Fritinancy

Word of the week: Floint

Whenever a word appears for the first time in the New York Times, a bot called @NYT_first_said auto-tweets it. (The name for such an occurrence is hapax legomenon, Greek for “something said only once.”) Then another bot, @NYT_said_where, follows up with a contextual link.

On April 24, @NYT_first_said tweeted this:

floint

— New New York Times (@NYT_first_said) April 24, 2019

I rarely catch these first occurrences in the wild, but by sheer luck I too had spotted floint. It appeared in a story, published in the Thursday Styles section of the print newspaper, about Carol Spencer, the 86-year-old designer who worked for Mattel from 1963 to 1998 and created many of the most memorable wardrobe items worn by fashion dolls Barbie, Skipper, Ken, and the rest of the posse. Spencer recently published a book, Dressing Barbie, about her career.

April linkfest

The 2019 Deadspin Name of the Year is down to the Elite Eight. Vote for your favorites in a field that includes Pope Thrower, Pretzel Monteclaro, and Jizyah Shorts. Yes, they’re all real names. (Deadspin) For background, see my 2018 Visual Thesaurus column about the tournament.

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How great writing begins: an analysis of the opening paragraphs of “the 94 most compelling articles” in The Atlantic, Fast Company, and the New York Times op-ed section. (Better Humans)

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In English, it’s “Once upon a time.” How do other cultures and languages begin their classic tales? (Chitra Soundar)

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Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana—the youngest and gayest candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination (so far)—also has the coolest campaign logos. (Note: Not a political endorsement.) (Brand New)

How 137 Films got its name

Last Sunday, at the San Francisco International Film Festival, I saw the world premiere of a fascinating and disturbing documentary, We Believe in Dinosaurs, about the building of the Ark Encounter, a $102 million pseudoscientific tourist attraction in Williamstown, Kentucky. (You can read about the Encounter’s 2016 opening and about Ken Ham, the “creationist” zealot behind the endeavor, here.)

The film doesn’t yet have a distributor, so I can’t tell you where it will play next. What I can tell you is the story of 137 Films, the production company that made We Believe in Dinosaurs. It’s one of the best how-they-got-that-name stories I’ve read, and certainly one of the best numeral-as-name stories.

137 Films logo

 

Kosher (for Passover) cannabis

Years ago, long before California legalized cannabis, I knew a pair of Jewish Deadheads whose Passover table always included “sweet herb” (wink, wink) along with the traditional bitter herb. (Or so they said. They never invited me to their seder.) I’ve lost touch with them, but if they’re still observing the ritual, I bet they’re plotzing over this year’s convergence of 4/20—the equivalent of St. Cannabis’ Day—and the first day of Passover. It’s like Thanksgivukkah, but for stoners. Call it Weed-Over, if you must. (The coinage belongs to Arielle Kaplan, a writer for Alma, the new-ish Jewish publication “for ladies with chutzpah.”)

So: How best to honor the occasion? Is cannabis kosher? Is cannabis kosher for Passover? Are we going to be asking 420 questions instead of the traditional four?

To the last question I say: Isn’t the seder already punishingly long? As for the others, here’s what I’ve dug up.

New writing for Medium and the Visual Thesaurus

Looking for naming advice? Read my latest post on Medium, “How journalism can help you create a name.” (Free, but clicking on the clapping-hands icon may someday result in my earning a few pennies.)

Curious about the origins of the “__ Nation” formula—Live Nation, Pantsuit Nation, Side Hustle Nation? I dig deep (and explore the side routes of national and nationalism) in my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, “A Nation of ‘Nations‘.” Full access is restricted to subscribers; here’s an excerpt:

The political sense of nation—an organized community sharing a defined territory and government—emerged around 1400 and gradually predominated, although the earlier meaning survives in the use, since the 1640s, of nation to describe indigenous American peoples: Choctaw Nation, Cherokee Nation. (The specifically Canadian “First Nations” began to be used in the 1970s; it applies to indigenous peoples south of the Arctic Circle and replaces “Indian,” which is both inaccurate and, according to some people, offensive.) 

Nation didn’t turn into the adjective national until the 1590s (“the nationall assemblie”); the noun sense of national—a citizen or subject of a specified state—emerged in the mid-19th century. (Then there’s the Grand National, which is a horse race if you’re English, Irish, or Scottish, and a rodeo if you’re Californian.) Nationalism, defined as “advocacy or support of the interests of one’s own nation, usually to the detriment or exclusion of any other nation’s interests”) is a little older: The OED’s earliest citation is from 1798. An 1844 citation from Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country declares that “Nationalism is another word for egotism.”

Z Nation is an American action/horror/comedy-drama/post-apocalyptic television series that aired from 2014 to 2018 on the SyFy network. The Z stands for “zombie.”

The unfamiliarity principle

Here’s something do-it-yourselfers often overlook when they’re struggling to name a product or company: the importance of making something familiar seem unfamiliar or making something unfamiliar seem familiar.

I’ve written about branding’s unfamiliarity principle in a new story for Medium. You can bypass the paywall to read it by clicking this link.

I’m experimenting with Medium—an elegantly designed, ad-free platform for writers—as a way to reach a wider audience and (maybe, someday) earn a little money from my writing. The payout depends on subscribing members reading and “applauding” my work (note the little clapping-hands icon), so if you like what you see, please subscribe.

My other Medium stories:

Need an Inspiring Brand Name? Look Outside

Hanging Out with the Godless

Word of the week: Human cloud

I’ve known, and written about, HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), Turkers (people who perform HITs), the sharing economy (exemplified by Uber and Airbnb), and the precariat (“people whose lives are precarious because they have little or no job security”) for years now. What I hadn’t known was the word that’s often used to describe workers in the “global gig economy”: the human cloud.

 

Part-time data entry, done by residents of places such as Kibera, Kenya, is “arguably the fastest-growing part of the global gig economy, known as the human cloud.” Source

Hold the burger

The headline on this April 4 Guardian story is a little premature.

 

“‘Veggie discs’ to replace veggie burgers”? Not so fast.

 

The “crackdown”—a ban on producers of vegetarian food using nomenclature usually deployed to describe meat, such as “burger,” “steak,” and “sausage”—was in fact passed by the EU parliament’s agriculture committee, but to become law it must be approved the full parliament and then by member states and the European commission. The push “to protect meat-related terms and names ‘exclusively for edible parts of the animals’” has been opposed by some vegetarian-leaning NGOs, including Greenpeace and Birdlife.

“Veggie disc,” noted the Guardian with a soupçon of dry wit, “has emerged as one possible, yet possibly unpalatable, new name for plant-based burgers.”

Still, it’s worth taking a look at the way we talk about and brand plant-based substitutes for meat, which are becoming an increasingly mainstream part of North American and European diets.

Word of the week: Hoax

Welcome to April Fools’ Day, which is what every day has felt like, to me at least, for the last few years. Every day another bit of trumpery (a word related etymologically to French tromper, to deceive). Every day another affront to denizens of the reality-based community, as Karl Rove infamously put it back in 2004.

It’s a good day, as days go, to consider hoax, a word that, appropriately enough, has no clear origins. It was documented first as a verb, in 1796, in Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (“to deceive or take in by inducing to believe an amusing or mischievous fabrication or fiction; to play upon the credulity of”), and a decade later as a noun, in the London publication Sporting Magazine (“a humorous or mischievous deception, usually taking the form of a fabrication of something fictitious or erroneous, told in such a manner as to impose upon the credulity of the victim”). The OED says hoax is “supposed to be a contraction of hocus,” which was a contraction of hocus-pocus, a mock-Latin phrase that originally referred to “a conjuror or juggler.” (Hocus is also partially responsible for hokey, which I wrote about in 2015.)