Fritinancy

November linkfest

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate, and happy fourth week of November to everyone else.

My book recommendation this month is The Confidence Men, by Margalit Fox, the riveting true story of two British officers’ escape from an “escape-proof” Turkish POW camp—“the Alcatraz of its day,” Fox writes—toward the end of World War I. What makes their story amazing is how they did it: no tunnels, no violence, no weapons except for a homemade Ouija board and the two men’s skill at psychological manipulation.

 

 

I love a prison-escape story, and Fox tells this tale expertly, and Richard Elfyn, the narrator of the audiobook I listened to, rises to the occasion, switching between accents and occasionally reading passages in Welsh. But just as interesting as the escape itself are the conditions that enabled it. In his paywalled review for the New York Review of Books, Neal Ascherson writes:

Persuading people to like something is a trade. Persuading them to change their minds and like something else is a skill. But inducing them to believe in something that their senses and experience tell them is plainly unreal or untrue—unicorns, papal infallibility, Trump’s assertions, ghosts—requires art and almost manic self-confidence. The “confidence men” of Margalit Fox’s title, two British prisoners of war who planned the most eccentric and devious of all escapes, had plenty of both. But Fox puts their story into a broad historical setting, using it to illustrate the ways in which scientific inventions made possible not only empowerment but also credulity and manipulation.

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Word of the week: Garble

I’d read and enjoyed Deborah Blum’s 2010 book, The Poisoner’s Handbook, about the birth of forensic medicine in the early 20th century, so I expected to be similarly educated and entertained by The Poison Squad (2018), about the fight for safe food in the US that led to the passage in 1906 of the Food and Drug Act. What I hadn’t expected was that I’d learn a completely new context and surprising etymology for a familiar word.

Word of the week: Loco

Democrats “have gone loco, they have gone loco,” President Trump told a crowd in Tennessee on October 1. He added, for the benefit of monolingual listeners: “They have gone crazy.” Earlier that day, at a White House press conference, he had used the same word to disparage another group on his enemies list:

“They’re loco,” he said of the media. “I use that word because of that fact that we made a trade deal with Mexico.”

Two days earlier, Trump had tested “loco” at a West Virginia rally, saying the Democratic Party was “so far left, Pocohantas” – his often-invoked slur for Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren – “is considered conservative.” The Democrats “have gone crazy. They’ve gone loco.”

And on October 10 Trump wielded his new favorite adjective against the Federal Reserve Bank.

Trump blames "loco" Fed for stock market slide https://t.co/BlAhxXHJ1H pic.twitter.com/LiKGxZYxy7

— The Hill (@thehill) October 11, 2018

His full comment, in an interview with Fox News: “The Fed is going wild. I mean, I don’t know what their problem is that they are raising interest rates and it’s ridiculous. The Fed is going loco, and there’s no reason for them to do it. I’m not happy about it.”

Faster than a speeding locomotive, reporters were turning “loco” against its source. “Donald Trump’s Loco Attack on the Federal Reserve” was the headline on an article by staff writer John Cassidy in the New Yorker online. (Cassidy’s conclusion: “Rather than acting strategically and respecting an institutional setup that, generally speaking, has served the country well, [Trump] went loco.”) Washington Post opinion writer Catherine Rampell observed that “Trump’s arm-twisting of the Fed is what’s truly ‘loco’.”

That’s a lot of “loco” for a single fortnight, and the reasons for its sudden surge are unclear. Trump often has trouble stringing together a coherent sentence in his native English, and he has no history of demonstrating admiration for the Spanish language or its speakers. (In the only other example I can recall of his using Spanish, he called for deporting “bad hombres” during an October 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton. He mispronounced “hombres” as “hambres,” which means “hungers.”) Is Trump a fan of Marcelo “El Loco” Bialsa, the Argentine-born soccer coach now managing Leeds United? Doubtful. Was the recent Spanish incursion was influenced by “Loco,” a new track by Machine Gun Kelly released in August of this year?

 

Probably not.

 

How Bulbul got its name

Bulbul is a contemporary Danish watch brand with a name whose etymological tentacles extend into in at least three languages, none of them Scandinavian.

Bulbul makes three minimalist styles of watch. The watches do only two things: tell time and look beautiful.

 

 

Pebble watch via SFMOMA

 

That asymmetrical face? Breathtaking. And, it turns out, devilishly difficult to manufacture. As Wired magazine reported in 2013, when Bulbul launched, “Factories are set up to make circular, square, and oval watches, but the subtly asymmetrical shape of the Pebble required almost every part to be customized—from the sapphire crystal on the face to hidden rubber rings inside the watch that keep it waterproof.” (Lots of droolworthy photos here.)

I’m going to wrench myself out of my covetous reverie (the watch is probably too big for me anyway, right?) and focus on the name: Where does “Bulbul” come from?

The case of the coded acronym

I’m over at the Strong Language blog today with a story about a Hollywood recording studio that recorded some of the biggest names of the 1960s and 1970s: the Doors, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, Linda Ronstadt. The studio’s own name was the acronym T.T.G., which may have stood for “Two Terrible Guys.” Or it may have stood for a Yiddish-Arabic expression that was considerably swearier.

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.