The Words of the Week - August 2

‘Olympian’

Olympian has seen increased lookups this week, naturally, in conjunction with the start of the 2024 Summer Olympics, aka the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad, in Paris, France.

It may be too early to call these Paris Olympics the Fashion Olympics. But, in the city widely considered the capital of fashion, the word ‘fashion’ has surely been mentioned so far more by now than in any other Games. And so it made sense to Angela Ruggiero, a four-time U.S. Olympic medalist in ice hockey, that if she was going to launch a celebration of gender parity in these Games, it should be with a fashion show. And that’s how some 20 or so former or current Olympians wound up sashaying down a makeshift runway on Sunday at a Paris restaurant, to whoops and high-fives from a supportive audience.
— Jocelyn Noveck, The Associated Press, 28 July 2024

The Olympic Games were first celebrated in the 8th century B.C., at the religious site called Olympia (far from Mt. Olympus). The ancient Olympic Games included several of the sports that are now part of the Summer Games program currently underway in Paris. When used as a noun, Olympian can refer to one of the ancient Greek deities dwelling on Mt. Olympus, or to a native or inhabitant of Olympia (Greece or Washington), but today most often refers to Olympic athletes.

‘Weird’

Lookups for weird have risen as the word has been widely reported on as featuring prominently in depictions of former president Donald Trump and his vice presidential running mate, JD Vance.

As Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign reported a hefty fund-raising haul, high-profile Democrats derided former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, as weird and strange on Sunday, embracing a characterization of the Republican ticket that the Harris campaign has also begun to try out.
— Nicholas Nehamas, The New York Times, 28 July 2024

You may know weird as a generalized term (as used by some supporters of Vice President Harris) describing something or someone unusual, but this word also has older meanings that are more specific. Weird comes from the Old English noun wyrd, essentially meaning “fate.” By the 8th century, the plural wyrde had begun to appear in texts as a gloss for Parcae, the Latin name for the Fates—three goddesses who spun, measured, and cut the thread of life. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Scots authors employed werd or weird in the phrase “weird sisters” to refer to the Fates. William Shakespeare adopted this usage in Macbeth, in which the “weird sisters” are depicted as three witches. Subsequent adjectival use of weird grew out of a reinterpretation of the weird used by Shakespeare.

‘Boneless’

Boneless saw increased lookups this week following news of an Ohio Supreme Court ruling involving boneless wings.

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled that a man who ordered boneless wings should have expected bones to be in them, denying him a jury trial after he suffered major injuries…
— Morgan Trau, Ohio Capital Journal, 29 July 2024

We define the relevant sense of bone as “one of the hard parts of the skeleton of a vertebrate.” Senses of boneless in our unabridged dictionary include “being without a bone” (as in “jellyfish are boneless”) and “having the bone or bones removed.”

‘Ding-dong’

Lookups for ding-dong climbed this week after a United States senator used the epithet to refer to Vice President Kamala Harris in a contentious television interview.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) on Monday said Americans view Vice President Harris as “a bit of a ding-dong,” a comment that was met with some pushback from Fox News host Neil Cavuto. … Cavuto continued to push back on Kennedy’s comments, questioning how beneficial it was for the senator and other Republicans to call the vice president names. “Margaret Thatcher didn’t giggle, Golda Meir didn’t giggle. When you look at the polls, fair or not, many Americans—and again, this may not be fair—but I’m showing you what the polls show. Many Americans think that the vice president is a little bit of a ding dong,” Kennedy said Monday. He did not specify what polls he was referring to.
— Lauren Sforza, The Hill, 29 July 2024

We define the noun ding-dong as both “the ringing sound produced by repeated strokes especially on a bell” and as a synonym of nitwit and kook, the latter being the sense invoked by Senator Kennedy. Ding-dong is also sometimes used as an adjective, mostly in British English, meaning “marked by a rapid exchange or alternation (as of blows)” as in “a ding-dong battle.”

Word Worth Knowing: ‘Pecksniffian’

Seth Pecksniff, a character with a holier-than-thou attitude in Charles Dickens’s 1844 novel Martin Chuzzlewit, was no angel, though he certainly tried to pass himself off as one. Pecksniff liked to preach morality and brag about his own virtue, but in reality he was a deceptive rascal who would use any means to advance his own selfish interests. It didn’t take long for Pecksniff’s reputation for canting sanctimoniousness to leave its mark on English; Pecksniffian has been used as a synonym of hypocritical ever since.