Fritinancy

Word of the week: Commute

On Friday, July 10, political operative Roger Stone received a presidential commutation of his 40-month sentence for seven felony crimes. The White House’s official statement was “punctuated by the sort of inflammatory language and angry grievances characteristic of the president’s Twitter feed,” according to a New York Times story.

Two Republican senators had opposing views of the commutation. Utah’s Mitt Romney (a former presidential candidate himself) called it “unprecedented, historic corruption.”

Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president.

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) July 11, 2020

Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of the president’s chief apologists in the Senate (a title with many contenders), called the action “justified.”

In my view it would be justified if President @realDonaldTrump decided to commute Roger Stone's prison sentence.

Mr. Stone is in his 70s and this was a non-violent, first-time offense.https://t.co/jbbGTucRpq

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) July 10, 2020

(Mr. Stone is not “in his 70s.” He is 67. And his felonies included witness tampering and lying to investigators—not exactly penny-ante stuff.)

But let’s put all that aside—tempting as it is to let it offend our sense of ethics and decency for the rest of time—and consider the word commute.

Coronacoinages III

It’s been almost four months—four months—since I first wrote about the new words emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. Through surges and spikes and reopenings and retreats, the indomitable spirit of wordy invention soldiers on. Here are some coronacoinages I’ve noticed recently. Let me know if I’ve overlooked any of your favorites.

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Word of the week: Long-hauler

“Survival is not recovery”—a phrase with roots in the language of sexual-abuse counseling—is turning out to have grim relevance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the World Health Organization reports that 80 percent of COVID infections are “mild or asymptomatic,” and most patients recover after one or two weeks, thousands of people now say they’ve been coping with serious symptoms for a month or longer. In online support groups, these people call themselves “long-haulers.”

Word of the week: Hypodescent

“I have rape-colored skin,” begins the powerful essay by Caroline Randall Williams, a poet, in the June 28 Sunday Review section of the New York Times. It’s headlined “You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument.” Williams goes on to say: “I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.” And she concludes that the monuments to the Confederacy—the vast majority of which were erected between 1890 and 1950, during the Jim Crow era, and which glorify not fallen soldiers but leaders of the Confederacy—“must come down.”

One word in Williams’s second paragraph jumped out at me, because I’d never seen it before: hypodescent. Williams writes:

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

Where does hypodescent come from, and how long has it been in use?

It's about time, Aunt Jemima

When Quaker Oats announced Wednesday that it would be changing the packaging and name of its 131-year-old Aunt Jemima brand, my immediate response was: What took them so long?

Original pancake mix with the most recent Aunt Jemima update, circa 1989. I’ve been unable to learn the name of the woman whose image is used in the current packaging; she may be a composite.

 

This is a brand name whose racist roots are only thinly covered by a modern mascot. It’s a troubled name that hurts far more than it helps. Its retirement is decades overdue.

"Defund the police"?

Since the shocking, videotaped killing of George Floyd, an African American man, by a white Minneapolis policeman on May 25, tens of thousands of Americans have taken to the streets in protest. In many places, demonstrations against police violence were met with callousness and more police violence, often military style.

You can’t have a protest without slogans, and of all the slogans that have appeared during these protests, the one that has been the most visible and provocative is “Defund the police.” On HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” host John Oliver devoted an entire show to the slogan and the issues behind it. The president, unsurprisingly, took the bait and tweeted repeatedly in opposition. A couple of his supporters escalated the threat.

“Defund the police” T-shirt via Etsy

I’ve been following the arguments over “Defund the police”—from “Is there a better way to say it?” to “What does it even mean?” (Interestingly, the OED doesn’t include a definition for defund that means “withdraw financial support from something,” although American dictionaries do.) My conclusion: Whenever you have to explain a slogan by saying “What we really mean is…”, it’s a bad slogan and you’re losing the argument.

Especially when your “explanation” uses a word like “decommodify” that needs more explanation. I don’t know who created this graphic; I found it on Reddit.

 

The commentary that spoke most directly to me comes from a Twitter user who goes by The Hoarse Whisperer and who tackled the subject the way those of us who work in branding and communications would.

Word of the week: Loot

“When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

That was the phrase in a tweet sent on May 28 from the @realDonaldTrump account—and retweeted by the official White House account—that caused Twitter to append a notice of rule violation: “This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible” (capitalization sic). If you want to see the original tweet, you need to click “View.” Replies to the tweet are hidden.

Twitter’s action provoked a lively discussion of First Amendment protections (which don’t apply to private companies, even publicly traded ones) and the source of the rhyming threat (a statement in 1967 by Miami’s chief of police, about which the president claimed ignorance—possibly because a staffer with greater historical knowledge had suggested the line).

But historian Peter A. Shulman had something else on his mind.

Curious about the once again omni-present word "looter," I looked up the etymology.

I was.. surprised!

Without looking, where does the word come from?

— Peter A. Shulman (@pashulman) May 29, 2020

Any guesses?

Word of the week: Draconian

How much are you suffering under your locality’s COVID-19 restrictions? If you’re reading this, I assume you aren’t running a fever or hooked up to a ventilator but are instead working from home or, if you’re fortunate, collecting unemployment. (Or, if you’re not fortunate, not collecting unemployment because you were self-employed or minimally employed.) Your gym/golf course/favorite restaurant has been closed for weeks; graduations, proms, and sports have been canceled; you can shop only for essentials, you’ve learned how to create makeshift face masks; and you’re washing your hands more than you’d ever dreamed possible.

Maybe you’d call this situation inconvenient. Or stressful. Or tough but necessary if we’re going to flatten the curve and save the lives of our fellow citizens.

On the other hand, maybe you self-identify as a member of the hard-core-individualist, expert-scorning, no-patience-with-patience slice of the Don’t-Tread-on-Me American populace. In that case, maybe you’re mad as hell and you’re not going to take any more government interference in your God-given liberties, not for any damn virus, nosiree. You’re calling the situation draconian.

Corona brands: Zoom

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

There are other video-conferencing tools—Webex, GoToMeeting, Blue Jeans, Google Hangouts—but during the COVIC-19 pandemic one brand has so dominated the landscape that “Zoom” has become the generic default for the whole category and the basis for a raft of new portmanteau words. As a March 23, 2020, New York Times headline put it: “We Live in Zoom Now.”

Word of the week: Potter’s field

You’ve probably seen the grim photos of the mass burials of unclaimed COVID-19 victims on New York City’s Hart Island. According to a New York Times article published online on April 10, the city has “drastically” increased interments on the island, “to around 24 a day, as many as it would bury there in a week before the pandemic hit.”

This week’s word (or “lexical item,” as the linguists say) comes from the lede of that story:

Since the mid-1800s, New York City’s potter’s field on Hart Island, off the coast of the Bronx, has figured in numerous epidemics affecting New York City — as a burial ground during the Spanish Flu and AIDS crisis, and a quarantine spot for yellow fever and tuberculosis victims.

It wasn’t the first time I’d encountered potter’s field, and it almost certainly wasn’t the first time I’d looked it up. I knew what it meant—a cemetery where indigent or unidentified people are buried in unmarked graves—but why potter?

“The Potter’s Field – The common trench,” by Jacob Riis, c. 1888-1898. Source: International Center for Photography