Fritinancy

New work: “Make It Meaningful”

The Athenian School, a small, private, progressive institution for grades 6 through 12 in Danville, California, celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2015. Simultaneously, it launched a $12 million capital campaign comprising three major facility improvements. I was brought in to develop a themeline for the campaign, which will span the 2016-2017 academic year and will be aimed at the school’s internal community, chiefly parents, grandparents, and alumni. The themeline needed to be appropriate for web, print, and video; and it needed to be flexible, even modular.

On the Visual Thesaurus: “There’s Something About ‘Thing’”

My new column for the Visual Thesaurus, “There’s Something About ‘Thing’,” takes a look at the astonishing versatility and utility of thing, one of the oldest words in the English language. Thing dates back to at least the seventh century C.E., yet it’s as current as the oft-invoked Internet of Things – a 1999 coinage to describe devices (thermostats, refrigerators, even garbage cans) with their own means of gathering information and understanding the world.

Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers for three months. Here’s an excerpt:

One new thing slogan appropriates an idiom that seems newly coined but is in fact decades old. Earlier this year, the cable channel truTV — which broadcasts, among other programming, some of the games of the NCAA basketball tournament, also known as March Madness — revealed a new, scrawled tagline: "truTV is A Thing.” The slogan turns a pop-culture expression into a positive declaration while sounding a bit self-effacing. “We're not the biggest channel on earth,” a spokesperson told me via Twitter. Rather, he said, truTV is modestly asserting that “we exist.”

“It’s a thing” and “Is that even a thing?” are trendy right now. But as Patricia O’Connor pointed out last year in her Grammarphobia blog, versions of the phrase have been around since at least the mid-1980s. She found an example in a 1984 issue of Musician magazine:

In the article, Garry Tallent, the bassist for the E Street Band, comments on a People magazine piece that compared the “clean-living” band to the Hardy Boys.

“It’s true,” Tallent is quoted as saying, “but, especially since People magazine, it’s become a thing.”

 

Read the rest of “There’s Something About ‘Thing’”

Word of the week: Flyting

Flyting: A ritual exchange of insults. According to a Wikipedia entry:

The root is the Old English word flītan meaning quarrel (from Old Norse word flyta meaning provocation). Examples of flyting are found throughout Norse, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Medieval literature involving both historical and mythological figures. The exchanges would become extremely provocative, often involving accusations of cowardice or sexual perversion.

There was a flurry of flyting after the real-estate heir and presidential aspirant Donald J. Trump posted a blustery tweet on Friday, the morning after the UK’s historic (and potentially calamitous) vote to leave the European Union, aka “Brexit”:

Just arrived in Scotland. Place is going wild over the vote. They took their country back, just like we will take America back. No games!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2016

In point of fact, while UK voters overall chose the “Leave” option, a resounding majority of Scots voters – 62 percent – opted to “Remain.” And many UK residents, Scots and Brits alike, were quick to set the record straight, tweet-showering Trump with florid epithets.

Fritinancy X

In June 2006, George W. Bush was president of the United States, crowdsourcing was new to the lexicon, a lot of people still called blogs “weblogs,” YouTube was barely seven months old, and the iPhone was still a twinkle in Steve Jobs’s eye.

Also, I began writing this blog.

Ten years! Happy anniversary, me.

I published my first real post (after a throat-clearing one) on June 8, 2006. It was about a nanoparticle of gold that needed a name. I offered some suggestions. My advice was ignored.

I carried on regardless.

Here are a few of my favorite posts from the archives. As an unctuous waiter would say: Enjoy!

Word of the week: Upskirt

Upskirt: “A video, usually taken in a crowded location such as a shopping mall, that is shot up a woman’s skirt” without the woman’s permission or even knowledge. (Source: Word Spy)

In early May, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie signed a law criminalizing upskirting. Philly.com reported:

Noting concerns for protecting children and privacy in a “highly digital age,” the Republican governor said the law would target “perpetrators of a perverse and growing form of pornography that victimizes vulnerable women and children in a matter of seconds.”

New Jersey’s invasion-of-privacy law prohibits photographing, videotaping, or otherwise recording the image of another person whose intimate parts are exposed without that person's consent and under circumstances in which a reasonable person would not expect to be observed.

The “upskirting” law also makes it a crime to photograph, video, or record photos of clothed intimate parts of another person without consent and under circumstances in which a reasonable person would not expect to have his or her private body parts observed.

Under the new law, the act of photographing or recording those photos is a fourth-degree crime punishable by up to 18 months in prison, a fine of up to $10,000, or both, Christie's office said.

Five “upskirters” were arrested in Manhattan in April. The office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance noted that incidences of upskirting increase as the weather grows warmer.

Urban Dictionary’s earliest entry for upskirting is from 2006, but Word Spy found a 1998 mention in the Washington Post:

What began as a small photo gallery on the Internet a couple of years ago has rapidly expanded to more than 40 such “Upskirt” sites, including one devoted entirely to shots taken up skirts in Maryland, said [Alexandria detective Harold] Duquette, who has been tracking the trend.

—Patricia Davis, “Video Peeping Toms Seeing More Trouble,” The Washington Post, June 7, 1998

 

Related: Downblouse.

Name in the news: tronc

The press release arrived in inboxes Thursday afternoon, and within minutes it seemed everyone in media or branding was scoffing at it.

Tribune Publishing Co. (NYSE:TPUB) today announced that the Company will change its name to tronc, Inc., a content curation and monetization company focused on creating and distributing premium, verified content across all channels. tronc, or tribune online content, captures the essence of the Company’s mission. tronc pools the Company’s leading media brands and leverages innovative technology to deliver personalized and interactive experiences to its 60 million monthly users. The name change will become effective on June 20, 2016.

Yes, that’s tronc with a lower-case t, an acronym created from tribune online content. The ticker symbol will be TRNC. And the “engine” of all that “content curation and monetization” will be called troncX, because nothing says “innovative technology” like an “X” in the name.

Tribune Publishing Co., based in Chicago, owns some of the oldest and biggest surviving newspapers in the United States, including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. The company, like the rest of the newspaper industry, has been struggling for years.

And now it faces yet another challenge: a storm of ridicule from journalists, brand consultants, and critical civilians.

Of course, negative response to a rebrand is to be expected. Indeed, most renaming announcements are met with jeers. (Everyone’s a critic.) For my part, I keep the Zajonc effect in mind: the tendency of people, after repeated exposure to something they initially disliked, to like the thing more over time. (Zajonc does not rhyme with “tronc”; it rhymes with “science.”)

But, ladies and gentlemen, I am fairly confident that years of exposure will not make me fall in love, or even in like, with tronc. It’s a word that sounds silly at best, ugly at worst, a rhyming cousin of honk, zonk, bonk, and honky-tonk. The lack of capitalization is ridiculous and impractical. (How will, say, the Chicago Tribune, a tronc property, treat the name at the beginning of a sentence?) And it’s a bad portmanteau, a Frankenname soldered together from a heartless DisruptionSpeak buzzword, “online content” (not to mention “premium, verified content”). The story that’s meant to justify it is blistered with other soulless buzzwords: “leverages,” “innovative,” “personalized,” “interactive experiences.”

No, there’s nothing but jonc in that tronc.

How Bulbul got its name

Bulbul is a contemporary Danish watch brand with a name whose etymological tentacles extend into in at least three languages, none of them Scandinavian.

Bulbul makes three minimalist styles of watch. The watches do only two things: tell time and look beautiful.

 

 

Pebble watch via SFMOMA

 

That asymmetrical face? Breathtaking. And, it turns out, devilishly difficult to manufacture. As Wired magazine reported in 2013, when Bulbul launched, “Factories are set up to make circular, square, and oval watches, but the subtly asymmetrical shape of the Pebble required almost every part to be customized—from the sapphire crystal on the face to hidden rubber rings inside the watch that keep it waterproof.” (Lots of droolworthy photos here.)

I’m going to wrench myself out of my covetous reverie (the watch is probably too big for me anyway, right?) and focus on the name: Where does “Bulbul” come from?