Fritinancy

July linkfest

Lots of news about Twitter this month; if you don’t care or are already saturated, feel free to scroll down to my Twitterless content.

The bluf: Twitter’s dark overlord, Elon Musk, announced on Saturday, July 23, that “soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” And lo, by the following day the Twitter logo and name—but not the word “tweet”—had disappeared from the platform, replaced by a grim, spindly “X,” Musk’s favorite letter. (In 2000, he wanted to rebrand PayPal as X. He was ousted as CEO, but bought back X.com and went on to found SpaceX, name the Tesla Model X, and sire a child named, alas, Æ A-Xii.)

It’s not quite the end of Twitter, but it sure ain’t what it used to be. I wrote for Medium about what I’ll miss—and am already missing—about Twitter, which I started using in 2008, a lifetime ago.

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April linkfest

A personal plug: I have a couple of new stories on the EatDrinkFilms site about an upcoming screening, with live orchestral accompaniment, of the classic silent film Pandora’s Box (1929). Pandora’s Box was made in Germany, but it starred a young American actress, Louise Brooks, whom the film historian David Thomson has called “one of the most mysterious and potent figures in the history of the cinema.” Read my story about Pandora’s Box and the sidebar about Club Foot Orchestra, the remarkable ensemble – now celebrating its 40th anniversary – that created the score for the film and will perform it, along with students from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, on May 6 at Oakland’s Paramount Theater. The event is being presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Hope to see some of you local cinephiles there!

Louise Brooks as Lulu with Gustav Diessel as an anachronistic Jack the Ripper. Her hairstyle had lasting influence.

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I’ve been enjoying “Stiffed,” a podcast – not to be confused with Mary Roach’s book Stiff or Susan Faludi’s book Stiffed, both of which I also recommend – about the rise and fall of Viva, an erotic magazine for women that briefly flourished in the 1970s. Founder/publisher Bob Guccione died in 2010, but host Jennifer Romolini managed to interview his son, Bob Jr., as well as many of the women who worked at Viva and tried their damnedest to inject feminism into the mix. Related: my March 2022 post about “Minx,” which name-checks Viva and also rival Playgirl, for which I was a contributing writer..

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Another podcast worth your attention: A Way with Words, hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette. The April 16 episode examined, among other topics, why Southern Californians insert “the” before freeway numbers (“take the 405 to the 5”) and whether there’s such a thing as a “neutral” accent.

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“We are currently in the midst of a radical reinvention of English. Not perhaps since the 15th, 16th and early 17th centuries has the English language shifted faster, with the rapid introduction of loanwords (borrowed from other languages), neologisms, buzzwords, slang and a host of acronyms.” (Steven Mintz for Inside Higher Ed)

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December linkfest

Happy Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us! I don’t have the traditional aluminum pole, and this year I’m sparing you my Airing of Grievances. (But you can air your own grievance on FestivusWeb.) As for the other primary tradition, I discovered this year that there’s a Feats of Strength cocktail, which sounds kind of like a hot toddy. Did you know that English toddy comes from Hindi tari, which means “palm sap”?

“Festivus-infused” maple syrup from family-owned, Vermont-based Runamok. You can buy it at REI.

Read my previous Festivus posts.

And here’s a year-end link roundup:

July linkfest

I’ve been gradually expanding my newsletter diet to include some lighter (but still substantial) fare. A few recommendations:

The Department of Salad, by Emily Nunn, is, yes, about salad and salad lore, but is also just a very chatty, very funny from an excellent writer. If you haven’t made Spicy Cherry Salad (aka Israeli Cherry Salad), you must do so immediately, before cherry season is over for good.

How Not to F*ck Up Your Face, “philosophical and practical advice for anyone who’s ever looked into a mirror,” is written by Valerie Monroe, who was the beauty editor at O magazine for almost 16 years. She’s on an extended stay in Japan right now, and I’ve been enjoying her reporting on the local scene, from Japanese toilets to “love hotels.”

The Unpublishable, by Jessica DeFino, a freelance beauty journalist. Subtitle: “The beauty industry’s least favorite newsletter.” DeFino covers topics like “how the ‘5-minute face’ became the $5,000 face” and why the words “THAT ACTUALLY WORK” are so common in beauty headlines. (It’s because most beauty products don’t work.)

“Potent, powerful skin care that works”? Probably not. (My photo; Walgreens.)

 

All three of these newsletters are published on the Substack platform, which means you can read them for free but paid subscriptions are what keeps the updates coming. 

June linkfest

“Place names and the stories behind them define how we perceive and connect to landscape. But we live in a world populated by places named for colonizers: Libraries, streets and counties across the country bear names like Washington, Jefferson and Jackson, while ‘San’s and ‘Santa’s dot the Southwest, shadowing California’s coast in missionaries’ cloaks. Can we even see the land underneath those names, in all its complexities? And what is the impact on the mind — especially the Indigenous mind — of a lifetime spent repeating colonizers’ names, invoking their stories?” (Brian Oaster for High Country News)

Trilingual sign in southern Colorado. Photo by Orin Hargraves. See my October 2021 Visual Thesaurus column (no paywall!) for more discussion of place names.

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February linkfest

After 22,000 submissions and 60,000 votes, the Minnesota Department of Transportation announced new names for six additional snowplows, including The Big Leplowski and Betty Whiteout. (Hat tip: Lynne Murphy)

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Some commentary on “Commanders,” the recently announced name of the Washington Football Team:

• “While it’s not surprising that a team in the NFL, a league that festoons itself in camouflage every November for its ‘Salute to Service’ campaign, would adopt a military-theme name, most of the American public likely identifies more with the boots on the ground than the brass giving them their marching orders.”  (James I. Bowie for Fast Company)
• “Fans will surely get used to Coms, but for most folks now that word solely means ‘communications’ (comms is commonly used in that way, particularly in the military).” (Catchword blog)

I wrote about the controversy over the team’s original name back in 2014.

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You’re already playing Wordle, right? How about Globle and Worldle, the geography guessing games? Or the Broadway word game created by Broadway World?

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The ten worst company-naming mistakes, from “imitating successful brands and following trends” to “focusing on the specifics of today rather than on your core purpose.” (Catchword blog)

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I was once a typesetter, and I still maintain an interest in typefaces, but I’d never heard of a typeface called Jim Crow. Sarah K. Kramer writes about its history and how it came to be renamed Ruby, in honor of school-desegregation pioneer Ruby Bridges. (Believer Magazine)

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“The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of Writer’s Block:”: a paper published by the Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis in 1974. (Kottke)

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“The Biden team — and the Democratic Party — could learn a lot from what Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump accomplished with their embrace of strong branding. Plainly put, it’s time for the White House to wake up. Or we are screwed.” (Julio Vincent Gambuto for Medium)

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Here’s your semi-regular reminder that you can follow me on Twitter and on Instagram, and read more of my writing on the Visual Thesaurus, the Strong Language blog, Medium, and—just once so far, but there’s more to come!—in EatDrinkFilms.

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“People sometimes poke fun at me for my unhealthy obsession with naming things: workism, hygiene theater, everything shortage. Naming things is a gimmick, and I am not strictly pro-gimmick. But I am an extreme partisan for memorable writing. I want people to read my words, and recall them, and use them, and talk about them.”: Derek Thompson’s tips for nonfiction writers. (I wrote about workism in 2019.)

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The 57 in the Heinz’s  “57 Varieties” slogan is a completely madeupical number, but it’s been a great brand-booster for more than a century. (CNN Business, via Michael F.)

A 1902 Heinz advertisement that lists far fewer than 57 varieites.

 

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Nothing to do with names or brands, but I know I’m not the only one who was strongly affected by Jennifer Senior’s story for The Atlantic about friendship. A short excerpt:

You lose friends to marriage, to parenthood, to politics—even when you share the same politics. (Political obsessions are a big, underdiscussed friendship-ender in my view, and they seem to only deepen with age.) You lose friends to success, to failure, to flukish strokes of good or ill luck. (Envy, dear God—it’s the mother of all unspeakables in a friendship, the lulu of all shames.) These life changes and upheavals don’t just consume your friends’ time and attention. They often reveal unseemly characterological truths about the people you love most, behaviors and traits you previously hadn’t imagined possible.

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Rebranding for the 13th century: Designer Ilya Stallone imagines how famous logos would have looked in the Middle Ages.  (UX Design)

Via Ilya Stallone

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How to say “mansplain” in languages other than English? Read the whole thread!

 

poll time!

which language has the best version of the verb that means: “(of a man) explain (something) to someone, typically a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending/patronising”?

(and please do reply with other variants—these are just the four I’m familiar with)

— Dan Hicks (@profdanhicks) February 7, 2022

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.

August linkfest

The rise of rifle logos in American branding: “[T]he terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 … put the US on a war footing for the next two decades and boosted the rifle’s prominence in the national psyche. While pistols have been the chosen weapons of traditional pop culture stars like spies, cops, and gunslingers, military combat prioritizes the rifle, and today’s gun logos reflect that.” (By James I. Bowie for Emblemetric)

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Speaking of guns (h/t Iva Cheung):

Here you go. The most American possible explanation of the Delta variant, and why it means you should get vaccinated and wear a mask, more than ever. pic.twitter.com/3dkSBLxWeX

— Dylan Meconis (@dmeconis) August 12, 2021

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Cleveland's baseball team is now the Guardians

They could have been the Spiders. Instead, Cleveland’s major-league baseball team, known for more than a century as the Indians, will be called the Guardians. The change will take place at the end of the 2021 baseball season.

The “Guardians” name pays tribute to a Cleveland landmark: the twin Guardians of Traffic statues on the Hope Memorial Bridge, near the team’s home ballpark, Progressive Field. Sports Illustrated provided some historical detail:

The Guardians of Traffic statues have flanked both sides of the Hope Memorial Bridge since 1932. Each of the four-winged Art Deco figures sports winged helmets and crowns, and each statue holds a different vehicle to signify "the spirit of progress in transportation," per bridge engineer Wilbur Watson. Each guardian stands 43 feet tall, and they remain the only public Art Deco monuments in Cleveland.

Word of the week: NIL

There’s lower-case nil, a contraction of Latin nihil, which means “nothing,” especially in British and Commonwealth sports scores and doctor’s orders (“nil by mouth,” also the title of a 1987 British film directed by Gary Oldman).

Then there’s the acronym NIL, which in the world of U.S. collegiate athletics stands for “name, image, likeness.” And that NIL is a very big something.

Until recently, college athletes in the U.S. were prohibited by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) from cashing in on their names, images, and likenesses—their NIL. On July 1, 2021, new laws went into effect in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and New Mexico that allow athletes at those states’ universities to “monetize their individual rights,” as a June 15 story in Sports Business Journal put it.

Promotion for “The N.I.L. Era,” a November 11, 2020, webinar presented by SporticoLive.