Word Spy Digest - March 30 2012

pink slime

n. An industrial meat byproduct consisting of compressed low quality beef trimmings treated with ammonia gas and used as a filler for ground beef.

Example Citations:

"Pink slime" will be off the menu this fall for schools in the National School Lunch Program that don't want byproducts containing what's known officially as "lean finely textured beef," the U.S. Department of Agriculture has decided....

Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University who wrote the book Safe Food, says the USDA is trying to manage a public relations problem, not a health concern: "pink slime may be safe, nutritious, and cheap, but it's yucky. It's kind of like pet food."
—Elizabeth Weise, "USDA: Schools can decide if 'pink slime' is used in lunches," USA Today, March 14, 2012

Baghai believes the market for "fresh and healthy" will only grow in the years ahead, especially with things such as "pink slime" now making ghastly headlines. (Pink slime is the meat filler sprayed with ammonia that is widely used in the U.S. as an unlabelled ingredient in ground beef.)
—Vinay Menon, "Shane Baghai, real estate mogul turned farmer, charges into Toronto's Burger War," The Toronto Star, March 12, 2012

Earliest Citation:

Another department microbiologist, Gerald Zirnstein, called the processed beef "pink slime" in a 2002 e-mail message to colleagues and said, "I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling."
—Michael Moss, "Company's Record on Treatment of Beef Is Called Into Question," The New York Times, December 31, 2009

Notes:

Categories:

Food and Drink
Insults

Posted on March 28, 2012

Permalink: http://www.wordspy.com/words/pinkslime.asp

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hashtag activism

n. Activism that uses a Twitter hashtag to promote a project or cause, particularly when it requires no other action from people.
—hashtag activist n.

Example Citations:

The advent of "hashtag activism" has been greeted with breathless claims about the birth of a new form of technology-based social movement. While such technologies can be extremely useful tools, they do not represent alternatives to the exhausting, age-old work of meeting people where they are, hearing their concerns, reaching common ground, building trust and convincing them that it is in their interests to act politically to change their circumstances.
—Eric Augenbraun, "Occupy Wall Street and the limits of spontaneous street protest," The Guardian, September 29, 2011

As a reporter, I don't sign up for various causes, but as someone who lives — far too much — in the world of social media, I can feel the pull of digital activism. And I have to admit I'm starting to experience a kind of "favoriting" fatigue — meaning that the digital causes of the day or week are all starting to blend together. Another week, another hashtag, and with it, a question about what is actually being accomplished.
—David Carr, "Hashtag Activism, and Its Limits," The New York Times, March 25, 2012

Earliest Citation:

Tracy and I wouldn't have devoted as much time and energy to hashtag activism in general and #p2 in particularly if we didn't understand what's at stake here.
—Jon Pincus, "The Great Hashtag Debate of 2009" (comment), Odd Time Signatures, May 3, 2009

Notes:

To learn more about Twitter hashtags, see Word Spy's bashtag entry.

Categories:

Social Networking
Insults
Activism

Posted on March 30, 2012

Permalink: http://www.wordspy.com/words/hashtagactivism.asp

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