This month’s book recommendation is Uncanny Valley: A Memoir, by Anna Wiener, who, as a twenty-something in 2012, left a low-paying publishing job in New York to work in the world of San Francisco tech startups. Until she moved across the country, she writes, it had never occurred to her “that I might someday become one of the people behind the internet, because I had never considered that there were people behind the internet at all.”She goes to work for company founders even younger than she is, managing millions of dollars of seed money and wearing “startup twinsets, branded hoodies unzipped to reveal T-shirts with the same logo.” Wiener’s voice is original and unforgettable: a mixture of skepticism and gullibility, of clarity and befuddlement. San Francisco is “an underdog city struggling to absorb an influx of alphas.” (Perfect.) San Franciscans, “living in neighborhoods where every other storefront had a pun in its name, were corny.” (True, alas.) Notably, Wiener declines to identify by name any of the companies she works for or near: they are, instead, “the social network everybody hated,” “an app for coupon-clipping,” “the online superstore” with the “chelonian” founder (a word I had to look up).
For more on the “uncanny valley” of the title—in tech, it refers to the dropoff in humans’ acceptance of robots when those creations’ appearance becomes eerily lifelike; in Wiener’s book, it also refers to Silicon Valley—see my December 2009 post.
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Molly Young builds on Uncanny Language to talk about corporate “garbage language”: “Usage peeves are always arbitrary and often depend as much on who is saying something as on what is being said. When [a manager] spoke about ‘business-critical asks’ and ‘high-level integrated decks,’ I heard ‘I am using meaningless words and forcing you to act like you understand them.’ When an intern said the same thing, I heard someone heroically struggling to communicate in the local dialect. I hate certain words partly because of the people who use them; I can’t help but equate linguistic misdemeanors with crimes of the soul.” (Vulture)
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I talked to Time reporter Katy Steinmetz about all those plus symbols in company names.
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A pharmacologist asks: Would replacing the word “painkiller” with “pain reliever” reduce patients’ expectations of opioids—and perhaps reduce the overuse crisis? (British Medical Journal; via Janet Byron Anderson)
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Be Best: Airport Mani-Pedi Edition pic.twitter.com/VytB8GDTih
— Christopher Schelling (@CRSRipley) February 17, 2020
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A new feature on the Wordnik blog, “Five words from ___,” by founder Erin McKean, highlights “interesting words from interesting books.” January’s post was about The Peripheral, by William Gibson (androgenic, tetrachromat, and more); February’s is about Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson (cryptoendolith, oneiric, and more).
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Amazon Marketplace is awash in “pseudo-brands,” John Herrman writes in the New York Times: weirdly spelled, meaning-free, often unpronounceable brands like UGBDER, MARSHEEPY, and SHSFTD that are launched by Chinese vendors uninterested in brand narrative. What they are interested in is US trademark registrations, which Amazon has required since 2017—and the weird spellings are likely to be more protectable than recognizable English words. The names are “more trademark than brand, and more Amazon than both.”
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Do you know how old the “IDK” initialism for “I don’t know” is? A lot older than you probably think: try World War I. (Task & Purpose, via Jared Keller, via Kory Stamper)
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So you want to be a professional name developer? My friends at Catchword Branding have some advice for you.
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“What am I—chopped liver?” is a customary idiom that expresses a grievance. So what did billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg mean during the February 19 Las Vegas debate when he grumbled, “What am I—chicken liver?” (Ben Zimmer for Politico)
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