Fritinancy

Word of the week: Stonks

Last week’s big financial story sounded like April Fool’s in January: Some mischievous day traders on the WallStreetBets subreddit noticed that GameStop, a struggling chain of brick-and-mortar video-game stores, was heavily shorted by Wall Street hedge funds—in other words, the hedgies were betting that GameStop would soon go belly-up. To stick it to the big-money investors, and maybe to make some money themselves, the Redditors began buying up undervalued GameStop stock, which drove up its price: from $4 a share a year ago to about $150 at market close on Friday, January 29. (They also bought up low-priced stock in other struggling companies: AMC movie theaters, Macys department stores, Blackberry. Yes, Blackberry is still around.)

There’s a lot more to the story than my synopsis; CNN Business reporter Allison Morrow broke it down concisely and clearly, and Bloomberg’s Matt Levine did his best to find The Meaning of It All.

Me, I’m going to stick to my own stock in trade: words.

Popcorn

How bad is it out here? On Wednesday, smoke from wildfires throughout the American West turned Bay Area skies an otherworldly shade of dark orange. The COVID pandemic is still very much with us, and most businesses and schools are at least partially closed. Bob Woodward’s new book about the Trump presidency, Rage, is predictably enraging. (Read Jennifer Szalai’s sharply written review in the New York Times.)

Things may be even worse in Florida.

So let’s take a moment for distraction. Pass the popcorn.

Pass the Popcorn, a movie-guessing game

Word of the week: Boogaloo

Why is this man wearing an aloha shirt—in Nebraska, in February—while toting a big ol’ weapon inside a government building? And what does all of that have to do with the word of the week, boogaloo?

Brett Hendrix of Omaha with an AR-15 in the #Nebraska Capitol. Hendrix said he brought the gun to demonstrate the right to keep and bear arms. He opposes a gun bill that will be heard this afternoon in the #NELeg Judiciary Committee, viewable here: https://t.co/3k43sJrjfC pic.twitter.com/834lwqOK5Z

— Fred Knapp (@fredmknapp) February 21, 2020

 

Get ready for an only-in-America explanation.

Word of the week: Macabre

The video depicts a mass shooting in a church by a lone assassin who looks very much like the grinning 45th president of the United States. It is violent, gruesome, tasteless, and obviously faked, but the adjective the New York Times editors chose for the headline above Monday’s story was none of those words. It was, instead, macabre, a word with a long, lurid, and murky history.

The organizer of the American Priority event at which the video was screened said the video was part of a “meme exhibit.”

Word of the week: Based

It’s not uncommon for words originally used as slurs to be reclaimed with pride by the targeted group. Queer was reappropriated by gay people, deplorable by Trump supporters, and Impressionist by 19th-century artists.

It’s much less common for a pejorative term to be reclaimed twice. Yet that’s what’s happened with based.

Based was in the news earlier this year after confrontations between pro- and anti-Trump groups in Berkeley, California. Kyle Chapman, a 41-year-old Trump supporter, was arrested at a rally in early March for hitting an Antifa protester over the head with a stick. Chapman’s fans dubbed him Based Stickman and began creating a legend around him. Chapman, who was released on bail, had already racked up a colorful rap sheet that included three felonies. He was arrested a second time on April 10.

Based Stickman regalia. (Image source.)

 

 

“First they came”: Evolution of a meme

In the 1950s, English translations of a statement by Martin Niemöller – a German Lutheran pastor who had at first supported Adolf Hitler’s rise to power but was later imprisoned for opposing the Nazi regime, and spent the last years of World War II in a concentration camp – began circulating in the United States. The statement (sometimes called a poem) was based on speeches Niemöller had begun giving in 1946. There are various versions, of which this one is perhaps the best known. All of the versions end in the same way: “Then they came for me / and there was no one left / to speak for me.”

“The quote was that rarest of things,” writes Megan Garber in The Atlantic: “a political argument grounded in religious tradition.”

In the last few weeks, Niemöller’s words have been revived and revised by people protesting the actions of the Trump/Bannon/Pence presidency – in particular, the ban on Muslims entering the U.S. The new slogans begin, like the original, with “First they came,” but they end in defiance.

 

“First they came for the Muslims and we said, “Not this time!”

 

Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor who was a Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2016, put it slightly differently:

The text is “infinitely malleable,” writes Garber, and, despite being 70 years old, uniquely well suited to 21st-century protest:

“First They Came” …  is particularly attuned to the needs of the modern protest: It offers wisdom about the evils of the past, in an attempt to prevent more evils of the future. To use its language is to claim an understanding of history—and an understanding, too, of how readily its mistakes can be repeated by those who fall victim to the luxuries of forgetfulness. It is #neveragain, and #neverforget, with the subjects added in. It is a poem made powerful by its pronouns: They-I-I, They-I-I, They-I-I, They-no one-me.

However!

This is the 21st century, and some of the new endings would make a starchy Lutheran pastor gasp, or faint. Here’s the one that’s gotten the most play:

 

“Not today motherfucker.” Via Amy Schumer on Instagram, among others and elsewhere.

 

I’ve also seen “Not today, asshole,” which was already a well-established meme by the time of the protests.

But there’s still another twist to the story.

Last week, at a March for Refugees in Salt Lake City, a woman named Karla held a hand-written sign that managed to be sly, tender, and subversive all at once.

 

This is Karla. I want Karla to see herself on the news. #RefugeesWelcome #SLC #LDS #protest #MarchForRefugees pic.twitter.com/lZ0U8LNgnw

— Jenn (@jlms_qkw) February 4, 2017

What a time to be alive, when even #PoliteMormonMoms are part of #TheResistance.

Alternative ads

On January 22, presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and defended a (provably false) statement by the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, about the size of the crowd at his boss’s swearing-in ceremony. Spicer wasn’t telling lies, Conway insisted; he was presenting “alternative facts.”

The phrase quickly became a social-media meme and an entry in Urban Dictionary. (Definition: “The worst of the four classifications of lies: lies, damned lies, statistics, alternative facts. Alternative facts are distinguished from the other damnable lies by the addition of gaslighting the listener.”)

And then it appeared in ads.

Nearly sweary ads: the nearly Spring edition

In an election season marked by one presidential candidate’s freewheeling use of naughty language, some observers have professed to be shocked, shocked that swearing is taking place in these hallowed halls. Well, readers of this blog and of my occasional posts at Strong Language are inured to shock: you know that swears and near-swears have been ubiquitous in the language of commerce for many years now. Here are three recent examples:

“…said no one ever”

I spotted this ad from 511.org, the Bay Area’s transit and traffic hub, last weekend on the back of a 10-Townsend Muni bus in San Francisco:

 

“Every minute in traffic is a dream come true, said no one ever.”

In the Wild: Adjective Noun Is Adjective

Here’s one of the Verizon “Better Matters” ads currently papering the Montgomery BART station in San Francisco:

 

“A better network is better.”

 

“Well, of course better is better,” you may be thinking with a twinge of annoyance. (“Some copywriter got overpaid for that?”) Ah, but there’s more to the slogan than meets the eye.