Fritinancy

Word of the week: Sportswashing

I first heard sportswashing in a story that aired in mid-March on NPR’s 1A program, “How Countries Use Sports to Improve Their Image.” The story provided a definition:

Sportswashing is the practice of laundering one’s reputation through sports; whether that be through team ownership, hosting a major tournament, or sponsorship. A country or politician gets involved with the hope that some of the sport’s popularity will improve their image.

Although it was unfamiliar to me, neither the word nor the practice is new. Sportswashing (or the British English variant sportwashing) was coined in 2015 by Sport for Rights, an Azerbaijani campaign to expose that country’s “attempt ‘to distract from its human rights record with prestigious sponsorship and hosting of events’, including the European Games hosted in Baku that year,” as the Oxford Words blog put it.

 

Protesters in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 2015. Image via Frontline Defenders.

 

In the seven years since, there have been plenty of other examples of sportswashing: Saudi Arabia buying the English Premier League team Newcastle United in 2021; China hosting the Winter Olympic Games in February 2022; Qatar hosting the next World Cup in November 2022. Earlier this year, American professional golfer Phil Nickelson admitted to biographer Alan Shipnuck that his association with the Saudi Golf League was “sportswashing.” (“They’re scary motherfuckers to get involved with,” Mickelson said of the Saudi regime. Perhaps he said it approvingly; who knows.) Reaching further back, NPR pointed to Adolf Hitler's reasons for hosting the 1936 Olympic games.

On the Visual Thesaurus: Understanding 'Maven'

How did a Yiddish noun with Hebrew roots and a sardonic connotation become a popular brand name, a scientific backronym, and even a baby name?

That’s the question I address in “Understanding Maven,” my May column for the Visual Thesaurus. I trace the spread of maven in mainstream culture back to a regional ad campaign in the 1960s and to two widely read journalists, William Safire and Malcolm Gladwell. As for the “Maven” baby name, it seems to be an extension of the Irish girl’s name Maeve—even though “Maven” is a masculine noun in Yiddish.

Access to the column is paywalled for three months; here’s an excerpt:

Maven’s real tipping point was … well, The Tipping Point, the 2000 book by Malcolm Gladwell that asserted that “ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do.” Long before “influencer” became a job description, Gladwell divided influential people into three groups: connectors, salesmen, and—you guessed it—mavens. Mavens, Gladwell wrote, “are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know”:

The critical thing about Mavens is that they aren’t passive collectors of information. It isn’t just that they are obsessed with how to get the best deal on a can of coffee. What sets them apart is that once they figure out how to get that deal, they want to tell you about it too. 

The Tipping Point became a best-seller and a favored reference in leadership seminars and marketing courses. It also enhanced our vocabulary. Not only did it make “tipping point”—a term used mostly by scientists beginning in the late 1950s—a household phrase, it educated thousands of readers about maven. Many of those readers went on to start companies that they named “Maven,” often explicitly acknowledging their debt to Gladwell and The Tipping Point.

Read the rest of the column.

Word of the week: Choice

Last week, in response to the leaked draft of a US Supreme Court opinion that would overturn the legal right to abortion, the Pro-Choice Caucus of the US House of Representatives distributed new messaging guidelines to House Democrats.

NEW: The Pro Choice Caucus has just sent out messaging materials to House Dems on Roe draft.

One of the recommendations: Don't use "choice." pic.twitter.com/nqVA8W1nWT

— Sarah Ferris (@sarahnferris) May 12, 2022

Among the guidelines: Instead of choice (“harmful”), use decision (“helpful”).

Yes, this recommendation came from the Pro-Choice Caucus, not the Pro-Decision Caucus. But putting aside that mixed message, what’s the reason for the change?

One ad line to rule them all

Is there a bar or a club where tech copywriters huddle to collude on slogans and ad lines? The CopyCat Lounge, maybe? Because I keep seeing double with outdoor ads, and it can’t be a coincidence.

Word of the week: Paparazzo

The death, on April 30, of the American photographer Ron Galella brought the fun-to-say Italian borrowing paparazzo back into the news. Galella, who was 91, was a “paparazzo extraordinaire,” the Telegraph and the Guardian headlined. “He personified the paparazzi,” the New York Times obituary reported, using the plural form: “brazen and relentless in chasing the famous, particularly Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.”

Galella himself proudly accepted the title of “paparazzo extraordinaire,” appropriating it for the title of his 2012 memoir.

Advertisement for a 2012 book-signing event for Ron Galella: Paparazzo Extraordinaire via New York Gossip Gal.