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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Word-of-the-year season has begun! The contenders so far:
Oxford Languages, which publishes the Oxford dictionaries, has picked vax: “A relatively rare word in our corpus until this year, by September it was over 72 times more frequent than at the same time last year. Click through to download a report on the language of vaccines and a discussion of the vax/vaxx debate.
Cambridge Dictionary, also based in the UK, chose perseverance, “a word which captures the undaunted will of people across the world to never give up, despite the many challenges of the last 12 months.”
Macquarie Dictionary, in Australia, is putting it to a public vote. The shortlist includes some Australia-specific terms (strollout, menty-b) and some words used throughout the English-speaking world, including hate-follow, dump cake (in use in the U.S. since at least 1980, but maybe new Down Under), and Delta. I’ve written about two of the nominees: range anxiety (in 2010!) and NFT (in March 2021).
In Japan, Jiyū Kokumin Sha, the publisher of Gendai yōgo no kiso chishiki (Basic Knowledge on Contemporary Terminology), holds an annual contest to decide the words of the year. This year’s list includes two English-language acronyms, SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) and NFT, as well as Ika gēmu (“Squid Game,” the South Korean hit show on Netflix), and yangu kearā, “young carers”: those under the age of 18 tasked with providing nursing or other care for family members at home.
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It’s name-of-the-year season, too, and the Namerology blog is asking for your nominations. Submissions so far have included Lilibet, Pfizer, Moderna, and Brandon. (Last year’s name of the year was Breonna.)
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On the names of pasta, from a 2013 book by Oretta Zanini, via Language Hat:
The popular imagination gave whimsical names to the simple paste of water and flour, and only rarely eggs, worked with the hands or with small tools. Thus we have cecamariti (husband blinders) and cordelle (ropes), curuli, fusilli (also called ciufulitti), frigulozzi, pencarelli, manfricoli, and sfusellati, as well as strozzapreti (priest stranglers), the lacchene of the town of Norma and the pizzicotti (pinches) of Bolsena, while the fieno (hay) of Canepina has, accompanied by paglia (straw), been absorbed into the repertory of the pan-Italian grande cucina.
Zanini should be a pasta name too, shouldn’t it? Bonus: read my March 2021 post about cascatelli, a new pasta shape.
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In October, the Cleveland Guardians roller derby team sued the newly renamed Cleveland Guardians baseball team, contending that the skaters had registered their name four years before the baseballers did, and that their trademark rights were being infringed. On November 16, both sides agreed to share the name. Bonus: read my July 2021 post about the Cleveland Guardians baseball team.
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Elsewhere in the wide world of sports, L.A.’s Staples Center, home of the Lakers NBA team, will become the Crypto.com Arena on December 25. If you’d never heard of Crypto.com before this, you’re not alone: The company, a cryptocurrency exchange, was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Singapore. The Los Angeles Times is already speculating that the arena will be called “The Crypt.” Something that interests me—and which I haven’t seen addressed elsewhere—is the peculiar, late-1990s persistence of “.com” in Crypto.com’s name. I mean, does anyone say “Amazon dot com” or “eBay dot com”—or “Staples.com”—any more?
This is the Crypto.com logo, which I thought was an anvil flanked by two oddly shaped bricks. Au contraire: “Our logo represents the Ethereum Lion. ... As a company, we have operations in Hong Kong (where the lion is a symbol of the largest bank) and Singapore (also known as the ‘Lion City’ derived from Malay singa (‘lion’) and pura (‘city’)) - therefore, the symbolism is close to our hearts.” Do you see the lion now?
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More name changes: U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland is calling for the word squaw to be removed from federal lands. “Racist terms have no place in our vernacular or on our federal lands. Our nation's lands and waters should be places to celebrate the outdoors and our shared cultural heritage — not to perpetuate the legacies of oppression,” Haaland said in a news release. Read my own story about the history of squaw and the recent Squaw Valley name change.
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What would your writing look like if you could see only the punctuation? Clive Thompson ran an experiment and made some interesting discoveries: “My oddest quirk? I occasional deploy super-exuberant parenthetical statements — ones that consist of several sentences, each of which ends in an exclamation point. (It’s so weird! But I guess it’s true! I must do this with some frequency!)”
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“I am begging you to learn how dictionaries work,” writes editor Jonathon Owen: “A dictionary that contained only the words you already know wouldn’t be a very useful dictionary, would it?”
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Metaverse, meet the Icelandverse.
Some said an open-world experience this immersive wasn’t possible. But it’s already here. And you don’t even need silly VR headsets.
— Inspired by Iceland (@iceland) November 11, 2021
Introducing, ✨Icelandverse✨#icelandverse pic.twitter.com/b1cf1REKl9
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And while we’re in Scandinavia: This year’s holiday ad from the Norwegian postal service is titled “When Harry Met Santa,” and it puts a new spin on “don we now our gay apparel.” You don’t need to understand Norwegian to get the heartwarming message.
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From the Wordnik blog, a guide to the language of Dune, much of which is influenced by Arabic.
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Jack Lynch talks turkey about turkey, from cold turkey to turquoise to the synonym for “flop.” Bonus: I wrote in 2020 about a weird smoking-cessation ad that promised to help you quit “slow turkey.”
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Ain't no party like a grammar party 'cause a grammar party don't stop unless there's an end mark like a period or an exclamation point or a question mark or hey maybe even an interrobang who am I to judge
— Dalton Tomlin (@daltontomlin) November 22, 2021
Thanks for the tip about Confidence Men--I'll look for it at the SF Public Library. I always enjoyed Margalit Fox's obituaries in the NY Times and likewise her very interesting book about the decipherment of Linear B. Until I saw Fox's book I had believed Michael Ventris was solely responsible but guess what, and guess why. (Small world note: Alice Kober attended Hunter High School and Hunter College in Manhattan; not too many years later, I attended Hunter College Elementary School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_College_Elementary_School where the late Ron Brown was one of my classmates.)
Posted by: john burke | November 30, 2021 at 08:44 AM