Fritinancy

Word of the week: Vegemite

The other morning, as I was spreading Vegemite on my toast like scores* of my fellow Americans, I took a closer look at the label and made a happy discovery: This year marks the centennial (or centenary**) of Vegemite yeast extract, as much an Australian national symbol as koalas and kangaroos. It’s a milestone that will be cheered by many of us and strenuously ignored by others.

“Proudly made in Australia since 1923”

 

To call Vegemite—a thick black paste made from brewer’s yeast—controversial is to put it mildly, and “mild” is a word you can never use with Vegemite. I happen to love the stuff, because I love anything that combines salty and umami flavors, but here in North America I find myself in a lonely minority. And it’s not just North Americans: Vegemite is one of three foods that represent Australia in the Disgusting Food Museum in Malmö, Sweden. (The others are wichetty grubs, which are insects; and musk sticks, which are a kind of perfume-y candy and are unassociated with the current owner of Twitter and other businesses.)

My photo of a jar of Vegemite at the pop-up Disgusting Food Museum in Los Angeles, January 2019. The last sentence on the card reads: “In 2011, President Obama angered Australians by saying that he found vegemite [sic] to be ‘horrible.” When Australian prime minister Julia Gillard described the product, Obama said, “So, it's like a quasi-vegetable by-product paste that you smear on your toast for breakfast – sounds good, doesn’t it?” Yes, Mr. Obama, it sounds good. And it’s good for you, too.

A little background to whet your appetite:

New writing on Medium: REMO rides again

Way back in 2006, in the early months of this blog, I wrote a sort of fan letter to a little Australian retail business called REMO that sold quirky, beautifully designed products I loved. Back then, I was celebrating what looked like REMO’s reinvention after a business collapse. What I couldn’t have foreseen was that REMO would sink again—and rise again. That’s unusual enough in any industry, but especially in retail. I thought it deserved a second look.

The REMO logo

 

You can read the story here. Don’t forget to clap if you like it (up to 50 times if you really like it).

 

The Britishism invasion continues: "Bum" and "loo"

Last week it was knickers, which I’d spotted, in clipped and diminutive forms, in two corporate names, Knix and Knickey. Yesterday’s mail (perhaps I should now be saying post?) brought an oversize card whose solicitation includes two more Britishisms: bum and loo.

It was looking like a tri-bloody-fecta.

Are Americans ready for knickers?

When I, an American, think of “knickers” I generally think of something like this (and I suspect I am not an outlier):

“Men’s Knickers – Khaki Twill,” via Historical Emporium, San Jose, California (“Authentic products and old-fashioned service” since 2003).

 

Across the pond, and Down Under, they think of something more like this:

“Know your knickers!” via Kayser Lingerie, Australia. Not for men.

 

But I’ve recently learned of two women’s-underwear brands doing business in the US that are trading on the British/Aussie sense of knickers. Which leads me to wonder whether we USians are about to adopt this sense of knickers into our retail vocabularies. (Or re-adopt, as I’ll explain in a bit.)

Word of the week: Stonks

Last week’s big financial story sounded like April Fool’s in January: Some mischievous day traders on the WallStreetBets subreddit noticed that GameStop, a struggling chain of brick-and-mortar video-game stores, was heavily shorted by Wall Street hedge funds—in other words, the hedgies were betting that GameStop would soon go belly-up. To stick it to the big-money investors, and maybe to make some money themselves, the Redditors began buying up undervalued GameStop stock, which drove up its price: from $4 a share a year ago to about $150 at market close on Friday, January 29. (They also bought up low-priced stock in other struggling companies: AMC movie theaters, Macys department stores, Blackberry. Yes, Blackberry is still around.)

There’s a lot more to the story than my synopsis; CNN Business reporter Allison Morrow broke it down concisely and clearly, and Bloomberg’s Matt Levine did his best to find The Meaning of It All.

Me, I’m going to stick to my own stock in trade: words.

Word of the week: Cheersing

People have been cheerful since the 15th century and have cheered one another on for just about as long. But you may be surprised, as I was, to learn that we’ve been saying “Cheers!” as “a toast or salutation before drinking,” as the OED puts it, only since the 20th century, and relatively late in the century at that—the OED’s earliest citation is from the Sunday Times of Perth, Australia, September 14, 1930: “The brief toast of ‘Cheers, dears!’” We can also credit the Aussies with Cheers! as a parting salutation (“goodbye”), which they’ve been saying since 1937. The Brits, for their part, took to saying Cheers! to mean thanks by the mid-1970s, if not earlier, according to the OED blog. You can read more about British cheers on Lynne Murphy’s linguistics blog, Separated by a Common Language.

But drinking-salutation cheers as a verb? That was new to me until very recently.

March linkfest

This month’s book recommendation is I Like to Watch (2019), by the Pulitzer Prize–winning television critic Emily Nussbaum. The book collects a decade’s worth of Nussbaum’s reviews and essays for the New Yorker and other publications, including one written especially for the book. Nussbaum is such a good writer that she made me care about shows that hadn’t appealed to me (I’ve watched exactly one episode each, for example, of “The Sopranos,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and “Lost”). And she made me care even more deeply about subjects I was already drawn to, like the complicated career of Joan Rivers and the way the 2016 presidential election made “jokes” unfunny. (You can read the jokes essay—one of the best pieces of writing to come out of that twisted season—here.)

 

Word of the week: Frunk

The Volkswagen Beetle had one from its very beginnings in the 1930s. The Chevrolet Corvair had one throughout its production run, from 1960 to 1969. Several Porsche models had one. So did the Renault 10 and the Tatra 603.

But not until Tesla came up with the Model S, in 2012, did any automaker deem it necessary to coin a word for the feature all these cars have in common: a trunk in the front. Or as Tesla chooses to call it, the frunk.

 

Tesla frunk, via Jalopnik.

 

On the Visual Thesaurus: The story of -o

My recent explorations of sicko and rhino led me to wonder about other words that end in -o and how they arrived in English. Those words are the subject of my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, “The Story of -o.” Full access is restricted to subscribers for three months; here’s a taste:

January linkfest

Is an Eataly ad for truffles offensive to Italians and Italian-Americans? (Chicago Tribune)