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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Word of the week: Pink

When I Googled “Barbie movie” yesterday, my screen blushed pink, with the Google wordmark standing out in darker pink.

 

Thanks to the movie-based-on-a-doll that opened last weekend, pink is the unofficial color of the year. It’s there in the bubble-gum-hued capital B on the movie poster.

It’s even the title of Lizzo’s contribution to the soundtrack.

“When I wake up in my own pink world / I get up outta bed and wave to my homegirls…”

 

I haven’t yet seen the film, but I’ve read thousands of words about it—enough to know that pink is its “signature vibrant aesthetic,” as Scientific American put it. (SciAm was interested in the psychological angle. “If Barbie was exposed to a single color her whole life, she wouldn’t necessarily register the world as pink but would instead likely see it as gray or neutral,” the magazine reported.)

I did my own research into pink and came up with these findings:

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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Word of the week: Galoot

There were 40 accepted words in the solution to the March 5 New York Times Spelling Bee, and one of them was galoot.

Was it a coincidence that on that very day two contributors to the American Dialect Society listserv discussed the origins of this word?

On the Visual Thesaurus: Locker-room talk

For my June Visual Thesaurus column, “Clean Language,” I take a deep dive into three familiar words—words I see regularly in the Dolphin Club locker room, where I spend time before and after swimming in San Francisco Bay. The three words are TOILET, SHOWER, and SAUNA, and they tell interesting (even surprising) stories about the history of the English language.

Full access to the column is paywalled for three months. Here’s an excerpt:

Word of the week: Overmused

One of my favorite word-of-the-year contests is also one of the less widely publicized: the one conducted by Paul Anthony Jones, proprietor of the Haggard Hawks blog and social-media accounts. The winner of this special honor must be “a suitably obscure term, pulled from one of the dustier corners of the dictionary, that somehow sums up the last twelve months.” In 2020 that word was respair—“renewed hope after a period of despair”—which I wrote about in December of that year. The 2021 winner, chosen by popular vote, is more downbeat: overmused, an adjective that means “worn out from thinking too much.”

Image from “The Trap of Overthinking,” Executive Support magazine.

June linkfest

“Controversial terms, from ‘abortion’ to ‘Zionism,’ tend to shut down dialog because they mean different things to different people.” The AllSides Red Blue Dictionary defines these hot-button terms across the political spectrum: “Until we fully understand what a term means to someone else, we don't know the issue and can't effectively communicate.”

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I’m enjoying (and learning from) the short essays Susan Orlean publishes on Medium, especially her stories about  the writing craft. Here she is on beginnings and on endings.

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After a four-month hiatus I’m back on Medium myself with some reflections on fifteen years of blogging. (And here’s your annoying-but-obligatory reminder that Medium contributors earn money from their stories only if enough people “clap” for them, and that up to 50 claps per story are allowable, nay, encouraged.)

Word of the week: Arum

Around midday last Monday I got an urgent call from my friend C.J.: “Come across the street right away! You’ve got to see this!” I know better than to disobey C.J., so I asked no questions, just shoved my feet into some sandals, grabbed my keys and phone, and dashed out my front door. In the driveway of the house directly opposite mine—a house I’d never once entered during the six and a half years I’ve lived on this street—was a Honda with with a hand-lettered sign taped to its rear window.

“Corpse flower (Amorphophallus titanum) UP DRIVEWAY – Thru Gate. Viewing ===>”

A corpse flower! This was definitely going to be good. 

Word of the week: Peccy

I thought I knew quite a bit about Amazon. I have, after all, been a customer since September 1997. (My first order: The Cynic’s Dictionary and Idiom Savant: Slang as It Is Slung.) I’ve written about the company and its brands (see here and here, for example). I’ve read two books about the company: Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America (2021) and Brad Stone’s The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2014)*.

But I’ve never worked for Amazon, which may explain my not knowing that the company had a mascot called Peccy.

May linkfest

Most naming advice in the popular media makes me clutch my head in despair, but this Inc. article by Minda Zetlin is different. Zetlin interviewed experienced name developers Anthony Shore and David Placek—both of whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with—and their real-world examples are smart and helpful. “Avoid names that describe your product” and “Don’t fall in love with one name” are the first tips, and yes, you’ve heard them from me, too. (h/t trademark lawyer Ed Timberlake)

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Steer clear of negative words in your business name? Not necessarily. Read about how Calamityware got its name. (And read my own post on negative names with positive impact.)

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I will probably go to my grave insisting on the distinction between lay and lie, so I got a satisfied chortle out of this table of cat tenses, from a Duolingo chat page. (Via Language Log)