Fritinancy

Word of the week: Choropleth

File this one under “Unfamiliar Words for Familiar Concepts,” “Words That Are Missing from the Big Dictionaries,” and “Fun with Greek.”

I know a few cartographic categories: topographic, thematic, political, economic, and so on. But I’d never encountered choropleth until last week, when I came across it on Twitter.

First genuinely surprising choropleth I’ve seen in a long time. pic.twitter.com/YmBT9pUMYQ

— Dr. Brian Keegan (@bkeegan) May 20, 2021

I couldn’t find choropleth in the OED, or in Merriam-Webster online, or in Wordnik. It isn’t even in my massive Webster’s Third New International (1986), which does include a related word, chorography: “the art of describing a particular region of district.”

Wikipedia to the rescue:

March linkfest

On March 13, 2020, Merriam-Webster editor Peter Sokolowski noticed that all of the dictionary’s lookups were pandemic related: coronavirus, quarantine, draconian, lockdown, cancel. For the somber one-year anniversary this month, WGBH looked at how the pandemic has transformed the English language, and whether its impact will endure:

Will people five years from now still say they are “zooming” when they conduct a video meeting online? Will slang terms like “doomscrolling” and “covidiot” make their way into wider use or be little-known relics from a brief moment in time? Will “COVID-19,” in all-caps, be the preferred styling? Or will it be overtaken by “Covid-19,” in lowercase, a styling many news organizations have started using?

(My most recent #coronacoinages post is here.)

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Silicon Valley maps

This hand-painted map from 1981 is believed to be the earliest map of Silicon Valley to highlight the region’s technology companies. It was created by Corbin Hillam, a designer and illustrator of children’s books.

 

Via the David Rumsey historical map collection

There are lots of hidden treasures in the map. (Golf! Baseball! Wineries! Skiing! Wait—skiing?) What I’m looking at, though, are the company names, which are perfectly of their era, meaning they sound like they were spit out by a room-size UNIVAC computer: Ampex, Memorex, Acuronex, Siliconix, Measurex, Litronix. (An even more famous x-suffixed company, Xerox PARC, is mysteriously missing. It was in founded in 1969 near Stanford University—PARC stands for Palo Alto Research Center—and in 1981 the company’s 8010 Star Information System became the first commercial computer that uses a mouse.) In that environment, the eponyms—Fairchild, Lockheed, Hewlett Packard before it became HP—are the standouts.

(Watch a 2019 interview with artist Corbin Hillam.) 

Over the next decade, print maps continued to be popular marketing devices for Silicon Valley tech companies—and the names on the maps continued to illustrate naming trends.

August linkfest

Caterpillar, the heavy-equipment manufacturer, has had a registered trademark for CAT since 1949. Now it’s extending CAT to a footwear line. And not just steel-toed boots, either: these oxfords are women’s street fashion. (Duets Blog)

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The method Google Maps uses to name city neighborhoods “is often mysterious. The company declined to detail how some place names came about, though some appear to have resulted from mistakes by researchers, rebrandings by real estate agents — or just outright fiction.” (New York Times)

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March linkfest

“Most verbs stay basically the same in different grammatical roles. ‘Walk’ looks like ‘walks’ and ‘walked.’ But the word ‘be’ looks nothing like the word ‘am,’ which looks nothing like the word ‘were.’” (Arika Okrent for Curiosity.)

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When I wrote about mansplain, in September 2010, the earliest citation I found for the word was from an April 2009 Urban Dictionary entry. Now lexicographers at the OED have antedated mansplaining to a May 2008 comment about the TV show “Supernatural.”Katherine Connor Martin, Oxford University Press’s head of US dictionaries, says the OED usually waits a decade or so before adding new words, but makes exceptions when a word “is deemed important enough.” (Quartz)

Mansplain magazine via Matt Round

February linkfest

The Oscar-nominated 2017 film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri has inspired at least two real-world imitations, reports AdWeek. After the shooting massacre in a Parkland, Florida, high school, the group Progressive Turnout Project placed a billboard with a gun-reform challenge outside the Janesville, Wisconsin, office of House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has accepted $61,401 in contributions from the National Rifle Association.

“17 killed in their classrooms. Still no gun reform? How come, Paul Ryan?”

 

And in London, Justice4Grenfell placed three mobile billboards outside Grenfell Towers, the site of disastrous fire last year that killed 71 people.

 

“71 dead / and still no arrests? / How come?”

 

For comparison, here are the billboards that appear in the film, which stars Frances McDormand.

 

October linkfest

Fictional African countries are in the news these days thanks to the U.S. commander-in-chief’s name-checking “Nambia” and anticipation building for the Black Panther movie. (Marvel Comics fans will recall that the Black Panther hails from the land of Wakanda.) Naturally, there’s a Wikipedia entry on fictional African countries – updated to include Nambia. And here’s Marvel’s Black Panther wiki, which includes the Wakandan map and flag.

 

 

March linkfest

Tuscan chicken, Tuscan toilets, Tuscan hummus: What exactly does Tuscan mean, anyway? (The New Yorker)

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How do nouns become verbs? Why are we OK with buttering our bread or boycotting a business, but clench our teeth at impacting and efforting? (JStor Daily) More on how branding weirds language (by me).

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And 1 extra grammatical error than Original Ready Crust too. pic.twitter.com/uAT87Bw5LV

— Jonathon Owen (@ArrantPedantry) March 14, 2016

 

 

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A 12-stanza poem composed entirely from the titles of SXSW panels.

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January Linkfest

“Picking a product name is all agony and no ecstasy,” writes Trello founder Dan Ostlund (“The Agonies of Picking a Product Name”). His detailed account of his own DIY effort is a cautionary tale, although he doesn’t explain why the company felt it necessary to jettison its perfectly good placeholder name.

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Top executives writing about verbal branding may be a trend now. Here’s Larry D. Kramer, president of the Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, California, on how his organization developed a new tagline (“What’s in a Tagline?”):

When I first proposed reexamining the tagline, I felt almost sheepish. The Hewlett Foundation pays little attention to self-promotion (that itself is a core value here), so why bother putting time and effort into something so marginal. Instead, the project proved to be both interesting and fruitful—an opportunity to reaffirm and remind ourselves about who we are and who we want to be.

You’ll have to scroll down to the tenth paragraph to learn what the new tagline is. Otherwise, nice process story.

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Ad Week rates the brand extensions of 2013: the worst (Grateful Dead skis) and the best (Google Glass).

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This parody trailer for the new Muppet movie, Muppets Most Wanted, aired during Sunday night’s live Golden Globes broadcast, and it was so smart and funny I wished I could hit the rewind button. AdFreak says the promo “does a double public service by also making fun of all the mass-media self-adulation that studios crank out during Hollywood awards season.”

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The Oxford University Press blog has a comprehensive words-of-the-year roundup that includes words of the year in Spain, Norway, France, and elsewhere. I’m fond of “plénior,” the mot nouveau pour 2014; it’s a more positive word for “senior citizen” that implies “full of life.”

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While we’re in Oxford, check out the Oxford English Dictionary birthday word generator, which scours the OED database for words’ first occurrences, 1900 through 2004, and offers up one for your birth year. If you were born in 1984, for example, your word is “shopaholic.” Happy 30th, you crazy shopper, you!

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“In books, movies, and media, the most popular title word is ‘new’,” according to Worldcat’s survey of more than 1 billion titles, summarized in The Atlantic.

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“Unneeded warnings against sentences that have nothing wrong with them are handed out by people who actually don’t know how to identify instances of what they are warning against, and the people they aim to educate or intimidate don’t know enough grammar to reject the nonsense they are offered. The blind warning the blind about a nonexistent danger.” That’s linguist Geoffrey Pullum in “Fear and Loathing of the English Passive.” It will be published later this year in the journal Language and Communication; but you can read the PDF now. Pullum cites 46 examples of tsk-tsking about “passive” constructions that aren’t passive at all. 

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Does Twitter seem like a foreign language to you? New York Magazine has a handy decoder for hatefave, Florida man, whoa, and other lingo (“The 2013 Twitter Glossary”). One of the terms, because, was chosen American Dialect Society Word of the Year for 2013; another, subtweet, was one of my 2013 words of the week.

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“Breaking it down Barney-style,” “Embrace the suck,” and 29 other phrases that only people in the military will understand, in Business Insider (hat tip: Patrick LaForge). For more on “embrace the suck,” read Ben Zimmer at the Slate language blog Lexicon Valley.

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“A mini-car named Hustler? Japan’s brand names raise eyebrows.” Via Reuters (hat tip: Rochelle Kopp of Japan Intercultural Consulting).

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U.S. readers: Have you/youse/y’all taken the Harvard Dialect Survey? Quick—take it now. Then, just for laughs, compare your results with Sarah Larson’s parody for the New Yorker’s humor blog, “What Do Y’all, Yinz, and Yix Call Stretchy Office Supplies?”

By the way, the HDS tells me I might be from Salt Lake City, a place I’ve visited exactly once and which about 700 miles distant from my true birthplace, Los Angeles.

December Linkfest

On the last linkfest of 2013, the Internet gave to me:

The ugliest Christmas sweater of them all: From REI, so it isn’t just hideous, “it’s packed with technical features and built to withstand decades of holiday wear.” Oh, it’s also fake.

 

Christmas carol grammar. On Mental Floss, Arika Okrent identifies the troll in “troll the ancient Yuletide carol” and the “yon” in “Round yon virgin.” And on Visual Thesaurus (subscription required), Erin Brenner takes on the lie/lay distinction in carols, using examples such as “Long lay the world in sin and error pining.”

Sheep counting. Stan Carey, author of the fine blog Sentence First, explains an old counting system used by shepherds in some parts of the UK. All together now: yan, tan, tethera, pethera, pimp…

A language map of Britain. From the Oxford Dictionaries blog:  “In the summer of 2012, supreme language-lovers David and Hilary Crystal set off on a tour round Britain, visiting 57 sites associated with key developments in the English language.”

New reindeer names. Laura Wattenberg of the Baby Name Wizard blog offers a 21st-century update to Dasher, Dancer, Blitzen, et al: “Now, Skylar! now, Stryker! now Ryker and Jaxon! / Now, Cabot! now, Copland! now Sawyer and Paxton!”

A new stadium name. Berkeleyside reports that the field-naming rights at UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium sold for $18 million to Kabam, a mobile-gaming company founded by three Cal grads. It’ll still be Memorial Stadium: the naming rights cover only the field.

Up-to-date military slang. The movies always get it wrong, writes Ben Brody in the Global Post: “Soldiers fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have developed an expansive new military vocabulary, taking elements from popular culture as well as the doublespeak of the military industrial complex.” It’s “bird,” not “chopper,” and an “oxygen thief” is a useless soldier. Hat tip: Ben Zimmer and Kevin Grant. (Bonus link: my 2007 post about Iraq war slang.)

Much doge. Wow. Psychologist and language columnist Jessica Love writes in The American Scholar about “the delicate dance between humor and inscrutability” in two Internet memes, doge and because + noun. If you haven’t yet become acquainted with doge, here’s a best-of-gallery. (Hat tip: Angus Grieve-Smith.) Wondering how to pronounce “doge”? Slate interviewed several experts and then let the Internet decide. “Wow. Such confused” polled a strong third.

Image via Slate.

Fifty shades of blue. Can you discern the difference between LinkedIn blue and Disqus blue? IBM blue and Evomail blue? Test your powers of perception at Name That Blue, then graduate to pinks, reds, purples, greens, and a whole lot of tech companies you’ve never heard of.

Helvetica the perfume. “We have created the ultimate Modernist perfume – a scent distilled down to only the purest and most essential elements to allow you, the content, to convey your message with the utmost clarity.” Translation: for $62, not including tax and shipping, you get distilled water in a clear bottle with a label.

“For those who dare to be the same.” Image via AdFreak.

Hideous holiday music. I note with sadness the passing in 2013 of Jim Nayder, curator of Chicago Public Radio’s Annoying Music show (frequently heard on NPR); and of Regretsy (“Where DIY Meets WTF”), the blog that compiled the very worst of Etsy craft projects. But there’s hope for both camps of mourners: the multitalented April Winchell, who ran Regretsy for four years (posting as Helen Killer), can still be found on her eponymous blog. And in an effort that would do Jim Nayder proud, she’s compiled her own catalog of wretched holiday tunes, from “Homo Christmas” (by Pansy Division) to the Bethlehem Rap, from “I Yust Go Nuts on Christmas” and “Yingle Bells” by that great, great faux-Swedish entertainer Yogi Yorgesson (né Harry Stewart) to the world’s worst version of “O Holy Night.”

And speaking of holiday traditions, watch this space for my annual Festivus Airing of Grievances, coming later this week.