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Dead-ender: A partisan who refuses to stop supporting a cause or candidate; a die-hard.
This sense of dead-ender – the most recent of several to have appeared during the term’s history – has appeared regularly during the current U.S. presidential campaign. It’s used as a disparaging tag for zealous supporters of candidates whose realistic chances of prevailing have steadily dwindled. These supporters often self-identify on social media with the hashtag #NeverHillary or #NeverTrump.
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I don’t knit, but that hasn’t stopped me from lurking around the Etsy shop of a German merchant called DyeForYarn. The pun, though forced, is fitting. Just take a look at the macabre names bestowed on many of the colors.
It’s Really Dead, Dead Walnut Wood, Black Hole, Gray Which Must Not Be Named. (“OOAK” stands for “one of a kind.”)
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A blanket merchant in the Pacific Northwest is doing laudable work under a mournful moniker.
The company commissions and sells handmade blankets in a variety of materials and designs. For every blanket you purchase, the company donates a blanket to your local homeless shelter.
The name of the company: Sackcloth & Ashes.
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Remember back in May, when Budweiser announced it was rebranding its beer “America” for the remainder of the U.S. election season? (You’ve probably noticed how much national harmony has broken out as a consequence.) Well, not to be outdone, a much smaller brewery in Minnesota has brought out its own patriotically themed brewski. It’s called #Merica! – hashtag, spelling, and exclamation mark sic.
All very charming, but my theme here today isn’t the beer name. It’s the brewery name: Surly.
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Miserabilism: A pessimistic philosophy; a consistently miserable outlook. From miserable combined with the philosophical suffix -ism.
I recently heard miserabilism in an unexpected context: the annual awards lunch hosted by the Oakland Chamber of Commerce. (I attended as the guest of a client.) Before we got to the awards, we were treated, or subjected, to a long state-of-the-city presentation by an economist from Los Angeles, which is 370 miles south of Oakland. As it happens, Dan Cohen was in the audience, too.
Prez of Beacon Economics told crowd at @OaklandChamber lunch to chill on #Brexit and not succumb to "Miserabilism" pic.twitter.com/3ymxnprPXf
— (((Dan Cohen))) (@dcstpaul) June 24, 2016
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When I discovered that an odd number (in both senses) was being used an even number of times (two) as a company name, my curiosity was naturally piqued.
The odd number in question is four hundred twenty-seven: 427. Does it signify anything to you? Me neither.
Of course, if you scramble the numerals you get 24/7, which does signify something: all day, every day. But that has nothing to do with the two 427 stories that I’m about to tell you.
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Aeroese: The universal language of airline pilots and air-traffic controllers. Pronounced arrow-ease. Also (and more commonly) known as Aviation English.
In an essay published last month in the online magazine Aeon, Mark Vanhoenacker – a licensed commercial pilot and the author of Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot – writes admiringly of the “clipped, technical majesty” of “the language of the sky”:
I like how different the language of the sky is from everyday English – indeed, we might give it its own name, Aeroese (though it’s also sometimes, and less aspirationally, called Aviation English). Above all, I love how Aeroese can somehow manage, in its technical, obscuring precision, to capture the high romance of flight – an aspect of my job, no matter how much I love it, that in the cockpit we rarely have reason to consider directly.
(Aeroese may be Vanhoenacker’s coinage: all the citations I found led back to his Aeon essay.)
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