Social media has proven a fair-weather friend to leftist political resistance over the past few decades. The 2010s saw pro-democratic uprisings in the Arab world coordinated over Facebook and Twitter on pages like “We Are All Khaled Said.” But the “Facebook Revolutions” couldn’t sustain momentum and the Arab Spring stalled. The Black Lives Matter movement dominated Instagram during the summer of 2020, spreading awareness about the pervasiveness of racism and even encouraging incremental wealth distribution.

“Almost everyone has had a run-in with the ghost at LTV,” one staffer told a curious visitor to East Hampton Town’s public-access television provider.

During the Second World War, East Hampton boys in the services communicated with one another across the far-flung fields of battle using a method that is astonishing today and yet worked remarkably well: They wrote letters home to the editor of The Star; the Star collated and printed snippets of their news in a column titled “Army, Navy, and Marines” that ran each week on Page Four, and then the service members read all about one another’s escapades and heroics a couple weeks later when their copy of the newspaper reached them.

We’re navigating weird days, are we not, friends? In this context of topsy-turvy, we thought it might help to provide East readers with an early glossary of 2026’s hard-working words and phrases, so, if nothing else, you can join the conversation and talk about it all.