Fritinancy

New writing

If you’ve landed here via search engine, welcome! For the last six months most of my writing has been published on Substack. That’s where you’ll find:

All about Veblen goods (and Thorstein Veblen, for whom they’re named)

Discovering Asian brands at San Francisco’s liveliest shopping center

Critiques of three brand names: Nuvet, TRYP, and Navier

And lots more! Subscribe—it’s free!

I also continue to publish on Medium. Recent stories include:

The triumph of the swears: Why naughty words dominated the Word of the Year vote

It’s been 40 years since Apple’s groundbreaking “1984” ad, and I still haven’t bought a single Apple product

And because squaw is back in the news because Fresno County (California) leaders are refusing to remove the word from a local place name, here’s a gift link to my 2021 story about the valley of the S-word.

You can read all of my Medium stories with an annual membership—just $50—that also gives you access to everything else published on Medium.

Buffalo

For a couple of years I’ve been participating in a food-testing program in which I receive free, full-size “better-for-you” products in exchange for posting online reviews. Some of the products are hits: loved the Haven’s Kitchen sauces and the Cleveland Kitchen kosher dill pickles! (“Kitchen” shows up a lot in these names, possibly to evoke quaint kettles simmering on a bustling homemaker’s stove.) Others are misses: The less said about those packaged “soft-baked” cookies, and those parmesan crisps with the unpleasant aftertaste, the better.

Last week I trotted over to Whole Foods to redeem a coupon for a product from yet another kitchen: Primal Kitchen Buffalo Mayo with avocado oil.

This 17-ounce squeeze bottle was free with my coupon. Regular price: about $15. Hear my primal scream.

 

After I’d sampled it on some steamed broccoli—probably not the typical Buffalo Mayo use case, but I was working with what I had on hand—I dutifully went to the website to post my review. Everything was going fine until I reached this question:

“How was the flavor? ☐ Good balance of Buffalo and Mayo ☐ Too spicy ☐ Not spicy enough”

So, a couple of things here.

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.

July linkfest

I’ve been gradually expanding my newsletter diet to include some lighter (but still substantial) fare. A few recommendations:

The Department of Salad, by Emily Nunn, is, yes, about salad and salad lore, but is also just a very chatty, very funny from an excellent writer. If you haven’t made Spicy Cherry Salad (aka Israeli Cherry Salad), you must do so immediately, before cherry season is over for good.

How Not to F*ck Up Your Face, “philosophical and practical advice for anyone who’s ever looked into a mirror,” is written by Valerie Monroe, who was the beauty editor at O magazine for almost 16 years. She’s on an extended stay in Japan right now, and I’ve been enjoying her reporting on the local scene, from Japanese toilets to “love hotels.”

The Unpublishable, by Jessica DeFino, a freelance beauty journalist. Subtitle: “The beauty industry’s least favorite newsletter.” DeFino covers topics like “how the ‘5-minute face’ became the $5,000 face” and why the words “THAT ACTUALLY WORK” are so common in beauty headlines. (It’s because most beauty products don’t work.)

“Potent, powerful skin care that works”? Probably not. (My photo; Walgreens.)

 

All three of these newsletters are published on the Substack platform, which means you can read them for free but paid subscriptions are what keeps the updates coming. 

June linkfest

“Place names and the stories behind them define how we perceive and connect to landscape. But we live in a world populated by places named for colonizers: Libraries, streets and counties across the country bear names like Washington, Jefferson and Jackson, while ‘San’s and ‘Santa’s dot the Southwest, shadowing California’s coast in missionaries’ cloaks. Can we even see the land underneath those names, in all its complexities? And what is the impact on the mind — especially the Indigenous mind — of a lifetime spent repeating colonizers’ names, invoking their stories?” (Brian Oaster for High Country News)

Trilingual sign in southern Colorado. Photo by Orin Hargraves. See my October 2021 Visual Thesaurus column (no paywall!) for more discussion of place names.

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Word of the week: Bookchella

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, first held in 1996, returned to the USC campus last weekend after a two-year Covid hiatus. Because April 22 through 24 was also the final weekend of this year’s Coachella Music Festival, held 130 miles away in Southern California’s Colorado Desert, someone—maybe the person in charge of the Times’s Twitter feed—decided it would be cute to call the literary festival #Bookchella.

And just like that, -chella became the new -stock: a portable suffix denoting “festival.”

Except it wasn’t exactly “just like that.” And watch your back, LATFOB: the music festival in the desert has a history of refusing to give up its -chella without a legal fight.

I don’t remember anyone calling it #Bookchella in 2019, when I attended, but that already feels like 50 years ago, so who knows.

On the Visual Thesaurus: Street names

William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, introduced the numbered street grid and the custom of naming streets after “things that Spontaneously Grow in the Country.” (Which explains why there are so many Chestnut Streets in the U.S.) San Francisco has eleven sets of alphabetically named streets (Anza, Balboa, Cabrillo…). Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, cities around the world renamed streets to honor Ukrainian independence—and not just any streets, but the ones on which Russian embassies are situated.

For my April Visual Thesaurus column, “Street Smarts,” I take a tour of street-name lore like this, with a tip of the hat to Deirdre Mask’s fascinating The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power. Full access is paywalled for three months; here’s a sample:

“Modern street names do more than describe; they commemorate,” Mask observes. Mexico has more than 500 streets named for the peasant-revolution leader Emiliano Zapata; the capital has a major thoroughfare named 16 de septiembre, the date marking Mexico’s independence from Spain. After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, it took the Dutch city of Haarlem only a week to name a street after him. (It took MLK’s birthplace, Atlanta, eight years.) Today nearly 900 streets are named for King in the U.S.; still more can be found as far away as France, South Africa, and Israel.

Read the rest of the column.

On the Visual Thesaurus: Where Do Place Names Come From?

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus is dated October 14 but in fact was published today, October 21. (Long story short: staffing issues.) It’s on a subject I’ve been researching for a while: the origins of place names. Full access to the column is restricted for three months to subscribers; here’s an excerpt:

The influence of commerce on place naming goes back at least to the 19th century. Company towns, where a single business is the main or sole employer, were often named for their benefactors: Fordlandia in Brazil, Grand-Hornu in Belgium, Manville in New Jersey. In 1845, the chief engineer of the Georgia Railroad, J. Edgar Thomson, took it upon himself to rename a tiny hamlet in northern Georgia that had been known first as simply Terminus and then as Marthasville, after the daughter of an ex-governor. “Certain ungallant railroad men,” wrote George R. Stewart in Names on the Land (1945), “looked upon Marthasville as a namby-pamby name for a place which was undoubtedly to become a great center.” Thomson had a better idea: “Atlanta, the terminus of the Western & Atlantic Railroad. Atlantic, masculine; Atlanta, feminine—a coined word—and if you think it will suit, adapt it.” They did.

Read the rest of the column, which includes the origin stories of Novi, Michigan; Truth or Consequences, New Mexico; and Selmer, Tennessee, among other colorful places.

And in case you missed it, here’s a story I wrote last month for Medium about the decision to change the name of the Squaw Valley Ski Resort—and other “squaw” names on the map.

New on Medium: The valley of the S-word

It was big news in California and Nevada last week when the 72-year-old Lake Tahoe resort formerly known as the Squaw Valley Ski Resort announced its new name: Palisades Tahoe. This was no ordinary rebranding but an acknowledgment that the old name had become irreparably tainted by racist and sexist associations.

In my latest Medium story, “The Valley of the S-word,” I look at the history of squaw, from an innocuous Algonquian word for “woman” to an epithet so charged that the Palisades Tahoe website dares not write its name. Every reference is now expressed as “S*.”

Read, clap, and comment here. And consider becoming a paid Medium member to support writing like mine.

Blog extras!

1. According to H.L. Mencken’s The American Language, the hugely influential gossip columnist Walter Winchell (1897–1972) was responsible for popularizing the slangy usage of squaw to mean “wife.” Other Winchellisms include Reno-vated (divorced), profanuage (profane language), and infanticipate (to expect a baby; pregnant was for many years a taboo word in the media).

2. Squaw man first entered the American language in 1856 to denote a non-Indigenous man married to an Indigenous woman. The Squaw Man was a 1905 play written by Edwin Milton Royle that ran for 222 performances on Broadway and enjoyed four revivals between 1907 and 1921. It was adapted three times into feature movies, in 1914, 1918, and 1931. All three versions were directed by Cecil B. DeMille.

Poster art for the 1931 Squaw Man, starring Warner Baxter, Lupe Velez, Eleanor Boardman, and Charles Bickford.