Fritinancy

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: Retrofuturism

Bruce McCall, the Canadian-born author and illustrator whose work adorned 83 New Yorker covers and who was, according to Car and Driver, “one of the funniest men ever to write about cars,” died on May 6, four days shy of his 88th birthday. He had recently completed “Safe Travels,” the gouache illustration that appears on the cover of the New Yorker’s May 15 issue.

McCall’s specialty was “retrofuturism,” a word he claimed to have coined. (The OED awards that honor to a 1988 issue of Inland Architect magazine. The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael used “retro-futurist” in a 1986 review of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.) As McCall defined it, retrofuturism entails “looking back to see how yesterday viewed tomorrow”—in McCall’s case, with sly faux-nostalgia and a keen eye for hucksterism and hyperbole. His first job after dropping out of high school was at a Toronto ad agency, and he later wrote copy for a Detroit agency that represented Chevrolet; he drew on those experiences to concoct automotive inventions with fanciful names like Bulgemobile and Bongo Beatnik Ferlinghetti Turbo-Hipster. Many of McCall’s delicious, fictitious car promotions originally appeared in the National Lampoon and were later included in The Last Dream-o-Rama: The Cars Detroit Forgot to Build. McCall also wrote about his automotive career in a memoir, How Did I Get Here?, which was excerpted—with wonderful illustrations—in the New Yorker.

 

In McCall’s imagining, Bulgemobile models included the Fireblast, the Blastfire, and the Firewood (“For the man who has everything and just needs something to carry it in!”).

April linkfest

A personal plug: I have a couple of new stories on the EatDrinkFilms site about an upcoming screening, with live orchestral accompaniment, of the classic silent film Pandora’s Box (1929). Pandora’s Box was made in Germany, but it starred a young American actress, Louise Brooks, whom the film historian David Thomson has called “one of the most mysterious and potent figures in the history of the cinema.” Read my story about Pandora’s Box and the sidebar about Club Foot Orchestra, the remarkable ensemble – now celebrating its 40th anniversary – that created the score for the film and will perform it, along with students from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, on May 6 at Oakland’s Paramount Theater. The event is being presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Hope to see some of you local cinephiles there!

Louise Brooks as Lulu with Gustav Diessel as an anachronistic Jack the Ripper. Her hairstyle had lasting influence.

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I’ve been enjoying “Stiffed,” a podcast – not to be confused with Mary Roach’s book Stiff or Susan Faludi’s book Stiffed, both of which I also recommend – about the rise and fall of Viva, an erotic magazine for women that briefly flourished in the 1970s. Founder/publisher Bob Guccione died in 2010, but host Jennifer Romolini managed to interview his son, Bob Jr., as well as many of the women who worked at Viva and tried their damnedest to inject feminism into the mix. Related: my March 2022 post about “Minx,” which name-checks Viva and also rival Playgirl, for which I was a contributing writer..

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Another podcast worth your attention: A Way with Words, hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette. The April 16 episode examined, among other topics, why Southern Californians insert “the” before freeway numbers (“take the 405 to the 5”) and whether there’s such a thing as a “neutral” accent.

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“We are currently in the midst of a radical reinvention of English. Not perhaps since the 15th, 16th and early 17th centuries has the English language shifted faster, with the rapid introduction of loanwords (borrowed from other languages), neologisms, buzzwords, slang and a host of acronyms.” (Steven Mintz for Inside Higher Ed)

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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.”

 

Word of the week: Minx

The new HBO Max series “Minx” takes its name from a fictional women’s magazine whose fortunes we follow from its launch in the early 1970s through … I have no idea. (Only the first two episodes are available so far.) The basic plot: When idealistic young Vassar grad Joyce Prigger—her surname couldn’t possibly be more on-the-nose—fails to start a feminist magazine called The Matriarchy Awakens, she reluctantly teams up with a Los Angeles fetish-magazine publisher, Doug Renetti, to create America’s first erotic magazine—complete with full-frontal male nudity—for “liberated” women.* Joyce wants to keep the Matriarchy title, but her new co-publisher tells her it’s “poon poison.” “What we need,” says Doug, “is a wet-pussy title.”

Alone at her desk after hours, Joyce mocks up the Issue #1 cover with the new title: Minx. 

Screenshot of Issue #1 cover, featuring a hunky firefighter.

 

And that’s it. We never learn how Joyce got from The Matriarchy Awakens to Minx. Alone? With a team? And we learn nothing about the replacement name other than that it’s The One. Would that all naming projects progressed as swiftly and seamlessly!

In the absence of any explanation from the show’s writers, I will take on the chore of decoding “Minx” to the best of my abilities.

Name in the news: Puck

One of the newest media outlets in the US has a very old name: Puck.

The digital publication, which launched in September, is owned and operated by a group of veteran New York journalists (Julia Ioffe, Barathunde Thurston, Jon Kelly, Matt Belloni, and others) and promotes itself as “a new media company dedicated to the power corridors of our culture: Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood” and as “a platform for smart, engaging (and, yes, occasionally dishy) journalism.” Its beats are Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Washington.

A pre-launch announcement from Puck.news.

 

You can read one article without paying, but if you want more dish you’ll have to dish out some cash. “A $100 annual fee entitles subscribers to personal emails from the authors and all the newsletters, features and breaking news; moving up to $250 brings all that plus access to conference calls with the authors, Q&As with the staff and invitations to events,” Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw reported on September 13.

What about the name? From the August 5, 2021, email announcement: “The name is a nod to Shakespeare—as well as to the building where humor magazine Spy was born.”

More about Spy in a bit. First, though, here’s the Puck Building.

Word of the week: Flirt

Next Sunday, February 14, is Valentine’s Day, a date that honors the third-century Christian martyr who is the patron saint of epilepsy. In the Middle Ages, St. Valentine also became associated with courtly love; by the 18th century, February 14 had turned into the holiday amorous couples still celebrate with greeting cards, roses, candy, and expensive restaurant meals.

It’s a high-pressure occasion, which may explain why, in late January, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the reopening of limited indoor dining in New York City restaurants. “This is the city’s second flirtation with a return to dining in” since the onset of the pandemic, wrote Helen Rosner in the New Yorker on February 5, employing a noun with meaningful V-Day overtones and shadings of deception and caprice.

“Flirt candy heart” mask via Red Bubble

 

The good plaice

Lynne Murphy, a UK-based American linguist, blogged recently about “British words (most) Americans don’t know”—such as pelmet, quango, and bolshy. Many of the words were unfamiliar to me, an American who tries to keep with such things but doesn’t always succeed. (See, for example, my post about tannoy.) But one of them, plaice, not only registered but brought back some amusing memories from my freelance-journalism past.

Via Fish and Kids (Marine Stewardship Council, London)

Lynne writes that plaice “is a kind of flatfish that's common at British fish-and-chip shops. The OED says ‘European flatfish of shallow seas, Pleuronectes platessa (family Pleuronectidae)’, but some other fish (esp. outside the UK) are sometimes called plaice. The name came from French long ago. It shows up in *many* punny shop names”—Our Plaice, The Happy Plaice, Park Plaice, and so on.

My own introduction to plaice came from a different punny restaurant name—possibly the original one. In 1985, a magazine I wrote for, Tables, sent me to London to interview Bob Payton, an American ad-guy-turned restaurateur who was making waves over there with his Chicago-style pizza places, a Chicago Rib Shack, and a seafood restaurant called, yes, Payton Plaice. It was a double pun.

Peyton Place was a bestselling 1956 novel, a 1957 movie starring Lana Turner, a 1961 sequel, and a TV soap opera that aired from 1964 to 1969 and introduced 19-year-old Mia Farrow to viewing audiences (and set off a trend for “Allison”—the name of her character—as a girl’s name). “Peyton Place” became a synonym, or metonym, for “small town with a lot of hanky-panky.”

 

September linkfest

“What linguists sometimes call ‘genericisation’ of brand names has a grimmer name among marketing types: “genericide”. The Economist’s Johnson on google, photoshop, xerox, and other examples of brand genericization.

 

A trademark-defense ad from Xerox, 2011. Yes, “zipper” used to be a trademark-protected brand name. Source.

 

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Related: The lawyers at Velcro® want you to know – in full-throated song – that the competitors’ product is properly called hook and loop tape. (Thanks, David!)

Word of the week: Thirst trap

Jennifer R. Bernstein wasn’t the only one stumped by this sentence, lifted from an article by Michael Hafford in Playboy whose headline reads “F—k Your Chella Bod. I Love Mine As Is and I’m Still Going to Coachella.” 

what do words even mean anymore pic.twitter.com/vPDk5msppX

— Jennifer R Bernstein (@jenniferrenu) April 15, 2017

Context helps: The story is about preparing for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, an event that’s taken place annually since 1999 and whose first weekend ended yesterday. Still, this particular sentence would have made no sense in 1999 or in 2009, and it would have required some decoding even five years ago. Because I am so old that I pronounce “Coachella” the way most Southern Californians of my generation do, with four syllables – Kids These Days pronounce it “co-chella,”* although this audio guide gives both options – I needed to do a fair amount of research, which I will share with you now.