Fritinancy

On the Visual Thesaurus: Where Do Place Names Come From?

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus is dated October 14 but in fact was published today, October 21. (Long story short: staffing issues.) It’s on a subject I’ve been researching for a while: the origins of place names. Full access to the column is restricted for three months to subscribers; here’s an excerpt:

The influence of commerce on place naming goes back at least to the 19th century. Company towns, where a single business is the main or sole employer, were often named for their benefactors: Fordlandia in Brazil, Grand-Hornu in Belgium, Manville in New Jersey. In 1845, the chief engineer of the Georgia Railroad, J. Edgar Thomson, took it upon himself to rename a tiny hamlet in northern Georgia that had been known first as simply Terminus and then as Marthasville, after the daughter of an ex-governor. “Certain ungallant railroad men,” wrote George R. Stewart in Names on the Land (1945), “looked upon Marthasville as a namby-pamby name for a place which was undoubtedly to become a great center.” Thomson had a better idea: “Atlanta, the terminus of the Western & Atlantic Railroad. Atlantic, masculine; Atlanta, feminine—a coined word—and if you think it will suit, adapt it.” They did.

Read the rest of the column, which includes the origin stories of Novi, Michigan; Truth or Consequences, New Mexico; and Selmer, Tennessee, among other colorful places.

And in case you missed it, here’s a story I wrote last month for Medium about the decision to change the name of the Squaw Valley Ski Resort—and other “squaw” names on the map.

Word of the week: Brandolini’s law

At the public library last week I picked up a copy of Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven Digital World, by Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West (2020). The authors teach a class, also called “Calling Bullshit,” at the University of Washington, and if the title hadn’t already beckoned to me—yes, I have a weakness for strong language—then the back-cover blurbs, from the likes of math expert Cathy O’Neill and physics laureate Saul Perlmutter, would have sealed the deal.

Library copy of Calling Bullshit flanked by my own copies of On Bullshit and Corporate Bullshit.

 

Memo to self

Think!

Think! protein bars (spotted at Trader Joe’s). The company slogan is the anthimeria-esque “Stand for Strong.”

 

Think!

Think! shoes, “designed in Austria, handcrafted in Europe,” found in my closet, via eBay.

 

ReThink

ReThink “tummy-friendly ice cream,” via Grocery Outlet. Not so tastebud-friendly, IMO.

 

Think Think Think

“Think” IBM slogan. From the IBM website:

THINK was a one-word slogan developed by IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, Sr. It appeared in IBM offices, plants and company publications in the 1920s and in the early 1930s began to take precedence over other slogans in IBM. It eventually appeared in wood, stone and bronze, and was published in company newspapers, magazines, calendars, photographs, medallions -- even New Yorker cartoons -- and it remained for years the name of IBM's employee publication. You can still find echoes of Watson’s motto in the brand name of IBM's popular notebook computers: the ThinkPad. This photograph shows a number of THINK signs rendered in a variety of languages for display by IBM employees around the world.

More thinky posts right here.

Name in the news: Shein

Here’s a statistic that surprised even me, a follower of fashion and retail trends: The most downloaded shopping app in the U.S. in May 2021 was not Amazon. It was Shein, an online-only retailer of cheap fast fashion for women and men (plus beauty products, plus home products) founded in 2008 in Nanjing, China, by Chris Xu, a search-engine-optimization specialist with no previous experience in fashion or retail.

Today, Shein (often styled as SHEIN) is a “quindecacorn”*—its gross merchandise volume is worth US$15 billion—and it’s forecast to surpass $20 billion in volume by the end of 2021. The word “juggernaut” comes up frequently in coverage of the company, which has achieved its numbers by targeting the mostly female tween, teen, and early-20s members of Generation Z who can’t resist buying tops and dresses for as little as $5 (and posting about their “hauls” on social media) and who eagerly anticipate Shein’s monthly roster of designer collaborations.

Still from a Shein “haul video” posted in December 2020 by Instagrammer Fabienne Pelaud, who struggles with the pronunciation of “Shein.”

 

Word of the week: Mjolnir

The pharmaceutical company Merck announced on October 1 that its new oral antiviral medication reduced by about 50 percent the risk of hospitalization and death in people with mild or moderate cases of COVID-19, and that it would seek emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for its use in the US.

The new drug’s generic name: molnupiravir.

Multisyllabic pharmaceutical names are of course nothing new. What’s unusual is molnupiravir’s origin, and the fact that Merck has publicly discussed the naming story.

Dean Li, Merck’s head of research and development, told the medical publication Stat News:

“Our prediction from our in vitro studies and now with this data is that molnupiravir is named after the right — you know, it’s named after Thor’s hammer [Mjollnir], this is a hammer against SARS-CoV-2 regardless of the variant.”

“The mighty Thor cannot reach his enchanged hammer! Is this to be Loki’s final victory???”: Marvel Comics