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English Words and Culture Wayne State University Anthropology Faculty Research Publications Anthropology 2021 The Lexiculture Papers: English Words and Culture Stephen Chrisomalis Wayne State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/anthrofrp Part of the Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons, Digital Humanities Commons, Discourse and Text Linguistics Commons, and the Linguistic Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Chrisomalis, Stephen (editor). 2021. The Lexiculture Papers: English Words and Culture. https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/anthrofrp/4/ This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Anthropology at DigitalCommons@WayneState. It has been accepted for inclusion in Anthropology Faculty Research Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@WayneState. The Lexiculture Papers English Words and Culture edited by Stephen Chrisomalis Wayne State University 2021 Introduction 1 Stephen Chrisomalis Lexiculture: A Student Perspective 6 Agata Borowiecki Akimbo 8 Agata Borowiecki Anymore 14 Jackie Lorey Artisanal 19 Emelyn Nyboer Aryan 23 David Prince Big-ass 28 Nicole Markovic Bromance 34 Alistair King Cafeteria 39 Deanna English Childfree 46 Virginia Nastase Chipotle 51 Gabriela Ortiz Cyber 56 Matthew Worpell Discotheque 60 Ashley Johnson Disinterested 66 Hope Kujawa Douche 71 Aila Kulkarni Dwarf 78 John Anderson Eleventy 84 Julia Connally Erectile Dysfunction 87 Corrinne Sanger Eskimo 93 Valerie Jaruzel Expat 97 Michelle Layton Feisty 103 Kathryn Horner Femme 108 Dana Paglia Gangbang 113 Michelle Gardner Giddy-up 117 William Pizzimenti Gnarly 124 Mallory Moore Guru 129 Kaitlin Carter Heavy Petting 134 Abigail Orzech Househusband 139 Lynn Charara Ixnay 144 Lisette Wittbrodt Judeo-Christian 149 Dominic Colaluca Kiki 155 Pierce Krolewski Lawl 159 Erica Preciado Make Out 164 Anna Khreizat Magick 170 Matthew Ashford MC 175 Travis Kruso Michigander 180 Jaime Baker Molly 187 Brianna LeBlanc Morph 194 Jack Marone Nirvana 199 Soni Qazim Nonzero 206 Gianna Eisele Nymphomaniac 212 Christen Helper Octopi 217 Kayla Niner Orgo 229 Emma Velasquez Penultimate 238 Asa Choate Pow 244 Justin Williams Punk 249 Mikey Elster Radical 258 Mohanned Darwish Ratchet 263 Jessica Hurst Realness 268 Samantha Hess Slaps 272 Cheyenne Boinais Soul Patch 279 Mikayla Swasey Spaniard 285 Eric Gresock Tarnation 289 Hannah Langsdorf Troll 298 Mary S. Cavanagh Undocumented 307 Issamar Camacho-Almaraz Uppity 314 Emily Lock-Lee Vanilla 321 Cecilia Murrell-Harvey Vape 325 Julia Hoelzle Vintage 334 Grace Fusani Winningest 338 Melissa Ashford Xerox 350 Sara Bugamelli Ye Olde 359 Gavin Redding Yoink 365 Jessica Beatty Introduction Stephen Chrisomalis Cite as: Chrisomalis, Stephen. 2021. Introduction. In The Lexiculture Papers: English Words and Culture, Stephen Chrisomalis (ed.), pp. 1-5. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. What is Lexiculture? Lexiculture is an approach to language that studies how words and their meanings intersect with cultural and historical contexts. The term is not entirely of my own invention; after starting to use it independently, I discovered that Robert Galisson had originated it (in French) in 1988 and used it in several publications thereafter, in much the same sense that I am using it (Galisson 1988, 1999). The common point of interest in our approaches is that words are seen as discrete, analyzable aspects of culture, and thus provide an avenue for analyzing social change. However, to my knowledge, the term has not yet percolated into the English-language scholarship. Of course, neither Galisson nor I are the first to reflect on the importance of individual words and their meanings for understanding social life. Raymond Williams’ Keywords (1976) is perhaps the best-known and widest-cited book in this research lineage. In Keywords, Williams, an intellectual and social historian, sought to demonstrate complex interrelations and semantic shifts in the basic vocabulary of the humanities and social sciences, with a particular aim to support students and scholars for whom the expansion and variation of terminologies could (and can) be an obstacle to clear understanding. Similarly, the cognitive linguist Anna Wierzbicka (1997) takes a cross-cultural, cognitive, and linguistic approach to similar sorts of issues in her Understanding Cultures through their Key Words and other publications. These books have the advantage of being supported by a substantial scholarly apparatus, and enjoy their well-deserved reputations. But for the student just taking the first steps into research of any kind, what they lack is a means to the joy of discovery in the social sciences of language, of collecting data on new words, important words, transformed words, and just plain weird words. Lexiculture is about taking that joy, transforming it into research questions, and then giving students the tools to arrive at satisfactory answers. What are the Lexiculture Papers? The Lexiculture Papers are essays of undergraduate student scholarship in linguistics and anthropology, bearing on the relationship between individual English words and the social contexts in which they are coined, used, and transformed. In choosing a neologism for this concept and for this project, I am consciously rejecting other terms, some of great antiquity (etymology, lexicography) and some of great recency (culturomics). Lexiculture aims to carve out a distinct interdisciplinary space, using concepts from sociolinguistics, lexicography, and linguistic anthropology, to study the ‘culture of words’ from a perspective accessible to lay readers and scholarly audiences alike. This project had its inception in 2010. As a professor of linguistic anthropology at Wayne State University, I teach a course each year entitled Language and Culture, which is required for all our undergraduate anthropology majors and is taken by many linguistics majors as well. Many of these students come into the class with a vague interest in language, but also significant trepidation or even 1 loathing at the sound of words like grammar and linguistics. Moreover, while some of my students have some knowledge of other languages, many of them do not, leaving English as the chief touchstone through which I can frame key concepts in the field. I developed a pilot project on the word chairperson (Chrisomalis 2010) followed by an experimental student project in my 2010 course, before putting it into full practice in the 2013 version of my course (Chrisomalis 2013), and run yearly since that time. The papers in this volume thus all originated as individual student research conducted in the span of a one-semester intermediate-division undergraduate course. None of the students had extensive background in linguistics or linguistic anthropology prior to taking the course. Students chose words based on their personal interest from a long (~100 items) list that I developed and am constantly expanding and revising, or, if they wished, they could make a written proposal to analyze another word of interest to them. Some of the most interesting papers in the volume have come from student-chosen words (e.g., ratchet, pow, nirvana). The words on my prepared list were single English words or two-word phrases that I felt might be of interest, and had their primary area of historical interest between roughly 1800 and the present. This time delimitation is necessary because the datasets that are freely available to students largely cover this period, and because of the more specialized knowledge that would be required to cover more distant periods (or, for that matter, non- English words). At the completion of the course, students who earned an A on their original term paper were invited to contribute to the published document you’re now reading, submitting their essay to me after the end of term, making changes to their papers as needed. Around 20%-25% of each class normally is thus invited to participate, and around 90% of those invited do, eventually, submit their work. I have done some copyediting, fixed dead links, and organized and structured the papers consistently, but the work is their own. The first papers in the volume were written in 2013, and the last ones in 2020; inevitably, that means that some of them are the product of the time when they were written, but I have ensured that active, relevant web links, where needed (in 2021) work. How do you do it? Given the wealth of tools available today, my entry into linguistic research for my students is through individual words, their histories, and their transformations. I probably could not have supported students in this project in 2000 or 2005 because so many of the tools we now have at our disposal did not exist then, or were available only to specialists. Linguistic corpora (such as COCA and COHA) and tools for massive textual analysis (most notably the Google Ngram Viewer) stand out among these. You’ll see that influence throughout the chapters of this book. There are some exceptional pieces of principally corpus-based, quantitative analysis of single words among the essays in this book (e.g., disinterested, anymore, xerox, nonzero) that deserve considerable attention for their approach and the answers they reach. This kind of analysis is one that few anthropology and linguistics students get the opportunity to employ, especially as undergraduates. But the Lexiculture Papers are not intended as a showcase for purely corpus-based
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