[Ads-l] WOTY candidate, non-Covidivision

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Sun Apr 19 15:13:34 UTC 2020


Well, sort of non-Covid:
"ASMRtist"

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ASMRtist

Its emergence does relate to the absence of alternative in-person (brick
and mortar?) forms of entertainment in this era of isolation and
quarantine. ASMR itself has been around long enough that I see there was a
paper at the last LSA conference that I seem to have missed on "The
multimodal construction of affective stance in Chinese ASMR performances".
Behind the curve as I am, I hadn't come across ASMR and its practitioners
until I read about them in a recent New Yorker article:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/06/performers-on-lockdown-turn-to-their-smartphones
Among other attributes, "ASMRtist" is one of the few (if any) blends I know
of in which one element is an initialism (as opposed to an acronym). Ben
will probably remind me of others. Any beyond feeble puns à la
"BBC-worthy", though?

LH

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