Fritinancy

Word of the week: Equisapien

Sorry to Bother You, now in theaters, was filmed in Oakland, California, where I live, with lots of recognizable landmarks in the background. But its characters are citizens of at least one alternate realm as well. The film, written and directed by activist-musician Boots Riley, begins as a workplace comedy set in a grim telemarketing firm – the film’s title comes from the script that our hero, Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield), must deliver – and quickly takes some surreal hairpin turns.

Lakeith Stanfield (left) and Armie Hammer in Sorry to Bother You

 

We end up in the offices of the ironically named WorryFree company, whose CEO, the hyper-libertarian Steve Lift (a composite of Steve Jobs and Lyft?), makes Cassius (also known as “Cash,” in case you didn’t catch on immediately) a Faustian offer he ultimately can’t refuse: $100 million in exchange for transforming – just for five years, you understand – into a bipedal horse-human hybrid. In the lingo of the film: an equisapien. It’s a word that, as far as I can tell, Riley invented for the film.*

I couldn’t find any images of Sorry to Bother You’s equisapiens, so here’s BoJack Horseman. More about him in a bit.

On the Visual Thesaurus: That extra S

The inspiration for my July column for the Visual Thesaurus came from a magazine ad for a Schick razor.

 

“Shave forwards and backwards”

 

When I worked as a copyeditor, I was trained to lop off the s at the end of words like forward and backward. It’s what American editors do (but not our British counterparts, who tend to keep the s at the end of all those directional -ward words). Yet here was an ad in an American magazine for an American brand, and here were forwards and backwards. Was this a new trend?

Word of the week: Quisling

After important events, people often rush to look up unfamiliar words in news coverage. As a public service, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary Twitter account often publicizes the top searches. Last Monday, after the two-party summit and press conference in Helsinki, the top look-ups were, in order, treason, abase, traitor, collusion, and presser. The last word is jargon for “press conference”; the other words reflect opinions about the behavior of the American president toward his Russian counterpart.

If the list had been a little longer, another, more exotic word might have been included: quisling.

What do you call politicians who betray their country for transitory political and financial advantage by working for a corrupt regime?

You call them quislings. And neither history nor irate citizens treat them well.

— Bob Garfield (@Bobosphere) July 16, 2018

July linkfest

Last week wine distributor Lot18 and MGM – producer of the Hulu streaming series The Handmaid’s Tale – announced one of the more harebrained merchandising collabs of recent years: three wines named after the show’s most prominent characters, Offred, Ofglen, and Serena Joy. It went about as badly as you might expect, and within 24 hours the wines had disappeared from the Lot18 website.

 

Word of the week: Bawbag

Do insults sound funnier with a Scottish inflection? They do to many Americans, and even to Brits. As evidence, I direct you to Saturday’s events in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and the Trump golf properties in Turnberry and Aberdeenshire, where crowds turned out to mock and protest the visit of the American president, whose ties to Caledonia go beyond real estate: his mother was born in the Outer Hebrides and emigrated to the U.S. in 1930.

Some of the epithets sent Americans like me to our Scottish slang dictionaries. Bawbag, for example, has a familiar ring, but what does it really mean?

pic.twitter.com/xI2UshCEAU

— Empirecookie (@Empirecookie) July 14, 2018

 

Welcome to Scotland ya giant tangerine bawbag in a wig#TrumpProtest #ScotlandAgainstTrump #TrumpVisitsUK pic.twitter.com/akaxXb7tjl

— Bigkenny (@bigkenny1975) July 13, 2018

 

Name in the news: Azuma

The design-critique blog Brand New last week reviewed the new look of LNER, a British railway with a nearly century-old history under various names and owners. The most recent owner was Virgin, which operated the line as Virgin Trains East Coast (VTEC); the railway is now owned by the UK’s Department of Transport, and the LNER acronym – which stands for London North East Railroad – is appearing again for the first time since 1948.

The point of the review was, of course, the new LNER logo, but what caught my eye was a paragraph about three-quarters of the way down about the newest fleet of trains. Brand New says they’re “nicknamed” Azuma, but in fact Azuma is their official name.

 

Moreover, “Azuma” isn’t entirely new; the LNER/Azuma identity designer, Brand Cooke, tells us that it had been developed by VTEC – in 2016, according to a Wikipedia page – and was already familiar to passengers.

But what does this un-British-sounding name signify?

Word of the week: Shun

Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor who became famous as the defense counsel for Mike Tyson, O.J. Simpson, and other transgressing celebrities, has had his feelings hurt.

Although he claims to be a liberal Democrat, Dershowitz has publicly defended the civil liberties of Donald J. Trump, and because of that, he wrote in an opinion piece for The Hill published June 27, he is being “shunned” by some of his “old friends on Martha’s Vineyard,” where he spends his summers. He’s soldiering on, he told his readers, because “from a personal point of view, I could not care less* about being shunned by people whose views regarding dialogue I do not respect.” He did seem a tad preoccupied, though: He used some form of the word shun seven times in the essay. (He had not just an ax to grind but a book to hawk: The Case Against Impeaching Trump is being published today.)

 

Poster for The Shunning (2011). “Beautiful Katie Lapp has always felt something missing in her simple Amish existence -- until a mysterious ‘Englisher’ comes to Lancaster County looking for the baby girl she gave up for adoption 19 years ago.”

Word of the week: Deepfake

I regret that I learned about the fifth Global Fact Checking Summit – indeed, that I learned that there was such a thing as a global fact-checking summit – only after it took place last month. It sure would have been a good excuse to get myself to Rome. (What? There are other excuses?) The summit was sponsored by the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism school in St. Petersburg, Florida, and one of the panels I’d have liked to attend was devoted to “the coming fake videogeddon,” which will be brought to us (or not) by a technology known by the convenient nickname deepfake.

Deepfake videos are a concern for fact-checkers, but they're not as easy to create as the media let on. We should know — we tried to create one https://t.co/fEQEglSLoe #GlobalFactV

— IFCN (@factchecknet) June 20, 2018