Sometimes, letting out a curse word feels pretty darn good, doesn’t it? How about letting out the word that means “feeling good about cursing?” It’s real, and it skyrocketed to the top of our trending words list for the week of April 6–13, 2018!LalocheziaSearches for lalochezia, which means “emotional relief gained by using indecent or vulgar language,” climbed a whopping 15,930%. The term has been making the rounds of social media thanks to Shashi Tharoor, an Indian politician who tweeted about it this week.
https://twitter.com/Dictionarycom/status/983773569393025024PugilisticMMA fighter Conor McGregor re-entered the public arena with posts on Instagram this week, his first comments since an arrest after an altercation at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. And, it seems debate over his allegedly pugilistic actions haven’t died down, at least by the trends on Dictionary.com. Searches were up 1207% for the word, which refers to a fighter, usually a boxer.
Shibboleth
British politician Barry Gardiner seems to have single-handedly driven searches for one word up 700% this week. In a talk timed to the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement, the Labour MP called the agreement credited as the cornerstone of the Northern Ireland peace process a shibboleth. So, what does it mean? Derived from Hebrew, the word is defined as “a common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth.” BastaStormy Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti has taken to ending many of his tweets with the hashtag #basta, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed by his followers. Searches for basta were up 201% over last week for this Italian loanword, which means “enough, stop.”
https://twitter.com/Dictionarycom/status/983697369891033089LimerenceIt may sound like limerick, a funny five-line poem, but limerence is more about lust than laughs. Defined as “a state of mind resulting from romantic attraction, characterized by feelings of euphoria, the desire to have one’s feelings reciprocated,” limerence popped up in searches after New York Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd used it in the opening paragraph of a recent column. Dowd’s decision drove searches up by 283%!Thug lifeUSA and the unexpected hit Unsolved: The Murders of Tupac and The Notorious B.I.G. have had millions of people going, going back, back to Cali, Cali. They’ve also had a lot of you hitting up the dictionary. Searches for thug life, the two words tattooed across Tupac Shakur’s abdomen, were up 250% this week. The term means “a determined and resilient attitude to succeed in life in spite of racism and injustice.”Day of reckoningIt’s technically three words, not one, but the phrase day of reckoning had a 179% spike this week. The idiom, which means “the time when one is called to account for one’s actions,” rose in searches immediately after reports that the FBI had executed a search warrant at the office of Michael Cohen, personal attorney to President Donald Trump.
https://twitter.com/Dictionarycom/status/983500735148118016PogChamp Searches for PogChamp were up 321% this week. If you weren’t one of the searchers, you may think the term refers to the title ’90s kids earned in the cafeteria by throwing down slammers. You can stop that trip down memory lane right now. In 2018, a PogChamp has nothing to do with milk caps. Instead, it’s a small image used to express shock, surprise, or excitement in chats on the video-game streaming platform Twitch.
