Scrabble’s Two Letter Words – No & Nu

No

Negative. Not any. Not at all.

When giving a definition for ‘no’, many people would write “the opposite of yes”. But that’s not true. No and yes have never been equals.

Negativity bias is the concept that, all things being equal, the human mind fixates on things that are negative instead of things that are positive. This well-documented psychological phenomenon sounds depressing at first blush. But if I told you that yes, there’s a new bistro across the street, and that no, you shouldn’t cross the street right now because of oncoming traffic, then I should hope your negative bias kicks in. I want you to be safe, ignore the potential for a delicious Rueben sandwich, and pay more attention to the oncoming traffic. Negative bias saves lives.

The problem, however, is when we think we’re measured in our use of negative and positive information to make accurate predications, but our negative bias allows us to warp reality. Let’s take the stock market, for example. Over time, the market goes up. But the idea of investing in stock with the possibility of a potential looming crash is scary. The constant and gradual gain of Target’s department stores makes for a mediocre story. The sudden bankruptcy and foreclosure of Toys ‘R Us, however, is fascinating.

Is it any wonder that many people refuse to invest a portion of their savings in stock, instead keeping it tucked away in a savings account? Or perhaps they don’t save at all, instead choosing to spend their money ‘while they still got it’. Logic tells us we should take advantage and invest a portion of our savings to reap rewards later, but negativity bias tells us we should ‘play it safe’, even when ‘safe’ is a holistically poor choice.

This is why there’s so much negative news in your average newspaper. Impactful good news is fine, but bad news sells. It’s easy to blame the media for taking advantage of negative bias, but the media only prints what we’re primed to read. Psychologist John Cacioppo, Ph.D. performed extensive studies on the way the brain reacts to positive stimuli versus negative stimuli. And he found that the electrical output of the cerebral cortex is more powerful by about a factor of three when confronted with negative stimulus compared to an equivalent positive stimulus. Furthermore, the electrical charge comes on faster for a more immediate reaction, and lingers longer. Whether we are repulsed or attracted to negative responses is a matter of our individuality, but we all share a sharp response to the word ‘no’.

Nu

The thirteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. Capital nu is represented by the letter ‘N’, but lowercase nu is represented by a lowercase ‘v’. When I finally get around to writing an article on the Greek alphabet, see also: Xi.

Nu is also an alternate spelling for ‘new’, in the same way that ‘lite’ is an alternate spelling for ‘light’. And, yes, nu and lite are English words. It doesn’t matter whether or you like it. If you can find the words in Oxford and/or Webster, it’s English.

This brings up a question: how does a dictionary decide that a word is a word? Well, if you’re Dictionary.com, you plagiarize from other dictionaries. But if you’re the Oxford English Dictionary, you make a gigantic catalog of every possible word in the language and the way those words are used in books, periodicals, and websites, then correlate the information into a digestible definition.

What you’re most interested in is locking down multiple sources who use the word identically. In 2018, the word ‘deepfake’ was used by Esquire and The Guardian to explain the phenomenon of AI-assisted tools to swap an actor’s face in a video with another actor. The concept had been around for a while, but took off when a Redditor by the name of u/deepfakes created a subreddit by the name of r/deepfakes in 2017, giving the community of face-swapping artists a place to show their craft. It became a news story because some ‘deepfakers’ were creating porn with unwitting celebrity faces, but it didn’t take long for the media to realize how much harm faked political messages could be. In want of a word to explain the phenomenon, reporters clung to the name of the subreddit: deepfake. Merriam-Webster took notice, and compiled instances of the word as it was used in various contexts. It was possible that the conflation of the subreddit and the phenomenon would die away and a new word would replace the placeholder name, but over time the articles about deepfake no longer bothered explaining the concept to an informed public. The name stuck. So as a part of Merriam-Webster’s 2020 update, deepfake was among the words entered into its lexicon.

This is the same process the Oxford Dictionary has used, going all the way back to 1857. It’s one of the oldest ongoing crowdsourcing projects in history. The original publishers knew that recording and defining every English word was a project greater than what any one government agency could do on its own. So they requested volunteer readers to copy down any strange or interesting word they might come across, or any odd use of a common word they might read, and mail those entries to their main office to create a massive database of words. The final instalment of the dictionary (All words from ‘Wise’ to ‘Wyzen’.) wasn’t completed until 1928. It took seventy-one years to sift through the incredible crush of language before it could be codified.

So when we English speakers spell words ‘incorrectly’, even if it’s for the lulz, Oxford takes notice. When advertisers pound the idea of a ‘Nite Time sleeping aid’ so hard that WebMD gets on board with the spelling, then it’s not Oxford’s fault for adding ‘nite’ to the dictionary. They’re just the nite-watch reporting the activities of barbarians on the frontier.

Likewise, the word nu has seen use by companies desperately trying to make their products seem exciting at least as far back as the Nuform shoe company in 1892, and more recently by the European Union’s ‘Nu-Age’ dietary strategy for the elderly.

It’s the world of 90s music where ‘nu’ really takes off. Much like how producers in the late 80s carved out a new ‘alternative rock’ from the mainstream rock, the word ‘nu’ was slapped in front of music genres in the early-to-mid-nineties to attract audiences to an evolving modern sound. Musicians weren’t making disco, house music, or soul anymore. They made nu-disco, nu house, and nu-soul. But the one genre which rose to the top of the charts consisted of metal fused with elements of hip hop, industrial, funk, and grunge, otherwise known as nu metal.

Like alternative before it, over time nu metal stopped being the alternative and became mainstream. Since it was popular, but also featured a number of controversial acts, there was a heavy push on producers to make nu metal more accessible to teenagers. And nothing kills a movement faster than adults creating art for teens. The genre picked up another name, spat out in disdain for the Spencer Gifts/Hot Topic teenage fashionistas who attempted to buy their way into misfitdom: mallcore. Nu metal was no longer nu, which meant the genre was dead… from a marketing perspective. But metal fusion bands never stop resurfacing, and as long as there are acts like Code Orange and Tallah, nu metal will not die.

Are you a logophile eager to learn more?  Why not head on over to the Scrabble’s Two Letter Words Page?