Fritinancy

Girls, girls, girls!

A few years ago I noted the proliferation of girl-y book titles: Gone Girl, How to Build a Girl, Not That Kind of Girl, et al. (not to mention The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and her multiple avatars). The trend flattened out for a while, but lately it’s burst back, more robust than ever, in plural form. Where the earlier literary crop tended to favor self-reflective memoirs or novels with complicated protagonists, the new girls in town are historical and come in groups or crews; in one way or another, they made history en masse.

From just the last year and a half we have: 

Word of the week: Henchman

This was the front page of the New York Daily News on August 22, 2018:

 

“All the President’s Henchmen”

 

The line puts a spin on the title of the most famous book (and movie) to come out of the Watergate scandal, which broke 45 years ago this month.

 

All the President’s Men (1974)

 

And that title was inspired by Robert Penn Warren’s political novel All the King’s Men, which won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1947 and was made into a 1949 movie starring Broderick Crawford (which won the Best Picture Oscar) and a 2006 movie starring Sean Penn (which has a miserable 11% rating on Rotten Tomatoes).

All the King’s Men (1946)

August linkfest

Caterpillar, the heavy-equipment manufacturer, has had a registered trademark for CAT since 1949. Now it’s extending CAT to a footwear line. And not just steel-toed boots, either: these oxfords are women’s street fashion. (Duets Blog)

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The method Google Maps uses to name city neighborhoods “is often mysterious. The company declined to detail how some place names came about, though some appear to have resulted from mistakes by researchers, rebrandings by real estate agents — or just outright fiction.” (New York Times)

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Word of the week: Measles

On Friday, August 17, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported that a case of measles had been confirmed in “a non-resident tourist” who had visited six Santa Monica businesses within a three-day period earlier in the month. No details about the tourist were provided, but at least two of the restaurants he or she visited – Ivy’s at the Beach and Chez Jay – are considered “celebrity hangouts,” with pricey menus that have no options for children. That could suggest that the person is an adult, even though measles – a highly contagious viral infection spread by coughing or sneezing – is commonly considered a disease of childhood.

That is, it used to be a common disease of childhood, one that afflicted hundreds of thousands of children in the United States every year, and killed as many as 30 percent of them, usually from complications such as measles pneumonia. Measles can also cause blindness, mental retardation, and – in children born to mothers who contract the disease – permanent deafness. Overall, the risks are much greater for infected adults than for children, but it’s no picnic for kids, either. (Keep reading.)

On the Visual Thesaurus: Speaking blockchain

Mystified by bitcoin, satoshi, token, and cryptocurrency? Follow me into the blockchain mines to discover and polish some linguistic nuggets. I also look into one of the newer applications of blockchain: Voatz, which is offering voting by smartphone app to military servicemembers from West Virginia who are stationed overseas.

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus is restricted to subscribers for three months; here’s an excerpt.

Token. This very old word is used in three novel ways in the blockchain universe. In a general sense, it describes any cryptocurrency. (Bitcoin is a token; Ethereum is a token.) It may also describe a unit of value (“I have 100 Bitcoin tokens”). And it may, according to CryptocurrencyFacts.com, refer “to the fact that the creation, transfer, and storage of cryptocurrencies use strings of data called tokens.”

Token goes back to Old English, where it was spelled tacen and meant a sign, a symbol, or evidence; it could also mean “a characteristic mark.” (During the plague years of the Middle Ages, the purplish spots on an infected person’s body were called “God’s tokens.”) The idiom “by the same token” – meaning “in the same way,” “for the same reason” – first appeared in the mid-15th century. By the late 16th century, a token was a coin-like piece of stamped metal,” a meaning we still see in “subway token.”

Token became an adjective meaning “nominal” or “symbolic” in the early 20th century; token payment (of a small or nominal sum) was first recorded around 1933. This “minimal” sense carries over to tokenism, a word that appeared in the 1960s to describe the practice or policy of making only a minimal effort toward racial or ethnic integration.

Read the rest of the column.

For more on blockchain, see my November 2017 blog post.

Word of the week: Penrose tiling

San Francisco’s new Transbay Transit Center, a 1.2-million-square-foot hub for four Bay Area counties’ bus systems plus intercity Greyhound buses (and light rail, too, eventually), officially opened on August 11 to huge crowds. I skipped the festivities but heard rave reports from friends who'd gone, and so on August 13 I took an AC Transit bus from Oakland to San Francisco to see it for myself. I was not disappointed. Indeed, I was elated by the light-filled Grand Hall, the clear signage, the well-integrated public art, the pristine restrooms (every fixture is touchless), and the astonishing 5.4-acre rooftop garden, officially called Salesforce Park. (The software company bought the naming rights to the park and transit center in 2017; the adjacent 1,070-foot-tall Salesforce Tower, which opened earlier this year, is the tallest building in San Francisco.)

During the eight years of construction, I’d frequently driven beneath a filigreed white overpass that marked one of the center’s boundaries. While researching the completed center I learned that the filigree’s distinctive pattern has a name: Penrose tiling. And it’s not merely some designer’s fanciful grace note: it’s a mathematical marvel discovered in the 1970s and defended in a famous lawsuit.

 

Filigreed Penrose tiling outside the new transit center.

Word of the week: White-caller crime

The first incident that made national headlines occurred right here in Oakland, directly across Lake Merritt from where I live. On April 29, a white woman later identified as Jennifer Schulte made a 911 call to report that two African American men were barbecuing in an area not designated for charcoal grills. A woman named Michelle Snider filmed the call on her own phone; the video, posted to YouTube, has attracted more than three million views. Also viral: the “BBQ Becky” meme.*

“BBQ Becky” on her phone, via BBC.

 

How Havaianas got its name

The Brazilian footwear brand Havaianas – established in 1962 and sold in the U.S. since 2007 – is synonymous with colorful, rubber-soled flip-flops that sell for $24 and up. (A current model, studded with Swarovski crystals and suitable for wedding parties, will set you back $78 a pair.) I knew more or less how to pronounce the brand name – hah-vah-YA-nas – but I’m chagrined to say that until very recently I had confidently subscribed to a completely baseless story about its origins.

Havaianas “Brazil” from the current collection