Fritinancy

April linkfest

This month I’ve been reading Stiffed: The Roots of Modern Male Rage, by Susan Faludi. Actually, I’ve been re-reading it; the book was originally published in 1999 with the subtitle The Betrayal of the American Man and was reissued in 2019 with a new author’s foreword that adds a Trump-era, #MeToo perspective. Faludi is a superb researcher, interviewer, and writer (and believe me, that’s a tough trifecta), and Stiffed—what a perfect title—holds up shockingly well. Faludi’s mid-1990s reporting took her to Vietnam veterans, diehard Cleveland Browns fans, an Alternatives to Violence group, laid-off defense workers, and meetings of Promise Keepers, a Christian men’s association. She investigates the post-World War II redefinition of masculinity as “something to drape over the body, not draw from inner resources” and to be “displayed, not demonstrated.” I couldn’t help reflecting on Stiffed when I read a recent New York Times roundtable discussion with eight men who described themselves as politically conservative and who repeatedly expressed a wistful longing for days gone by—the same days, some 25 years ago, that Faludi wrote about: a time of layoffs and gang violence and painful domestic rifts. Moral: Beware the nostalgia trap and the Golden Age fallacy; there never were any good old days, except for the ones that seemed good because you were a little kid and didn’t know any better. (You may also be interested in the letters to the editor about that roundtable discussion. I’ve unlocked both links so that nonsubscribers can access them.)

 

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Why A-list names often aren’t A+ clients. (Nora Trice for A Hundred Monkeys)

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Attention, all you skinflints frugal people! Here are some of my Visual Thesaurus columns that are now unlocked and available to non-subscribers: All about the -core suffix; my picks for brand names of the year for 2021; the lingo of film noir. Don’t you wish you’d read them earlier? You can—a subscription is just $19.95 a year! Give a gift to yourself, or to Mom for Mother’s Day!

Word of the week: Dopamine dressing

It’s been a tough week, in Ukraine and elsewhere. The responsible, grown-up thing would have been to write about a serious topical word like tranche or SWIFT or drought. But I couldn’t work up the will.

Instead, I went looking for a mood boost. I found one, sort of, in the fashion pages.

“The Science—and Styles—Behind Dopamine Dressing in 2022.” – Town & Country, February 2022. 

Word of the week: Blue lie

At its annual meeting last week, the American Dialect Society selected insurrection as its word of the year for 2021. I’d originally picked insurrection myself, but switched to Big Lie, which, I argued, was the insurrection’s impetus and underpinning. Big Lie did make the ADS’s shortlist, though. And this week I’m looking at another shade of mendacity—one that was new to me until very recently: blue lie.

I came across blue lie in a New Yorker article by Evan Osnos about a hugely popular and scarily influential right-wing radio host: “Dan Bongino and the Big Business of Returning Trump to Power,” published in the magazine’s January 3 & 10 issue. Here’s the relevant passage:

Bongino, like other prominent supporters, seems to put increasing stock in what researchers refer to as “blue lies,” the kinds of claims that pull believers together and drive skeptics away. (“There were known issues with the election,” he said in December, adding, “We get that.”)

I’d known about “white lies,” of course—untruths told to help someone else, even at a cost to ourselves. There are also, according to some people fond of color categories, “black lies” (told out of selfishness), “gray lies” (told partly to help others, partly to help ourselves) and “red lies” (told out of spite or vengeance). But blue lies?

Here’s the Wikipedia definition*: “a form of lying that is told purportedly to benefit a collective or ‘in the name of the collective good’. The origin of the term ‘blue lie’ is possibly from cases where police officers made false statements to protect the police force or to ensure the success of a legal case against an accused.” Blue, the color of police uniforms, is a stand-in—a metonym—for “police.”

 

Thin Blue Lie: The Failure of High-Tech Policing, by Matt Stroud (2019). The title puns on “thin blue line,” the concept that the police keep society from descending into violent chaos. Popularized by the Los Angeles Police Department in the 1950s, “thin blue line” was itself a variation on “The Thin Red Line,” a British regiment during the Crimean War. The Thin Blue Line is the title of a 1988 documentary by Errol Morris about the murder of a Texas police officer. The thin blue line flag has been displayed as a show of support for law enforcement “but also has come to signal opposition to the racial-justice movement.” 

December linkfest

Happy Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us! When you’ve completed the traditional Feats of Strength you may feel like you deserve a celebratory quaff. There are several Festivus beers and ales; here’s one from Market Garden Brewery in Cleveland. They registered the trademark in October 2015.

There’s also a Festivus Maximus sparkling wine, but it’s only tangentially about the made-up December 23 holiday and “Seinfeld.” It’s actually a Baltimore Ravens story: “Festivus Maximus” was coach Brian Billick’s substitute phrase for “playoffs,” a word he superstitiously wouldn’t allow players to utter in the runup to the 2000 Super Bowl (which Baltimore would go on to win).

And now—drumroll, please—it’s time for the traditional Airing of Grievances. In order from serious to frivolous:

Grievance #1: U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, “Democrat” of West Virginia.
Grievance #2: Punitive abortion laws.
Grievance #3: Expensive, hard-to-find Covid test kits.
Grievance #4: People who still haven’t gotten Covid vaccinations.
Grievance #5: TFG. Enough already.
Grievance #6: Movies that run more than two hours. Looking at you, Nightmare Alley.
Grievance #7: Remakes. See #6.
Grievance #8: Sequels.
Grievance #9: Prequels.
Grievance #10: Holiday promotions that include the phrase “’Tis the Season.”

Read my previous Festivus posts.

September linkfest

I’m about halfway through Virginia Postrel’s 2020 book The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, and the only reason I haven’t finished it is because I keep stopping to take notes, usually punctuated with exclamation marks. Postrel is a journalist and independent scholar who has written very good books about style and glamour; here she elegantly blends centuries of research and her own investigations (she learned to spin thread, spent a week at a traditional Indian dyeing school, and visited weavers of Guatemalan huipiles) into a highly readable and compelling history. The glossary alone is worth the investment in the book. As Postrel writes:

We drag our heirloom metaphors—“on tenterhooks,” “towheaded,” “frazzled”—with no idea that we’re talking about fabric and fibers. We repeat threadbare clichés: “whole cloth,” “hanging by a thread,” “dyed in the wool.” We catch airline shuttles, weave through traffic, follow comment threads. We speak of life spans and spinoffs and never wonder why drawing our fibers and twirling them into thread looms so large in our language.

Listen to an interview with Postrel on The Woven Road, a podcast about fiber arts.

May linkfest

Most naming advice in the popular media makes me clutch my head in despair, but this Inc. article by Minda Zetlin is different. Zetlin interviewed experienced name developers Anthony Shore and David Placek—both of whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with—and their real-world examples are smart and helpful. “Avoid names that describe your product” and “Don’t fall in love with one name” are the first tips, and yes, you’ve heard them from me, too. (h/t trademark lawyer Ed Timberlake)

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Steer clear of negative words in your business name? Not necessarily. Read about how Calamityware got its name. (And read my own post on negative names with positive impact.)

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I will probably go to my grave insisting on the distinction between lay and lie, so I got a satisfied chortle out of this table of cat tenses, from a Duolingo chat page. (Via Language Log)

December linkfest

Happy Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us! The traditional Airing of Grievances seems superfluous this year: we’ve been airing and grieving for most of 2020. So let us gather quietly—and virtually—around the traditionally unadorned Festivus pole and wish for feats of strength to get us through the season.

Festivus T-shirt from Snorg Tees. Read my previous Festivus posts.

 

Now let’s open some link-y presents!

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Word of the year, California edition: Purple

Politically, California remains blue: My state voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, 63.5 to 34.3 percent, and has a Democratic governor, two Democratic US Senators and a majority-Democratic Congressional representation.

But in our non-electoral lives, it was a very purple year.

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.)

 

July linkfest

“Companies change their slogans and catchphrases all the time to keep themselves fresh in customers’ minds. But DiGiorno might be the only one that has kept the same catchphrase, but changed the implication.” (Eater)

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“Sometimes I look at license plates for new prefix ideas. Sometimes I borrow from the names of cats or dogs.” How two women in Chicago create all those names for generic prescription drugs. (David Lazarus for Los Angeles Times; via MJF)*