Fritinancy

Word of the week: Blunderbuss

On Friday President Trump signed an executive order – written by one or both of his strategists named Steve – that restricts immigration from seven majority Muslim countries, suspends all refugee admission for 120 days, and excludes all Syrian refugees indefinitely. (Not included in the list of restricted countries: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates, all countries in which the Trump Organization has business dealings.) The order was popular among Trump’s rapidly dwindling fan base – his approval rating last week, which Gallup placed at 42 percent and Quinnipiac at 36 percent, is the lowest in modern times for an incoming president – and vehemently opposed not only by Democrats but also by several prominent members of the party Trump claims to represent.

Monday’s Wall Street Journal carries an editorial headlined “Trump’s Refugee Bonfire” that called the executive order “no doubt legal” but took issue with its implementation. (Experts cited by the New York Times say the ban is unlikely to be effective in curbing terrorism. The Times’s editorial board called it “cowardly and dangerous.”) The WSJ editorial uses a quaint term, blunderbuss, to describe the ban:

Mr. Trump campaigned on a promise of “extreme vetting” for refugees from countries with a history of terrorism, and his focus on protecting Americans has popular support. But his refugee ban is so blunderbuss and broad, and so poorly explained and prepared for, that it has produced confusion and fear at airports, an immediate legal defeat, and political fury at home and abroad. Governing is more complicated than a campaign rally.

 

17th-century wheellock blunderbuss. Source.

Name in the news: Werowocomoco

Last November the film director and winemaker Francis Ford Coppola opened a new restaurant in Geyserville (Sonoma County). It has an unusual menu for a California Wine Country restaurant, or indeed any California restaurant: fry bread tacos, venison chili, rotisserie prairie chicken, pine ice cream. It’s located inside a winery with a historic name: Virginia Dare. And then there’s the six-syllable name of the restaurant itself: Werowocomoco.

What’s the story?

Not Native American: “American Native.”

Word of the week: Antifa

On January 20, Inauguration Day, white nationalist Richard Spencer was knocked to the ground in Washington, D.C., by a masked protester. He filed a police report the following day, and posted multiple tweets about the incident, including this one:

If law enforcement can't protect us from antifa assaults we will begin protecting ourselves.

— Richard Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) January 21, 2017

Antifa is a truncation of “antifascist.” (It’s pronounced with the primary stress on the first syllable.) The word has roots in early-1930s antifascist movements in several European countries, including the German Antifaschistische Aktion. The German group was forcibly disbanded by the Nazi Party in 1933; it was revived in the 1980s.

Antifaschistische Aktion logo.

 

January linkfest

What was Kellogg’s Product 19, and how did it get that slightly sinister name? (Slate)

 

 

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Word of the week: Dossier

Last week Buzzfeed published a collection of memos, prepared in 2015 by a former British intelligence agent, that make “explosive — but unverified — allegations that the Russian government has been ‘cultivating, supporting and assisting’ President-elect Donald Trump for years and gained compromising information about him.” The “compromising information” included reports that Trump had engaged in “perverted sexual acts” in a Moscow hotel – acts that had been arranged and monitored by the FSB, Russia’s foreign security service.

The story introduced several terms to the public, including kompromat (a Russian portmanteau meaning “compromising material”) and “golden shower” (defined in the report as “a urination show” performed by Russian prostitutes). But the word that circulated most widely was dossier, which can mean “file,” “document,” “report,” or “case history,” often with detailed information on a specific person or subject.

How an unverified but explosive dossier became a crisis for Donald Trump https://t.co/W1lO6nhni0

— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 16, 2017

 

New York Post, January 13, 2017

Name in the news: Altaba

It’s the end of an era for Yahoo – again.

If the deal goes through, Yahoo, the pioneer internet portal founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in 1994, will be selling its core internet assets to Verizon for $4.8 billion. On Monday it was announced that what’s left – a 15 percent stake in the Chinese retail business Alibaba and the Yahoo Japan joint venture with Softbank – would be renamed Altaba. CEO Marissa Mayer and founder Filo will be leaving the board.

 

The old Yahoo billboard near the Bryant Street on-ramp to the westbound Bay Bridge. It went dark in 2011. Read my post about it.

Word of the week: Dumpster fire

At its annual meeting, held this year in Austin, the American Dialect Society selected a two-word lexical item as its word of the year for 2016: dumpster fire. And it set a precedent by including an emoji representation of the term in its announcement of the vote.

Yes, that’s a wastebasket, not a dumpster. More about that later.

 

 

For a full list of nominees and winners, see the ADS press release.

Why dumpster fire? “As 2016 unfolded, many people latched on to dumpster fire as a colorful, evocative expression to verbalize their feelings that the year was shaping up to be a catastrophic one,” Ben Zimmer, chairman of the society's new words committee, said in the press release. “In pessimistic times, dumpster fire served as a darkly humorous summation of how many viewed the year’s events.”

Name in the news: Kalorama

Earlier this week, Washington-area news media reported that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, daughter and son-in-law of the president-elect, would be moving into a six-bedroom, six-and-a-half-bathroom house in the District of Columbia. The house, which sold on December 22 for $5.5 million, $400,000 under the listing price, is less than two blocks from where President and Mrs. Obama will live after they leave the White House. (It isn’t clear whether the Trump-Kushners had bought it or will be renting from the buyer).

The neighborhood is called Kalorama, which got my attention.

 

2449 Tracy Place NW. Built in 1923 by Waddy Wood, who championed Colonial Revival designs over the Craftsman style. Walk score: 50 (mostly car dependent).

Word of the week: Gish Gallop

In debate strategy, there are assertions, counter-assertions, framing, reframing, rebuttals, and undermining. Then there’s the Gish Gallop, also known as “proof by verbosity,” “baffle them with bullshit,” or, latterly, the “Trump Tirade. “

This fallacious tactic seeks to drown an opponent “in a flood of individually weak arguments.” (In the case of Donald J. Trump, with outright lies.) The technique is named for Duane Gish (1921-2013), who managed, despite having earned a PhD in biochemistry from UC Berkeley, to define himself as a Young Earth creationist. (He was at one time the vice president of the Institute for Creation Research.) The American anthropologist Eugenie Scott, who was for many years the director of the National Center for Science Education, coined the term “Gish Gallop” in the 1990s to describe the “presentation of misconception after misconception” in public forums. (From 2011, here’s an example of a climate-science Gish Gallop.) Scott did not engage in unstructured public “debates” with creationists, preferring instead written debates that allow “the opportunity for documentation and references, impractical in oral debates.”