Fritinancy

Book review: “Writing with Style”

It’s Independence Day here in the US, and how better to celebrate our divorce from the colonizers than with a book written by an American expatriate for reporters at a British publication?

 

Word of the week: Internym

I figured I was pretty well acquainted with the -nym family, from acronym and backronym to mononym and toponym. (If you need a refresher, see Mike Pope’s 2013 column for the Visual Thesaurus, “What’s in a -Nym?”) But last Friday I stumbled upon a new (well, new-to-me) -nym that fills a gap I hadn’t known existed.

Word of the week: Hallucination

Do chatbots dream of human sweethearts?

That’s one of the many questions a reader asks herself after scrolling through the transcript of a conversation—there’s no other word for it—between a New York Times technology columnist and the new release of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. New Bing differs from Old Bing in that it’s powered by artificial intelligence software from OpenAI, the same folks who brought us ChatGPT. And therein lies all the difference.

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Book Review: "The People's Tongue"

My family didn’t own many books when I was growing up. That was what public libraries were for, declared my father, who laid down the law in such matters. Why spend money on a book you’d read only once?

He made one big exception: Somehow, he’d learned that the Los Angeles public school system gave away books that were no longer fit for classroom circulation, and he’d go to those giveaways and come home with an armful of free, slightly battered textbooks.

I still own, and cherish, one of the books he salvaged: Adventures in American Literature, published by Harcourt, Brace & Company.*

It was intended for long-ago high school English classes, but I was probably only 10 or so when I started picking my way through it, oblivious to its out-of-date-ness, choosing whatever seemed exotic (“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” by the Puritan cleric Jonathan Edwards, filled me with delicious terror, as did Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game”—the very first selection in the book!) or accessible (“Sixteen,” by Maureen Daly, a huge success when it was originally published in 1938) or funny (“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” “Gleanings from the Devil’s Dictionary”). The book even includes the complete text of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which I read over and over, imagining how the characters looked and sounded. The questions and prompts and the end of each entry nudged me toward deeper appreciation, but mostly I read for simple pleasure. The book was aptly titled: American literature was indeed a terrific adventure.

Now a new book, The People’s Tongue: Americans and the English Language, brings a similar sense of discovery and delight to new generations of readers.

 

Disclaimer: I received a review copy of The People’s Tongue from the publisher, Restless Books (nice name!).

A newish sense of “cover”

The verb to cover has lots of meanings: to lay something over something else, to apply a surface layer onto something, to make a new recording of another performer’s song, to protect, to match in value, even to copulate (said of horses, usually). Over the last five years I’ve noticed an emerging sense: “to appear on the cover of a magazine.”

So far, I’ve seen cover in this sense only in fashion and celebrity journalism, with veteran style bloggers Tom and Lorenzo in the vanguard.

Here’s an example from November 2017: “Ruth Negga covers @BazaarUK”

Ruth Negga covers @BazaarUK https://t.co/VV0vdifp5Y pic.twitter.com/PXepwF51r3

— Tom and Lorenzo (@tomandlorenzo) November 3, 2017

And here’s an example from this week from Elle magazine: “Gisele Bündchen covers ELLE’s October 2022 issue.”

 

July linkfest

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. 

On the Visual Thesaurus: Understanding 'Maven'

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.

Read the rest of the column.

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.” 

Word of the week: Tiktaalik

Few science stories have delighted me as much as the one that appeared in the New York Times on April 29 (online) and April 30 (print). The story, by Sabrina Imbler, is about an extinct sea creature that may be a missing link between fish and four-legged mammals—a fishapod connection to our very own species.

Tiktaalik roseae illustration by Zina Deretsky for the National Science Foundation, 2006.

 

The news hook isn’t the creature’s discovery; that happened in 2004, in the Nunavut Territory in the Arctic. Nor is it the animal’s name, Tiktaalik (tic-TAH-lick), which departs from traditional scientific naming conventions—Latinate, possibly honoring a scientist—in that it’s an Inuktitut word that means “large freshwater fish that lives in the shallows.” (The full name, Tiktaalik roseae, does have a Latin component: The second element “cryptically honors an anonymous donor”—someone named Rose, maybe?—according to a Wikipedia entry.) A council of Inuit tribal elders worked with a team of paleontologists to develop the name.*

The Carpetbagger vs. The Projectionist

The Academy Award nominations were announced this week, which gives me an excuse to finally write about something I’ve been thinking about for a while: the name of the New York Times awards-season column.

The column was launched as a blog in 2005; its original author was David Carr, and its original name was The Carpetbagger. Its purpose was (and remains) “to cover the film world and give viewers a peek into how celebrity news is made, on and off the red carpet,” as a Times press release put it. Carr was replaced in 2009 by Melena Ryzik, in 2014 by Cara Buckley, and in 2018 by Kyle Buchanan, who remains the column’s lead writer. (Carr died in 2015. The column now appears in print as well as online.)

That Carpetbagger title always puzzled and troubled me, because the word has such a fraught history. (More about that in a minute.) So it was a relief to learn, in November 2020, that the column was getting a new name. And it was a surprise to learn, at last, the significance of the original title. (I’d missed the explanation when it was originally published.)

January linkfest

This month I listened to At the Strangers’ Gate (2017) written and narrated by Adam Gopnik, one of my favorite New Yorker writers. (His latest New Yorker essay is about two new biographies of Buster Keaton, one of which—Camera Man, by Dana Stevens—I’ve just begun to read.)

At the Strangers’ Gate covers the 1980s, when Gopnik and his new bride arrived in Manhattan from Montreal and he began his writing career. It’s a decade I’ve been thinking about a lot lately (AIDS, Reagan, Madonna, Bonfire of the Vanities), and Gopnik evokes it with keen observations, especially about the art and literary scenes. You can skip directly to Chapter 9, “Writing,” for Gopnik’s insights into the differences, and occasional overlaps, between those scenes. Here he is on art, writing, and money:

Art world paydays made book world paydays look like no paydays at all. Visual artists hunted for golden tickets, and when they got one, they were set. Good pictures in the art market—a market that has never stopped booming in all the years since—buy estates in the Hamptons. Even large royalties in the literary world (the handful—no, fingerful—of truly “commercial” writers aside) bought small apartments in the upper reaches of West End Avenue, and then in Park Slope—no small or bad thing, but not the same thing.

Gopnik is the rare author who’s also an outstanding narrator; his slightly Canadian inflections and wry line readings make this audiobook a joy. But it’s also a book I want to own in print, on paper, between covers.