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Maybe it’s because I was reading The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis’s 2018 book about how the current administration in Washington is “government led by the uninterested,” as NPR put it, but my first response to the announcement last week of the Fifth City makeup brand was: What are the first, second, third, and fourth cities?
It could have been worse: They could have called it Fifth Place.
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Last week’s headlines were full of bovine references. I’m not talking about the usual bull: This was all about a fake cow with hundreds of thousands of (presumably) real Twitter followers—a cowfluencer, you might say—that’s being sued by a sitting U.S. congressman.
The cow in question (1,200 followers on March 18, 634,000 followers on March 24):
The congressman (404,000 followers):
Yes, Devin Nunes of California’s Central Valley, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, is suing Twitter over a parody account that tweets hashtags like #TheMooovement and #ProtectTheHerd and mocks the “udderly worthless” congressman, who owns a dairy farm not in his home county, as he often boasts, but in far-off Iowa. Nunes is also suing a parody account called Devin Nunes’ Mom and a couple of non-anonymous accounts, all of which he claims “repeatedly tweeted and retweeted abusive and hateful content” about him. He’s asking for $250 million in compensatory damages and $350,000 in punitive damages. Because Nunes is a public figure, the suits have little chance of succeeding, but they’ll keep a herd of lawyers busy for a while.
Headline writers had a field day—or was it a pasture day?—with cow-related headlines: “How Now, Defamatory Cow?”, “Jimmy Kimmel Milks Devin Nunes’ Cow for Late-Night Comedy,” “Devin Nunes Is Having a Cow.” (More about “how now” and “have a cow” in a bit.) At a “release the Trump-Russia report” demonstration in Washington Saturday evening, some people in the crowd wore cow costumes.
Outside the White House tonight: pic.twitter.com/h6i5oq1PIe
— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) March 23, 2019
But enough about current events. My own interest is in the little word at the center of the beef: cow.
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NASA has renamed a facility in West Virginia after Katherine Johnson, the mathematician whose story was told in the book and and subsequent film Hidden Figures. Johnson, who was born in West Virginia, will turn 101 in August.
Katherine Johnson. Source
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You can help name some newly discovered moons of Jupiter, but only you follow some restrictive rules. The name “must be 16 characters or fewer, preferably one word. It can’t be offensive, too commercial, or closely tied to any political, military or religious activities of the past 100 years.” And that’s just the beginning. (Hat tip: Chris Labarthe.)
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My March column for the Visual Thesaurus is something a little different: a review of Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, by Benjamin Dreyer. Dreyer is managing editor and copy chief at Random House, and a witty dispenser of advice and stories. (If you’re not following him on Twitter, you should be.) The book was a joy to read and great fun to review. Good news for all my stingy thrifty readers: There’s no paywall on this column, so dive right in (and share).
The author and the authored
Here’s an excerpt:
Dreyer's English is several things at once: a description and dissection of the art of copyediting, a set of tips and guidelines, and a memoir of a working life spent with some of the best writers of our era (to name a few: Elizabeth Strout, Michael Chabon, E.L. Doctorow, and, posthumously, Shirley Jackson). It’s the tips and guidelines that I’m guessing most readers will zoom in on, because who among us, no matter how experienced or widely published, doesn’t feel just a little bit uncertain about comma placement and possessive apostrophes and the correct spelling of “leprechaun”?
Benjamin Dreyer is happy to oblige. He’s firm about the series or Oxford comma (not “serial,” comma, he writes, because “for me ‘serial’ evokes ‘killer’”) — the second comma in “lettuce, turnips, and peas”: “Whatever you want to call it: Use it. I don't want to belabor the point; neither am I willing to negotiate it.” All well and good for him, because, as he tells us, the use of the series comma is the only hard-and-fast style rule applied to all Random House books. If you’re a newspaper copy editor in the United States, though, you’ll follow a different standard: Associated Press style, which frowns on series commas. (In an interview, Dreyer admitted that until a few years ago he hadn’t heard of AP style. Copyediting is a multifarious profession.)
Read the rest of “Dreyer’s English”: An Utterly Readable Style Guide.
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On March 15, a gunman killed at least 50 people and injured another 50 as they gathered in two Christchurch mosques. Minutes before the attacks, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern had been emailed a 74-page document, variously called a “manifesto” and a “screed,” purported to have been written by the gunman. In it, the man – a 28-year-old Australian living in New Zealand – denounced immigrants as “invaders.”
Hours later, Donald Trump held a ceremony at the White House to mark the first veto of his presidential term, overriding the congressional block of the “national emergency” he had declared on the southern border of the U.S. During the event, he explained why he felt the veto was necessary, using language strikingly similar to that of the Christchurch assassin: “People hate the word ‘invasion,’ but that’s what it is,” he said, referring to migrants from Central America and Mexico seeking to come to the United States.
I still can't get over the fact that the Christchurch killer's manifesto plainly used the term "invaders" and hours later the President of the United States said "people hate the word ‘invasion,’ but that’s what it is" when talking about the US border.
— digby (@digby56) March 16, 2019
It's stunning.
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Women’s-wear retailer Anthropologie is launching a new “inclusively sized” (women’s 16 to 26) collection today. The collection’s name is clear, simple, and elegant: APlus.
Anthropologie’s last foray into fashion sub-branding was the misbegotten BHLDN, which I wrote about in 2011. I am happy to report that APlus is a vast improvement: The capital A evokes the parent brand, and the “plus” in this context is positive rather than pejorative. My favorite label for this category remains Alexander McCall Smith’s “traditionally sized,” but APlus gets a high grade from me, too.
(For more on the use of “plus” in retail – you may be interested to know that at one time in U.S. history the category was called “stout” – see my 2015 post “Plus Is Equal.”)
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I’m reading Rose George’s new book, Nine Pints: A Journey through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood, which is written in an appealingly conversational style and which pumps out a steady flow of startling and irresistible stories about transfusion, menstruation, hemophilia, and blood-borne disease. I’m an every-eight-weeks blood donor myself (O-positive, CMV-negative), so I was riveted by George’s accounts of whole-blood and plasma donation. For sheer eye-widening, jaw-dropping amazingness, though, it’s hard to top Chapter 2: “That Most Singular and Valuable Reptile,” which is all about leeches.
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A nonprofit company founded in January 2018 by three billionaire business titans – Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase) – and headed by a non-billionaire-but-not-doing-badly-at-all celebrity doctor, Atul Gawande, yesterday announced its name: Haven.
Connecting the dots?
Haven is being called a healthcare venture, but it’s not a care provider. It’s neither a hospital nor a clinic. Nor is it an insurance company. For now, it will be headquartered in Boston (a New York office is in the works) and serve only the employees of the three founders’ companies.
So what is it?
Here’s what Gawande, a practicing surgeon who is also the author of Being Mortal and a regular New Yorker contributor, says on the Haven website:
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“The religion of workism is making Americans miserable,” writes Derek Thompson in The Atlantic, coining a word and then defining it as “the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.”
Workism is not to be confused with an older coinage, workerism, “a political theory that emphasizes the importance of, or glorifies, the working class.” (Workerism first appeared in English in the 1950s, following parallel coinages in French and Italian.) Workism, by contrast, started with “the moneyed elite but,” Thompson writes, “the ethos is spreading—across gender and age”:
Even as Americans worship workism, its leaders consecrate it from the marble daises of Congress and enshrine it in law. Most advanced countries give new parents paid leave; but the United States guarantees no such thing. Many advanced countries ease the burden of parenthood with national policies; but U.S. public spending on child care and early education is near the bottom of international rankings. In most advanced countries, citizens are guaranteed access to health care by their government; but the majority of insured Americans get health care through—where else?—their workplace.
“Workers of the World Unite!” (1943)
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(Part of my Naming 101 series.)
A couple of years ago I published a post about naming objectives: what a name should or must communicate. Naming objectives are a key element of your written naming brief, and one of the foundations on which names are developed.
There’s another important foundation: naming criteria.* If objectives are about meaning, criteria are about everything else that goes into a name: spelling, sound, legal requirements, web addresses.
Here’s a checklist for your own naming criteria:
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