Fritinancy

Word of the week: Balk

I was as surprised as Language Hat (Stephen Dodson) to learn that balk may be acquiring a new meaning that’s pretty much the opposite of the traditional one. (I was not surprised, as he was, that the “l” in balk is silent; I’ve always pronounced the word that way on the very few occasions I’ve used it.)

It turns out there’s a lot about balk that’s interesting. For one thing, it’s spelled baulk in the UK. This was news to me, but not completely surprising, because after all the Brits colorfully and flavorfully insert a u in the center of a lot of words.

Name in the news: Block

Its best-known brand is Square, the payment app that launched in 2009 and whose fortunes soared during the 2020 pandemic as more retailers began accepting cashless payments. But as of December 10 the parent company—whose holdings also include the streaming-music service Tidal and the mysteriously named open developer platform TBD54566975*—will be known as Block. Like Facebook’s Meta and Google’s Alphabet, this is a corporate name change that will not directly affect consumers.

Block’s shape-shifting logo, an oddly shaped cube.

 

CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey, 45, a cryptocurrency enthusiast, had stepped down from his role as Twitter CEO on November 29.

Block will keep the ticker symbol SQ; its URL is block.xyz.

From the Twitter announcement:

Stephen Sondheim, 1930–2021

He lived 91 richly productive years, attended a live theater production eleven days before he died, enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner with friends the day before his death. Who can ask, as the Gershwin song goes, for anything more? But we fans are greedy: The death of the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, on November 26, after a long life of creative brilliance, leaves us wanting still more.

So here’s a little more.

A partial list of Sondheim musicals in chronological order, via Teepublic

Word of the week: Omicron

Were you one of the thousands of people who, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, decided to learn a new language? Well, congratulations: You’re now learning Greek! Or at least the Greek alphabet.

The highly contagious Delta variant, named after the fourth letter of that alphabet, was first identified in India in October 2020 and quickly spread around the globe. And we learned last week that yet another troubling Covid variant had emerged in South Africa. It was named after the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet: Omicron.

How did we jump from fourth letter to fifteenth? The New York Times explains:

November linkfest

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate, and happy fourth week of November to everyone else.

My book recommendation this month is The Confidence Men, by Margalit Fox, the riveting true story of two British officers’ escape from an “escape-proof” Turkish POW camp—“the Alcatraz of its day,” Fox writes—toward the end of World War I. What makes their story amazing is how they did it: no tunnels, no violence, no weapons except for a homemade Ouija board and the two men’s skill at psychological manipulation.

 

 

I love a prison-escape story, and Fox tells this tale expertly, and Richard Elfyn, the narrator of the audiobook I listened to, rises to the occasion, switching between accents and occasionally reading passages in Welsh. But just as interesting as the escape itself are the conditions that enabled it. In his paywalled review for the New York Review of Books, Neal Ascherson writes:

Persuading people to like something is a trade. Persuading them to change their minds and like something else is a skill. But inducing them to believe in something that their senses and experience tell them is plainly unreal or untrue—unicorns, papal infallibility, Trump’s assertions, ghosts—requires art and almost manic self-confidence. The “confidence men” of Margalit Fox’s title, two British prisoners of war who planned the most eccentric and devious of all escapes, had plenty of both. But Fox puts their story into a broad historical setting, using it to illustrate the ways in which scientific inventions made possible not only empowerment but also credulity and manipulation.

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