Likewise, the "holidate" portmanteau seems like a pleasant way to describe a short-term relationship over Christmas but online dating site eHarmony coined the less elegant "snowmanning" (the relationship will melt away soon) and its cousins “sledging” (staying with someone until January 1st) and “winter coating” (getting back with an old flame for the holidate.) A holidate is positive whereas those three are clearly negative. It may be why over 50% concede it will happen, with the difference between men and women doing one of those being so small it is in the statistical noise range. It may even be a matter of choice. If you'd rather be "sledged" after the holiday than "Scrooge-ed" before it, you both maintain agency. eHarmony says it is concerned about health risks, like STDs, but the psychological risk of being with someone who is Sneating (they date for free dinners) aren't great either.
If you look at every Christmas as the last Christmas, you will just enjoy the experience. In the Doctor Who Christmas Special "The Husbands of River Song" he knew it was their last Christmas together so they spent it in a place where the night lasts 24 years. A holidate can still be meaningful.
One of the few that that has survived some less-worthy challenger is "meet-cute", which got re-introduced to most in the hit film "The Holiday". where Eli Wallach (playing an old Hollywood screenwriter) gets a ride home from the vacationing British newspaper writer played by Kate Winslet. He asks about her accent, she replies she was raised in Surrey and he says that is where Cary Grant was born. At the end of the ride he says "this was some meet-cute" and she asks what that meant. It isn't tiresome exposition done that way because she's British and it was more of an American idiom.
It is instead clever because Nancy Meyers is. The example the old screenwriter uses to explain the term is a man goes into a department store to buys pajama bottoms and a woman is there who only wants to buy a pajama top. They look at each other and sparks fly.
This was an actual movie, "Bluebeard's Eighth Wife", but it starred Gary Cooper, not Cary Grant (a GC, not a CG) and Cary Grant was born in Bristol. not Surrey. Nancy Meyers had to know all of that. She clearly knew the movie, which meant she knew that the term "meet-cute" was coined by the director of that film, Ernst Lubitsch, a German who spoke English with Deutsch sentence structure and wanted a short way to describe Billy Wilder's premise of a cute meeting.
Was the screenwriter addled? Was he reshaping the facts to make a better tale, as storytellers do? Was Meyers just wrong? We don't know and there is no way to ask because the story can be whatever it is. Progressive historians have ret-con'ed (another portmanteau, for retroactive continuity) history to where Nazis were right-wing, when they were allowed to form a government with Hindenburg only because National Socialists were less left-wing than the Fascists and the Communists who held enough seats to create a coalition, a screenwriter can certainly ret-con what was in their brain writing numerous drafts.
It's often challenging to get real answers on words because so many people use Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is a disaster. If you look up Science 2.0, for example, despite me clearly coining it after reading discussions by Tim O'Reilly's team on "Web 2.0" after the dot-com crash I thought the same thing about science, which was being bludgeoned by journalists who wrote with no critical thinking about "global warming" while demonizing genetic engineering, nuclear energy, and medicine. What was needed, I wrote, was a Science 2.0 where scientists could write directly to the public. Other places were doing blogging about science, but they were dominated by non-scientists the same way newspapers and magazines were.
On Wikipedia, none of that history exists. Wikipedia bans actual people involved from being...involved...but a German university I threatened to sue when they started hosting conferences and selling tickets for "Science 2.0" (I was fine if it was free to attend) got people to edit the page, and the originator of Science 2.0 is, to them, some journalist writing in Scientific American two years after we launched.
Yet that will be history. It is only 18 years ago and historians won't even get that right. "Holidate" became a movie because of the term yet in the future, the movie will be assumed as the origin, even though it existed at least as far back as the 1990s and the film only came out in 2020.
Adrienne Koopersmith claims to have coined "holidate" but I have no idea how true that is. The problem with language history is that there is a lot of guessing. Then another humanities scholar later will write a paper claiming the original guessing is all wrong and their guessing based on other guessing is better.
As history becomes entirely digital and people become more social media-driven, they want fast solutions, those near the top of Google search, where Wikipedia will be. History will be determined by Tyranny of the Majority - those who clicked on a link the most because an SEO expert manipulated search engines.
Even in science, epidemiologists will be considered facts over science, because they will have the media attention - journalists just popularized a crazy claim by a fundraising group that plastic spatulas will give you cancer despite the methodology of their conclusion being shown wrong by 10X - so weedkillers like Atrazine can 'turn frogs gay', as a Berkeley professor once claimed, because it is in Wikipedia, and the EPA panel investigating it and believing he just made that up will be buried, and environmental lawyers will say it must be true because the journal, PNAS, never retracted it despite it being unsubstantiated, just a picture, and peer-reviewed by a personal friend of his.
Don't let that happen to holidays also. And start using "momshell" instead of "MILF." Women will thank you.
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