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The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
I've learned a new word – and now I'm seeing the people it describes everywhere
A friend held a controversial opinion about something, which he shared with me on WhatsApp. He insisted he wasn't being an edgelord. A what? I took this to be a typo, a typo that happened to suit him quite well. But he claimed an edgelord was an actual thing. He defined it as a person who specialises in edgy opinions, especially if they don't really believe them. I checked with a few people who are more across the ways of the world than I seem to be these days: my daughters, a neighbour, an on-trend colleague or two. Blank looks all around. 'Sounds dirty,' said one of my BBC colleagues. Then I asked one of my handlers at the Guardian, who not only knew the word but also failed to hide their surprise that I hadn't. Which just goes to show that this publication is indeed at the cutting edge of things, even if some of its writers need educating. Edgelord isn't in my Chambers dictionary, and WhatsApp itself doesn't recognise the word. The laptop on which I'm writing this, however, is comfortable with it, offering no squiggly red line beneath the word. The Merriam-Webster dictionary and both have it, but they're American, so are not, in my view, to be fully trusted in these matters. I bet myself that the Oxford English Dictionary would have no truck with this nonsense – but no, here it is: 'A person who affects a provocative or extreme persona, esp online.' Furthermore, the OED says the word has been about since 2013 and was 'attested earliest in the context of video gaming, denoting a type of online player who customizes his or her character's appearance, username, etc, in a manner deemed to be overly self-serious'. I'm not sure what the OED thinks it is doing spelling customises with a z, by the way, but I'll let that pass. Not for the first time, I feel clever and foolish at the same time. Clever for knowing what an edgelord is when others don't; foolish for taking 12 years to join the party. As a new recruit, it ill becomes me to be picky, but surely there's a gender issue here. I've come across several female edgelords in my time. What are we to call them? Not edgeladies, surely? But what else? And another thing: what's the opposite of an edgelord? Perhaps they are thought so dull, they don't merit a name of their own. Now I'm seeing edgelords everywhere. I may even see one when I look in the mirror. They're not just online, either – they're to be found in conversations everywhere, at work and at play. Saying whatever they think it takes in order to be heard and seen, to help them feel relevant. The edgelord community is a broad church indeed, encompassing everyone from common-or-garden bar bores to the vilest of internet trolls to the most erudite of columnists. In a society of short and shrinking attention spans, their lordships provide an essential service for all of us. We crave something different, something radical, something interesting, whether or not it's complete bollocks. If we don't like or believe whatever edgelordery we're listening to, our anger makes us feel alive. If we like what we hear, we'll repeat it in order to edgelord it over others. But if too many edgelords spout the same line, it will soon lose its edge. This means some edgelord or other will have to come up with something new. And so it goes on. The edgelords need to be aware of something important, though: they play with fire. Because what started as an opinion they only conceived in order to shock may, like Tolkien's ring, overwhelm them. It will become their truth, and the edgelord will turn into Gollum. Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
ABC News
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
From shock to relief: See the emotional spectrum at the Scripps National Spelling Bee
Hundreds of young word whizzes have turned out to compete in the prestigious Scripps National Spelling Bee in the US. The bee, which started on Tuesday, features 243 students, with at least one from each state, as well as spellers from Canada, Germany, Ghana, Kuwait and Nigeria. Just 99 spellers remained on stage by the quarterfinals held on Wednesday, which narrowed the field to 57 semifinalists. By the time the finals are held on Thursday, local time, only about a dozen competitors will still be in contention. The winner receives a custom trophy and more than $US50,000 ($75,000) in cash and prizes. The national bee's preliminaries consist of one spelling round and one multiple-choice vocabulary round. Those who make it through the preliminaries sit for a written spelling and vocabulary test, with the top 100 or so finishers advancing to later rounds. The words for the test, and for all subsequent rounds, are taken from the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary. Throughout the quarterfinals and semifinals, spellers are eliminated at the microphone through oral spelling or vocabulary questions. The annual competition was first held in 1925 when The Louisville Courier-Journal invited other newspapers to host spelling bees and send their champions to Washington, DC. Here are some of the scenes from the competition so far: AP
The Guardian
27-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
How the word ‘womyn' dragged the National Spelling Bee into the US culture wars
We're living through turbulent times, to say the least. Authoritarianism and fascism threaten the United States. The conspiracy thinking, paranoia and manufactured outrage so characteristic of QAnon and the big lie about the 2020 election have colonized our political discourse like a fungus. Even the National Spelling Bee, a cultural institution which will be celebrating its centennial this year and which is generally exempted from the far right's paranoid vitriol, hasn't been immune. Earlier this year, a foofaraw erupted when right-wing outlets reported on the acceptance of 'womyn' as an alternate spelling of 'women' in the regional-level wordlist which the National Spelling Bee issues each year. The reason 'womyn' was included in the wordlist wasn't some shadowy feminist plot by the Bee's organizers. The competition simply allows any word in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged dictionary, unless it is obsolete. 'Womyn' is in the dictionary, along with tens of thousands of other words, such as 'pointless', 'culture' and 'war'. With zero self-awareness, an anti-trans podcast host raged that the Bee's uncontroversial decision to allow 'womyn' was a manifestation of 'fabricated issues' and 'totally manufactured outrage.' On Fox News, she snarled, 'How lucky are we to live in the United States of America, where the spelling of women, never mind the definition, has become a national debate.' Samantha Poetter-Parshall, a Kansas state representative, joined in the criticism, calling the inclusion of womyn an instance of 'crazy indoctrination of our children.' A parent quoted in reportage on the faux scandal shared Poetter-Parshall's concern, asserting, 'This is supposed to be about spelling and language, not ideology.' George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm, 1984, and the essay Politics and the English Language, would be startled to hear such a complaint. Orwell deeply understood the intimate relationship between language, thought, and politics. He keenly observed how 'in our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible ... Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.' In our time, imprisoning and attempting to deport legal residents of the US for their political views and sending legal residents and gay people fleeing persecution in Venezuela – and potentially US citizens – to prisons in El Salvador where torture is widespread based on flimsy evidence from disgraced police officers is called 'securing our homeland'. The announcement of economically ruinous tariffs which have wiped trillions off the stock market is called 'liberation day.' Orwell believed that 'to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration.' To combat the creep of Orwellian language, he argued that we should 'recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end,' aiming to always use 'language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought'. In its emphasis on linguistic precision and its heartfelt delight in words, the National Spelling Bee is already political in Orwell's sense. The Bee also has an implicit politics of appreciation for cultural and linguistic diversity. Though most spellers are American, the competition has an international flavor: it regularly features participants from Ghana, Canada, Jamaica, South Korea, China, and Nigeria, and spelling bees have sprung up in countries like Zimbabwe too. The welcome which the Bee extends to logophiles from all over the world inculcates in kids an appreciation of other cultures and promotes a cosmopolitan worldview. Spellers study words from Latin, French, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and German; this cultivates their love of linguistic variety. What's more, the fact that the South Asian community regularly dominates the upper echelons of the competition reaffirms the importance of immigration to our society. These days, even if many Americans reject the Trump regime's ugly attitudes and practices, xenophobia and racism are rampant, hearkening back to the bad old days of the Know-Nothing Party and the Chinese Exclusion Act. The US government has become increasingly hostile to international travelers: there have been a spate of horrific stories of tourists, visitors, and legal residents from Germany, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere who have done nothing wrong being arrested, detained, and held for weeks by Ice, or being refused entry to the US and deported. In such a context, the National Spelling Bee's steadfast commitment to multiculturalism is all the more essential. Despite its unfortunate Covid-induced cancellation in 2020 and some turbulence from rule changes and regional sponsor attrition in 2021 and 2022, the National Spelling Bee has been a relative constant for students in an age of extreme dislocation and upheaval. In these politically polarized times, it offers Americans an opportunity for joy and collective uplift. It celebrates education, attention, focus, dedication, and quiet, patient effort. It teaches students grit, discipline, and linguistics. It reminds us of the importance of the human in an age of AI. It reinforces the importance of good sportsmanship and fair play. It promotes respect and friendship towards humanity at large. It invites us to honor and remember the values that ought to unite us all. The National Spelling Bee is a reminder of what America has been – and what it must continue to be. Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend's action after newsletter promotion Scott Remer is a professional spelling bee tutor, freelance writer, and the author of the textbooks Words of Wisdom: Keys to Success in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Sesquipedalia!: A Rigorous Vocabulary Study Guide, Regional Bee Ready!, and A Few Final Words of Wisdom.
Digital Trends
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Digital Trends
Merriam-Webster hops on the Wordle train with new daily puzzle game
Following in The New York Times' footsteps, Merriam-Webster launched a new daily puzzle game called Revealed. The free browser game has players trying to guess a topic from a description filled with redacted words. Considering that Merriam-Webster is behind the world's most iconic dictionary, it makes perfect sense that it would eventually come up with a word game of its own. Though its coming in years after Wordle, a hit that inspired countless daily puzzle games, first took off, Revealed is a clever game in its own right that's worth checking out. Recommended Videos Here's how it works. Each day, players are shown a sheet of paper with a category, such as Arts & Culture, at the top of the page. Below that is an encyclopedia entry where several words are blacked out. Players need to type in what the page is describing by using context clues. That's difficult at a quick glance, but that's where hints come in handy. Each day, players can use up to seven reveals, each of which will uncover a redacted word. Players can also reveal a letter of the topic using a hint. The goal is to guess the topic using as few hints as possible. REVEALED: A Daily Puzzle GameGuess the topic using the fewest reveals and hints! — Merriam-Webster (@ 2025-05-21T13:41:20.902Z So as to not rob you of a real solution, I'll make up an example here. Let's say that that the answer to a puzzle one day is Super Mario Bros. You'd see a page that starts with something like 'Blank is a blank blank released in blank.' You won't be able to reveal that first blank, but say you choose to reveal the second. You'll get the word video, which might clue you in to the fact that the second is game. Rather than wasting a precious reveal confirming that, maybe you'll choose to reveal the next one instead to get the year. You'll do that throughout the page until you feel like you have enough information to make a guess. At the end, you'll get to see your final stats and compare how you did with other players. Lifetime stats like your completion rate and streak are recorded too. If that all sounds enticing, you can try Revealed for free now on Merriam-Webster's website. And if you want more games like it, check out our list of the best games like Wordle.
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Pollution can't kill Iowa fish if the fish are already dead
Every time I read about a manure spill, oil spill, or chemical spill somewhere in Iowa I see the sentence: 'No dead fish have been observed.' Of course not. There were no live fish in Iowa prior to the spill because Iowa creeks and rivers are full of manure, oil, and chemicals. Marty Ryan, Des Moines Why vote for a hypocrite? Merriam Webster defines 'hypocrite' as 1. a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue or religion; (and) 2. a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings.' State Sen. Sarah Trone Garriott meets both definitions. In her campaigns for state Legislature, and now for Congress, Trone Garriott features her role as a Lutheran pastor. As such, she would be expected to uphold the biblical teachings that God 'didst form my inward parts, thou didst knit me together in my mother's womb (Psalms 139:13), and knew us even "before I formed you in the womb' (Jeremiah 1:5); that 'thou shalt not kill'; and 'It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.' Luke 17:2. Yet, she sees the killing of an unborn child as merely a 'deeply personal, private health care decision.' She has claimed that 'The near-total abortion ban is devastating reproductive care in our state, putting lives at risk.' If she is actually concerned about 'lives at risk,' why zero concern for the unborn child threatened with abortion? To use one's position as a Lutheran pastor and to claim a concern about 'lives at risk' while supporting abortion are the actions of a hypocrite. Her positions are consistent with her designation as a 'Planned Parenthood champion' but wholly inconsistent with being a Christian pastor. Donald W. Bohlken, Indianola I have questions about the headline 'Auditor questioned over his role in $27M judicial branch misallocation' in the May 2 Metro & Iowa section. The headline clearly implies Auditor Rob Sand is a party to, if not complicit in, mismanagement of funds under the judicial branch's control. But the story explains exactly the opposite. It states that Sand wasn't informed of the misallocation, wasn't asked by the judicial branch to investigate the problem, and didn't have the necessary computer coding personnel in the auditor's office to solve it. Meanwhile, a few Republican legislators, with an assist from the Register, are attempting to connect Sand to this mess. Could it be the legislators are better served by stirring up a deceptive story backed by a colorful headline because it provides such a juicy, and misleading opportunity to diminish Sand as the jockeying begins for the 2026 state election cycle? Frank McDowell, Spirit Lake This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Real Christian pastors don't support abortion rights | Letters
