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On July 27, the 45th president of the United States took to Twitter, as he does, to attack Elijah Cummings, who has represented Maryland’s 7th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1996. The president called Rep. Cummings’s Baltimore district “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” He misspelled Cummings’s name “Cumming.” It was unclear whether he knows that a rat is a rodent, or whether he just likes to repeat himself alliteratively.
Rep. Elijah Cummings
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“Companies change their slogans and catchphrases all the time to keep themselves fresh in customers’ minds. But DiGiorno might be the only one that has kept the same catchphrase, but changed the implication.” (Eater)
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“Sometimes I look at license plates for new prefix ideas. Sometimes I borrow from the names of cats or dogs.” How two women in Chicago create all those names for generic prescription drugs. (David Lazarus for Los Angeles Times; via MJF)*
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How many people do you need to form a “squad”? If you’re playing in the Cricket World Cup, 15 (11 of whom will be on the field at any time). If you’re the World Cup champion U.S. women’s national soccer team, 23 in all.
If you’re members of the U.S. House of Representatives, all you need are four: Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
“The Squad” T-shirt, $22.99 on Etsy (shipping included).
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My July column for the Visual Thesaurus is a review of Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, by Gretchen McCullough, resident linguist at Wired (among her many other distinctions). If you’ve ever wondered how a period (full stop) can be passive-aggressive, or how LOL evolved into lol, or how to express ~sarcasm~ online, you will hecking* enjoy this book. I certainly did.
There’s no paywall on this column, so read and share freely! And preorder the book—authors love preorders—before its publication date, July 23.
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* Hecking comes from an internet meme called Snek. Read the book to learn more.
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So many candidates! Twenty-five at last count, although by the time I click “publish,” six or seven of them may have thrown in the towel. (Rep. Eric Swalwell, who took part in the first round of televised debates, in June, dropped out earlier this week. His slogan was “Go Big. Be Bold. Do Good,” but three short verbs didn’t sufficiently activate his supporters.)
More than two dozen candidates, but few signs of originality in their messaging. Nine candidates—Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Tulsi Gabbard, Wayne Messam, Joe Sestak, and Tom Steyer—use only their first names in their logos, a trend that goes back as far as 1948’s “Give ’Em Hell, Harry” and 1952’s “I Like Ike,” but which got a big boost in 2016, with “Jeb!,” “Hillary” and “Bernie” as first-name-basis contenders.
Beyond that major theme, I see a bunch of other trends. Here are my evaluations and letter grades for the 2020 Democratic slogans; you can see all of them, organized alphabetically by candidate name, with their respective logos, on Ballotpedia, the nonprofit “digital encyclopedia of American politics and elections.”
Continue reading "Rating the Democratic candidates’ slogans" »
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“If you believe, wherever you are, clap your hands, and she’ll hear you. Clap! Clap! Don’t let Tink die! Clap!”
If you’ve seen any version of Peter Pan, or read the original J.M. Barrie book, you know that this exhortation yields a happy ending. Fervent belief, accompanied by vigorous clapping, brings a dying fairy called Tinker Bell back to life.
The idea that “enough belief in something will cause things to happen,” as TV Tropes puts it, has been enshrined in the social sciences as the Tinkerbell effect.
Disneyfied Tinker Bell, via Disneyclips. In stage productions of Peter Pan, Tinker Bell is represented by a darting light and a tinkling bell. The character’s name is spelled with two words, Tinker Bell: “Tinker” because she has tinkering skills, such as mending pots and pans; and “Bell” because of the sound of her speech, understandable only to other fairies.
The term was coined by a Swarthmore College psychology professor, Frank H. Durgin, in a 2002 paper about “the illusory perception of coherent motion in dynamic noise,” published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. He titled the paper “The Tinkerbell Effect,” and gave this explanation:
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Here in the U.S. we’re headed into a long holiday weekend—a friend of mine calls it Interdependence Day, which I like a lot. If your dog hates fireworks and you’re not thrilled with the tinpot-dictator-y look of tanks at the Lincoln Memorial, perhaps you’ll enjoy spending some of your leisure time reading my newest post on Medium. It’s about how I’ve always hated my own name, and how that antipathy led to a career creating names for companies and products. It’s also a love letter to a dictionary.
Read My Name and I: A Hate/Love Story.
Just say no to names with bad associations.
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“Buenas noches,” said Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
“Cada voz debemos escuchar,” said Beto O’Rourke, the former Texas congressman.
“La situación ahora es inaceptable,” said Cory Booker, a U.S. senator from New Jersey.
“Me llamo Julián Castro, y estoy postulando por presidente de los Estados Unidos,” said the former secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
Via Politico
The four candidates were hablando español* during the first round of the Democratic primary debates, on June 26 and 27. The question afterward: Were they demonstrating “how down they are with Hispanic and Latinx voters” (the fastest-growing segment of the American electorate), as NPR’s Code Switch put it, or were they hispandering?
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