Fritinancy

Don't look!

The “disaster comedy” Don’t Look Up opens December 10 in theaters and comes to Netflix on December 24. Directed by Adam McKay (Vice, The Big Short) it features what Variety, in a pan, calls “a galaxy full of stars” and an all-too-plausible premise: “Two low-level astronomers must go on a giant media tour to warn mankind of an approaching comet that will destroy planet Earth.”

Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Cate Blanchett, Mark Rylance…

 

Does the title have a familiar ring? It should: Hollywood has been fond of “don’t-look” titles for more than half a century. In chronological order:

Word of the week: Omicron

Were you one of the thousands of people who, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, decided to learn a new language? Well, congratulations: You’re now learning Greek! Or at least the Greek alphabet.

The highly contagious Delta variant, named after the fourth letter of that alphabet, was first identified in India in October 2020 and quickly spread around the globe. And we learned last week that yet another troubling Covid variant had emerged in South Africa. It was named after the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet: Omicron.

How did we jump from fourth letter to fifteenth? The New York Times explains:

November linkfest

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate, and happy fourth week of November to everyone else.

My book recommendation this month is The Confidence Men, by Margalit Fox, the riveting true story of two British officers’ escape from an “escape-proof” Turkish POW camp—“the Alcatraz of its day,” Fox writes—toward the end of World War I. What makes their story amazing is how they did it: no tunnels, no violence, no weapons except for a homemade Ouija board and the two men’s skill at psychological manipulation.

 

 

I love a prison-escape story, and Fox tells this tale expertly, and Richard Elfyn, the narrator of the audiobook I listened to, rises to the occasion, switching between accents and occasionally reading passages in Welsh. But just as interesting as the escape itself are the conditions that enabled it. In his paywalled review for the New York Review of Books, Neal Ascherson writes:

Persuading people to like something is a trade. Persuading them to change their minds and like something else is a skill. But inducing them to believe in something that their senses and experience tell them is plainly unreal or untrue—unicorns, papal infallibility, Trump’s assertions, ghosts—requires art and almost manic self-confidence. The “confidence men” of Margalit Fox’s title, two British prisoners of war who planned the most eccentric and devious of all escapes, had plenty of both. But Fox puts their story into a broad historical setting, using it to illustrate the ways in which scientific inventions made possible not only empowerment but also credulity and manipulation.

*

 

On the Visual Thesaurus: The lingo of film noir

For my latest Visual Thesaurus column I’m celebrating Noirvember—the monthlong tribute to film noir—with a lineup of classic noir slang.

The column is paywalled for three months; here’s an excerpt:

Word of the week: Oneiric

During the first year of the Covid pandemic, some people took up sourdough baking, others began studying a new language or learning to play an instrument. My preferred pastime was, and remains, film noir. Over the last eighteen months I’ve watched more than 100 noirs, many of them more than once, from The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, from 1958, is often considered the last true film noir; I saw it once in a theater, years ago, and plan to see it again soon, after I’ve crossed a few never-watched titles off my list—Decoy (1946), Railroaded! (1947), and The Chase (1946) currently top the queue. I just can’t seem to get enough of corrupt cops, washed-up boxers, double-crossing dames, and hard-boiled shamuses.

I’ve been supplementing my screenings with books, articles, and videos about noir. (For a partial list, as well as ways to stream film noirs, see the end of this post.) It was in one of those books, Film Noir: A Very Short Introduction*, by James Naremore, that I came across this week’s word, oneiric, which sent me to a dictionary. It’s pronounced with a long-I sound in the middle—oh-NIGH-rick—and it comes from a Greek source, although relatively recently. It means “related to dreams.”

Forever words

On October 18, the Biden administration announced plans to regulate “a group of long-lasting, human-made chemicals that pose health risks to millions of Americans, even as they continue to be used in an array of products such as cosmetics, dental floss, food packaging, clothing and cleaning supplies.” The polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are “more commonly known as ‘forever chemicals,’ which do not break down naturally and have turned up in the water supplies of communities across the country,” the Washington Post reported.

Certain chemicals have been tagged as “forever” for a while—I found a 2019 article about them, and the usage is probably older than that. But forever hasn’t been an adjective forever, and that’s what interests me here: not just forever chemicals but forever homes, forever stamps, forever cars, forever sneakers, and much more.

The Forever Purge (2021), a horror-action film directed by Everardo Gout, is the fifth film in the Purge series.

Adverbial forever, meaning “always,” first appeared in print around 1275. Adjectival forever, meaning “permanent” or “for the foreseeable future,” is a relative newcomer. The OED’s earliest citation is from an 1879 article in a Quaker magazine, The Friend, published in London: “He..would sign himself, ‘Your most humble servant, and to be your future and forever friend in the spiritual world.’”

We don’t see “forever friend” much now; it’s been superseded by Best Friends Forever, I guess. Here are the forevers that linger:

“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.