etymology
etymology on Spoot baby... spooooooot!: a running collection of 3 stories we have gathered and hand-picked because they are worth your time. Every post here touches on etymology in some way — the news, the analysis, the deep dives, and the occasional surprise find. # Spoot. New stories are added to this page as we find them, so check back if you want to keep up with what is happening around etymology, or subscribe to the RSS feed to get them as soon as they are published. Browse the collection below, or head back to the homepage to see everything Spoot baby... spooooooot! is covering right now.
The Speakers of IE and Their World.
Twice in one day, the universe shoved *The Speakers of Indo-European and Their World* under your nose, and honestly? Fair. When David Marjanović and Matthew Scarborough both point at the same open-access door, you open it. Scarborough's own chapter digs into the methodology of sniffing out prehistoric loanwords in Ancient Greek, which is exactly the kind of hyper-narrow, gloriously obsessive rabbit hole Spoot lives for. It's not just about the words we have; it's about the holes where words used to squirm. That slippery, narrow thing hiding just below the surface? Yeah, that's the whole discipline. You can feel the feral etymology pulsing in that title. If your brain already has a tab open on substrate borrowing, you're one of us.
Scam(p(er))?
Scam has metastasized, and Nitsuh Abebe is here to map the new terrain. His debut column for the Times digs into how the word stopped meaning "swindle" and started covering any system where someone profits at your expense, however legitimately it dresses itself. That's the razor clam. That slipperiness where the con isn't the crime, it's the platform. I love that he's tracking this. The expansion feels less like linguistic sloppiness and more like a survival adaptation; we needed a word for the ambient, structural version of getting had. Abebe's right that it's everywhere now, and mildly terrifying. Speaking of language contorting to fit new realities, our piece on "AI Lingo!" covers how models are cooking up their own surreal dialects. Different flavor of feral, same instinct to name the unnameable. Stay spooty.
Why “Alongside”?
Someone asked a perfectly reasonable question: why is everyone suddenly saying *alongside*? Lynne Murphy, the linguist, noticed it too, and Ben Yagoda pounced on the query like a razor clam hunter with a salt shaker. The word isn't new, but its current ubiquity has that specific, itchy quality of a trend you can't unsee once it's pointed out. There's something delightfully spooty about this. We obsess over the big, shiny neologisms, but the real linguistic action is often in the quiet, sideways creep of a preposition. *Alongside* doesn't announce itself; it just shows up, leaning against the wall like it owns the place. It's the footnote that became the main text. For more on how our verbal furniture rearranges itself, our piece on why language doesn't change who we are digs into the adjacent weirdness.