Lexical Compendium

From Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," a poem in "Through the Looking Glass."

The poem was about the capture and killing of a creature called the "Jabberwock" and is filled with many other nonsense terms.

The word "jabberwocky," itself, has come to mean something meaningless in writing.

I won't abrogate my duties as a journalist...

I heard the above while listening to the news and had to look up the word abrogate. By context clues, it's obvious that one meaning of this word is to abandon one's responsibilities.

The more common use is in a legal context and here it means to abolish a law.

And there's also a medical use, where it is used in the context of suppressing an immune response (...strategies to abrogate antibody production...).

Somewhat recently my brother introduced me to this word. Agnotology is the study of how ignorance is deliberately produced, particularly through the publication of inaccurate or misleading information.

This is precisely the type of word I love learning about. As of October 2025, I’ve been thinking a lot about how social media, news journalism, and even scientific publishing shape what we know -- and what we don’t.

Agnotology was coined in 1992 by Iain Boal at the request of Robert Proctor. Proctor writes about this in the postscript of his Agnotology: A Missing Term to Describe the Cultural Production of Ignorance (and Its Study)^[2]:

Some time into this project I learned that there already was a word that has been used to designate the study of ignorance, albeit with a quite different slant from how we shall be using the term. Apart from being obscure and somewhat inharmonious, agnoiology has often been taken to mean "the doctrine of things of which we are necessarily ignorant" in some profound metaphysical sense. My hope for devising a new term was to suggest the opposite, namely, the historicity and artifactuality of non-knowing and the non-known-and the potential fruitfulness of studying such things. In 1992, I posed this challenge to the linguist Iain Boal, and it was he who came up with the term agnotology, in the spring of that year.

Proctor, a Professor of the History of Science at Stanford, is best known for uncovering how the tobacco industry manipulated scientific research to keep the public ignorant of its harms ^[3] -- a quintessential example of manufactured doubt.

I suspect he intended agnotology to be applied to the scientific realm, but I think it works nicely when thinking about this topic generally. When the Trump administration repeatedly cites false data, that's an agnogenic practice -- the deliberate creation of ignorance.

Similarly alarming, credulously contrarian Bari Weiss (founder of "The Free Press") was recently named CBS News' new editor-in-chief ^[5], reporting directly to CEO David Ellison (Larry Ellison’s son). Larry, meanwhile, is part of the group overseeing U.S. operations of TikTok ^[6] -- a platform where an astonishing percentage of young people now get their news. ^[7] Add to that RFK Jr.'s steady promotion of half-baked "research" ^[8] to push his agenda, and it feels as though we’re barreling toward a Ray Bradbury–esque dystopia -- one where ignorance isn’t accidental, but curated. (And we didn't even touch the accelerating ease of deepfake generation. ^[1])

I think that agnotology dovetails with another Lexicon entry: Bespoke Reality. One concept explains how ignorance is manufactured, the other how it becomes personalized. Together they describe the feedback loop of our time -- ignorance produced at scale, then force-fed to everyone in their individual feed.

An anathema is something or someone that is abhorrent or extremely disliked.

I came across this word while reading an essay, "'Weird' Should Not Be An Insult."

Using “weird” as an insult ought to be anathema to Democrats.

Leading up to the 2024 presidential election, Democrats took to calling Republicans (especially Donald Trump and his VP candidate JD Vance) weird. (And the Republican retort seems to be: "I'm not weird, you are.")

While writing this, it's too early to know whether or not this tact will pay off.

The word anathema has its origins in the Greek word anatithenai, meaning "to dedicate." In the "Old Testament" of "The Bible," the word anathema is sometimes used in this way. Interestingly, the meaning of the word shifted to mean something accursed or repulsive and translated into Hebrew as herem. We see this meaning in the "New Testament" of "The Bible."

The ecclesiastical meaning of the word still exists today (it's the second definition in Merriam-Webster's dictionary). A more prominent use in English, though, is something that is vehemently disliked.

Something that is anodyne is not likely to provoke dissent or offense. The word is often used metaphorically to describe a tactful way of communicating something. When used this way, the word is mildly pejorative in that anodyne content is typically boring, watered-down and so deliberately inoffensive that it has lost any real substance or edge.

The word comes from the Greek anōdynos, meaning "painless."

Argy-bargy is British slang for the kind of back-and-forth that accompanies a vigorous argument.

When my brother and I discuss politics, there's always a bit of argy-bargy.

Argy-bargy and the similar argle-bargle appear to have originated in Scottish slang. One can clearly see that the first part of the rhyming pair is formed from the word argue and the second is nonsense... or mumbo-jumbo. This type of word is what's known as a rhyming reduplication (other examples are mumbo-jumbo or okey-dokey).

I first encountered this term while listening to the Aussie host of the podcast Risky Business (#758).

I've used this word many times, but I never stopped to think about its origins and I was surprised to learn that it was eponymous. The term "borked" traces back to Robert Bork, a U.S. Supreme Court nominee whose 1987 confirmation was famously derailed by aggressive political opposition. His name became a verb -- "to bork" -- meaning to systematically obstruct or defame a nominee or candidate, especially through public criticism.

Though the word originally had political connotations, it also gained popularity in tech circles and online culture. This second usage may share the same etymology, but it’s equally plausible that it arose as a playful corruption of broke -- much like how pwn evolved from a misspelling of own.

I first heard about the political use of the word while listening to the 99% Invisible podcast.

Broligarchy is a portmanteau of "bro" (slang for brother or close male friend) and "oligarchy" (a system where power rests with a small number of people).

After the inauguration of President Donald Trump in 2025, this term has been in the media a lot. The three richest men in the world, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have seemingly moved into Trump's inner-circle (with Musk heading the "Department of Government Efficiency").

Interestingly, broligarchy doesn't seem to have been coined recently. The Urban Dictionary entry dates back to 2011.

Broligarchy was a 2024 American Dialect Society "Political Word of the Year."

A canard is false or unfounded statement/story.

It literally comes from the French canard meaning "duck." There's a French idiom that goes "vendre un canard à moitié" and means "to sell half a duck," in other words, to swindle someone. Over time this evolved to mean something more like a "false report."

There's a second use of this word in the aviation industry where it's a bit of jargon which describes a configuration in which a small forewing is placed ahead of the craft's main wings.

In the early 1900s French aviation engineers built a plane with these small forewings that was reminiscent of a duck and they started calling these planes "avions canard."

The word chookas is Australian slang and something performers traditionally say to each other to wish luck before a show. It's similar to the expression "break a leg."

Chook is Aussie slang for chicken. One explanation for how chookas came to be used in the performing arts is that if there was a full house, the theater company could afford a chicken dinner.

Other sources seem to indicate that it was originally pronounced choogas was was an abbreviation of the phrase "cheers and good wishes."

I first came across the word chookas while watching Deadloch (S1, E6).