Fritinancy

May linkfest

Fifty years ago this month, seven Chicago-area women were arrested and jailed on eleven counts of performing abortions and “conspiracy to commit abortion.“ They were members of a clandestine feminist network known as “Jane” that, for four years before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the US, helped women terminate their pregnancies. Their story—more relevant than ever, now that Roe’s protections are in imminent peril—is told in a new documentary, The Janes, that will premiere on HBO on June 8. But The Janes isn’t the first telling of the story. In 1995, a former Jane member, Laura Kaplan, published a history of the group, The Story of Jane: The Legendary Feminist Abortion Service. I read it a couple of weeks ago and recommend it to you. (I found it in my local public library.) Here’s a passage that could have been written today: “Women are being reduced, once again, to the incubators of future generations with total responsibility but no power. That is the same oppressive view that the women’s movement sought to challenge. It is not just abortion, but women’s power to control their destinies that is at stake.”

Related: My post about “choice.” And here’s Clyde Haberman’s 2018 “Retro Report” for the New York Times about Jane’s work in Chicago. Link has been de-paywalled.

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Word of the week: Sportswashing

I first heard sportswashing in a story that aired in mid-March on NPR’s 1A program, “How Countries Use Sports to Improve Their Image.” The story provided a definition:

Sportswashing is the practice of laundering one’s reputation through sports; whether that be through team ownership, hosting a major tournament, or sponsorship. A country or politician gets involved with the hope that some of the sport’s popularity will improve their image.

Although it was unfamiliar to me, neither the word nor the practice is new. Sportswashing (or the British English variant sportwashing) was coined in 2015 by Sport for Rights, an Azerbaijani campaign to expose that country’s “attempt ‘to distract from its human rights record with prestigious sponsorship and hosting of events’, including the European Games hosted in Baku that year,” as the Oxford Words blog put it.

 

Protesters in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 2015. Image via Frontline Defenders.

 

In the seven years since, there have been plenty of other examples of sportswashing: Saudi Arabia buying the English Premier League team Newcastle United in 2021; China hosting the Winter Olympic Games in February 2022; Qatar hosting the next World Cup in November 2022. Earlier this year, American professional golfer Phil Nickelson admitted to biographer Alan Shipnuck that his association with the Saudi Golf League was “sportswashing.” (“They’re scary motherfuckers to get involved with,” Mickelson said of the Saudi regime. Perhaps he said it approvingly; who knows.) Reaching further back, NPR pointed to Adolf Hitler's reasons for hosting the 1936 Olympic games.

On the Visual Thesaurus: Understanding 'Maven'

How did a Yiddish noun with Hebrew roots and a sardonic connotation become a popular brand name, a scientific backronym, and even a baby name?

That’s the question I address in “Understanding Maven,” my May column for the Visual Thesaurus. I trace the spread of maven in mainstream culture back to a regional ad campaign in the 1960s and to two widely read journalists, William Safire and Malcolm Gladwell. As for the “Maven” baby name, it seems to be an extension of the Irish girl’s name Maeve—even though “Maven” is a masculine noun in Yiddish.

Access to the column is paywalled for three months; here’s an excerpt:

Maven’s real tipping point was … well, The Tipping Point, the 2000 book by Malcolm Gladwell that asserted that “ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do.” Long before “influencer” became a job description, Gladwell divided influential people into three groups: connectors, salesmen, and—you guessed it—mavens. Mavens, Gladwell wrote, “are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know”:

The critical thing about Mavens is that they aren’t passive collectors of information. It isn’t just that they are obsessed with how to get the best deal on a can of coffee. What sets them apart is that once they figure out how to get that deal, they want to tell you about it too. 

The Tipping Point became a best-seller and a favored reference in leadership seminars and marketing courses. It also enhanced our vocabulary. Not only did it make “tipping point”—a term used mostly by scientists beginning in the late 1950s—a household phrase, it educated thousands of readers about maven. Many of those readers went on to start companies that they named “Maven,” often explicitly acknowledging their debt to Gladwell and The Tipping Point.

Read the rest of the column.

UPDATE, May 27: The software company Mavenlink, which I mention in the Visual Thesaurus story, has been renamed Kantata following a merger. According to the press release, the new name “was inspired by ‘cantata’ – a classical music composition that intricately and beautifully combines multiple voice and instrumentation elements. This style of classical music is a metaphor for the collaborative creation that is the foundation of all successful professional services organizations.” 

Word of the week: Choice

Last week, in response to the leaked draft of a US Supreme Court opinion that would overturn the legal right to abortion, the Pro-Choice Caucus of the US House of Representatives distributed new messaging guidelines to House Democrats.

NEW: The Pro Choice Caucus has just sent out messaging materials to House Dems on Roe draft.

One of the recommendations: Don't use "choice." pic.twitter.com/nqVA8W1nWT

— Sarah Ferris (@sarahnferris) May 12, 2022

Among the guidelines: Instead of choice (“harmful”), use decision (“helpful”).

Yes, this recommendation came from the Pro-Choice Caucus, not the Pro-Decision Caucus. But putting aside that mixed message, what’s the reason for the change?

One ad line to rule them all

Is there a bar or a club where tech copywriters huddle to collude on slogans and ad lines? The CopyCat Lounge, maybe? Because I keep seeing double with outdoor ads, and it can’t be a coincidence.

Word of the week: Paparazzo

The death, on April 30, of the American photographer Ron Galella brought the fun-to-say Italian borrowing paparazzo back into the news. Galella, who was 91, was a “paparazzo extraordinaire,” the Telegraph and the Guardian headlined. “He personified the paparazzi,” the New York Times obituary reported, using the plural form: “brazen and relentless in chasing the famous, particularly Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.”

Galella himself proudly accepted the title of “paparazzo extraordinaire,” appropriating it for the title of his 2012 memoir.

Advertisement for a 2012 book-signing event for Ron Galella: Paparazzo Extraordinaire via New York Gossip Gal.

What we talk about when we talk about abortion

Because that’s what we’re talking about this week. Don’t worry, though: I’m going to stay in my lane. Mostly.

In case you’ve been tuning out the news, and who could blame you: On Monday, a leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito for the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, confirmed what many of us have been gloomily anticipating for years: that the precedents established in Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), long considered settled law, are about to be jettisoned. “The immediate impact of the ruling as drafted in February would be to end a half-century guarantee of federal constitutional protection of abortion rights and allow each state to decide whether to restrict or ban abortion,” wrote Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward for Politico. 

Here’s what “allowing each state to decide” can mean: Twenty-three states already have laws that could be used to restrict legal access to abortion. Under a state law passed by the Texas legislature in September 2021, abortions are prohibited after six weeks of pregnancy, before many women even know they’re pregnant. “The law empowers private citizens to sue anyone who ‘aids or abets’ a prohibited abortion,” the Texas Tribune reported in March 2022. “Those who sue could be awarded at least $10,000 if they win.”

Snitches get riches, in other words.

I believe abortion is health care. I support abortion access for anyone who needs it. But I’m not a lawyer or a legislator, so I’m using this platform to share some resources about my own specialty: language, messaging, and branding, all of which have played, and continue to play, outsize roles in the ongoing fight for safe and legal abortions.

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Word of the week: Tiktaalik

Few science stories have delighted me as much as the one that appeared in the New York Times on April 29 (online) and April 30 (print). The story, by Sabrina Imbler, is about an extinct sea creature that may be a missing link between fish and four-legged mammals—a fishapod connection to our very own species.

Tiktaalik roseae illustration by Zina Deretsky for the National Science Foundation, 2006.

 

The news hook isn’t the creature’s discovery; that happened in 2004, in the Nunavut Territory in the Arctic. Nor is it the animal’s name, Tiktaalik (tic-TAH-lick), which departs from traditional scientific naming conventions—Latinate, possibly honoring a scientist—in that it’s an Inuktitut word that means “large freshwater fish that lives in the shallows.” (The full name, Tiktaalik roseae, does have a Latin component: The second element “cryptically honors an anonymous donor”—someone named Rose, maybe?—according to a Wikipedia entry.) A council of Inuit tribal elders worked with a team of paleontologists to develop the name.*