Lexical Compendium

A fomite is an object or surface that acts as a medium to transmit infection. I became aware of this word during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

A fractomorpheme is a productive morpheme, that is, one that is readily used to make new words.

An example is the suffix -gate, coming to denote something scandalous. It is derived from Watergate, the name of the hotel at the center of the early 1970s scandal that ultimately led to the resignation of President Nixon.

In early March 2025, members of the Trump administration were using Signal to coordinate a military operation in Yemen. Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic, was erroneously added to this group chat. The scandal that ensued was dubbed Signalgate.

Update May 2025: it turns out that it wasn't exactly Signal that the Trump administration was using, but rather TeleMessage Signal, or TM SGNL. TeleMessage has been hacked at least twice and the stolen data is available on DDoSSecrets.

The term fridging describes a narrative trope in which a female character is used primarily to motivate the male protagonist.^[2] The female character is harmed, killed, traumatized, etc in order to catalyze the protagonist's journey -- his grief or vengeance are what propels him forward.

The term comes from the comic Green Lantern in an issue in which the hero discovers his girlfriend murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator by a villain.^[3] Comics writer Gail Simone later cataloged a long list of similar cases under the project "Women in Refrigerators," and the name stuck.^[4]

In November 2025 I saw the remake of the movie The Running Man.^[1] The primary motivation for the main character joining the deadly game show The Running Man is that he is unable to support his wife and sick daughter. These characters are only in the movie to motivate the protagonist. The picture he keeps of them seems to get more air time than the actual characters.

To glaze is to excessively praise or flatter someone, often in an over-the-top, cringe, or sarcastic manner. The implication is often that the recipient was unworthy of such praise. This slang word was popularized in online spaces like TikTok.

I first heard it when Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) had the following Tweet exchange:

@sama:
we updated GPT-4o today! improved both intelligence and personality.

@StockLizardKing:
It’s been feeling very yes-man like lately

Would like to see that change in future updates

@sama:
yeah it glazes too much

will fix

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Coined by British economist and statistician Charles Goodhart, Goodhart's Law describes the tendency for metrics to become distorted once people are incentivized to optimize them directly. A measurement that accurately reflects success under normal circumstances often loses its usefulness when rewards, punishments, or status become tied to the number itself.

Goodhart coined the phrase in the 1970s in an article discussing monetary policy. ^[1] The law and the perverse incentives ^[2] they create exist elsewhere. Take a couple examples I've seen recently in my day-to-day:

• A team judged solely on ticket closure rates may rush tickets closed without properly addressing the customer's problem.
• Engineers evaluated on AI usage metrics may engage in "token-maxxing" -- artificially increasing AI token consumption to improve their standing on internal dashboards. The metric rises, but the underlying objective of greater productivity or better outcomes may not. ^[3]

As a joke (hopefully), someone wrote a small utility designed expressly to use up tokens: Burn, baby, burn (those tokens) ^[4]

A groyper is a member of a loosely organized far-right, predominately male, online subculture centered around nationalist, reactionary, and often overtly extremist ideology (antisemitism, neo-Nazism, etc). ^[3]

In the fall of 2025, this term has been in the news because of an interview that Tucker Carlson gave to Nick Fuentes.^[6] Nick Fuentes is considered to be the front man of the groyper group.^[7]

The word groyper comes from the name of this group's symbol or mascot -- a cartoon frog. In 2005 Matt Furie created the character Pepe the Frog for his "Boy's Club" comic, which he originally published on his MySpace page.^[8] This character became memeified and many variants arose -- one of which was Groyper. The groyper movement is internet-native and this frog is used to signal membership and to mark online posts as “in-group” communications.

How prevalent is this community? In November 2025, conservative writer Rod Dreher made the claim that 30-40% of conservative Gen Z staffers on Capitol Hill and in the Trump administration are Groypers on his Substack and then later in a published piece for The Free Press.^[2]

I was inspired to write this entry after listening to Ezra Klein interview John Gan in a piece he called The ‘Groyperfication’ of the G.O.P..^[1]

This archaic word was used to describe someone who was discontent, i.e. someone who grumbles a lot. The origins of the word are in 17th century English politics.

I heard the word in an episode of the podcast The Allusionist.

Habeas corpus is a Latin phrase meaning "you shall have the body."

It is a legal principle that safeguards individual freedom by protecting against unlawful or indefinite imprisonment and it has its origins many hundreds of years ago in England. The Magna Carta in 1215 established that no one -- not even the king -- is above the law. In the 13th century and for the next few hundred years, common law court practices involved issuing writs to check unlawful imprisonment. These started with Habeas corpus ad subjiciendum, meaning you have the body to submit [before the court]. Over time, this evolved into a powerful legal tool, eventually codified in the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679.

In the U.S., the right to habeas corpus is enshrined in the Constitution (Article I, Section 9), which states that it may only be suspended "when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." As it was centuries ago, it remains a key check on arbitrary power by government leaders. . I’ll be honest -- if you’d asked me to define habeas corpus or explain the Magna Carta, I probably would’ve stumbled through it. I knew the term appeared in the Constitution, but I couldn’t have told you exactly what it meant.

Then came the news cycle in late May 2025.

Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, bungled answers on Tuesday about habeas corpus, incorrectly asserting that the legal right of people to challenge their detention by the government was actually the president’s “constitutional right” to deport people.

-- Gold, Michael. "Noem Incorrectly Defines Habeas Corpus as the President’s Right to Deport People" The New York Times, 20 May 2025

Heather Cox Richardson also covered this in the 20 May 2025 Letters From an American.

I'm guessing I wasn’t the only one suddenly revisiting high school civics after that performance.

Edit: Habeas corpus was in the news again in October 2025 as Donald Trump seemingly didn't know what (or who?) it was.

A seat, carriage, or covered platform placed on the back of an elephant (or camel) for carrying passengers. Historically, howdahs were often elaborately decorated and used by royalty, hunters, or soldiers. ^[2]

I learned this word while camping. A friend casually asked, "What's the thing called that sits on top of an elephant so you can ride it?" Another friend immediately replied: “Howdah.”

I was impressed -- not only because I had never heard the word, but because he retrieved such an obscure and wonderfully specific term without hesitation

Howdah comes from the Hindi haudā, ultimately derived from an Arabic word for a litter carried by a camel.

And what is a litter? It is a portable bed or enclosed seat used to carry a person, typically borne by people or animals. The word ultimately comes from the Latin lectus, meaning “bed” or “couch.”

For a while now, I've been searching for a term that captures human-made creativity -- as opposed to something created by an LLM. Occasionally I see the word organic used in this context. ^[6] It works, but it feels a little off. Organic implies something that happens naturally, often without human involvement.

Here I'd like to proffer humanic: a word meaning pertaining to or originating from human agency or creativity, particularly in contrast to work produced by AI. An appropriate antonym in this context might be synthetic. So: humanic and synthetic. I like the symmetry.

The word humanic isn't actually new. Historically, it referred to the study of human nature.^[7] But let's reclaim it to also denote cultural artifacts made by humans in a world where if feels like we're just moments away from being saturated with purely synthetic content. Maybe others will organically come upon this usage. I'll use this space to record any sightings.

The word humanic is not necessarily anti-AI, it is descriptive of origin, not ideology. We may need another word to convey sentiment and preference.

Example:

"Oh, I love the theater. It's so refreshing to see content that is entirely humanic."

Note: Anthropic might have also been a good choice, but this, ironically, is already the name of a popular LLM.^[8]

Other contenders: anthrogenic, anthropogenic

Updates:

• In Nov 2025 YouTuber/filmmaker Thomas Flight published a thought-provoking piece on art versus artifice ^[9]
• In Nov 2025, a song made by AI topped Billboard's "Country Digital Song Sales" chart ^[1]
• In Feb 2026, an AI bot tried to submit a PR, got rejected, and wrote a blog in retaliation. ^[4]
• A May 2026 article in The Atlantic ^[3] contained a link to an interesting pre-print paper ^[5] suggesting that using LLMs has impacted human speach in terms of the words we use.
• A July 2026 article in The SF Gate ^[2] described how a restaurant's food images were ridiculed for being generated by AI.