Fritinancy

“Dear” in the headlights

Earlier this week I received a fundraising email whose salutation was “Look,” which seemed just a little … testy. But what do I know; I was schooled in the “Dear Sir or Madam” era. It made me wonder which forms of address are acceptable in 2021, which are a little edgy, and which are too quaint to be taken seriously.

“Dear ___,” it goes without saying, now falls into the third category—in correspondence, anyway. When traveling grammar advisor Ellen Jovin conducted a Twitter poll last year, the “Dear ___” salutation received zero votes. 

What percentage of your work emails begin with the word "Dear"?

— Ellen is at the Grammar Table (@GrammarTable) October 10, 2020

Click through to see additional polls.

In the titles of books, movies, and plays, though, “Dear” practically de rigueur. Maybe it’s ironic. Maybe it’s nostalgic. But there’s no denying it’s popular.

Word of the week: Celebrity

I’ve been thinking a lot about celebrity lately. Not because the word has an unexpected etymology: It came straight into Middle English from Latin celebritāt, where it meant “a crowded celebration or festival.” (OK, I do have one fun fact: celebrate was spelled cellybrate in Middle English.) And also not because there’s a topical hook on which to hang this post.

In lieu of any of that, here is some of the wool I’ve been gathering about celebrity over the last week or so:

What’s its pronoun?

A new Amazon Original anthology series, Them, comes to Prime Video on April 9. If the title sounds familiar, it may be because you still have nightmares from the original (and unrelated) Them! (1954). Or maybe you’ve just been seeing a lot of pronouns in movie titles lately. What do they have in common? Horror, thrills, monsters, a dystopian present or future. In reverse chronological order:

Word of the week: Lingualer

What kind of word is lingualer? A rare one, that’s for sure. In fact, it may qualify as that rarest of rare words, a hapax legomenon: a word that occurs only once within a context or in the entire written record of a language. We can thank Variety, the show-business weekly that has been inventing words for more than a century, for its existence.

February linkfest

“Trade characters” like Aunt Jemima and the Quaker Oats man used to be much more common in American commerce than they are today, writes logo expert James I. Bowie in Marker. They were so common, in fact, that the US Patent and Trademark Office assigned six-digit codes to trademark applications to “capture personal characteristics, including race and gender, as they were perceived in American culture many decades ago”:

There are codes for Native Americans and Asian Pacific people, but not for African Americans. Women, but not men, can be coded as “Hawaiian,” while men, but not women, can be deemed “Famous,” “Cowboys and westerners,” or “Farmers, hillbillies, or hobos” (the second of these terms was recently stricken). The categories for Scottish men and women seem to exist solely to code trade characters representing thriftiness — or, more bluntly, cheapness.

Aunt Jemima pancake mix, circa 1940s. James Bowie: “The Aunt Jemima logo was given codes 020301 (portraits of women) and 020315 (women wearing scarves on their heads).” Read my February 10 post about Aunt Jemima’s recently announced name change.

Word of the week: Flirt

Next Sunday, February 14, is Valentine’s Day, a date that honors the third-century Christian martyr who is the patron saint of epilepsy. In the Middle Ages, St. Valentine also became associated with courtly love; by the 18th century, February 14 had turned into the holiday amorous couples still celebrate with greeting cards, roses, candy, and expensive restaurant meals.

It’s a high-pressure occasion, which may explain why, in late January, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the reopening of limited indoor dining in New York City restaurants. “This is the city’s second flirtation with a return to dining in” since the onset of the pandemic, wrote Helen Rosner in the New Yorker on February 5, employing a noun with meaningful V-Day overtones and shadings of deception and caprice.

“Flirt candy heart” mask via Red Bubble

 

Choosy

As if the pandemic hasn’t already tested all of us in countless ways, now even our entertainment comes in the form of a multiple-choice exam.

Bad backronym: SCRIPT

At last: a story that isn’t about COVID-19! Instead, it’s about movies; the US Department of Defense; the People’s Republic of China; and a bill, introduced last week by US Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), with an absurdly tone-deaf name.

The bill is known by its acronym, SCRIPT. Here’s how Cruz touted it on Twitter.

The SCRIPT Act will serve as a wake-up call by forcing Hollywood studios to choose between the assistance they need from the American government and the dollars they want from China: https://t.co/EmqdC5H012

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 28, 2020

Not so bad, right? But wait: Here’s the full name of the proposed act.

Yes, it’s the “Stopping Censorship, Restoring Integrity, and Protecting Talkies” Act.

Imagine coming up with SCRIPT (in the first place: why?) and then having to reverse-engineer an acronym (that is, a backronym) for it. You get all the way to T and you’re stumped. What are we protecting? Truth? Trust? Trademarks? Taste? Taxes? Telecommunications? Twinkies? 

Word of the week: Boogaloo

Why is this man wearing an aloha shirt—in Nebraska, in February—while toting a big ol’ weapon inside a government building? And what does all of that have to do with the word of the week, boogaloo?

Brett Hendrix of Omaha with an AR-15 in the #Nebraska Capitol. Hendrix said he brought the gun to demonstrate the right to keep and bear arms. He opposes a gun bill that will be heard this afternoon in the #NELeg Judiciary Committee, viewable here: https://t.co/3k43sJrjfC pic.twitter.com/834lwqOK5Z

— Fred Knapp (@fredmknapp) February 21, 2020

 

Get ready for an only-in-America explanation.

January linkfest

I’ll get to the regularly scheduled links in a bit, but I wanted to lead off with some recommendations from my 2019 media diet (a term I’ve borrowed from Jason Kottke, whose blog always makes for tasty consumption).