Fritinancy

Word of the week: Equisapien

Sorry to Bother You, now in theaters, was filmed in Oakland, California, where I live, with lots of recognizable landmarks in the background. But its characters are citizens of at least one alternate realm as well. The film, written and directed by activist-musician Boots Riley, begins as a workplace comedy set in a grim telemarketing firm – the film’s title comes from the script that our hero, Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield), must deliver – and quickly takes some surreal hairpin turns.

Lakeith Stanfield (left) and Armie Hammer in Sorry to Bother You

 

We end up in the offices of the ironically named WorryFree company, whose CEO, the hyper-libertarian Steve Lift (a composite of Steve Jobs and Lyft?), makes Cassius (also known as “Cash,” in case you didn’t catch on immediately) a Faustian offer he ultimately can’t refuse: $100 million in exchange for transforming – just for five years, you understand – into a bipedal horse-human hybrid. In the lingo of the film: an equisapien. It’s a word that, as far as I can tell, Riley invented for the film.*

I couldn’t find any images of Sorry to Bother You’s equisapiens, so here’s BoJack Horseman. More about him in a bit.

April linkfest

You know how Google names its Android versions after sweets like Kit Kat and Marshmallow? Well, writes Justin Pot, Microsoft should name its updates after dogs. (How to Geek)

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Speaking of Kit Kat, the brand is hugely popular in Japan, in part because “Kit Kat” translates to “You will surely win.” (Fortune; h/t MJF)

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A century ago, dozens of American girls were named Milady because of the success of a new product: the Milady Décolleté Gillette safety razor, developed to remove underarm hair. (And did you know that “underarm” was coined as a euphemism for “armpit”?) (Baby Name Wizard)

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March linkfest

“Most verbs stay basically the same in different grammatical roles. ‘Walk’ looks like ‘walks’ and ‘walked.’ But the word ‘be’ looks nothing like the word ‘am,’ which looks nothing like the word ‘were.’” (Arika Okrent for Curiosity.)

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When I wrote about mansplain, in September 2010, the earliest citation I found for the word was from an April 2009 Urban Dictionary entry. Now lexicographers at the OED have antedated mansplaining to a May 2008 comment about the TV show “Supernatural.”Katherine Connor Martin, Oxford University Press’s head of US dictionaries, says the OED usually waits a decade or so before adding new words, but makes exceptions when a word “is deemed important enough.” (Quartz)

Mansplain magazine via Matt Round

Word of the week: Rhino

You know it as a shorter, simpler way to say “rhinoceros.” But in the 17th and 18th centuries rhino was slang for “money,” and the related adjective rhinocerical was slang for “wealthy.” And no one is sure why.

These are not the rhinos you’re looking for. (But they sure are cool in Black Panther.)

 

Rhinoceros, from Greek roots meaning “nose-horned,” entered English around 1300; it referred to the herbivorous odd-toed ungulate, two species of which are found in Africa and three in Southern Asia. Rhino- also appears in combination forms such as rhinoplasty (plastic surgery of the nose; first appearance in print: 1828); rhinolaryngitis (1891); and rhinovirus (1961). As the shortened form of the animal name, the word first appeared in print in 1870. But nearly two centuries earlier it was popularly used in England to mean “cash,” and by 1697 the idiom “ready rhino” (or “ready rino”) was in circulation.

 

August linkfest

Years ago, I named the world’s first “bidirectional” condom, so this story really spoke to me:

Diverse & Resilient, an LGBTQ organization in Milwaukee, decided to do something about the bland branding of free condoms. So it partnered with a local marekting agency, Cramer Krasselt, to create Naughty Bags, condoms designed by teens for teens. According to Adweek, the condoms are made “to be sex-positive, humorous, and cool” and feature “witty names like Pork Parka, Pelvic Poncho, Scuba Gear, Surge Protector and—our favorite—Papa Stopper.” Brilliant – in every sense.

Word of the week: Gaggle

When is a press briefing not a briefing? When it’s a gaggle, sometimes held en route to somewhere, sometimes in the James Brady Press Briefing Room, sometimes excluding the biggest media outlets in the U.S.

“White House Excludes Several Outlets From Press Gaggle,” NBC News, February 27, 2017

Names of the year 2016

The American Name Society is accepting nominations for Names of the Year, with the winners to be announced at the society’s annual meeting in Austin, Texas, on January 5, 2017. Anyone can play; submit your nominations before January 3.

Here are my own nominations in the categories established by ANS – names “that best illustrate, through their creation and/or use during the past 12 months, important trends in the culture of the United States and Canada.”

Word of the week: Animalic

Animalic: Related to animals; used in discussions of perfume to refer to scents derived from or reminiscent of animals, such as musk or civet.

The New York Times devoted some ink in its Thursday Styles section last week to the “feral fragrance clouds” that are captivating “high-fashion niche circles.” “Maybe it’s the desire of millennials to reclaim their beastly odors in an age of technological detachment,” reporter Rachel Syme speculates, “but fragrance buyers are newly excited to smell as if they come from an elegant zoo.”

One of the new perfume brands besotted with beastly odors is Zoologist, founded in 2013 by Victor Wong, a game developer in Toronto who became a gamy-scent developer when he teamed up with a British perfumer, Chris Bartlett, to create Beaver. Yes, that’s what it’s called.

Word of the week: Lam

Lam: An escape, especially from custody; an act of running or flight.

Headline and photo via Atlas Obscura, August 5, 2016.

 

On the lam is favored by journalists aiming for a combination of wry humor and tough-guy slang. For some reason, it’s especially popular in animal stories: I found news reports of goats, a cow, a steer, a capybara, and a lynx on the lam. (The lynx attacked four lambs while on the lam.) The recent found-panda story isn’t even the first collocation I found of on the lam and red panda: Masala the red panda escaped from a zoo in Eureka (California) in November 2015 and spent “a few tense days on the lam,” according to SFGate.com. It also shows up in stories about murder suspects, mob bosses, and a fugitive rabbi.

The phrase arose in the U.S. underworld; it first appeared in print (as “take it on a lam”) in a 1904 book, Life in Sing Sing, according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang. It entered widespread use in the 1920s and has been kept alive ever since by detective novelists and the aforementioned journalists. Its origin isn’t known for sure, but it may have developed from a verb lam, possibly of Scottish origin, that has meant “to beat” or “to strike” since the late 1500s. It would thus be related to lambaste (a blend of lam and baste, to thrash). If so, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, “the word [lam] has the same etymological sense as the slang expression beat it.”

Names of the Year 2015

The American Name Society is accepting nominations for Names of the Year, with the winners to be announced at the society’s annual meeting in Washington, DC, on January 8, 2016. Anyone can play; submit your nominations before January 5.

Here are my own nominations in the categories established by ANS – names “that best illustrate, through their creation and/or use during the past 12 months, important trends in the culture of the United States and Canada.” My top picks are *starred.