Fritinancy

September linkfest

I’m about halfway through Virginia Postrel’s 2020 book The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, and the only reason I haven’t finished it is because I keep stopping to take notes, usually punctuated with exclamation marks. Postrel is a journalist and independent scholar who has written very good books about style and glamour; here she elegantly blends centuries of research and her own investigations (she learned to spin thread, spent a week at a traditional Indian dyeing school, and visited weavers of Guatemalan huipiles) into a highly readable and compelling history. The glossary alone is worth the investment in the book. As Postrel writes:

We drag our heirloom metaphors—“on tenterhooks,” “towheaded,” “frazzled”—with no idea that we’re talking about fabric and fibers. We repeat threadbare clichés: “whole cloth,” “hanging by a thread,” “dyed in the wool.” We catch airline shuttles, weave through traffic, follow comment threads. We speak of life spans and spinoffs and never wonder why drawing our fibers and twirling them into thread looms so large in our language.

Listen to an interview with Postrel on The Woven Road, a podcast about fiber arts.

Word of the week: Twisties

“Having a little bit of the twisties,” said Simone Biles, the world’s best gymnast, explaining her decision July 27 to pull out of two Olympic finals in the Tokyo Olympics. For most of us non-gymnasts, twisties was a new term that prompted multiple explainers: It’s a mental block, it’s a sudden failure of muscle memory, it’s dangerous, it can even be deadly, especially when you’re attempting a skill called an Amanar, which is “a roundoff onto springboard, back handspring onto vaulting platform and into 2½ twists in a back layout salto off the table,” according to a Wikipedia entry. I get the twisties just reading those words.

Twister (1996). “Twister” has been used in the U.S. since the late 19th century to refer to a tornado or cyclone.

Word of the week: XBE

Do you own a BE?

That’s a “business enterprise,” which sounds redundant only to non-enterprise-y people. Maybe yours is a small business enterprise (SBE), which, according to a top-ranked definition, is “a privately owned corporation, partnership, or sole proprietorship that has fewer employees and less annual revenue than a corporation or regular-sized business.” (It seems that where tax policy is concerned, the definition of “small” varies by country and industry and who knows what else.)

Maybe, on the other hand, yours is a woman-owned business (WBE). Or a minority-owned business (MBE). Or a veteran-owned business (VBE). Or a “disability-owned business” (DBE). (Can a disability own a business?)

Now suppose you want to talk about BEs collectively, and you wish to exclude large, majority-, male-, able-bodied, or nonmilitary BEs. You’re searching for an umbrella term.

And now you have one: XBE.

Not the XBE cryptocurrency. Not XBE the Xbox file extension. Not XBE LLC the Chicago-based software company, which is a—nounpile alert!—”horizontal construction optimization solutions provider.” 

And no, the X isn’t the Roman numeral X or the “Rated X for adult content” X.

This is the algebraic X: an unknown or undefined variable. 

Here’s how the global design firm CannonDesign, which creates “transformational places, plans and strategies that improve life,” uses XBE on its website:

Wordy miscellany

The American Dialect Society, the OG Word of the Year anointer, usually holds its WotY contest in person, and it’s always a rollicking event. This year ADS is soliciting nominations and taking reservations online, and there’s a bonus pre-event event: On December 10 at 12 pm EST/9 am PST, famous word guy Ben Zimmer, in partnership with Washington’s new Planet Word Museum, will explain the nomination and selection processes and talk about his year’s likely candidates. Register here (free). Or you can skip directly to registration for the ADS livestream on December 17, and nominate up to five words while you’re at it.

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“What’s the word?/Thunderbird!/How’s it sold?/Good and cold.” More about the word (and the wine) at Modern Drunkard magazine.

Word of the week: Scrollytelling

There ought to be a word for “a familiar phenomenon you didn’t know had a name.” I’d been thinking about the concept for a few weeks, ever since two friends, on separate occasions, expressed puzzlement over the word paywall. Sure, they’d encountered subscriber-only websites or articles. But they hadn’t known there was a special word to describe the “pay or leave” block. (For the record, paywall has been documented in print since at least 2004, according to the OED. It was coined in imitation of firewall.)

I had my own “There’s a word for that?” moment last week when my copyeditor pal Andy Behr asked me whether I’d heard of scrollytelling, a word that had come up in a staff meeting she’d attended (virtually, of course). “I think it has something to do with those fancy online stories where nifty bells and whistles unfold as you scroll down,” Andy said. 

A facsimile of one of the Dead Sea Scrolls (408 BCE - 318 CE). Image via Facsimile Editions

Word of the week: Complexifier

There was salaciousness in “No Thank You, Mr. Pecker,” Jeff Bezos’s statement, published February 7 on Medium, addressed to the National Enquirer’s publisher; there were accusations of extortion and blackmail as well. But the word that incited the most chatter was complexifier, which Bezos used twice:

Here’s a piece of context: My ownership of the Washington Post is a complexifier for me. It’s unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy.

President Trump is one of those people, obvious by his many tweets. Also, The Post’s essential and unrelenting coverage of the murder of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi is undoubtedly unpopular in certain circles.

(Even though The Post is a complexifier for me, I do not at all regret my investment. The Post is a critical institution with a critical mission. My stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life, if I’m lucky enough to live that long, regardless of any complexities it creates for me.)

“It is a real word, just not in English,” wrote the New York Times’s Kevin Granville the following day. He added that it was a French word, which is true; but in French complexifier is a transitive verb, not a noun. It’s also true that complexifier does not (yet) appear in any standard English-language dictionaries, but read on.

November linkfest

This month we give thanks for WOTY, dictionaries, diet jargon, naming advice, and more.

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Word-of-the-year season kicks off in traditional fashion with the Oxford Dictionaries selection. This year it’s toxic, as in toxic masculinity and toxic chemical. Interestingly, toxic derives from the Greek term for word for “poisoned arrow,” but only the “arrow” part. Toxic won out over other words on the shortlist, including incel, gaslighting, big dick energy, and gammon, the last of which was a Fritinancy word of the week in May. Oxford’s word of the year is “a word of expression that is judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year, and have lasting potential as a term of cultural significance.” Read more.

 

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Big dict energy: The stupendously useful Green’s Dictionary of Slang – which was published in three volumes in the UK in 2010 and which moved online in 2016 – is now free to all users. Read more in Ben Yagoda’s post on Lingua Franca, and follow Jonathon Green on Twitter.

 

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This tweet is good, and the thread that follows (click on the date stamp) is even better.

Trump cereals:
- Total Witch Hunt
- Golden Shower Grahams
- Leerios
- ICE Krispies
- Porn Flakes
- Racism Bran
- Special KKK
- Your Votes Don’t Count Chocula
- Honeycombover

— The Volatile Mermaid (@OhNoSheTwitnt) November 15, 2018

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On the Visual Thesaurus: Speaking blockchain

Mystified by bitcoin, satoshi, token, and cryptocurrency? Follow me into the blockchain mines to discover and polish some linguistic nuggets. I also look into one of the newer applications of blockchain: Voatz, which is offering voting by smartphone app to military servicemembers from West Virginia who are stationed overseas.

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus is restricted to subscribers for three months; here’s an excerpt.

Token. This very old word is used in three novel ways in the blockchain universe. In a general sense, it describes any cryptocurrency. (Bitcoin is a token; Ethereum is a token.) It may also describe a unit of value (“I have 100 Bitcoin tokens”). And it may, according to CryptocurrencyFacts.com, refer “to the fact that the creation, transfer, and storage of cryptocurrencies use strings of data called tokens.”

Token goes back to Old English, where it was spelled tacen and meant a sign, a symbol, or evidence; it could also mean “a characteristic mark.” (During the plague years of the Middle Ages, the purplish spots on an infected person’s body were called “God’s tokens.”) The idiom “by the same token” – meaning “in the same way,” “for the same reason” – first appeared in the mid-15th century. By the late 16th century, a token was a coin-like piece of stamped metal,” a meaning we still see in “subway token.”

Token became an adjective meaning “nominal” or “symbolic” in the early 20th century; token payment (of a small or nominal sum) was first recorded around 1933. This “minimal” sense carries over to tokenism, a word that appeared in the 1960s to describe the practice or policy of making only a minimal effort toward racial or ethnic integration.

Read the rest of the column.

For more on blockchain, see my November 2017 blog post.

April linkfest

You know how Google names its Android versions after sweets like Kit Kat and Marshmallow? Well, writes Justin Pot, Microsoft should name its updates after dogs. (How to Geek)

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Speaking of Kit Kat, the brand is hugely popular in Japan, in part because “Kit Kat” translates to “You will surely win.” (Fortune; h/t MJF)

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A century ago, dozens of American girls were named Milady because of the success of a new product: the Milady Décolleté Gillette safety razor, developed to remove underarm hair. (And did you know that “underarm” was coined as a euphemism for “armpit”?) (Baby Name Wizard)

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November linkfest

Dictionary.com’s word of the year for 2017 is complicit. The selection is based on the number of online lookups, which spiked in March, when SNL featured a perfume ad parody; and in April, when Ivanka Trump said she didn’t know “what it means to be complicit.”

 

 

Collins Dictionary, based in London and Glasgow, got a head start on the WOTY competition in early November, selecting fake news over runners-up such as unicorn, echo chamber, and gig economy. (Related: My November 2016 post on fake.)