Fritinancy

Brands of the decade: 2010–2019

Ten years ago, when social media and blogging were still new and a rational person was in the White House, I did something ambitious and presumptuous: I published a list of the Brands of the Decade.*

And now it’s time to do it again.

To qualify for my highly subjective top-12 list, a brand had to meet these guidelines:

• Founded during the second decade of the 21st century or shortly before or
• Had a significant impact on the way we do business or live our lives during this decade or
• Consistently made headlines during the decade (for better or worse).

Because I’m a name developer, I gave a little extra weight to brands with interesting or influential names.

A message to sticklers: Yes, I know that actually a decade begins in a year ending in 1, not 0. SORRY.

In alphabetical order, then:

Word of the week: Revision

What are the odds? Whether through coincidence or cosmic convergence, two new novels with nearly identical titles—The Revisioners and The Revisionaries—are being published within a single 30-day period this autumn.

The Revisioners, by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton (November 5, 2019). Read the New York Times review.

 

The Revisionaries, by A.R. Moxon (December 3, 2019). Read the publisher’s synopsis.

 

I haven’t yet read either of the books, but I am interested in title trends (read my Medium story about book titles here), and this one is especially intriguing. Sexton’s book is about women, race, and the stories told in families; Moxon’s is about a street preacher, a mental patient, and a religious cult. (And yes, I noted the other coincidence: both authors have an X in their surnames.) What is it, I wonder, about revision that appeals so strongly right now to two writers with such different interests and approaches? And not just those two writers: I see revisionist and revisionary cropping up regularly in popular culture.

Name in the news: Cybertruck

On November 21, eleven days before Cyber Monday, Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk introduced his company’s newest vehicle: a pickup truck with an otherworldly, polygonal “exoskeleton”—what the rest of the autosphere calls a chassis—and a crashingly pedestrian name: Cybertruck.

 

Yes, that is the actual logo. On Twitter, Christian Wilkie said the Cybertruck wordmark “could only be improved with the ‘3000’ suffix.”

 

A family resemblance? {The Cyberpunk 2077 game will be released in April 2020. Cyberpunk the sci-fi subgenre, which emerged in the early 1980s, is typified, according to the OED, “by a bleak, high-tech setting in which a lawless subculture exists within an oppressive society dominated by computer technology.”)

 

If you’ve followed the Tesla news even a little, you’ve heard of the failed test of the vehicle’s windows, which cracked when metal balls were hurled at them. The Cybertruck name is a fiasco of a different order: a failure of imagination; a surrender to the prosaic where a flight of invention was called for.

Word of the week: Garble

I’d read and enjoyed Deborah Blum’s 2010 book, The Poisoner’s Handbook, about the birth of forensic medicine in the early 20th century, so I expected to be similarly educated and entertained by The Poison Squad (2018), about the fight for safe food in the US that led to the passage in 1906 of the Food and Drug Act. What I hadn’t expected was that I’d learn a completely new context and surprising etymology for a familiar word.

November linkfest

The wildfires have barely been extinguished here in California, but it’s already word-of-the-year season across the pond, where three prominent dictionaries chose words or phrases with a common theme: climate change, or preventing it. Cambridge Dictionary went first, with upcycling: “the activity of making new furniture, objects, etc. out of old or used things or waste material.” Collins Dictionary chose climate strike: “a protest demanding action on climate change.” And Oxford Dictionaries picked climate emergency from an all-environmental shortlist that included “climate action,” “climate denial,” “eco-anxiety,” “extinction” and “flight shame.”

Let the record show that lexicographer Jane Solomon, recently of Dictionary.com, spotted the trend back in September.

So @OxfordWords picked ‘climate emergency’ for their 2019 Word of the year. And @CollinsDict picked ‘climate strike.’

In September I suggested ‘climate crisis.’

Clearly lexicographers are all on the same page about this. https://t.co/75klqC7c6e

— 〰️Jane Solomon〰️ (@janesolomon) November 20, 2019

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