Fritinancy

Word of the week: Omicron

Were you one of the thousands of people who, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, decided to learn a new language? Well, congratulations: You’re now learning Greek! Or at least the Greek alphabet.

The highly contagious Delta variant, named after the fourth letter of that alphabet, was first identified in India in October 2020 and quickly spread around the globe. And we learned last week that yet another troubling Covid variant had emerged in South Africa. It was named after the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet: Omicron.

How did we jump from fourth letter to fifteenth? The New York Times explains:

November linkfest

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate, and happy fourth week of November to everyone else.

My book recommendation this month is The Confidence Men, by Margalit Fox, the riveting true story of two British officers’ escape from an “escape-proof” Turkish POW camp—“the Alcatraz of its day,” Fox writes—toward the end of World War I. What makes their story amazing is how they did it: no tunnels, no violence, no weapons except for a homemade Ouija board and the two men’s skill at psychological manipulation.

 

 

I love a prison-escape story, and Fox tells this tale expertly, and Richard Elfyn, the narrator of the audiobook I listened to, rises to the occasion, switching between accents and occasionally reading passages in Welsh. But just as interesting as the escape itself are the conditions that enabled it. In his paywalled review for the New York Review of Books, Neal Ascherson writes:

Persuading people to like something is a trade. Persuading them to change their minds and like something else is a skill. But inducing them to believe in something that their senses and experience tell them is plainly unreal or untrue—unicorns, papal infallibility, Trump’s assertions, ghosts—requires art and almost manic self-confidence. The “confidence men” of Margalit Fox’s title, two British prisoners of war who planned the most eccentric and devious of all escapes, had plenty of both. But Fox puts their story into a broad historical setting, using it to illustrate the ways in which scientific inventions made possible not only empowerment but also credulity and manipulation.

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On the Visual Thesaurus: The lingo of film noir

For my latest Visual Thesaurus column I’m celebrating Noirvember—the monthlong tribute to film noir—with a lineup of classic noir slang.

The column is paywalled for three months; here’s an excerpt:

Word of the week: Revenge dress

Revenge dress was all over the celebrity/entertainment news last week, capping a year notable for its revenge compounds.

“… said no one ever” (again)

Throwback Thursday! Remember when I first wrote about an ad that used the catchphrase “… said no one ever”? It was in February 2016; here’s the link. Five years later, said no one is still being said by almost everyone, ad nauseam. As proof, I bring you two companies and two outdoor ads currently installed at opposite ends of San Francisco. 

Word of the week: Oneiric

During the first year of the Covid pandemic, some people took up sourdough baking, others began studying a new language or learning to play an instrument. My preferred pastime was, and remains, film noir. Over the last eighteen months I’ve watched more than 100 noirs, many of them more than once, from The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, from 1958, is often considered the last true film noir; I saw it once in a theater, years ago, and plan to see it again soon, after I’ve crossed a few never-watched titles off my list—Decoy (1946), Railroaded! (1947), and The Chase (1946) currently top the queue. I just can’t seem to get enough of corrupt cops, washed-up boxers, double-crossing dames, and hard-boiled shamuses.

I’ve been supplementing my screenings with books, articles, and videos about noir. (For a partial list, as well as ways to stream film noirs, see the end of this post.) It was in one of those books, Film Noir: A Very Short Introduction*, by James Naremore, that I came across this week’s word, oneiric, which sent me to a dictionary. It’s pronounced with a long-I sound in the middle—oh-NIGH-rick—and it comes from a Greek source, although relatively recently. It means “related to dreams.”

Name in the news: Puck

One of the newest media outlets in the US has a very old name: Puck.

The digital publication, which launched in September, is owned and operated by a group of veteran New York journalists (Julia Ioffe, Barathunde Thurston, Jon Kelly, Matt Belloni, and others) and promotes itself as “a new media company dedicated to the power corridors of our culture: Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood” and as “a platform for smart, engaging (and, yes, occasionally dishy) journalism.” Its beats are Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Washington.

A pre-launch announcement from Puck.news.

 

You can read one article without paying, but if you want more dish you’ll have to dish out some cash. “A $100 annual fee entitles subscribers to personal emails from the authors and all the newsletters, features and breaking news; moving up to $250 brings all that plus access to conference calls with the authors, Q&As with the staff and invitations to events,” Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw reported on September 13.

What about the name? From the August 5, 2021, email announcement: “The name is a nod to Shakespeare—as well as to the building where humor magazine Spy was born.”

More about Spy in a bit. First, though, here’s the Puck Building.

On the Strong Language blog: “Let’s go, Brandon”

This week’s word is a three-word slogan with a sweary subtext. It’s also  a shibboleth, a slogan, a meme, a mondegreen and the title of three recently released songs (well, “songs”).

Read all about it in my new post for Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing.