Brow Beat

Jeff Daniels on The Newsroom, a show many people hate-watched in 2012

Photo by Melissa Moseley – © HBO

The most authoritative word-of-the-year selection, in Brow Beat’s collective view, comes from the American Dialect Society. It’ll be a few more days before we know their choice: Formal nominations will be made at their annual meeting later this week, with the final vote happening on Friday.

But the chair of the ADS’s New Words Committee—and Slate contributor—Ben Zimmer was on NPR this past Friday discussing some of the verbal candidates likely to be considered. Among them are several terms deployed repeatedly during coverage of  major 2012 news events, such as fiscal cliff and superstorm. Those two are both solid choices—they’re certainly ubiquitous enough, and each, obviously, captures something about the current moment. Insofar as superstorms are the wave of the future (so to speak), that term has the added cachet of increasing future relevance.

Can you describe Ian McKellen's performance in The Hobbit in a pithy parenthetical aside?

James Fisher – © 2012 Warner Bros. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

It’s that wonderful time of year when the Hollywood studios flood the market with prestige films, the ones they hope will win greenbacks from vacationing moviegoers and gold from the Academy. These films tend to tackle complicated issues—slavery, the abolition of slavery, “enhanced interrogation”—and boast strong performances from their leading men and women. With all this ground to cover, even the most breviloquent of film critics can find herself forced to squeeze the assessment of a supporting actor’s performance into a mere parenthetical.

Luckily, our best critics have elevated such pithy appraisals to an art form. Consider, for example, the following sentence, from Manohla Dargis’s New York Times review of Flight, in which she lists the characters circling Denzel Washington’s troubled pilot: “a drug addict (the lyrically melancholic Kelly Reilly); his son (a fine Justin Martin); a friend (a blustery John Goodman); and a lawyer (Don Cheadle, doing a lot with little).” In just thirty words, Dargis has captured the essence of four supporting performances.

In celebration of such feats of concision—and as a test of your holiday movie knowledge—I’ve created a short quiz.

Gwyneth Paltrow helped the cause of amazeballs by saying it on Glee (FOX)

Katy Steinmetz had a delightful rundown yesterday in Time of some of 2012’s worst words and phrases: the ones that popped up everywhere, like evil prairie dogs, making you long for a society that communicated solely through pictographs. Her bag of verbal irritants included YOLO, adorkable, mommy porn, andzombie apocalypse.

But towering above these in sheer horribleness is one word that I couldn’t even believe Steinmetz hadn’t made up, despite mounting Twitter evidence to the contrary: amazeballs. I suppose the idea is to convey cake balls, or perhaps some other type of balls, made of amazing. And then, by conjuring this Deep Image—which in its reluctance to be visualized puts Robert Bly to shame—to fan outward into abstraction, so that anything can be amazeballs: you, me, your go-to holiday outfit, brownies (which are square, and have nothing to do with balls of any kind). It is frightening.

I felt so traumatized by my discovery of amazeballs that I dropped everything I had to do and attempted to prove it (they?) didn’t actually exist.

Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean (in disguise) holding the young Cosette (Isabelle Allen), whom he rescues in Les Misérables

© 2012 - Universal Pictures

Earlier this week in Slate, Rachel Maddux attempted to explain why tweens—or, as we called them when I was one, children—love Les Misérables, despite the musical seeming, on paper, “decidedly un-kid-friendly,” what with its centuries-old, epic source material and its emphasis on poverty and prostitution and so on.

Among the reasons Maddux cites: the “show’s overwhelming emotional bigness,” the way its characters are all “straining or scrambling toward some unseeable future” (like, e.g., someone on the cusp of adulthood), and the “peephole” the show provides into “grown-up stuff.”

Having seen the musical when I was 9, on its first U.S. tour, all of those reasons sound right to me. But there’s another one, perhaps more particular (but not unique, surely) to boys, which only hit me when I watched the new film adaptation: Jean Valjean is a superhero.

Cheddar Gougères

Robert Anderson for Slate

Pâte à choux, the pastry dough essential to éclairs and a litany of other French delights, can seem alien and a little scary to American cooks, whose baking exploits may have been limited to yeast and quick breads. Its process, texture, and momentum are entirely different, in ways that feel uncomfortable the first few times you attempt it. And, as with all homemade baked goods, the threat of abject failure looms, a threat that feels all the more acute because pâte à choux relies on steam for lift rather than yeast or chemical leaveners.

What better time than the arrival of the New Year—which can itself feel a bit threatening—to face your fears and make pâte à choux? None, if you ask me.