Fritinancy

Word of the week: Fae

“Neopronoun with a nod to folklore”: That was the 28-Across clue in the September 23, 2022, New York Times crossword, and until I completed the fill I was stumped.

I was familiar with the term neopronoun: “a category of neologistic English third-person personal pronouns beyond ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘they,’ ‘one,’ and ‘it,’” according to a Wikipedia entry on the topic. I’d even read Dennis Baron’s 2020 book, What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond He and She, which includes a handy chart.

Fae and faer are down at the bottom. Baron does not explain their origin or significance, so I did some more research.

Book review: “Rebel with a Clause”

Are names destiny? I can’t help wondering whether Ellen Jovin, a communications expert and language maven whose surname rhymes with rovin’, was fated to travel to 47 states with her portable Grammar Table, and then write a book about her adventures called Rebel with a Clause: Tales and Tips from a Roving Grammarian. She certainly took to the project with energy and élan, and the result is a book so delightful that it could win over even the grammarphobic and the grammar-shy. 

May linkfest

Most naming advice in the popular media makes me clutch my head in despair, but this Inc. article by Minda Zetlin is different. Zetlin interviewed experienced name developers Anthony Shore and David Placek—both of whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with—and their real-world examples are smart and helpful. “Avoid names that describe your product” and “Don’t fall in love with one name” are the first tips, and yes, you’ve heard them from me, too. (h/t trademark lawyer Ed Timberlake)

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Steer clear of negative words in your business name? Not necessarily. Read about how Calamityware got its name. (And read my own post on negative names with positive impact.)

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I will probably go to my grave insisting on the distinction between lay and lie, so I got a satisfied chortle out of this table of cat tenses, from a Duolingo chat page. (Via Language Log)

April linkfest

Journalist, novelist, and author Kurt Andersen (Spy magazine, Fantasyland, Evil Geniuses) wrote about “how an article about genomic sequencing led to an afternoon playing around with AI branding tools.” The names and logos these tools spat out—Dynester, Aerodynamiq, ModernZeal—led Andersen to muse about how real life is increasingly indistinguishable from science fiction.

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Speaking of science fiction, here’s a list of fictional super-metals, from Adamantium to Zortium.

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If you’re a fan of the New York Times Spelling Bee, you’ll want to try Tylogram, a new word-formation game created by William Shunn, the genius behind Spelling Bee Solver. As with the Bee, you’ll create words for points; slide the tiles around the grid to maximize their value. But it’s even trickier than that! (And fun.)

 

Word of the week: Turncoat

I’m not betraying any secrets when I tell you that TURNCOAT was the pangram in Sunday’s New York Times online Spelling Bee. (A pangram is a word that contains all the letters in a given alphabet, in this case A, C, N, O, R, T, and U.)

You’ll need to find 43 words in this hive to achieve the coveted “Queen Bee” status. Words must contain at least four letters, one of which must be the central letter. Letters may be re-used in a word.

 

Turncoat was also on the minds of some people who followed the Senate vote on Saturday in Donald J. Trump’s second impeachment trial. Although the tally fell short of the 67 votes needed to convict the ex-president, seven Republican senators did break ranks to vote with their Democratic colleagues. “Seven Turncoats” was the finger-pointing headline in American Thinker, a conservative daily online magazine. (The piece also calls the aye-voting senators “treasonous faux Republicans” and asserts that “Trump was a truly great president” and also “the most revered president since Reagan”—in case you had any confusion about where they’re coming from.)

What is a turncoat? Here’s a good explanation from Vocabulary.com:

A turncoat is a traitor. … Turncoat comes from the ancient practice of wearing a badge or pin on one's coat signifying the party or leader you supported. By “turning your coat” you quite literally hid your allegiance to others. Often used interchangeably with defector, and while they are similar they are not quite the same. Turncoat is worse: it implies no possibility of any good or honest motive. Defector can at least sometimes have a neutral or even positive implication.

The first appearance of the noun turncoat in print was in 1570, before its spelling (or any other English spelling) had been standardized: “I will beleue none of you all, for you be turne coates, and chaungelinges, and be wauering minded.” It appeared as an adjective the following year: “Hee peynteth out more expressely theire turnecote craftynesse.”

Here’s what I love about turncoat: It’s a special sort of word, a member of a category called agentive and instrumental exocentric verb-noun compounds. Or, if you prefer, cutthroat compounds.

November linkfest

The wildfires have barely been extinguished here in California, but it’s already word-of-the-year season across the pond, where three prominent dictionaries chose words or phrases with a common theme: climate change, or preventing it. Cambridge Dictionary went first, with upcycling: “the activity of making new furniture, objects, etc. out of old or used things or waste material.” Collins Dictionary chose climate strike: “a protest demanding action on climate change.” And Oxford Dictionaries picked climate emergency from an all-environmental shortlist that included “climate action,” “climate denial,” “eco-anxiety,” “extinction” and “flight shame.”

Let the record show that lexicographer Jane Solomon, recently of Dictionary.com, spotted the trend back in September.

So @OxfordWords picked ‘climate emergency’ for their 2019 Word of the year. And @CollinsDict picked ‘climate strike.’

In September I suggested ‘climate crisis.’

Clearly lexicographers are all on the same page about this. https://t.co/75klqC7c6e

— 〰️Jane Solomon〰️ (@janesolomon) November 20, 2019

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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.)

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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

Imperfection

This headline popped up today on the home page of Uniqlo, the ubiquitous Japanese retail chain.

It links to the site’s jeans section, where the clothing is replete with rips, holes, and other “tasteful rough touches.”

Normally I’d focus on the verbing of imperfect – an example of anthimeria I hadn’t encountered previously. But as it happened I’d already been thinking about another sense of perfect: the grammatical sense. In grammar, perfect doesn't mean “impeccable”; it means “made complete” or “completely done.” 

The impetus for my musing was a tweet from @realDonaldTrump, a personal Twitter account, at 5:35 a.m. this morning:

August linkfest

This “refresher on trademark basics” is addressed to the craft beer industry, but it’s filled with solid information for anyone who needs to legally own a business name. (Hat tip: Timberlake Law.)

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More beer? Sure, why not. Craft brewers run out of catchy names “as puns run dry.”

 

    

Girl Stout cookie beer; Breaking Bad beer.

 

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March linkfest

Tuscan chicken, Tuscan toilets, Tuscan hummus: What exactly does Tuscan mean, anyway? (The New Yorker)

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How do nouns become verbs? Why are we OK with buttering our bread or boycotting a business, but clench our teeth at impacting and efforting? (JStor Daily) More on how branding weirds language (by me).

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And 1 extra grammatical error than Original Ready Crust too. pic.twitter.com/uAT87Bw5LV

— Jonathon Owen (@ArrantPedantry) March 14, 2016

 

 

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A 12-stanza poem composed entirely from the titles of SXSW panels.

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