Fritinancy

March linkfest

Masha Gessen writes in the New Yorker about how “Z”—a letter that doesn’t exist in Cyrillic alphabets—became the symbol of the new Russian politics of aggression: “Graphically, the ‘Z’ is clearly closer to the swastika than to any prominent Soviet symbol, such as the five-pointed star, the hammer and sickle, or the red flag. Its use seems to require a double inversion: first, the people of Ukraine—a nation that suffered some of the greatest losses at the hands of Nazi Germany and one that is currently led by a Jewish President—are rendered as Nazis; then, the Russians, who claim to be fighting for peace and ‘de-Nazification,’ adopt a visual symbol that appears to reference the swastika.” In late March two German states outlawed public displays of the letter “Z.” (Read about earlier, merely annoying meanings of “Z.”)

Russian truck in Ukraine marked “Z.” Via Wikipedia.

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Ukrainians who loathe their aggressor neighbor refer to it as “Rashka.” Benjamin Moser writes that the word is “derived from the English pronunciation of Russia, complete with the diminutive suffix to convey extra venom.”

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Words of the week: Jigger and jolly

A few weeks ago I walked over to the Oakland Museum of California* to see “Edith Heath: A Life in Ceramics,” a new exhibit that spotlights the life and work of Edith Kiertzner Heath, who founded Heath Ceramics in Sausalito in 1948.

Edith Heath (1911–2005) looking nerdy-glam in her studio. Via “Edith Heath: A Life in Ceramics”

 

I love this type of museum exhibit, which focuses as much on social and cultural context as on objects. Edith Heath rebelled against the mid-20th-century dogma that said only fine porcelain china was suitable for entertaining; her Heathware, by contrast, which was intended for every occasion, used humble but beautiful California clay, sculpted into elegant shapes and glazed in striking color combinations. She was both the chief designer and the chief executive of the company she founded—an uncommon dual role for a mid-20th-century woman. 

A tableau of Heathware at the OMCA exhibit. (My own not-very-good photo.)

 

What about the word(s) of the week, you are asking by now. Well, one of the wall texts was headed “Jiggering and Jollying.” I’d never before seen either jigger or jolly in connection with ceramics or indeed any of the arts.

On the Strong Language blog: Merkins

Today I’m at Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing, with a post about merkin, the medieval pubic wig that still plays a role in our cultural life. Merkin was originally a nickname for a woman or girl; it’s an unrelated surname, too, and I write about that as well.

My favorite bit of research involved discovering Make a Merkin Great Again, a 2019 political art project by Diane Bush (yes, that’s her name). Here are two of the art merkins Bush created from cat fur (yes, cat fur).

Read This Merkin Life (apologies to This American Life).

Word of the week: Minx

The new HBO Max series “Minx” takes its name from a fictional women’s magazine whose fortunes we follow from its launch in the early 1970s through … I have no idea. (Only the first two episodes are available so far.) The basic plot: When idealistic young Vassar grad Joyce Prigger—her surname couldn’t possibly be more on-the-nose—fails to start a feminist magazine called The Matriarchy Awakens, she reluctantly teams up with a Los Angeles fetish-magazine publisher, Doug Renetti, to create America’s first erotic magazine—complete with full-frontal male nudity—for “liberated” women.* Joyce wants to keep the Matriarchy title, but her new co-publisher tells her it’s “poon poison.” “What we need,” says Doug, “is a wet-pussy title.”

Alone at her desk after hours, Joyce mocks up the Issue #1 cover with the new title: Minx. 

Screenshot of Issue #1 cover, featuring a hunky firefighter.

 

And that’s it. We never learn how Joyce got from The Matriarchy Awakens to Minx. Alone? With a team? And we learn nothing about the replacement name other than that it’s The One. Would that all naming projects progressed as swiftly and seamlessly!

In the absence of any explanation from the show’s writers, I will take on the chore of decoding “Minx” to the best of my abilities.

On the Visual Thesaurus: The tales behind the Best Picture titles

For my March column for the Visual Thesaurus I take a look at the titles of this year’s Best Picture nominees, each of which represents a distinct style, from acronym to slogan to Biblical quote.

Full access to the column is paywalled for three months. Here’s an excerpt:

 

Word of the week: Illth

If I asked you for a word that’s the opposite of wealth, you’d probably say poverty. But wealth has another antonym that’s both more obscure and a more perfect etymological parallel: illth. 

Illth was coined by the English writer and critic John Ruskin in Unto This Last, a critique of political economy published in 1860. Ruskin put the word between quotation marks toward the end of a nearly 200-word sentence that begins with a long description of wealth and slides into a parenthetical comment that “we ought to have a correspondent term.” Illth it is.

John Ruskin (1819-1900), via the Ruskin Museum

Name in the news: Bellingcat

“It is not a war on Russian TV,” Stanislav Kucher, a Russian television host, told the New York Times in an article published March 8, 2022. “You will not see explosions, you will not see strikes on neighborhoods where civilians live, you will not see a lot in terms of troops, soldiers, heavy armored vehicles or anything like that.”

How to debunk—or even prebunk—Russia’s propaganda and disinformation? One answer is the work done by an open-source intelligence (OSINT) organization called Bellingcat. Founded by British journalist/blogger Eliot Higgins in 2014 and headquartered in the Netherlands, Bellingcat has researchers in more than 70 countries; it uses “publicly available data and citizen journalist analysis” to advance  “narratives of conflict, crime, and human rights abuses.” Geolocation tags, radar data, and satellite images are among the tools that Bellingcat researchers have employed in investigations from Syria to Yemen to Eastern Europe.

Bellingcat’s elegant wordmark

 

You can learn more about Bellingcat from its excellent website and Twitter feed; from a March 2021 interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air”; from a February 27, 2022, CBC story about Russian disinformation,; from a February 1, 2022, PBS interview with Eliot Higgins; and from a March 8, 2022, story in the Atlantic headlined “The Information War Isn’t Over Yet.” Higgins has also published a book, We Are Belllingcat (2021); when The Guardian reviewed it in February 2021, it called the book “a manifesto for optimism in a dark age”:

It argues that “cyber-miserabilism” – the doomy belief that big tech and bad actors have permanently screwed our democracy – is wrong. Instead, Higgins hails the internet as an “extraordinary gift”. In his view, facts still matter, accountability is possible, and people still care about the difference between truth and lies.

(I wrote about “miserabilism” in 2016. “Cyber-miserabilism” is a nice new twist.)

My focus here, however, is the Bellingcat name, which I’ve admired for years. I' regret only that it took Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to prompt me to finally write about it.

Word of the week: Prebunking

“The Ukrainian crisis shows that the West has learned a lot about countering Russian propaganda in the past few years.,” New York Times opinion columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote in an essay published March 2, 2022, six days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began:

Social media companies are now adept at spotting and removing Russian disinformation. The Biden administration has been masterful at “prebunking” Russia’s moves; by disseminating intelligence about Russian plans almost as quickly as it collects it, the White House has managed to embarrass and undermine Russian efforts to control the Ukraine story.

That word prebunking—the link goes to an explainer published in First Draft in June 2021—has been cropping up frequently in coverage of the Ukraine conflict. But it isn’t new, and the Russian invasion isn’t the first occasion for its use.

In the news: Metamates and Amazonification

How are the 1,500-pound gorillas of commerce doing these days? Let’s rattle some Facebook and Amazon cages and find out!

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