Fritinancy

Word of the week: Magenta

Every December since 1999, the color mavens at Pantone have announced a color of the year for the upcoming twelve-month period. The Pantone color for 2023, revealed earlier this month, is Viva Magenta, a color that

balances boldness with a feeling of fun. This dynamic mix exudes rebellion, but not at the expense of softness. It embodies an expression of fierce grace, inspiring us to show up with confidence and humanity. The digital space has accelerated globalization, and as a result, we are more deeply connected to each other than ever before. We can never fully understand what lies beneath the surface of the friends and strangers we meet, but we can always work to deepen our empathy. The Color of the Year 2023 speaks to our desire to take on new challenges and try the unconventional while meeting others with compassion.

That’s a lot of words for a color that looks like this.

 

Unless it looks like this.

Image via Pantone.com

Red? Purple? It’s a mystery.

 

Women’s high-top sneaker in Viva Magenta from Cariuma.

Why are we still calling it "Blackwater"?

My latest story for Medium is about a zombie brand name: Blackwater.

Original Blackwater logo

 

The private military/security company, which was founded in 1996, jettisoned the Blackwater name in 2009 and has undergone two name changes and a merger in the dozen years since. But to the general public, and even to the media, it’s still Blackwater. Why?

Read “The Undead Brand Name” and follow me on Medium for more stories like this one (and also unlike this one!).

June linkfest

This month’s book recommendation, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, by Kathryn Schulz, is ten years old and as timely as ever.

I wrote last month about Schulz’s excellent pieces for the New Yorker, and I’m here to tell you that Being Wrong is every bit as well researched, witty, and graceful. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that I’m fascinated by failure, but hey—everyone has a story to tell about wrongness petty or vast. Schulz’s catalog of errors includes explorers undone by mirages, buyers beset by remorse, the famous gorilla-on-the-basketball-court experiment, the impossibility of saying “I am wrong” (as opposed to “I was wrong”), and the ’Cuz It’s True Constraint (a name I love). She dips into cognitive psychology, history, philosophy, aesthetics, and religion; Newsweek called the book “intellectualism made fun!” and it is.

I listened to the audiobook, and immediately discovered that I’d been wrong for ages about the pronunciation of the author’s last name. It rhymes with pools, not cults.

You can read an excerpt from Chapter 1 here.

April linkfest

This month’s book recommendation is The Plague and I, published by Betty MacDonald in 1948. The book is a lightly fictionalized account of MacDonald’s nine-month stay in a Seattle tuberculosis sanatorium in the late 1930s, when TB was known as “the white plague”; there were no effective vaccines; and treatment entailed rigorous bedrest, hearty meals, and an occasional session of artificial pneumothorax, in which gas was injected into the pleural cavity. Survival was far from certain and recovery times were long: many of MacDonald’s fellow inpatients remained at the sanatorium for years.

 

Sounds grim, right? Here’s the thing: it’s a hoot. MacDonald is sadly overlooked now—she died in 1958—but she was one of the foremost comic writers of her era, and The Plague and I is sharply observed, un-self-pitying, and downright chipper. (One of the chapters is titled “I’m Cold and So Is the Attitude of the Staff.”) I guarantee it will make you feel much more upbeat about our own current predicament.

February linkfest

This month’s book recommendation is Uncanny Valley: A Memoir, by Anna Wiener, who, as a twenty-something in 2012, left a low-paying publishing job in New York to work in the world of San Francisco tech startups. Until she moved across the country, she writes, it had never occurred to her “that I might someday become one of the people behind the internet, because I had never considered that there were people behind the internet at all.”She goes to work for company founders even younger than she is, managing millions of dollars of seed money and wearing “startup twinsets, branded hoodies unzipped to reveal T-shirts with the same logo.” Wiener’s voice is original and unforgettable: a mixture of skepticism and gullibility, of clarity and befuddlement. San Francisco is “an underdog city struggling to absorb an influx of alphas.” (Perfect.) San Franciscans, “living in neighborhoods where every other storefront had a pun in its name, were corny.” (True, alas.) Notably, Wiener declines to identify by name any of the companies she works for or near: they are, instead, “the social network everybody hated,” “an app for coupon-clipping,” “the online superstore” with the “chelonian” founder (a word I had to look up).

For more on the “uncanny valley” of the title—in tech, it refers to the dropoff in humans’ acceptance of robots when those creations’ appearance becomes eerily lifelike; in Wiener’s book, it also refers to Silicon Valley—see my December 2009 post.

Three acronyms and an ism

The acronyms aren’t new, just new to me – as in last-two-weeks new. The ism appears to be a recent (and helpful) coinage.  

Word of the week: Blue Falcon

You’ll find the story behind this week’s word, blue falcon, over at Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing. What does blue falcon have to do with swearing? A couple of hints: It’s a bit of coded military jargon that became a Twitter hashtag after an emotional speech delivered by White House Chief of Staff (and retired Marine general) John Kelly.  

 

 

 

Read about blue falcon.

August Linkfest

Media holding company Gannett’s new job descriptions for “the newsroom of the future” (“Content Coach,” “Engagement Editor,” et al.) are pretty close to self-parody. But that didn’t stop some anonymous wag—obviously very close to the machine—from creating a parody. Apply now to be a Bullshit Artist 1, Reduction in Force Synergy Coach, and other dream jobs.  (Via Romenesko.)

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“Avoid using areas or volumes when representing quantities” and other rules for data visualization, published by the U.S. Bureau of the Census … in 1915. (Via Ben Schmidt’s Sapping Attention blog.)

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Weird Al’s “Word Crimes” parody song got all the ink, but I got a bigger kick out of another of his new songs, “Mission Statement,” which would be a spoof of corporate buzzwords if the subject weren’t already spoofproof. Watch the video and read about how TruScribe, a “video-scribing” company in Wisconsin, created the catchy and effective graphics. I learned about TruScribe via a Wall Street Journal blog post about the Yankovic video. One commenter wrote: “The beautiful part of this is that I can watch it at work with my headphones on and to anyone passing by it looks like I’m just watching some motivational business video.”

 

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Remember the Toyota “Swagger Wagon” ads? (Actually, there’s a new one.) “White-guy rapvertising is never going out of style,” declares AdFreak. Proof: this new video for webinar platform On24. Sample lyric: “Just look at your core competencies and extend your brand/Drive your penetration, and then you’ll be the man.”

 

“Get your webinar on.” 

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“The tale of ‘scofflaw,’ born in Boston at a time when Prohibitionists were staging mock funerals of ‘John Barleycorn’ and fleets of Coast Guard rum-chasers patrolled Boston Harbor, shows that sometimes real words can actually be invented on demand. They just don’t always behave exactly the way their engineers hope they will.” (Boston Globe, via @ammonshea.) I wrote about “scofflaw” in a 2011 blog post. More on the language of Prohibition in this 2010 post.

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Speaking of (and to) Ammon Shea, the Oxford University Press had 10 questions for the author of Bad English and Reading the OED.

 

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How advertisers used World War 1 to sell, sell, sell. (The Atlantic.)

“The cussed Huns have got my gramophone.” Via The Atlantic.

 

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XBMC, makers of media-center software—the initialism originally stood for Xbox Media Center—recently changed its name to Kodi. From legal and branding perspectives, it was a smart move. But many customers took to the comments section of the company’s blog to protest vehemently.

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Jewelry designer Wendy Brandes made a necklace. Literally.

“If you buy this, I guarantee you will literally enjoy the shit out of it.” – Wendy Brandes

 

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Color, value, and the evolution of logos. (The Trademark Blog.)

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How some of the world’s most famous restaurants—including Le Bernardin, Per Se, and Chez Panisse—got their names. (Via @socialdiner.)

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Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky—whose new book, The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, comes out in September—takes a close look at the words we use for tea: “These tea words (‘tea’, ‘cha’, ‘chai’, ‘matcha’, ‘laphet’) are players in an unusual linguistic story, in which two differing pronunciations of a word reflect the two ways that Europe and Asia have traded over the last 500 years: by land or by sea.”

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Anne Curzan on how Iron Dome, the Israeli anti-missile system, got its name:

[T]he project leader’s initial idea was straightforward: the Anti-Qassam, referring to the type of missiles most commonly fired by Hamas. When that was rejected as “problematic,” he and his wife came up with Golden Dome, an image that brings to mind the palaces of Kubla Khan or perhaps (closer to home) the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. That name was rejected as being too ostentatious, so under the pressure of time, gold was reduced to a lesser metal, and Iron Dome was born.

Um-productive

Two brand names and a few branching digressions.

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Umcka ColdCare.

 

Umcka products are derived from the medicinal plant Pelargonium sidoides, a type of geranium native to southern Africa. The brand name comes from a Zulu word for the plant, umckaloabo, which translates to “heavy cough.” According to the Umcka website:

In 1897, Englishman Charles Stevens went to South Africa hoping to cure himself of a respiratory illness.  While there, an African tribal healer gave him a remedy made from Pelargonium sidoides roots (a plant native to the coastal regions of South Africa).  Fully recovered, Stevens brought the remedy back to England where it became popular as Stevens’ Consumption Cure.

After excursions through Switzerland and homeopathy, Umcka came to American drugstore shelves as a sub-brand of Nature’s Way.

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Umpqua Bank (“The World’s Greatest Bank”).

 

Today the bank has branches along the Pacific coast between San Francisco and Seattle.  Umpqua Bank was founded (as South Umpqua State Bank) in 1953 in Centerville, Oregon. According to a Wikipedia entry, the bank’s founders were “a group of people working in the timber-logging business who wanted to create a means for their loggers to cash their payroll checks.” Earlier this week, the bank’s parent company, Umpqua Holdings Corporation, approved a merger with Sterling Financial Corporation of Spokane.

Umpqua is the Native name for several tribes that live in present-day south-central Oregon; the word has been variously translated as “thundering waters,” “across the waters,” and “satisfied.” It’s an unusual name for a bank—and Umpqua presents itself as an out-of-the-ordinary financial institution—but not an unusual word in its place of origin: southern Oregon is home to the Umpqua River, the Umpqua National Forest, Umpqua Community College, Umpqua Dairy, and Umpqua Transit (“UTrans”). The umpqua.com domain is owned by Umpqua Feather Merchants, which makes fly-fishing ties.

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Umpty: a word meaning “of an indefinite number.” The OED calls it “a fanciful verbal representation of the dash (—) in Morse code,” and dates it back to 1905. But a World Wide Words entry (under “Weird Words”) found much earlier citations “in which it was a nonsense syllable in poetry, for example as umpty-tumpty-tiddle-dee.” The earliest WWW citation is from 1884. WWW also mentions a more recent British expression, “give it some umpty,” (“an encouragement to effort”).

Iddy-umpty is early 20th-century military slang for Morse code. (Likewise, “umpteen” is believed to have originated among soldiers in World War I.) I found this in a post on the Virtual Linguist blog:

Troops were apparently taught to recognise whether a dot or a dash was being transmitted by the sound of the machine. A dot made an 'iddy' sound and a dash sounded like 'umpty'.

 

Iddy Umpty card game from 1920: “Quickly teaches you to read Morse.” Source: Board Game Geek.

 

A.A. Milne (yes, the author of Winnie-the-Pooh) used “umpty-iddy-umpty” and its variations in a passage about Morse code in his 1921 short story “The Red House Murder,” published in Everybody’s Magazine.

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Um… by Michael Erard (2007).

Um…: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean

From the website:

Covering a vast array of verbal blunders, from Spoonerisms to malapropisms to “uh” and “um,” linguist and author Erard creates a unique narrative blend of science, history, pop culture, and politics that gets at what really matter when we speak — and when we listen.

Word of the Week: Trebuchet

Trebuchet: A stone-throwing engine of war. The word was imported from French into English in the 13th century, when the device was invented; the French verb trabucher meant “to overturn, overthrow,” from tra- (from Latin trans-, here expressing “displacement”) and Old French buc “trunk, bulk.” (Source: Online Etymology Dictionary.)

Drawing from Real World Physics Problems, which notes that “the payload could be thrown a far distance and do considerable damage, either by smashing down walls or striking the enemy while inside their stronghold.”

Trebuchets have been in the news lately because of their role in the antigovernment protests that have been taking place in Ukraine since November 2013. “The Battle for Ukraine Is Being Fought Using Ancient Military Tactics” read a January 22 headline in Business Insider. While protesters favoring European integration built a trebuchet in the capital city of Kiev (or Kyiv), government forces adopted an ancient Roman shielding tactic called the testudo, Latin for “tortoise.”

Photo: Reuters/Maks Levin. More photos at The Atlantic and Slate.

 

What’s the difference, you ask, between a trebuchet and a catapult? I looked it up for you. According to Jarod’s Forge, a history blog written by museum curator Jarod Kearny, a catapult is “any device that throws an object, although it commonly refers to the medieval siege weapon”; a catapult uses tension for its throwing force. Trebuchets “are a TYPE of catapult, using gravity (with a counterweight) or traction (men pulling down), to propel the arm and often employing a sling at the end of the arm for greater distance.”

The distinction is sometimes overlooked in coverage of the Ukrainian conflict. RT.com (formerly known as Russia Today) called the machine a catapult:

Puzzled protesters and journalists watched Monday as a group of masked people studied some plans, standing next to a pile of long wooden poles they had carried to a central Kiev area earlier.
It soon turned out the protesters were building a catapult – or, as some argued, a trebuchet.

And there was this:

RT @Walldo: naturally the homemade catapult used by protesters in Ukraine has its own Twitter account -> @ukr_catapult

— Robert Loerzel (@robertloerzel) January 23, 2014

Other words that frequently appear in coverage of the protests include Maidan (square, plaza), a word with cognates in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu; Berkut (“golden eagle”), the riot police; and Moskal (a derogatory term for a resident of Moscow). For more, see this Radio Free Europe glossary.

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Previous Fritinancy coverage of antique weapons: Bayonets.