The Lingo That'll Save Your Next Cocktail Party, From 'Rovables' to 'Manthreading'

One of the rewards of inventing something new is that you get to name it. The name doesn't always stick; with familiarity, "horse less carriages" tend to become "automo biles" and finally mere "cars." But the original coinage stands as a wonderful snapshot of how we saw the world at a certain moment, flush with delight in new pos sibilities. And given a chance to make their mark in the lexicon, even the most sober scientists can be gleefully silly: Think of particle physics' quarks and squarks, its muons and gluons. One of the most poetic neologisms of 2016, included in our year-end round-up of the best new words, was "dark sunshine": hypothetical photons generated by (equally hypothetical) dark matter in stars.