Fritinancy

Let’s hear it for the boys

I’ve been watching The Boys on Amazon Prime, and along with enjoying the clever conceit (superheroes as corrupt bad guys controlled by an evil mega-corporation) and the dash of Brit slang and swearing (shufti, dekko, chuffed, lots of casual cunts), I’ve been thinking about the title. The show is based on a graphic-novel series that I’ve never read, and maybe “boys” is more overtly explained there, but on the show we’re left to infer that The Boys are the good-guy squad, even though one of their number is a young woman.

 

They aren’t the only capital-B Boys trending in popular-culture titles right now. Although less robust than the ongoing Girl/Girls title phenomenon (see my posts from 2015 and from 2018), “Boy/Boys” is still a trendlet worth noting.

Word of the week: Farmageddon

It’s a book! It’s a movie! It’s a brewery! (Two breweries, actually.) It’s an impending economic catastrophe, or maybe two catastrophes!

I spotted the economic-disaster farmageddon, a portmanteau of farm and Armageddon, in a tweet-reply to short-term Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci.

What gain? He's s failure by virtually all standards. We're in a manufacturing recession; and tariff infuced Farmageddon

— Jossy (@Unitedshashe) August 12, 2019

 

Pretty big little tiny lying things

The news that Tiny Pretty Things, the 2016 YA novel about ballet students by Sona Charaipotra and Dhonielle Clayton, is being made into a 10-episode Netflix series sent me into a free-association reverie.

“Black Swan meets Pretty Little Liars.” – Amazon. The sequel (2017) is titled Shiny Broken Pieces.

Word of the week: Intimacy director

Just for my own amusement, I keep a list of job titles that didn’t exist until relatively recently. Most of them are in technology fields: Customer success manager. Code sensei. Scooter juicer. Operations Jedi.

One recently created job, however, depends not on technology but on psychology and stagecraft. Intimacy directors—the title appears to have been invented around 2016 by the founders of Intimacy Directors International, although the discipline was developed about 15 years ago—work with theater actors to choreograph “moments of staged intimacy in order to create safe, repeatable, and effective storytelling,” according to IDI’s website. (Their counterparts in television and film are called intimacy coordinators, and play similar roles in “scenes containing intimacy, simulated sex, nudity or high emotional content.”)

Un-titled

I’ve finally gotten around to watching “Unforgotten,” the British detective show, now on Netflix, starring Nicola Walker (whom I liked a lot in “Last Tango in Halifax” and the National Theatre’s brilliant Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time). Something about the title jogged my memory: It felt like I’d been seeing a lot of un- titles and names lately. So I did some digging. And I was right.

How 137 Films got its name

Last Sunday, at the San Francisco International Film Festival, I saw the world premiere of a fascinating and disturbing documentary, We Believe in Dinosaurs, about the building of the Ark Encounter, a $102 million pseudoscientific tourist attraction in Williamstown, Kentucky. (You can read about the Encounter’s 2016 opening and about Ken Ham, the “creationist” zealot behind the endeavor, here.)

The film doesn’t yet have a distributor, so I can’t tell you where it will play next. What I can tell you is the story of 137 Films, the production company that made We Believe in Dinosaurs. It’s one of the best how-they-got-that-name stories I’ve read, and certainly one of the best numeral-as-name stories.

137 Films logo

 

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.