Fritinancy

July linkfest

I’ve been gradually expanding my newsletter diet to include some lighter (but still substantial) fare. A few recommendations:

The Department of Salad, by Emily Nunn, is, yes, about salad and salad lore, but is also just a very chatty, very funny from an excellent writer. If you haven’t made Spicy Cherry Salad (aka Israeli Cherry Salad), you must do so immediately, before cherry season is over for good.

How Not to F*ck Up Your Face, “philosophical and practical advice for anyone who’s ever looked into a mirror,” is written by Valerie Monroe, who was the beauty editor at O magazine for almost 16 years. She’s on an extended stay in Japan right now, and I’ve been enjoying her reporting on the local scene, from Japanese toilets to “love hotels.”

The Unpublishable, by Jessica DeFino, a freelance beauty journalist. Subtitle: “The beauty industry’s least favorite newsletter.” DeFino covers topics like “how the ‘5-minute face’ became the $5,000 face” and why the words “THAT ACTUALLY WORK” are so common in beauty headlines. (It’s because most beauty products don’t work.)

“Potent, powerful skin care that works”? Probably not. (My photo; Walgreens.)

 

All three of these newsletters are published on the Substack platform, which means you can read them for free but paid subscriptions are what keeps the updates coming. 

Word of the week: J6

Some significant historical dates are expressed in numerical shorthand: 7/7, 9/11, 8888. (The last number represents Burma’s People Power Uprising, also known as the 8888 Uprising, which peaked on 8 August 1988.) But the riot at the US Capitol that took place on January 6, 2021, is widely known by a different abbreviation: J6. Where did this unusual contraction come from, and how did it spread?

The source is not an official one. The full name of the governmental entity looking into the insurrection is the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol,; the URL is january6th.house.gov.

Nor did “J6” originate on Twitter, although the abbreviation has proved useful on that 280-character platform, where it pops up across the political spectrum.

One claim I’ve heard ad nauseam from MAGA is that Trump “has been robbed of due process” by these hearings. The J6 committee are not prosecutors conducting a trial. They are an investigative team tasked with uncovering the truth for the American people about January 6th.

— Andrew Wortman ️‍ (@AmoneyResists) July 25, 2022

 

105 days until the midterms, and literally, anything can happen in that time - from J6 committee revelations to a big Trump announcement. The Breakdown welcomes Lincoln Project Sr. Advisor @stuartpstevens, to dig into what comes. Tomorrow at 7p ET. pic.twitter.com/0ih3lV4ANq

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 25, 2022

 

CNN’s @wolfblitzer has a panel of three people who all agree with him - and who all hate Trump.

Wolf has no dissenting voices to talk about the J6 Committee (where there are no dissenting voices either).

This is unAmerican.

— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) July 25, 2022

(By the way, it’s spelled un-American. Thank you, Jonathon Owen.)

Nor did I find any evidence that any media outlet invented “J6.”

Instead, it appears that the “J6” abbreviation originated from within the insurrection.

On the Visual Thesaurus: Gun idioms

Guns, as we know, are pervasive in American culture. Unsurprisingly, they also pervade our everyday language. For my July Visual Thesaurus column—my parting shot, so to speak, after 16 years—I explore some of the idioms and metaphors borrowed from firearms, from riding shotgun to bullet train to firing line.

As always, full access is limited to subscribers for three months. Here’s a free sample, and keep reading for an explanation of why this is my parting shot:

Trigger

Following the June 24, 2022, US Supreme Court decision overturning federal abortion protections, some American states implemented trigger laws that limited or banned abortion within their jurisdictions. A trigger law is unenforceable when it’s passed, becoming enforceable only after one legal factor is changed, “triggering” the law’s implementation. A trigger warning is a statement that alerts a reader or viewer to the presence of content that may “trigger” distress; the term’s first published use, according to the OED, was in the title of a September 1993 Usenet group post: “possible movie trigger warning.” Trigger finger is a nickname for a medical condition in which a finger (or, frequently, thumb) becomes stuck in a bent position as though it were pulling on a gun’s trigger. The condition, also known as stenosing tenosynovitis, is caused by inflammation around the tendon in the affected finger.

Read the rest of Shoot! How Gun Idioms Color Our Speech.

Blog bonus!

Guns and gun-related lingo are also popular in branding. (In the column, I cover Quaker cereals’ long-running “shot from guns” ad campaign.) Here are a few examples of brand names borrowed from firearms:

Bye-bye, DALL·E mini. Hello, craiyon (sic).

This is a story about a Very Online phenomenon with a Very Universal liability: a name that needed to be changed, pronto. The old name, DALL·E—styled with that little dot instead of a hyphen—is now craiyon, with a lower-case c.

Here’s the story.

In the beginning there was OpenAI, a company incorporated in December 2015 by Elon Musk—maybe you’ve heard of him—and five co-founders. OpenAI is a San Francisco-based artificial-intelligence lab with some serious goals, but it may be best known for an image generator dubbed DALL·E. I wrote about DALL·E in my January 2021 linkfest; the name, I explained, is a blend of “WALL-E”—a Pixar-coined acronym for “Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth Class”—and Dali, as in the surrealist artist. As of this writing, OpenAI’s DALL·E is not available to the public. Nor does OpenAI own any trademarks for DALL·E. (This last point will turn out to be a key factor in the story.)

You might say that repurposing WALL-E as DALL·E represented its own sort of load lift, to put it generously. Pixar, however, didn’t appear to mind. Then things got complicated.

My article on "the Big Lie" is now in "American Speech"

My short article about Big Lie for American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society, is now available online. You can read it by clicking the “PDF” button here.

The entry appears in the “Among the New Words” section, edited by Ben Zimmer, Kelly E. Wright, Brianne Hughes, and Charles E. Carson. This quarter’s new words were drawn from the nominations for 2021 Word of the Year, held January 7, 2022, via Zoom. (The overall winner was insurrection.)

The issue is dated May 2022, but the print edition was delivered in June and the online version was posted within the last couple of weeks. (For a while I was checking every day, but then I slacked off and voilà—there it was.)

My thanks to Ben Zimmer for inviting me to contribute—it’s my first-ever publication in an academic journal! I’ll have another entry in the August issue; I’ll let you know when it appears online.

Read the full Among the New Words article, which includes antiwork, no bones day, -core, and other noteworthy additions to the lexicon. (Read my Visual Thesaurus column on -core.)

Ambiguity for the win: When two meanings are better than one

Some advertisements are blunt and straightforward: “Save 50%!” “Visit Beautiful Vermont.” Others communicate more indirectly and creatively, using idioms or slang with double meanings.

Here are four recent examples of successful ambiguity in advertising, and one example of unintentional—and unwelcome—ambiguity.

Word of the Week: Camping

A private Facebook group, USA Camping Resource Center, doesn’t offer tips on tents, bedrolls, or water purifiers. Instead, it’s a hub for information about abortion access in post-Roe America. Camping is one of several authority- and algorithm-evading code words on social media used as substitutes for “abortion”; others include “fishing,” “shoe-shopping,” and “bookstore.” As NBC News reported on June 30, “The posts follow similar coded language trends used by people trying to avoid algorithmic censorship on social media or potential detection by law enforcement.”

Two almost identically worded tweets from May 4, 2022—the earliest examples of the message I’ve found. Text: “If you are a person who suddenly finds yourself with a need to go camping in another state, a state friendly towards camping, just know that I will happily drive you, support you, and not talk about the camping trip to anyone ever.” Link and link.