Fritinancy

June linkfest

A quick audiobook recommendation: I thoroughly enjoyed So Many Steves: Afternoons with Steve Martin, a series of conversations between Martin and his longtime friend the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. (Gopnik is everywhere, isn’t he? He was also “in conversation with” the fictional Lydia Tár in last year’s Tár.) Martin, who will turn 78 in August, has spent more than 60 years plying his various trades: magician, musician, comedian, actor, novelist, librettist. Gopnik elicits charming stories and surprising revelations, and gently nudges Martin toward a discussion of craft and motivation. The book—audio only, with some delightful banjo music—is available from Pushkin Industries and the usual online merchants. Or, if your public library supports the Libby app, you can borrow it free for three weeks. (By the way, the title is a twist on the E.E. Cummings poem “So Many Selves.” Martin is a big fan of Cummings, it turns out.)

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Name in the news: Puck

One of the newest media outlets in the US has a very old name: Puck.

The digital publication, which launched in September, is owned and operated by a group of veteran New York journalists (Julia Ioffe, Barathunde Thurston, Jon Kelly, Matt Belloni, and others) and promotes itself as “a new media company dedicated to the power corridors of our culture: Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood” and as “a platform for smart, engaging (and, yes, occasionally dishy) journalism.” Its beats are Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Washington.

A pre-launch announcement from Puck.news.

 

You can read one article without paying, but if you want more dish you’ll have to dish out some cash. “A $100 annual fee entitles subscribers to personal emails from the authors and all the newsletters, features and breaking news; moving up to $250 brings all that plus access to conference calls with the authors, Q&As with the staff and invitations to events,” Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw reported on September 13.

What about the name? From the August 5, 2021, email announcement: “The name is a nod to Shakespeare—as well as to the building where humor magazine Spy was born.”

More about Spy in a bit. First, though, here’s the Puck Building.

Word of the week: Obelisk

Tom Cotton, the junior US senator from Arkansas, is an army veteran, but these days his preferred incendiary devices are words. A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times published an op-ed he wrote urging the Trump administration to “Send in the Troops” to put down the protests taking place in many cities, which Cotton called “riots” perpetrated by “bands of miscreants.” There was outrage and outcry in response to the op-ed, and the Times backpedaled, a little, by tacking on a five-paragraph explanation/apology about insufficient fact-checking. A few days later, the editor of the editorial-page section, James Bennett, resigned.

You can read more that particular drama in this New Yorker essay, if you like. My subject today, however, is a phrase Cotton dropped on June 11 during remarks on the Senate floor about calls, once again, to remove statues and monuments that celebrate the Confederacy (which, you probably don’t need to be reminded, was the losing side of the Civil War). Cotton, from the Land of Cotton, was having none of it.

Sen. Tom Cotton: "Are we going to tear the Washington Monument down? Are we going to rename it the Obelisk of Wokeness?" pic.twitter.com/gPTACs2Ep6

— The Hill (@thehill) June 11, 2020

"Just up the mall is the Washington Monument,” he said, after demanding that his colleagues “end the madness” of “cancel culture.” “Are we going to tear the Washington Monument down? Are we going to rename it the Obelisk of Wokeness?”

Word of the week: Defenestration

It’s rare that a nonce word – a word invented for a single situation, also called an occasionalism – takes root in the language and continues to thrive centuries after its original use. But that’s the case with defenestration, which was created from Latin roots meaning “out the window” and which first appeared in English in 1619, a year after the Second Defenestration of Prague, in which “a group of Protestant Bohemian protestors threw two Catholic imperial officials and their secretary out of a window in Prague Castle, thus helping to precipitate the Thirty Years’ War” (source: OED).

 

The Second Defenestration of Prague, from a 1618 pamphlet. Source: Coins Weekly.

That’s right: the second defenestration. There have been three famous defenestrations in Prague, a city that is to window-ejecting as Paris is to guillotining. The first took place in 1419; the third, of the liberal Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk, was in 1948. (Masaryk’s death was officially ruled a suicide, but its circumstances remain suspicious. As the bitter joke had it: “Jan Masaryk was a very tidy man. He was such a tidy man that when he jumped he shut the window after himself.”)

 

 A Czech poster advertising the 590th anniversary of the first Defenestration of Prague in 1419.

 

For more than three hundred years, defenestration was reserved for historical discussions and the odd open-window murder. Then, around 1955, defenestration began to be used figuratively, much like dethrone, to describe “the dismissal or removal of a person from a position of power or authority” (OED again). And that – with one striking exception – is how we’ve been seeing it during the last month or so.

Name in the news: Kalorama

Earlier this week, Washington-area news media reported that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, daughter and son-in-law of the president-elect, would be moving into a six-bedroom, six-and-a-half-bathroom house in the District of Columbia. The house, which sold on December 22 for $5.5 million, $400,000 under the listing price, is less than two blocks from where President and Mrs. Obama will live after they leave the White House. (It isn’t clear whether the Trump-Kushners had bought it or will be renting from the buyer).

The neighborhood is called Kalorama, which got my attention.

 

2449 Tracy Place NW. Built in 1923 by Waddy Wood, who championed Colonial Revival designs over the Craftsman style. Walk score: 50 (mostly car dependent).

Name in the news: Samara

This week Airbnb – which now styles itself as a “worldwide accommodations leader” with the slogan “Live There” (it used to be “Belong Anywhere”) – revealed a new division called Samara and announced the division’s first project: a communal housing development meant to revitalize a small town in Japan. According to a story in FastCoDesign, “That model isn’t meant to be a one-off. After this project, Airbnb will look to scale it to other declining small towns across the world. The idea is that Airbnb could become a force not only in sharing homes, but in urban planning.”

So far, Airbnb itself has provided almost no details about Samara. The division’s website, which is nested within Airbnb.com, has minimal text — embellished with a few “handwritten” scrawls — and no photographs. This is the entirety of the statement:

(For more on metaphorical “journey,” see my February 2016 Visual Thesaurus column.)

Where does the name Samara come from? The website doesn’t say. So I did some investigating.

Word of the Week: Pent Room

Pent room: An extra or attached room in a house or apartment. Sometimes spelled pent-room or pentroom.

Pent room has been cropping up with some regularity in San Francisco’s overheated real-estate market. The earliest usage I’ve found is in a 2007 book, Linda Applewhite’s Architectural Interiors: Transforming Your Home with Decorative Structural Elements. A caption accompanying a photo of a cozy sitting area reads: “This small pent-room on the top floor of a loft-like space on Nob Hill feels huge and wondrous with the City by the Bay as its backdrop.”

A December 5, 2009, story in SF Luxe about “the Pacific Heights dream house,” a seven-bedroom Victorian at 2311 Broadway, had this gushing comment about a pent room:

The bright and airy pent room on the top level features soaring cathedral ceilings, sparkling views sweeping across the City and Bay, a wet bar with refrigerator and an abundance of skylights and windows. It works beautifully as a combination media and family/game room –– and is a perfect spot to enjoy sunsets over the Golden Gate Bridge*.

*On fog-free days.

Listed at $6,950,000, this house sold in 2010 for $6,500,000. A current Zillow estimate places its value at more than $10.5 million.

There was a pent room in this year’s San Francisco Decorator Showcase, a Presidio Heights mansion whose architect was Julia Morgan, designer of Hearst Castle.

“For the adults, Jeff Schlarb of Green Couch Interior Design created the ‘Pent Room,’ a space for gathering, gaming, entertaining and relaxing.”

A pent room is the smaller cousin of a penthouse (first documented use: 1921), now defined as a luxury apartment on the top floor(s) of a skyscraper. According to a Wikipedia entry:

One of the earliest penthouse apartments in [New York] was publisher Conde Nast’s duplex penthouse at 1040 Park Avenue. The original 1923 plan for the building provided three units on each floor with additional maids’ rooms on the roof, but in 1924 the building’s upper spaces were constructed to provide a grand duplex for Nast. Connected by a staircase to the rooftop entertaining salons, the corner unit at the top floor was redesigned to be private family quarters.

But penthouse wasn’t coined in the 20th century. It first appeared in the early 14th century, when it was spelled pendize and referred to any attached building, often a simple structure. (According to Online Etymology Dictionary, in some Middle English homilies Jesus’ birthplace was called not a manger but a penthouse.)

The pent- of penthouse and pent room is unrelated to the pent in pent-up (confined), which is a past participle of pen. In fact, penthouse is an example of a false etymology’s influence on spelling. Here’s Daily Etymology:

The Middle English word “pendize” was changed over time to a combination of the more familiar English word “house” (a natural assumption since the original word indicated a somewhat house-like structure) and the Middle French “pente” meaning “slope.” In other words, the penthouse was originally an attached building with a sloping roof.

So a pent room is actually an appendage room – what might, in a less frenzied market, have simply been called a bonus room, attic, or garret.

There’s evidence of even further pent- drift in a 2011 listing for a Telegraph Hill (San Francisco) house with a “view pent level family room & spacious deck.” “View” is intended here as an adjective, and “pent” may be a shortening of “penthouse.” In Brooklyn, “pent level” can refer to something far more modest, as in a recent Craigslist listing for a “large pent level studio flat!!” with “modern flare [sic].” Rent: $1,925 a month. In San Francisco, that would be considered a bargain.

How BAM Architecture Studio Got Its Name

From a New York Times Q&A with Adam Ross Cole, a co-founder of BAM Architecture Studio in New York:

Q. What does BAM stand for?

A. That’s a good question. People have asked us that, and over the years we’ve tried to re-engineer it: maybe it stands for Better Architectural Methods. But it wasn’t where the name came from. We tend to do more complex, sophisticated projects, where there’s a lot of intricate thought required for the design aspect. So the idea was: Bam! What’s the big idea? So that’s where the name came from.

Hmm. I’d say that “Bam!” suggests the opposite of “complex, sophisticated projects” requiring “a lot of intricate thought.”

Names in the News

Four new names that caught my attention:

Mansion is the unapologetically 1 percent-ish name of the Wall Street Journal’s new weekly section devoted to “high-end property.” In a letter to WSJ subscribers, managing editor Robert Thomson said Mansion would be “the home of both aspiration and real-estate realization.” I look forward to the quarterly spin-off, Car Elevator.

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What the fut was Alaska Telecom thinking when it renamed itself Futaris? This, apparently: “Based on the word future, Futaris represents limitless possibilities and progress.” Funny, because when I look at this sad excuse for a logo, I see “futility.”

(Hat tip: @IgorNaming.)

UPDATE: Reader Dan Freiberg suggests that “this variation helps with pronunciation, and works better with the symbol.”

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Juniper is a new subscription service for women who don’t own calendars. Oh, sorry: it’s “a monthly care package” consisting of tampons (five brands are offered) and a collection of “gourmet sweets and artisan savory treats.” (Yes, it’s that word!) “Never panic shop again,” says the home-page copy. The price, however, may cause cramping: $28 a month. I couldn’t find a story behind the name—which is lovely in its nondescriptive way—but I’m wondering whether founder Lynn Tao, young as she appears to be, is a Donovan fan. Remember “Jennifer Juniper,” who “longs for what she lacks”?

UPDATE: Mystery solved (although I’m still fond of my own theory):

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I’m even more mystified by Tassafaronga Village, a mixed-income residential development in East Oakland that I learned about this week via a New York Times story. There’s no explanation of the name in the story or on the website of the architect, David Baker, so I tried to dig deeper. I learned that Tassafaronga Point, on Guadalcanal (Solomon Islands), was the site of several naval engagements between US and Japanese forces during World War II. But that wasn’t very helpful: the housing project is meant to heal a troubled neighborhood, so why name it after a bloody, 70-year-old series of battles? And why the Melanesian reference in Oakland, where Pacific Islanders make up less than 1 percent of the population?

It’s certainly a distinctive name, fun to say if a little challenging to spell. Here’s hoping someone who knows the whole story reads this post and leaves a comment that clears up the mystery.

UPDATE: It took less than half an hour to get an answer to my question about Tassafaronga. See comments below from Gene, proprietor of the excellent Our Oakland blog.

Word of the Week: Parklet

Parklet: A small city park created by replacing one or two parking spaces, or an unused bus stop, with a platform on which planters and other amenities are installed. The parklet is publicly sanctioned but constructed and maintained with private funds.

Divisadero Street parklet, San Francisco. Source: Pavement to Parks.

 

Parklets have been built in several US cities but have been most successful in San Francisco, where since 2009 22 parklets have been created; they have thrived there despite the chronic shortage of parking spaces in the 49-square-mile city. According to San Francisco Chronicle urban design critic John King, six more parklets have been approved and 44 are “in various stages of review.” Across the bay, Oakland has created a pilot program for parklets and is accepting applications from business owners and other eligible parties. (My own Oakland neighborhood may become home to one of the new parklets.)

In a December 29 column King called parklets “the most significant change to San Francisco’s landscape in 2011.” In an October article, “Life in the Slow Lane,” Architectural Record called parklets “the ultimate revenge on the modern city: one less parking space, one more park.” Not everyone is a fan, AR continues:

The parklets have drawn criticism, from similar circles that fought and killed a proposal for food stands in the city’s beloved Dolores Park and continue to battle the notion of POPOS (privately owned public open spaces) in downtown. Opponents argue that a parklet’s extra seating is a revenue generator veiled as public good. Then there’s the occasional voicing of the car driver’s plight. One more parklet, after all, means two or three fewer places to park. …

While the city loses an estimated $5,000 per year in parking fees for each spot (and meter) removed, it gains an array of public gathering places. Built independently, quickly, and cheaply—usually between $7,000 and $20,000, often with materials and funds donated by neighbors—each parklet is defiantly unique, from Four Barrel’s bike rack-cum-garden trellis to Terroir wine shop’s planned bocce ball court.

Read more about Pavement to Parks. Read John King’s article in the Chronicle, which includes a photo gallery and a tour of every San Francisco parklet now open.