What can the most frequently searched words of the year tell us about 2020? On this special edition, Emily Brewster and Peter Sokolowski reveal our 2020 Word of the Year, along with 11 more of the words that shaped a year like no other.
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Transcript
Emily Brewster:
Coming up on this special edition of Word Matters: the words of 2020. I'm Emily Brewster and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media. On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
2020 will go down in the books as well, quite a year. It challenged everyone in multiple ways, but words never escaped us entirely. Dictionary users still came to merriam-webster.com to learn more about the language, which means we still have a word and words of the year. Today, Peter Sokolowski and I reveal our 2020 word of the year. And a few of the other words that made the year what it was. As the annus horribilis that is the year 2020 comes to a close, there are various announcements of words of the year. We at Merriam-Webster always determine a word of the year; it is always based on evidence of what words people have been searching for in the merriam-webster.com dictionary. Peter, do you care to announce what this year's word of the year is?
Peter Sokolowski:
Well yes, indeed. And we can discuss so much about how we come to this and also what it means for the dictionary and for the culture. Merriam-Webster's word of the year for 2020 is pandemic. This will surprise very few people, I suspect. The thing about looking at the news through the prism of vocabulary is that the words that people look up aren't always the most important words. They're usually the words that send you to the dictionary. The words that might seem technical or difficult or hard to spell. In this case, however, we have a word that sort of crosses a bunch of important points, which is of course, this is the big news story. But it also has the sense of maybe a general vocabulary word that we understand, but in this case it has a real poignant and urgent specificity. And I think that's what brought people to the dictionary.
Emily Brewster:
Let's back up for just a minute and talk about why I said specifically that we had determined our Word of the Year and not chosen it because we do not choose the Word of the Year based on some kind of arbitrary preference for one word over another word. It is based on the data that we analyze of all the many, many, many millions of lookups that occur at merriam-webster.com. So can you describe that process a little bit?
Peter Sokolowski:
Yeah, absolutely. To have it as a statistical measure of curiosity, I think is even more interesting. And what I mean by that is that we are kind of reporting back to the public what, in fact, they were curious about during the year and in this case, we take our data from the dictionary at merriam-webster.com. So maybe a hundred million page views a year plus a couple billion at the app for the dictionary. So huge number of lookups that contribute to this continuous wave of data that we view every day. It's a very long tale. The dictionary has maybe 500,000 bull faced forms. So that means that there are some words that are looked up all the time. And there are some words that are looked up never. And what we see in that wide range are certain spikes of curiosity at certain moments in time, so that we can determine at a given moment, what is driving the curiosity of the public.
And in this case, of course, it was quite evident what was driving the curiosity. And then when those spikes are measurable, we can then add the numbers together and we can then do one important step, which is to do a year over year comparison, to compare backwards to 2019, to look at a word like pandemic, for example, and see how frequently it was looked up then to have a baseline, to have an understanding of what made 2020 different from 2019. And this has become important for us because there are so many words that are looked up in the dictionary day in, day out, year in, year out that tell us a lot about what makes English interesting and difficult or what people are curious about, what they're thinking about, but it doesn't tell us anything specific about 2020.
Emily Brewster:
That's right. And so our Word of the Year is always a word that was looked up in significant numbers, looked up a great deal at merriam-webster.com. And that also was looked up in far greater numbers than in previous years. The striking thing to me in our process was that it was very clear instantly that pandemic was consistently looked up a great deal throughout 2020. We can get into details on exactly when that began, but really for basically the entire year, it was looked up far more frequently. And it was just one of the top lookups for much of the year.
Peter Sokolowski: I Indeed. And of course the story is ongoing and this poignant specificity about this word, which is to say, we're still trying to understand literally what it is that we're experiencing. And there's something about the way that we find our Word of the Year that tells us something about curiosity and the year itself. But in this case, there's something else. If you go back to 2008, the Word of the Year was bailout. And again, that gave you this incredibly specific idea of what was going on in the news. There was a great recession, this was the political term, and it was the word that people looked up the most. However, we don't look back to that period and call it the bailout, but we will almost certainly look back on this period and call it the pandemic. We're hearing things like pandemic fatigue. In other words, the term has already become sort of the name for the period through which we are living, that we are experiencing this.
Emily Brewster:
Let's take a moment and just define it.
Peter Sokolowski:
Sure.
Emily Brewster:
Pandemic is defined as, "An outbreak of a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area, such as multiple countries or continents, and typically affects a significant proportion of the population." I think we're all being affected in this case. Yes. One of the questions that the dictionary is able to answer is the distinction between similar words, pandemic and epidemic. Epidemic was also a word that was on people's minds. And there was a point when COVID-19 switched from being an epidemic to being a pandemic.
Peter Sokolowski:
That day was the biggest single spike. The day that it was announced by the World Health Organization, that this can now be considered a pandemic, that was March 11th. There's an actual timeline to this. The first flicker of curiosity was in January, January 20th, which corresponded to the first case of COVID in the United States. Of course, we didn't even have the name COVID at that point. And we could immediately see this term start to tick up. There was news from China, of course there was news also in February about cruise ships. And so this word was sort of in the ether and was climbing, but it wasn't until the World Health Organization's announcement of this sort of official designation that the word spiked in our data in an enormous way and became this overwhelmingly important term. What's interesting about pandemic, epidemic, these are words that come from Greek, of course, and pan meaning all or every. And demic from Damos, which is the same root as democracy, population or people.
So pandemic, all of the people. Epidemic means upon the people, on the people. Endemic means in or within the people. So the fact is there are kind of three stages of vocabulary that account for this. And it's true that there's an overlap obviously between epidemic and pandemic. And it's clear that the WHO made a distinction that once this was truly global, truly universal, it could be called a pandemic. Again with a word like this, it might be in somebody's vocabulary, there suddenly seemed to be a legal, technical medical specificity, and that is something we've seen over and over again that sends people to the dictionary. A word that you may well be comfortable with, a word like moderator or a word like debate before political debates. It just so happens that we see this on a regular basis too. Those words suddenly seemed super specific in the moment at 9:00 PM Eastern on the night of a debate. So pandemic seemed suddenly technical and medical and needless to say important.
Emily Brewster:
Yes. Now another word that is among our words of the year is the word that was likely unknown to most people in the United States until it was suddenly everywhere. And that is the word coronavirus.
Peter Sokolowski:
I have to say, I was unfamiliar with this word, or it was such a technical medical term. I actually looked back at the data. It was barely looked up at all in the early part of January. It was just such a technical term. The dictionary is full of technical terms, especially full of Latin based technical terms, names for flowers and plants and diseases and treatments, which tend to come from Latin or what we call New Latin, the naming conventions of scientists, which used what had been the scientific universal language of the Renaissance and early modern period. And coronavirus had been in the dictionary for decades. And it was just sitting there. And of course an important word for sure, but not one that was in our vocabulary.
Emily Brewster:
Many people may have been familiar with specific coronaviruses that have affected many people in other times in the past. There's SARS and MERS. Those are both examples of coronaviruses, but we referred to them by their specific names, just as we refer to COVID-19 by its specific name. Those are the diseases that are caused by a coronavirus, but coronavirus was not previously a term that was familiar to many people.
Peter Sokolowski:
The thing is, this word spiked on March 19th. So a week later basically. Pandemic was the big splash, the big sort of emergency call just at the moment that so many big cities, places like New York and Boston, Seattle, certainly and new Orleans had those early cases when there were early shutdown orders. But coronavirus was the second word to spike from this crisis. And there's something else about this. You bring up an important point, which is we refer to SARS as SARS, and I would not have known that it was a coronavirus. I would have had to look that up. SARS is in the dictionary too.
I have a question that I think won't be resolved immediately, which is how will we refer to this disease generically in the future? It seems to me, I'm hearing many people refer to COVID-19 as simply coronavirus or the coronavirus pandemic for example, in that fashion. I hear it quite a lot on, for example, radio news, as a shorthand for the pandemic. The specificity of COVID-19, like SARS, now that we've all educated ourselves to this broader term of coronavirus, it may be that the broader term becomes the generic term for this disease. But I think we won't know that until a few years pass maybe.
Emily Brewster:
My four year old calls it corona. And then I also hear just COVID as a short form being used to refer to the specific disease.
Peter Sokolowski:
Absolutely. And in fact is we had a kind of an emergency release of new dictionary entries in March related to COVID-19. And this was important in lots of ways. One thing is our science staff were watching this disease and watching these terms back in January and February, we were all in the office. They were doing their due diligence as always to notice new terms that are in the news, in the science journals. And they had started drafting entries and revisions for terms like coronavirus. In February, the term COVID-19 was coined. We had to make a definition for that. We could see something in our data, which is that many people were coming to the dictionary for definition of that term. And sadly, we didn't have one. And in fact, nobody did. The term was just weeks old at this point.
And that's when we decided in a kind of a new model of publishing that since we're not going to wait for the next print edition, for example, for these terms, that we could add them when they were ready to the dictionary, a few dozen words and updated entries for things like SARS and coronavirus and self-isolation and quarantine. And we did that and that set a record in our history, at least for the fastest entry of a newly coined term in a dictionary, which I believe was 34 days from its coinage.
Emily Brewster:
That's right.
Peter Sokolowski:
It's kind of amazing.
Emily Brewster:
Now COVID-19 did not qualify to be in this list of words of the year, because as I said, the criteria are significant lookups, like a great number of lookups. But also a significant increase in lookups over previous years and especially over the previous year. And there was no 2019 data for COVID-19. It did not exist.
Peter Sokolowski:
And that shows you one way that words enter a language, [inaudible] because this is a term that is universally understood. It's used everywhere. And it literally wasn't in the vocabulary in 2019.
Emily Brewster:
This is really, I think, a member of a very small class of words that can qualify for entry so quickly because it was coined and then it was instantly accepted as being the appropriate term to refer to this thing. And it was also instantly ubiquitous. There is no escaping this word.
Peter Sokolowski:
My understanding is that the fastest entry prior to this in a Merriam-Webster dictionary was two years, but that goes back to the early 1980s when we had to wait for a printing schedule as well, but that word was AIDS. And it was obviously a very similar set of decisions that were made. This term was suddenly in the news. It was clearly going to stay. It was very important for people to understand in its scientific accuracy. I think that's this kind of poignant connection also with this term, but it's true. This word COVID-19 is certainly among the words of the year in any kind of setting, but not in our official list because we have this word of the year and then a kind of a group of another 10 words that were highly looked up during the year. They had spikes maybe with occasional specific stories or in the case of coronavirus, words that have been looked up sort of consistently through the pandemic.
Emily Brewster:
Coronavirus is defined, it's a two part definition. It is, "Any of a family Corona Vera D of large single stranded RNA viruses that have a lipid envelope studded with club shaped, spike proteins, infect birds and many mammals, including humans and include the causative agents of MERS, SARS and COVID-19." [inaudible] two, the second part of the definition is, "An illness caused by a coronavirus, especially COVID-19."
Peter Sokolowski:
Interesting. So you see that recently updated entry there for coronavirus and corona means crown. Term was coined by a group of scientists in 1968. So we do know specifically when this word came into the language and it was because of the way it looked under a microscope. It had that sort of crown like a solar eclipse. And it sort of had these rays that emanated from a center.
Emily Brewster:
So lovely and so terrifying.
Peter Sokolowski:
Yeah, we have that symbol that we see often of the sort of sphere with spikes on it that resembles the coronavirus. Another word that was looked up a lot of course is the word quarantine. And so there are several categories that we saw, words that were medical, words that were sort of in this case, governmental or procedural in terms of policy. And then there were also sometimes terms that reflected a personal reaction we saw in the initial lookups, words spike that included pandemic and epidemic and lockdown and quarantine and self-isolation. But also words like calamity and Kafkaesque that were a more personal response as opposed to the scientific or technical or legal terms.
But quarantine is interesting and has such a fascinating story. It really came into use at the time of another pandemic, the Black Death back in the 14th century, in Italian, not in English. But that was the word that we brought into English. This idea of waiting in a ship offshore, a period of 40 days before it was safe to come on shore. That would ensure that anyone who had the disease on the ship would be discovered before they came on shore and possibly infect a port city. Kind of ghoulish also in its own history.
There's something else about this word, which is the spelling of it looks a little bit more French because we in English had borrowed this word, quarantaine meaning a period of 40 days from French. And then this Italian word, quarantena was sort of blended with it. And because we already had the French word in English and they were almost the same word, our spelling looks more French than Italian, but the meaning that we use is more of that Italian meaning even though a quarantine today often refers to a period of 14 days rather than 40 days etymologically.
Emily Brewster:
That's right and happily for all of us, our quarantines have not had to be on ships. That meaning of the word quarantine is established in the English language. And so the definition has a number of different items listed underneath it. Definitions of the word 2A is, "A term during which a ship arriving in port and suspected of carrying contagious disease is held in isolation from the shore." But since 3A is the one that is being applied in contexts where people are encountering the word today. And that is, "A restraint upon the activities or communication of persons or the transport of goods designed to prevent the spread of disease or pests." Now, most of the time when a state, when a government, when they establish a quarantine, the specifics of that are laid out in the text. But I think people were hearing this word and they were interested in this word. I don't think people were unfamiliar with it as a word, but they wanted a more specific understanding of it.
Peter Sokolowski:
Yeah, there's a nuance and a detail. And again, it seemed official. It seemed technical, maybe even legal, that sends people to the dictionary. And the other thing is the date of this. The big first spike was March 20th. So we see a little bit of this progression, pandemic spiked on the 11th and then coronavirus on the 19th and then immediately quarantine on the 20th. But that's sort of how we experienced it also, it was this wash of news and it came so quickly.
Emily Brewster:
And then immediately after that was asymptomatic. One of the most challenging aspects of this disease is that people can have it and not be exhibiting any symptoms and yet be contagious.
Peter Sokolowski:
This really feels technical, doesn't it? It feels like a medical term. It obviously is a medical term and suddenly we're all expected to understand it and to use it and to be able to think through this. That you could get a test and test negative today, but you may still be carrying this virus and then subsequently be asymptomatic or symptomatic. It's hard to know.
Emily Brewster:
We define the word as, "Not causing, marked by or presenting with signs or symptoms of infection, illness, or disease." Let's progress to a different realm of the words of the year because 2020 was although very much dominated by the pandemic, other things were happening also. And other words were generating interest.
Peter Sokolowski:
Sports and show business, entertainment, generally drive a huge amount of traffic to the dictionary. It's not just politics or news or health crises. And in this case, it was a huge news story when Kobe Bryant died in that helicopter crash. And there was a huge outpouring, as you know, on social media for sudden deaths of beloved public figures. In this case though, the word that was looked up was mamba.
Emily Brewster:
Yes, Mamba is a nickname that Bryant had chosen for himself and it refers to a kind of snake. Mamba is defined as, "Any of several chiefly arboreal, venomous green or black elapid snakes" (genus Dendroaspis) of Sub-Saharan Africa." And it comes from a Zulu word, imamba. And he had chosen this name for them, the Black Mamba, inspired by a character in the movie Kill Bill.
Peter Sokolowski:
Oh, no kidding.
Emily Brewster:
Yes, but the Black Mamba is a snake that is extremely fast and very deadly. And so when people read of the news of his passing, people came to the dictionary to look up this word that was so closely associated with him: mamba.
Peter Sokolowski:
I have to say it was new to me and it was possibly new to many people. It's a good reason to go to the dictionary. And one of these sort of shared moments of mourning that we have periodically, and I do think are driven in some way by social media, because you find out sort of quickly, and then you are immediately drawn to the story and maybe the words that lead you to it. Now, the next word has to do with another big cultural phenomenon of this year and indeed of the past several years. And that is the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests against police violence and kind of a new use of a word. And it's defund.
Emily Brewster:
The idea of to defund the police was being raised by activists as a method for dealing with police violence against Black Americans. And people were questioning what that word truly meant.
Peter Sokolowski:
Sure.
Emily Brewster:
The word is defined as, "To withdraw funding from." Did defund the police mean to take away all their funding or did it mean to reallocate funding? And different activists had different answers to that question? So the actual meaning of the word was a big part of why people were looking it up.
Peter Sokolowski:
Sure. And it was used on both sides of the political sphere, either as a kind of rallying cry or as an accusation. And so it really did center on the meaning of this term, which again, we define in such a generic way, really in a very, very plain way that doesn't give us that detail, that policy detail that's involved in this. But again, the prism of vocabulary, the focus of this story somehow was around this word and it sent people to the dictionary and that's extraordinary. And our next term does also come from entertainment.
Emily Brewster:
Two-prong entertainment story, the word it is antebellum. It had two significant spikes in lookups. The first jump came in June when an award-winning musical trio changed their name from Lady Antebellum to Lady A, because the word antebellum means "existing before a war." But it also has a very specific meaning of existing before the American Civil War. And what also existed before the American Civil War, most poignantly, was slavery. So they changed their names that it no longer had this reference to a period of time when so many of the citizens of this country were slaves. And then again, the word had another spike in lookups when it was used as the title of a movie, a horror movie called Antebellum.
Peter Sokolowski:
I missed that. It's interesting to see the careful use of words. This music group wanted to distance itself from that association. Words matter.
Emily Brewster:
And the movie on the other hand wanted to point at it very directly.
Peter Sokolowski:
Directly. Yeah. Interesting. It shows you how important your word choice is for sure.
Emily Brewster:
So far this list has been very dark and very serious. These are words that have had a tremendous impact on people and that are painful in many ways. The next word is a word that also pains many people, but not dictionary people. And that is the word irregardless.
Peter Sokolowski:
Absolutely.
Emily Brewster:
We do not hate irregardless. We define it in our dictionary as "regardless" because it actually means "regardless." And we also include a note that says that we don't recommend that you use this word because it is so deeply despised by so many people. We do define it. It is a word, has been used by many, many people over a long period of time. It meets all the criteria of being a word.
Peter Sokolowski:
Sure.
Emily Brewster:
And we define it, but we do recommend people not use it because it is so despised.
Peter Sokolowski:
There's often surprise that it's in the dictionary and that was some of the spikes for this word. I think it was Jamie Lee Curtis was one of the celebrities and John Legend who were appalled that this word was in the dictionary at all. And we have discussed this before and we will again.
Emily Brewster:
Yes, our first podcast episode is all about irregardless, but yes, it was Jamie Lee Curtis, the actor. She tweeted that we had only just entered irregardless into our dictionary. And that is not true. It was at first in the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 1934. And it has always been in the merriam-webster.com dictionary. But I think people went to see, no, is this outrage true or is it not true? And it actually is true. We do define it.
Peter Sokolowski:
It is stigmatized. And so the important point is that there is a usage note and a usage label as well. It's marked nonstandard. And nonstandard English is English that you wouldn't use in a formal setting or an academic setting. And it's important for us as lexicographers to recognize, or to sort of share that we regard this as a word because it certainly is one. It's used by lots of people, is found in lots of publications. And we also regard all words kind of equally, as word scientists, as lexicographers. We don't play favorites. We tend not to have favorites. So the fact that we acknowledge and record and define this term in the dictionary is not the same as recommending its use. We just acknowledge its existence. And I think that is sort of the beauty of standing back a little bit and using the dictionary as a pure reference and recognizing that's what is telling me. Yes, it exists. No, I will choose not to use it.
Emily Brewster:
That's right. And you don't have to use it even if it is one of our words of the year for 2020. The next word is kraken.
Peter Sokolowski:
The spelling of this is striking. It's K-R-A-K-E-N.
Emily Brewster:
Yes. This word originally traces back to Norwegian dialect. So it certainly does not look like a word from a Romance language.
Peter Sokolowski:
I have to say, the word is new to me. And why did it spike? I mean, it's the name of a ...
Emily Brewster:
It's the name of a mythical Scandinavian sea monster, especially a very squid-like one. In July, it was chosen as the new name of Seattle's brand new National Hockey League franchise. Kraken is definitely an intimidating creature.
Peter Sokolowski:
It's a great name for a coastal city.
Emily Brewster:
Yes, but this word has another life in English. It refers to the mythological Scandinavian sea monster, of course, but it has also featured in Marvel comics in a few different iterations. And then also there is a really famous line from the 2010, I think it is, Clash of The Titans remake where Liam Neeson, he's playing Zeus. He's going to bring forth harsh punishment to enemies. And he says, "Release the Kraken."
Peter Sokolowski:
Does sound dramatic.
Emily Brewster:
Yes. It's very, very dramatic. The phrase, release the Kraken also has some life of its own in a kind of mocking, mostly, use.
Peter Sokolowski:
And this is a term that I think because of its novelty, sometimes people look words up simply because they are new, that they are not familiar. And we see familiar words in our data, we see scientific words in our data, we see entertainment words in our data, and sometimes it's just pure curiosity.
Emily Brewster:
Yes. Well, in a major new sports franchise, it's big news. For anyone who is familiar with kraken it's very evocative. And for people who are not familiar with it, they're like, why is this name chosen?
Peter Sokolowski:
You've just given a vocabulary lesson to us all basically. That's fantastic. Now our next word is the word icon. And this is a word that appears when notable figures die. It was a word that was looked up when Michael Jackson died, for example. But in this case this year, we had a couple of spikes with this word and they relate to public figures.
Emily Brewster:
That's right. At the passing of two beloved public figures. First representative John Lewis served in the Congress for a long time after being a very important civil rights leader outside of the government, and then Supreme court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Peter Sokolowski:
And two widely covered careers, and icon just seems to fit.
Emily Brewster:
In both cases, these were figures who were written about in the news and frequently, it was very typical in both cases for any kind of eulogizing to include the word icon. Because these were admired and respected people and people who were also considered to be a kind of exemplar to some kind of cause or the civil rights movement for representative John Lewis and to feminism for Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Peter Sokolowski:
And that's what icon actually means. It comes from the Greek word that means "to resemble." So it means the sort of image of a thing. They become what they stand for, or they become the thing that people regard as emblematic to use your word, of a cause, a policy, a history. There's so much going on with this word. I think this is a word that is criticized often also, or iconic the adjective. I think a lot of people think it can only apply to the sort of visual representation.
Emily Brewster:
In its earliest use, the word referred simply to an image, adjustment and image. And then it took on over a few centuries in this meaning to refer specifically to a religious image that was used in devotion.
Peter Sokolowski:
Of course. Right. And we think of them as orthodox icons and things like that.
Emily Brewster:
That's right. Especially Eastern orthodox Christianity.
Peter Sokolowski:
It's a word that was in the news. Now the next word that was also in the news a couple of times is also, I think a kind of a wordie's word, a word lover's word: schadenfreude. And this is a hard word to spell, this is a word that shows up in spelling bees all the time. And it's S-C-H-A-D-E-N-F-R-E-U-D-E. So it's spelled as it would be in German. As we do with modern borrowings of French and German in particular, we tend to keep their native spellings and we pronounce it very much in the German way, schadenfreude and it, of course it means enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others.
Emily Brewster:
Yes, it's a German compound term. The German language is very good at generating these compound terms that can mash together. Schaden means damage and freude means joy. And sort of joy in the damage of someone else.
Peter Sokolowski:
And the big spike happened on the day that President Trump's COVID diagnosis was announced. For example, USA Today had a headline that said, "President Donald Trump's Coronavirus infection draws international sympathy and a degree of schadenfreude. And this was a term that was, I think, spontaneously used in social media by a lot of people. Obviously also used in this kind of editorial way.
Emily Brewster:
Almost universally, there were well-wishes to him before his complete recovery. But I think also because of the administration's downplaying of the virus, there was this weird schadenfreude seemed to apply it also.
Peter Sokolowski:
Absolutely. Well, yes. I mean, he denied the seriousness of the disease and then he caught the disease himself possibly as a result of his denial of its seriousness. And then of course, the people in his orbit, many of whom have tested positive subsequently.
Emily Brewster:
And by not following protocols that other people have been following very strictly.
Peter Sokolowski:
This word was sort of the big one. It was also looked up quite a bit after it was declared that Joe Biden is the President-Elect. Not the height of the spike that we saw when President Trump was diagnosed with COVID, but there was another wave of lookups with this word. And again, it's a word I think that people enjoy using and saying out loud, and it's kind of a fun word, but for a kind of a malicious motivation.
Emily Brewster:
There is a bit of malice in it. Yes. Now the last word for our 2020 words of the year relates specifically to the President-Elect Joe Biden. And that is the word malarkey. It's likely that we are going to be hearing more of malarkey in 2021.
Peter Sokolowski:
Well, we've heard this word from Joe Biden, in fact, in our Trend Watch series online, I acknowledge and report on the spikes in our data. Joe Biden used the term in his vice-presidential debate back in 2012, sent a huge spike of this word. And then subsequently at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, he used it. He used it, of course in the debates this year. We actually went back and found quotations of Biden using this word back into the early 1980s. So it's just part of his idiolect, it's part of the language that he uses, but it also sort of suits him. It's informal. It's a little old fashioned.
Emily Brewster:
It's folksy.
Peter Sokolowski:
Folksy. It's an Irish American term. I think folksy, we could laugh about whatever is deliberate or artificial about a public figure's image. And yet in this case, I think the word resonates so well because it somehow fits him. It just suits him so perfectly.
Emily Brewster:
Well, let's define it. We define it as, "Insincere or foolish talk. Bunkum."
Peter Sokolowski:
Bunkum.
Emily Brewster:
You said the word was Irish American, but I think that its etymology is in fact somewhat disputed. I don't think it is settled.
Peter Sokolowski:
That's right.
Emily Brewster:
It is an American word. The first evidence of it in use in in American English. But it's understood that it may come from an Irish surname. Is that right?
Peter Sokolowski:
Yeah. Well, Malarkey is an Irish surname. It's almost 100 years old and we date it back to the early 1920s. It's one of those mysterious words. There are plenty of words in the dictionary that have no known origin and this is one of them. It has a resonance. It sounds a little bit like an Irish word. There are such things that we don't really know. The thing about this word too, is it's very informal, but it also might be euphemistic. Did he use it to mean something stronger? And I think a lot of the curiosity about this word was simply the question on the part of the public is this in the dictionary? Is this really informal word in the dictionary at all? And boy, he sends people to the dictionary every time he uses it.
Emily Brewster:
Which we say, of course it is, [crosstalk] doing our job.
Peter Sokolowski:
It's an informal term. Like maybe misunderestimated on the part of George W. Bush or the word normalcy for Warren Harding for the Warren Harding fans. I think this is going to be a word that will be forever associated with Joe Biden.
Emily Brewster:
Well, let's hope that the year 2021 is full of words that are as lighthearted as malarkey though maybe not necessarily entirely foolish.
Peter Sokolowski:
We can only hope. Thanks Emily.
Emily Brewster:
Thanks Peter.
Let us know what you think about Word Matters. Review us on Apple Podcasts or email us at m-w.com. You can also visit us at nepm.org and for the word of the day, and all your general dictionary needs, visit merriam-webster.com. Our theme music is by Tobias Voigt, artwork by Annie Jacobson. Word Matters is produced by John Voci and Adam Maid. for Neil Serven, Ammon Shea, and Peter Sokolowski, I'm Emily Brewster. Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
