Fritinancy

Stay home, save links

Lynne Murphy wrote about the original UK slogan coronavirus slogan—“Stay at home/Protect the NHS/Save lives”—and its replacement (“Stay alert”), which was “mocked relentlessly on UK social media within a day of its announcement.” My own thoughts went immediately to an old joke, which I see is still alive and well.

Via Zazzle

 

Because Lynne’s a linguist, she went deep on some interesting points of grammar. I hadn’t realized, for example, that at-less “Stay home” marks you as a speaker of American English.

It appears some of you idiots can’t follow a simple instruction so here’s THE NEW AND MUCH CLEARER Government COVID Slogan generator pic.twitter.com/t6tXmfp75E

— Olaf Falafel (@OFalafel) May 11, 2020

I’m a fan of this balanced two-part slogan from PassItOn.com: “Stay apart. Pull together.” Their other pandemic-related billboards—“First In. Second to None”; “Nursing a Country Back to Health”—are good, too.

 

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My American friend Diana Howard wrote about her experience of COVID-19 “confinement” in Aix-en-Provence, France, where she has lived for several years. Diana and I met when she was a graphic designer; we worked on a number of projects together. She’s now a full-time artist, and the accompanying illustrations are charming. 

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And speaking of France (h/t Jesse Sheidlower):

BREAKING NEWS: The Académie Française, the French language police, have just announced that while Covid19 *could* be a masculine word because of “le virus” that it’s preferable to be feminine because of “la maladie.” https://t.co/rsYWY97VEJ

— Dr. Jen Schradie (@schradie) May 8, 2020

 

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Erin Griffith interviewed me for a New York Times article about all those Zoom-y business names. And then she … zoomed away with it. It’s hilarious, and just the teensiest bit deranged. (Check out the URL.)

I wrote a few weeks ago about ten of those Zoom names.

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And speaking of me, my latest story for Medium is about my adventures in picking up trash during the pandemic. Medium says it’s a four-minute read, but you can stretch it out to six if you pace yourself.

 

Word of the week (again): Debacle

Another March, another health-care crisis, another chance to look at debacle, a French import with connections to spring, medicine, and failure.

Word of the week: Tinsel

“Is Tinsel Canceled?” asks a headline in the December 19 New York Times Style section. The verdict: “Glitter, tinsel and shiny wrapping paper are now signs of the apocalypse, judging by the #zerowasteholidays and similar hashtags that are blooming on Instagram.”

That may be an overstatement: Tinsel tours and tinsel trails still thrive in various US municipalities, and mirror-bright strips adorn plenty of wreaths and trees. So let’s table the eco-arguments aside and get to the question at hand: What is this stuff called tinsel, and where does that word come from?

 

Tinsel, a Christmas-themed pop-up bar in Philadelphia. Via Philadelphia magazine.

 

Word of the week: Democracy grief

What’s your grief, and how are you coping with it? Perhaps you suffer from climate grief, a term that may have been coined in 2007, by the authors of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, to describe the despair and depression people experience when they contemplate the climate crisis. Maybe you console yourself by eating, which may result in what Germans call kummerspeck (literally “grief fat”).

Or maybe you, like New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg, are experiencing democracy grief: not merely “anxiety and anger” but also “a demoralizing degree of fear, even depression” that—as one psychologist put it to Goldberg—“the institutions that we rely on to protect us from a dangerous individual might fail.”

 

How Democracies Die (2018). by Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who warn of the “gradual chipping away of democratic institutions” that makes it “harder and harder to dislodge the incumbent [elected official] by democratic means.”

June linkfest

“The use of rainbows as logo design elements has fallen back almost to its pre-1970s level, while the use of rainbow colors in logos has taken off.” (Emblemetric)

Image via Emblemetric

 

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Remember tronc, possibly the worst corporate name ever? You can forget it now. (The Verge)

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After 27 years, Greece has finally agreed to the formal name of its northern neighbor, the Republic of North Macedonia. (BBC)

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This ad for Texas Congressional candidate Mary Jennings “MJ” Hegar sets a new standard for political advertising: It’s well written, brilliantly edited, and engaging.

Word of the week: Gammon

Another week, another epithet. Last week we had a look at soy boy, although I’d considered shining a spotlight on incel instead. (For an analysis of this insult, a portmanteau of involuntary and celibate, see Ben Zimmer’s essay for Politico.) This week we have another way to dis (white) men, this one instigated by our cousins across the pond: gammon.

Fooled you! Today’s gammon is unrelated to backgammon.

Word of the week: Chagrin

Such a lovely-sounding word; such a subtle, complex, and nearly universal emotion: “acute vexation, annoyance, or mortification, arising from disappointment, thwarting, or failure,” as the OED puts it*; “disquietude or distress of mind caused by humiliation, disappointment, or failure,” according to Merriam-Webster. It found its way into English from French in the late 17th century, and was considered “affected or frenchified” for several decades thereafter. Alexander Pope used chagrin in his 1714 narrative poem “The Rape of the Lock,” where he rhymed it with “spleen.” (Pope may have been singlehandedly responsible for rescuing chagrin from French purgatory: the OED gives two additional example sentences from his correspondence.)

I was surprised to learn that chagrin comes not from the language of moods but from the lexicon of the physical world. You may know its Anglicized form, shagreen (yes, rhymes with “spleen”), which means “rough, untanned leather … prepared from the skin of the horse, ass, etc., or of the shark, seal, etc., and frequently dyed green.” It’s also a color name.

From The Spruce, a home-and-family website: “If you're looking for a fun green paint color, consider Shagreen. This green is right on the cusp of warm and cool, with just enough softness to push it over to the cool side.”

 

How did a word for a type of leather become a word for a type of feeling?

A visit to the Museum of Failure

How best to mark the end of the shitshow that was 2017? With a pilgrimage to an institution that mocks and celebrates all manner of flops, lemons, fiascos, misfires, and fuckups, of course. Which is how I found myself last week at the Museum of Failure in downtown Los Angeles’s Arts District. The traveling installation, housed in the A+D (architecture + design) Museum, is open to the public through February 4; it then returns to its permanent home home in Helsingborg, Sweden.

Word of the week: Debacle

On March 24, Republican Congressional leaders withdrew the American Health Care Act – H.R. 1628, also known as AHCA, TrumpCare, RepubliCare, and RyanCare (after the House Speaker) – a mere 16 days after it was introduced in committee. The bill had been slapped together as a fulfillment of the “repeal and replace Obamacare” promise that Donald Trump had repeatedly made on the campaign trail, and which Republicans had been clamoring for since 2009, when “Obamacare” (the Affordable Care Act) became law. But it satisfied almost no one, and it was clearly not going to get enough House votes to be passed on to the Senate.

What to call this turn of events? CNN said it was “an epic failure.” Fox Business called it a “stinging defeat.” The Washington Post chose fiasco, a bit of 19th-century theater slang that borrows an Italian word for bottle, although the connection with failure is now obscure. On Twitter, conservative columnist Ben Shapiro it “self-beclowning.”

But many observers summoned up a word with French roots and nonpolitical origins: debacle.

The Week, March 24.

 

this spectacular debacle for Trump/GOP was achieved entirely by Trump/GOP — opposition didn’t have to do a thing

— Philip Gourevitch (@PGourevitch) March 24, 2017

 

#POTUS response to #trumpcare debacle was "delusional" said @David_Gergen. Said at least @SpeakerRyan "manned up" #ACARepeal

— Meredith White (@MeredithWhite1) March 24, 2017

January linkfest

What was Kellogg’s Product 19, and how did it get that slightly sinister name? (Slate)

 

 

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