[Ads-l] teotwawki

[Nancy Friedman]

Thanks, Ben! And yes, that should have been “preppers,” not “peppers,” in
my email.



Nancy Friedman
Chief Wordworker
https://wordworking.com
https://fritinancy.substack.com

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On Sun, Apr 14, 2024, 8:27 PM Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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 Here's an archived version: https://archive.is/1kHoW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.
> > >
> >
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org