September 26, 2010Word of the Day
PHATIC \FATT-ik\DEFINITIONadjective

: of, relating to, or being speech used for social or emotive purposes rather than for communicating information
EXAMPLES Joe has a tendency to take even phatic inquiries seriously, so when Kristen asked him how he was feeling, I knew the answer would be much longer than "better, thanks."

"Conversation is also more than the explicit back and forth between individuals asking questions and directly referencing one another. It's about the more subtle back and forth that allow us to keep our connections going. It's about the phatic communication and the gestures, the little updates and the awareness of what's happening in space." -- From an article about Twitter by Danah Boyd in Vator News, September 10, 2009
DID YOU KNOW?“Phatic” was coined in the early 20th century by people who apparently wanted to label a particular quirk of human communication—the tendency to use certain rote phrases (such as the standard greeting "how are you?") merely to establish a social connection without sharing any actual information. It probably won't surprise you, then, to learn that "phatic" derives from the Greek "phatos," a form of the verb "phanai," meaning "to speak." Other descendants of "phanai" in English include "apophasis" ("the raising of an issue by claiming not to mention it"), "euphemism," "prophet," and the combining suffix "-phasia" (used to denote a speech disorder). You may also have spotted a similarity to "emphatic," but that turns out to be purely coincidence; "emphatic" traces back to a different Greek verb which means "to show."

And here we have a further example of the above entry:

RATS - Noun. Entitled owner or privilege.

USAGE" "We Southerners are willing to fight for our rats"!
(todays southern word comes from a school teacher in America's southernmost state: Hawaii. As part of her class study of the "War of Northern Agression" (known to Yankees as the "Civil War"), she showed her class the movie Gettysburg. The students wondered why the Confederacy was fighting for their "rats." The answer, of course, is obvious: Southerners have very friendly rats... in fact, you could almost say that we have some downright civil rats.) Hey, I just type them as they come out of the printer.