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Lex maniac

“Investigating changes in American English vocabulary over the last 50 years”

Tag Archives: nutrition

April 1, 2024 sugar high

sugar high

(1980’s | journalese? | “hyperactivity,” “euphoria,” “mania,” “burst (of energy, spending, etc.)”)

There is a firm consensus among scientists that there is no such thing as a sugar high. Or if there is, it’s because sugar causes your brain to release dopamine (um, a lot of drugs work like that, actually, and we don’t accuse them of failing to produce a buzz). Or your kid is acting up because you expect him to act up, or because he’s excited about something else. The waters are muddied by the fact that the same scientists will tell you that there is such a thing as a sugar crash after the non-existent sugar high, which occurs when insulin levels remain elevated even after neutralizing all the sucrose, thus causing your glucose level to drop, which makes you tired and grouchy. The hangover without the intoxication — thanks, science!

Parents, on the other hand, have been to too many birthday parties to doubt the existence of the sugar high, so this has become one more battleground between the mandarins and the laypersons. I recall a visit to Fenton’s, the famous ice cream parlor in Oakland, years ago with three girls, all under ten. We walked around a park afterwards, and the kids were positively loopy. I’m sure some of that was a conscious response to the grownups’ jokes about the effects of so much sugar, but they really did seem to be tripping a little bit. I don’t recall any crash later, but it may have been mitigated by the exercise. The phrase has always had a strong association with children, although adults can court the experience, complete with crash, and often do.

“Sugar high” and “sugar rush” began bobbing up in LexisNexis around 1985 and were always interchangeable; other phrases, such as “sugar buzz,” are not as common. It’s not clear where the term was invented or who invented it. By 2000, it had entered general usage as a word for any short-term bliss and had crept into the vocabulary of economists and financiers, where it has earned a well-wrought niche. While it remains even now most frequently used in nutritional contexts, some secondary meanings have become firmly part of today’s English.

Economists’ adoption of “sugar high” falls squarely into a long tradition of protesting and bemoaning any government action that helps non-millionaires. A chorus of legislators, bank presidents, and professors intones the old anthem: Easy money and easy credit lead to rack and ruin. Yet the chorus falls strangely silent when the government dispenses easy money to millionaires, and fails to notice when rack and ruin in fact follow. Government stimulus intended to help ordinary people? Disgraceful! Only last month Jamie Dimon warned that the U.S. economy is artificially buoyed by a “sugar high of debt.” From a historical perspective, Dimon has a point; too much deficit spending and debt lead to unpleasant reckonings that most people do not see coming. But we get the real, crippling crashes when the big boys have too much free money and not enough regulation, not when wealth is redistributed broadly among the population. The reason the scolds detest broad-based stimulus is that they can’t stand it when government helps regular people. They prefer a world in which government and big business operate as a loose conglomerate, with lots of dubious money sloshing around and a spirit of good fellowship among the men who are writing and cashing the checks.

The main thing to observe about the sugar high is that it is irresponsible. Its most common meaning goes straight back to our old puritan disapproval of candy (covered here), which brings deceptive and short-lived pleasure that will punish you afterwards. (Stories of people doing stupid, short-sighted things and swiftly regretting them are popular among Americans puritan and otherwise.) That same contempt underlies the financial sense of the phrase as well. It doesn’t always hold; when a sportswriter uses “sugar high” in reference to a team celebrating a championship, for example, the implication of irresponsibility disappears, while the implication of ephemerality remains. Most of the time, however, the phrase all but gloats that we have overdone it and will richly deserve the resulting bellyache.

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November 14, 2021 vegan

vegan

(1980’s | “non-dairy vegetarian”)

There is such a firm on-line consensus about when, where, and by whom the word “vegan” was invented that I’m inclined to believe it, though I might not if the OED didn’t back it up. No more suspense: In 1944, an Englishman named Donald Watson and a small group of like-minded “non-dairy vegetarians” founded a group to promote their way of life. The story goes that the word is an abridgement of “veg-etari-an” that evolved from group deliberations among Watson and his circle as they searched for a simple, memorable way of referring to themselves. They did not invent veganism, of course; many religious movements and illustrious individuals had attached themselves to it over the centuries. But they did change its course.

It takes a while for tiny groups with unpopular ideas to make headway, but it happens more often than you think. Outside of scientific journals, “vegan” seems to have occurred rarely before 1975, and infrequently until a decade or so after that. One supposes, without having looked for any evidence, that a critical mass had built by then within the culture — that is, enough people practiced veganism and were willing, nay, determined to talk about it — and therefore the existing word began to take up room in our common vocabulary. Well, it might be true, but how would you prove it?

Note on pronunciation: Apparently Watson preferred “veegan” from the beginning; dictionaries printed as late as 1990 gave “vejjan” as an alternative. (“Vaygan,” as in a being from the star Vega, and “veggan,” off-rhyming with legging, seem not to have been considered.) “Veegan” has definitely become standard; I don’t recall ever hearing it pronounced any other way. (I think I first encountered the word around 1990, probably in print.)

The roots of Watson’s veganism lay in an abhorrence of animal cruelty; it stems from anti-vivisectionism. Vegans despised the exploitation of animals and the violence that went with it. That is still true, but I sense that the case for veganism has come to rest more on nutritional and environmental grounds. Raising plants for food is much more efficient than raising animals. (There the argument can be made in terms of going beyond sparing animals to sparing the earth.) Nutritional justifications have had a harder time — vegans have had to combat the perception that their diet leads to various deficiencies, most of which can be corrected with supplements. But in comparison with the effects of meat-eating, veganism doesn’t look so bad.

Vegans must also reckon with our species’ prehistoric domestication of animals, and millennia of hunting before that — we’ve always killed and eaten animals, so why should we stop now? To which the vegan replies, there are many, many ancient practices that civilized people don’t perform any more, and killing our fellow animals for their products, edible or otherwise, ought to be on that list. As the earth continues to groan under us, it’s getting harder to deny that at least some forms of domestication will not be sustainable much longer. Just don’t make me live without potatoes fried in peanut oil.

The cruelty argument, powerful though it is, collapses if we discover that plants are conscious, feel pain, etc. It may be that we cannot feed ourselves without viciously exploiting one or another sentient product of the earth. I suppose we could try eating each other (wait, that sounds like a movie). If we devour ourselves like the cats of Kilkenny, that will save the planet, won’t it?

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