Context: New words – 17 May 2021
These new words and phrases possess little aesthetic merit and less etymological grace but in novel conceptual juxtaposition capture something else that sits quite naturally in a blindspot that lexicographical taxonomies can not, arguably, identify. Observe that this kind of word and word grouping (or abbreviated compression) represents a convergence and encoding, if not normative formalisation, of a certain class of ascendant uncertainty that characterises our historical moment.
These are not words that find themselves anchored upon relatively static semantic endpoints or (other) aspirational certainties. They hover in some great grey ambiguity between a vast and yawning abyss of unmasked existential fear and the sprawling sociotechnical labyrinths we have invoked to cope with it; that only ever generate more complexity, doubt and a visceral sense of haunted alienation from the selves we must become to cope with all this unmanageable acceleration and change.
Notice, also, that this metamorphosis of language is not as of isolated atoms drifting and jostling, recombining in the semantic void so much as it is of distributed fields of meaning that incandesce within and as each of us, generating their own self-propagating rationale.
Daedelus Kite 