Fritinancy

Word of the week: Glowie

Most of the time, I enjoy learning new words. But every so often I come across a new-to-me word that I sort of wish I’d never seen. That’s the case with glowie, which popped up on Twitter a few days ago in a reference to a far-right rally planned for September 18 in Washington, DC. Now that I’ve learned about it, you’re going to learn about it too. Quit reading now if you’re easily offended by conspiracy theories or a spelled-out N-word.

The tweet pointed to “Let’s Talk About September 18,” posted on September 9, 2021, in Jared Holt’s Substack newsletter Sh!tpost. Holt is a reporter who covers the intersection of politics and technology, with an emphasis on domestic extremism. His take on the September 18 rally—which organizers say will “demand ‘justice’ for people arrested for participating” in the January 6 US Capitol riot—is that it’s been overhyped by conventional news media, and that “the overwhelming consensus in extremist communities is: Don’t go.”

Here’s why:

Word of the week: Ghost gun

On April 8, President Biden announced a series of measures he planned to take, independent of Congress, to limit gun violence in the US. Among those measures is a directive empowering the Justice Department to stop the spread of “ghost guns”—homemade firearms, assembled from kits, that lack serial numbers and are thus untraceable. “I want to see these kits treated as firearms under the Gun Control Act,” the president said.

As reporter Annie Karni wrote in a New York Times explainer: “There is no need to pass a background check to obtain the components of a ghost gun. They are sold online as D.I.Y. kits, and typically shipped as ‘80 percent receivers.’ That means the gun is 80 percent complete, and buyers have to assemble the final 20 percent themselves.”

 

Ghost guns vs. traceable guns: Illustration via Everytown for Gun Safety, an American nonprofit organization, created in 2013, that advocates for gun control and against gun violence. Everytown is financed largely by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

February linkfest

“Trade characters” like Aunt Jemima and the Quaker Oats man used to be much more common in American commerce than they are today, writes logo expert James I. Bowie in Marker. They were so common, in fact, that the US Patent and Trademark Office assigned six-digit codes to trademark applications to “capture personal characteristics, including race and gender, as they were perceived in American culture many decades ago”:

There are codes for Native Americans and Asian Pacific people, but not for African Americans. Women, but not men, can be coded as “Hawaiian,” while men, but not women, can be deemed “Famous,” “Cowboys and westerners,” or “Farmers, hillbillies, or hobos” (the second of these terms was recently stricken). The categories for Scottish men and women seem to exist solely to code trade characters representing thriftiness — or, more bluntly, cheapness.

Aunt Jemima pancake mix, circa 1940s. James Bowie: “The Aunt Jemima logo was given codes 020301 (portraits of women) and 020315 (women wearing scarves on their heads).” Read my February 10 post about Aunt Jemima’s recently announced name change.

December linkfest

Happy Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us! The traditional Airing of Grievances seems superfluous this year: we’ve been airing and grieving for most of 2020. So let us gather quietly—and virtually—around the traditionally unadorned Festivus pole and wish for feats of strength to get us through the season.

Festivus T-shirt from Snorg Tees. Read my previous Festivus posts.

 

Now let’s open some link-y presents!

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Word of the year, California edition: Purple

Politically, California remains blue: My state voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, 63.5 to 34.3 percent, and has a Democratic governor, two Democratic US Senators and a majority-Democratic Congressional representation.

But in our non-electoral lives, it was a very purple year.

July linkfest

This month’s book recommendation is Becoming Duchess Goldblatt, by Anonymous. Duchess Goldblatt—Her Grace or DG to her thousands of Twitter followers, myself included—has been an indelible, wholly invented presence on Twitter for some eight years. Her avatar is a 1633 portrait by Frans Hals, and her distinctive voice—firm yet loving, barmy yet authoritative, warm yet tinged with acid—has inspired endless speculation about her “real” identity. You won’t learn that secret from this memoir, but you will learn how the anonymous author (now a woman of perhaps middle age) came to create her, during a terrible period in her life during which she lost her marriage, her house, her job, and most of her friends. The Duchess became her 81-year-old alter ego: an escape from loneliness and an outlet for her considerable writing talent. The book combines memoir with selected DG tweets, and if you choose the audiobook—try your local library system—you’ll enjoy not just the primary narration by Gabra Zackman but also the wonderful actress J. Smith Cameron reading the tweets and singer/songwriter/actor Lyle Lovett reading the Lyle Lovett parts. (Lovett and Her Grace have a mutual admiration society, and if only DG would deign to follow me back on Twitter we could make it a threesome.)

 

Writers can be a lot of fun at parties, but word to the wise: Keep an eye on your good memories. They’ll strip them down for parts.

— Duchess Goldblatt (@duchessgoldblat) December 5, 2017

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Remember when the owner of that professional football team in Washington, DC, said he would NEVER change the team’s name? “Daniel Snyder surely meant NEVER to mean forever,” writes trademark lawyer Steven Baird in Duets Blog, “but in 2013, he could not have foreseen how quickly the world has changed over the last six weeks.” A thorough review of what led up to Snyder’s promised “thorough review of the offending team name.

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On the Visual Thesaurus: "Plantation"

Now that Aunt Jemima and the Washington Redskins have announced plans to change their troubled names, is it time to take another look at brands and institutions that incorporate the word plantation?

Plantation brand blackstrap molasses, distributed by Allied Old English, Inc., of Port Reading, New Jersey

That’s the subject of my new Visual Thesaurus column, which ranges from Rhode Island to Florida to Texas and from dog food to rum to window shutters. Full access is restricted to subscribers; here’s a preview:

In the 1950s, among African Americans in particular, plantation began to take on the metaphorical sense of “any institution regarded as exploitative or paternalistic.” In his Autobiography, published in 1989, the musician Miles Davis wrote: “All the record companies were interested in at the time was making a lot of money and keeping their so-called black stars on the music plantation so that their white stars could just rip us off.” Commenting on the National Football League’s 2018 decision to fine players who didn’t stand for the National Anthem, the African American sociologist Harry Edwards told an interviewer: “This land is not free. My people are not free. It’s a carryover from 400 years of slavery and oppression. [NFL team] owners are acting like plantation owners, insisting that any act of ‘rebellion’ must be squelched.” 

Read the rest of the column.

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Blog bonus! As I note in the column, plantation can have a neutral meaning: “the act of planting.” It’s also pretty innocent in the song “Dalmatian Plantation,” by Mel Leven, sung at the end of the 1961 Disney animated movie One Hundred and One Dalmatians. This “plantation” is a haven, not a bastion of Cruella-ty. And, of course, it rhyme with “dalmation.”

Sheet music via Etsy

We'll have a dalmatian plantation
Where our population can roam
In this new location
Our whole aggregation
Will love our plantation home.

 

 

 

Word of the week: Commute

On Friday, July 10, political operative Roger Stone received a presidential commutation of his 40-month sentence for seven felony crimes. The White House’s official statement was “punctuated by the sort of inflammatory language and angry grievances characteristic of the president’s Twitter feed,” according to a New York Times story.

Two Republican senators had opposing views of the commutation. Utah’s Mitt Romney (a former presidential candidate himself) called it “unprecedented, historic corruption.”

Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president.

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) July 11, 2020

Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of the president’s chief apologists in the Senate (a title with many contenders), called the action “justified.”

In my view it would be justified if President @realDonaldTrump decided to commute Roger Stone's prison sentence.

Mr. Stone is in his 70s and this was a non-violent, first-time offense.https://t.co/jbbGTucRpq

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) July 10, 2020

(Mr. Stone is not “in his 70s.” He is 67. And his felonies included witness tampering and lying to investigators—not exactly penny-ante stuff.)

But let’s put all that aside—tempting as it is to let it offend our sense of ethics and decency for the rest of time—and consider the word commute.

"Defund the police"?

Since the shocking, videotaped killing of George Floyd, an African American man, by a white Minneapolis policeman on May 25, tens of thousands of Americans have taken to the streets in protest. In many places, demonstrations against police violence were met with callousness and more police violence, often military style.

You can’t have a protest without slogans, and of all the slogans that have appeared during these protests, the one that has been the most visible and provocative is “Defund the police.” On HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” host John Oliver devoted an entire show to the slogan and the issues behind it. The president, unsurprisingly, took the bait and tweeted repeatedly in opposition. A couple of his supporters escalated the threat.

“Defund the police” T-shirt via Etsy

I’ve been following the arguments over “Defund the police”—from “Is there a better way to say it?” to “What does it even mean?” (Interestingly, the OED doesn’t include a definition for defund that means “withdraw financial support from something,” although American dictionaries do.) My conclusion: Whenever you have to explain a slogan by saying “What we really mean is…”, it’s a bad slogan and you’re losing the argument.

Especially when your “explanation” uses a word like “decommodify” that needs more explanation. I don’t know who created this graphic; I found it on Reddit.

 

The commentary that spoke most directly to me comes from a Twitter user who goes by The Hoarse Whisperer and who tackled the subject the way those of us who work in branding and communications would.

Bad backronym: SCRIPT

At last: a story that isn’t about COVID-19! Instead, it’s about movies; the US Department of Defense; the People’s Republic of China; and a bill, introduced last week by US Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), with an absurdly tone-deaf name.

The bill is known by its acronym, SCRIPT. Here’s how Cruz touted it on Twitter.

The SCRIPT Act will serve as a wake-up call by forcing Hollywood studios to choose between the assistance they need from the American government and the dollars they want from China: https://t.co/EmqdC5H012

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 28, 2020

Not so bad, right? But wait: Here’s the full name of the proposed act.

Yes, it’s the “Stopping Censorship, Restoring Integrity, and Protecting Talkies” Act.

Imagine coming up with SCRIPT (in the first place: why?) and then having to reverse-engineer an acronym (that is, a backronym) for it. You get all the way to T and you’re stumped. What are we protecting? Truth? Trust? Trademarks? Taste? Taxes? Telecommunications? Twinkies?