{"id":13112,"date":"2010-06-19T12:00:40","date_gmt":"2010-06-19T19:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/neology\/2010\/06\/19\/fracking.html"},"modified":"2010-06-19T12:00:40","modified_gmt":"2010-06-19T19:00:40","slug":"fracking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2010\/06\/19\/fracking\/","title":{"rendered":"fracking"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I turned on the radio during Talk of the Nation<\/cite>'s Science Friday<\/a> yesterday, in the middle of a segment about natural gas in water<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At one point (starting at 13:52 in the segment), the guest (Josh Fox, director of a documentary on the topic) said, fairly emphatically:<\/p>\n

\n

Chemicals in the fracking process are not supposed to be found in wells. [...] I happen to trust the citizens on the ground, who are saying, “Look, our water wasn't flammable before; they came and did a frack job; all of a sudden our water is flammable.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And I thought, Wow, I had no idea that the term “frak” from Battlestar Galactica<\/cite> had gained such widespread acceptance. I heard it on Gilmore Girls<\/cite> once<\/a>, but I don't think I've heard anyone else outside of sf circles say it; but here's a guy on the radio using it completely casually as a swear word, sounding like he says it all the time.<\/i><\/p>\n

So I started to write this entry about it, but I had to go find the recording to get the quote right. And that was how I found out that the episode title was “New Film Investigates ‘Fracking’ For Natural Gas.”<\/p>\n

Which made clear that I was misinterpreting something.<\/p>\n

One quick web search later, I learned that hydraulic fracturing<\/a> is a method of acquiring oil and natural gas, and that it's also known as “fracking.”<\/p>\n

Which means that Fox wasn't swearing at all.<\/p>\n

So instead of this being an entry about the use of a science fiction swear word in mainstream society, it's an entry about a word I hadn't previously known, and about the misinterpretations that can occur when you know a homophone for the word someone is actually saying.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I turned on the radio during Talk of the Nation’s Science Friday yesterday, in the middle of a segment about natural gas in water. At one point (starting at 13:52…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,25,58,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-homophones","category-maledicta","category-new-to-me-words","category-slang"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13112\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}