The Words of the Week - November 1

‘Deadhead’

Deadhead saw a rise in lookups following the death of Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh at the age of 84.

Lesh wrote (with Robert Hunter) and sang lead on one of the Dead’s finest existential benedictions, “Box of Rain.” Another Lesh song rightly beloved by Deadheads is “Unbroken Chain,” which he wrote with his friend Bobby Petersen. It begins in folky contemplation, but unfolds with musicianly surprises: unexpected meter shifts, jazzy interludes and shivery electronic tones. Lesh sings thoughtfully about solitude, natural beauty and the idea that “forgiveness is the key to every door.”
— Jon Pareles, The New York Times, 27 Oct. 2024

We define several senses of the noun deadhead, including “one who has not paid for a ticket,” “a partially submerged log,” and “a faded blossom on a flowering plant.” The sense in question, capitalized as Deadhead, refers to a devoted fan of the rock group Grateful Dead.

‘Jack-o’-lantern’

A number of Halloween-related words saw increased lookups this week, including jack-o’-lantern.

’Tis the season for all things eerie and macabre. As jack-o’-lanterns cast their glow and costumed revelers share tales of ghosts and ghouls, it’s worth remembering that the thrill of supernatural horror isn’t unique to Western tradition. While Halloween only caught on in South Korea in the late 90s via Western immigration and pop culture, Koreans have long nurtured their own rich supernatural tradition. Their folklore brims with spirits, demons and shape-shifting creatures that would give even the most seasoned trick-or-treater pause.
— Moon Ki-hoon, The Korea Herald, 29 Oct. 2024

We define jack-o’-lantern as “a lantern made of a pumpkin usually cut to resemble a human face.” It can also refer to any of several large orangish gill fungi of the genus Omphalotus that are poisonous and luminescent, or be used as a synonym of ignis fatuus, which means “a light that sometimes appears in the night over marshy ground and is often attributable to the combustion of gas from decomposed organic matter.”

‘Cheddar’

News of a London cheese heist kicked the number of lookups for cheddar up a notch.

The owners of Neal’s Yard Dairy have said they have had an “overwhelming” response after it emerged that more than 22 tonnes of cheddar had been stolen from the London cheese specialist. The company delivered 950 wheels of cheddar–reported to be worth as much as £300,000–to an alleged fraudster posing as a wholesale distributor for a major French retailer. … The celebrity chef Jamie Oliver told his 10.5 million Instagram followers: “There has been a great cheese robbery. Some of the best cheddar cheese in the world has been stolen.”
— Ben Quinn, The Guardian (London, England), 28 Oct. 2024

We define cheddar, sometimes called cheddar cheese, as “a hard white, yellow, or orange smooth-textured cheese with a flavor that ranges from mild to strong as the cheese matures.” The word comes from Cheddar, a village in Somerset, England. The noun has a second definition in our Unabridged dictionary, where it is listed as a synonym for money or cash in US slang (as in “£300,000 is a lot of cheddar”). There you will also find an entry for the verb cheddar, which means “to pile and repile (slices of curd) so as to expel any remaining free whey in cheddar-making.”

‘Macabre’

Macabre was also among the spooky words trending on Halloween.

The tradition [of Halloween], which started in Europe, was brought to America by Irish immigrants and has become an institution in their culture. As early as the 1950s, the focus changed to be less creepy and macabre to more family-orientated.
— Jess Spiro, Crush Magazine (Cape Town, South Africa), 31 Oct. 2024

We trace the origins of macabre to the name of the Book of Maccabees, which is included in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox canons of the Old Testament and in the Protestant Apocrypha. Sections of this biblical text address both the deaths of faithful people asked to renounce their religion and the manner in which the dead should be properly commemorated. In medieval France, representations of these passages were performed as what became known as the “dance of death” or “dance Maccabee,” which was spelled in several different ways, including danse macabre. In English, macabre was originally used in reference to this “dance of death” and then gradually came to refer to anything grim or gruesome.

Word Worth Knowing: ‘Macaronic’

The adjective macaronic sounds like it should mean “resembling macaroni.” It does not, even though it comes (via New Latin) from maccarone, a dialectical Italian word for “macaroni,” that totally tubular pasta. The oldest sense of macaronic in English is defined by our Unabridged dictionary as “having the characteristics of a jumble or medley” and is considered archaic, though it still sees use from time to time:

What the director came up with is something of a macaronic mixture of classical drama, folkloristic fantasy, cabaret-style archness, and wink-winking 21st-century irony.
— Jeremy Eichler, The Boston Globe, 21 Oct. 2017

More often, macaronic describes things—such as texts, literature, language, or librettos—that are characterized by a mixture of two languages, or by a mixture of vernacular, or everyday words with Latin words or with non-Latin words having Latin endings.

Last year a writer in the New Yorker referred to Aldous Huxley’s macaronic tendency to drag in untranslated quotations.
— James J. Kilpatrick, The Chicago Sun-Times, 21 Nov. 2004

An example of a macaronic phrase might be “It’s like rain on your nuptiae.” Isn’t it macaronic, don’t you think?