Fritinancy

Word of the week: Cone of uncertainty

The science of predicting tropical storms and hurricanes has improved greatly in recent years, but it still isn’t exact. That’s why storm maps show not a straight-line path of a hurricane’s progress but a tadpole-shaped “cone of uncertainty.” The area inside the cone is the danger zone, and the size of each circle within it “is set so that two-thirds of historical official forecast errors over a 5-year sample fall within the circle,” according to a National Hurricane Center explanation.

The cone of uncertainty was in the news last week as Hurricane Dorian, a Category 5 storm, bore down on the southeastern United States after devastating the Bahamas. On September 1, President Trump tweeted that “in addition to Florida - South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.” Whoops. Alabama had never been included in the forecast, or positioned within many miles of the cone of uncertainty. Trump apparently invented the “prediction.”

The National Weather Service in Birmingham, Alabama, immediately reassured Alabamians that their state would “NOT see any impacts from #Dorian.” The NWS, as its name indicates, is an agency of the federal government. Nevertheless, Trump would not be contradicted. In a move that could have been dictated by Stalin, or Orwell, he made up his own alternative weather facts, and a map to support them.

 

On September 4, President Trump displayed a doctored National Hurricane Center map dated August 29 that depicts Hurricane Dorian’s cone of uncertainty along with a bulbous black-outlined annex of uncertain origin and dubious credibility. Source: Politico

Listen to me!

The witty and skillful Helen Zaltzman, host of The Allusionist language podcast, recently invited me on the show to talk about “novelty spellings for foods-that-aren’t-made-out-of-the-things-they-sound-like-they’re-made-out-of”—like chik’n, cheez, and mylk. The episode is now live and free for the listening here. You’ll hear me at the beginning and the end of the show (and in the coda, which Helen calls the Mini-llusionist). In between is a segment with the owner of a vegan restaurant in Ontario, Canada, who got into a bit of a bureaucratic dust-up over a menu item labeled “cheddar cheese.”

Image via The Allusionist

 

If you like what you hear, why not subscribe to The Allusionist and sign up for the newsletter? And check out the schedule of live Allusionist shows, possibly coming to a city near you (Portland, Oregon, September 5; London next week; back in the U.S. beginning mid-October).

More from me about food names here.

Word of the week: Mere

The first word I remember not recognizing, when I began reading on my own at about age 5, was mere. I no longer remember the title of the book, but I remember that the phrase that gave me pause was a mere mouse. I wasn’t yet in the habit of looking up words in dictionaries, so I asked my mother what it meant. She said “small,” which shut me up for the time being even though, I would later learn, it wasn’t quite right.

It’s a curious word, mere. It is not, to get this out of the way, related to motherly French mère. The OED lists multiple English definitions, including “a lake or pond” (often seen in place names such as Windermere or Woodmere) and “a siren or mermaid” (truncated from mermin, in which mer comes not from Latinate sources meaning “sea” but from Old English menon, meaning “female servant”). There’s a transitive verb to mere, meaning “to mark out” (from Old English mǣre, a boundary or border). And there are multiple adjective senses. One, whose meaning is now obsolete, meant “renowned, famous, illustrious, brilliant”; its cognates show up as parts of many European personal names, including Old High German Sigimār and Russian Vladimir. At one time mere also meant “pure,” “undiluted,” “perfect,” or “downright.”

The mere in C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (1952) is to be interpreted as “absolute” or “pure,” according to scholars who know more about this subject than I pretend to. Lewis borrowed “mere Christianity” from a 17th-century Puritan, Richard Baxter.

It’s not fake anything

I was recently interviewed about food naming for The Allusionist, the language podcast conceived and hosted by Helen Zaltzman.* Helen wanted my take on plant-based alternatives to animal-based foods, an industry that’s seen a lot of growth lately, and also a fair amount of pushback from Big Carnivore. (See the final item in my July Linkfest for a news story about Mississippi banning the use of “burger” and “hot dog” in the names of vegan substitutes. Across the Atlantic, the EU has also attempted to restrict the use of meat-associated words for vegetarian substitutes.)

The BLUF: Names of vegan foodstuffs are a lot less imaginative than the ingredients and technology that go into producing them, and generally rely on familiar terms from the world of animal protein.

The names fall into four broad categories:

Word of the week: Epistocracy

Aristocracy, as you know, is government by the “best” or the “noblest” citizens. Kakistocracy is the opposite: government by the worst (or, more literally, the shittiest). Idiocracy was invented by director Mike Judge to serve as the title and theme of his 2006 dystopian comedy, set in the year 2505, when a professional wrestler and porn star occupies the White House. (In what passes for the real world, it took only 10 years for a WWE Hall of Famer and porn-star diddler to win the presidency; in a 2017 interview, Judge admitted that in the age of Trump, his film now seems “optimistic.”)

Until now, I hadn’t noticed the idiotic phonetic explainer. Intentional, I hope.

 

And epistocracy, our word of the week? It’s a recent coinage, created about 16 years ago by Brown University political philosophy professor David Estlund, that means “government by the knowledgeable.” The episto- part is related to other words about knowledge, including epistemology (the study of knowledge systems) and epistemic closure (an information cocoon). (I wrote about epistemic closure in 2012.)