I first learned the word ‘fealty’ on first reading ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’. I’m not sure I’d ever seen or heard it used again until Trump ascended. Since then, it seems like every day someone lambastes someone else for their ‘fealty to Trump’. And I mean every day.
Although ‘fealty’ seems to be an extreme case, there’ve been a number of other words that seem to have suddenly flooded the media lately (many of which seem to have appeared in response to Trump, e.g. solipsist, dissemble, imperious).
I’m sure there are lots more good examples but damned if I can think of any right now.
I’ll buy that to some extent; but some words do just suddenly become voguish, I’m absolutely convinced. Two or three years ago the word egregious (re)appeared from nowhere and was suddenly all over the place. I think the same is true, more recently (but to a lesser extent), of fungible - though I might be being a little Baader-Meinhoffy about that one.
Maybe in part. But I’ve known fealty since I was a teen but had almost never heard it since, until it became an everyday term the last couple of years (typically in descrptions of GOP politicians).
ETA: Treppenwitz - egregious is/was a great example
It could be that fealty is becoming a much more common word - but the subjective sense that you’ve heard it more recently lately is a tricky thing to rely on, so let me look for something a little more objective
Huh. Didn’t notice any uptick in the word “egregious.” It seems to me like it’s always been reasonably common. A quick scan of my emails, at least, shows pretty steady use of it going back to 2010 (which is as far back as my emails are archived.) Is there something in particular that would have led to a spike in usage?
That said, maybe “uptick” is more common than it was before. For me, it’s more words like that and “impact” (as a verb to mean “affect” or “effect,” as opposed to “collide with”) and other business-type jargon that I’ve noted in the last 10-15 years.
Oh, I know plenty of folks who don’t get “rescued” animals but, yes, referring to a dog or cat as “a rescue” does seem to be something I’ve only heard in the last 10-15 years. The phrase that substitutes sometimes for “pet” is “companion animal.”
Maybe words just drift into and out of fashion. When is the last time you heard “gyve”, “contumely”, “dight”, “esurient”, “yclept”, etc.? A word may languish in the back of a dusty lexicon for decades, or even centuries, and all it takes is some random circumstances to bring it back, because people repeat what they hear.
Yeah, but “gifted” means something specific. I can gift you a Starbucks card for your birthday, and gave it to you the moment I handed it over. I can give you a pencil in class because you forgot yours, but I in no way gifted it to you. And that distinction is pretty old, it just fell out of use for a while.
Again, it means something specific. You rescue a pet when you literally bring it in off the streets, or when you get it from a shelter, or maybe when you pre-empt someone taking it to a shelter by allowing it to be “re-homed” with you. No one rescues a puppy they have purchased from a breeder for $800. Blind people do not rescue the dogs they get from Seeing Eye, Inc.
I’m not saying there aren’t people who use the word with a little smugness, but it does mean something more specific than just “getting” a pet.
I feel like using “adjacent” to describe a related phenomena or to acknowledge that a word is imprecise has become more common suddenly. Like, “I"m not a democrat, but I am certainly Democrat-adjacent”.
I feel like using “adjacent” to describe a related phenomena or to acknowledge that a word is imprecise has become more common suddenly. Like, “I"m not a democrat, but I am certainly Democrat-adjacent”.
