YOUTHY
Sort of youthful; not quite adulty. Samuel Pepys preferred youthsome, but youthy is an actual word, not from Stephen Colbert, but from the great Scot James Halliwell, who included it in his word list from 1611. This corner believes it is a MNW (much needed word), if not an indispensable word, because it captures in a catchy way the essence of the obsession with staying young at all costs or worshipping at the altar of youth. Epitomizing this phenomenon are Hollywood, Paris, and Monaco, among other places, where naturally aging people do unnatural things to themselves in an attempt to appear younger than they are. Compare this monomaniacal behavior to the philosophy championed by the immortal Satchel Paige, who once said: “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?” Companion words obsessed with youth include youth culture, youth-oriented, and fountain of youth. Of the concern with youthfulness, Mae West said, “You’re never too old to become younger,” and the youthsome Oscar Wilde uttered, “An inordinate passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young.” At least he didn’t say youthy.
YUMA (CUBAN-SPANISH)
Cuban street slang for “foreigner,” especially those from Europe or North America. The word was all the vogue for young Cubans after Castro’s coup in 1959, and was spontaneously revived after the 1980s surge of asylum-seeking abroad. In the expression “I want to go to La Yuma” it became shorthand for “Stateside.” To this day, it’s a word or phrase relatively unknown in Mexico or Spain, and despite the fact that few Cubans would be able to locate Yuma on a map, it remains popular. The folk etymology traces it back to the 1957 movie version of Elmore Leonard’s short story, 3:10 to Yuma, which mythologized “cowboy honor.” To Cubans, the flick became the Hollywood equivalent of a “cherriedout” ‘63 Impala or the innumerable cowboy dime novels seen around Cuba, which have become emblematic of “honor and obligation.” In the movie, a struggling rancher agrees, for the price of a bounty, to take a captured outlaw into custody until the train arrives that will take him to court in Yuma, Arizona. While they wait, the outlaw tries to sway the rancher to let him escape. What was in the movie that caught the Cubans’ attention and affection? When I viewed the 2007 remake, the lines leapt out at me. The rancher, Dan Evans (Van Heflin/Christian Bale), is stupefied that the outlaw, Ben Wade (Glenn Ford/Russell Crowe), rescued him when he could’ve escaped: Evans: “Why did you do it, Ben?” Wade: “I don’t like owing anybody any favors. You saved my life back at the hotel. That’s all right, I’ve broken out of Yuma before.” 3:10 to Yuma is a cry for freedom.
Z
ZAFTIG (YIDDISH)
Pleasingly, plumply pulchritudinous; alluringly curvaceous. My now nearly forty-year-old going-to-college gift from my parents, the wheel-stop-worthy Random House Dictionary, simply and safely defines zaftig as “sexually attractive.” That hardly does justice to the sizzling z, the long-sighing a, and the suggestive “tig.” We come closer if we think full-bodied, full-bosomed, or if we consult a Yiddish dictionary or a Yiddish-speaking friend. Zaftig comes from the Yiddish zaftik, which means “juicy,” from zaft, juice. So, properly speaking, a zaftig woman is a juicy Lucy, full of life, saucy, full of sass, ripe and luscious. To further appreciate zaftig, look at Rembrandt’s Delilah, Titian’s Venus of Urbina, or Diego Rivera’s portrait of his wife, Frida Kahlo. Woody Allen writes, in Mere Anarchy, “I never once in forty years looked at another woman except for Elsie, which candidly was not so easy as I’m the first to admit she’s not a dish like those zaftig courvers who pose in God knows what positions in magazines you probably wait drooling on the docks for as the boats arrive from Copenhagen.”
ZEMBLANITY
An unhappy accident or unfortunate encounter; the opposite of serendipity. Coined by novelist William Boyd, in Armadillo, after reading of the unfortunate fate of the Arctic island Novaya Zemlya, north of mainland Russia, which was riddled with atomic blasts set off by the Russians. Boyd figured it was news he could live without, but he couldn’t quite find the word to say that, so he plucked the word right out of the paper. Zemblanity is an experience you didn’t want to happen and no one wants to hear about. While researching my book Once and Future Myths, in 2000, I came across a column by one of my favorite word virtuosos, William Safire, on “Zemblanity.” The word caught my eye because it didn’t remotely resemble any word I’d ever seen before. I clipped the column for future reference and recently dug it out. Safire wrote, “The novel’s hero … is undone by an outbreak of zemblanity, the opposite of serendipity. … Think of another world in the far north, barren, icebound—Zembla. Ergo: zemblanity, the opposite of serendipity, the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries by design.” Writers from Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope to Jules Verne and Salman Rushdie have used Novaya Zemlya’s arctic wastes as symbolic of what Charlotte Brontë called “forlorn regions of dreary space.” Now this site for testing non-nuclear explosives at a nuclear facility has given birth to zemblanity, the discovery of what we don’t want to know.
ZEPHYR
One of the eight gods of the winds in classical times; a soft breeze in ours. A refreshing breeze from the West, a gentle wind. Zephyr is from Zephyrus, the West Wind. While traveling in Taiwan for work on a film and book about tea, I carried with me a translation of the first known book on the subject, the 8th-century Classic Book of Tea, by Lu Yu. There, he writes, with metaphors as rich as the finest mountain Oolong, “The best quality tea must have creases like the leathern boot of Tartar horsemen, curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock, unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine, gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr, and be wet and soft like a fine earth newly swept by rain.” Thomas Gray wrote liltingly, in “The Bard,” “Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyrs.” Tenderly, Emily Dickinson wrote, “Good Night! Which put the Candle out? / A jealous Zephyr—not a doubt—” In August 2009 Leah Garchik wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, “It had been a rare warm day in San Francisco, and I’d pictured after-show lounging on the veranda, with zephyrs gently fanning the flames of the nearby fire pit.” And this just in from the curiosity department: a zephyr is also a lightweight garment worn by rowing crews.
ZITCOM
A sitcom for teens. One of the more colorful of the bountiful examples of newly slung slang. In all truthiness, as Stephen Colbert calls slippery talk, it takes a staminac, a sleep-starved overachiever, or a sleep camel, a power-sleeping workaholic who slaves away for a few days, then draws on those stored z’s for the long trek across a week of nineteen-hour workdays, to keep up with the slang. Other eclectic examples: Spendorphins is the curious boost of shopping endorphins released upon entrance into the local mall. Banalysis is a trivial recap of complex material; blamestorming is faultfinding among co-workers. Chipmunking is looking all scrunched up while typing out text messages. Digitalia refers to indispensable gadgets from the wired world. Infonesia is amnesia about information, possibly due to being overwhelmed by infoglut. And for me the most stirring neologism of all, tankmanning: standing up to authority, after the anonymous man who defied the tanks in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, providing the world with a modern equivalent of Gandhi’s Salt March, King’s Selma March, and the actions of the current titan of courageous protest, the pro-democracy figure Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been calmly defying Burmese authorities for the last nineteen years.
ZOMBIFICATION
Turning the living into the walking dead by administering the evil potion of consumerism. Coined by the court jester of NPR, poet-satirist Andrei Codrescu, who based an essay on the word zombie. From Haitian, actually a 19th-century word from West African Kikongo, zumbi, and Kimbundu nzambi, god, a snake god. In the Caribbean it evolved to mean a corpse that’s come back to life, as depicted in the vodou cult of Haiti and in the American cult of horror films such as Night of the Living Dead. Codrescu’s revival of the word promises to be even more lethal, suggesting a culture of the walking dead, people deadened by a culture of consumerism and soul-sapping popular culture. By the 1930s zom
bie had also come to suggest a “slow-witted” person. With no little irony, Codrescu writes, “The world is undergoing zombification . It was gradual a while, a few zombies here and there, mostly in high office, where being a corpse in a suit was de rigueur. … The worst part about zombies raging unchecked is the slow paralysis they induce in people who aren’t quite zombies yet.” A curious-to-strange companion word is cad, from cadaver, a corpse or dead body, an example of campus black humor, according to Brewer, meaning anyone not enrolled in a university, thus, uneducated, a deadhead. And who can forget the Zombies, the ‘60s rock group from England, with hits like “She’s Not There,” “Tell Her No,” and “Time of the Season.” You see, there’s still some life in those old dead words.
THE TEN MOST BEAUTIFUL WORDS
(Source: The British Council, 2004; based on a poll of 40,000 people in 102 countries)
1. mother
2. passion
3. smile
4. love
5. eternity
6. fantastic
7. destiny
8. freedom
9. liberty
10. tranquility
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