Fritinancy

In the Wild: Bitcoin Billboards

Spenders of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your change.

 

A Bitcoin billboard in my neighborhood (Grand Avenue, Oakland), January 12. Yes, that’s a QR code. (Keep reading.)

 

The organization behind the sign, Arise Bitcoin, says its mission is “to start, support, and execute projects that promote the awareness of bitcoin to the general public.” It claims to have posted more than 40 billboards throughout the Bay Area since December 27, 2013. (According to Arise Bitcoin’s Twitter bio, the organization is based in Cleveland, Ohio.)

Another organization, BitcoinBillboards, has posted billboards in Los Angeles. According to the BitcoinBillboards website, “QR codes do work on billboards! And … QR codes do work to send Bitcoins. PLEASE use common sense and do not attempt to scan while driving!”

Robertson Blvd., Los Angeles. Image from BitcoinBillboards.

 

Bitcoin, in case you haven’t been reading my blog, is the virtual currency (or cryptocurrency, or altcoin) invented in 2009 by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. The value of one bitcoin was about $900 yesterday.

Bitcoin’s popularity has inspired as many as 70 rival altcoins, according to a Bloomberg.com report. They include Coinye (named for singer Kanye West), Dogecoin (named for the doge meme), and RonPaulCoin, named for the libertarian former presidential candidate.

Have you seen any bitcoin billboards in your area?

Word of the Week: Afterdrop

Afterdrop: “A further cooling of core temperature [that] occurs after the victim is removed from the cold environment.” (Source: Hypothermia.org.) Also after-drop.

From the Open Water Chicago website:

When you first enter the water and begin your swim, your body reacts by constricting the peripheral blood vessels in your arms and legs. This helps prevent heat loss by consolidating your body heat into your core. And as long as you continue with your physical activity, you will easily preserve a stable temperature.

However, once you end your swim and exit the water, your body sends your blood back to the skin to “warm up.” Because your skin is very cold at this point, your blood actually gets colder and is then recirculated back to your core. In essence, your core body temperature actually decreases during this rewarming period in a phenomenon known as the “afterdrop.”

Afterdrop is part of the specialized lingo of physicians and emergency workers, and it’s also familiar to cold-water swimmers like me and other members of San Francisco’s Dolphin and South End clubs, where we swim year round, without wetsuits, in San Francisco Bay. Water temperature in our part of the bay ranges between 50°F/10°C (January) and 66°F/19°C (September, if ever). To prevent afterdrop, swimmers and boaters are advised to go horizontal; warm up gradually, preferably in a sauna or swaddled in blankets; and avoid drinking alcoholic beverages. (Some hypothermia resources recommend continued exercise. The truth, according to a physician I consulted, is “No one knows.”)

Dolphin Club member Dr. Thomas J. Nuckton, a specialist in pulmonary and critical care medicine, conducted a study of 11 Dolphin Club members who had swum from Alcatraz Island to San Francisco’s Aquatic Park on New Year’s Day in 1998. (It’s an annual tradition.) His findings, published in The American Journal of Emergency Medicine in 2000, included the observation that 10 of the 11 swimmers had experienced core afterdrop of at least 1.8°F. Nuckton also tells the story of 16 Danish fishermen who were rescued after spending an hour in open water; although they were able to climb aboard the rescue vessel, all of them later died of hypothermia.

The OED’s earliest citation for afterdrop (spelled after-drop in the dictionary) is a 1945 British report: “Rewarming must be rapid to cushion the ‘after-drop’ in temperature, which continues to fall for 10 to 15 minutes after the subject is removed from the cold water.” (That is, rewarming must commence quickly; it’s now considered risky to rewarm a patient too rapidly.)

The English word has a grim history, according to the OED: “Originally after German Nachsinken (1942 in a typescript document reporting the results of experiments on live subjects at the Dachau concentration camp, later used as part of the Nuremberg trials).”

Modern Framily

For the record, I am not categorically anti-portmanteau. I think affluenza and gundamentalist are inspired. I admire the speedy, seamless blend of Travelocity. I appreciate Lewis Carroll’s contributions to the genre.

But few commercial portmanteaus rise to those heights. Instead, what we see is a lot of chop-and-jam (or perhaps choja, as the blend trend would have it).

Last year, for example, saw the debut of Burger King’s Satisfries, a combo of “satisfy” and “fries” that satisfied no one. (It doesn’t help that the word sounds almost exactly like “saddest fries.”) Sonic Drive-In tortured phonetics with Spicedictive, a distinctly nonaddictive word. The New York Times devoted many column inches to a bourbon-rye blend called Bourye, which I see as Bour Ye and want to pronounce like “Hear ye, hear ye!”

Also in 2013, Subway introduced the Flatizza (flatbread/pizza), which invites adolescent chortling* about flat tits.

Image via A Walk in the Words, who called Flatizza “a phonetically problematic portmanteau.” Indeed.

 

And I’m sorry to say that we are far from finished with this tired trend. Today marks the rollout of Framily, from Sprint.

How Sludge Became “Biosolids”

One of the most edifying books I read in 2013 was Rose George’s The Big Necessity, first published in the U.S. in 2009. George, a British journalist, delves into history, descends into city sewers, visits a Japanese factory that makes robo-toilets, and interviews the leaders of India’s “open-defecation-free” campaign in her exploration of “the unmentionable world of human waste.” If you like the work of Mary Roach (who blurbed George’s book), you’ll love the combination of thorough research and zesty writing in The Big Necessity.

In addition to some boggling statistics (2.6 billion people have no access to even the most primitive form of sanitation), The Big Necessity offers some good stories about language and names. Here, for example, is the story of how and why “sludge”—first used, in the late 19th century, to mean “the precipitate matter in sewage tanks”—was reinvented a century later as “biosolids.”

First, a little background from Chapter 7, “The Battle of Biosolids”:

The Harper-Collins Dictionary of Environmental Science defines sludge as “a viscous, semisolid mixture of bacteria and virus-laden organic matter, toxic metals, synthetic organic chemicals and settled solids removed from domestic industrial waste water at a sewage treatment plant.” The Clean Water Act keeps it simple and calls it a pollutant.

“[B]y the end of the [20th] century sludge contained far more than pure human excrement,” George writes, “and hardly any of it good. Anything that goes into the sewers can end up in sludge.”

Decades ago, one pioneering sewage authority determined to turn sludge into metaphorical gold:

In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD) has been selling its sludge as fertilizer since 1925, with discreet labeling. Only someone who knew what MMSD stood for would realize Milorganite is derived from a human body.

The sludge and wastewater industry looked at Milorganite and saw the light. No one would want to live near farms where sewage sludge was applied. But people might want to live near fields that were covered in a fertilizer called something else. The transformation of sludge into “biosolids” was brilliantly documented in Toxic Sludge Is Good for You by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. The book was about “the lies, damn lies” of the PR industry in general, but the maneuvers of the Water Environment Federation (WEF), the U.S. sewage industry association, were impressive enough to provide the authors with their title. The EPA, they write, was conscious even in 1981 of the need to persuade the public to accept sludge farming. A Name Change Task Force was formed, and suggestions solicited through a WEF newsletter. The 250 suggestions received included “bioslurp,” “black gold,” “the end product,” “hudoo,” “powergro,” and—my favorite—ROSE, standing for “Recycling Of Solids Environmentally.” [Ed: A ROSE by any other name would smell as sweet?] Biosolids won, probably because it was the blandest. Maureen Reilly, a prominent sludge opponent and the producer of the prolific SludgeWatch newsletter, calls this “linguistic detoxification.”

In an endnote, George gives more detail about Milorganite:

Milorganite was named by McIver and Son of Charleston, South Carolina, who entered a competition to name the new fertilizer in National Fertilizer Magazine in 1925. Milorganite stands for Milwaukee Organic Nitrogen. Its history is told at http://www.milorganite.com.

According to that website, “Milorganite fertilizer is one of the oldest branded fertilizers on the market today.”

Let’s Talk About Names

Need fast feedback about a naming dilemma? On a tight budget? You can now hire my expert naming services by the minute—yes, one-sixtieth of an hour—through Clarity.fm*, a year-old San Francisco company that connects entrepreneurs with experts, over the phone, for advice on business challenges.

In a 15-, 30-, or 45-minute phone conversation (or longer, if you have the stamina), I can review your naming objectives and criteria, give you a quick professional critique of your top name choices, and point out areas you may have overlooked. You can ask me questions about product names, company names, taglines, domains, or brand architecture. There’s no obligation to hire me for further naming work, but if you’d like to do so we can talk about that, too.

Yesterday, for example, I spoke with a couple of entrepreneurs in Vancouver, BC, who wanted my opinion of their four top name candidates. In a fast-paced 17-minute call, I gave them my impressions of the names and advice for a follow-up round of creative work.

Sound good? Read about how it works, check out my Clarity profile, then sign up and give me a call!

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* About that .fm domain extension: It’s the country code for the Federated States of Micronesia—and an apt choice for a company called Clarity.

Wonder Land

Spotted on adjacent shelves at independent bookseller Books Inc., San Francisco:

Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof, by Alisa Solomon (2013)

 

Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection, by Debora L. Spar (2013)

 

An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist, by Richard Dawkins (2013)

 

And let’s not forget:

 

State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett (2011)

 

As the late Lawrence Welk would have said…

Wunnerful, Wunnerful! (1971)

Word of the Week: Bodgery

Bodgery: Bungling, botched work. Probably related to botch.

The OED calls bodgery “obsolete,” and gives only one citation for the word, from the playwright Thomas Nashe, who used it in the late 16th century. (“Doe you know your owne misbegotten bodgery?”) But I encountered it just last week in the January 2014 issue of The Atlantic, in an article by James Parker titled “TV’s Post-Recession Obsession with Stuff.” (Subtitle: “What to make of all these reality programs about pawn stores, storage lockers, and hoarders?”) Here’s the relevant sentence, along with a little context:

They’re none of them very “good,” these pawn and storage shows. Which is appropriate. Quality would be the wrong thing here. I do enjoy the drowsy Cajun vibe of Swamp Pawn, with its Barry Hannah–esque cast of loopy fishermen selling each other trucks and turtle shells, but the rest of the programs smell familiarly of contrivance, bodgery, rip-off—slapdash narratives and prodded-by-the-producer freak-outs.

In his 2011 book The Story of English in 100 Words, linguist David Crystal devotes a chapter to bodgery, using it as an excuse to talk about 16th-century word coiners:

Some 16th-century poets and playwrights seem almost to have coined words for a living. Nashe was second only to Shakespeare in the number of words whose first recorded use is found in his writing – nearly 800 – and several did become a permanent part of the language, such as conundrum, grandiloquent, multifarious and balderdash. Nashe also coined a word which would one day receive new life in science fiction: earthling.

But most coined words don’t survive, Crystal observes:

The list of words that never made it has a surreal quality. From Philip Sidney we have disinvite, hangworthy, rageful and triflingness. From Edmund Spenser, disadventurous, jolliment, schoolery and adviceful. From John Marston, cockall (‘perfection’), bespirtle (‘to spot with vice’), fubbery (‘cheating’) and glibbery (‘slippery’) – creations Lewis Carroll would have been proud of. Sometimes it’s impossible to say why one word stayed and another didn’t. Why did Spenser’s tuneful catch on but his gazeful did not?

However, you can never tell what will happen. Musicry was coined by John Marston, and nobody used it after him – until 1961, when a writer revived it for a book on the arts. Nashe’s chatmate is currently the only instance of its use in the Oxford English Dictionary. But that will soon change, for in the world of chatrooms, social networking and internet dating, what do we find? Chatmates. There’s hope for bodgery yet.

For more stories about coined-word successes and failures, see Predicting New Words, by Allan Metcalf, a book I’ve cited in posts about blurb and scofflaw.

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Bonus link: Tinplate Studios: Steampunk Wonders and Bodgery, an Etsy shop specializing in steampunk “ray guns, respirators, odd gadgets, and masks as well as disturbing cryptozoological anomalies under glass.”

Nominees for American Dialect Society Word of the Year

Yesterday, members of the American Dialect Society selected their nominees for Word of the Year for 2013. Ben Zimmer, chair of the society’s New Words Committee, presided over the nominating session and has summarized the nominations in a Visual Thesaurus column.

In addition to the traditional categories (Most Useful, Most Likely to Succeed, etc.), members proposed a new category, Most Productive, for word parts that have given rise to a number of new words. (For example, -elfie has produced selfie, drelfie, and twolfie twofie.)

Quite a few of the nominations overlap with my own list, which I published last week. A couple of other words (fatberg, demised) were my words of the week during the year.* But I’m equally interested in the words I hadn’t considered, including robo sabiens, stack ranking, and struggle bus.

The final vote will take place at 5:30 today, Friday. If you’re in Minneapolis, you can join in the fun by simply showing up. If you’re playing along at home, follow Ben Zimmer on Twitter, or search for the hashtag #woty13.

UPDATE: The results! If you need some ling-splaining of the overall winner, Because X, here’s a good place to start.

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* For the record, I didn’t nominate fatberg or demised because they originated in the UK and haven’t yet been adopted in the US. This is, after all, an American word-of-the-year vote.

Passionately De-Layering the Low-Hanging Fruit

I’m not a fan of word bans: They’re a slippery slope and an exercise in futility. Nevertheless, I sympathize with reporters who, at the slow tail end of a holiday week, can’t resist one more “let’s ban buzzwords” story. Guaranteed link bait!

The Wall Street Journal’s roundup of bannable buzzwords, published yesterday, is a little different from the usual fare, because the submissions come not from grumpy wage slaves but from the people at the very top: CEOs and founders, many of whom are probably responsible for poisoning the well with those buzzwords back when they (the words, that is) seemed fresh.

The list contains the usual suspects: push the envelope, viral, low-hanging fruit, big data. One entry, however, made me smile: passionate.

“On the recruiting side, I’m pretty sick of the term…do you want passion in a typical workplace? Isn’t that a lot like drama?” says Peter Cappelli, director of the Wharton School’s Center for Human Resources.

I’ve been tracking corporate passion for almost eight years, so it’s gratifying to learn that I have an ally with actual influence.

The WSJ also polled readers, who were eager to share their peeves. Two of the terms they’d like to consign to the dustbin of history—reach out and disrupt—are words I’ve written about for the Visual Thesaurus. Another reader-nominated word, ideate, is not, as the submitter claims, newly “made-up”; it’s been part of the English lexicon since about 1600.

On the other hand, a couple of the terms in the main article—de-layering (a euphemism for “firing,” aka “demising”) and dynamic resilience (sorry, I still have no idea what this means)—were new to me, which makes me wonder whether I’ve been hanging out in the wrong meetings.

Buzzwords attain their status because they’re catchy and zeitgeist-y. There’s residual value there, so I vote for recycling them, not dumping them. Try, for example, singing along to the tune of “It’s De-Lovely”:

We can’t say “fire,”
We can’t say “axe,”
We’d have HR pouncing on our backs.
Say “disrupting,” say “demising,” say “de-layering”!

And here’s my own suggestion for a word I’d like to see less of in 2014: whomever. It’s a legitimate and venerable word, of course, but it’s archaic and almost invariably used incorrectly, as in this New York Times lede. (“Whoever,” please.) You can read up on whoever/whomever—Grammar Girl and Vocabulary.com are good resources, and Literal-Minded goes deeper—or you can just excise “whomever” from your vocabulary. I promise you no one will mind, or even notice.

Here’s to good words and good ideas in 2014!