More WotY action

From The Washington Post:

The Oxford English Dictionary blew it in The Oxford English Dictionary blew it in anointing “brain rot” as the word of the year.

First off, that’s two words. But the real miss was overlooking the rightful winner, “slop,” which was on the dictionary publisher’s short list for word of the year. That’s like Beyoncé losing the top Grammy award to Harry Styles.

From The Economist:

SOME YEARS it is hard to identify the main event, much less sum it up in a word. This is not the problem in 2024; the return of Donald Trump to the White House after a four-year absence is consequential not only for the world’s most powerful country but also for its neighbours and everywhere else. Which word can capture the mix of surprise, excitement and trepidation people feel as the MAGA movement returns to power?

[…] For the year’s defining word, it helps to look back—a long way. English has a host of political terms derived from Greek, because it got a lot of its political thinking from the likes of Plato and Aristotle. So if you go through the lexicon (itself Greek), a few roots abound. Arche (ruler), for example, is found in monarchy, oligarchy and anarchy (the rule of one, the few and none, respectively).

Greek has another root for “rule”, kratia, which is even more common. It features in democracy, aristocracy, gerontocracy, theocracy and plutocracy, as well as meritocracy (a modern coinage for which Alan Fox, a British sociologist, married a Latin root with a Greek one in 1956). The Oxford English Dictionary is also full of rarer species such as ochlocracy (rule by the mob), gynaecocracy (rule by women) and thalassocracy (mastery of the seas).

Two other “-cracy” words seem appropriate in this election year. One is theatrocracy, or rule by theatre-goers. This sounds as if it might refer to dominance by the media elites writing for the culture sections of newspapers. But the word has its origins in Plato, who described people skilled in fanning the emotions of the crowd at a theatre into a powerful political force. This might, in hindsight, have been a good word of the year for 2016, when a former reality-TV star with a talent for working the crowd was first elected president.

After Mr Trump was re-elected on November 5th, the world watched anxiously as he began filling top jobs. Some picks, such as the sensible Susie Wiles for chief of staff and Marco Rubio, a long-serving senator, for secretary of state, were qualified and competent. But a flurry of nominations in the week ending November 15th led to a spike in people looking up another “-cracy” word on Google.

Matt Gaetz, accused of sex and drug crimes and the subject of a congressional ethics investigation, was nominated to be the country’s highest law-enforcement officer. Robert F. Kennedy junior, a man with crackpot views on vaccines, was to be secretary of health. Tulsi Gabbard, a conspiracy theorist with nice things to say about the despots of Syria and Russia, was to run America’s intelligence services. And Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host sporting tattoos associated with the far right (and who had been accused of sexual assault) was tapped as defence secretary.

So the word everyone was Googling was kakistocracy: the rule of the worst. The first root, kakos, is found in few others in English. “Kakistocracy” is not found in ancient sources; it seems to have been coined in English as an intentional antonym to aristocracy, originally “rule by the best”. Having spiked on Google Trends the day after Mr Trump’s election, kakistocracy jumped a second time in the wake of these nominations. Searches surged a third time on November 21st, when Mr Gaetz announced that he would withdraw from consideration for attorney-general, suggesting that he was seen as the worst of the worst. The term was particularly popular in Democratic strongholds such as Oregon, Massachusetts and Minnesota.

Back in 2011, Geoff Pullum's son suggested a less formal combination with kratia: "The assholocracy", 12/13/2011. Nancy Friedman immediately made the connection — "Late-Breaking Contender for Word of the Year", 12/14/2011:

It’s assholocracy.

Admit it: You love it, too.

I learned about this word only yesterday, when linguist Geoffrey Pullum reported on Language Log about a recent conversation he’d had with his son […].

Assholocracy: “rule by assholes.” A little Anglo-Saxon, the language of bluntness; a little Greek, because that’s where the -cracies come from.

Sure, it could have been a “real” word, kakistocracy, whose dictionary definition is “rule by the least qualified” but whose deeper etymology points to something like “rule by the shitty.” But that would risk going straight over the heads of those who most need to know, i.e., the assholocrats.

Looking into things further, I realized that I've been the victim of a  folk etymology that I apparently shared with Nancy. As Wiktionary explains, κᾰ́κῐστος (kákistos) is the superlative degree of κακός (kakós), which means lots of negative things:

As a measure of quality: bad, worthless, useless As a measure of appearance: ugly, hideous Of circumstances: injurious, wretched, unhappy As a measure of character: low, mean, vile, evil

That much I knew. But as for the etymology of κακός , I assumed that it came from (some form of) kaka (in some language) meaning "feces" — which is apparently the least likely (and worst sourced) alternative given by Wiktionary:

Strong's concordance tells us that κᾰ́κῐστος (kákistos) does not occur in the Greek New Testament, but forms of κακός occur 51 time in 46 verses, glossed variously as

1. universally, of a bad nature; not such as it ought to be. 2. (morally, i. e.) of a mode of thinking, feeling, acting; base, wrong, wicked […] 3. troublesome, injurious, pernicious, destructive, baneful […]

The link will take you to all 46 verses, if you want.