The Words of the Week - Dec. 9

’Infamy’

Infamy was one of our top lookups this week, as is the case in early December every year. On the 7th of December in 1941, Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japanese planes; a surprise attack which prompted President Franklin Roosevelt to declare in a speech the following day that December 7th would be “a date which will live in infamy.” Although Roosevelt did not actually use the phrase “day of infamy,” his speech addressing Congress has come to be widely known by that title.

The next day, Congress would declare war with Japan, leading the U.S. into World War II. During an address to a joint session of Congress, then-President Franklin Roosevelt famously called Dec. 7, 1941 “a date which will live in infamy.”
— Marina Pitofsky, USA Today, 7 Dec. 2022

We define infamy as “evil reputation brought about by something grossly criminal, shocking, or brutal,” “an extreme and publicly known criminal or evil act,” or “the state of being infamous." It is worth noting that although words such as inadequate and inelegant mean “not adequate” and “not elegant,” infamous does not mean “not famous”; it means “having a reputation of the worst kind : notoriously evil.”

’Felonious’ & ‘Verdict'

The Trump Organization was convicted of 17 counts brought against it last week, and as a result considerable attention was focussed on words such as felonious and verdict.

The size of the potential punishment underscores that while the tax fraud conviction has forever tarred the Trump Organization’s name — and branded it a felonious enterprise — the company is facing far less than a financial death sentence.‌
— Ben Protess and Jonah E. Bromwich, The New York Times, 7 Dec. 2022

The guilty verdict comes as Trump is under scrutiny by federal and state prosecutors for his handling of classified documents, the effort to overturn the 2020 election results, and the accuracy of the Trump Organization’s business records and financial statements.
— Kara Scannell and Lauren del Valle, CNN, 7 Dec. 2022

Felonious has an archaic meaning of “very evil,” although the sense found in modern use is far more likely to be “of, relating to, or having the nature of a felony.” In the US felony is typically defined as a crime punishable by a term of imprisonment of not less than one year or by the death penalty. Misdemeanors, in contrast, are often defined as offenses punishable only by fines or by short terms of imprisonment in local jails. 

There are a number of meanings of verdict, both in legal and non-legal senses. The most common legal sense is defined as “the usually unanimous finding or decision of a jury on one or more matters (as counts of an indictment or complaint) submitted to it in trial that ordinarily in civil actions is for the plaintiff or for the defendant and in criminal actions is guilty or not guilty.”

’Chatbot’

Chatbot was also one of or top lookups for the week, after a new one of these captured the imagination and fancy of a good portion of the internet.

Why Everyone's Talking About ChatGPT, a Mindblowing AI Chatbot
— (headline) CNET, 6 Dec. 2022

We define chatbot as “a bot that is designed to converse with human beings,” and bot as “a computer program or character (as in a game) designed to mimic the actions of a person.” Bot is a shortened form of robot, a word that comes from the title of a play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek (R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots, published in 1920). Čapek's play is a bleak look at a society populated with mechanical workers, in which the titular robots have been created from synthetic matter. The play was quite popular, and within a few years the word had made the leap across the Atlantic, and was being used in English. 

Words Worth Knowing: ‘Circumforaneous’

It is a time of the year in which many people are busy shopping, and so the word worth knowing this week is circumforaneous, defined as “going about from market to market.” The word may also be used in the sense “wandering from place to place.”

From a Bank of Green turf his old habitation,
A Worm put his head out, and made Proclamation:
"Let all the Beasts know, if any one is sick
"I Worm am by Practice a Doctor o' Physick;
"I'me none of your Quacks that are circumforaneous:
"But skil'd by long Travell in Parts Subterraneous:
"Where nature her chymical Art does display,
"Where all the rich juyces and minerals lay:
"I think without vanity I know the powr's
"And vertues lockt up in roots, stones or flowr’s."
— Anon., Æsop naturaliz’d, 1697