The extreme dysfunction of 2021 has changed that. While the dictionary has been watching the term “supply chain” since the late 1980s, Brewster said that “because it has not really been a terribly popular word in the language, we’ve considered it self explanatory.” If a reader knew the words “chain” and “supply,” they could pretty much work out what “supply chain” meant, and for a relatively obscure term, that was adequate by the dictionary’s standards.
To assess the merit of a new entry into the Merriam-Webster dictionary, its lexicographers look at how a term is being used in the language, combing through sources like newspapers, academic journals and Tweets. “As a rule we do not promise that any particular term is going to get in to the dictionary, but I can tell you that its chances are very good.” “The definition is in the works,” Brewster said. Brewster said that Merriam-Webster is now considering “supply chain” for the dictionary’s next release, in about six months. A slew of other words related to the pandemic followed in its wake, like “PPE” and “patient zero.” As the phase of the pandemic shifted from medical concerns to economic impacts, so did the new words in the dictionary, which included terms related to things like remote work in its most recent release on Nov. Last year, the word covid-19 made it into the dictionary at record speed-34 days since the name was announced by the World Health Organization, said Brewster of Merriam-Webster. Meanwhile, a headline in The Onion pondered a potential consequence of the crisis: “White House Warns Supply Chain Shortages Could Lead Americans To Discover True Meaning Of Christmas.” Over in the New Yorker, a concerned Cookie Monster strolls with a friend in a recent cartoon, asking: “What me want to know is: What are the implications of supply-chain crisis for cookie?” The dictionary definition of “supply chain”
3, in the first blog post it promises will be a twice a month update on the topic, “’Supply chains,’ a term once reserved for business logistics teams, has now become a household phrase.”
Chaos in the global supply chain has developed alongside the pandemic and is now reverberating across everyday life, causing shipping delays and shortages from wine bottles to Thanksgiving pies. If a good supply chain is one you never talk about, as the industry saying goes, in 2021, we’re finding out that a supply chain in crisis gets memed. In recent months, the phrase has figured in an Onion headline, a New Yorker cartoon, and in flurries of Tweets and TikToks from people who have nothing to do with logistics. 15-as shipments limped toward Black Friday and Christmas. A tally of transcripts showed that utterances of “supply chain” began hitting new highs in 2020 and swelled to a 10-year peak this quarter-S&P 500 firms logged a record 342 mentions (pdf) between Sept.