‘Existential’ pick as word of the year
meet artists that are islands on their own and I tell them all the time, ‘Find your flock, gather your flock,’ ” he said. “We live in such a singular society that really doesn’t encourage the idea of collaborating or even social gatherings anymore.”
The hope is that the party’s guests will mingle and learn about each other, sparking partnerships and alliances. He likens it to highlevel speed dating.
“For me, the result is when people the next day say, ‘Hey. I exchanged numbers with this particular artist or this particular singer, this particular writer or this particular architect, and now we’re going to work and collaborate together,’ ” he said.
Included in the book is
Marisa Tomei’s grandmother’s recipe for charred red peppers, Carla Hall’s pimento cheese dip, Jessica Biel’s blueberry cake and Carol Lim’s Korean fried chicken. A mac and cheese from QTip contains no less than five cheeses. “In most black households, if it’s less than five cheeses, it’s not legit,” Questlove jokes.
Questlove, born Ahmir Thompson, said the seed of the book sprouted more than 20 years ago when The Roots were trying to lure musicians to collaborate in Philadelphia. The best bribe turned out to be food, “the proverbial pie on the windowsill that drew everyone in.” They even convinced their record label to add a chef to the budget.
“For me, music and food and creatives go hand-inhand. So, some 20 plus years later, I just now call them food salons. And instead of using food to attract musicians to create music, I’m kind of doing the opposite where music is now in the background.”
To inspire his “Mixtape Potluck” contributers, Questlove sent along a song that he felt best captured their unique creative energy. Martha Stewart got a Snoop Dogg tune while vegetarian Natalie Portman got “Vegetables” by The Beach Boys.
Jimmy Fallon, host of “The Tonight Show” where The Roots are the house band, got Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart” and, in turn, offered his recipe for Air-Fried Chicken Burgers. “Giving him a Bruce Springsteen song is very easy because in his heart there’s a Jersey boy dying to come out in Jimmy Fallon’s soul.”
Questlove admits to being a little ADD and is obsessed with making lists. He has dozens of Spotify playlists and challenges himself to compile things like 100 songs about the color blue or 100 songs in which the title is never sung. His deep insight led him to cook up the AMC show, “Hip Hop: The Songs That Shook America.”
Climate change, gun violence, the very nature of democracy and an angsty little movie star called Forky helped propel “existential” to Dictionary.com’s word of the year.
The choice reflects months of high-stakes threats and crises, real and pondered, across the news, the world and throughout 2019.
“In our data, it speaks to this sense of grappling with our survival, both literally and figuratively, that defined so much of the discourse,” said John Kelly, senior research editor for the site, ahead of Monday’s announcement.
The word earned top of mind awareness in sustained searches at Dictionary.com in the aftermath of wildfires and Hurricane Dorian, and mass shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas. It also reared itself in presidential politics and pop culture, including Forky the white plastic spork who was the breakout star of “Toy Story 4.”
The soiled utensil is convinced his destiny is in the trash, until he embraces his purpose as a treasured toy of kindergartener Bonnie. “Forky underscores how this sense of grappling can also inspire us to ask big questions about who we are, about our purpose,” Kelly told the Associated Press.
Oxford Dictionaries picked “climate emergency” as its word of the year, noting usage evidence that reflects the “ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year,” the company said in a statement.
Dictionary.com crunches lookup and other data to decide which word to anoint each year. The site has been picking a word of the year since 2010.
Among search spikes for “existential” were those that occurred after both Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders and 16-yearold climate activist Greta Thunberg characterized climate change as an “existential” crisis, Kelly said.
Another spike occurred when former Vice President Joe Biden, also vying for the Democratic presidential nod, painted President Donald Trump as an “existential threat” to decency.