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May 2, 2022
This week’s themeNew words This week’s words clickbait omnishambles listicle acquihire paywall 
Your brain on clickbait
Intrigued → Excited → Disappointed → Angry → Depressed In approximately three seconds Image: desdemona72 / Shutterstock Previous week’s theme There’s a word for it 
A.Word.A.Day
with Anu GargThe universe is expanding. Galaxies, stars, everything is going farther away. Maybe they have taken this social distancing thing to heart. My theory is that the expansion is to make room for all the new words we keep adding to the language. These new additions help us describe new ideas and new things, not all of them good. When we say new, we don’t mean words coined this morning. In the world of words, things move slowly. Some of these words have been around for decades. It’s just that it takes time for them to bubble up and be noticed. When most of the words in the language are hundreds of years old, a few decades is relatively new. What new words have you coined? Share below or email us at words@wordsmith.org. As always, include your location (city, state). Sometimes a word is coined by several persons independently. Don’t forget to google your word first to make sure no one else has thought of it earlier. clickbait
PRONUNCIATION:
(KLIK-bayt)
MEANING:
noun: A sensationalized, often misleading, headline that is designed to entice users to click on a hyperlink.
ETYMOLOGY:
A combination of click + bait, a headline that makes a user click on the
link to find out more, only to be disappointed by content of dubious value.
Earliest documented use: 1999.
USAGE:
“‘Amy’s fishing for clickbait!’ she said, with an eye roll. ‘What?’ Amy snapped. ‘I am not! My articles have depth and substance, Janet!’” Lisette Prendergast; Bianca De Lumiere; Full Time Unicorn Press; 2020. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Man can be the most affectionate and altruistic of creatures, yet he's
potentially more vicious than any other. He is the only one who can be
persuaded to hate millions of his own kind whom he has never seen and to
kill as many as he can lay his hands on in the name of his tribe or his
God. -Benjamin Spock, pediatrician and author (2 May 1903-1998)
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