There were 40 accepted words in the solution to the March 5 New York Times Spelling Bee, and one of them was galoot.
Was it a coincidence that on that very day two contributors to the American Dialect Society listserv discussed the origins of this word?
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For my year-end wrap-up I’m letting my pictures do the talking. Pictures with words, that is. My thanks for the inspiration to Nancy Nall, whose blog I’ve enjoyed for many years.
January
Covid boosters became widely available (I got my first booster in September 2021 and my second in March 2022). Humboldt Distillery saw an opportunity to seize the zeitgeist.
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I’ve read more books about Trump, Trumpism, and What It All Means than is probably healthy for me, but until I read Thank You for Your Servitude, by Mark Leibovich (Penguin Random House, 2022), I’d never laughed my way through a Trump book. Leibovich, a veteran Washington correspondent (New York Times, The Atlantic), focuses not on “your favorite president” but on the lickspittles and soul-sellers who sought relevance through their obeisance to him, most notably Senators Rubio (R-FL), Cruz (R-TX), and Graham (R-SC), all of whom had been loudly contemptuous about TFG before he became the nominee and they made the bread-butter connection. Leibovich is the rare insider with an outsider’s sense of irony, and he’s a master of the snappy sentence. Here’s one example, about former Republican National Committee Reince Priebus, who became 45’s much-put-upon first chief of staff: “No matter how much Trump had roiled the Republican water, it remained Priebus’s job to carry it.”
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I’ve written frequently about the names of vegetarian and vegan substitutes for animal-based foods: the apostrophes (Turk’y, Chick’n), the negatives (Nada Moo, Beef-less), the kree8tiv misspellings (Mylk, Krab). For more, see this post and “Phood for Thought,” my 2011 Vocabulary.com column.
Here’s a recent entry in the Name That Phood sweepstakes: ChiQin Nuggets, a new product from Quorn (“Home of Meatless”).
The protein source is fermented Fusarium venenatum, a fungus found naturally in soil.
This isn’t Quorn’s first foray into not-chicken; you can still find Quorn Chik’n products on Amazon and elsewhere. I haven’t found an explanation for the new name—perhaps it’s a new recipe, or maybe Quorn is doubling down on the initial letter of its corporate name, which here is pronounced identically to the /ck/ in chicken (or Chick’n). A third possibility—that the spelling is a coded message about the QAnon conspiracy—is too unappetizing to consider.*
Lest you think “Only in America!”—well, think again. Around the world, producers of plant-based products are having phun with their phood.
Last week OrenH tweeted from Jerusalem about “kmozzarella.”
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I’ve been gradually expanding my newsletter diet to include some lighter (but still substantial) fare. A few recommendations:
The Department of Salad, by Emily Nunn, is, yes, about salad and salad lore, but is also just a very chatty, very funny from an excellent writer. If you haven’t made Spicy Cherry Salad (aka Israeli Cherry Salad), you must do so immediately, before cherry season is over for good.
How Not to F*ck Up Your Face, “philosophical and practical advice for anyone who’s ever looked into a mirror,” is written by Valerie Monroe, who was the beauty editor at O magazine for almost 16 years. She’s on an extended stay in Japan right now, and I’ve been enjoying her reporting on the local scene, from Japanese toilets to “love hotels.”
The Unpublishable, by Jessica DeFino, a freelance beauty journalist. Subtitle: “The beauty industry’s least favorite newsletter.” DeFino covers topics like “how the ‘5-minute face’ became the $5,000 face” and why the words “THAT ACTUALLY WORK” are so common in beauty headlines. (It’s because most beauty products don’t work.)
“Potent, powerful skin care that works”? Probably not. (My photo; Walgreens.)
All three of these newsletters are published on the Substack platform, which means you can read them for free but paid subscriptions are what keeps the updates coming.
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How did a Yiddish noun with Hebrew roots and a sardonic connotation become a popular brand name, a scientific backronym, and even a baby name?
That’s the question I address in “Understanding Maven,” my May column for the Visual Thesaurus. I trace the spread of maven in mainstream culture back to a regional ad campaign in the 1960s and to two widely read journalists, William Safire and Malcolm Gladwell. As for the “Maven” baby name, it seems to be an extension of the Irish girl’s name Maeve—even though “Maven” is a masculine noun in Yiddish.
Access to the column is paywalled for three months; here’s an excerpt:
Maven’s real tipping point was … well, The Tipping Point, the 2000 book by Malcolm Gladwell that asserted that “ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do.” Long before “influencer” became a job description, Gladwell divided influential people into three groups: connectors, salesmen, and—you guessed it—mavens. Mavens, Gladwell wrote, “are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know”:
The critical thing about Mavens is that they aren’t passive collectors of information. It isn’t just that they are obsessed with how to get the best deal on a can of coffee. What sets them apart is that once they figure out how to get that deal, they want to tell you about it too.
The Tipping Point became a best-seller and a favored reference in leadership seminars and marketing courses. It also enhanced our vocabulary. Not only did it make “tipping point”—a term used mostly by scientists beginning in the late 1950s—a household phrase, it educated thousands of readers about maven. Many of those readers went on to start companies that they named “Maven,” often explicitly acknowledging their debt to Gladwell and The Tipping Point.
UPDATE, May 27: The software company Mavenlink, which I mention in the Visual Thesaurus story, has been renamed Kantata following a merger. According to the press release, the new name “was inspired by ‘cantata’ – a classical music composition that intricately and beautifully combines multiple voice and instrumentation elements. This style of classical music is a metaphor for the collaborative creation that is the foundation of all successful professional services organizations.”
Continue reading "On the Visual Thesaurus: Understanding 'Maven'" »
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My latest story for Medium is about language, identity, and what it means to be “Anglo-Saxon”—which is how I was labeled when I lived in Israel, despite having neither Angles nor Saxons anywhere in my family tree.
You can read it here: When I Was Anglo-Saxon.
Happy Labor Day and a sweet new year—5782 on the Jewish calendar—to those who celebrate.
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The title of Diane Ravitch’s new book about American schools, Slaying Goliath, struck me right between the eyes. Hadn’t I seen something like it very recently?
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Years ago, long before California legalized cannabis, I knew a pair of Jewish Deadheads whose Passover table always included “sweet herb” (wink, wink) along with the traditional bitter herb. (Or so they said. They never invited me to their seder.) I’ve lost touch with them, but if they’re still observing the ritual, I bet they’re plotzing over this year’s convergence of 4/20—the equivalent of St. Cannabis’ Day—and the first day of Passover. It’s like Thanksgivukkah, but for stoners. Call it Weed-Over, if you must. (The coinage belongs to Arielle Kaplan, a writer for Alma, the new-ish Jewish publication “for ladies with chutzpah.”)
So: How best to honor the occasion? Is cannabis kosher? Is cannabis kosher for Passover? Are we going to be asking 420 questions instead of the traditional four?
To the last question I say: Isn’t the seder already punishingly long? As for the others, here’s what I’ve dug up.
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A blanket merchant in the Pacific Northwest is doing laudable work under a mournful moniker.
The company commissions and sells handmade blankets in a variety of materials and designs. For every blanket you purchase, the company donates a blanket to your local homeless shelter.
The name of the company: Sackcloth & Ashes.
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