celebrate literary translation into French.
The shortlisted works this year are: Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Thin Places / En ces lieux bienfaisants, translated by Karine Lalechère (Phébus, 2023); Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses / Troubles, translated by Cécile Leclère (Éditions Denoël, 2023); Sara Baume’s A Line Made by Walking / Ligne de fuite, translated by France Camus-Pichon, (Les Éditions Noir sur Blanc, 2023); and Donal Ryan’s A Slanting of the Sun / Soleil oblique et autres histoires irlandaises, translated by Marie Hermet (Albin Michel, 2023)
The winning author and translator pair will be announced on March 5th by Minister Peter Burke at an event to mark the start of Francophonie month, a month dedicated to the celebration of French language and culture.
Laura Cumming: longlisted for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction
The 16-strong longlist for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction has been announced, with authors from America, Australia, Canada, India, Jamaica, the Philippines and the UK. The books vary in style and genre, from gripping memoirs to innovative new histories, ground-breaking journalism and books that challenge the status quo.
The longlisted titles are: The Britannias: An Island Quest by Alice Albinia; Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom by Grace Blakeley; Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon; Intervals by Marianne Brooker; Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century by Joya Chatterji; Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death by Laura Cumming; Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in the Philippines by Patricia Evangelista; Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder; Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood by Lucy Jones; Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein; A Flat Place by Noreen Masud; All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles; Code-Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia; The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie; Young Queens: The Intertwined Lives of Catherine de’ Medici, Elisabeth de Valois and Mary, Queen of Scots by Leah Redmond Chang; and How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir by Safiya Sinclair.
Prof Suzannah Lipscomb, chair of judges for this year’s awards, said: “Reading for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction has been a revelation and a joy. I am very proud to introduce the sensational books that make up the inaugural Longlist. Our selection represents the breadth of women’s non-fiction writing: science, history, memoir, technology, literary biography, health, linguistics, investigative journalism, art history, activism, travel-writing and economics. And each author has created a masterpiece that is worthy of your attention. Buy them, borrow them – above all read them – and in so doing you’ll be elevating women’s voices and female perspectives in a whole range of disciplines and on a whole host of topics.”
The shortlist will be announced on March 27th and the winner of the £30,000 prize on June 13th.
Novelist and playwright Kate O’Brien (1897-1974). Photograph: Sasha/Getty Images)
Celebrating 40 years in 2024, the Limerick Literary Festival will run from February 23rd to 25th at the Dooradoyle Library and the Belltable. The event honours the life and works of Limerick author Kate O’Brien while attracting prominent participants from all over the world. The festival is also marking the 50th anniversary of the death of O’Brien, having started as The Kate O’Brien Weekend in 1984 to mark the tenth anniversary of her death.
Building on this significant history, the Limerick Literary Festival seeks to promote Limerick nationally as a place of literary excellence and to provide a platform where readers can meet their favourite authors and other readers.
The festival will be opened with an intimate evening of words and music by spoken-word artist and musician Denise Chaila and the full weekend programme feature authors Vona Groarke, Mary Morrissy, Antoine Laurain, Francis Spufford, Dorothy Cross, Dr Jana Fischerova, Elaine Feeney, Jane Clarke and Claire Keegan. It will also feature perennial favourite Desert Island Books, a session with Poetry Pharmacist William Sieghart and the presentation of the 2024 Kate O’Brien Award for a debut novel or short story collection from a female Irish author.
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From 1-4pm on Wednesday, February 21st, Prof Maebh Harding and Julie Morrissy, 2024 Law & Poetry Fellow, University College Dublin Sutherland School of Law, will be hosting a durational reading of the Bunreacht/Irish Constitution in the Gardiner Atrium at the UCD School of Law. The event is free and open to the public. You can drop in at any time and stay for however long you like.
By reading the Bunreacht aloud from start to finish, the aim is to emphasise the importance of collective and collaborative reading practices as a means to bolster community and spark conversations about potential changes to our society.
Paul Lynch with his Booker Prize 2023 winning book, Prophet Song.
Maynooth University has announced that 2023 Booker Prize Winner Paul Lynch has been appointed Maynooth University Distinguished Writing Fellow.
Lynch is a multi-award-winning author of five novels – his Booker winner Prophet Song (2023), Red Sky in the Morning (2013), The Black Snow (2014), Grace (2017), Beyond the Sea (2019) -- making him one of Ireland’s most prolific and critically-acclaimed contemporary authors.
Prior to winning the Booker Prize in November, his novels were nominated for or have won the Prix du Premier Roman, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, Prix Gens de Mer and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year.
Prof Alison Hood, Dean of Arts, Celtic Studies & Philosophy, said that Maynooth University was delighted with the appointment.
“Paul’s novels are testament to an extraordinary and visionary talent. Paul was Maynooth University’s Arts Council Writer-in-Residence in 2023. This appointment means that Maynooth University welcomes Paul back as a colleague in the Department of English, where he will teach on the MA in Creative Writing.”
Muldoon's Picnic
After a successful Irish tour in 2017, 2019, and again in 2022, as well as ten sold out seasons at the Irish Arts Center in New York, Muldoon’s Picnic returns for four dates nationwide from May 13th-17th.
An omnium-gatherum of poetry, prose and music, Muldoon’s Picnic is a cabaret-style evening, hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon.
Devised and developed by the acclaimed Irish poet Paul Muldoon, the show is hosted by Muldoon and house band Rogue Oliphant - a collective of musicians and composers including Chris Harford (Three Colors, Band of Changes), Cáit O’Riordan (The Pogues), David Mansfield (Bob Dylan, The Alpha Band), Ray Kubian (Electric Six, Chris Forsyth) and Warren Zanes (Del Fuegos).
On May 13th, in the Town Hall Theatre in Galway, Muldoon and house band Rogue Oliphant will be joined by Booker Prize winning novelist Anna Burns, poet Padraig Regan, and Oscar-winning musician Glen Hansard.
The Market Place Theatre in Armagh on May 15th event features TS Eliot Prize nominee Jane Clarke, composer and musician Colm Mac Con Iomaire and Booker Prize winner Anne Enright.
On May 16th at Wexford Arts Centre, author Donal Ryan, singer and harpist Síle Denvir and poet Nithy Kasa will be the guests. The final night of the tour, May 17th, in the Pavilion Theatre in Dun Laoghaire, features Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle, guitarist, composer and author Hugh Buckley, poet Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh and author Liz Nugent.
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Two Irish illustrators have been longlisted for the 2024 Yoto Carnegies, the UK’s longest-running book awards for children and young people – Steve McCarthy for The Wilderness, an adventure book celebrating learning opportunities in the great outdoors, and Paddy Donnelly for Sarah Tagholm’s Wolves in Helicopters, a dark and atmospheric tale offering practical advice to overcome nightmares and disturbed sleep.
A total of 36 books have been selected from 20 different publishers; 19 for the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Writing, and 18 for the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Illustration.
One title has been longlisted in both Medal categories – Tyger by SF Said, illustrated by Dave McKean. Four previous winners are again longlisted for the Medal for Illustration; two-time winner Sydney Smith for My Baba’s Garden, Bob Graham for The Concrete Garden, Jon Klassen for The Skull and Catherine Rayner for The Bowerbird.
Former Carnegie Medal for Writing winner Anthony McGowen is longlisted for Dogs of the Deadland, a tale of survival inspired by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Waterstones Children’s Laureate and previous shortlistee Joseph Coelho is longlisted for The Boy Lost in the Maze, one of four verse novels recognised for the Medal for Writing. The other three are by New York Times bestselling author Kwame Alexander and debut authors Cathy Faulkner and Tia Fisher.
Eight-time shortlisted author Marcus Sedgwick has been longlisted posthumously for Ravencave, the follow-up to Wrath, longlisted in 2023. A further four previous shortlistees are longlisted: Kwame Alexander (2019), Phil Earle (2022) and Candy Gourlay (2019) for writing and Poonam Mistry, who has been shortlisted three times (2019, 2020 and 2021) for illustration.
The Yoto Carnegies celebrate outstanding reading experiences in books for children and young people. They are unique in being judged by librarians, with the Shadowers’ Choice Medal voted for by children and young people. The longlists were chosen from 129 nominations by the judging panel which includes 12 children’s and youth librarians from CILIP’s Youth Libraries Group.
The shortlists will be announced on March 13th at London Book Fair. The winners will be announced and celebrated on June 20th at a livestreamed ceremony.
The Supreme Court on Monday, in a significant order, directed that the expression ‘forest’ will continue to be “broad and all-encompassing” for the time being, and include 1.97 lakh square km of undeclared forest lands.
A Bench headed by Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud passed the order on a petition challenging the amended Forest Conservation Act of 2023.
The new amendments had “circumscribed or substantially diluted” the definition of forest to two categories — declared forests and lands recorded as ‘forests’ in government records after 1980.
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In its order, the apex court ordered the government to revert to the “dictionary meaning” of ‘forest’ as upheld in a 1996 Supreme Court decision in the T.N. Godavarman Thirumulpad case.
“The adoption of this dictionary meaning to forests was made to align with the intent of the Forest Conservation Act, 1980. It is clarified that the expression ’forest’ will cover but not be confined to lands recorded as forests in the government records,” the court noted.
EXPLAINED | How the amended Forest (Conservation) Act imperils the Northeast
Consolidated record
The Bench noted that the “all-encompassing” dictionary meaning upheld by the Supreme Court in the Godavarman case 25 years ago would continue to hold field until the States and Union Territories prepare a consolidated record of forest-like areas, unclassed and community forest lands in their respective jurisdictions as per Rule 16 of the Forest Conservation Rules.
The court said this exercise to prepare a consolidated record was notified on November 29, 2023 and would take a year.
“We clarify that pending the completion of this exercise by the States and union territories under Rule 16, the principles in T.N. Godavarman Thirumulpad must continue to be observed,” the court ordered.
The Bench ordered the Environment Ministry to issue a circular in this regard to the States and Union Territories.
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The court said the Thirumulpad order had at the time ordered States and Union Territories to constitute expert committees to identify forest lands.
On this, the Bench directed the Union government to require States and Union Territories within two weeks to forward the “comprehensive records” of the lands such expert committees had identified in pursuance of the apex court’s orders in the Thirumulpad case.
The States and Union Territories have to forward the records by March 31, 2024. The Environment Ministry has to publish these records on its website by April 15, 2024.
The Bench also directed that establishment of any “zoos or safaris” by any government or authority should not be consented to without the final approval of the apex court.
Firefox 123.0 binaries are available today ahead of the official announcement tomorrow for this newest monthly web browser update.
Firefox 123 binaries for Linux and other platforms are available for download. Firefox 123 is another incremental step forward bringing translation enhancements and other web development platform additions, albeit mostly minor this time around. Some of the Firefox 123 enhancements include:
- Firefox's local web page translation feature can now translate text within tooltips and text displayed within form controls.
- Address bar settings are now displayed within the search section of Firefox Settings.
- Firefox's Network Monitor can now save a response body to disk using the "Save Response As" context menu item.
- Support for linear RGB interpolation for SVG gradients.
- Early Hints are now fully supported via Preload and Modulepreload support.
- Support for declarative ShadowDOM.
- The Web Authentication API now supports cross-origin credential creation.
Downloads for Firefox 123.0 are available from ftp.mozilla.org.
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?”
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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