By Shelley Bennett
Are you a New Year’s Resolution maker? I never have been. It always seems to me that New Year’s Day is still a celebration and then it’s my dad’s birthday the next day, so we are still celebrating, staying up late, and eating a lot of delicious (but not the healthiest) food. If I made a resolution, it would be broken by noon on January 1st.
Instead, I prefer to take the first couple of weeks to enjoy a fresh start and then decide how things might change, or not, in the new year.
A couple of years ago (2020 in fact), my students chose a word for the year. There were some great choices: perseverance, goals, satisfaction, grace, journey, etc. Rannon chose “Yeet”.
When I asked what “Yeet” meant, he told me that yeet could mean anything you wanted. It could act as a verb or noun. You could “yeet” around whether you were doing really well or having a bad day.
It could also be used as a greeting, as in: “Yeet” said Rannon and Landon responded, “Yeet!”
Yeet can be an exclamation. Like, Yeet! I can’t believe the Raiders won that game!
Urban Dictionary defines yeet as “to violently throw an object that you deem to be worthless, inferior, or just plain garbage.” This certainly fits when you think about the year 2020. In fact, I thought we “yeeted” that year over 365 days ago and got rid of it! Yeet!
“Pivot” was the word for last year and the never-ending school schedule changes as we went from in-person to distance learning, distance learning to hybrid. By March I was dizzy, confused, and just plain tired.
This year, I propose we all choose the same word: respair, the opposite of despair. I first heard about this word from Dan Rather’s Facebook post. He credited the etymologist Suzie Dent with its “re-discovery” and defined the word as “fresh hope, recovery from despair”.
A tweet from Haggard Hawks adds that respair is a “word for a renewed or reinvigorated hope, or a recovery from anguish or hopelessness.”
It’s an archaic word, first coined by Andrew of Wyntoun, a Scottish poet who lived between 1350 and 1423. At some point, English speakers stopped using respair, yet continued on with its cousin despair. When did we decide we need more negative than positive in our language?
The year 2022 needs this word. I urge you to use it in a sentence, post it on your social media, and say it as your mantra each morning. Respair is what we need to survive this month and make it through the next wave of illness, quarantines, and canceled events.
If we can make yeet happen, respair should be a piece of cake.
Remember when news was ‘newsy’? When you read about weddings, family events and engagement announcements in the newspaper? If you have something that might be newsworthy, please submit it to [email protected] and I’ll do my best to include it here in “The Good Stuff.”
