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.

I’m looking forward to reading two just-published books, both about animals, by two of my favorite authors: On Animals, an essay collection from Susan Orlean; and Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, by Mary Roach.

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I’m writing a piece on place-naming, and my research turned up a very cool Wikipedia page about toponymy and place-name classification. The next time you want to refer to the proper name of a cave, use its speleonym—a word that, as you may have guessed, is related to spelunk.

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Someone just unsubscribed from my newsletter because it has "just too much salad information!" The name of my newsletter is "The Department of Salad."

— emily nunn (@EmilyRNunn) September 29, 2021

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The lingo of NFTs, from “GM” (“good morning”) to “degen” (“short for Degenerate, meaning taking unreasonably high trading risks”) and beyond. (Twitter thread from @punk6529). Need a refresher on NFTs? See my March 2021 post.

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“Why the euphemisms? My father did not ‘pass.’ Neither did he ‘depart.’ He died.” I freely admit that euphemisms for “death” annoy the hell out of me. (David Sedaris for the New Yorker)

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Why are hyperlinks blue? (Mozilla blog)

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Are brands turning into blands? Hint: There’s no such thing as “the good old days.” (Emblemetric)

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Why do we use pudendum—from a Latin word meaning “shame”—to refer to the female genitalia? (New York Times; link is unlocked)

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“Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, novels were regarded as the video games or TikTok of their age — shallow, addictive, and dangerous.” (Clive Thompson for Medium. Subscribe to his feed for more fascinating stories like this one and “Rewilding Your Attention.”)

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Reader Dan Freiberg writes: “A Minnesota electronics controls company,named TESCOM has a modern, techy-sounding name. It was founded in 1916 by Elmer Smith. In the 1950s, the name was changed to TESCOM—an acronym for The Elmer Smith Company Of Minnesota. The name origin always amused me. I did some work for the company in the late 90s. In 2005, the company was acquired by Emerson Electric.” See TESCOM’s 2015 product catalog.

 

Comments

[Jonathon Owen]

The pudendum article got me wondering how common that kind of meaning is cross-linguistically. The German word for "pubic hair" is Schamhaar, literally "shame hair." And apparently Scham was once used to refer to the pubic region or to the vulva specifically, though that use is dated now. It makes me wonder if they simply translated the Latin term or if it was a common concept, at least in Europe.