Fritinancy

Word of the week: Glowie

Most of the time, I enjoy learning new words. But every so often I come across a new-to-me word that I sort of wish I’d never seen. That’s the case with glowie, which popped up on Twitter a few days ago in a reference to a far-right rally planned for September 18 in Washington, DC. Now that I’ve learned about it, you’re going to learn about it too. Quit reading now if you’re easily offended by conspiracy theories or a spelled-out N-word.

The tweet pointed to “Let’s Talk About September 18,” posted on September 9, 2021, in Jared Holt’s Substack newsletter Sh!tpost. Holt is a reporter who covers the intersection of politics and technology, with an emphasis on domestic extremism. His take on the September 18 rally—which organizers say will “demand ‘justice’ for people arrested for participating” in the January 6 US Capitol riot—is that it’s been overhyped by conventional news media, and that “the overwhelming consensus in extremist communities is: Don’t go.”

Here’s why:

Nicely named: Amberlink

“The Internet Is Rotting,” reads the headline, and it’s no overstatement. The article beneath the hed, published in The Atlantic on June 30, 2021, was written by Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard who has spent a lot of time thinking about the World Wide Web and its discontents. He’s worried, as we all should be, about the alarming impermanence of our digital artifacts. And he’s proposing solutions.

On being “Anglo-Saxon”

My latest story for Medium is about language, identity, and what it means to be “Anglo-Saxon”—which is how I was labeled when I lived in Israel, despite having neither Angles nor Saxons anywhere in my family tree.

You can read it here: When I Was Anglo-Saxon.

Happy Labor Day and a sweet new year—5782 on the Jewish calendar—to those who celebrate.

Weekend reads

It’s Week Eleventy-Kajillion of the COVID pandemic and we’re headed into the long Labor Day weekend here, and then the Jewish New Year. I have no amusing stories about names and brands today; instead, here are a few things I’ve been reading (and stewing over) that you may find interesting.

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Word of the week: Zilch

I knew that zilch was a slangy way to say “nothing,” but until last week I knew, well, zilch about where the word came from. Was it computer jargon like kluge or foo? Or maybe a borrowing from Yiddish?

Neither, it turns out. I owe my enlightenment to a couple of posts on the American Dialect Society’s listserv by Peter Reitan, who has done some impressive research into the word and its origins. Reitan, who blogs as Peter Jensen Brown at the Early Sports and Pop Culture Blog, assembled his findings into a long and fascinating post, “Frank Tinney, Ida Mae Chadwick, and Joseph Zilch—Why ‘Zilch’ Means ‘Zero.’”

That’s right: zilch is an eponym—or perhaps more precisely, a kadigan, or placeholder word. Joe (or Joseph) Zilch was the equivalent of other interchangeable Joes: Joe Blow, Joe Doakes, Joe Six-Pack. Nunnally Johnson used the name regularly, beginning in 1923, in his column for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. But, Reitan writes, Johnson didn’t coin the name:

He almost certainly borrowed it from a running gag used by the comedian Frank Tinney. “Joe Zilch” was the name of his “mysterious off-stage friend” who never appears onstage, which made the name perfectly suited for use as a generic everyman, a nobody – a zero.

And Tinney in turn had borrowed the name “from the husband of one of his co-stars, Ida May Chadwick. Joseph Zilch was a graduate of Brown University, an occasional vaudevillian and a longtime car, truck and automotive parts salesman in Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey.”