Words don't 'alf define a Society: useful words for the 2020s -- Clare Wiener (Mari Howard)
Another from (soft) science writing? Liminality : I stared at this word, wondering whether I’d seen it before, and what it meant. Was it actually a mistake, for something I could imagine: ‘luminality’ ? Luminality made sense of a kind: the writer probably meant whatever possessed this quality in spades — it illumined, or lit, things, rooms, extremely well. I then returned to my normal self and understood: liminality was the name of an Easter art exhibition which I’d recently contributed to, about the ‘liminal’ or in-between time between, for example, career or job changes, between taking exams and receiving your degree results, and in this particular case — this Easter exhibition — the Saturday between Good Friday, the Crucifixion, and Easter Sunday, the Resurrection… ‘Liminal’ — a somewhat poetic word — has entered popular use rather recently (it was 11 times more frequent in 2019 than in 1980). What I was reading used its ‘ality’ noun ‘liminality’ (10 times more frequent in 2019 than...