Fritinancy

Word of the week: Pandemicene

I’m not sure how I missed this new word when it originally surfaced. An article by Ed Yong, published  in The Atlantic on April 28, 2022, under the headline “We Created the ‘Pandemicene,’” may have been the word’s first appearance in a general-interest publication. (Note the quotation marks, a signal that the word is novel.) But as early as January 2021 the Science and Justice Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz, had launched a Pandemicene Podcast, so it’s possible that UCSC coined the term, a seamless blend of “pandemic” and the -cene combining form that signifies “geological epoch.”

Logo of the Pandemicene Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz

 

What finally got my attention was a “Post-Normal” column in the February 26, 2023, issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine by David Wallace-Wells. The headline in the table of contents is “The Pandemicene Era” (gift link).

February linkfest

I’ve started listening to the “Tech Won’t Save Us” podcast, expertly hosted by Canadian tech critic Paris Marx, who’s joined each week by an expert who critically examines “the tech industry, the powerful people who helm it, and the products and services it unleashes on the world.” Separating tech from politics, says Marx, “has consequences for us all, especially the most vulnerable.” I’m looking forward to reading books by two recent guests, Malcolm Harris (Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World), and Edward Niedermeyer (Ludicrous: The Unvarnished History of Tesla Motors). Niedermeyer introduced me to the useful word autonowashing, “the practice of making unverified or misleading claims which misrepresent the appropriate level of human supervision required by a partially or semi-autonomous product, service or technology.” (More -washing compounds here.)

 

“Tech Won’t Save Us” logo tee

 

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Word of the week: Hallucination

Do chatbots dream of human sweethearts?

That’s one of the many questions a reader asks herself after scrolling through the transcript of a conversation—there’s no other word for it—between a New York Times technology columnist and the new release of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. New Bing differs from Old Bing in that it’s powered by artificial intelligence software from OpenAI, the same folks who brought us ChatGPT. And therein lies all the difference.

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Book Review: "The People's Tongue"

My family didn’t own many books when I was growing up. That was what public libraries were for, declared my father, who laid down the law in such matters. Why spend money on a book you’d read only once?

He made one big exception: Somehow, he’d learned that the Los Angeles public school system gave away books that were no longer fit for classroom circulation, and he’d go to those giveaways and come home with an armful of free, slightly battered textbooks.

I still own, and cherish, one of the books he salvaged: Adventures in American Literature, published by Harcourt, Brace & Company.*

It was intended for long-ago high school English classes, but I was probably only 10 or so when I started picking my way through it, oblivious to its out-of-date-ness, choosing whatever seemed exotic (“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” by the Puritan cleric Jonathan Edwards, filled me with delicious terror, as did Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game”—the very first selection in the book!) or accessible (“Sixteen,” by Maureen Daly, a huge success when it was originally published in 1938) or funny (“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” “Gleanings from the Devil’s Dictionary”). The book even includes the complete text of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which I read over and over, imagining how the characters looked and sounded. The questions and prompts and the end of each entry nudged me toward deeper appreciation, but mostly I read for simple pleasure. The book was aptly titled: American literature was indeed a terrific adventure.

Now a new book, The People’s Tongue: Americans and the English Language, brings a similar sense of discovery and delight to new generations of readers.

 

Disclaimer: I received a review copy of The People’s Tongue from the publisher, Restless Books (nice name!).

Word of the week: Bard

Google has a new AI-assisted chatbot, and—surprise!—it isn’t called GoogleAI. It’s called Bard, which is an excellent name and not, I’m told on good authority, an acronym, a backronym, or an eponym.

Image via Tom’s Guide

 

Too bad about Bard’s snafu* last week when it attempted to answer a question about NASA’s** James Webb Space Telescope. But I’m here to praise Bard, not to bury it in smarty-pants ridicule.

The Bard of Avon, aka William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon

 

A new tagline for De Beers

For the first time in its 135-year history, the giant diamond company De Beers has a “global ambassador.” And for the first tine in 75 years, it has a new tagline. Bye-bye, “A Diamond Is Forever,” hello “Where It Begins.”

Lupita Nyong’o in a full-page ad in Town and Country, February 2023

I take a look at the history of De Beers advertising in my latest story for Medium, “All That Glitters: Diamonds and the Cultivation of Desire” (friend link).

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Blog bonuses:

I first wrote about diamond advertising way back in 2008.

For an excellent overview of the worldwide diamond trade, I recommend The Heartless Stone by Tom Zoellner (2006), which remains relevant today. Thanks to Mike Pope for recommending it to me many years ago.

De Beers was founded in 1888 by the British capitalist and imperialist Cecil Rhodes, but unlike Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), Rhodes University, and the Rhodes Scholarship, the company isn’t named for him. Instead, it takes its name from two Dutch brothers named De Beer on whose South African farm diamonds were discovered. Rhodes, who had moved to South Africa in 1870. got his start in the diamond business by renting water to miners.

Word of the week: Catch-22

You don’t need me to explain catch-22: It’s been part of our vocabulary for more than 60 years. A catch-22 is “a paradoxical situation from which an individual can’t escape because of contradictory rules or limitations.”

Catch-22 comes from Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel of the same name, published in 1961 and set during World War II; it was made into a 1970 movie (directed by Mike Nichols) and a 2019 miniseries (starring, among others, George Clooney). The novel has never been out of print.

In the novel, Doc Daneeka, an army psychiatrist, explains that “anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy” and therefore can’t plead mental illness as grounds for discharge:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.

On the Strong Language blog: Enshittification

My latest post for Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing, is about two sweary neologisms: enshittify and enshittification. Both were coined within the last year by journalist and author Cory Doctorow, who uses them to describe the current state of certain large internet platforms and e-commerce sites.

Read more about the history and morphology of enshittify and enshittification.