Fritinancy

Name in the wild: Lurline

I spotted this container ship as the San Francisco Bay Ferry was pulling out into the Oakland Estuary, and did a double-take when I saw its name.

The Matson Lurline, 2022. Photo by me.

 

“Lurline” is a storied name in San Francisco, in Hawaii, and in the history of the Matson Navigation Company, which was founded in Honolulu in 1882 by Swedish immigrant William Matson. But for most of its history the name was associated with passenger travel, not cargo. In the middle of all that history it was the name of two San Francisco heiresses. More about that in a bit.

Word of the week: Bimbo

Ms. magazine, which launched 50 years ago this summer, wasn’t destined to be called Ms. In a roundtable interview about the magazine’s founding, published this week in the New York Times Sunday Review, Letty Cottin Pogrebin recalls that one name she and her co-founders considered was Sisters. Another was Sojourner, in honor of the 19th-century African American activist Sojourner Truth. And at one point, co-founder Gloria Steinem suggested Bimbo. “She meant it as an ironic appropriation,” Pogrebin told the Times, “but in those years, we didn’t have the luxury of irony.”

This wasn’t the only bimbo-drop in the June 19 Sunday Review: On the very same spread as the Ms. story is an essay about “BimboTok,” a “sex-positive and sex-work-positive” subset of TikTok where “comedians and creators mix makeup tips with articulations of left-leaning politics” while “talking about how hot and dumb” they are. “BimboTok came about at a time when the girlboss had more or less faded as a trendy cultural type,” writes the author, Sophie Haigney. “Bimboism offers an opposing and, to some, refreshing premise: Value me, look at me, not because I’m smart and diligent, but for the fact that I’m not.”

Neither of these stories troubles to define bimbo; both seem to take it for granted that we know what it means: An unserious young woman with what used to be called loose morals. An airhead. A floozy.

But bimbo wasn’t always an insult. It didn’t even always refer to a woman. Originally a masculine Italian diminutive, the word migrated a century ago into American slang, where it changed its sex and its sense.

On the Visual Thesaurus: Locker-room talk

For my June Visual Thesaurus column, “Clean Language,” I take a deep dive into three familiar words—words I see regularly in the Dolphin Club locker room, where I spend time before and after swimming in San Francisco Bay. The three words are TOILET, SHOWER, and SAUNA, and they tell interesting (even surprising) stories about the history of the English language.

Full access to the column is paywalled for three months. Here’s an excerpt:

Word of the week: Monetize

I’ve been thinking about this word ever since Twitter introduced “monetization” options for “Super Follows” in 2021, although I’d started thinking about it in early 2000, when I first heard it used in conversation. I thought about it even more when I received my latest income statement from Medium, where I’ve been publishing since 2018, lured in by promises of a modest income stream, aka monetization. My total for the month of May was 19 cents, or half a cent for each of the stories I’ve published.

And so, because I am clearly bad at monetizing but somewhat better at writing about it, I have published a story about monetize—its origins, its connotations, its spread—for (what else?) Medium.

Counting my pennies.

 

You can read the story here. It’s free, but if you’d like to support my sad monetization journey, you can follow me on Medium and “clap” for each of my stories. You can “clap” up to 50 times!

Every clap counts, although three claps don’t count for much.

 

I’ve written about demonetization, too, if that’s more your jam. It has nothing to do with demons and everything to do with money, or the lack of it. 

 

 

 

May linkfest

Fifty years ago this month, seven Chicago-area women were arrested and jailed on eleven counts of performing abortions and “conspiracy to commit abortion.“ They were members of a clandestine feminist network known as “Jane” that, for four years before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the US, helped women terminate their pregnancies. Their story—more relevant than ever, now that Roe’s protections are in imminent peril—is told in a new documentary, The Janes, that will premiere on HBO on June 8. But The Janes isn’t the first telling of the story. In 1995, a former Jane member, Laura Kaplan, published a history of the group, The Story of Jane: The Legendary Feminist Abortion Service. I read it a couple of weeks ago and recommend it to you. (I found it in my local public library.) Here’s a passage that could have been written today: “Women are being reduced, once again, to the incubators of future generations with total responsibility but no power. That is the same oppressive view that the women’s movement sought to challenge. It is not just abortion, but women’s power to control their destinies that is at stake.”

Related: My post about “choice.” And here’s Clyde Haberman’s 2018 “Retro Report” for the New York Times about Jane’s work in Chicago. Link has been de-paywalled.

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