Fritinancy

June linkfest

A quick audiobook recommendation: I thoroughly enjoyed So Many Steves: Afternoons with Steve Martin, a series of conversations between Martin and his longtime friend the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. (Gopnik is everywhere, isn’t he? He was also “in conversation with” the fictional Lydia Tár in last year’s Tár.) Martin, who will turn 78 in August, has spent more than 60 years plying his various trades: magician, musician, comedian, actor, novelist, librettist. Gopnik elicits charming stories and surprising revelations, and gently nudges Martin toward a discussion of craft and motivation. The book—audio only, with some delightful banjo music—is available from Pushkin Industries and the usual online merchants. Or, if your public library supports the Libby app, you can borrow it free for three weeks. (By the way, the title is a twist on the E.E. Cummings poem “So Many Selves.” Martin is a big fan of Cummings, it turns out.)

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Names of the year 2022: Fritinancy edition

Because my words-of-the-year list couldn’t cover the whole territory, here’s a list of upper-case names that stood out over the past year. For a different take, see Namerology’s name-of-the-year post about Volodymyr, which includes a discussion of language, identity, and spelling.

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Word of the week: Monetize

I’ve been thinking about this word ever since Twitter introduced “monetization” options for “Super Follows” in 2021, although I’d started thinking about it in early 2000, when I first heard it used in conversation. I thought about it even more when I received my latest income statement from Medium, where I’ve been publishing since 2018, lured in by promises of a modest income stream, aka monetization. My total for the month of May was 19 cents, or half a cent for each of the stories I’ve published.

And so, because I am clearly bad at monetizing but somewhat better at writing about it, I have published a story about monetize—its origins, its connotations, its spread—for (what else?) Medium.

Counting my pennies.

 

You can read the story here. It’s free, but if you’d like to support my sad monetization journey, you can follow me on Medium and “clap” for each of my stories. You can “clap” up to 50 times!

Every clap counts, although three claps don’t count for much.

 

I’ve written about demonetization, too, if that’s more your jam. It has nothing to do with demons and everything to do with money, or the lack of it. 

 

 

 

Word of the week: Funge

I got such a headache writing about NFTs (non-fungible tokens) in March 2021 that I sincerely hoped never to revisit the subject. But then I saw a tweet that kind of funged me up.

I funged Jimmy Fallon's ape. It's our now. pic.twitter.com/JQ3OmlnsDB

— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) January 28, 2022

Down the rabbit hole, or ape hole, I went. I inferred that funge had something to do with non-fungible, but was funge now a verb with regular conjugations? I know who Jimmy Fallon is—host of “The Tonight Show” since 2014—but … ape?

Words of the year 2021: Fritinancy edition

Covid-19 turned into Covid 2021, the U.S. presidency changed hands despite TFG’s efforts to the contrary, and we somehow summoned the energy to invent new words and repurpose old ones. Here are my picks for this year’s keywords; scroll to the bottom for previous years’ lists. And stay tuned for the American Dialect Society’s selection of the word of the year on January 7.

My criteria are the ADS’s: words (or “lexical items”—acronyms and phrases appear here, too) that were new or newly prominent, widely used, and relevant to events of 2021. 

In alphabetical order:

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:

Word of the week: SPAC

It’s been quite a year, so far, for novel acronyms and initialisms: NIL, NFT, XBE, TFG. (And let’s not forget LFG, from late 2019, which is now the title of a documentary, released in June 2021, about the US women’s national soccer team.)

Now we have the next BFD of acronyms: SPAC. It rhymes with crack and it stands for “special purpose acquisition company.”

Abrdn? Srsly?

Vowels: Who needs them?

That, it seems, was the guiding principle behind the name change, announced April 26, of Standard Life Aberdeen PLC, an asset-management firm based in Edinburgh. The company name will henceforth be rendered as Abrdn—but pronounced, as in days of yore, as “Aberdeen.”

In an official statement, the company’s chief executive, Stephen Bird, said: “Our new brand Abrdn builds on our heritage and is modern, dynamic, and, most importantly, engaging for all of our client and customer channels.” He also said the new brand “reflects the clarity of focus that the leadership team are bringing to the business as we seek to deliver sustainable growth.” 

Many, many people begged to differ.

Word of the week: NFT

I am going to do my best to explain the hot initialism of the week—trust me, I’m just as baffled as most non-rich, non-tech people—but first I’m going to tell you what it doesn’t stand for.

It doesn’t stand for “Not For Tourists,” the series of city guides first published in 2000.

 

The circled sans-serif letters originally suggested the distinctive font of New York subway lines, an iconography that is Not Fully Transferable to other cities, although the San Francisco Municipal Railway does in fact operate N, F, and T lines.

 

Which is a shame, because I definitely understand Not For Tourists. I bought a San Francisco NFT guide in 2006 or 2007 and found it well designed and helpful in my pre-smartphone phase.

This year’s NFT stands for non-fungible token, and the reason you’ve been hearing about it (or maybe not hearing about it, if you live mostly in the Real World, lucky you) is because what was once —say, in January—a niche internet hobby is now mainstream, or perhaps just “mainstream.” Also because Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, is attempting to sell the first tweet—his own, from March 6, 2006—as an NFT. Bidding reached $2.5 million on the evening of March 6, 2021.

Yes, anyone can view, retweet, and reproduce this tweet for free. Like this:

just setting up my twttr

— jack (@jack) March 21, 2006

But that’s not an NFT. An NFT gives you ownership rights to a piece of code in a blockchain. Not copyright or trademark rights, you understand. But still: rights.

Here’s an explanation by game developer Everest Pipkin, who’s concerned about the environmental impact of NFTs (something I won’t get into here, so read the full article if you’re interested):

An individual piece of cryptoart is called an NFT. You can think of each NFT as a trading card or a collectible with an individual value that is also affected by the general market value of NFTs as a concept, the Ethereum network and cryptocurrency in general. Like beanie babies without the beans.

Cryptoart is bought and sold with- and has its value calculated in- Ethereum, a 6-year-old cryptocurrency that was (at the time of writing, 2 pm March 2nd 2021) trading at 1 ETH = $1476.21 USD.

Is your head hurting? My head is hurting.

This would be a good time to take a break and read about the Tinkerbell effect, which is germane. I’ll wait.

Word of the week: Stonks

Last week’s big financial story sounded like April Fool’s in January: Some mischievous day traders on the WallStreetBets subreddit noticed that GameStop, a struggling chain of brick-and-mortar video-game stores, was heavily shorted by Wall Street hedge funds—in other words, the hedgies were betting that GameStop would soon go belly-up. To stick it to the big-money investors, and maybe to make some money themselves, the Redditors began buying up undervalued GameStop stock, which drove up its price: from $4 a share a year ago to about $150 at market close on Friday, January 29. (They also bought up low-priced stock in other struggling companies: AMC movie theaters, Macys department stores, Blackberry. Yes, Blackberry is still around.)

There’s a lot more to the story than my synopsis; CNN Business reporter Allison Morrow broke it down concisely and clearly, and Bloomberg’s Matt Levine did his best to find The Meaning of It All.

Me, I’m going to stick to my own stock in trade: words.