Fritinancy

Grimace

I have a confession: I have never eaten at a McDonald’s. Once, many years ago, I ducked into a Mickey D’s in Berkeley to use the restroom, and then ducked right out again. And once when I was babysitting a cranky child I briefly pacified him with a Happy Meal. But I myself have never eaten a Big Mac or a McRib or an Egg McMuffin or even the McDonald’s “salad.” I am, obviously, a Bad American.

I’m not totally ignorant. I’ve watched The Founder, the demi-factual 2016 film about Ray Kroc and the McDonald brothers, so I’m familiar with the origin story. And I’ve written about “You Deserve a Break Today,” the hugely influential McDonald’s ad campaign that ran from 1971 to 1990.

Like just about everyone, I knew about Ronald McDonald, the clown mascot who first appeared in Washington, DC, in 1963. (He was originally portrayed by Willard Scott, former Bozo the Clown, future Today Show weatherman.) But somehow I’d never, even once, heard of the big purple blob called Grimace, a denizen of McDonaldland who’s celebrating his 52nd birthday this month.

Grimace evolution via McDonald’s Wiki

 

And I might have remained blissfully unaware of Grimace were it not for a June 12 post about Grimace’s birthday on The Impulsive Buy, a blog about fast food and supermarket snacks. To celebrate the occasion, McDonald’s is offering a combo meal consisting of a Big Mac or Chicken McNuggets, fries, and a Grimace’s Birthday Shake. The shake, writes TIB correspondent Marvo, “has a delightful blueberry flavor that reminds me of the fruit at the bottom of a blueberry yogurt but a little more intense.”

But enough about food. What’s the Grimace story, and why the name?

Word of the week: Grooming

Not this kind of grooming.

Glamour Grooming for pets, Shawnee, Kansas

 

Not this kind, either.

National Men’s Grooming Day is August 19

 

And not these grooms, although they’re cute.

 

“Custom gay wedding toppers.”

 

No, this week we’re looking at yet another sense of grooming, one that’s been in headlines a lot lately.

Corona brands: King Arthur flour

Fourth in a series of posts about US brands that are thriving during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Around the end of March, a couple of weeks into California’s shelter-in-place directive, I used up the last of my flour on a batch of Marion Cunningham’s raw apple muffins—a recipe I’d first tasted, years earlier, at Cunningham’s house in Walnut Creek, where I’d gone to interview her. (I’ve forgotten what story I was writing, but I’ll never forget the warm muffins and strong coffee she served me. As I was leaving, she gave me her well-worn and annotated copy of The Breakfast Book, which I still use.)

When I ventured out to buy more flour, all of the shelves were bare. I’d had the bad luck to run out of provisions during a pandemic baking boom; flour mills had been caught short. I was late to this realization: In early March, King Arthur Flour—the oldest flour company in America and the country’s fourteenth-oldest manufacturer—had noticed a 600 percent jump in grocery-store sales of their products virtually overnight. “It was as if half of America had decided all at once that they needed to bake. A lot,” writes David H. Freedman in an engrossing story for Medium about the King Arthur company.

Finally found some!

 

The problem wasn’t supply—there was plenty of wheat available—but logistics. Until the pandemic, home baking had been in decline for years; flour mills like King Arthur stayed in business by supplying restaurants and commercial bakeries, which bought in huge quantities and which were now shut down. 

Freedman’s story reveals how King Arthur quickly adapted to meet the new market demands. It’s also full of other interesting tidbits. For one, the company has been employee owned since 1996. For another, employees call the Vermont headquarters “Carbohydrate Camelot.”

But the story doesn’t delve into the history and significance of the company name. So I did my own investigation.

Word of the week: Democracy grief

What’s your grief, and how are you coping with it? Perhaps you suffer from climate grief, a term that may have been coined in 2007, by the authors of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, to describe the despair and depression people experience when they contemplate the climate crisis. Maybe you console yourself by eating, which may result in what Germans call kummerspeck (literally “grief fat”).

Or maybe you, like New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg, are experiencing democracy grief: not merely “anxiety and anger” but also “a demoralizing degree of fear, even depression” that—as one psychologist put it to Goldberg—“the institutions that we rely on to protect us from a dangerous individual might fail.”

 

How Democracies Die (2018). by Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who warn of the “gradual chipping away of democratic institutions” that makes it “harder and harder to dislodge the incumbent [elected official] by democratic means.”

Words of the decade 2010–2019: Fritinancy edition

In a few weeks, members of the American Dialect Society (and of the word-loving public) will gather in New Orleans and vote on the words of the year and the decade. Ten years ago, the American Dialect Society picked google as its overall winner; my own list back then included blog, Ground Zero, terrorism, and PTSD.

New decade, new list. As before, I’m following ADS criteria. To qualify for my list, a word must be:

• demonstrably new or newly popular in the decade in question
• widely and/or prominently used in the decade in question
• indicative or reflective of the popular discourse
• not a peeve or a complaint about overuse or misuse

I confess a bias toward my interests in technology, business, and social media (just as the ADS has a bias toward words of specifically linguistic interest).

I welcome your own nominations in the comments. You can also submit words of the year and decade to ADS: [email protected].

As for WOTY, I’ll post my own nominations soon—see last year’s list here—and have already posted my choices for brand names of the decade.

Word of the week: Cursed

I feel uncharacteristically moved by the Halloween spirit this year—the ghastly, chilling spirit, not the sexy-Mr.-Rogers-costume spirit, I hasten to add. Last week, the spirit manifested itself in an investigation of macabre. This week I’m drawn to cursed, a word that New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino notes “has become central in the online vernacular.” In her essay “How We Came to Live in ‘Cursed’ Times,” published October 7, Tolentino points to the Twitter account Cursed Images, an Instagram account called Cursed Shirts (defined by its creator as “bad shirts”), and a suspended Twitter account called Cursed TikToks (which posted “the cringiest of the cringiest TikTok videos ever made,” according to a DailyDot report).

What these accounts have in common, besides their image-centeredness, is “a sort of context-driven profanity,” Tolentino writes. She quotes Jenny Odell, the author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy:

How did Wakanda get its name?

I saw Black Panther on opening weekend – in Oakland, California, birthplace of the film’s director, Ryan Coogler – and have been thinking ever since about the names in the movie. I’m not a comic-book fan and had never read the source material or seen Captain America: Civil War, the 2016 film that introduced the Black Panther character to movie audiences, so I came to the experience with fresh eyes and ears.

And I came away with questions. Where, for starters, did “Wakanda” – the name of the tiny, technologically advanced African country that’s home to the Black Panther character – come from?

 

The fictional country of Wakanda, via SciFi Stack Exchange. Theories vary about Wakanda’s location; see the comments on the entry.

 

A visit to the Museum of Failure

How best to mark the end of the shitshow that was 2017? With a pilgrimage to an institution that mocks and celebrates all manner of flops, lemons, fiascos, misfires, and fuckups, of course. Which is how I found myself last week at the Museum of Failure in downtown Los Angeles’s Arts District. The traveling installation, housed in the A+D (architecture + design) Museum, is open to the public through February 4; it then returns to its permanent home home in Helsingborg, Sweden.

Word of the week: Blackpilling

Will Sommer writes in his blog, Right Richter*:

After Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer announced a potential DACA deal, pro-Trump forums and Twitter lit up with mentions of “blackpilling”— the concept that the political process is useless, and that either completely dropping out of society or responding with mass violence is the answer. The idea that Trump would betray them, they said, was the ultimate blackpill.”

(Emphasis added.)

Blackpill (noun), blackpilling (gerund), and to blackpill (transitive verb) are relatively new, but since 2016 they’ve been pervasive among the so-called alt-right, whose adherents include neo-Nazis, white separatists, and the manosphere. The terms were inspired by The Matrix (1999), written by siblings Lilly and Lana Wachowski, in which the protagonist, Neo, is offered a choice of a virtual red pill or a virtual blue bill. “You take the blue pill, the story ends,” the character Morpheus tells Neo. “You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

“Red pill” – a metaphor for “reality, however harsh” – was adopted by the men’s rights movement, many of whose adherents frequent a sub-Reddit called The Red Pill. The Red Pill was also the title of a 2016 documentary about the men’s rights movement directed by Cassie Jaye.  

What “redpilling” is to the manosphere, “blackpilling” is to a segment of the alt-right: the neoreaction movement, self-styled as NRx.

Word of the week: Wypipo

Maybe you’ve never seen the word wypipo. I’d never seen it myself until a couple of weeks ago. But just say it aloud, or even silently: WYE-pee-poh.

Still not getting it? Take a look at this:

Via The Lisa B Experience (Lisa Beasley)

 

No? Here; I’ll help: Wypipo is white people with a dash of baby-talk and a lot of eyeroll. It’s used almost exclusively by people of color, almost always as a term of condescension, disparagement, or outright hostility. Its origins, like those of many slang terms, are murky, but there’s a better than zero probability that it was born on social media, where eye dialect thrives. (I first encountered it on Twitter.) As a written word, it’s pretty recent: Urban Dictionary has only two entries, the earliest of which is dated January 29, 2016: “Twitter slang or dialect that with read aloud sounds like ‘white people’ which is its actual meaning.” The example sentence in that entry is: “Girl wypipo are crazy, they let their dogs lick their mouths.”

It will probably not surprise you to learn that usage of wypipo has grown exponentially since the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, during the weekend of August 12.