Word of the week: Tariff
And other words of import.
Relax — I’m not going to burden you with Big Thoughts about macroeconomics.1 I’m just a lowly wordsmith, after all, and not a global-trade boffin.2
But even though I barely passed the one statistics class I took in grad school, I predict with 90 percent confidence that tariff will end up on multiple word-of-the-year lists. What’s more, it’s an interesting word! So let’s have some fun with it while we can still afford to.
Depending on how you look at it, it’s either perfectly apt or cosmically ironic that tariff is an exported — or, viewed from the other side, imported — word. It was actually exported twice: first from Arabic ta’rif (“information, notification, a making known; inventory of fees to be paid”) into Italian, and then, in the late 1500s, from Italian tariffa (“a book of rates for duties”) into English. It was, according to Etymonline, just one example of “the commercial jargon of the Mediterranean” that became absorbed into English.
And the other examples? Etymonline sticks them into a parenthetical phrase that made me sit up straighter: “garble, jar (n.), average (perhaps), orange, tabby, etc.”
I’ll let you follow those links at your leisure3, but I can’t resist sharing the lore about tabby, which today is associated only with cats. Here’s how it evolved:
Tabby — originally a type of striped silk — comes from from Arabic ’attabi, a truncation of ’Atabiyah, a neighborhood of Baghdad where the cloth was made. It was imported into French as tabis (a rich, watered silk, originally striped) and made its way into English around 1630. If striped fabric could be called tabby, so could a striped cat.
Exports, imports, borrowings: They make the world go round.
Given how much we’re talking about tariffs right now, I had expected to see a surge of new tariff-related trademark applications in the USPTO database. Hustlers are always trying to make a buck off a buzzword. So I was surprised to find only two filings since January 2025, both for use on clothing and accessories.
An application for THERE’S A NEW TARIFF IN TOWN was filed in February, probably inspired by a January 27, 2025, New York Post headline.
A separate application for various spellings of “tariffied” (TARIFFIED, TARIFF-IED, TARIFFIED, TARIFF’EYED, TARIFF-EYED, AND/OR TARIFFEYED) was filed on March 15, 2025. I can’t say for certain whether this Trump Got Me Tariffied shirt, available on eBay, is covered under that registration, or whether it’s merely a coincidence.
An unrelated Estonian business, Tariffy, calls itself “your go-to AI assistant for tackling the often headache-inducing world of Harmonized System (HS) codes in international trade.” Tariffy filed for U.S. trademark protection in September 2024, two months before the presidential election. Maybe the tariffy/terrify homophone isn’t an issue in Estonian?
As for “Penguins Against Tariffs,” I found no evidence of it in the trademark database. I just like the design.
Perhaps the most unlikely tariff-merch success story is the one inspired by a 23-word headline written in May 2018, during Trump 1.0.
“Tariffs not only impose immense economic costs but also fail to achieve their primary policy aims and foster political dysfunction along the way” announced a podcast from Scott Lincicome, a global-trade expert and vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute. Fast-forward to July 2024, when Matthew Yglesias wrote about then-candidate Trump’s proposed tariffs (they “mean big opportunities for corruption,” Yglesias warned) and included a photo of Lincicome wearing a blue T-shirt with the “immense economic costs” message. Lincicome boosted the news to his 91,000 followers on X/Twitter, adding “Order yours today!”
You can still order the shirt from a vendor called The Darkest Political Timeline; other vendors sell knockoff versions, some of which misspell “dysfunction.”
Bonus link: xkcd on tariffs.
I’ve been filling in the gaps in my knowledge by reading Paul Krugman’s “Primer on Trade Wars” (Substack, April 6); Jerusalem Demsas’s “There’s No Coming Back From Trump’s Tariff Disaster” (The Atlantic gift link, April 12); Brian Merchant’s “This Is What AI-Generated Trade Policy Looks Like” (when your name is Merchant, you’d damn well better know about trade policy); and Reddit’s r/economy discussions, which are entertaining even when they aren’t exactly edifying. And if “boffin” is unfamiliar to you, possibly because you’re an American, here’s something I wrote about that word in 2011.
I’ve written about garble myself. It’s a wild story!
As one social-media poster noted, you can't spell "tariffs" without "ffs"
I'm just here for the penguins.