"Fauci ouchie"

“Fauci ouchie”, the rhyming phrase for a Covid-19 vaccine dreamed up in honour of Dr Anthony Fauci, has been named the “most creative word or phrase of the year” by the American Dialect Society.

Founded in 1889, the society is made up of linguists, lexicographers, etymologists and scholars dedicated to the study of the English language in North America. More than 300 members took part in this year’s annual meeting, at which “Fauci ouchie” beat “chin diaper” – defined as a “face mask worn below the chin instead of properly covering the nose and mouth” – to the accolade.

The meeting also saw “insurrection” named the overall word of 2021, beating vax/vaxx. Alison Flood, The Guardian

e per continuare a parlare di lingua, ecco un bell'articolo sul "not":

Every language has negatives, and every writer needs them. They need them for formal logic, for quantum leaps, for the existential gloom of Being and Nothingness. “Without Contraries,” writes the poet William Blake, “is no progression.” Yet the literary effects of these negatives are hard to pin down, even mysterious: What happens really when someone says not? The mystery may be because the very idea of negation is hard in itself, or perhaps because we have not yet got the right emphasis. Max Byrd, The American Scholar