The Great American Apparel Diet

no buying for one year

Excerpted from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23wwln-safire-t.html

The lexies at the New Oxford American Dictionary made public their choice for 2008’s Word of the Year: hypermiling (defined as an “attempt to maximize gas mileage by making fuel-conserving adjustments to one’s car and one’s driving techniques.”)

Fortunately, Oxford’s neologists have provided us with their shortlist from which we can make our own choice of hottest word.  My choice has to be attuned to the economic event writers will be dealing with in 2009: a word for the recession (which we optimists call “the prerecovery period”).

One entry on the Oxford shortlist rings my bell, with its rich etymology, current utility and potential staying power well beyond the nonce. It is frugalista, defined as “a person who lives a frugal lifestyle but stays fashionable and healthy by swapping clothes, buying secondhand, growing own produce, etc.” This could become the nom de guerre of the “recession warrior.”

I think frugalista has a nice ring to it and is not as obvious as recession ista. The adjectivefrugal is rooted in the Latin for “fruits,” which in the 16th century some found relatively cheap. The word was at first applied to the careful apportionment of food, but Shakespeare in his 1598 “Merry Wives of Windsor” used it as a metaphor to mean “sparingly supplied; thrifty” of anything, as, “I was then Frugall of my mirth.”

Concerned about your budget in this year’s market debacle? Sharpening your pencil and tightening your belt, foraging for bargains but not altogether abandoning good food and good screens? Join the frugalistas!

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