Ripped from the Headlines: January 2024: This Week in Words: Current Events Vocab for December 30, 2023–January 5, 2024

On New Year's Eve, Denmark’s Queen Margrethe surprised her subjects by announcing that she would abdicate her position. The 83-year-old ruler, who has been on the throne for more than 50 years, said she was stepping down because of her age and poor health. Her son, Prince Frederik, will succeed Margrethe as monarch when she officially vacates her position on January 14. Abdicate comes from the Latin phrase abdicare magistratu, "renounce office."

For the first time, the very earliest images of Mickey Mouse are now in the public domain. On January 1, the black-and-white characters of Mickey and Minnie as they appeared in Disney's Steamboat Willie are available for public use, as their 1928 copyright has expired. The expiration of their copyright means these works of art, along with A.A. Milne's Tigger and J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, are now part of a creative realm that is open to the general public.

Lake Superior State University's 2024 Banished Words List suggests what people should eradicate from their vocabulary. The list includes Oxford's word of the year, rizz (slang for charisma), and overused words like hack, obsessed, and the verb impact. The list's authors argue that eliminating these words can make language more powerful and meaningful. Eradicate literally means "pull up by the roots," from the Latin radix, "root."

Record numbers of people are signing up for Obamacare, with officials estimating that 19 million Americans will enroll for 2024 health insurance through the federal marketplace. It's a 33 percent increase over last year, as a growing number of patients seek better ways to protect themselves from unexpected health care costs. Laws passed during the height of the pandemic increased subsidies for many people, lowering monthly premiums for Affordable Care Act health insurance.

The European Medicines Agency has approved a groundbreaking new therapy for acute sleeping sickness, a fatal disease that's caused by a parasite. Earlier treatments were toxic to the kidneys and brain, while the new drug has few side effects and cures about 97 percent of patients. The microscopic creatures that cause sleeping sickness live on and feed off of tsetse flies, which pass the illness along when they bite humans. The Greek root of parasite means "feeding beside."

Three of Donald Trump’s Republican primary challengers would pardon him of any felony convictions if they were elected president. Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Vivek Ramaswamy have all said that if the former president is found guilty of any of the dozens of charges he currently faces, granting him clemency would be in the country's best interest. The president has the power to reverse criminal convictions and all of their consequences.

Goffin’s cockatoos are the first parrots found to dip their food in water the way a person might dunk a cookie in milk. Researchers observed birds in a Viennese lab dipping dry bits of rusk, a crunchy, twice-baked toast, into the water normally used to bathe and drink. It was clear to scientists that the white parrots were deliberately softening the food to make it more palatable, sometimes soaking it as long as 30 seconds.

A new study shows that chimpanzees remember family members after decades of separation. When chimps and bonobos were shown photos of apes, they spent much more time gazing at pictures of their own former groupmates than at unfamiliar individuals — even when 25 years had passed since they had been together. This milestone in primatology supports a theory that humans' social memory evolved from an ancestor we share with chimpanzees. Primatology is from a root meaning "first."

Experts say that time management is key to making resolutions and sticking to them. They advise organizing around specific goals and learning to decline invitations or tasks that don't align with those goals. Resolving to do things that are relevant, measurable, and achievable is also important, making it more likely that the things people aim to do in the new year will actually be accomplished. Resolution is from a Latin word meaning "reducing things into simpler forms."

The world's oldest known land animal turned 191 on January 1. The birthday is approximate, but a Saint Helena veterinarian celebrates annually, marking the years that Jonathan the tortoise has lived. Joe Hollins says 191 is a "conservative estimate," and the enormous reptile is probably even more ancient. Besides Greenland sharks, no animal is older than the slow-moving, hard-shelled tortoise. Tortoise may derive from the Latin tartaruchus, "of the underworld."

Cities around the U.S. are eliminating parking requirements, aiming to end up with better public transit. Rules that previously required a minimum number of off-street parking spots for each new unit of housing are being overturned in places including Austin, Texas, Gainesville, Florida, and Anchorage, Alaska. The goal is walkable cities, with more shade from trees and improved bus and train service. The Latin root of transit is transire, "pass through."

Japan issued tsunami warnings after a massive earthquake shook the country's west coast on January 1. The 7.6-magnitude earthquake immediately triggered large waves, about four feet high, leading to fears of catastrophic swells in the Sea of Japan and triggering evacuations on the Noto Peninsula. The tsunami danger had passed by January 3, but dozens of aftershocks continued. Tsunami is from Japanese roots tsu , "harbor," and nami, "waves."