Verified by 
Key points
- Words and the truths they define are constantly changing.
- The terms we use show what we find important, and what we no longer consider relevant.
- With animal species in decline, new dictionary editions emphasize technology.
An 80-year-old man walks into Walmart and asks for thongs. The clerk, surprised but polite, takes him to women’s underwear. She isn’t judgmental. Who’s to know what’s up in another person’s life?
Once at the undies, the man, a friend of mine, stops, looks at the clerk, confused, and then begins to laugh.
“I was looking for sandals,” he says. “I guess you call them ‘flip-flops’ now?”
The clerk bursts out in relieved laughter and directs him to shoes.
Language has always been fluid, and the longer we live, the more we see words come and go or morph into meaning something else altogether. I love words, and I enjoy keeping up. But I miss the mark enough to make my kids chuckle. I honestly thought LOL meant “lots of love,” and it’s a little tricky for me to understand that “brat” is now a positive.
How things get named in the first place is an enigma. Merriam-Webster lists three meanings of “thongs,” the first being a “leather strip,” the second a “sandal held on the foot by a thong fitting between the toes,” and the third “an article of swimwear or underwear with the back portion consisting of a narrow strip of cloth that passes between the buttocks and connects with a waistband.”
I imagine an earnest lexicographer sitting at her desk, eyeglasses at the tip of her nose, as mine are now, holding up a lace undie to analyze its construction and wondering: Does it really pass between the buttocks? And what part is connected to the waistband? How? Does it matter linguistically?
In my friend’s defense, sandals come before underwear, at least in the dictionary. When we were young, underwear in the buttocks was called a wedgie and was neither trendy nor comfy. In 20 years, who knows what “thongs” might mean? I do not have that much imagination.
And take the word “butch.” If you would.
My husband got a bad haircut a few weeks ago and was looking for a way to tame what was left. “I need some butch wax,” he said. I snorted my coffee as I imagined him dancing with John Travolta in “Grease,” pulling a comb from his back pocket and running it through his slick hair while checking himself out in the rearview mirror of a souped-up Chevy.
Close-cropped and deliberately masculine
For “butch,” Mirriam-Webster has two definitions: “deliberately masculine” or “close-cropped.” The first refers to an attitude, the second to a hairstyle that reflects that attitude and was popular in the 1950s and ’60s. But the term has fallen out of favor, except for all the men who were named after Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. That was one fine Butch.
My husband says butch wax still exists. “You can find it on the internet,” he says. I’m just amazed that, at 86, he continues to need hair products.
New words are added to the dictionary annually, while old ones fade away. In 2024, we saw the addition of terms that had no connection to reality when I was young. “Climate refugee,” “chatbot,” and “doom scroll” are self-explanatory. But “quiet quit” (to stay at a job but limit the amount of work you do), “rizz” (romantic appeal—short for charisma), and “chumocracy” (a network of close friends) need a bit more explanation for those of us worried about wedgies.
Keeping up with culture means keeping up with words
Words name our world, reflecting reality and projecting meaning. Keeping up with culture means keeping up with words. But sometimes, I don’t want to keep up.
In 2007, the Oxford Junior Dictionary eliminated 40 words about nature they said modern children seldom used, such as “acorn,” “bluebell,” “fern,” “heron,” “ivy,” and “kingfisher.” Sadly, these words of beauty were replaced with terms reflecting technology—“broadband,” “blog,” and “chatroom.” It was a direct blow to the wildness of nature in defense of technological change. It was not, to many, progress. More than 50,000 people, including authors such as Margaret Atwood, signed a petition to Oxford University Press to reinstate the words.
Writer Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris responded to the controversy with Lost Words, a beautiful, oversized “book of spells” celebrating the deleted words with large-scale, full-color artwork and poetic incantations invoking the magic of each lost word. I have it on my bookshelf and often leave it open to one of the magical drawings.
“We’ve got more than 50 percent of species in decline,” Macfarlane said when the book was introduced. “And names, good names, well used can help us see and they help us care. We find it hard to love what we cannot give a name to. And what we do not love we will not save.”
Kids are regularly faced with chatrooms. But let’s make sure they remember herons and ferns. As more species face extinction, the need only increases for us to use the words of the wild.
Being gobsmacked and catawampus
When our grandson was 7 or 8, he loved the word “catawampus,” as in “my socks are all catawampus.” It’s hard to imagine a better word, and I think he enjoyed it for its slightly silly sound. I am encouraged to see it serve the youngest generation as it served mine and my parents’. Not everything changes. (To complicate things, the word is also spelled “cattywampus.")
My favorite word right now might be “gobsmacked,” partly because of its meaning—astonished—which I often am while watching our political world unfold, but also because of its transcendent goofiness. The editing function on my Word document doesn’t recognize the term, but I know better than that electronic gnome, and it is not the boss of me. So use it I will.
As a child, I would have been gobsmacked at the thought of zooming or tweeting—those were the things of Saturday morning cartoons, which I watched wearing thongs, with my brothers beside me smelling of butch wax, sitting together on what our mother called a davenport. The Roadrunner zoomed, and Tweety Bird tweeted, and we all laughed—a word that, fortunately, has retained its happy, exuberant meaning through the centuries. May it live many centuries more.
Copyright 2024. Patricia Prijatel.
