The Words of the Week - Oct. 6

‘Zombie’

Zombie shuffled to the top of our lookups last week, after a number of people opined online that some vaccinees would become zombified.

Conspiracy theorists fear Emergency Alert System test will turn the vaccinated into ‘zombies’
— (headline) The Independent (London), 5 Oct. 2023

There are a number of senses of zombie; the one presumably intended by the aforementioned conspiracy theorists is “a will-less and speechless human (as in voodoo belief and in fictional stories) held to have died and been supernaturally reanimated.” Other senses of zombie include “a person held to resemble the so-called walking dead” and “a mixed drink made of several kinds of rum, liqueur, and fruit juice.” The word comes to English from the Louisiana Creole or Haitian Creole zonbi, which is itself of Bantu origin.

‘Vacate’

Kevin McCarthy, the Republican speaker of the house, was last week removed from that position, and a number of words spiked in lookups as a result; among these was vacate.

Gaetz had introduced a motion to vacate, a seldom-used congressional procedure to replace a speaker.
— George Petras, Janet Loehrke, Ramon Padilla, USA Today, 4 Oct. 2023

Vacate means “to make (an office, post, house, etc.) vacant; to deprive of an incumbent or occupant.” It is also employed in a legal sense with the meaning “to say officially that (a legal judgment) is no longer valid.”

‘Hammerlock’

Also trending as a result of McCarthy’s vacation was hammerlock, after Senator McConnell used the word with somewhat of a rhetorical flourish.

McConnell warns procedural tool used to oust McCarthy puts speaker in “hammerlock of dysfunction”
— (headline) CNN, 4 Oct. 2023

A hammerlock is “a wrestling hold in which an opponent's arm is held bent behind the back.” It is also used more broadly, in non-wrestling contexts, to mean “a strong hold.”

“Andre Christol, the French wrestler, who was defeated recently in Melbourne by Jack Connor, is anxious for another try with his conqueror. Christol says that he will bar neither hammerlock nor any other hold, and the only stipulation he makes is that the ground wrestling shall be limited to two minutes.
— The San Francisco Chronicle, 24 Feb. 1887

‘Facetious’

Yet another word that spiked in lookups from the removal of the speaker was facetious, when President Biden averred that this word was not applicable to his comments on the matter.

On Sunday, after comments marking the passage of the continuing resolution, Biden avoided questions over whether Democrats should save McCarthy if Gaetz pushes a motion to vacate. The president simply said he hopes “this experience for the speaker has been one of personal revelation.” “I'm not being facetious,” he added.
— Marianna Sotomayor, Leigh Ann Caldwell, Mariana Alfaro, The Washington Post, 2 Oct. 2023

Facetious means “joking or jesting often inappropriately” or “meant to be humorous or funny.” It is one of a small group of words in English that not only uses all five vowels once, but uses them in order. Other members of this peculiar club include abstemious (and abstemiously), and arsenious. There is also an odd class of words which contain each vowel, used once, in reverse order: Pulmonifera, Muscoidea, and subcontinental.

‘mRNA’

mRNA had a large increase in lookups last week, after a pair of scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work with mRNA vaccines.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to biochemist Katalin Karikó and immunologist Drew Weissman for discoveries that enabled the development of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.
— Ewen Callaway and Miryam Naddaf, Nature, 2 Oct. 2023

mRNA is a shortened form of messenger RNA, which is defined as “an RNA produced by transcription that carries the code for a particular protein from the nuclear DNA to a ribosome in the cytoplasm and acts as a template for the formation of that protein.” RNA comes from ribonucleic acid and is “any of various nucleic acids that contain ribose and uracil as structural components and are associated with the control of cellular chemical activities.”

Words Worth Knowing: ‘Disobligation’

This week’s word worth knowing is disobligation, which obligingly has two definitions: “an act that purposely inconveniences or offends” and “the state or sensation of being disobliged.” We trust that enough of you are routinely inconvenienced by someone or something that this word will come in handy.