[Ads-l] teotwawki

[Ben Zimmer]

That paywalled Boston Globe article is probably my column, "How to Talk
Like a Doomsday Prepper" (12/30/2012):

https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2012/12/30/how-talk-like-doomsday-prepper/n5P4CeiU4Hj7QBO9k3SygN/story.html

Here's an archived version: https://archive.is/1kHoW

And here's the relevant bit:

---
Much of this survivalist slang first started to percolate in the mid- to
late '90s, when fears grew that the Y2K "millennium bug" would disable the
world's computers as the calendar turned to 2000. TEOTWAWKI is first
attested in a 1996 post by Mike Medintz in the Usenet newsgroup
misc.survivalism, and it soon got picked up by Y2K "doomers."
R.E.M.'s catchy 1987 song "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I
Feel Fine)" no doubt popularized the full expression, but it had actually
been in use for about a century before that. As far back as 1889, a
monograph on "thermal repulsion" and gravitational attraction closed with
the ominous words, "The end of the world as we know it would come by an
explosion or contraction, if either of these forces was suspended for an
instant."
Another variation, "the end of civilization as we know it" or TEOCAWKI,
dates back to the outbreak of World War I, with the acronymic version
surfacing as early as 1958. That year, it showed up in the British humor
magazine Punch: "Will it not be rather boring for these men to stand year
in year out, as one hopes, beside whopping great rockets that can only be
let off in the event of TEOCAWKI?" "What was that word again?" "I beg your
pardon--the end of civilization as we know it. One keeps slipping into
these Army abbreviations."
---

--bgz

On Sun, Apr 14, 2024 at 8:01 PM Nancy Friedman <wordworking at gmail.com>
wrote:

> It’s pronounced “tee-ought-wah-kee,” and it’s been around for at least a
> couple of decades. (A paywalled Boston Globe article to which I don't have
> full access says since 1996.)  I included it in a 2012 post about peppers:
>
>
> https://nancyfriedman.typepad.com/away_with_words/2012/11/word-of-the-week-prepper.html
>
> On Sun, Apr 14, 2024, 4:21 PM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/yes-civil-war-movie-terrifying-110000545.html
> > :
> >
> > Some [militia groups] are more generally preparing for social collapse —
> > what’s known in online circles as “teotwawki,” for “the end of the world
> as
> > we know it”— and are stockpiling weapons and supplies in anticipation.
> >
>

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