New Words for a New World

One of our favorite curmudgeons, William Safire, chose frugalista for his favorite new word of 2008 (NYT Sunday Magazine 11-23-08). A frugalista is a penny-pinching fashionista, who swaps and trades for designer clothes rather than buying them. There is a pleasant shade of gentle ridicule in the term, a suggestion that the frugalista devotes a silly revolutionary zeal to her practice.

Safire chose frugalista from a list of the best new words of 2008, proposed by the New Oxford American Dictionary. Safire rejected The NOAD’s winner new word hypermiling, which describes driving an automobile with the minimum use of gasoline. Safire found hypermiling and its synonym ecoDriving (A favorite word of California Governor Arnold Schwarznegger.) too "news-specific", as if global warming and the energy crisis were ephemeral issues, like the season’s hemlines.

The Grumpy loves the new word frenemy, used recently to describe the special love-loathe relationship between Barack and Hillary. This word has legs and is not at all trendy or newsy. It describes a classic political pas-de-deux in which you stab your esteemed friend gently through the ribs while smiling in his or her face.

Big Bill will no doubt correct me if frenemy was not coined in 2008. Perhaps recent research will indicate that it was first used by Samuel Johnson to describe that pesky Boswell fellow, but was lost to lexicographical history when a part time waiter at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese mistook the great man’s scrawl for a snuff stained rag and threw it in the fire.

All this neologizing got The Grumpy cranked up and thinking about some new words that could be useful in the new year.

The Grumpy liked frugalista and plans to use it a lot, but felt we needed a more earnest less ironic appellation for someone dealing bravely with straightended circumstances. The Grumpy tried out frugalnaut on some of his few friends but was not met with applause. Thriftanaut smacks of great heroic adventures in moderation and making-do, and may be applied especially to cheapskate travelers.

Safire will surely enjoy misercrat, a word to describe and poke fun at a familiar brand of puritanical liberal who thinks we can save the world if we all just ride bicycles and save string.

In a New York Times editorial of 11/23/08 (Yes, The Grumpy has to broaden his reading.), we learned that some Bush administration zealots plan to go feral inside the Obama administration, converting themselves from political appointees into permanent civil service moles. These burrowers, as the Times calls them, will bury themselves deep inside the vast federal system intent on sabotaging the new administration and its policies from within. May we improve on this neologism in progress and refer to these dead enders as burrowcrats and suggest that they form an insidious burrowacracy? The Grumpy needs your blessing Bill.

Some have suggested that burrowcrats be known simply as Brownies in honor of the infamously incompetent FEMA director, in the same way that London’s Bobbies took their moniker from Prime Minister Robert Peel.

The Grumpy does not yet have a satisfying word to describe the effort to dig out the burrowcrats. Deburrowcratification somehow doesn’t cut it.

Bush-hogging already exists and does not have the correct connotation of digging out and up rooting the pesky varmints, although it does make a sly reference to that sweaty bucolic pastime, favored by many recent Republican presidents, of hacking away at the shrubbery while on vacation.

Mole whacking is joyful but packs a disagreeable whiff of futility. The moles in the whack-a-mole carnival game keep popping back up and never get properly whacked, in the preferred wise-guy sense of the word.

DeBushification, an appropriate twist on the deBathification of the boondoggliest (most boondoggled) period of the Iraq War, may be the most ready to wear term for dispatching burrowcrats, but it still needs work. Any suggestions?

The office of the Vice President will certainly require a special regimen of intellectual and constitutional fumigation. Some may speak of the need to deCheneyize the office. Political sophisticates will refer to an era of anti-Addingtoniansim, after David Addington the legal architect of the unitary executive theory and inflato-vice-presidentialism.

Bidenize may be used to describe an act of replacing anything grandiose and dangerously overarching with something solid and regular. When you downsize from a McMasion to a small but comfortable cape they will say you have Bidenized your living arrangements. Any similar swap: Rolls for Chevy, Gucci for Thom McCann, The Ritz for Motel 6; will become an example of Bidenization.

Obamafication will be used by right wing talk show hosts to stick a scary foreign sounding label on the normal practice of replacing incompetents with people who know how to do their jobs.

As Lincoln was The Great Emancipator, so Reagan was the Great Communicator. George H. W. Bush, The Great Lip Reader came before Clinton, The Great Triangulator. Has anyone yet christened George W. Bush The Great Discombobulator?

Perhaps Obama will restore peace and prosperity to our nation and become The Great Combobulator, or should that be Recombobulator? Even Safire can hope that coinage represents change we can believe in.