Fritinancy

September linkfest

I’m about halfway through Virginia Postrel’s 2020 book The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, and the only reason I haven’t finished it is because I keep stopping to take notes, usually punctuated with exclamation marks. Postrel is a journalist and independent scholar who has written very good books about style and glamour; here she elegantly blends centuries of research and her own investigations (she learned to spin thread, spent a week at a traditional Indian dyeing school, and visited weavers of Guatemalan huipiles) into a highly readable and compelling history. The glossary alone is worth the investment in the book. As Postrel writes:

We drag our heirloom metaphors—“on tenterhooks,” “towheaded,” “frazzled”—with no idea that we’re talking about fabric and fibers. We repeat threadbare clichés: “whole cloth,” “hanging by a thread,” “dyed in the wool.” We catch airline shuttles, weave through traffic, follow comment threads. We speak of life spans and spinoffs and never wonder why drawing our fibers and twirling them into thread looms so large in our language.

Listen to an interview with Postrel on The Woven Road, a podcast about fiber arts.

Word of the week: Shacket

Fashion loves hybrids—jeans as tight as leggings! shorts that look like a skirt!—and fashionspeak loves hybrid descriptors, also known as portmanteaus. Thus: jeggings (first use in print: 2009) and skort (1951), not to mention athleisure (1995), flatforms (2010?), and cardi-coat (date unknown). (More fashmanteaus here.) This year we’ve been hearing a lot about the shacket (“the cutest way to stay comfortable in between seasons”—Stylecaster; “a must-have”--Narcity), a blend of shirt and jacket that sounds like it ought to describe a petite shack. It’s newly trendy but not really new at all.

Women’ shackets by Dickies and BB Dakota, Nordstrom, September 2021.

 

Women’ shackets by Dickies and BB Dakota, Nordstrom, September 2021.

 

Women’ shackets by Dickies and BB Dakota, Nordstrom, September 2021.

 

“Dear” in the headlights

Earlier this week I received a fundraising email whose salutation was “Look,” which seemed just a little … testy. But what do I know; I was schooled in the “Dear Sir or Madam” era. It made me wonder which forms of address are acceptable in 2021, which are a little edgy, and which are too quaint to be taken seriously.

“Dear ___,” it goes without saying, now falls into the third category—in correspondence, anyway. When traveling grammar advisor Ellen Jovin conducted a Twitter poll last year, the “Dear ___” salutation received zero votes. 

What percentage of your work emails begin with the word "Dear"?

— Ellen is at the Grammar Table (@GrammarTable) October 10, 2020

Click through to see additional polls.

In the titles of books, movies, and plays, though, “Dear” practically de rigueur. Maybe it’s ironic. Maybe it’s nostalgic. But there’s no denying it’s popular.

New on Medium: The valley of the S-word

It was big news in California and Nevada last week when the 72-year-old Lake Tahoe resort formerly known as the Squaw Valley Ski Resort announced its new name: Palisades Tahoe. This was no ordinary rebranding but an acknowledgment that the old name had become irreparably tainted by racist and sexist associations.

In my latest Medium story, “The Valley of the S-word,” I look at the history of squaw, from an innocuous Algonquian word for “woman” to an epithet so charged that the Palisades Tahoe website dares not write its name. Every reference is now expressed as “S*.”

Read, clap, and comment here. And consider becoming a paid Medium member to support writing like mine.

Blog extras!

1. According to H.L. Mencken’s The American Language, the hugely influential gossip columnist Walter Winchell (1897–1972) was responsible for popularizing the slangy usage of squaw to mean “wife.” Other Winchellisms include Reno-vated (divorced), profanuage (profane language), and infanticipate (to expect a baby; pregnant was for many years a taboo word in the media).

2. Squaw man first entered the American language in 1856 to denote a non-Indigenous man married to an Indigenous woman. The Squaw Man was a 1905 play written by Edwin Milton Royle that ran for 222 performances on Broadway and enjoyed four revivals between 1907 and 1921. It was adapted three times into feature movies, in 1914, 1918, and 1931. All three versions were directed by Cecil B. DeMille.

Poster art for the 1931 Squaw Man, starring Warner Baxter, Lupe Velez, Eleanor Boardman, and Charles Bickford.

Word of the week: Nikkei

A massive new rooftop restaurant called Chotto Matte is coming in 2022 in San Francisco’s Union Square, in the building that used to house Macy’s men’s store. According to a September 1 story in SFist, the restaurant—the latest in a chain with origins in London—will be San Francisco’s largest, with prix-fixe menus ranging in price from $75 to $155 per person.

The part of the story that interested me, though, was the description of the menu: “the very best of Nikkei (Japanese-Peruvian) cuisine.”

This usage of Nikkei—the word is often capitalized, for reasons unknown—was new to me and, it turns out, inaccurate. (More on that in a bit.) New to me but not new-new: it’s actually been around for at least 20 years. I knew a different Nikkei: the Japanese blue-chip stock index founded in 1950, which has a distinct etymology. And neither of these Nikkeis is related etymologically to another Japanese word familiar to many of us: nisei, or “second-generation.”

The menu at Nikkei restaurant at Mandaluyong (metro Manila), Philippines, has Peruvian influences.

 

On the Visual Thesaurus: Turduckenyms

Most portmanteaus are blends of two words: slithy from slimy and lithe, brunch from breakfast and lunch. But every so often, and with great effort, someone creates a portmanteau from three or more words. These tripartite blends, overstuffed like a Thanksgiving turducken, are the subject of my September column for the Visual Thesaurus.

My columns are paywalled for three months. Here’s a slice to whet your appetite—some turduckenym examples from the world of branding and advertising:

Word of the week: Glowie

Most of the time, I enjoy learning new words. But every so often I come across a new-to-me word that I sort of wish I’d never seen. That’s the case with glowie, which popped up on Twitter a few days ago in a reference to a far-right rally planned for September 18 in Washington, DC. Now that I’ve learned about it, you’re going to learn about it too. Quit reading now if you’re easily offended by conspiracy theories or a spelled-out N-word.

The tweet pointed to “Let’s Talk About September 18,” posted on September 9, 2021, in Jared Holt’s Substack newsletter Sh!tpost. Holt is a reporter who covers the intersection of politics and technology, with an emphasis on domestic extremism. His take on the September 18 rally—which organizers say will “demand ‘justice’ for people arrested for participating” in the January 6 US Capitol riot—is that it’s been overhyped by conventional news media, and that “the overwhelming consensus in extremist communities is: Don’t go.”

Here’s why:

Nicely named: Amberlink

“The Internet Is Rotting,” reads the headline, and it’s no overstatement. The article beneath the hed, published in The Atlantic on June 30, 2021, was written by Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard who has spent a lot of time thinking about the World Wide Web and its discontents. He’s worried, as we all should be, about the alarming impermanence of our digital artifacts. And he’s proposing solutions.

On being “Anglo-Saxon”

My latest story for Medium is about language, identity, and what it means to be “Anglo-Saxon”—which is how I was labeled when I lived in Israel, despite having neither Angles nor Saxons anywhere in my family tree.

You can read it here: When I Was Anglo-Saxon.

Happy Labor Day and a sweet new year—5782 on the Jewish calendar—to those who celebrate.

Weekend reads

It’s Week Eleventy-Kajillion of the COVID pandemic and we’re headed into the long Labor Day weekend here, and then the Jewish New Year. I have no amusing stories about names and brands today; instead, here are a few things I’ve been reading (and stewing over) that you may find interesting.

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