Fritinancy

Word of the week: Tiktaalik

Few science stories have delighted me as much as the one that appeared in the New York Times on April 29 (online) and April 30 (print). The story, by Sabrina Imbler, is about an extinct sea creature that may be a missing link between fish and four-legged mammals—a fishapod connection to our very own species.

Tiktaalik roseae illustration by Zina Deretsky for the National Science Foundation, 2006.

 

The news hook isn’t the creature’s discovery; that happened in 2004, in the Nunavut Territory in the Arctic. Nor is it the animal’s name, Tiktaalik (tic-TAH-lick), which departs from traditional scientific naming conventions—Latinate, possibly honoring a scientist—in that it’s an Inuktitut word that means “large freshwater fish that lives in the shallows.” (The full name, Tiktaalik roseae, does have a Latin component: The second element “cryptically honors an anonymous donor”—someone named Rose, maybe?—according to a Wikipedia entry.) A council of Inuit tribal elders worked with a team of paleontologists to develop the name.*

Words of the week: Jigger and jolly

A few weeks ago I walked over to the Oakland Museum of California* to see “Edith Heath: A Life in Ceramics,” a new exhibit that spotlights the life and work of Edith Kiertzner Heath, who founded Heath Ceramics in Sausalito in 1948.

Edith Heath (1911–2005) looking nerdy-glam in her studio. Via “Edith Heath: A Life in Ceramics”

 

I love this type of museum exhibit, which focuses as much on social and cultural context as on objects. Edith Heath rebelled against the mid-20th-century dogma that said only fine porcelain china was suitable for entertaining; her Heathware, by contrast, which was intended for every occasion, used humble but beautiful California clay, sculpted into elegant shapes and glazed in striking color combinations. She was both the chief designer and the chief executive of the company she founded—an uncommon dual role for a mid-20th-century woman. 

A tableau of Heathware at the OMCA exhibit. (My own not-very-good photo.)

 

What about the word(s) of the week, you are asking by now. Well, one of the wall texts was headed “Jiggering and Jollying.” I’d never before seen either jigger or jolly in connection with ceramics or indeed any of the arts.

On the Strong Language blog: Merkins

Today I’m at Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing, with a post about merkin, the medieval pubic wig that still plays a role in our cultural life. Merkin was originally a nickname for a woman or girl; it’s an unrelated surname, too, and I write about that as well.

My favorite bit of research involved discovering Make a Merkin Great Again, a 2019 political art project by Diane Bush (yes, that’s her name). Here are two of the art merkins Bush created from cat fur (yes, cat fur).

Read This Merkin Life (apologies to This American Life).

On the brand trail: Oakland to Denver (and back again)

I interrupt my regularly scheduled posting—word of the week, monthly linkfest—to bring you some notes and images from my recent trip to Denver. It was my first out-of-California trip, and first non-driving trip, since May 2019, and the most time (four full days) I’ve ever spent in the Mile-High City.

Word of the week: NFT

I am going to do my best to explain the hot initialism of the week—trust me, I’m just as baffled as most non-rich, non-tech people—but first I’m going to tell you what it doesn’t stand for.

It doesn’t stand for “Not For Tourists,” the series of city guides first published in 2000.

 

The circled sans-serif letters originally suggested the distinctive font of New York subway lines, an iconography that is Not Fully Transferable to other cities, although the San Francisco Municipal Railway does in fact operate N, F, and T lines.

 

Which is a shame, because I definitely understand Not For Tourists. I bought a San Francisco NFT guide in 2006 or 2007 and found it well designed and helpful in my pre-smartphone phase.

This year’s NFT stands for non-fungible token, and the reason you’ve been hearing about it (or maybe not hearing about it, if you live mostly in the Real World, lucky you) is because what was once —say, in January—a niche internet hobby is now mainstream, or perhaps just “mainstream.” Also because Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, is attempting to sell the first tweet—his own, from March 6, 2006—as an NFT. Bidding reached $2.5 million on the evening of March 6, 2021.

Yes, anyone can view, retweet, and reproduce this tweet for free. Like this:

just setting up my twttr

— jack (@jack) March 21, 2006

But that’s not an NFT. An NFT gives you ownership rights to a piece of code in a blockchain. Not copyright or trademark rights, you understand. But still: rights.

Here’s an explanation by game developer Everest Pipkin, who’s concerned about the environmental impact of NFTs (something I won’t get into here, so read the full article if you’re interested):

An individual piece of cryptoart is called an NFT. You can think of each NFT as a trading card or a collectible with an individual value that is also affected by the general market value of NFTs as a concept, the Ethereum network and cryptocurrency in general. Like beanie babies without the beans.

Cryptoart is bought and sold with- and has its value calculated in- Ethereum, a 6-year-old cryptocurrency that was (at the time of writing, 2 pm March 2nd 2021) trading at 1 ETH = $1476.21 USD.

Is your head hurting? My head is hurting.

This would be a good time to take a break and read about the Tinkerbell effect, which is germane. I’ll wait.

February linkfest

“Trade characters” like Aunt Jemima and the Quaker Oats man used to be much more common in American commerce than they are today, writes logo expert James I. Bowie in Marker. They were so common, in fact, that the US Patent and Trademark Office assigned six-digit codes to trademark applications to “capture personal characteristics, including race and gender, as they were perceived in American culture many decades ago”:

There are codes for Native Americans and Asian Pacific people, but not for African Americans. Women, but not men, can be coded as “Hawaiian,” while men, but not women, can be deemed “Famous,” “Cowboys and westerners,” or “Farmers, hillbillies, or hobos” (the second of these terms was recently stricken). The categories for Scottish men and women seem to exist solely to code trade characters representing thriftiness — or, more bluntly, cheapness.

Aunt Jemima pancake mix, circa 1940s. James Bowie: “The Aunt Jemima logo was given codes 020301 (portraits of women) and 020315 (women wearing scarves on their heads).” Read my February 10 post about Aunt Jemima’s recently announced name change.

November linkfest

It’s Word of the Year season, and two British dictionaries are leading the pack. Collins picked lockdown – a word we threw around here in the US but never experienced the way they did in the UK and elsewhere. (A friend of mine is literally confined to her London apartment after spending a month in France: she can’t go outdoors at all.) And Oxford Languages, publisher of the Oxford dictionaries, chose a phenomenon instead of a single word: the impact of the COVID-19 on language. “What struck the team as most distinctive in 2020 was the sheer scale and scope of change,” Katherine Connor Martin, the company’s head of product, told the New York Times’s Jennifer Schuessler. “This event was experienced globally and by its nature changed the way we express every other thing that happened this year.”

“Social distance”: sign in an Oakland produce-store window, May 2020.

Re-viewing America

On Election Eve, I’m taking a break from the anger and the stress. I’m looking back on a project I once participated in that gave me hope about America: the Art of the State book series.

 

You can read my essay on Medium. And if you haven’t yet voted, please vote.

I shot a sign in Reno

Several signs, in fact.

Word of the week: Penrose tiling

San Francisco’s new Transbay Transit Center, a 1.2-million-square-foot hub for four Bay Area counties’ bus systems plus intercity Greyhound buses (and light rail, too, eventually), officially opened on August 11 to huge crowds. I skipped the festivities but heard rave reports from friends who'd gone, and so on August 13 I took an AC Transit bus from Oakland to San Francisco to see it for myself. I was not disappointed. Indeed, I was elated by the light-filled Grand Hall, the clear signage, the well-integrated public art, the pristine restrooms (every fixture is touchless), and the astonishing 5.4-acre rooftop garden, officially called Salesforce Park. (The software company bought the naming rights to the park and transit center in 2017; the adjacent 1,070-foot-tall Salesforce Tower, which opened earlier this year, is the tallest building in San Francisco.)

During the eight years of construction, I’d frequently driven beneath a filigreed white overpass that marked one of the center’s boundaries. While researching the completed center I learned that the filigree’s distinctive pattern has a name: Penrose tiling. And it’s not merely some designer’s fanciful grace note: it’s a mathematical marvel discovered in the 1970s and defended in a famous lawsuit.

 

Filigreed Penrose tiling outside the new transit center.