Fritinancy

January linkfest

This month I listened to At the Strangers’ Gate (2017) written and narrated by Adam Gopnik, one of my favorite New Yorker writers. (His latest New Yorker essay is about two new biographies of Buster Keaton, one of which—Camera Man, by Dana Stevens—I’ve just begun to read.)

At the Strangers’ Gate covers the 1980s, when Gopnik and his new bride arrived in Manhattan from Montreal and he began his writing career. It’s a decade I’ve been thinking about a lot lately (AIDS, Reagan, Madonna, Bonfire of the Vanities), and Gopnik evokes it with keen observations, especially about the art and literary scenes. You can skip directly to Chapter 9, “Writing,” for Gopnik’s insights into the differences, and occasional overlaps, between those scenes. Here he is on art, writing, and money:

Art world paydays made book world paydays look like no paydays at all. Visual artists hunted for golden tickets, and when they got one, they were set. Good pictures in the art market—a market that has never stopped booming in all the years since—buy estates in the Hamptons. Even large royalties in the literary world (the handful—no, fingerful—of truly “commercial” writers aside) bought small apartments in the upper reaches of West End Avenue, and then in Park Slope—no small or bad thing, but not the same thing.

Gopnik is the rare author who’s also an outstanding narrator; his slightly Canadian inflections and wry line readings make this audiobook a joy. But it’s also a book I want to own in print, on paper, between covers.

How Prego spaghetti sauce got its name

I’m ashamed to confess that until I read her New York Times obituary over the weekend I’d never heard of Laurel Cutler, who had a distinguished five-decade career on Madison Avenue and was named both “Woman of the Year” and “Man of the Year” by the American Advertising Federation. (Quite an achievement!) She died at age 94 on November 28, 2021.

The obit reads like a mini-history of mid-20th-century advertising, and I encourage you to read the whole thing. (My link bypasses the Times paywall.) One bit, though, stood out for me: the story of how Prego spaghetti sauce got its name:

The most important role she played in the Prego campaign, she told Inc. magazine in 1987, “was convincing them to change the name from Campbell’s Very Own Spaghetti Sauce, which was very much a 1970s concept, to Prego, which was much more ’80s.” The day before she had to present her proposal for a name, she scanned an English-Italian dictionary and plucked out “prego,” which means both “please” and “you’re welcome.”

Grazie, Laurel Cutler!

 

Ms. Cutler was also a futurist whose many accurate predictions included the “high-low” shopping trend: “‘The very same people would buy at Neiman Marcus in the morning and Kmart in the afternoon,’ she told Inc.”

It was quite a rise from an 80-cents-an-hour entry-level job as a contest judge at the marketing firm Reuben Donnelly.

Ms. Cutler’s 2016 memoir was never published. Maybe that oversight will be corrected now.

 

 

 

 

 

Word of the week: Overmused

One of my favorite word-of-the-year contests is also one of the less widely publicized: the one conducted by Paul Anthony Jones, proprietor of the Haggard Hawks blog and social-media accounts. The winner of this special honor must be “a suitably obscure term, pulled from one of the dustier corners of the dictionary, that somehow sums up the last twelve months.” In 2020 that word was respair—“renewed hope after a period of despair”—which I wrote about in December of that year. The 2021 winner, chosen by popular vote, is more downbeat: overmused, an adjective that means “worn out from thinking too much.”

Image from “The Trap of Overthinking,” Executive Support magazine.

On the Visual Thesaurus: The -core corps

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at the increasingly common -core suffix, which has evolved from descriptions of music and pornography to what’s being termed “aesthetics”: personal style choices, from adventurecore to zombiecore.

Full access to the column is paywalled for three months; here’s a sample.

It was music that pushed -core into new directions. In their “Among the New Words” column in the Summer 2012 issue of American Speech, Ben Zimmer and Charles Carson traced this evolution back to speedcore, which first appeared in 1985. (It refers to hardcore rock music played aggressively at a fast tempo.) They identified a clutch of other musical -cores, including sad core, noise core, deathcore, and nerdcore. In his March 2012 keynote address at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, Bruce Springsteen wondered aloud at some of these offshoots: “Huh? I just want to know what Nintendo core is, myself.” (Wikipedia has the answer: “a broadly defined style of rock music that most commonly fuses chiptune and video game music with hardcore punk and/or heavy metal.”) The -core suffix “became a way to assign authenticity to a host of new musical genres from rock to dance music to hip-hop,” wrote Britt Peterson in a 2015 Washingtonian article headlined “-Core Is the Suffix of Our Time.” But, Peterson added, “as we discovered grindcore, thrashcore, skacore, breakcore, raggacore, crunkcore, and so on, ‘-core’ lost its hardness—and, in its ubiquity, became a pop-culture wink.”

Read the rest of the column to learn about the vast -core catalog at Aesthetics Wiki. And more!

Zombiecore: “an aesthetic based on the feeling, sensation, and visuals of being a zombie or surviving a zombie apocalypse.” Definition and image via Aesthetics Wiki.

Blog bonuses! I’ve written previously about mumblecore (2007), couplecore (2009), lardcore (2010), mid-core (2013), normcore (2014), and cottagecore (2020). And here’s a new one, via the Guardian: dystopia-core, “which is in direct opposition to ‘dopamine dressing’ – wearing overtly fun clothes to help lift your mood – can be seen as the next step of the grunge and goth revivals.” When the New York Times spotted the proto-trend back in 2018 B.C. (Before Covid), the editors dubbed it “war-core.”

Has -core jumped the shark? At least one person thinks so.

Stop suffixing thinks with -punk and -core, you fucking creepy assed normies with your shitty taste.

— Nolan Void (@HitlerPuncher) January 16, 2022

(Thinks or things? Unclear.)

Word of the week: Meteotsunami

It’s always something here on the West Coast, isn’t it? If it isn’t wildfires—thankfully not a major problem last year—it’s flooding, if it isn’t flooding it’s earthquakes, and if it isn’t earthquakes it’s … a volcanic eruption? Not here, but close enough—5,300 miles away, off the coast of Tonga, one mile below the ocean surface. It was massive enough to trigger tsunami advisories throughout coastal California and to cause surges in places like Santa Cruz and Pacifica.

 

 

One of many permanent tsunami signs in San Francisco.

On the extremely micro level, that meant canceling my scheduled swim in San Francisco Bay. Not that I’m complaining: I may be crazy to swim in 51°F water, but at least I’m not the sort of idiot who thinks, “Oooh, a tsunami! Surf’s up!”

Stuck on high ground, I did some research into the language of tsunamis, and soon discovered the word of the week, meteotsunami, which was new to me. More about this word a little later. First, though, about tsunami. The word is, of course, borrowed from Japanese; its deceptively mild literal meaning is “harbor waves.” I learned from the OED that the transliterated word first appeared in an English-language text in 1897, in a collection of stories by Lafcadio Hearn titled Gleanings in Buddha-Fields: “‘Tsunami!’ shrieked the people; and then all shrieks and all sounds and all power to hear sounds were annihilated by a nameless shock … as the colossal swell smote the shore with a weight that sent a shudder through the hills.”