The Words of the Week - May 30
Dictionary lookups from Memorial Day, cryptocurrency, and the White House
‘Memorial Day’
Memorial Day was this past Monday, leading to a bump in lookups for the entry.
One of the earliest known celebrations of Memorial Day can be traced back to formerly enslaved persons and white missionaries in Charleston, South Carolina. On May 1, 1865, according to reports in The New York Tribune and The Charleston Courier, 3,000 Black schoolchildren carried bouquets of flowers and sang “John Brown’s Body” while members of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment and other Black Union regiments performed double time marches and Black ministers recited verses from the Bible.
—Daniel Johnson, Black Enterprise, 26 May 2025
Memorial Day refers to the last Monday of May, observed as a legal holiday in most states of the U.S. in remembrance of war dead. It is intended as a recognition of those who have died in service, rather than those who have served in the armed forces and survived (the latter are honored on Veterans’ Day, November 11th).
‘Rococo’
Lookups for rococo were higher than usual this week following publication of an essay in the New York Times.
The decoration Mr. Trump has splattered across the Oval Office is inspired by European Baroque and Rococo of the 1600s and 1700s, when power was shown through ornate displays of grotesque abundance. Gold leaf moldings and large mirrors filled Baroque palace walls from Versailles to the Peterhof Palace. But in the early 1700s Rococo, an even gaudier style distinct for its asymmetry, swirling tendrils and gilded seashells, was born. Often criticized for being purely decorative and intellectually vacuous, it would become a perfect visual metaphor for the European royal courts of the 18th century: unserious people draped in gold baubles and ruffled pastels.
— Emily Keegin, The New York Times, 27 May 2025
We define the relevant sense of the adjective rococo as “of or relating to an artistic style especially of the 18th century characterized by fanciful curved asymmetrical forms and elaborate ornamentation.” Rococo is also used as a noun to refer to rococo work or style. The word comes from French rocaille, which literally means “stone debris,” and predates rococo in English as another French borrowing referring to a style of ornamentation using sinuous leaf shapes.
‘Crypto’
Crypto featured in several prominent news stories this week and saw a corresponding bump in lookups.
Vance doubles down on crypto support
—Another Arrest in Crypto Kidnapping and Torture Case
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We define the relevant sense of the noun crypto as a synonym of cryptocurrency, which refers to any form of currency that only exists digitally, that usually has no central issuing or regulating authority but instead uses a decentralized system to record transactions and manage the issuance of new units, and that relies on cryptography to prevent counterfeiting and fraudulent transactions. It is often used before another noun, as in “crypto market.”
‘Chicken out’
Lookups for chicken out were higher than usual on Wednesday.
President Donald Trump flashed his anger after getting a ‘nasty’ question about ‘chickening out’ by repeatedly threatening tariffs only to relax or postpone them. A reporter asked Trump about a new acronym making the rounds on Wall Street about the ‘TACO trade,’ which stands for ‘Trump Always Chickens Out.’ ... ‘Don’t ever say what you said,’ Trump scolded the reporter. ‘That's a nasty question. To me, that’s the nastiest question.’
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We define the phrasal verb chicken out as “to decide not to do something because one is afraid.”
Word Worth Knowing: ‘Scofflaw’
In 1924, a wealthy Massachusetts Prohibitionist named Delcevare King sponsored a contest in which he asked participants to coin an appropriate word to mean “a lawless drinker.” King sought a word that would cast violators of Prohibition laws in a light of shame. Two respondents came up independently with the winning word: scofflaw, formed by combining the verb scoff and the noun law. Henry Dale and Kate Butler, also of Massachusetts, split King’s $200 prize. Improbably and despite some early scoffing from language critics, scofflaw managed to pick up steam in English and expand to a meaning that went beyond its Prohibition roots, referring to one who violates any law, not just laws related to drinking.
