Read on Twitter
Here at the end of 2020, you might be wondering: who invented the best word of the year, namely "doomscrolling"?
Friends, it was me!
And, at the same time, it wasn't me!
Pull up a chair and hear how #doomscrolling came into existence
Friends, it was me!
And, at the same time, it wasn't me!
Pull up a chair and hear how #doomscrolling came into existence
So, Saturday, March 14: my employer, the University of Michigan, had just that week made the call to cancel in-person classes, which felt apocalyptic---UM is known for *not* canceling class, even in the worst conditions, so the U pivoting to in-person was a big shoe to drop.
That morning, my partner and I were trawling through our social media, reporting to each other what had been cancelled, and we just kept refreshing---we were slack-jawed at what was happening, and just could not stop looking for the next big cancellation.
I looked up, and we'd been craned over our phones and refreshing for almost an hour. It was halfway to lunch and we hadn’t done the breakfast dishes. It felt both terrible and irresistible.
I was standing near our phone chargers, thinking about what else I could do to distract myself, and I thought about my flash card decks. So, I tweeted: https://twitter.com/emuehlbe/status/1238835310965989378
I have a visceral memory of reaching around for an appropriate word, not finding one, then making it up, and being pleased at how well it captured what we had been doing. And, my friends immediately reacted like I had coined a great word ( @ericdaryl, @ymiller419, and others)
A targeted search on Twitter confirms: I was the first to use it to name what we were all doing---endlessly scrolling through Twitter, watching the COVID cancellations roll in, and realizing just how bad things were going to get.
https://twitter.com/search?q=doomscrolling%20until%3A2020-03-15%20since%3A2019-01-01&src=typed_query&f=live
https://twitter.com/search?q=doomscrolling%20until%3A2020-03-15%20since%3A2019-01-01&src=typed_query&f=live
Then, it gets weird, because in a week, it’s *everywhere*:
https://twitter.com/search?q=doomscrolling%20until%3A2020-03-21%20since%3A2020-03-14&src=typed_query&f=live
https://twitter.com/search?q=doomscrolling%20until%3A2020-03-21%20since%3A2020-03-14&src=typed_query&f=live
Two weeks later, and “doomscrolling” is just normal English:
https://twitter.com/search?q=doomscrolling%20until%3A2020-04-01%20since%3A2020-03-14&src=typed_query&f=live
https://twitter.com/search?q=doomscrolling%20until%3A2020-04-01%20since%3A2020-03-14&src=typed_query&f=live
And, then, predictably, people start wondering: who coined it? Who named this thing that we were all suddenly doing? Lots of people suggest @karenkho, who popularized the term on Twitter by generously and continuously nudging all of us to stop doing it!
Over the course of the year, sleuths of all stripes went looking at the record. That is, they did the same searches on Twitter that I posted above, and come up with the result: I was the person they were looking for. https://twitter.com/IChatterjea/status/1272546834947485698
Hell, a @nytimes reporter finds me that way and interviews me about “inventing” the term.
And that’s where I had to explain: Yes, I made it up for that tweet---I even remember thinking as I was composing, “that’s not a word, but f*#% it, it sounds right.” It wasn’t a word I’d ever heard before. But, no, I am not the inventor.
That’s for two reasons: first, I couldn’t possibly be “the first,” since other people had in fact used the word before. Here’s a blog post that runs down the various occurrences over the last several years: https://archeothoughts.wordpress.com/2020/07/06/on-the-origin-of-doom-scrolling/
As the blog post notes, these pop up from time to time, but never in the context of the onset of the pandemic. For that, there’s just one instance of the word on Twitter between January 1st and March 15th --- and that’s me!
The blog post doesn’t link to my tweet, though, or name it as the origin of the way we all use “doomscrolling” now, probably because they looked at my account and came to the same conclusion I did: I don’t have a big enough following to influence that many users that quickly.
Second, and more important: that’s not how language works anyway. I made it up for myself, but “doomscrolling” was out there, used by lots of people before the pandemic in ways that are visible in internet searches *and also* in ways not captured in the record of the internet.
When I talked with @jonesieman from the NYT, he brought up another point: new words like “doomscrolling” get formed on patterns we already use in their context. They’re progenitor words that prime us to make the new sound.
His excellent example in this case: the word "rickrolling"!
(here's a piece on how progenitor words work, if you're curious)
https://www.thisworldthesedays.com/progenitorwordsandhowtheywork.html
(here's a piece on how progenitor words work, if you're curious)
https://www.thisworldthesedays.com/progenitorwordsandhowtheywork.html
I’d add that pattern and meter matter, too. “Doomscrolling” has a great long-short-short pattern, so it feels good to sound it out. Vowel-wise, it lines up with “tombstone,” so it already comes with a morbid echo, even before you parse the meaning of the word.
All of these things add up to the complex fact: “doomscrolling” doesn’t have a single inventor you can find.
Looking for an “inventor,” an “author,” an original use from which all others descend is a fool’s errand. As this recent essay from a scholar in my field, @ekaputrat, explains, it’s also an errand tied up with whiteness. https://politicaltheology.com/the-stubborn-invisibility-of-whiteness-in-biblical-scholarship/
So, whence "doomscrolling"? Likely multiple English speakers generated it at multiple times, when they needed the word for what they wanted to say---just like I generated it that March morning at the start of the pandemic.
