Welcome to NewsFeed’s weekly highlight of our vocabulary — including useful, new, hilarious and surprising words (as well as some that are just fun to roll off the old tongue).
Chinese euphemism of the week: “Internet management”
The Chinese government passed new regulations that require bars, restaurants, hotels and bookstores to install $3,100 software that monitors who is logging onto their wireless connections and what they are doing. The idea is “to eliminate a loophole in ‘Internet management,'” the New York Times explains, making sure those iPad-owning hipster expats aren’t surfing around unsupervised while they eat their dim sum.
Hedging through history: The Chinese government loves its euphemisms, from the “Cultural Revolution,” which many saw as a synonym for “purge,” to “a possible emergency,” which was their code for a Japanese invasion circa 1935. (They even nicknamed a threatening Russia their “polar bear.”) Meanwhile the Japanese, not to be out-euphemized, referred to females forced to have sex with military men during World War II as “comfort women.”
Perilous profession: social assassin
In the latest episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which Larry David plays a cantankerous, outspoken version of himself, he tries his hand at being a “social assassin”: a person who will criticize others’ social behavior for those who don’t have the guts to speak up themselves. David is bribed, for instance, to tell a friend’s wife that she shouldn’t say “LOL” out loud. (Actual laughter, he explains, is a better option.)
Previous usage: David wasn’t the first person to name this vocation. In a New York Times article from 1911, a man named Ellis Parker Butler quits his job as “sidewalk chairman” in charge of maintaining those walkways in Queens. He had quite the bad time of convincing people to make improvements and said that whoever takes over the post should be “some social assassin, his dagger steeped in bitter herbs, ready to knife his dearest friend.” Sidewalks being, apparently, a rather touchy subject in the early 20th century.
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Most-looked-up word: panegyric
The New York Times has released the semiannual list of words that had readers running for the dictionary. The esoteric winner was panegyric, meaning a speech or text praising someone or something. As in, “Italian Director Bernardo Bertolucci was … caught in a crossfire of critical overkill—pans on one side, panegyrics on the other.” Also near the top were immiscible (can’t be mixed) and crepuscular (of or pertaining to twilight).
The defense: The editors note that they know readers “turn to us for news, not SAT prep” but argue that they still shouldn’t “water down” the prose. One word for which there is just no replacement is No. 30, schadenfreude, a German term meaning to take joy in the misfortune of others. A telling usage came in the Wall Street Journal‘s recent editorial defending News Corp’s publications in light of the hacking scandal. “The Schadenfreude is so thick,” they said, “you can’t cut it with a chainsaw.”
Indoor infirmity: nature deficit disorder
In an interview with TIME earlier this week, documentarian Ken Burns lamented the disconnect between today’s kids and nature. “We now talk about ‘nature deficit disorder,'” he said. “You go fly over suburbia and every diamond is silent and the jungle gyms are without kids, and you worry tremendously about what the effect is—for people who know how to shoot down enemy aliens in video games, who know how to text while they’re doing three other things but don’t know how to forge real relationships with their world.”
Where to go from here: The term “nature deficit disorder” was coined in 2005 by author Richard Louv to describe “the psychological, physical and cognitive costs of human alienation from nature, particularly for children.” The Early Show later did a special on the best cities in which to raise a nature-deficient child, and the top three were Boulder, Colo.; Jackson, Wyo.; and Durango, Colo. Colorado is also the only state in the U.S. with an obesity rate under 20%, which is, of course, how it got its nickname. “Colorado: The State Where Skinny People Aren’t Afraid of Trees.”
(MORE: The Most Obese States in America)
Katy Steinmetz is a reporter at TIME. Find her on Twitter at @KatySteinmetz. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.