Fritinancy

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.

Word of the week: Deadstock

An April 22 Instagram post from Carol Young | Undesigned, a boutique in Los Angeles’s Los Feliz neighborhood:

Happy Earth Day! We try to make everyday [sic] earth day here, using designer dead stock fabrics and organic fabrics since launching the line in 2003.

On the shop’s website, you’ll find shoes made of “leather salvaged from dead stock inventory.”

What is deadstock (or dead stock)? Several things, depending on where you live and what you’re selling.

23 cows struck by lightning in northern Texas, September 2019.

Deceased cattle may technically qualify as “dead stock,” but on a ranch or farm, deadstock is the opposite of livestock in a different way: It refers to equipment and implements.

 

The deadstock on Carol Young’s site is “dead” in the sense of “previously manufactured but unused.” Here’s an excerpt from a deadstock explainer published in September 2019 by Techpacker, a Brooklyn company that helps companies make samples quickly:

Deadstock fabrics are textiles which are sitting around as leftovers and are not part of a plan for immediate or future use. For example, it could be the leftover fabric of a fashion brand’s collection or it could also refer to unused textiles from movie sets or fabric mills.

Deadstock fabric is also known as overstock, surplus or jobber fabric; they all mean the same thing.

This sense of deadstock has been in use for centuries. Here’s the relevant entry (under dead) in OED:

c. Of goods: Lying unsold, unsaleable, for which there is no market.

1670   J. Dryden Tyrannick Love v. i. 64   And all your Goods lie dead upon your hand.

1681   R. Knox Hist. Relation Ceylon 146   And now Caps were become a very dead Commodity.

1879   C. Hibbs in Cassell's Techn. Educator IV. 263/2   A large quantity of finished articles lying as dead stock in the market.

In the niche market of athletic-shoe collecting, however, deadstock has a different and specific meaning that began emerging in the early 2000s. A June 2005 Urban Dictionary entry gives a terse definition:

Brand New. Never worn, Never Tried and would usually include a box for the shoes.

Unlike deadstock fabrics, which may have been sitting unremembered for years in a musty warehouse, deadstock shoes are often bought with the intention of future resale at a profit.

 

“Deadstock Jordan’s [sic] whatthe4s size 9.5 never tried on once. 1000% authentic with receipt from Nike;” $375 on the resale site Poshmark.. Does anyone else get a strong “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” vibe from this?

 

Adam Bluestein wrote about the phenomenon in a March 2, 2021, article for Marker:

Analysts predict the global sneaker resale market will reach $30 billion by 2030; last summer investment bank Cowen estimated the U.S. resale market was worth $2 billion in North America alone. Apart from Supreme, the hottest merch “collab” (usually indicated with an “x,” for example, Supreme x Comme des Garçons) a brand can score is with Nike (Adidas comes in second). Unworn Jordans, Airs, and Dunks — called “deadstock” — are the gold standard of the resale economy — and, really, as liquid and versatile a global currency as a U.S. dollar or a euro, “a bona fide asset class” as Bloomberg Businessweek put it recently. In marketplaces like StockX — founded in 2015 and now valued at over $1 billion — Stadium Goods, and GOAT a valuation of any given shoe can be obtained instantly.

Hat tip to Colin Morris, who posted the Marker link on the ADS-L listserv. He also found an 1897 instance of deadstock being applied to unsold clothing offered for resale in Laotian shops: “felt hats of various antiquated shapes, hard and soft, the deadstock of the shops of Bombay, Calcutta and London.”

Word of the week: Incalculable

“An incalculable loss” reads the banner headline on the front page of Sunday’s New York Times. In small type, over a total of 16 columns, the paper printed the names and ages of 1,000 people—1 percent of the US total to date—whose deaths have been attributed to COVID-19, along with brief bios: “sign-language interpreter,” “wife with little time to enjoy a new marriage,” “remembered for his successful career as a tango dancer.” A sidebar explains that the names and descriptions were drawn from “hundreds of obituaries, news articles and paid death notices that have appeared in newspapers and digital media over the past few months,” lightly edited for clarity.

 

Online, the format is different but equally powerful: an interactive list accompanied by a three-month timeline.

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

Motto in the news: “Democracy Dies in Darkness”

Last Friday the Washington Post quietly unveiled its new motto on Snapchat. Yesterday the new motto appeared in the paper’s online edition.

“Democracy Dies in Darkness” – that is, absent the shining light of the press.

 

“This is actually something we’ve said internally for a long time in speaking about our mission,” Post spokeswoman Kris Coratti told CNN’s Brian Stelter. The mandate may have come from the top: Post owner (and Amazon founder) Jeff Bezos had used the line in an April 2016 interview explaining why he bought the paper. (“I’ve always believed democracy dies in darkness. Certain institutions have an important role in making sure that there is light. And I think the Washington Post has an important seat to do just that because it is located here in the heart of Washington DC.”)

As mottos go, this one is, well, dark. A lot of people are squeamish about the word die, preferring mealy-mouthed euphemisms like passed away. Not me, though. I’m seeing a lot of bleakness in the news these days, and I’m OK with an up-front acknowledgment. Let’s call an abyss an abyss.

Granted, the Post’s alliteration is a bit forced and the spirit of the motto is a tad self-congratulatory. But what is a motto for if not to self-congratulate? “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” the New York Times’s long-standing motto, is hardly modest. I once worked for the number-two newspaper in a two-paper town (San Francisco); it called itself “The Monarch of the Dailies,” which provoked both secret pride and overt mockery in us ink-stained members of the Newspaper Guild. The number-one paper – now the last one standing – still calls itself “The Voice of the West,” a bit of overreaching that also suggests cowboys whooping it up.

The Post would have attracted criticism no matter what it chose as its motto. What did the critics, self appointed and otherwise, have to say about this one?

February linkfest

Why do so many robot names sound alike? FastCoDesign put the question to name developer Christopher Johnson, who explained that Kuri, Yui, Yobi, et al. “sound like the kind of names you might give your dog.” 

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Speaking of machines and names, Amazon’s Alexa is making life miserable for a lot of people named Alexis, Alex, and Alexa.

 

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Some good advice from Nielsen Norman Group, the user-experience people, on writing headlines, page titles, subject lines, and other “microcontent.”

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PROFANITY BREAK!

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Is shitgibbon the simian epithet of the year? After Daylin Leach, a Pennsylvania state senator, used the word in a tweet aimed at @realDonaldTrump, Ben Zimmer did some scholarly analysis for Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing; and for Slate’s Browbeat blog.

 

 

Then the MetaFilter crowd weighed in. (Sample: “No mention of the shitgibbon’s closest primate relative, the poontangutan?”)

Linguist Gretchen McCulloch considered “the origin and constraints of shitgibbon compounds.” (She thinks douchebaboon “would actually work just fine,” but shitbaboon and shitcanoe “are both pretty bad.”)

 

 

Geoff Nunberg – you may know him as linguist Geoff Nunberg from NPR’s “Fresh Air” – waxed poetic.

@bgzimmer @stronglang @browbeat Or to summarize the story as a double dactyl: pic.twitter.com/6im5FrMcEe

— Geoffrey Nunberg (@GeoffNunberg) February 12, 2017

And The Forward’s language columnist, Aviya Kushner, surveyed the whole megillah, observing parenthetically: “Many of us, even if we aren’t senators or linguists, can use a little bit of fun right now, and why not turn to insult-making as stress relief?”

Finally, we bid adieu to the zoo and consider the shit show. Or is it shitshow?

"Shit show" and "shitshow" are neck and neck in our data, and also in the world in general. https://t.co/nFAEvStqG1

— Kory Stamper (@KoryStamper) January 30, 2017

 

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END OF PROFANITY BREAK.

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How do new drugs get those strange-sounding names? (See also my post from last September about the psoriasis drug Taltz.)

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Where does new slang comes from?

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Australia has some pretty awesome ads about dying, I'll give it that pic.twitter.com/ib2aAmOmbK

— Matt Novak (@paleofuture) February 15, 2017

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The surprising history of snowflake as a political insult. 

 

I love this. Such a sublime failure of understanding how the 'putting the X into Y' headline fórmula works. pic.twitter.com/LU2cwXkwxb

— Nick Parker (@nickparker) February 10, 2017

 

Ben Yagoda has been seeing a lot of better in advertisements, and he doesn’t feel good about it.

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There’s better, there’s worse, and then there’s Thee Worst.

“Thee Worst” is Dutch for “tea sausage.” Hat tip: @AbsP.

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“Now that a sneering, orange man-child is sinking his tiny fingers into every aspect of American life, [branding] experts believe activism will become nearly as ubiquitous in the brand world as it is on college campuses.” Let’s see what they have to say.

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HOW ALL CAPS CAME TO SIGNIFY SHOUTING.

 

 

Not so smart

I’ve been tracking smart in product and company branding for a couple of years (see this blog post and this Visual Thesaurus column), but I’ve still been amazed and amused by a recent cascade of smart brands – a smartnado, if you will. Many of the newer smart brands don’t even incorporate tiny artificial brains: They’re just attempting to tell us that they’re geniuses at whatever they do.

Word of the week: Dead-ender

Dead-ender: A partisan who refuses to stop supporting a cause or candidate; a die-hard.

This sense of dead-ender – the most recent of several to have appeared during the term’s history – has appeared regularly during the current U.S. presidential campaign. It’s used as a disparaging tag for zealous supporters of candidates whose realistic chances of prevailing have steadily dwindled. These supporters often self-identify on social media with the hashtag #NeverHillary or #NeverTrump.

A haunting yarn

I don’t knit, but that hasn’t stopped me from lurking around the Etsy shop of a German merchant called DyeForYarn. The pun, though forced, is fitting. Just take a look at the macabre names bestowed on many of the colors.

It’s Really Dead, Dead Walnut Wood, Black Hole, Gray Which Must Not Be Named. (“OOAK” stands for “one of a kind.”)

Word of the Week: Taphephobia

Taphephobia: Fear of being buried alive. From Greek taphē burial, grave (whence also epitaph) and New Latin phobia. Also taphiphobia, taphophobia.

 The Premature Burial (1962). Image via Gallery Hip.

 

The OED has no entry for any of the spellings of this curious word; other sources, including Collins Dictionary and Webster’s Third International, provide brief definitions but no date of first usage. I first encountered it in At Home: A Short History of Private Life, Bill Bryson’s chatty and informative 2010 chronicle of domesticity through the millennia. Taphephobia comes up in Chapter XV: The Bedroom, amid a long section on death (causes of, customs surrounding, etc.).

Taphephobia was coined sometime in the mid-19th century, Bryson avers with some confidence. The Victorians had “some peculiar anxieties about death”:

Catalepsy, a condition of paralysis in which the victim seemed dead while actually being fully conscious, became the dread disease of the day. Newspapers and popular magazines abounded with stories of people who suffered from its immobilizing effects. One well-known case was that of Eleanor Markham of upstate New York who was about to be buried in July 1894 when anxious noises were heard coming from her coffin. The lid was lifted and Miss Markham cried out, “My God, you are burying me alive!” …

For at least a generation such stories became routine in even serious periodicals. So many people became morbidly obsessed with the fear of being interred before their time that a word was coined for it: taphephobia. The novelist Wilkie Collins placed on his bedside table each night a letter bearing standing instructions of the tests he wished carried out to ensure that really had died in his sleep if he was found in a seemingly corpse-like state. Others directed that their heads be cut off or their hearts removed before burial, to put the matter comfortably (if that is the right word) beyond doubt.

 

Nor is taphephobia itself dead and buried. Here, in its entirety, is an item published in ArtVoice in January 2009 :

Freud [!] de Melo, 73, operates a quirky tourist park in central Brazil that features stone models of Noah’s Ark and other sculptures, but he also notoriously suffers from taphephobia, the fear of being buried alive, and one of his sculptures is his own elaborate, fear-assuaging crypt. His vault houses a TV and fruit pantry, has access to fresh air, and features two built-in plastic cones that act as megaphones to the outside, reassuring de Melo that if he is buried too soon, he will be able to protest (as he demonstrated for a Wall Street Journal reporter, for an October dispatch, screaming into the countryside, “Help me! Come quick! I’ve been buried alive!”). (Taphephobia was more common in centuries past, afflicting George Washington among others, because doctors often missed lingering signs of life in sick patients.)

According to IMDb, there was a 2006 movie called Taphephobia (synopsis: “A man wakes up buried in a coffin, alone with the light from a cell phone”), possibly never released. And mark your calendars:: Taphaphobia, an episode of the web series “In Fear Of,” is scheduled to air, appropriately enough, on October 31, 2014.