affordance

“Conventional models of perceptual psychology didn’t accurately account for what he saw, so once peace had returned Gibson set to work on a new theory of perception, which included the concept of affordance: that aspect of an object which makes the object useful to a human interacting with it.”

Affordances depend not just on the qualities of the object, but the abilities of the human interacting with it.

egodocument

“‘Egodocument’, a neologism first coined by the historian Jacques Presser in the 1950s, is now a widely used umbrella term for diaries and journals, and the first academic journal devoted to ‘life writing’ appeared in 2012.”

Egodocuments include diaries, journals, travelogues, correspondence, memoirs, and wills.

polyptych

“Operating on the same principle as a wipe-clean table-book or wax tablet, the polyptych consisted of twelve fine ivory sheets, pinned together at one end so that they could fan open for temporary note-taking.”

The word polyptych comes from a Greek word meaning ‘having many folds’. The polyptych described here is Thomas Jefferson’s.

schifanoia

“The only surviving draft was dedicated, as a schifanoia or ‘boredom buster’, to Isabella d’Este, Countess of Mantua and one of the Renaissance’s most important patrons.”

The word schifanoia comes from an Italian phrase meaning “to escape from boredom”. The Este family also had a palazzo, the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, now a museum.

woodfree

“Confusingly, ‘woodfree’ paper is made of wood: the term refers to the pulp having been bleached to remove the tint of wood sap.”

Woodfree paper is also called ‘tree-free’ or ‘fine’ paper. The chemical process used to create it removes lignin, which is the source of paper yellowing.

Welcome to the latest installment of “Five Words From …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this installment, Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist explains Spotify’s influence on the modern music business, and how it’s reshaped the experience of both listening to and creating music.

datafication

“The writer Rob Horning once argued in his newsletter that datafication, or the process of rendering our lives as data, is ‘first and foremost a kind of surveillance designed to impose classification and norms on the surveilled while devaluing whatever ways they understand themselves.’”

Places such as the Data Justice Lab investigate the social justice implications of how personal data is used by corporations for profit.

enshittification

“In the hands of major labels and streambait consultants, AI was looking likely to become just another tool of what Cory Doctorow called platform decay, or “enshittification,” and it was all going to be monetized by streaming.”

Doctorow explains enshittification as “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

freemium

“By the end of 2007, the freemium business model—which included ad-supported and subscription-based tiers, with the goal of funneling users from free to paid—was created as a deep collaboration between Spotify and the [record] labels.”

Freemium as a business model has been extensively analyzed and studied to make it more effective.

hope labor

“Spotify’s emphasis on selling the feeling of potential also reflects a broader tendency of 2010s platform capitalism: the prevalence of hope labor, a term that academics have used to frame the aspirational work that users do for free in hopes that it will lead to future work.”

Similar to artists being asked to do things for “exposure,” hope labor offers merely the chance to be recognized rather than fair pay.

lean-back

“In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing.”

The opposite of “lean-back” listeners are the “lean-forward” listeners, who know what kind of music they want to listen to and actively seek it out.

Got a book you’d like to see given the “five words from” treatment? Nominate it through this form, or email us!

circumnutation

In this teenage phase, hormones set the shoot tip to wandering, inscribing a circle in the air, a process known as circumnutation.

The word circumnutation comes from Latin roots meaning ‘around’ and ‘nodding’.

biocultural

It is an exemplar of a new holistic approach, called biocultural or reciprocal restoration.

Biocultural methodologies start with local cultural perspectives, taking into account those communities’ values, knowledge, and needs, and build upon them, recognizing feedback cycles between ecosystems and the health and development of people.

summerwood

These densely packed cells are called late wood or summerwood.

Summerwood is also known as latewood. Wood in a growth ring of a tree that is produced early in the growing season is known as earlywood or springwood.

aerenchyma

These white cells, called aerenchyma, are big enough to be seen with the naked eye and make a buoyant, cushiony layer at the base of each leaf.

Aerenchyma is a “spongy tissue that creates spaces or air channels in the leaves, stems and roots of some plants, which allows exchange of gases between the shoot and the root.” [Wikipedia]

phytochrome

There are photosensors by the hundreds in every single bud, packed with light-absorbing pigments called phytochromes.

“Phytochromes control many aspects of plant development. They regulate the germination of seeds (photoblasty), the synthesis of chlorophyll, the elongation of seedlings, the size, shape and number and movement of leaves and the timing of flowering in adult plants.” [Wikipedia]

holt

The wild otter I saw would no doubt be out of the water and making tracks to its own musky holt, to curl belly-upward in a home of roots, peat and rocks.

Otters’ resting-places are also sometimes called lodges or couches.

leat

Lower down, the path joins an old leat, a stone waterway engineered a hundred years ago to carry water to feed the reservoirs and tin mines.

The word ‘leat’ is more commonly found in the south and west of England, and in Wales; the word goit is more common in northern England.

spraint

There may be spraint, the otter’s droppings, nearby, and these signs can sometimes form great mounds.

Otter excrement is also sometimes called coke, because it has a black, ashy appearance. For other terms for animal droppings, check out the Wordnik list “Specific Excrement“.

stickle

In the twentieth century, sometimes a hunted otter would be trapped in the water by a line of people forming a barrier with poles. This was called a “stickle” and if caught like this the otter was less likely to escape.

In the dramatic conclusion of Tarka the Otter (an inspiration for Darlington’s own otter search), Tarka escapes from between two stickles, killing a hunting hound before swimming free.

vibrissae

From this sniff-level position I get a flash of the bristling vibrissae, the otter’s extravagant whiskers, and in a split second he catches my scent.

The word vibrissa (vibrissae is the plural) comes from a Latin word meaning ‘vibrate’.

Got a book you’d like to see given the “five words from” treatment? Nominate it through this form, or email us!

augury

“The word ‘augury’ comes from the Greek word meaning ‘bird talk’, for to understand the language of birds was to understand the gods.”

Montgomery’s chickens communicated with her and each other through elaborate noises that conveyed specific meanings. For more on how birds communicate, check out Barbara Ballentine and Jeremy Hyman’s Bird Talk: An Exploration of Avian Communication.

crop

“When Peanut was a year and a half old she developed a blockage in her crop–the muscular compartment where birds store and soften their food.”

The average chicken’s crop can hold about an ounce and a half of food.

ermine

“There was the skunk, and another time a mink, another time a neighbor’s dog and once an ermine. The tiny ferocious weasel in its snowy winter coat had slipped through our barn’s foundation and decapitated one of our hens.”

Keeping live chickens is an invitation to meet the local predators and Montgomery encountered plenty of wild animals eager for chicken dinners. The ermine (also called a stoat) is a common visitor to chicken coops across Europe and North America.

overpet

“Then it starts all over again, until the hen has had enough and has reached what we call “overpet.” She fluffs her feathers, shakes, and, fortified by affection, strolls off to continue her chicken day.”

Many animals have less-patient responses than chickens to overstimulation (sometimes called sensory overload).

sex crouch

“And just as the hens always do with me, she assumed her distinctive squatting posture. This is a well-known chicken behavior usually directed at a member of her own species. It is actually known as a “sex crouch.” It’s a position that a chicken normally uses to make it easy for a rooster to mount her.”

Hens will begin showing this behavior (called lordosis in mammals) when they are mature enough to start laying. When chickens see a human they know, they might squat in this position, hoping to be picked up or petted.

algospeak

“To appreciate how common it is for regular users to try to evade content moderation, consider algospeak: words or phrases that are widely understood and adopted by social media users as a way to avoid being mistakenly penalized by fickle content moderation algorithms.”

Neologism researcher Brianne Hughes has created a Wordnik list of “Algorithm Avoidant Inventions” to collect algospeak examples.

cliodynamics

“One ambitious effort is the theory of cliodynamics by Peter Turchin, which applies mathematical models to populations.”

The ‘clio-‘ of ‘cliodynamics’ comes the name of the muse of history in Greek mythology.

criti-hype

“Researcher Lee Vinsel called this phenomenon criti-hype—criticism that tends up portraying technology as all powerful instead of calling out its limitations.”

Vinsel created the word ‘criti-hype’ in a 2021 Medium post titled “You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype“.

deep learning

“In 2011, Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton decided to take a crack at the ImageNet competition using neural networks, which by then had been branded “deep learning” because of the key insight that having more layers (depth) improves accuracy.”

Neural networks, despite the name, are not intended to realistically model the behavior of actual neurons.

shadowbanning

“Instead of removal, the post can be slapped with a warning, or, if it is a “borderline” policy violation, it might be silently shown to fewer users than it otherwise would. This is a notable development in the last few years known as downranking or demotion, or, colloquially, shadowbanning.”

Rich Kyanka, the creator of Something Awful, claims that the term ‘shadow ban’ was created on that forum. A 2018 explainer from Vice, “Where Did the Concept of ‘Shadow Banning’ Come From?” highlights similar practices, including ‘twit bit’, ‘bozo filter’, and ‘toading’.

Night Eating Syndrome

“Night Eating Syndrome (NES) is classified as its own eating disorder, one that affects about one in ten people who have obesity.”

NES as an eating disorder that can be comorbid with anxiety, depression, and insomnia in adult men and women. More information and help can be found on the Sleep Foundation’s website: Night Eating Syndrome: Symptoms, Causes, and Treatments.

SMILF

“Frankie Shaw’s SMILF ran for two seasons on Showtime, and while the series wasn’t perfect on screen or off … the story that endeavored to tell about women parenting, class, addiction, and food was profoundly ambitious.”

Slang for “single mom I’d like to fuck,” though in some cases the “S” stands for “step” or “soccer”. In the context of the television show, the “S” represents South Boston.

fat icon

“Yes, today’s teenagers have fat icons like Paloma Elsesser, Barbie Ferreira, and Aidy Bryant to look up to, but representation can go only so far and do only so much.”

Specter posits that a handful of representatives have little influence against the global institutions selling the idea that weight loss and thinness are the only routes to happiness.

meta-shame

“I now know that what I was experiencing was what Sonia Renee Taylor refers to in her 2018 book The Body Is Not An Apology as meta-shame, or the state of feeling shame for feeling shame about our bodies.”

Specter shares that the roots of body-shaming have been difficult to eradicate, especially when she hasn’t felt she has been able to find self-acceptance in the “correct” way.

terror management

“In times of stress or fear, people focus more than usual on the things they believe they can control, this is called terror management.”

Specter discusses that during the COVID pandemic, quarantine allowed people to scrutinize their eating and food consumption (often in disordered ways) as a means to feel agency in their own lives.

bioswale

“It also likely means unbuilding structures, whether that’s relocating buildings away from shorelines facing sea-level rise and higher storm surges, or taking up the concrete around urban river and replacing it with bioswales, vegetated channels that absorb stormwater, preventing floods while removing pollutants.”

The Portland Nursery offers a PDF listing plants you can use to create bioswales (or rain gardens) in your own yard.

exogenous

“A graph of the total exogenous energy usage of humanity (that is, energy from all sources outside our own bodies) over time is flat until about 1800, after which it becomes roughly exponential, starting slowly and then rising more and more steeply.”

The word ‘exogenous’ comes ultimately from Greek roots meaning ‘born’ and ‘outside’.

externality

“Externalities, to economists, are values or costs that aren’t accounted for by the market, because they accrue to someone who isn’t part of the transaction and therefore often has no choice in whether it happens or not.”

This sense of the word ‘externality’ was first used by Alfred Marshall, a British economist, in Principles of Economics, published in 1890.

ultrastructure

“While talking through what we had seen over the course of that weekend, Charlie and I landed on the term “ultrastructure” to describe this web of social structures, all of the cultural, political, regulatory, and other systems that shape and govern infrastructure.”

Chachra talks in more depth about the idea of ‘ultrastructure’ in this interview in the excellent Scope of Work newsletter.

veneriforming

“If terraforming is taking an uninhabitable planet like Mars and changing the atmosphere to make an ecosystem capable of supporting life, we are instead taking our perfectly habitable planet and veneriforming it, transforming our terrestrial home into our other planetary next-door neighbor, suffocatingly hot Venus.”

The word ‘veneriform‘ exists in another Venus-related sense: having the shape of the shell of the Venus clam.

stagflation

The story that most economics professors will tell is that, in the early 1970s, Keynesian economics lost ground when the world’s developed economies experienced stagflation—a combination of high unemployment, slow economic growth (stagnation), and rising prices (inflation).

kleptocracy

“Kleptocracy literally means “rule by thieves” (from the Greek kleptes, ‘thief’, and kratia, ‘power’ or ‘rule’)—we’re talking here about heads of state and political leaders who loot their own countries.”

chumocracy

“Putin’s Russia and Berluconi’s Italy are two particularly memorable examples, but we would be prudent not to assume that widespread state corruption only happens somewhere else—just think of the UK’s ‘chumocracy’ scandal in 2020 or of Donald Trump’s attempt to rig the 202 presidential election in the US.”

degrowth

“Still other proposals for a new economic system argue that we should start by replacing our obsession with GDP growth with an ambition for sustainable prosperity, sometimes known as ‘degrowth’.”

affluenza

“As the granddaughter of a former president of General Motors, [Jessie] O’Neill is herself from the third generation of a wealthy family, and has also worked as a therapist. She coined the term ‘affluenza’ to denote the harmful psychological effects of extreme wealth, especially on children.”

Hanif Abdurraqib’s 2024 memoir, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, finds him refusing to separate life from its external influences. Structured as a basketball game with quarters, intermissions, and timeouts, Abdurraqib meditates on basketball, belonging, and the art and function of looking back.

naked

“I propose the difference between being naked and being bare is that in a state of nakedness, the end can be seen even if it hasn’t arrived yet. It has less to do with what one is or isn’t wearing, or showing, and more to do with how poorly one keeps the inevitable hidden.”

Abdurraqib opens with an exploration of male baldness as an exercise in self-discovery and self-worth, framed by both the “Fab Five” 1991 recruits for the University of Michigan Men’s Basketball team, and Abdurraqib’s father. The decision to shave one’s head (and the acceptance of genetics) investigates vulnerabilities and self-truths for the mentioned men.

homecoming

“For all of the reasons I love the hood, the greatest reason is for how we honor our homecomings. The people who will show up to praise your return simply because it is a return. Doesn’t even have to be spectacular, though it often is.”

Abdurraqib remembers his neighbor, high school basketball legend Kenny Gregory, returning from the 1997 McDonald’s All American game, circling the block with his trophies in the front seat before an impromptu parade of neighborhood fans.

miracle

“Miracle is another word for deception. Who or what, can make someone believe anything that would otherwise be unbelievable?….A team is losing until it isn’t, until an architect of the miraculous takes over a game and the deception becomes real.”

Abdurraqib recounts his history of inconsistent prayer, both as a reluctant child and desperate adult, and how miracles are often requested in times of great duress. He witnessed what many Ohioans considered a miracle: the path leading to the Cleveland Cavaliers gaining the first pick in the 2003 NBA draft, where they chose LeBron James.

control

“The people who ignored LeBron’s obvious exit knew they didn’t have any control over what LeBron did or didn’t do, but they were in complete control over when and how their own heartbreak arrived.”

LeBron became a free agent in 2010, forcing locals to process their emotions around their hometown hero leaving. At the same time, Abdurraqib toys with the idea of leaving, as his parole nears completion, for the glimmer of life elsewhere. Here control becomes the basketball court, with awareness and denial being opposing teams.

nostalgia

“Nostalgia is only for the broken-hearted, for the displeased or disaffected, the ones who need to look to the past to give meaning to their present. I’m told there’s nothing in my childhood that will save me from what’s coming, whenever what’s coming arrives…I say I was happier in the past because the pain of the past is a relic. I speak of it, but no longer feel it. I do not know what pain is coming, but I know it is coming.”

Abdurraqib also calls nostalgia “a relentless hustler.” He remembers loved ones and looks ahead to look back on his own death. With clarity and precision, he understands that while nostalgia may honor the death of whole selves and parts of selves, it will never stop the clock from counting down to zero.

Got a book you’d like to see given the “five words from” treatment? Nominate it through this form, or email us!