Word of the week: Minger (plus some WotY news)
An amuse-bouche to whet your appetite while I finish my words-of-the-year list
Its name rhymes with finger, not ginger, and it’s being called the world’s smelliest cheese. The New York Times introduced it to American readers last week with this tangy lede: “There is a cheese that may stand alone. In proud fetidness, that is.”
Minger is “a pungent brie-style cheese with a harder rind and a gooey middle,” explained the Telegraph (UK); it’s been produced in the North of Scotland for seven years “and has won legions of fans among adventurous foodies.” It’s now being carried by Asda, one of the UK’s largest supermarket chains.
The name may draw blank stares from Americans, but it’s a different story in the UK, where minger is slang for “a smelly or unattractive person, especially a woman” — “a stinker,” as
puts it in his Green’s Dictionary of Slang. Minger gained currency in the 1990s, but its origin is word that emerged in the 1920s: ming, a Scottish word meaning “human excrement” or “an unpleasant smell.”(I could find no evidence that minger has ever meant “septic vagina,” as a popular Urban Dictionary entry asserts. It’s possible that there’s some confusion with a different word, minge or minch, which comes from mingra, a Romany word for woman or vagina.)
Cheesemaker Rory Stone told the Telegraph that the Minger has “a smooth texture and a ‘minty‘ flavor. The ‘cabbagey’ aroma, Mr. Stone insisted, is ‘not there in the taste’”:
“I didn’t know we could get the smell to be so very rich, so horrendous,” Mr. Stone said. “I didn’t know we’d be good at that. I remember walking into the store and thinking, ‘Oh my God, we’ve hit it,’ and other people recoiling in horror. And I’m going, ‘Well, that’s what washed rind should smell like.’”
As long as we’re visiting the UK, here’s some word-of-the-year news from that side of the Atlantic:
The Guardian asked readers to choose their words of the year for 2023. The winners include two 19th-century Americans (discombobulate1 and irregardless); a word I’d never before seen spelled with a C (cumquat); and a German word that means “someone with a punchable face” (backpfpfeifengesicht).
The Economist’s word of the year is ChatGPT, the trademark of a large language model developed by OpenAI. The publication considered other artificial-intelligence terms — “Generative would be the word of the year if it were more widely known and used beyond the experts who follow ai” — before settling on ChatGPT. The story is paywalled; here’s the relevant excerpt:
[S]ince its launch in 2022, one term in particular — ChatGPT — has been on the lips of everyone from journalists to cab drivers wondering what all the fuss is about. Can a name be a word of the year? Is it even a word?
Yes. Names are nouns. And Google searches for “ChatGPT” are more than 90 times as frequent as those for “generative ai” or “large language model”. ChatGPT is the same in every language. Moreover, trade names have a long history of spreading into the collective parlance: aspirin, escalator, Hoover and Frisbee. (Though it is a mark of success, companies desperately try to prevent the “genericide” of their brands.)
And here’s a bit of self-promotional news: My latest story for Medium is an ode to film festivals. I attended six local film festivals in 2023 and will be going to Noir City’s one-night-only Xmas festival — a screening of Cover Up (1949) — on December 20. Read “How to Enjoy Going to the Movies” and let me know your own film-festival recommendations.
Do I know about the Milwaukee airport’s recombobulation area? Indeed I do. I wrote about it back in 2010.
Down here in London minger rhymes with singer but not finger.
ha, I haven't heard 'minger' in many a year (approx 25)