Fritinancy

Word of the week: Sewershed

Throughout the pandemic, researchers have been monitoring wastewater to detect levels of coronavirus. Lately, those efforts have yielded a startling find: “cryptic lineages” of the virus. These viral fragments, found in New York City sewers and elsewhere, are “cryptic” because they have “a unique constellation of mutations that had never been reported before in human patients — a potential sign of a new, previously undetected variant,” reported Emily Anthes in a New York Times article published online February 3. Researchers at UC Berkeley “have found similar sequences in one California sewershed.”

It was only the second time sewershed had appeared in the Times. (There’s a Twitter bot that keeps track of such things.) The first time was on January 19, 2022, in a story about wastewater surveillance in several U.S. states, including Missouri. The story quoted Jessica Gilmore, director of the pharmacy department at Hannibal Regional Hospital: “We don’t have the capability to do gene sequencing in real time to know which variants are prevalent. … So the best we have is the sewershed data to help us guide our decision making.”

Sewershed provoked some head-scratching.

On the Visual Thesaurus: "Bound" for glory

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus was inspired by an email from reader Dan Freiberg, who sent me this photo of a bottle of Windex glass cleaner.

“100% Ocean Bound Plastic”

 

Dan wrote: “To me, this doesn’t mean what I think SC Johnson” — parent company of Windex—“wants it to mean.”

Investigating exactly what ocean bound means led me down some twisty paths. According to a Danish organization called Ocean Bound Plastic, ocean bound plastic—yes, there should be a hyphen in there—is land based, whereas ocean-waste plastic is retrieved from waterways and then recycled. But that was just the beginning, because bound has multiple meanings and at least four unrelated etymologies. 

Access to the full column is paywalled. Here’s an excerpt:

AutoThink

Last year I wrote several posts about the proliferation of brand names and ad campaigns using “Think” and “Rethink”: Think Indian, Think! Shoes, Think Bank, Saks Fifth Avenue’s “Think About It,” and so on.

Now Volkswagen has plunged into the Think tank with a new ad campaign, “Think Blue.”

 

Full-page ad for the MoMA/VW partnership in The New Yorker’s June 6, 2011, issue.

VW’s “Think Blue” website elaborates:

Think Blue is more than just food for thought; it’s a state of mind. It’s a global call to action—sustainable ecological action.

But “Think Blue” is also more than a state of mind; it’s a history lesson.

 

Not Stupid

In honor of Earth Day, here’s an eco-friendly slogan I admire a lot. Although maybe “friendly” isn’t quite the right word.

 

 

“Don’t leave the planet to the stupid.”

The slogan’s been around for at least a year, but I’d never seen it—or anything else from the German solar-panel company Solon—until I opened my Sunday San Francisco Chronicle a few weeks ago*. Last May, TriplePundit called the slogan “the most fantastic, and perhaps the most arrogant corporate tag-line of all time.”

I agree, if “fantastic” means “excellent” and “arrogant” means “smart and confident.” In a world of interchangeable Three P slogans (“People Passion Performance,” et al.), Solon’s tagline is bracing, distinctive, and unequivocal. It’s unafraid to break rules—like the “no negatives” rule (why not start with “Don’t”?) and the “keep it bland” rule (why not call the stupid “the stupid”?). And, yes, it’s seven words long. Just because Nike uses a three-word slogan doesn’t mean your company has to.

The Solon name is satisfying, too. It packs a double punch: it suggests “sun on”—“sol” means “sun” in Latin and Spanish—while evoking wisdom and laws. (Solon was an Athenian lawgiver; lower-case “solon” used to show up frequently in headlines when editors needed a shorter synonym for “legislator.”) It’s a solid, classical name with plenty of gravitas—nicely offset by the yeah-I’m-talking-to-you directness of the tagline.

Judging from the TriplePundit** post, Solon’s headquarters in Berlin are pretty smart, too.

Well played, Solon.

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* The chance to discover ads like Solon’s is one reason I still read dead-tree media.

** I regret to report that TriplePundit has one of those interchangeable Three P slogans: “People, Planet, Profit.”

More Words of the Year

Wutbürger, or “enraged citizen,” tops the German Language Society’s list of the most important words and phrases of 2010. “The word was coined to describe the irate residents of Stuttgart, who gathered week after week to demonstrate against a controversial rail project in the Baden-Württemberg capital,” reports The Local, an English-language German news site. Vuvuzela came in at eighth place, and the completely wonderful unter den Eurorettungsschirm schlüpfen, or “to slip under the European bailout umbrella”—a reference to the European Union’s bailout of Ireland—slipped under the wire at #10. It wuz robbed. (Hat tip: Lance Knobel.)

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Here are the New York Times’s words of the year, selected and categorized by lexicographer Grant Barrett with commentary by reporter Sam Sifton. I was pleased to see several of my own favorites (vuvuzela, QE2, mansplainer) and I enjoyed pondering some less-familiar coinages (sofalize, coffice, poutrage).

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Ben Zimmer selects five Visual Thesaurus words of the year in each of six categories. Among his more intriguing picks: fracking, thumbo, and junk (as in the airport-security admonition, “Don’t touch my junk”). 

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Merriam-Webster’s words of the year are words “that have had spikes that strike us very much as an anomaly for their regular behavior,” says John Morse, the dictionary company’s president and publisher. Topping the 2010 list: austerity, which prompted more than 250,000 online searches of the dictionary’s database.

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Joe Clark, author of a book about Canadian spelling that sounds simply marvel(l)ous, picks the Canadian words of the year. In the #1 spot is G20, which I recognized from the June headlines. But busty hookers, kettling, vampire squid? Separated by a common language, eh?

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The American Dialect Society will announce its 2010 words of the year on January 7. While we’re awaiting the final vote, here are some early submissions from ADS stalwart Wayne Glowka, dean of arts and humanities at Reinhardt University in Waleska, Georgia. New to me: spillion, skyaking (really? people do this?), neocortical presidency, and vuvu-stopper, all of which are just brilliant.

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LATE-BREAKING: Speaking of “separated by a common language,” linguist Lynne Murphy, who keeps a blog by that name, has just announced her words of the year. In this case, the winners are words that have successfully crossed the Atlantic. The US-to-UK winner for 2010 is shellacking, and the UK-to-US winner is ginger (as in hair color). Read more.