Fritinancy

Word of the week: Cage match

“Welcome to the age of the cage match,” read the headline on a July 7, 2023, story by Joseph Bernstein in the New York Times. (Free link here.) The subhed: “These days, powerful men want to beat one another. Literally.”

The main event, as Bernstein put it, is between the CEOs of Twitter and Meta. On June 21, Elon Musk (in the Twitter corner) let it be known to his 148 million Twitter followers that he was willing to fight Mark Zuckerberg—CEO of Meta, which launched Twitter rival Threads on July 5—in a “cage match.”

I’m up for a cage match if he is lol

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 21, 2023

Musk, who has been at various times in the last two years the world’s richest human, later tweeted that such a match might take place in the Las Vegas Octagon, or on second thought, in Rome’s Colosseum. (The Italian minister of culture reportedly issued an invitation.) He also proposed “a literal dick-measuring contest.” Zuckerberg, a fellow billionaire whose wealth usually places him within grasping distance of Musk, is a student of Brazilian jujitsu. Musk has admitted that he almost never works out.

 

zuck wins the cage match without ever stepping into the ring pic.twitter.com/f2nLWD80v8

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) July 10, 2023

Chalk it all up to the silly season, or to that male-primate-dominance thing, or to the “it’s just a joke lol” spirit of the age. (Neil Postman nailed it in 1985 with Amusing Ourselves to Death; Emily Nussbaum published a superb update in early 2017, “How Jokes Won the Election.”) In any event, I found myself wondering about the origin and history of cage match.

April linkfest

This month I’ve been reading Stiffed: The Roots of Modern Male Rage, by Susan Faludi. Actually, I’ve been re-reading it; the book was originally published in 1999 with the subtitle The Betrayal of the American Man and was reissued in 2019 with a new author’s foreword that adds a Trump-era, #MeToo perspective. Faludi is a superb researcher, interviewer, and writer (and believe me, that’s a tough trifecta), and Stiffed—what a perfect title—holds up shockingly well. Faludi’s mid-1990s reporting took her to Vietnam veterans, diehard Cleveland Browns fans, an Alternatives to Violence group, laid-off defense workers, and meetings of Promise Keepers, a Christian men’s association. She investigates the post-World War II redefinition of masculinity as “something to drape over the body, not draw from inner resources” and to be “displayed, not demonstrated.” I couldn’t help reflecting on Stiffed when I read a recent New York Times roundtable discussion with eight men who described themselves as politically conservative and who repeatedly expressed a wistful longing for days gone by—the same days, some 25 years ago, that Faludi wrote about: a time of layoffs and gang violence and painful domestic rifts. Moral: Beware the nostalgia trap and the Golden Age fallacy; there never were any good old days, except for the ones that seemed good because you were a little kid and didn’t know any better. (You may also be interested in the letters to the editor about that roundtable discussion. I’ve unlocked both links so that nonsubscribers can access them.)

 

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Why A-list names often aren’t A+ clients. (Nora Trice for A Hundred Monkeys)

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Attention, all you skinflints frugal people! Here are some of my Visual Thesaurus columns that are now unlocked and available to non-subscribers: All about the -core suffix; my picks for brand names of the year for 2021; the lingo of film noir. Don’t you wish you’d read them earlier? You can—a subscription is just $19.95 a year! Give a gift to yourself, or to Mom for Mother’s Day!

February linkfest

After 22,000 submissions and 60,000 votes, the Minnesota Department of Transportation announced new names for six additional snowplows, including The Big Leplowski and Betty Whiteout. (Hat tip: Lynne Murphy)

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Some commentary on “Commanders,” the recently announced name of the Washington Football Team:

• “While it’s not surprising that a team in the NFL, a league that festoons itself in camouflage every November for its ‘Salute to Service’ campaign, would adopt a military-theme name, most of the American public likely identifies more with the boots on the ground than the brass giving them their marching orders.”  (James I. Bowie for Fast Company)
• “Fans will surely get used to Coms, but for most folks now that word solely means ‘communications’ (comms is commonly used in that way, particularly in the military).” (Catchword blog)

I wrote about the controversy over the team’s original name back in 2014.

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You’re already playing Wordle, right? How about Globle and Worldle, the geography guessing games? Or the Broadway word game created by Broadway World?

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The ten worst company-naming mistakes, from “imitating successful brands and following trends” to “focusing on the specifics of today rather than on your core purpose.” (Catchword blog)

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I was once a typesetter, and I still maintain an interest in typefaces, but I’d never heard of a typeface called Jim Crow. Sarah K. Kramer writes about its history and how it came to be renamed Ruby, in honor of school-desegregation pioneer Ruby Bridges. (Believer Magazine)

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“The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of Writer’s Block:”: a paper published by the Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis in 1974. (Kottke)

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“The Biden team — and the Democratic Party — could learn a lot from what Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump accomplished with their embrace of strong branding. Plainly put, it’s time for the White House to wake up. Or we are screwed.” (Julio Vincent Gambuto for Medium)

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Here’s your semi-regular reminder that you can follow me on Twitter and on Instagram, and read more of my writing on the Visual Thesaurus, the Strong Language blog, Medium, and—just once so far, but there’s more to come!—in EatDrinkFilms.

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“People sometimes poke fun at me for my unhealthy obsession with naming things: workism, hygiene theater, everything shortage. Naming things is a gimmick, and I am not strictly pro-gimmick. But I am an extreme partisan for memorable writing. I want people to read my words, and recall them, and use them, and talk about them.”: Derek Thompson’s tips for nonfiction writers. (I wrote about workism in 2019.)

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The 57 in the Heinz’s  “57 Varieties” slogan is a completely madeupical number, but it’s been a great brand-booster for more than a century. (CNN Business, via Michael F.)

A 1902 Heinz advertisement that lists far fewer than 57 varieites.

 

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Nothing to do with names or brands, but I know I’m not the only one who was strongly affected by Jennifer Senior’s story for The Atlantic about friendship. A short excerpt:

You lose friends to marriage, to parenthood, to politics—even when you share the same politics. (Political obsessions are a big, underdiscussed friendship-ender in my view, and they seem to only deepen with age.) You lose friends to success, to failure, to flukish strokes of good or ill luck. (Envy, dear God—it’s the mother of all unspeakables in a friendship, the lulu of all shames.) These life changes and upheavals don’t just consume your friends’ time and attention. They often reveal unseemly characterological truths about the people you love most, behaviors and traits you previously hadn’t imagined possible.

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Rebranding for the 13th century: Designer Ilya Stallone imagines how famous logos would have looked in the Middle Ages.  (UX Design)

Via Ilya Stallone

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How to say “mansplain” in languages other than English? Read the whole thread!

 

poll time!

which language has the best version of the verb that means: “(of a man) explain (something) to someone, typically a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending/patronising”?

(and please do reply with other variants—these are just the four I’m familiar with)

— Dan Hicks (@profdanhicks) February 7, 2022

March linkfest

This month’s book recommendation is I Like to Watch (2019), by the Pulitzer Prize–winning television critic Emily Nussbaum. The book collects a decade’s worth of Nussbaum’s reviews and essays for the New Yorker and other publications, including one written especially for the book. Nussbaum is such a good writer that she made me care about shows that hadn’t appealed to me (I’ve watched exactly one episode each, for example, of “The Sopranos,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and “Lost”). And she made me care even more deeply about subjects I was already drawn to, like the complicated career of Joan Rivers and the way the 2016 presidential election made “jokes” unfunny. (You can read the jokes essay—one of the best pieces of writing to come out of that twisted season—here.)

 

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: Spanandry

I had not expected to be sent to the dictionary by “Schitt’s Creek,” the Canadian comedy series starring Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara as temporarily embarrassed multimillionaires Johnny and Moira Rose, who’ve been divested of all their assets except their fabulous wardrobes, their helpless adult children, and the town of the title, which Johnny had long ago bought—yes, the whole town—as a joke gift for his son. But the show, which originated on CBC, is full of surprises. (You can catch the first four seasons on Netflix; the fifth is currently airing on the Pop network.) It’s “a comedy sleeper hit” (Rolling Stone), “Canada’s kindest and wiggiest sitcom” (Vulture), and “so much more than its title” (Vox).

What's your daddy?

Polldaddy is dead; long live Crowdsignal, its successor in the platform-agnostic poll- and survey-creation business. The service, which is owned by Wordpress, was silent on the reason for the recent name change, leaving us to wonder: Was daddy too patriarchal? Was the name likely to be confused with the unrelated GoDaddy*, the internet-domain registrar?

As long as we’re asking questions, what accounts for the plethora of DADDY brand names? There are 757 DADDY registrations in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database, from FROG DADDY (“men’s and women’s wearing apparel”) and CAT DADDY (“beds for household pets”) to THE SOUP DADDY (“soups, stews”), THE CANDLE DADDY (“candles”), TACO DADDY (“catering”), UNDERWEAR DADDY (“socks”), CHOCOLATE DADDY (“sunglasses”), WOLF DADDY (“reality-based television program”), and ICE DADDY (“electric air deodorizers for refrigerators”). Nearly a third of the registrations have been filed in the last two years. What accounts for the trend?

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.

Word of the week: Reckoning

All this autumn, the stories have been tumbling out: about sexual harassment, sexual “misconduct” and, in some cases, actual rape, perpetrated by men in positions of power. Men in Hollywood (Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K., Kevin Spacey), men in the media (Mark Halperin, Leon Wieseltier, Michael Oreskes), men in tech (Uber, SoFi, Tesla), men in politics (Roy Moore, Donald Trump). The stories have been told by famous women, by almost-famous women, and by non-famous women who took to Facebook and Twitter, sometimes revealing no more than the #MeToo hashtag.

There has been shock, anger, and even backlash. Overwhelmingly, though, there has been a demand for reckoning.

 

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, a role-playing video game released in 2012.

Word of the Week: Dad Bod

Dad Bod: “A nice balance between a beer gut and working out.” – Clemson University sophomore Mackenzie Pearson, who popularized the term by writing about it in The Odyssey Online, a publication that serves college communities around the United States. Also spelled dadbod.

From Pearson’s essay, published March 31, 2015:

The dad bod is a new trend and fraternity boys everywhere seem to be rejoicing. Turns out skipping the gym for a few brews last Thursday after class turned out to be in their favor. While we all love a sculpted guy, there is just something about the dad bod that makes boys seem more human, natural, and attractive.

(Yep, I noticed “turns out/turned out.” The Odyssey Online does not appear to be edited, or proofread; “Berkeley” is misspelled on the About page.)