Fritinancy

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

Words of the week: More coronacoinages

Too many words are being invented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic for me to pick just one this week. Thus this update of my March 16 post, which covered quarantini, coronials, coronadouche, and other coinages, some of which have already slipped out of usage.

 

Word of the week: Shelter

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we’ve been under a shelter-in-place directive in response to the COVID-19 health crisis since Tuesday, March 18. On March 20, California Governor Gavin Newsom expanded shelter-in-place to all of the state’s 40 million residents, with no set end date. We’re hunkering down indoors, dashing out only for essential activities (including fresh-air exercise that observes safe physical distancing from other humans).

Shelter-in-place has been borrowed for this unprecedented crisis from earlier applications in emergency management. In 2013, after the Boston Marathon bombings, Ben Zimmer traced the phrase’s origins to “Cold War scenarios of nuclear fallout.” The earliest usage he found was in a 1976 congressional hearing on civil defense: the general idea is to encourage people to stay at home, indoors, rather than evacuate to a central gathering spot. Shelter-in-place has since been pressed into service for weather emergencies such as hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes as well as for the all-too-familiar-by-now active-shooter situations. (In ordering New York State’s version of shelter-in-place, which went into effect at 8 p.m. March 22, Governor Andrew Cuomo eschewed “shelter-in-place” because the term “evoked active shooter situations and nuclear war,” according to a New York Times story. Instead, the order is called PAUSE—the acronym awkwardly stands for “Policies Assure Uniform Safety for Everyone.”)

So much for the whole phrase. But what about the verb—where does shelter come from, and what has it signified over the years?

Corona reads

Like the rest of the Bay Area, I’m sheltering in place, waiting out the coronavirus crisis. But I’m still open for business: in fact, I’ve had a couple of small naming jobs this week. Under SIP, we’re still allowed to go outside for essential errands and exercise, and I’ve been taking full advantage (and taking photos). I intend to continue publishing here once or twice a week, and would be interested to know what you’d like to read about.

In the meantime, here are some things I found interesting.