Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Retcon

Retcon: Abbreviation for “retroactive continuity,” “reframing past events to serve a current plot need.” (Source: TV Tropes.) Also used as a verb meaning “to revise history.”

“Retroactive continuity” first appeared in print in a scholarly 1973 book, The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg, where it was an English translation of a German phrase, “Kontinuät nach rückwärts.” A Wikipedia entry quotes the relevant passage:

Pannenberg’s conception of retroactive continuity ultimately means that history flows fundamentally from the future into the past, that the future is not basically a product of the past.

The term was popularized in the 1980s by the comic-book and science-fiction communities; Damian Cugley has claimed credit for shortening it to “retcon” in a 1988 Usenet discussion of the comic book Saga of the Swamp Thing. It has since been applied to many kinds of serial fiction, including television shows such as “The Simpsons,”  “in which the timeline of the family's history must be continually shifted forward to explain them not getting any older” (Wikipedia).

In the last decade or so, “retcon” has been appearing in political journalism as well, substituting for the previously popular “revisionism” and its derivatives.

My husband on Obama's unconvincing attempt to retcon "If you like your insurance, you can keep it. Period." http://t.co/qQJRkv4x92

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) November 5, 2013

The link goes to an article by Peter Sunderman in Reason:

If you’re a fan of comic books or other types of serial fiction, you’re probably familiar with the concept of the “retcon”—a made-up word that stands for “retroactive continuity.” …

I wonder if President Obama is a comic book fan. Because with the updated version of his oft-repeated promise that individuals who like their health plans can keep them, he’s essentially retconned himself.

I found citations for “retcon” from the George W. Bush era as well. An October 2004 post in the blog Burnt Electrons was titled “So Now We Retcon Wars...” A satirical May 2005 post on the Defective Yeti blog invented a quote for Ken Mehlman, then chairman of the Republican National Committee: “Americans have always been very accepting of our retcons.”

Google Ngram for “retroactive continuity” and “retcon.”

 

From TV Tropes:

As the number of twists and misdirections in a story becomes higher, it becomes more difficult to tell whether an event actually is a retcon (which implies that the writers changed their minds), or a misdirection (which implies that the writers intended the “retconned” version all along, and had been deliberately misleading the audience before). In some cases, it is impossible to tell, short of reading the author's mind (even then, it might not helped, as it's entirely possible for an author to be on the fence about what they're planning to do).

Words of the Year 2013: Fritinancy Edition

We binge-watched revenge porn while leaning in and snacking on cronuts. We took a break from being selfie-absorbed (not to mention shelfie-, welfie-, and lelfie-) to cheer Batkid and jeer Glassholes. We ducked out of Thanksgivukkah dinner to vape our e-cigarettes. We worried about drones that spied on our metadata. Wow. Such doge!

It was the silliest of years, it was the most serious of years. And our favorite words expressed all the mood swings.

To compile my Words of the Year list, I followed the American Dialect Society's criteria for selection:

• new or newly popular in 2013
• widely or prominently used in 2013
• indicative or reflective of the popular discourse.

My submissions to the ADS vote, to be held in Minneapolis on January 3:

Word of the year: Obamacare.

Most useful: Binge-watching.

Most likely to succeed:  Selfie.

Least likely to succeed: Thanksgivukkah.

Euphemism of the year. Slimdown, Fox News happy-talk for the Republican-led government shutdown that lasted more than two weeks in October. The euphemism was picked up by the Associated Press.

Most creative: Cronut and its many derivatives.

Most outrageous: Revenge porn.

Most unnecessary: Shmeat.

 

And here’s my full list, which emphasizes words from my beat, the language of commerce. In some cases, I’ve linked to Word of the Week posts previously published here.

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Word of the Year Predictions

Misty Harris, who writes about consumer trends and pop culture for Canada’s Postmedia News, interviewed me and other word-watchers—Grant Barrett, Marty Chan, Erin McKean, and Ben Zimmer—about our picks for the words of the year for 2013. Her story, “Cronuts and Selfies and Twerking, Oh My!”, is now available online.

The me part:

Nancy Friedman, a professional name-developer and columnist for Visual Thesaurus, said food portmanteaus stood out for her as having a banner year. Among the most notable were cronut (a croissant-donut hybrid), s’monut (s’more-donut), and frissant (fritter-croissant).

“(It) must say something about wanting it all — or wanting at least two things at once — and then indulging our playful side in the naming,” said Friedman, whose other picks for 2013 include “glasshole” (someone who wears Google Glass in a socially inappropriate way), “lean” (as in, lean in), and “BYOD” (Bring Your Own Device).

Come back Friday to read my complete WotY list.

Word of the Week: Ephemeral

Ephemeral: Transitory or short-lived. From Greek via Latin, “lasting only for a day.” The earliest sense of “ephemera” in English (1528) was medical: a fever that lasted a single day. The adjective “ephemeral” also originally applied only to diseases. “Ephemerality” was first documented in 1822.

Ephemerality is newly in vogue—indeed, it’s “the new buzz word” among some startup founders and investors, according to Forbes writer Parmy Olson—thanks to mobile applications that cause photos (Snapchat) and messages (Gryphn, Frankly, Wickr) to self-destruct* after a defined time period.

Snapchat’s mascot, “Ghostface Chillah.” In November Snapchat’s founders rejected a $3 billion purchase offer from Facebook. Two-year-old Snapchat has not yet generated any revenue.

Wickr logo. From the home page: “The Internet is forever. Your private communications don’t need to be.”
 

In a December 22 column for the Wall Street Journal, technology writer Farhad Manjoo calls Snapchat “the most important technology of 2013” because it “provides a sense of liberation from the constraints of a permanent record.” Manjoo asks whether we want “an erasable Internet”:

That question is exactly why Snapchat is so important, because before Snapchat, the Erasable Internet wasn’t an option. The Forever Internet seemed the only way. Now, with users, investors, and engineers rushing to ephemeral-data apps created in Snapchat's image, forever-ness isn’t assumed.

“Apps that make data ephemeral are going to be used with increasing frequency,” says Lee Raine, director of the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, “because people are beginning to recognize that the context of a post can be misunderstood, and it is better to have more control over exchanges and not risk the possibility that content stays out there and causes problems down the road.” (Source: Communications of the ACM.)

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* According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, “self-destruct” was “apparently first attested in the U.S. television series ‘Mission Impossible’ (1966).” However, “self-destructive” has been around since the 1650s.

The Airing of Grievances: Fifth Anniversary Edition

I bring glad tidings for Festivus 2013! Last week Denver celebrated its second annual Beer Festivus (“A Beer Festival for the Rest of Us!”). There’s a Festivus pole constructed of Pabst Blue Ribbon cans inside the Capitol in Tallahassee, Florida, erected by “artist/protester/drinker of cheap beer Chaz Stevens” to protest the Nativity scene in the same government building. And I’m back for the fifth consecutive year with a public Airing of Grievances, one of the canonical rites of this defiantly non-canonical holiday.

If you go in for tradition, Festivus is celebrated on December 23. But we Festivusians say feh! to tradition. We also say, “I’ve got a lot of problems with you people!”

Source.

How Amazon Got Its Name

In 1994, a Princeton graduate named Jeff Bezos left the New York hedge fund D.E. Shaw, where he had quickly risen through the ranks, to start a new venture. As Brad Stone tells the story in his new book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, Bezos went with a close friend, Jeff Holden, to a barbecue restaurant on 44th Street to strategize. They talked about the name of the business they wanted to start:

Bezos had tentatively decided to call his company Cadabra Inc., but was not committed to the name. Holden filled both sides of a piece of notebook paper with alternatives. The one Bezos liked best on the list was MakeItSo.com, after Captain Picard’s frequent command in Star Trek.

But MakeItSo didn’t stick. In August 1994, when Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, had moved to the Seattle area and was beginning to hire developers “to help pioneer commerce on the Internet,” he revisited the naming project:

The magical allusions of Cadabra Inc., as Todd Tarbert, Bezos’s first lawyer, pointed out after they registered that name with Washington State in July of 1994, were too obscure, and over the phone, people tended to hear the name as Cadaver. So later that summer, after renting a three-bedroom ranch house in the East Seattle suburb of Bellevue, Bezos and MacKenzie started brainstorming. Internet records show that during that time, they registered the Web domains Awake.com, Browse.com, and Bookmall.com. Bezos also briefly considered Aard.com, from a Dutch word, as a way to stake a claim at the top of most listings of websites, which at the time were arranged alphabetically.

Aard means “earth” in Dutch. Aardvark—from Afrikaans, which is related to Dutch—means “earth pig.”

Bezos and his wife grew fond of another possibility: Relentless.com. Friends suggested that it sounded a bit sinister. But something about it must have captivated Bezos: he registered the URL in September 1994, and he kept it. Type Relentless.com into the Web today and it takes you to Amazon.¹

Still, Cadabra.com lived on through the fall, while Bezos set up his headquarters in a converted garage. Shel Kaphan, a founding employee, arrived in Seattle from California and “immediately began worrying about the company’s name”:

“I was once part of a little consultancy called the Symmetry Group, and people always thought we were the Cemetery Group,” says Kaphan. “When I heard about Cadaver Inc., I thought, Oh God, not this again.”

The final name selection occurred in late October 1994:

Bezos pored through the A section of the dictionary and had an epiphany when he reached the word Amazon. Earth’s largest river; Earth’s largest bookstore. He walked into the garage one morning and informed his colleagues of the company’s new name. He gave the impression that he didn’t care to hear anyone’s opinion on it, and he registered the new URL on November 1, 1994.

Later in the book, Stone tells the story of the Kindle, which was developed by an Amazon division dubbed Lab126 headed by Gregg Zehr. (Stone: “The 1 stood for a, the 26 for z; it’s a sublte indication of Bezos’s dream to allow customers to buy any book every published, from a to z.” The arrow in the Amazon logo also reinforces the a-to-z association.)

Lab126 reported to Steve Kessel, who had joined Amazon in 1999 and took over the new digital initiative in 2004.

In those waning months of 2004, the early Lab126 engineers selected a code name for their new project. On his desk, Zehr had a copy of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, a futuristic novel about an engineer who steals a rare interactive textbook to give to his daughter, Fiona. The early Lab126 engineers thought of the fictitious textbook in the novel as a template for what they were creating. Michael Cronan, the San Francisco-based graphic designer and marketing executive who baptized the TiVo, was later hired to officially brand the new dedicated reading device, and he came up with Kindle, which played off the notion of starting a conflagration and worked as both a noun and a verb.² But by then Kessel’s team was devoted to the name Fiona and the group tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Bezos to keep it. In a sense, the knowledge-starved Fiona of Stephenson’s fictional world became Amazon’s patron saint in its risky journey into the digital frontier.

The code name for the Kindle 2, released in 2009, was Turing, “after a castle in The Diamond Age,” Stone writes. That castle was in turn named for Alan Turing, the pioneering British computer scientist best known for the Turing test, considered the foundation of artificial intelligence.

Read my 2008 post about how the Kindle got its name, and my January 2013 remembrance of Michael Cronan.

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¹ Confirmed.

² Strictly speaking, “kindle” is only a verb; the noun form is “kindling.” But through association with the device, Kindle has become a proper noun.

December Linkfest

On the last linkfest of 2013, the Internet gave to me:

The ugliest Christmas sweater of them all: From REI, so it isn’t just hideous, “it’s packed with technical features and built to withstand decades of holiday wear.” Oh, it’s also fake.

 

Christmas carol grammar. On Mental Floss, Arika Okrent identifies the troll in “troll the ancient Yuletide carol” and the “yon” in “Round yon virgin.” And on Visual Thesaurus (subscription required), Erin Brenner takes on the lie/lay distinction in carols, using examples such as “Long lay the world in sin and error pining.”

Sheep counting. Stan Carey, author of the fine blog Sentence First, explains an old counting system used by shepherds in some parts of the UK. All together now: yan, tan, tethera, pethera, pimp…

A language map of Britain. From the Oxford Dictionaries blog:  “In the summer of 2012, supreme language-lovers David and Hilary Crystal set off on a tour round Britain, visiting 57 sites associated with key developments in the English language.”

New reindeer names. Laura Wattenberg of the Baby Name Wizard blog offers a 21st-century update to Dasher, Dancer, Blitzen, et al: “Now, Skylar! now, Stryker! now Ryker and Jaxon! / Now, Cabot! now, Copland! now Sawyer and Paxton!”

A new stadium name. Berkeleyside reports that the field-naming rights at UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium sold for $18 million to Kabam, a mobile-gaming company founded by three Cal grads. It’ll still be Memorial Stadium: the naming rights cover only the field.

Up-to-date military slang. The movies always get it wrong, writes Ben Brody in the Global Post: “Soldiers fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have developed an expansive new military vocabulary, taking elements from popular culture as well as the doublespeak of the military industrial complex.” It’s “bird,” not “chopper,” and an “oxygen thief” is a useless soldier. Hat tip: Ben Zimmer and Kevin Grant. (Bonus link: my 2007 post about Iraq war slang.)

Much doge. Wow. Psychologist and language columnist Jessica Love writes in The American Scholar about “the delicate dance between humor and inscrutability” in two Internet memes, doge and because + noun. If you haven’t yet become acquainted with doge, here’s a best-of-gallery. (Hat tip: Angus Grieve-Smith.) Wondering how to pronounce “doge”? Slate interviewed several experts and then let the Internet decide. “Wow. Such confused” polled a strong third.

Image via Slate.

Fifty shades of blue. Can you discern the difference between LinkedIn blue and Disqus blue? IBM blue and Evomail blue? Test your powers of perception at Name That Blue, then graduate to pinks, reds, purples, greens, and a whole lot of tech companies you’ve never heard of.

Helvetica the perfume. “We have created the ultimate Modernist perfume – a scent distilled down to only the purest and most essential elements to allow you, the content, to convey your message with the utmost clarity.” Translation: for $62, not including tax and shipping, you get distilled water in a clear bottle with a label.

“For those who dare to be the same.” Image via AdFreak.

Hideous holiday music. I note with sadness the passing in 2013 of Jim Nayder, curator of Chicago Public Radio’s Annoying Music show (frequently heard on NPR); and of Regretsy (“Where DIY Meets WTF”), the blog that compiled the very worst of Etsy craft projects. But there’s hope for both camps of mourners: the multitalented April Winchell, who ran Regretsy for four years (posting as Helen Killer), can still be found on her eponymous blog. And in an effort that would do Jim Nayder proud, she’s compiled her own catalog of wretched holiday tunes, from “Homo Christmas” (by Pansy Division) to the Bethlehem Rap, from “I Yust Go Nuts on Christmas” and “Yingle Bells” by that great, great faux-Swedish entertainer Yogi Yorgesson (né Harry Stewart) to the world’s worst version of “O Holy Night.”

And speaking of holiday traditions, watch this space for my annual Festivus Airing of Grievances, coming later this week.

Word of the Week: Affluenza

Affluenza: “A painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.” – Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, by John de Graaf et al. (originally published 2001). Coined from affluence and influenza. Affluenza is sometimes defined as a contemporary version of “keeping up with the Joneses.”*

Last week, a juvenile-court judge in Texas apparently took the “influenza” part of “affluenza” seriously when she sentenced Ethan Couch, a 16-year-old from a wealthy Fort Worth family, to a mere 10 years’ probation for killing four people and critically wounding two others in a drunken-driving car crash. Prosecutors had sought a 20-year prison sentence, according to a New York Times story:

Judge [Jean] Boyd did not discuss her reasoning for her order, but it came after a psychologist called by the defense argued that Mr. Couch should not be sent to prison because he suffered from “affluenza” — a term that dates at least to the 1980s to describe the psychological problems that can afflict children of privilege.

A USA Today story went into more detail about the affluenza “affliction,” defining it as a condition “in which children — generally from richer families — have a sense of entitlement, are irresponsible, and make excuses for poor behavior because parents have not set proper boundaries.” The legal ploy quickly was dubbed “the affluenza defense.”

The term in fact dates back to at least October 1979, according to Word Spy, but its earliest documented use—by the Washington Post critic Tom Shales, who may have offhandedly coined the word—was in a nonmedical context. Writing about the author Ann Beattie, Shales noted that “a Boston paper even referred to the people she writes about, usually disenchanted orphans of Affluenza, as The Beattie Generation.”

[Update: A message last week from Christopher Phipps on the American Dialect Society listserv included a 2001 Chicago Tribune article about new words that traced “affluenza” back to 1954. A follow-up message, from Garson O'Toole, provided a 1908 (!) citation from a London publication that included  “affluenza.” Clearly, this is a word that has been invented many times over many decades.]

In 1997, PBS aired an hour-long documentary, “Affluenza,” and a “solution-oriented sequel,” “Escape from Affluenza.” The website for the two films treated “affluenza” both as a made-up illness (complete with diagnosis and treatment) and as a quasi-geographic construct (“escape from affluenza”). Also in 1997, Jessie O’Neill, a psychotherapist and a great-granddaughter of a president of General Motors, published The Golden Ghetto: The Psychology of Affluence, in which she defined affluenza as “the psychological dysfunctions of affluence”—“these collective addictions, character flaws, psychological wounds, neuroses, and behavioral disorders caused or greatly exacerbated by the presence or desire for excess money”—and devoted a chapter to exploring the condition.

Since then, affluenza has been the subject of a PhD dissertation at Antioch University and has appeared in the titles of at least four books not by de Graaf et al. It is invoked by lawyers and financial planners who advise wealthy families. It has also spawned at least one semi-jocular, not-very-successful spinoff, afflufemza, coined by Sandra Tsing Loh in 2006 to describe her “malaise,” “wherein the problems of affluence are recast as the struggles of feminism, and you find yourself in a dreamlike state of reading firstperson essays about it, over and over again.”

The Texas affluenza case prompted criticism from psychologists who objected that affluenza is “junk science” (perhaps akin to the Twinkie Defense). Even the psychologist who testified in the trial, G. Dick Miller, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that he regretted using the word. “We used to call these people spoiled brats,” he said.

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* Literary footnote: The Joneses of that idiom are sometimes said to be the birth family of the writer Edith Wharton, née Jones (1862-1937). However, The Phrase Finder traces the saying to Arthur (Pop) Momand's Keep Up With The Joneses comic strip in the New York Globe, first published in 1913. According to The Phrase Finder: “The ‘Joneses’ in the cartoon weren't based on anyone in particular, and they weren't portrayed in the cartoon itself. Jones was a very common name and ‘the Joneses’ was merely a generic name for ‘the neighbours’.”

The Reason for the Cheese’n

’Twouldn’t be ’Tis the Season season without Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Dinner ’Tis the Chees’n Winter Shapes, would it?

Also available in Monsters University Shapes, Cheesy Alfredo, Cheesy Southwestern Chipotle, and Sponge Bob Square Pants Shapes.

After Andy Behr tipped me about this product (and ’tis grateful I am!), I searched for it at my local Safeway. No luck. But of course it’s available on Amazon, where the very first review, posted in 2010*, is a minor classic of the genre:

As I sit here, with a mouth full of this fine Kraft product, I can't help but remember that fateful December afternoon. The war had ended some time ago, yet you could still hear the resentment resonating through the townsfolk's gnashed teeth. Jake and I were at the bar, as usual, trying to drink away the sun. The barkeep, sliding a filthy rag across the counter, squinted as he tried to read our shirts. He let a grin escape and shook his head.

“You got a problem, old man?” Jake took off his glasses.

The barkeep ran his forearm across his wrinkled face. “Ain’t no problem here. You boys have guts, is all, wearin’ those Kraft logos around these parts. This is a Stouffer’s county.”

Jake stood up, sliding his stool back across the hardwood floor. “If I wanted to choke down frozen food, I’d move my ass to Alaska. I’ll take The Cheesiest any day.” We used to call him Jake the Patriot. Always looking for a fight. I grabbed his arm in a vain attempt to pacify him. Looking around the room, I saw we were vastly outnumbered.

Read the rest of the Amazon review. And then read this 2011 review (with video tutorial!) of ’Tis the Cheese’n Winter Shapes in the X-Entertainment blog. It includes this sentence:

The candy canes, requiring two words that don’t begin with “s,” are the ostracized bastards of the Kraft winter shapes social circle.

Read much, much more about ’Tis the Season in my December 5 roundup.

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* The flavor in question was Original, not ’Tis the Chees’n Winter Shapes, but I figured the December setting was sufficiently seasonal.

On the Visual Thesaurus: Brand Names of the Year for 2013

My new column for the Visual Thesaurus is a year-end look at some significant brand names of 2013. As I say in my introduction, it isn’t a list of the biggest or more famous companies; rather, it’s my subjective catalog of names that were “newly prominent or notable” (per the American Dialect Society’s criteria for words of the year), showed linguistic significance (or “interestingness”), and represented naming trends or breakthroughs.

Access to the full column is restricted to subscribers (subscribe! an excellent gift!). Here’s one of the 10 names on my list:

Redskins. Football’s Washington Redskins have had that name since 1937 – before that, the team was the Boston Redskins – but in 2013 there was renewed pressure to change what many Native Americans and others see as an offensive term. In a 29-page report issued in October, the National Council of American Indians spelled the name with an asterisk (“Redsk*ns”) and decried the team’s “ugly” legacy of racism. Ten members of the U.S. Congress, 60 clergy members, and President Obama called for a name change, and several newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, stopped printing the Redskins name in stories about the team. On the other hand, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford — not exactly free of controversy himself this year — also weighed in, saying a name change would be “ridiculous.”

Read the rest of the column. And watch this space in the next couple of weeks for more names and words of the year.