Fritinancy

Word of the week: Equisapien

Sorry to Bother You, now in theaters, was filmed in Oakland, California, where I live, with lots of recognizable landmarks in the background. But its characters are citizens of at least one alternate realm as well. The film, written and directed by activist-musician Boots Riley, begins as a workplace comedy set in a grim telemarketing firm – the film’s title comes from the script that our hero, Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield), must deliver – and quickly takes some surreal hairpin turns.

Lakeith Stanfield (left) and Armie Hammer in Sorry to Bother You

 

We end up in the offices of the ironically named WorryFree company, whose CEO, the hyper-libertarian Steve Lift (a composite of Steve Jobs and Lyft?), makes Cassius (also known as “Cash,” in case you didn’t catch on immediately) a Faustian offer he ultimately can’t refuse: $100 million in exchange for transforming – just for five years, you understand – into a bipedal horse-human hybrid. In the lingo of the film: an equisapien. It’s a word that, as far as I can tell, Riley invented for the film.*

I couldn’t find any images of Sorry to Bother You’s equisapiens, so here’s BoJack Horseman. More about him in a bit.

How did Wakanda get its name?

I saw Black Panther on opening weekend – in Oakland, California, birthplace of the film’s director, Ryan Coogler – and have been thinking ever since about the names in the movie. I’m not a comic-book fan and had never read the source material or seen Captain America: Civil War, the 2016 film that introduced the Black Panther character to movie audiences, so I came to the experience with fresh eyes and ears.

And I came away with questions. Where, for starters, did “Wakanda” – the name of the tiny, technologically advanced African country that’s home to the Black Panther character – come from?

 

The fictional country of Wakanda, via SciFi Stack Exchange. Theories vary about Wakanda’s location; see the comments on the entry.

 

March linkfest

“Most verbs stay basically the same in different grammatical roles. ‘Walk’ looks like ‘walks’ and ‘walked.’ But the word ‘be’ looks nothing like the word ‘am,’ which looks nothing like the word ‘were.’” (Arika Okrent for Curiosity.)

*

When I wrote about mansplain, in September 2010, the earliest citation I found for the word was from an April 2009 Urban Dictionary entry. Now lexicographers at the OED have antedated mansplaining to a May 2008 comment about the TV show “Supernatural.”Katherine Connor Martin, Oxford University Press’s head of US dictionaries, says the OED usually waits a decade or so before adding new words, but makes exceptions when a word “is deemed important enough.” (Quartz)

Mansplain magazine via Matt Round

Dear, dear

According to business-etiquette experts Barbara Pachter and Will Schwalbe, starting an email with “Dear ___” will likely be perceived as “old-fashioned” or “a bit too formal.” Much safer, they tell Business Insider, to use “Hi.”

Tell that to the people coming up with titles for new or recent movies, TV series, plays, and books. For them, it’s “Dear” all the way down.

Word of the week: Sicko

On February 22 – the birthday of America’s first president, George Washington – @RealDonaldTrump rose early and poked out a farrago of tweets – seven in all – proffering his theories about guns, schools, and a “GREAT DETERRENT” (his capitalization) to massacres like the one that occurred on Valentine’s Day at Marjory Stoneman Davis High School in Parkland, Florida. Scattered within those tweets like so much buckshot were three occurrences of the word sicko. 

....immediately fire back if a savage sicko came to a school with bad intentions. Highly trained teachers would also serve as a deterrent to the cowards that do this. Far more assets at much less cost than guards. A “gun free” school is a magnet for bad people. ATTACKS WOULD END!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2018

....If a potential “sicko shooter” knows that a school has a large number of very weapons talented teachers (and others) who will be instantly shooting, the sicko will NEVER attack that school. Cowards won’t go there...problem solved. Must be offensive, defense alone won’t work!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2018

 

February linkfest

The Oscar-nominated 2017 film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri has inspired at least two real-world imitations, reports AdWeek. After the shooting massacre in a Parkland, Florida, high school, the group Progressive Turnout Project placed a billboard with a gun-reform challenge outside the Janesville, Wisconsin, office of House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has accepted $61,401 in contributions from the National Rifle Association.

“17 killed in their classrooms. Still no gun reform? How come, Paul Ryan?”

 

And in London, Justice4Grenfell placed three mobile billboards outside Grenfell Towers, the site of disastrous fire last year that killed 71 people.

 

“71 dead / and still no arrests? / How come?”

 

For comparison, here are the billboards that appear in the film, which stars Frances McDormand.

 

Wonderment

I ducked into Mrs. Dalloway’s, a Berkeley bookstore, to pick up a gift. And what to my wondering eyes should appear? Three books with wonder in their titles, all published in the last 12 months.

 

Wonder Valley, by Ivy Pochoda, “a visionary portrait of contemporary Los Angeles in all its facets, from the Mojave Desert to the Pacific, from the 110 to Skid Row.”

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.

 

 

Unceded land

During my recent trip to Vancouver I attended five screenings at the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF). The films were good – I especially enjoyed Lucky, the actor Harry Dean Stanton’s last movie (he died in September); and You’re Soaking in It, a disturbing Canadian-produced documentary about data-driven advertising – but what most impressed me about the festival didn’t appear on the screen. It was, instead, a 32-word statement read by a presenter before each screening.

When I returned home I emailed VIFF to get the precise wording of the statement. Here it is:

First we would like to acknowledge that we are on the unceded Indigenous land belonging to the Coast Salish peoples, including the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, Stolo, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

Five films, five readings, each exactly the same except for one ad-lib when the presenter looked up after “unceded” and commented: “I guess we aren’t yet allowed to say stolen.”

Now, I attend film festivals pretty regularly here in the Bay Area, which is also – like much of these United States – unceded Indigenous land. Has anyone ever acknowledged that fact here? Not even once. Not even at the most politically astute events.

Between screenings, and after I left Vancouver, I thought a lot about that word unceded. Its root, cede, has a legal meaning: to yield or grant, especially by means of a treaty. This Vancouver land hadn’t been ceded. It had been taken long ago by British colonizers. Stolen.

I asked the VIFF organizers how this acknowledgment came about. Was it unique to VIFF? The response was prompt and clear:

It is quite common in Vancouver for organizations to publicly acknowledge that they are on unceded land belonging to the Coast Salish peoples, particularly arts, culture, and educational organizations. This is part of Canada's ongoing reconciliation with the First Nations peoples. VIFF believes in the importance of this reconciliation. This is the first year that VIFF has made this acknowledgment before each screening, but we are actually latecomers to this practise, as other local film festivals and live event exhibitors have been doing it for quite a few years now. 

Repeating an acknowledgment about unceded land and the people who refused to cede it – five, 50, or 500 times – will not change history. But it makes an impression that lingers and deepens. It changes the way you look at your surroundings, the way you think about how you and your forebears got here, the way you think about what you owe to those who came long before. For the institutions that commit to the acknowledgment, it’s a powerful form of branding – of communicating character and purpose. It’s a step away from the spotlight, which is an unusual and admirable thing for a film festival to do, when you think about it.

It’s not a solution. But it’s a start.

 

Word of the week: Blackpilling

Will Sommer writes in his blog, Right Richter*:

After Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer announced a potential DACA deal, pro-Trump forums and Twitter lit up with mentions of “blackpilling”— the concept that the political process is useless, and that either completely dropping out of society or responding with mass violence is the answer. The idea that Trump would betray them, they said, was the ultimate blackpill.”

(Emphasis added.)

Blackpill (noun), blackpilling (gerund), and to blackpill (transitive verb) are relatively new, but since 2016 they’ve been pervasive among the so-called alt-right, whose adherents include neo-Nazis, white separatists, and the manosphere. The terms were inspired by The Matrix (1999), written by siblings Lilly and Lana Wachowski, in which the protagonist, Neo, is offered a choice of a virtual red pill or a virtual blue bill. “You take the blue pill, the story ends,” the character Morpheus tells Neo. “You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

“Red pill” – a metaphor for “reality, however harsh” – was adopted by the men’s rights movement, many of whose adherents frequent a sub-Reddit called The Red Pill. The Red Pill was also the title of a 2016 documentary about the men’s rights movement directed by Cassie Jaye.  

What “redpilling” is to the manosphere, “blackpilling” is to a segment of the alt-right: the neoreaction movement, self-styled as NRx.