Sewer Socialism & Other Neologisms
The beauty of English is that neologisms aka newly created words are cropping up all the time in all corners of the world.
Just this morning, I found an article in the New York Times with the headline “Mamdani, Leaning Into ‘Sewer Socialism,’ Gets His Hands Dirty.”
Wow! I was familiar with socialism, democratic socialism, national socialism, state socialism, etc., but what the heck is “sewer socialism.”
As I read through the article, I discovered that we have to thank New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani for this new variant of socialism.
In plain English, sewer socialism describes an idea that the city must address basic quality of life issues like fixing sewers and potholes, ensuring clean parks and sidewalks, plowing snow off roads, providing public toilets for delivery workers, removing trash from public areas and the like.
“We are delivering the very kinds of public goods and public excellence that, too often for New Yorkers, have been missing in their day-to-day lives.” Mamdani said in the NYT article (Mamdani, Leaning Into ‘Sewer Socialism,’ Gets His Hands Dirty, New York Times, April 11, 2026).
Some of Mamdani’s aides are also using the term street socialism to describe a similar thing.
Another interesting word I learned recently is ambulance pingpong. This one comes from South Korea and describes the practice of ambulance drivers ferrying seriously ill patients from hospital to hospital and asking whether the ER can admit their patient (Source: NYT, April 12, 2026). The South Korean news media has taken to describing the process as “ER runaround,” “ambulance pingpong” or ER “merry-go-round.”
Most of us are familiar with the term “influencer.” But how many of us have heard of exfluencer? An exfluencer is a former influencer who has stopped creating online content and promoting products on social media, and now lives a private life.
Since we live in the age of artificial Intelligence, it’s hardly surprising that our next term is related to AI. As I was browsing the Cambridge dictionary web site, I came across the term slopper. The dictionary described a slopper as “someone who relies too much on AI chatbots to make decisions, find out information, etc.”
Another AI neologism is trendslop, the tendency of answers by an AI model to follow popular trends instead of analyzing the situation and providing a relevant response.
Our next neologism is also related to AI and it is FOBO. The acronym expands into “fear of becoming obsolete”: a worried feeling that you may lose your job because your role can be performed by AI.
Moving away from AI, we have tradwife. This word is a shortened form of traditional wife. It means “a married woman, especially one who posts on social media, who stays at home doing cooking, washing, cleaning, and taking care of the children.” Example: Despite possessing a Ph.D in nuclear physics from IIT Kanpur and receiving multiple job offers, my cousin Gopal’s wife Manekha opted to be a tradwife.
Finally, let’s consider passport bros, a term I came across in a recent issue of The Economist (April 18, 2026, p.82). According to the magazine, passport bros are “young Western men who travel abroad in search of better dating prospects.”
That’s enough neologisms for today.