Fritinancy

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: Crixa

Happy Lunar New Year! It’s the Year of the Rabbit, so I’m digging deep into the archives to bring you a bunny-related* word I originally wrote about 15 years ago.

Watership Down, by Richard Adams (1972)

Word of the week: Roevember

After the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, ending federal protections for abortion, American women showed their disapproval in many ways: by publicly protesting, by publishing opinion pieces, and by registering to vote in often unprecedented numbers. The collective impact of these actions may result in what is optimistically being called Roevember: a rejection in the November 8 state and federal election of elected officials who opposed women’s right to privacy and autonomy.

I haven’t been able to pinpoint the precise origin of “Roevember,” a portmanteau of Roe and November. The earliest usages I’ve found are from early August 2022 (let me know if you’ve found earlier examples!).

On August 1, Insider New Jersey reported on sightings of “See You in ROEvember” T-shirts at a Democratic gathering in Morris County.

“See You in Roevember” throw pillow, $29.99 at Fed Up Frannie’s

On the Visual Thesaurus: Character names

You may know me as a developer of company and product names, but I’m also interested in the whole spectrum of naming. In my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus—timed to coincide with National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo—I look at fictional character names and offer some tips for creating memorable ones. I’m grateful to the many successful authors—including Elizabeth McCracken, Andrew Sean Greer, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and Cathleen Schine—who generously shared their tips and insights with me. The column isn’t paywalled this month, so read (and share) freely!

Blog bonus #1: In the column I include a brief quote from a chapter on literary names in The Language of Names, the 1997 book by Anne Bernays and Justin Kaplan that’s occupied my reference shelf for more than a decade. Here’s a bit more from that chapter:

When the paperback edition of [Anne] Bernays’s first novel, Short Pleasures, was published in 1963, she was sued for a million dollars by a man who had the same unusual surname as one of her characters, a predatory, bisexual summer-theater director. The plaintiff was someone she had never met or heard of.

She discovered, too late, that there were only five people in the Manhattan telephone directory with that name, and they were all related to one another. It cost her thousands simply to defend the suit, which was eventually settled out of court.

Blog bonus #2: Want more naming suggestions, or feedback on your own characters’ names? Schedule a call with me on Clarity.fm. P.S. I also consult on book titles.

Word of the week: Blackacre

In U.S. and Canadian law, there’s a long-established* practice of using “Jane Doe” or “John Doe” to refer to a person whose name is unknown or must be withheld. Placeholder names like these are called kadigans, and it turns out there are legal kadigans for parcels of real property as well. The primary such placeholder name is Blackacre; if two parcels of property are being compared, the second is usually called Whiteacre. 

This is where I confess that while I’d known about Jane and John Doe for a long time, I first encountered “Blackacre” less than a week ago, by way of a clever tweet from Kathryn Rubino, an editor at the Above the Law blog.

Blackacre-ish #nameacivillawTVshow

— Kathryn Rubino (@Kathryn1) November 2, 2017

(Fans of legal puns can find more like this on Kathryn’s Twitter timeline.)

October linkfest

Fictional African countries are in the news these days thanks to the U.S. commander-in-chief’s name-checking “Nambia” and anticipation building for the Black Panther movie. (Marvel Comics fans will recall that the Black Panther hails from the land of Wakanda.) Naturally, there’s a Wikipedia entry on fictional African countries – updated to include Nambia. And here’s Marvel’s Black Panther wiki, which includes the Wakandan map and flag.

 

 

September linkfest

“What linguists sometimes call ‘genericisation’ of brand names has a grimmer name among marketing types: “genericide”. The Economist’s Johnson on google, photoshop, xerox, and other examples of brand genericization.

 

A trademark-defense ad from Xerox, 2011. Yes, “zipper” used to be a trademark-protected brand name. Source.

 

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Related: The lawyers at Velcro® want you to know – in full-throated song – that the competitors’ product is properly called hook and loop tape. (Thanks, David!)

November linkfest

Warning: more politics than usual this month, although many of the links have have a language-y angle.

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Post-truth is Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year for 2016. The word, an adjective, means “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”; it rose to prominence this year during the UK’s Brexit vote and the US presidential election. Related: an interview with Oxford English Dictionary editor-in-chief Michael Proffitt on post-truth and secrets of the dictionary trade. (It’s not uncommon, he says, for a new OED lexicographer to be given a “rude word” to define.) Hat tip for both links: Jesse Sheidlower.

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Marketers rethink how to talk to consumers in a post-truth world, where “facts and reason matter less than they expected — a counterintuitive discovery in the age of information.”

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Posted without comment pic.twitter.com/SrVoCpTvtv

— SF Book Club, London (@SFbookclub) November 14, 2016

October Linkfest

In the spirit of Halloween, here’s Arika Okrent on how morticians reinvented their job title.

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Yelp was almost named Yocal; Zappos was originally ShoeSite.com. GeekWire’s Adam Lang tells the stories of what 15 tech brands might have been called. (Hat tip: The Name Inspector.)

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March Linkfest

Here’s a spirited celebration of St. Patrick’s Day: “Mudebroth, an Ejaculation of St. Patrick.” It’s on Strong Language, so expect naughty words.

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“Clickspittle: an unquestioningly loyal follower who obediently shares every trivial thought of their idol on social media.” Post-modern portmanteaus from The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present, excerpted in The Independent.  (Via @Catchword)

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“Most important, it stood for Internet. But it also stood for other valuable i things, like individual, imagination, i as in me, etc. It also did a pretty good job of laying a solid foundation for future product naming.” A knowledgeable Quora answer to the question “What is the history of the i prefix in Apple product names?”(Via @AlanBrew)

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When you’re creating a name, trademark protection is more important than domain name—but the wrong domain name can get you into trademark trouble, writes Brent Lorentz on Duets Blog.

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Eight great fake company names. (Via @HenryAlpert)

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“Around the time of the birth of OK, there was a fad for komical Ks instead of Cs on the pages of newspapers … including from 1839: ‘The gentleman to the left of the speaker, in klaret kolored koat with krimson kollar, is Mr. Klay, member of Kongress from Kentucky’.” Allan Metcalf, author of OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word, marks the 176th anniversary of “OK” with a post about the word’s “konspicuous, kurious, komical” … uh, kwalities. (Read my 2010 post about “OK.”)

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What do we lose when dictionaries delete words like bluebell, catkin, lark, and mistletoe to make room for blog, broadband, MP3 player, and chatroom? British nature writer Robert Macfarlane—most recently the author of Landmarks—writes in The Guardian about “the importance of preserving and plenishing a diverse language for landscape.” His essay includes some beautiful, obscure words like ammil, “a Devon term for the thin film of ice that lacquers all leaves, twigs, and grass blades when a freeze follows a partial thaw, and that in sunlight can cause a whole landscape to glitter.” Plenishing is pretty wonderful, too. (Via @StanCarey)