Politically, California remains blue: My state voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, 63.5 to 34.3 percent, and has a Democratic governor, two Democratic US Senators and a majority-Democratic Congressional representation.
But in our non-electoral lives, it was a very purple year.
Continue reading "Word of the year, California edition: Purple" »
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Since 2009 I have observed Festivus – the holiday for the rest of us, celebrated on December 23 – by publishing misspellings, grammar flubs, and punctuation errors committed in the name of commerce. It’s all been lighthearted and lightly instructive: my way of honoring The Airing of Grievances, a mock-tradition of this mock-holiday.
This year, however, my grievances are much more grievous than a misplaced apostrophe or a misspelled brass plaque.
Like many of you, I was dismayed by the 2016 presidential campaign, its outcome, and its aftermath. As I surveyed the devastation, I saw root causes in the practices of my own industry – marketing and branding – and in the ideology of technology, which now permeates the general culture.
And so my grievances this year aren’t minor infractions but rather more serious sins. Here, as I see it, is how we came to this sorry pass.
Via Pinterest. An authentic Festivus pole would be unadorned: decorations are “distracting.”
Continue reading "The airing of grievances: A Festivus wail" »
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Ping: Imitative of the sound of a bullet striking something sharply (noun, 1835; verb, 1855). Ping has been used since the early 1920s in the U.S. to mean “an engine’s metallic rattle”; it’s spelled pink in the U.K. The OED’s earliest citation for ping meaning “a short, high-pitched electronic pulse” (as in sonar) comes from 1943: “‘Daisy had a ping about an hour ago... We're doing an Asdic sweep’... A ‘ping’ is the slang term for an echo.”
The computer sense of ping is attested from at least 1981; its original meaning was “to send a packet in order to determine whether a host is present, particularly by use of the ping utility”—a tool to troubleshoot problems in an IP network. The author of the ping utility, Mike Muuss, named it after the sound that sonar makes; it’s not an acronym, but a backronym was subsequently contrived: p(acket) in(formation) g(roper).
The word slipped into non-tech usage; the American version of Oxford Dictionaries Onlinegives one definition as “Contact a person briefly (especially electronically): he just pinged me, pointing to a breaking news story.’'
(If you don’t approve of using ping in this way, plese recall that the synonym contact was, until just a few decades ago, regarded with disapproval and even disgust.)
Ping and pinger have featured prominently in stories about the search for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 (MH370), which disappeared March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Searchers have been listening for acoustic signals—pings—from the aircraft’s black box.
Until the plane’s location can be pinpointed, searchers have been relying on a device called a towed pinger locator (TPL)
In various broadcast transcripts, “towed pinger locator” appears as “toad pinger locator”—a rendering that evokes an unforgettable if erroneous image. (I thank W. Brewer of the American Dialect Society email list for alerting me to the toad/towed mixup. “Actually,” he wrote, “<toad pinger> does
make some sense, rhythmically sending out a ribbit, waiting for a return response. Although the robot more resembles a sting-ray.” You can read more in this vein by going to the ADS-L archive and searching for “pinger.”)
Speaking of toads, until October 2013, Ping was the name of a mobile messaging app. After the company received a cease-and-desist letter from PING Golf—which owns ping.com and is not in the mobile, or even static, messaging business—Ping changed its name to Hop. (Ah yes—the toad connection.) I’m a little surprised the challenge didn’t come from Bing.
Actually, Yahoo got there first.
Ping! The Yahoo! Messenger Guide to All Things IM, published August 2005.
That was around the time Yahoo Messenger ran ads saying “Ring’em [sic] or ping’em [sic]: Make PC-to-phone calls as low as 1¢/min with Yahoo! Messenger with Voice.”
And long before any of these electronic pings, there was The Story About Ping.
“Once upon a time there was a beautiful young duck named Ping…” Story by Marjorie Flack, illustrations by Kurt Wiese; originally published in 1933.
This guy isn’t buying it:
Surely Ping isn't a real name.
— H.Bailey (@harrybailey93) April 10, 2014
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XPocalypse: The disaster predicted to befall millions of Microsoft Windows users on April 8, 2014, when Microsoft stops supporting its twelve-year-old XP operating system. A portmanteau of XP and apocalypse.
It’s coming: XPocalypse—the end of Microsoft’s support of Windows XP on April 8. Anyone who still has a PC with Windows XP is either scrambling to figure out what to do with it—or in some state of blissful denial about it all. Or, they are lashing themselves to the mast of their old XP schooner, determined to ride out the storm.
The disaster looms most ominously for businesses that use the Windows OS. Three-quarters of businesses in the UK still use Windows XP, according to an April 1 report in the Telegraph. A January 16, 2014, story in Bloomberg Businessweek pointed out vulnerabilities in the US, too:
Microsoft’s 12-year-old Windows XP dominates the ATM market, powering more than 95 percent of the world’s machines and a similar percentage in the U.S., according to Robert Johnston, a marketing director at NCR, the largest ATM supplier in the U.S.
Microsoft, unsurprisingly, paints an upbeat picture of the impending demise.
“Honestly, it’s time for a change.”*
Atlanta-based Liquidware Labs created an XPocalypse 2014 website—“your guide to migrating XPombies,” which seems to have something to do with zombies. The site promotes Liquidware’s ProfileUnity product, but it misstates the date of XP’s euthanasia as April 13.
The earliest citation I found for XPocalypse is in the website of IT Boss, an Australian technology-support company. A post dated August 13, 2013, has the headline “The Coming XPocalypse: Windows XP Support Is Going Away,” and depicted the disaster scenario in a convincing pie chart:
Chart from IT Boss.
By mid-September, US news sites were beginning to pick up the term. A ZDNet post dated September 18, 2013, has the headline “The coming XPocalypse and five things Microsoft can do to prevent it.” The lede uses another -pocalypse coinage as well:
Unlike the Mayan nonpocalypse, which was predicted by everyone but the Mayans, we know that April 8, 2014 will be an XPocalypse of epic proportions -- and even Microsoft agrees on the year, month, and day.
“Xpocalypse” had surfaced pre-2013 with different associations and a slightly different spelling. The @Xpocalypse Twitter account is based in Detroit; its bio is “Resources to survive the apocalypse”—no mention of Microsoft. The account sent six tweets between August and September 2011 and has been silent ever since. There’s also an Xpocalypse Pinterest account with the same gas-mask icon as the Twitter account.
XPocalypse is not to be confused with Zpocalypse, “a survival board game set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.”
The original meaning of “apocalypse” was not “disaster” but “revelation.” The word entered English in the late 14th century from Church Latin; its root is Greek apokalyptein “uncover, disclose, reveal.”
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Related: postapocalit, Inaugalypse, snowpocalypse, and guacapocalypse.
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* Is it just me, or does that image look a lot like a tampon ad?
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Fatberg: A sewer-clogging lump of congealed cooking fat mixed with wet wipes and other products. Coined from fat and the suffix of iceberg.
Last week workers cleared a “bus-sized” fatberg from the London sewer system, averting a huge sewage overflow in the suburb of Kingston.
“Fatberg ahead!”: The Guardian, August 6, 2013. Fifteen tonnes (metric tons) is the equivalent of nearly 17 tons (34,000 pounds). British English prefers sewerage for “sewage system” and sewage for the waste itself.
“Blimey, it’s slimy”: Grist.org, August 7, 2013.
From the Grist article:
What do you call a festering schoolbus-sized glob of lard? If you answered ‘fatberg,’ you’d fit right in at the U.K.’s largest water company. Thames Water uses the silly term to describe a serious lump of trouble that was, until recently, lurking in the London sewer system.
The 33,000-pound ’berg came from modest beginnings: flushed wet wipes and food waste created from Brits pouring grease and fatty foods down the drain.
How bad are fatbergs? Very bad, according to Atlantic Cities:
“A fatberg,” says Simon Evans, media relations manager at Thames Water, “is a vile, festering, steaming collection of fat and wet wipes.” Fatberg creation is a vicious cycle, according to Evans, who coined the term. “Fat clings to wipes, wipes cling to the fat,” he explains. “They are the catalysts in this horrible fatberg game.”
Fatbergs have become a growing problem (in every sense) in London in part because many residents have switched from toilet paper, which is engineered to break down in sewer systems, to wet wipes, which aren’t. Wet-wipe sales in the UK have been rising by double-digit percentages each year, the National Geographic reports:
The trend hasn’t quite caught on the U.S., but some corporations are trying to help it along: one out of every ten Americans adopting the practice would create a billion-dollar market… and a million dollar nightmare for sewer officials.
Earlier this year, Thames Water introduced a new slogan, “Bin it, don’t block it,” to prevent “sewer abuse”—putting anything other than human waste or toilet paper down drains. Thames Water clears about 55,000 sewer blockages each year.
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Postapocalit: “Novels set in an imaginary North American wilderness after the unthinkable happens” (John Seabrook, “Love Among the Chickens”). A blend of postapocalyptic and lit, short for literature.
“Postapocalit” appears to have been coined very recently – last week, to be precise – by New Yorker writer John Seabrook. In his October 26 post for the magazine’s Page-Turner blog, Seabrook writes that he’s “been reading a lot of postapocalit.” He explains:
While the category is new, the genre isn’t; it goes back to Stephen King’s 1979 novel “The Stand,” and beyond, to sci-fi classics like “On the Beach,” “I Am Legend,” “Day of the Triffids,” “Planet of the Apes,” and the forgotten “Alas, Babylon,” by Pat Frank. The genre was revitalized by Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel “The Road,” which made postapocalit safe for serious fiction, and recent years have brought several estimable contributions to this corner of my bookshelf, including Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” trilogy, Justin Cronin’s “The Passage,” (the recently published sequel, “The Twelve,” is on my digital beside table), and Peter Heller’s wonderful “The Dog Stars,” which is my subject today.
First British paperback edition of Alas Babylon, via Existential Ennui.
“Postapocalit” combines two word-blend trends: the “lit” blend (see “shtick lit” and its kin, which I wrote about in December 2009) and the “apocalypse” blend (see Inaugulypse and related words, which I wrote about in January 2009; also see this Word Routes post by Ben Zimmer about “snowpocalypse” and other snowmanteaux).
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Rampture: The traffic congestion that’s expected to ensue after the closing of Wilshire Boulevard on- and offramps to (the) northbound I-405 on Los Angeles’s Westside. Rampture is a humorous blend of ramp and rapture; in certain Christian belief systems (the) rapture represents the “carrying away” of believers after Jesus’ return to Earth.
Some background: Over the coming year, all eight Wilshire ramps will be replaced as part of the $1 billion I-405 Sepulveda Pass Improvement Project. Last year, work on the project required the temporary shutdown of 11 miles of freeway, an event that gave rise to another religiously themed coinage, Carmageddon. (The work went smoothly, and the predicted apocalypse failed to materialize.)
This year’s ramp closings are a much bigger deal, according to most sources. Here’s the lede from a May 11 post, “The Rampture on the 405 is Real and It Starts June 22,” on Curbed LA:
The Westside and Valley are just about to prove how far they'll go for a carpool lane on the northbound 405. LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky's blog announced today that the Rampture ramp closures will commence June 22, and they will continue to inflict pain on the Wilshire Boulevard access to the 405 over the next year.
Yaroslavsky does not use “Rampture” in his discussions of the closures. (His being Jewish may or may not be a reason.) He prefers the more secular, rock-’n’-roll-tinged “Ramp Jam.”
UCLA Today, a generally even-toned publication that covers faculty and staff news, did use “Rampture” in the headline of a May 18 story about the ramp demolition, which is taking place in the university’s neighborhood. The article quoted Bruce Taylor, a UCLA professor in urban planning and director of the Institute for Transportation Studies:
“It would be easier if we could just shut everything down,” Taylor said. “Instead, we have to do this while we’re still moving 300,000 vehicles through there a day. ... There are going to be incredible delays.”
Dave Karwaski, UCLA’s senior associate director of transportation, told UCLA Today: “It’s a good time to take a vacation.”
You can follow the progress of the Sepulveda Pass work via Los Angeles County’s dedicated Twitter feed, @I_405.
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It’s not just a video game anymore.
This weekend, 11 miles of the I-405 freeway in Los Angeles will be closed for 53 hours for the demolition of the 51-year-old Mulholland Bridge. The freeway connects L.A.’s Westside and the San Fernando Valley; on an average weekend, it carries 500,000 cars.
Even the New York Times is calling it Carmageddon. (Predictably, the Times misspelled “Westside.” It’s one word in L.A.)
L.A.’s mayor didn’t sugarcoat his warning at a June 6 press conference:
“There’s gridlock on the 405 virtually any time of the day, but particularly during the rush hour, and if you think it's bad now, let me just make something absolutely clear: On July 16 and 17, it will be an absolute nightmare,” said Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
Other city leaders are doing their best to sound upbeat. On Metro.net, L.A.’s public-transit hub, two Metro officials offered soothing reassurances that “the project is on schedule” and if Angelenos will just stay home over the weekend, “everything will go smoothly.”
Readers may be less than heartened to learn that one of those officials, Metro’s executive director of highway projects, is named Doug Failing. I did not make this up.
This is the second coming for carmageddon: The word was reportedly coined (from car and Armageddon) by a KNX Newsradio anchor, Denise Fondo, for the August 2010 visit to L.A. by President Obama. As you may have heard, Los Angeles survived that event.
This year’s Carmageddon has its own Facebook page and an app, powered by Israeli startup Waze, that relies on crowdsourced traffic information. There’s a website and Twitter feed that encourage bars and restaurants in the Carmageddon Zone to offer discounts “to weary travelers.” Oh, and the L.A. Times has a special Carmageddon Twitter feed, too. (“Two words: surface streets.”)
Another local paper, the LA Weekly, has been counting down to Carmageddon with almost unseemly glee. On June 30, the Weekly published a Carmageddon Q&A headlined “Will It Suck? Yes It Will.” A sample exchange:
Q: What if I have a medical emergency?
A: Plan ahead.
Q: But --
A: Plan ahead.
And it wouldn’t be an impending disaster without a Hitler-meme video, would it? This one is particularly well executed (you should pardon the expression), and extra-hilarious if you know L.A. well enough to catch all the Southland references.
(Hat tip: MJF)
For extra credit, see Snowmageddon and Wordgeddon. And for “disaster news and end-of-the-world scenarios,” see Armageddon Online.
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Ever wonder why Southern Californians put “the” in front of freeway numbers and Northern Californians don’t? Language Hat provided a semi-official explanation back in 2008.
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I-405 graphic from CarMageddonLA. Yes, you can buy a T-shirt.
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