Fritinancy

December linkfest

Happy Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us! I don’t have the traditional aluminum pole, and this year I’m sparing you my Airing of Grievances. (But you can air your own grievance on FestivusWeb.) As for the other primary tradition, I discovered this year that there’s a Feats of Strength cocktail, which sounds kind of like a hot toddy. Did you know that English toddy comes from Hindi tari, which means “palm sap”?

“Festivus-infused” maple syrup from family-owned, Vermont-based Runamok. You can buy it at REI.

Read my previous Festivus posts.

And here’s a year-end link roundup:

Issey Miyake, 1938–2022

Issey Miyake, who died August 5 at 84, was acclaimed for his inventive fashion designs and best-selling fragrances. But he was also a prolific and often playful inventor of names. His company’s brand family is full of international references and multilingual puns—appropriate for a Japanese-born designer whose first collection debuted in New York (in 1971) and who was the first foreign-born designer to show at Paris Fashion Week (in 1974).

On the Visual Thesaurus: The tales behind the Best Picture titles

For my March column for the Visual Thesaurus I take a look at the titles of this year’s Best Picture nominees, each of which represents a distinct style, from acronym to slogan to Biblical quote.

Full access to the column is paywalled for three months. Here’s an excerpt:

 

Word of the week: Meteotsunami

It’s always something here on the West Coast, isn’t it? If it isn’t wildfires—thankfully not a major problem last year—it’s flooding, if it isn’t flooding it’s earthquakes, and if it isn’t earthquakes it’s … a volcanic eruption? Not here, but close enough—5,300 miles away, off the coast of Tonga, one mile below the ocean surface. It was massive enough to trigger tsunami advisories throughout coastal California and to cause surges in places like Santa Cruz and Pacifica.

 

 

One of many permanent tsunami signs in San Francisco.

On the extremely micro level, that meant canceling my scheduled swim in San Francisco Bay. Not that I’m complaining: I may be crazy to swim in 51°F water, but at least I’m not the sort of idiot who thinks, “Oooh, a tsunami! Surf’s up!”

Stuck on high ground, I did some research into the language of tsunamis, and soon discovered the word of the week, meteotsunami, which was new to me. More about this word a little later. First, though, about tsunami. The word is, of course, borrowed from Japanese; its deceptively mild literal meaning is “harbor waves.” I learned from the OED that the transliterated word first appeared in an English-language text in 1897, in a collection of stories by Lafcadio Hearn titled Gleanings in Buddha-Fields: “‘Tsunami!’ shrieked the people; and then all shrieks and all sounds and all power to hear sounds were annihilated by a nameless shock … as the colossal swell smote the shore with a weight that sent a shudder through the hills.”

Word of the week: Nikkei

A massive new rooftop restaurant called Chotto Matte is coming in 2022 in San Francisco’s Union Square, in the building that used to house Macy’s men’s store. According to a September 1 story in SFist, the restaurant—the latest in a chain with origins in London—will be San Francisco’s largest, with prix-fixe menus ranging in price from $75 to $155 per person.

The part of the story that interested me, though, was the description of the menu: “the very best of Nikkei (Japanese-Peruvian) cuisine.”

This usage of Nikkei—the word is often capitalized, for reasons unknown—was new to me and, it turns out, inaccurate. (More on that in a bit.) New to me but not new-new: it’s actually been around for at least 20 years. I knew a different Nikkei: the Japanese blue-chip stock index founded in 1950, which has a distinct etymology. And neither of these Nikkeis is related etymologically to another Japanese word familiar to many of us: nisei, or “second-generation.”

The menu at Nikkei restaurant at Mandaluyong (metro Manila), Philippines, has Peruvian influences.

 

Mascots in the news

I have mixed feelings about mascots. The whole concept of adults dressing up as animals—“wearing the fur,” in the haunting phrase from Stephen King’s novel Joyland—strikes me as more than a little creepy. On the other hand, a high school classmate of mine moved to Orlando and enjoyed a satisfying career portraying either Chip or Dale (she switched between them) for the guests at Disney World, and I’m happy for her.

I’ve written about mascots when I’ve found a naming angle. That’s what happened this week: I read three fascinating stories about mascots that are also about names and naming. And fandom. And storytelling.

Luigi Francisco Seal, better known as Lou Seal, the San Francisco Giants’ mascot since 1996. Read a Q&A with him here. Image via Reddit.

June linkfest

This month’s book recommendation, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, by Kathryn Schulz, is ten years old and as timely as ever.

I wrote last month about Schulz’s excellent pieces for the New Yorker, and I’m here to tell you that Being Wrong is every bit as well researched, witty, and graceful. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that I’m fascinated by failure, but hey—everyone has a story to tell about wrongness petty or vast. Schulz’s catalog of errors includes explorers undone by mirages, buyers beset by remorse, the famous gorilla-on-the-basketball-court experiment, the impossibility of saying “I am wrong” (as opposed to “I was wrong”), and the ’Cuz It’s True Constraint (a name I love). She dips into cognitive psychology, history, philosophy, aesthetics, and religion; Newsweek called the book “intellectualism made fun!” and it is.

I listened to the audiobook, and immediately discovered that I’d been wrong for ages about the pronunciation of the author’s last name. It rhymes with pools, not cults.

You can read an excerpt from Chapter 1 here.

On the Visual Thesaurus: Generations

In my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, I look at how and why we give names to generations, from Lost to Greatest to Millennial and beyond. (There have already been proposals to name the generation being born, or coming of age, during the COVID-19 pandemic: “Generation C”—for COVID or coronavirus.)

“My Generation” (1965): “I hope I die before I get old”

 

Full access is restricted to subscribers; here’s a slightly edited excerpt:

December linkfest

It’s the end of the year as we know it, and I feel linky.

*

New York-based creative director Lukas Weber turned some familiar online abbreviations – LOL, ROFL, BTW, and more – into familiar-looking logos. (Via Brand New blog)

 

 

*

“An examination of today’s American skull logos shows a variety of businesses exhibiting crude expressions of menace, juvenile assertions of badassedness, and more than a little fascist iconography.” (Emblemetric)

*

Name in the news: Azuma

The design-critique blog Brand New last week reviewed the new look of LNER, a British railway with a nearly century-old history under various names and owners. The most recent owner was Virgin, which operated the line as Virgin Trains East Coast (VTEC); the railway is now owned by the UK’s Department of Transport, and the LNER acronym – which stands for London North East Railroad – is appearing again for the first time since 1948.

The point of the review was, of course, the new LNER logo, but what caught my eye was a paragraph about three-quarters of the way down about the newest fleet of trains. Brand New says they’re “nicknamed” Azuma, but in fact Azuma is their official name.

 

Moreover, “Azuma” isn’t entirely new; the LNER/Azuma identity designer, Brand Cooke, tells us that it had been developed by VTEC – in 2016, according to a Wikipedia page – and was already familiar to passengers.

But what does this un-British-sounding name signify?