The Words of the Week - October 11

‘Ghost gun’

Lookups for ghost gun were high this week as the Supreme Court considered a challenge seeking to invalidate Biden administration rules regarding the sale of ghost gun components.

The company, Polymer80, was for a time the country’s largest manufacturer and online seller of the components used to assemble the untraceable homemade weapons known as “ghost guns.” The weapons fueled a surge in gun crime after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic across the country, particularly in California, according to law enforcement officials.
— Glenn Thrush, The New York Times, 7 Oct. 2024

We define ghost gun as “a gun that lacks a serial number by which it can be identified and that is typically assembled by the user (as from purchased or homemade components).” This use of ghost echoes its role in a number of other compounds, such as ghost kitchen (“a commercial cooking facility used for the preparation of food consumed off the premises”) or ghostwriter (“one that writes for and in the name of another”), in that it refers to something or someone that is not typically seen, experienced, or traced.

‘Misinformation’

Misinformation has been much-discussed in the news recently with regard to recovery and rescue efforts following Hurricane Helene, leading to a rise in lookups for the word misinformation.

As recovery efforts from Hurricane Helene continue across the southeastern U.S., federal and state officials have warned that misinformation and conspiracy theories are hindering efforts to provide aid and accurate information to victims. The American Red Cross said misinformation is hurting relief efforts, while Deanne Criswell, who leads the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the false claims are “demoralizing” to aid workers. Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina told “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the claims distract from rescue work. On Monday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called out “scam artists and bad faith actors and others who are putting politics over people are promoting misinformation about our efforts, including falsehoods about federal assistance.”
— Rhona Tarrant, CBS News, 7 Oct. 2024

Misinformation is defined as “incorrect or misleading information.” You may wish to distinguish between this word and the exceedingly similar disinformation, which we define as “false information deliberately and often covertly spread (as by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth.” Misinformation has been in use for over 400 years, with citations found from the early 1600s. Disinformation, on the other hand, is considerably more recent, not appearing in print until the middle of the 20th century.

‘Millibar’

The rapid intensification of Hurricane Milton in the Gulf of Mexico contributed to higher-than-normal lookups for millibar.

As Hurricane Milton exploded from a Category 1 storm into a Category 5 storm over the course of 12 hours yesterday, climate scientists and meteorologists were stunned. NBC6’s John Morales, a veteran TV meteorologist in South Florida, choked up on air while describing how quickly and dramatically the storm had intensified. To most people, a drop in pressure of 50 millibars means nothing; a weatherman understands, as Morales said mid-broadcast, that “this is just horrific.” Florida is still cleaning up from Helene; this storm is spinning much faster, and it’s more compact and organized.
— Zoë Schlanger, The Atlantic, 8 Oct. 2024

A millibar is a unit of atmospheric pressure equal to 1/1000 bar or 100 pascals. A characteristic feature of tropical cyclones, such as hurricanes, is the eye—a central region of clear skies, warm temperatures, and low atmospheric pressure. Typically, atmospheric pressure at the surface of Earth is about 1,000 millibars. At the center of a tropical cyclone, however, it is typically around 960 millibars, and in a very intense “super typhoon” of the western Pacific it may be as low as 880 millibars. According to the National Hurricane Center, on Monday night the pressure in Milton’s eye fell to 897 millibars.

‘Nobel Prize’

Nobel Prize spiked in lookups this week, as it often does during this time of the year, after winners were announced.

Today, the Swedish Academy awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature to Han Kang, “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. In 1993 she made her literary debut as a poet, and was first published as novelist in 1994. In 2016, she broke out into the English-speaking literary world with Deborah Smith’s translation of The Vegetarian, originally published in 2007, which Daniel Hahn called “a bracing, visceral, system-shocking addition to the Anglophone reader’s diet,” and which won the Booker Prize.
— Emily Temple, LitHub.com, 10 Oct. 2024

The 2024 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on Friday to the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo, a grass-roots movement of atomic bomb survivors, “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.” Nihon Hidankyo has for decades represented hundreds of thousands of survivors of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. These survivors, known as the hibakusha, are living memorials to the horror of the attacks and have used their testimony to raise awareness of the human consequences of nuclear warfare.
— Megan Specia and Lynsey Chutel, The New York Times, 11 Oct. 2024

Nobel Prize refers to any of various annual prizes (as in peace, literature, medicine) established by the will of Swedish manufacturer, inventor, and philanthropist Alfred Bernhard Nobel (1833-1896) for the encouragement of persons who work for the interests of humanity. Every year when the Nobels are announced someone manages to confuse the name with the word noble, which is an entirely different word, and most often means “possessing outstanding qualities: illustrious.”

Word Worth Knowing: ‘Bugan’

The English language is replete with words for things that go bump in the night, some more common than others. For every ghost or goblin there’s a boggart or a bugan. We defined bugan in our Unabridged dictionary as a synonym of both ghost and hobgoblin, so the finer distinctions between these spooky entities may be left to your imagination. English borrowed bugan from the Welsh word bwgan over two and a half centuries ago. Although its use is today limited to some parts of England (such as the West Midlands as well as the Isle of Man), perhaps bugan will extend its spectral reach further in the future. The animated series Futurama offered a glimpse of what that could look like when it put the word bugan in the mouth of the feisty robot Bender.