Fritinancy

New from me on Medium: From Burma-Shave to Burma-Gram

It’s been 60 years since Burma-Shave rhyming ads last entertained and instructed drivers on U.S. highways, but their spirit lives on in a quirky Instagram account I discovered a couple of years ago. In my latest story for Medium, I write about Burma-Gram, which updates the “verse by the side of the road” concept with clever online messages for 21st-century readers.

A famous Burma-Shave rhyming ad: “Within this vale / of toil / and sin / your head grows bald / but not your chin/ Burma-Shave.” (Via Legends of America)

 

A recent Burma-Gram:

 

Read “Burma-Shave Is Dead. Long Live Burma-Shave,” and be sure to scroll down to the end, where I attempt my own Burma-style rhyme. Don’t forget to clap (up to 50 times per story!), and if you feel moved to join Medium, here’s my referral link.

*

Blog bonus #1: A 2012 article in Print magazine, “The motion-graphic ads of Burma-Shave, 1927-1963” (the URL calls it “morbid roadside ad poetry”).

Blog bonus #2: Post–Burma-Shave, but long before Burma-Gram, U.S. political campaigns borrowed the roadside-verse format for their own ends. In 2008, Poetry & Popular Culture blogger Mike Chasar wrote about some of those efforts in “Burma-Shave Politics.” 

Book Review: "The People's Tongue"

My family didn’t own many books when I was growing up. That was what public libraries were for, declared my father, who laid down the law in such matters. Why spend money on a book you’d read only once?

He made one big exception: Somehow, he’d learned that the Los Angeles public school system gave away books that were no longer fit for classroom circulation, and he’d go to those giveaways and come home with an armful of free, slightly battered textbooks.

I still own, and cherish, one of the books he salvaged: Adventures in American Literature, published by Harcourt, Brace & Company.*

It was intended for long-ago high school English classes, but I was probably only 10 or so when I started picking my way through it, oblivious to its out-of-date-ness, choosing whatever seemed exotic (“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” by the Puritan cleric Jonathan Edwards, filled me with delicious terror, as did Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game”—the very first selection in the book!) or accessible (“Sixteen,” by Maureen Daly, a huge success when it was originally published in 1938) or funny (“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” “Gleanings from the Devil’s Dictionary”). The book even includes the complete text of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which I read over and over, imagining how the characters looked and sounded. The questions and prompts and the end of each entry nudged me toward deeper appreciation, but mostly I read for simple pleasure. The book was aptly titled: American literature was indeed a terrific adventure.

Now a new book, The People’s Tongue: Americans and the English Language, brings a similar sense of discovery and delight to new generations of readers.

 

Disclaimer: I received a review copy of The People’s Tongue from the publisher, Restless Books (nice name!).

Word of the week: Bard

Google has a new AI-assisted chatbot, and—surprise!—it isn’t called GoogleAI. It’s called Bard, which is an excellent name and not, I’m told on good authority, an acronym, a backronym, or an eponym.

Image via Tom’s Guide

 

Too bad about Bard’s snafu* last week when it attempted to answer a question about NASA’s** James Webb Space Telescope. But I’m here to praise Bard, not to bury it in smarty-pants ridicule.

The Bard of Avon, aka William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon

 

June linkfest

“Controversial terms, from ‘abortion’ to ‘Zionism,’ tend to shut down dialog because they mean different things to different people.” The AllSides Red Blue Dictionary defines these hot-button terms across the political spectrum: “Until we fully understand what a term means to someone else, we don't know the issue and can't effectively communicate.”

*

I’m enjoying (and learning from) the short essays Susan Orlean publishes on Medium, especially her stories about  the writing craft. Here she is on beginnings and on endings.

*

After a four-month hiatus I’m back on Medium myself with some reflections on fifteen years of blogging. (And here’s your annoying-but-obligatory reminder that Medium contributors earn money from their stories only if enough people “clap” for them, and that up to 50 claps per story are allowable, nay, encouraged.)

Word of the week: Fig

This post was going to be a short riff on a line in that Inauguration poem by Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman—the line about the vine and the fig tree, which got me thinking about figs. Mmmm, figs. But one fig led to another, and next thing you know I was way down a figgy rabbit hole from which there was no escape. Go figure.

Word of the week: Respair

Here’s an old word that feels new and apt at the end of this sad, stalled year.

Respair has just a single citation in the OED, which calls it “obsolete” and “rare.” The word appears to have been coined by Andrew of Wyntoun, a Scottish poet and chronicler who lived between c. 1350 and c. 1423. It’s coined from Latin roots meaning “again” and “hope.”

 

 

You’d think that such an interesting and useful word would have a long and vigorous life in the language. But instead respair languished—at least until March 2017, when Lane Greene, who writes The Economist’s language column as “Johnson,” included it in an essay about “why words die”:

The OED has “respair”, both as a noun and verb, meaning the return of hope after a period of despair—an obvious etymological kissing-cousin. But the great dictionary’s only citation for this dates back to 1425. For whatever reason, “respair” is a word that English-speakers decided they could happily live without.

Could happily live without until 2020, that is.

*

Word of the week: Mere

The first word I remember not recognizing, when I began reading on my own at about age 5, was mere. I no longer remember the title of the book, but I remember that the phrase that gave me pause was a mere mouse. I wasn’t yet in the habit of looking up words in dictionaries, so I asked my mother what it meant. She said “small,” which shut me up for the time being even though, I would later learn, it wasn’t quite right.

It’s a curious word, mere. It is not, to get this out of the way, related to motherly French mère. The OED lists multiple English definitions, including “a lake or pond” (often seen in place names such as Windermere or Woodmere) and “a siren or mermaid” (truncated from mermin, in which mer comes not from Latinate sources meaning “sea” but from Old English menon, meaning “female servant”). There’s a transitive verb to mere, meaning “to mark out” (from Old English mǣre, a boundary or border). And there are multiple adjective senses. One, whose meaning is now obsolete, meant “renowned, famous, illustrious, brilliant”; its cognates show up as parts of many European personal names, including Old High German Sigimār and Russian Vladimir. At one time mere also meant “pure,” “undiluted,” “perfect,” or “downright.”

The mere in C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (1952) is to be interpreted as “absolute” or “pure,” according to scholars who know more about this subject than I pretend to. Lewis borrowed “mere Christianity” from a 17th-century Puritan, Richard Baxter.

Word of the week: Cow

Last week’s headlines were full of bovine references. I’m not talking about the usual bull: This was all about a fake cow with hundreds of thousands of (presumably) real Twitter followers—a cowfluencer, you might say—that’s being sued by a sitting U.S. congressman.

The cow in question (1,200 followers on March 18, 634,000 followers on March 24):

 

The congressman (404,000 followers):

 

Yes, Devin Nunes of California’s Central Valley, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, is suing Twitter over a parody account that tweets hashtags like #TheMooovement and #ProtectTheHerd and mocks the “udderly worthless” congressman, who owns a dairy farm not in his home county, as he often boasts, but in far-off Iowa. Nunes is also suing a parody account called Devin Nunes’ Mom and a couple of non-anonymous accounts, all of which he claims “repeatedly tweeted and retweeted abusive and hateful content” about him. He’s asking for $250 million in compensatory damages and $350,000 in punitive damages. Because Nunes is a public figure, the suits have little chance of succeeding, but they’ll keep a herd of lawyers busy for a while.

Headline writers had a field day—or was it a pasture day?—with cow-related headlines: “How Now, Defamatory Cow?”, “Jimmy Kimmel Milks Devin Nunes’ Cow for Late-Night Comedy,” “Devin Nunes Is Having a Cow.” (More about “how now” and “have a cow” in a bit.) At a “release the Trump-Russia report” demonstration in Washington Saturday evening, some people in the crowd wore cow costumes.

Outside the White House tonight: pic.twitter.com/h6i5oq1PIe

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) March 23, 2019

But enough about current events. My own interest is in the little word at the center of the beef: cow.

Word of the week: Villanelle

“Killing Eve,” the new series created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge*, premiered earlier this month on BBC America. The show – which Vogue called “part spy drama, part serial killer thriller, part absurdist comedy” – is based on novellas by the British author Luke Jennings that are known collectively as the Villanelle series, after the codename of one of the principal characters. From a synopsis of the books:

Oxana Vorontsova, a beautiful but supremely dangerous psychopath, is sprung from a Russian prison, and reborn as the glamorous Villanelle. The price of her new existence: to be trained in the dark arts of assassination, and to kill on demand.

 

“Villanelle” is a dictionary word with a backstory, but not the one Jennings provides.

Word of the week: Blackacre

In U.S. and Canadian law, there’s a long-established* practice of using “Jane Doe” or “John Doe” to refer to a person whose name is unknown or must be withheld. Placeholder names like these are called kadigans, and it turns out there are legal kadigans for parcels of real property as well. The primary such placeholder name is Blackacre; if two parcels of property are being compared, the second is usually called Whiteacre. 

This is where I confess that while I’d known about Jane and John Doe for a long time, I first encountered “Blackacre” less than a week ago, by way of a clever tweet from Kathryn Rubino, an editor at the Above the Law blog.

Blackacre-ish #nameacivillawTVshow

— Kathryn Rubino (@Kathryn1) November 2, 2017

(Fans of legal puns can find more like this on Kathryn’s Twitter timeline.)