Fritinancy

June linkfest

“The use of rainbows as logo design elements has fallen back almost to its pre-1970s level, while the use of rainbow colors in logos has taken off.” (Emblemetric)

Image via Emblemetric

 

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Remember tronc, possibly the worst corporate name ever? You can forget it now. (The Verge)

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After 27 years, Greece has finally agreed to the formal name of its northern neighbor, the Republic of North Macedonia. (BBC)

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This ad for Texas Congressional candidate Mary Jennings “MJ” Hegar sets a new standard for political advertising: It’s well written, brilliantly edited, and engaging.

Word of the week: Feckless

Those of you with long memories will recall that this is the second time feckless has been a Fritinancy word of the week. The first occasion was in 2012, when U.S. Senator John McCain used feckless to describe President Obama’s foreign policy.

This time around, feckless found itself in hotter water.

Image by erokism via Flickr

Word of the week: Truckle

“Well, Paul Ryan, you’re a free man now,” began the New York Times editorial that appeared on April 11, the day the Wisconsin congressman announced he’d be stepping down as House speaker and leaving Congress in January. Three paragraphs down, the editorial counseled Ryan about how to put his liberation to good use:

You don’t have to worry anymore about weathering a primary challenger from the far right. You don’t have to truckle before a blast of presidential tweets. You can use your remaining authority and credibility with your colleagues to pass legislation to make it harder for the president to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and other officials at the Department of Justice. On your way out the door, on that crucial question, you still have a chance to put yourself on the right side of history.

To truckle before stands out in that paragraph. Its meaning is clear enough in context – something about deference, obsequiousness, sycophancy – but where does it come from?

Word of the week: Demonetization

Nasim Najafi Aghdam, the 39-year-old woman who shot three people at YouTube’s San Bruno, California, headquarters on April 3 before killing herself, is said to have been angry about the company’s policies, especially demonetization. According to an article in Entrepreneur, she had written on her website: “There is no equal growth opportunity on YOUTUBE or any other video sharing site, your channel will grow if they want to!!!!!”

Nasim Aghdam, via San Bruno Police.

Word of the week: Bracket

“Is there a Trump firing bracket?” asked Josh Marshall, the editor and publisher of Turning Points Memo on Twitter. It was the beginning of March Madness, the annual NCAA basketball championship, and the middle – or the beginning of the middle, or the end of the beginning – of a dizzying string of dismissals from the White House. The latest departure: FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, two days before he would have been eligible to retire with his full pension.

The answer to Marshall’s question: Yes.

Word of the week: Sicko

On February 22 – the birthday of America’s first president, George Washington – @RealDonaldTrump rose early and poked out a farrago of tweets – seven in all – proffering his theories about guns, schools, and a “GREAT DETERRENT” (his capitalization) to massacres like the one that occurred on Valentine’s Day at Marjory Stoneman Davis High School in Parkland, Florida. Scattered within those tweets like so much buckshot were three occurrences of the word sicko. 

....immediately fire back if a savage sicko came to a school with bad intentions. Highly trained teachers would also serve as a deterrent to the cowards that do this. Far more assets at much less cost than guards. A “gun free” school is a magnet for bad people. ATTACKS WOULD END!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2018

....If a potential “sicko shooter” knows that a school has a large number of very weapons talented teachers (and others) who will be instantly shooting, the sicko will NEVER attack that school. Cowards won’t go there...problem solved. Must be offensive, defense alone won’t work!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2018

 

Word of the week: Craven

On Wednesday, Valentine’s Day 2018, a 19-year-old armed with an AR-15 assault rifle entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and opened fire. By the time he dumped his rifle and attempted to flee, he’d killed 17 people, mostly teenagers, and injured more than a dozen.

Mass shootings are shockingly common in the U.S.: there have been at least 146 in the last half-century, and the rate of their occurrence has tripled since 2011. School shootings, Malcolm Gladwell wrote in The New Yorker in 2015, are a modern phenomenon; they mostly involve young white men like Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland shooter.

How do Americans respond to random, recurring massacres? In Congress and the White House, by offering  trite, ineffectual words: “thoughts and prayers.” On social media, though, a different word has surfaced repeatedly, aimed in anger and frustration at those very officials: craven.

Word of the week: Mulligan

“We kind of gave him—‘All right, you get a mulligan. You get a do-over here,’” Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, told Politico’s Isaac Dovere last Tuesday. By “him” Perkins meant the president of the United States. Perkins used the same term in an interview that day with CNN’s Erin Burnett: “Yes, evangelicals, conservatives, they gave him a mulligan. They let him have a do-over. They said we’ll start afresh with you and we’ll give you a second chance.” And he repeated it twice on Thursday in a post he published on FRC.org under his own byline titled “On Morals and Mulligans…” He meant mulligan in its “political” sense, he told his evangelical followers:

I’m not saying his performance as president can buy him grace -- only Christ can do that. And while evangelicals can give him a mulligan regarding their political support, only through repentance and God's forgiveness can he have a totally new start.

 

Yes, Perkins called in to CNN from Pride, Louisiana. His Twitter bio gives Washington, DC, as his location; it’s where the FRC is headquartered.

 

Word of the week: Quiverfull

On January 14, David and Louise Turpin – the parents of 13 children, ages 2 to 29 – were arrested in Perris (Riverside County), California, and later charged with multiple counts of false imprisonment, child abuse, and torture. The children had been starved, beaten, chained to their beds, and permitted to bathe only once a year; they had been home-schooled (minimally), forced to memorize long passages of the Bible, and denied medical or dental care.

David Turpin’s parents told ABC News they were “surprised and shocked” by the allegations because their son and daughter-in-law are “a good Christian family.” “God called on them” to have as many children as they did, the elder Turpins said.

That statement led to speculation in some quarters that David and Louise Turpin might be adherents of a fringe Christian movement called Quiverfull.

 

Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement (2010). Kathryn Joyce is freelance journalist. Read an excerpt here.

Word of the week: Oust

What do the former CEOs of Uber and SoFi have in common with the presidents of Zimbabwe and Catalonia, the political director of CBS News, an FBI agent working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and a one-time “reality”-TV celebrity recently in the employ of the White House?

All of them have, in the last four weeks, been described in news reports as “ousted” from their positions.

Not merely “fired” or “removed” or “dismissed” – no, their expulsions were executed with sufficient vigor to merit an old verb that lands a satisfying punch: oust.

Big year for ousting

— Emily Nussbaum (@emilynussbaum) January 4, 2018