Fritinancy

Ro, Ro, Ro

Ads for erectile-dysfunction drugs are so ubiquitous on cable-news channels that I rarely give them more than a glance. But a few months ago I saw an ad for an ED service whose name caught my attention: Roman. Nice, I thought: A classical allusion with man embedded in the name.

I no longer remember exactly which ad I saw, but this long-form spot should give you the idea of Roman’s cocky positioning. Yes, I said cocky.

 

I was interested enough to do some research. And then I was even more interested.

Word of the week: Leech

I’m reading Rose George’s new book, Nine Pints: A Journey through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood, which is written in an appealingly  conversational style and which pumps out a steady flow of startling and irresistible stories about transfusion, menstruation, hemophilia, and blood-borne disease. I’m an every-eight-weeks blood donor myself (O-positive, CMV-negative), so I was riveted by George’s accounts of whole-blood and plasma donation. For sheer eye-widening, jaw-dropping amazingness, though, it’s hard to top Chapter 2: “That Most Singular and Valuable Reptile,” which is all about leeches.

Name in the news: Haven

A nonprofit company founded in January 2018 by three billionaire business titans – Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase) – and headed by a non-billionaire-but-not-doing-badly-at-all celebrity doctor, Atul Gawande, yesterday announced its name: Haven.

Connecting the dots?

 

Haven is being called a healthcare venture, but it’s not a care provider. It’s neither a hospital nor a clinic. Nor is it an insurance company. For now, it will be headquartered in Boston (a New York office is in the works) and serve only the employees of the three founders’ companies.

So what is it?

Here’s what Gawande, a practicing surgeon who is also the author of Being Mortal and a regular New Yorker contributor, says on the Haven website:

Word of the week: Measles

On Friday, August 17, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported that a case of measles had been confirmed in “a non-resident tourist” who had visited six Santa Monica businesses within a three-day period earlier in the month. No details about the tourist were provided, but at least two of the restaurants he or she visited – Ivy’s at the Beach and Chez Jay – are considered “celebrity hangouts,” with pricey menus that have no options for children. That could suggest that the person is an adult, even though measles – a highly contagious viral infection spread by coughing or sneezing – is commonly considered a disease of childhood.

That is, it used to be a common disease of childhood, one that afflicted hundreds of thousands of children in the United States every year, and killed as many as 30 percent of them, usually from complications such as measles pneumonia. Measles can also cause blindness, mental retardation, and – in children born to mothers who contract the disease – permanent deafness. Overall, the risks are much greater for infected adults than for children, but it’s no picnic for kids, either. (Keep reading.)

Word of the week: Soy boy

Settle in with a nice tofu sandwich and some edamame as I tell you about soy boy and how it became the insult of choice among alt-right troglodytes – the sort of chuckleheads who call Trump “god emperor.” 

 

Via Reddit/The_Donald. Note pussy hat.

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: Spoonie

I’ve followed Tinu Abayomi-Paul on Twitter for years, but I only recently noticed that her profile included the hashtag #spoonie, a term unfamiliar to me.

 

 

So I did a little research.

World’s greatest derp

Federal-level idiocy was on full, florid display this week. On Sunday, the current occupant of the White House and Mar-a-Lago took to Twitter to share his innermost thoughts, and got so carried away he misspelled the word principles.

It’s probably not a word he’s had much occasion to use.

Words of the year 2016: Fritinancy edition

This post marks my eighth annual foray into word-of-the-year (WOTY) speculation. My first such summing-up, in 2009, included birther, Tea Party, and FAIL, among other lexical units. How things have changed. Or not.

As in the past, my choices for 2016 follow the guidelines of the American Dialect Society, which will choose its own WOTYs on January 6, 2017, at its annual meeting in Austin, Texas. (If you happen to be in the vicinity, the vote is open to the public, and it’s hella fun.) There are a few new ADS categories this year – political word of the year, digital (tech-related) word of the year, slang word of the year, WTF word of the year – and there’s always the possibility of even more categories being nominated from the floor. (For my own list, I’ve created three new categories: Obscenity of the Year, Import of the Year, and Spoonerism of the Year.) Nominated words don’t have to be brand new, but they do need to “show widespread usage by a large number of people in a variety of contexts and situations, and which reflect important events, people, places, ideas, or preoccupations of English-speakers in North America in 2016.”

The Fritinancy list, in alphabetical order:

Word of the week: Derangement syndrome

Tomorrow is Election Day in the United States, the culmination of an unprecedentedly nerve-combusting season of political warfare. It’s been a campaign for which derangement – a mental disturbance; a disruption of the regular order – would seem to have been invented. It would even seem to merit the coining of derangement syndrome: an extreme response, often untethered from empirical reality, to a particular candidate or elected official.

There’s plenty of evidence. 

The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics, by Maureen Dowd (2016)