Vocabulary

After years of eavesdropping on my children, I can’t help sometimes trying on their words. Hence the time a few months ago when I casually slid the remark “That is so cringe” into a conversation with the twelve-year-old.

“MOM,” came his response. “Never say that again.”

“Oh, so if I say ‘cringe,’ it’s cringe?” I taunted.

He just shook his head, unable to speak with the horror of it all. If using “cringe” as an adjective was already sooooo 2022, my borrowing it became the last nail in the coffin of any social currency it may have had.

Pounding in that nail further, “cringe” had just been officially explained by the New York Times. I know because I subscribe to the Sunday paper, because I am of the demographic socialized to engage with printed matter, the same demographic that gets solicited for membership in a certain megalobby on aging, and the one that presumably needs the phrase “so cringe” explained to them. I felt smug because I already knew, thanks to my hip little housemates. They keep you young, I always say of being an older parent, and this is one of the most delightful ways.

A few weeks later, the Times turned its attention to “hacker.” Thanks to all the YouTube “Noob, Pro, or Hacker?!” videos I had been made to watch by the seven-year-old, I already had its current connotations down.

When I’m not word-hunting at home, I’m doing so at work, this semester while co-teaching a class on literary editing with managing editor extraordinaire Katie Berta. We use TIR as our lab. In my first lecture, I attempted to tell the class what a literary magazine is for: “It shows us how we live now.”

Here are some of the words used by writers in this issue:

Narcan.

Self-care.

Girlboss-quitting (as in, quitting in a style befitting a girlboss).

Podcast.

Roomba.

Click-through rate.

Claw machine.

IHOP.

Earbuds.

Each conjures familiar images from my world before pulling me into the singular vision of a poet, essayist, or fiction writer. I travel to an ambulance that stocks Narcan. View a message thread on self-care between a mother of small children and her text-only therapist. Glimpse the routine of a teenage cashier in a sticky boardwalk arcade.

Time as well as space are bridged. I’m at a cutthroat New York advertising agency circa 2017, Cardi B playing in the background. Seated at a Mississippi pancake house at 3 a.m. with some undergraduates.

Sometimes we go quite far. To the bottom of the Sea of Crete with a sunken ship called the Tanais. To the Georgia State Penitentiary in 1909. My usual world and words are left behind, and I learn new ones. But still, there’s something about how we live now in what preoccupies us about the past.

Back in my living room, my boys and their friends shout excitedly as they play video games. Words catch my ear: “broken” (good), “sick” (good), “OP” (overpowered), “spam” (hit a button over and over again), “troll” (annoy another player). Words that rise and fall, that change in meaning daily, the way living things change. I enjoy the ride and try to pay attention.

—Lynne Nugent