Fritinancy

Name in the news: Cybertruck

On November 21, eleven days before Cyber Monday, Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk introduced his company’s newest vehicle: a pickup truck with an otherworldly, polygonal “exoskeleton”—what the rest of the autosphere calls a chassis—and a crashingly pedestrian name: Cybertruck.

 

Yes, that is the actual logo. On Twitter, Christian Wilkie said the Cybertruck wordmark “could only be improved with the ‘3000’ suffix.”

 

A family resemblance? {The Cyberpunk 2077 game will be released in April 2020. Cyberpunk the sci-fi subgenre, which emerged in the early 1980s, is typified, according to the OED, “by a bleak, high-tech setting in which a lawless subculture exists within an oppressive society dominated by computer technology.”)

 

If you’ve followed the Tesla news even a little, you’ve heard of the failed test of the vehicle’s windows, which cracked when metal balls were hurled at them. The Cybertruck name is a fiasco of a different order: a failure of imagination; a surrender to the prosaic where a flight of invention was called for.

Word of the week: Garble

I’d read and enjoyed Deborah Blum’s 2010 book, The Poisoner’s Handbook, about the birth of forensic medicine in the early 20th century, so I expected to be similarly educated and entertained by The Poison Squad (2018), about the fight for safe food in the US that led to the passage in 1906 of the Food and Drug Act. What I hadn’t expected was that I’d learn a completely new context and surprising etymology for a familiar word.

November linkfest

The wildfires have barely been extinguished here in California, but it’s already word-of-the-year season across the pond, where three prominent dictionaries chose words or phrases with a common theme: climate change, or preventing it. Cambridge Dictionary went first, with upcycling: “the activity of making new furniture, objects, etc. out of old or used things or waste material.” Collins Dictionary chose climate strike: “a protest demanding action on climate change.” And Oxford Dictionaries picked climate emergency from an all-environmental shortlist that included “climate action,” “climate denial,” “eco-anxiety,” “extinction” and “flight shame.”

Let the record show that lexicographer Jane Solomon, recently of Dictionary.com, spotted the trend back in September.

So @OxfordWords picked ‘climate emergency’ for their 2019 Word of the year. And @CollinsDict picked ‘climate strike.’

In September I suggested ‘climate crisis.’

Clearly lexicographers are all on the same page about this. https://t.co/75klqC7c6e

— 〰️Jane Solomon〰️ (@janesolomon) November 20, 2019

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Word of the week: Pizzazz

The NBCNews.com headline over Jonathan Allen’s story kvetched about the lack of “drama” on the first day of the impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives, but the person in charge of the Twitter account chose a more, well, pizzazz-y synonym for “drama.”

Analysis: The first two witnesses called Wednesday testified to President Trump's scheme, but lacked the pizzazz necessary to capture public attention. https://t.co/1UfkaeZ3I4

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 14, 2019

Struggling with a book title? I'm here to help.

Maybe you’ve accepted the NaNoWriMo challenge: Write 50,000 words of a new novel during the month of November. Maybe you’re working on an essay collection, a biography, or a book-length work of journalism.

Whatever your project, at some point you’ll need a title. Selecting the right one can seem daunting until you understand an important truth: You don’t need to be creative or even original. You need to follow a formula with proven success.

In my latest essay for Medium, “Book Titles Made Easy(ish),” I present ten popular formulas for book titles, from the punchy single word (Blink, Grunt, Cod) to the inquisitive journalistic style (Where the Crawdads Sing, Why We Dream, When You Are Engulfed in Flames). I also provide exercises for experimenting with each formula.

What’s the formula for Carl Zimmer’s She Has Her Mother’s Laugh? Read the post to find out.

 

 

Need more help? I offer short phone consultations. For advice on character names, see my recent Visual Thesaurus column, “How to Name Your Characters.”

 

Word of the week: H-index

The new PBS Frontline documentary, In the Age of AI, is a solid and sometimes scary overview of the near future of self-driving vehicles, facial-recognition technology, cancer detection, and what the researcher and author Shoshana Zuboff calls “the age of surveillance capitalism.” In other words, a little bit optimistic but mostly alarming. (Full transcript here.)

Early on, the program introduces us to Yoshua Bengio, an artificial-intelligence researcher at the University of Montreal. I was curious about his work, so I looked him up online. One entry in his bio was unfamiliar to me: “h-index.” It clearly was something positive, or it wouldn’t be included. But what does it mean?

 

 

Here’s what I learned:

On the Visual Thesaurus: Character names

You may know me as a developer of company and product names, but I’m also interested in the whole spectrum of naming. In my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus—timed to coincide with National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo—I look at fictional character names and offer some tips for creating memorable ones. I’m grateful to the many successful authors—including Elizabeth McCracken, Andrew Sean Greer, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and Cathleen Schine—who generously shared their tips and insights with me. The column isn’t paywalled this month, so read (and share) freely!

Blog bonus #1: In the column I include a brief quote from a chapter on literary names in The Language of Names, the 1997 book by Anne Bernays and Justin Kaplan that’s occupied my reference shelf for more than a decade. Here’s a bit more from that chapter:

When the paperback edition of [Anne] Bernays’s first novel, Short Pleasures, was published in 1963, she was sued for a million dollars by a man who had the same unusual surname as one of her characters, a predatory, bisexual summer-theater director. The plaintiff was someone she had never met or heard of.

She discovered, too late, that there were only five people in the Manhattan telephone directory with that name, and they were all related to one another. It cost her thousands simply to defend the suit, which was eventually settled out of court.

Blog bonus #2: Want more naming suggestions, or feedback on your own characters’ names? Schedule a call with me on Clarity.fm. P.S. I also consult on book titles.

Word of the week: Boo

Halloween is over, but echoes of boo are still reverberating throughout the land, most notably when the current occupant of the White House ventures out of his safe spaces and into the unfiltered public domain. He was greeted with loud boos and chants of “lock him up” at Nationals Park in Washington during Game 5 of the World Series on October 27.

Meanwhile chants of “boos” & “lock him up” rang out when Trump was shown on the Jumbotron at tonight’s World Series game. Signs that read “Veterans for Impeachment” and “Impeach Trump” were also hung around the stadium by fans pic.twitter.com/Pzjjs4AI4t

— HOT 97 (@HOT97) October 28, 2019

 

And there were more boos at what would seem to have been an even friendlier milieu: an Ultimate Fighting Championship match in Madison Square Garden on November 2.

Trump was loudly booed during his arrival to this UFC fight — the second sports arena to boo him this week pic.twitter.com/Num0v1kiOP

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) November 3, 2019

As historian Kevin Kruse pointed out on Twitter, there is robust precedent for president-booing at sporting events.

And other presidents have been booed at baseball games, in case everyone suddenly forgot.

If I'm remembering correctly, Obama was booed at the All-Star Game in 2009, GWBush was booed at a Nationals game in 2008, and GHWBush was famously booed at the 1992 All-Star Game: pic.twitter.com/spZjEj1vqh

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) October 28, 2019

But enough celebration of our right to free and loud expression. What about that word boo? How did it come to signify disapproval (verb), surprise (interjection), and affection (noun) – and much more?