Fritinancy

On the Visual Thesaurus: Fakes, lies, and post-truth politics

The English language gives us many ways to call something (or someone) false or untruthful. In my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, “Unreality Check,” I explore many of those options, from fake, phony, and kayfabe (from underworld slang) to swindle (from German) and disinformation (originally Russian). Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers (reminder: a VT subscription makes a great gift for a word-lover). Here’s an excerpt:

One term for intentional deception comes not from the Anglophone world but from Russian. Disinformation is a direct translation of Russian дезинформация, or “dezinformatsiya”; the original source may be French. A Cold War term coined by Soviet spy agencies, disinformation is intentionally false or misleading information spread in a calculated way to deceive target audiences. (The definition is from the Wikipedia entry.) Disinformation is distinct from misinformation, which is unintentionally false.

Would you prefer to be more discreet when you talk about a person’s reckless disregard for facts? There’s a word for that, too: dissemble, “to hide or conceal behind a false appearance.” The word itself is hiding behind a false front; it was originally dissimule, from an Old French source. Its spelling changed around the 16^th century, possibly in imitation of resemble.

Read the rest of the column.

Word of the week: Hotep

I discovered hotep (or Hotep) serendipitously: I was looking for Afro-Cuban responses to the death of Fidel Castro, and a Twitter trail led me to @audaciouskay. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did learn a new word.

And that's where some of the black vote for Trump came on. Hotepped right on to the polls. https://t.co/z25Zdk0IFr

— King K (@audaciouskay) November 26, 2016

 

The word reminded me of the names of ancient Egyptian deities and pharaohs, and a bit of research confirmed my hunch. Hotep is an Egyptian word that’s translated as “to be at peace.” The word is also found in some ancient Egyptian names, such as Hotepsekhemwy (“the two powers are at peace”), the first ruler of Egypt’s Second Dynasty (c. 2890 – c. 2606 BCE); and the four pharaohs named Amenhotep (“Amun is pleased”). Hotep was a character (voiced by Steve Martin) in the 1998 animated film The Prince of Egypt.

The Twitter usage, though, looked more like contemporary slang than classicism – and pejorative slang at that. So I checked out Urban Dictionary, where the oldest definition of hotep, by “Brother Enki,” is from January 2011 and reads:

“Peace” or “I come in Peace” it is a common greeting with people well versed in true world history.

That still didn’t fit “Hotepped right on to the polls.” Something had changed in the last five years.

Word of the week: Fake

In a week that saw post-truth anointed word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries, the media – mainstream and social – were full of news about fake news. Facebook was put on the defensive for allowing “misinformation” about the U.S. presidential election to spread throughout its social network. Google announced it would bar fake-news purveyors from using AdSense, its online advertising service. Paul Horner, the fake-news impresario who invented the “Amish community supports Trump” story (and many others), told the Washington Post he considered his work to be “satire.” He estimated he was earning $10,000 a month for his efforts, considerably more than the average real-news reporter. Five days before the election, BuzzFeed broke a story about teenagers in a single Macedonian town, population 45,000, who had created as many as 140 fake-news websites with American-sounding names like “TrumpVision365.com.” “Most of the posts on these sites are aggregated, or completely plagiarized, from fringe and right-wing sites in the US,” writes BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman. “The Macedonians see a story elsewhere, write a sensationalized headline, and quickly post it to their site. Then they share it on Facebook to try and generate traffic.”

It’s a depressing picture of greed and gullibility. But let’s focus on facts: What’s the authentic story of fake? 

 

 

Fake news debunked by Hoax-Slayer.

   

November linkfest

Warning: more politics than usual this month, although many of the links have have a language-y angle.

*

Post-truth is Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year for 2016. The word, an adjective, means “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”; it rose to prominence this year during the UK’s Brexit vote and the US presidential election. Related: an interview with Oxford English Dictionary editor-in-chief Michael Proffitt on post-truth and secrets of the dictionary trade. (It’s not uncommon, he says, for a new OED lexicographer to be given a “rude word” to define.) Hat tip for both links: Jesse Sheidlower.

*

Marketers rethink how to talk to consumers in a post-truth world, where “facts and reason matter less than they expected — a counterintuitive discovery in the age of information.”

*

Posted without comment pic.twitter.com/SrVoCpTvtv

— SF Book Club, London (@SFbookclub) November 14, 2016

Where Hillary Clinton's marketing went wrong

Full disclosure up front: I’m a registered Democrat, and I voted for Hillary Clinton in the California primary and the general election. I contributed a modest amount of money to her campaign. I am in no way an expert in presidential politics, just a reasonably well-informed observer and participant in the democratic process (such as it is under late-stage capitalism).

Here’s what I do know a few things about: branding and marketing. And from the beginning, even though I liked Clinton as a candidate and wanted her to prevail, I saw a lot that troubled me about how her campaign handled marketing, positioning, and advertising. I kept seeing what seemed like rookie mistakes, despite Clinton’s decades of experience and despite the glossy surface of the marketing content.

And so, even though the election was eight days ago and this may seem like beating a dead horse, I’m going to do a little flogging. With any luck, I may prevent some of you from making similar errors in your own marketing efforts – political, personal, or corporate.

Word of the week: Normalization

On November 8 a sub-majority of American voters elected as president a 70-year-old New Yorker who has never held public office or worked in government, never served in the armed forces, and never had a boss other than his father. (After his inauguration in January he will have 300 million bosses, as June Casagrande observed on Twitter.) During his campaign he insulted Mexico, China, Iran, a federal judge, many reporters and news organizations, and, of course, his opponents; mocked a reporter with a disability; promised to deport 11 million illegal immigrants, build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border, and require Muslim-Americans to register in a database; and lashed out at the parents of a Muslim-American soldier killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq. He boasted publicly that he would “bomb the shit out of” ISIS, said “torture works,” and called a political rival a “pussy.” His supporters showed up at rallies sporting T-shirts referring to his general-election opponent as a “bitch”; one of his supporters, an elected official in Texas, referred to that opponent on Twitter as a “cunt.” Another supporter is a former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

On November 9, hey presto: The new president-elect told a cheering crowd it was time “to bind the wounds of division.” (The phrase echoed, but did not credit, Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address.) Many reporters scrambled to relay the news in neutral, if not optimistic, terms.

This is “normalization”: the process, wrote Hua Hsu in the New Yorker on November 13, “through which wisdom becomes conventional and utopian ideals slam against questions of feasibility.”

The morning after

I didn’t think I’d have anything to say this morning – I got less than three hours’ sleep after watching the election returns – but then I saw the print edition of today’s New York Times, which came with a wraparound ad for the new Netflix series The Crown. The 10-episode first season of The Crown, which is about the young Queen Elizabeth II, debuted November 4; it cost $130 million, making it the most expensive TV series ever.

The ad must have been expensive, too, and it must have been prepared at least a few days in advance.

This is the outside of the wrap.

This is the inside left panel.

 

I don’t think I’m alone in suspecting the copywriter was thinking also – prematurely, over-optimistically – of another woman leader, on the opposite side of the Atlantic.

And this is the inside right panel.

 

I’ve watched six episodes of the series. “Revolution” is not among its themes.

 

How long ago, I wonder, was this ad written? What went on in the strategy and creative meetings? Who decided to gamble on subtext and victory? Why run the ad the morning after the American elections and not on premiere day?*

No answers from me, on this or anything else right now.

__

* Although it seems, in light of everything else, ridiculously trivial to bring it up, I have to ask: Who chose to insert “of” after “befitting”? It doesn’t belong there.

Word of the week: Derangement syndrome

Tomorrow is Election Day in the United States, the culmination of an unprecedentedly nerve-combusting season of political warfare. It’s been a campaign for which derangement – a mental disturbance; a disruption of the regular order – would seem to have been invented. It would even seem to merit the coining of derangement syndrome: an extreme response, often untethered from empirical reality, to a particular candidate or elected official.

There’s plenty of evidence. 

The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics, by Maureen Dowd (2016)

Acronyms on the menu

Two signs in two restaurants, both in my general neighborhood in Oakland.

1. Choriz-O-M-G at Chipotle on Lakeshore Avenue.

 

Chipotle is also running a “BOGO” promotion – Buy One, Get One –for active, reserve, and retired members of the armed services.

For other commercial uses of OMG, see my 2012 post.

Name in the news: Wawa

For any other political candidate, the campaign stop would not have made headlines. But because it was this cycle’s Republican nominee, who has rarely deigned to perform the rituals of retail politics, it created a bit of a stir.

 

He would prefer not to. (Via Philly.com)

 

Happening now: Trump and his entourage make surprise visit to a Wawa gas station in PA. pic.twitter.com/1gEJZFSBgD

— Sarah McCammon NPR (@sarahmccammon) November 1, 2016

 

*TastyKake. https://t.co/UCzEk693dZ

— [RAPH]AEL (@MyNameIsRaph) November 1, 2016

The news reminded this Californian that there still are regional mysteries in this great land of ours. “Wawa” is one of them.

 

 

You say “Wawa,” I say “Baba.”