the-word
collection · 3 published
the-word
Two chemists built petrichor from rock and the fluid in the veins of the gods
Isabel Joy Bear and R. G. Thomas coined it in Nature in 1964 for an oil that plants leave in dry soil, years before the word came to carry a bacterial compound they never named.
the-word
Cory Doctorow coined a vulgarity for how platforms rot, and two dictionaries named it word of the year
Written on a blog in November 2022, it marks a sequence older complaints blur: a platform good to its users, then turned against them, then against the businesses that depend on it, then dead.
the-word
Horace Walpole built 'serendipity' to require sagacity, not luck
He built it in a 1754 letter out of a fairy tale about three traveling princes, and fixed the rule himself: a discovery you set out to make does not count.