Fritinancy

It’s not fake anything

I was recently interviewed about food naming for The Allusionist, the language podcast conceived and hosted by Helen Zaltzman.* Helen wanted my take on plant-based alternatives to animal-based foods, an industry that’s seen a lot of growth lately, and also a fair amount of pushback from Big Carnivore. (See the final item in my July Linkfest for a news story about Mississippi banning the use of “burger” and “hot dog” in the names of vegan substitutes. Across the Atlantic, the EU has also attempted to restrict the use of meat-associated words for vegetarian substitutes.)

The BLUF: Names of vegan foodstuffs are a lot less imaginative than the ingredients and technology that go into producing them, and generally rely on familiar terms from the world of animal protein.

The names fall into four broad categories:

Word of the week: Epistocracy

Aristocracy, as you know, is government by the “best” or the “noblest” citizens. Kakistocracy is the opposite: government by the worst (or, more literally, the shittiest). Idiocracy was invented by director Mike Judge to serve as the title and theme of his 2006 dystopian comedy, set in the year 2505, when a professional wrestler and porn star occupies the White House. (In what passes for the real world, it took only 10 years for a WWE Hall of Famer and porn-star diddler to win the presidency; in a 2017 interview, Judge admitted that in the age of Trump, his film now seems “optimistic.”)

Until now, I hadn’t noticed the idiotic phonetic explainer. Intentional, I hope.

 

And epistocracy, our word of the week? It’s a recent coinage, created about 16 years ago by Brown University political philosophy professor David Estlund, that means “government by the knowledgeable.” The episto- part is related to other words about knowledge, including epistemology (the study of knowledge systems) and epistemic closure (an information cocoon). (I wrote about epistemic closure in 2012.)

August linkfest

The Ohio State University definitely wants you to associate it with the definite article: The institution has applied for trademark protection for THE for use on shirts and hats. (h/t Alex Johnson)

Don’t look so surprised, says trademark lawyer Ed Timberlake.

In case anybody's curious:

THE

is already a registered trademark
(for cell phone battery chargers)https://t.co/ZFrC8ZUuEN#trademarks pic.twitter.com/NpmUxrq7pW

— Trademarks Are Magic (@TimberlakeLaw) August 14, 2019

Meanwhile, the University OF Michigan would also like a word. 

™ pic.twitter.com/bx2vTBUtst

— University of Michigan (@UMich) August 14, 2019

*

On the Visual Thesaurus: The character of our content

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at content, a ubiquitous word with a long history and some specific contemporary senses.

Full access is restricted to subscribers; here’s an excerpt:

What are you reading right here, right now? A sentence? A paragraph? An article? Yes, yes, and yes, but think more globally and generally. In the universe of 21st-century media and marketing, these words on this website, and the image that accompanies them, are content.

And not only here on the Visual Thesaurus: content is all around. As the old dishwashing-liquid ad used to tell us, we’re soaking in it. Blog posts are content. YouTube videos are content. For the cookware retailer Williams-Sonoma, recipes are content. For General Electric and thousands of other companies, Instagram posts are content. White papers, graphs, podcasts, webinars, e-books: all content.

Content is produced by content creators and content providers, some of whom toil in content farms or content factories. It's distributed through content management systems and shaped by content strategists who may report to a chief content officer for whom content marketing is — as the business author Seth Godin put it in 2008 — “the only marketing that’s left.”

Read the rest of “The Character of Our Content.”

Word of the week: Farmageddon

It’s a book! It’s a movie! It’s a brewery! (Two breweries, actually.) It’s an impending economic catastrophe, or maybe two catastrophes!

I spotted the economic-disaster farmageddon, a portmanteau of farm and Armageddon, in a tweet-reply to short-term Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci.

What gain? He's s failure by virtually all standards. We're in a manufacturing recession; and tariff infuced Farmageddon

— Jossy (@Unitedshashe) August 12, 2019

 

Pretty big little tiny lying things

The news that Tiny Pretty Things, the 2016 YA novel about ballet students by Sona Charaipotra and Dhonielle Clayton, is being made into a 10-episode Netflix series sent me into a free-association reverie.

“Black Swan meets Pretty Little Liars.” – Amazon. The sequel (2017) is titled Shiny Broken Pieces.

Words of the week: Gundamentalist, ammosexual

Gilroy. El Paso. Dayton.

In these three American cities, at least 32 children and adults were killed by three shooters in a single week, 23 of them within just 13 hours over the weekend of August 3 and 4. While attending a garlic festival. While shopping at Walmart. While socializing in a popular entertainment district.

 

The Onion has run this headline and story at least nine times.

 

I’m exhausted and angry—furious, actually—and can’t think of anything original to say about my compatriots’ sick obsession with firearms. So I’ll refer you to a couple of posts from the Fritinancy archives.