This month I’ve been reading Stiffed: The Roots of Modern Male Rage, by Susan Faludi. Actually, I’ve been re-reading it; the book was originally published in 1999 with the subtitle The Betrayal of the American Man and was reissued in 2019 with a new author’s foreword that adds a Trump-era, #MeToo perspective. Faludi is a superb researcher, interviewer, and writer (and believe me, that’s a tough trifecta), and Stiffed—what a perfect title—holds up shockingly well. Faludi’s mid-1990s reporting took her to Vietnam veterans, diehard Cleveland Browns fans, an Alternatives to Violence group, laid-off defense workers, and meetings of Promise Keepers, a Christian men’s association. She investigates the post-World War II redefinition of masculinity as “something to drape over the body, not draw from inner resources” and to be “displayed, not demonstrated.” I couldn’t help reflecting on Stiffed when I read a recent New York Times roundtable discussion with eight men who described themselves as politically conservative and who repeatedly expressed a wistful longing for days gone by—the same days, some 25 years ago, that Faludi wrote about: a time of layoffs and gang violence and painful domestic rifts. Moral: Beware the nostalgia trap and the Golden Age fallacy; there never were any good old days, except for the ones that seemed good because you were a little kid and didn’t know any better. (You may also be interested in the letters to the editor about that roundtable discussion. I’ve unlocked both links so that nonsubscribers can access them.)
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Why A-list names often aren’t A+ clients. (Nora Trice for A Hundred Monkeys)
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Attention, all you skinflints frugal people! Here are some of my Visual Thesaurus columns that are now unlocked and available to non-subscribers: All about the -core suffix; my picks for brand names of the year for 2021; the lingo of film noir. Don’t you wish you’d read them earlier? You can—a subscription is just $19.95 a year! Give a gift to yourself, or to Mom for Mother’s Day!
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I will never pass up a long read about the Gap, a company that for a time signed my paychecks. (I was editorial director at Banana Republic, which was and is a Gap property.) “Shrinking the Gap,” by Eliza Brooke for The Guardian, covers a lot of interesting ground: the move out of malls and toward a franchise model in Europe; the Yeezy x Gap collaboration; the “squishy new tagline,” Modern American Optimism. And it deftly examines the company’s history, from its 1969 beginnings as a Levi’s-and-records store in San Francisco through some of the most memorable ad campaigns of the late 20th century.
Steve McQueen in an ad from Gap’s 1993 “Who Wore Khakis?” campaign. See more ads at Classiq.
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Speaking of retail collaborations, Ben Schott wrote for Bloomberg (back in January, but I’m just now catching up) about the St. Andrew’s cross, our era’s hot typographic symbol: “In an age when virality is the jackpot, ‘×’ marks not just the spot where brands collide creatively, but where they stake their fortunes on multiplication.” Our use of that symbol, Schott writes, dates to William Oughtred’s 1631 text “The Key to Mathematics.”
Couture’s Kenzo × fast-fashion’s H&M, a 2016 collab that underperformed.
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Meet “algospeak,” algorithm-skirting “code words or turns of phrase users have adopted in an effort to create a brand-safe lexicon that will avoid getting their posts removed or down-ranked by content moderation systems.” For instance, writes Taylor Lorenz in the Washington Post, “in many online videos, it’s common to say ‘unalive’ rather than ‘dead,’ ‘SA” instead of ‘sexual assault,’ or ‘spicy eggplant’instead of ‘vibrator.’”
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Clive Thompson, who writes about tech and culture for Medium and other publications, provides some historical context for algospeak: “Back in the ‘90s, family-focused dial-up networks like AOL or Prodigy banned a ton of swear words, so I remember teenagers writing ‘phuc’ in place of the f-bomb (among many other substitutions).” And he offers a way out: “To have a healthier style of moderation, a social network would need to have employees whose entire job is acting as online hosts.”
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OK, one more on “algorithm.” Did you know that it’s an eponym? (Kottke)
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How green—and not blue—became the official color of environmentalism. (Edwin L. Battistella for Grammar Girl)
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Word watch: fictosexual. (Guardian)
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So many car ads now feels like motivational posters set to music.
— Theo Erasmus (@theodoreerasmus) April 23, 2022align="center">*
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Here’s some good news: Ben Yagoda, the proprietor of Not One-Off Britishisms, is writing a book based on his blog. Ben’s most recent post is about Richard Grant White, a 19th-century American literary critic (and father of the architect Stanford White), who “coined the word ‘Briticism’ in 1868, to mean words and usages that had sprung up in Britain (but not America) in the century or so since the countries had been apart.”
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If you liked my recent Visual Thesaurus column about street names, you may enjoy Benjamin Lukoff’s Writes of Way, “musings on Seattle’s streets, their names, and more besides.” (Hat tip: Mike Pope.)
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Stan Carey, the co-founder of Strong Language (where I’m an occasional contributor), has a newish post on visual swears in film. Check it the fuck out!
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And here’s a reminder that you can follow me on Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter—at least until our billionaire overlords make social media too miserable to bear.
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