Fritinancy

March linkfest

A link of my own to kick things off: I wrote for the Strong Language blog about a product name I was surprised (to put it mildly) to encounter in a family-owned, family-friendly grocery store in Berkeley, California.

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I also continue to publish about once a week on Medium, a platform that actually pays me! This week’s story is about Pepsi’s new logo—and the logo that preceded it, back in 2008 (friend link), which the branding agency sold with a totally bonkers presentation. If you’re not a Medium member, use this referral link to join. Yes, there’s a fee, but you’ll gain access to lots of other good writers, too. And maybe you’ll want to start publishing there yourself, and you’ll be glad you made this tiny investment.

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For more than a century, the New York Times’s nameplate included a period. Then, one day in 1961, it was gone. “Dropping the period caused much consternation and soul-searching at the Times, until finally the production manager came up with the calculation that eliminating the period would save some $600 a year in ink!” (Steven Heller for Print Magazine)

The final full stop?

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February linkfest

I’ve started listening to the “Tech Won’t Save Us” podcast, expertly hosted by Canadian tech critic Paris Marx, who’s joined each week by an expert who critically examines “the tech industry, the powerful people who helm it, and the products and services it unleashes on the world.” Separating tech from politics, says Marx, “has consequences for us all, especially the most vulnerable.” I’m looking forward to reading books by two recent guests, Malcolm Harris (Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World), and Edward Niedermeyer (Ludicrous: The Unvarnished History of Tesla Motors). Niedermeyer introduced me to the useful word autonowashing, “the practice of making unverified or misleading claims which misrepresent the appropriate level of human supervision required by a partially or semi-autonomous product, service or technology.” (More -washing compounds here.)

 

“Tech Won’t Save Us” logo tee

 

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December linkfest

Happy Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us! I don’t have the traditional aluminum pole, and this year I’m sparing you my Airing of Grievances. (But you can air your own grievance on FestivusWeb.) As for the other primary tradition, I discovered this year that there’s a Feats of Strength cocktail, which sounds kind of like a hot toddy. Did you know that English toddy comes from Hindi tari, which means “palm sap”?

“Festivus-infused” maple syrup from family-owned, Vermont-based Runamok. You can buy it at REI.

Read my previous Festivus posts.

And here’s a year-end link roundup:

Book review: “Rebel with a Clause”

Are names destiny? I can’t help wondering whether Ellen Jovin, a communications expert and language maven whose surname rhymes with rovin’, was fated to travel to 47 states with her portable Grammar Table, and then write a book about her adventures called Rebel with a Clause: Tales and Tips from a Roving Grammarian. She certainly took to the project with energy and élan, and the result is a book so delightful that it could win over even the grammarphobic and the grammar-shy. 

December linkfest

Happy Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us! When you’ve completed the traditional Feats of Strength you may feel like you deserve a celebratory quaff. There are several Festivus beers and ales; here’s one from Market Garden Brewery in Cleveland. They registered the trademark in October 2015.

There’s also a Festivus Maximus sparkling wine, but it’s only tangentially about the made-up December 23 holiday and “Seinfeld.” It’s actually a Baltimore Ravens story: “Festivus Maximus” was coach Brian Billick’s substitute phrase for “playoffs,” a word he superstitiously wouldn’t allow players to utter in the runup to the 2000 Super Bowl (which Baltimore would go on to win).

And now—drumroll, please—it’s time for the traditional Airing of Grievances. In order from serious to frivolous:

Grievance #1: U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, “Democrat” of West Virginia.
Grievance #2: Punitive abortion laws.
Grievance #3: Expensive, hard-to-find Covid test kits.
Grievance #4: People who still haven’t gotten Covid vaccinations.
Grievance #5: TFG. Enough already.
Grievance #6: Movies that run more than two hours. Looking at you, Nightmare Alley.
Grievance #7: Remakes. See #6.
Grievance #8: Sequels.
Grievance #9: Prequels.
Grievance #10: Holiday promotions that include the phrase “’Tis the Season.”

Read my previous Festivus posts.

November linkfest

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate, and happy fourth week of November to everyone else.

My book recommendation this month is The Confidence Men, by Margalit Fox, the riveting true story of two British officers’ escape from an “escape-proof” Turkish POW camp—“the Alcatraz of its day,” Fox writes—toward the end of World War I. What makes their story amazing is how they did it: no tunnels, no violence, no weapons except for a homemade Ouija board and the two men’s skill at psychological manipulation.

 

 

I love a prison-escape story, and Fox tells this tale expertly, and Richard Elfyn, the narrator of the audiobook I listened to, rises to the occasion, switching between accents and occasionally reading passages in Welsh. But just as interesting as the escape itself are the conditions that enabled it. In his paywalled review for the New York Review of Books, Neal Ascherson writes:

Persuading people to like something is a trade. Persuading them to change their minds and like something else is a skill. But inducing them to believe in something that their senses and experience tell them is plainly unreal or untrue—unicorns, papal infallibility, Trump’s assertions, ghosts—requires art and almost manic self-confidence. The “confidence men” of Margalit Fox’s title, two British prisoners of war who planned the most eccentric and devious of all escapes, had plenty of both. But Fox puts their story into a broad historical setting, using it to illustrate the ways in which scientific inventions made possible not only empowerment but also credulity and manipulation.

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February linkfest

“Trade characters” like Aunt Jemima and the Quaker Oats man used to be much more common in American commerce than they are today, writes logo expert James I. Bowie in Marker. They were so common, in fact, that the US Patent and Trademark Office assigned six-digit codes to trademark applications to “capture personal characteristics, including race and gender, as they were perceived in American culture many decades ago”:

There are codes for Native Americans and Asian Pacific people, but not for African Americans. Women, but not men, can be coded as “Hawaiian,” while men, but not women, can be deemed “Famous,” “Cowboys and westerners,” or “Farmers, hillbillies, or hobos” (the second of these terms was recently stricken). The categories for Scottish men and women seem to exist solely to code trade characters representing thriftiness — or, more bluntly, cheapness.

Aunt Jemima pancake mix, circa 1940s. James Bowie: “The Aunt Jemima logo was given codes 020301 (portraits of women) and 020315 (women wearing scarves on their heads).” Read my February 10 post about Aunt Jemima’s recently announced name change.

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.

No, thanks?

On October 11, editor and blogger Mike Pope tweeted this photo of an ad for an in-store Starbucks in a Seattle supermarket.

“YES, PSLEASE.” Photo by Sabrina 

 

As the small print clarifies, the PSL in PSLEASE refers to Pumpkin Spice Latte, the nigh-ubiquitous autumn beverage, and not, say, to Process Specification Language, Personal Seat License, Philadelphia Sports Leagues, Phoenix Senior Living*, or the Romanian semiautomatic rifle.

Responses to the tweet fell into four categories:

Word of the week: Apostrophe

You know what an apostrophe is. It’s the little squiggle above the baseline in don’t and it’s that substitutes for a missing letter (o and i, respectively). Or it’s the little squiggle that denotes possession, because there is in fact a missing letter in those words: In Chaucer’s time, genitives (the linguistic term for what we casually call possessives) were formed by inserting an e before the s (the doges bone). We get apostrophe from Greek, with stops in Latin and French; the original form means “avert, turn away,” which is why we also use apostrophe for the rhetorical device of “turning away” to briefly address some person or thing—as one often does, say, on Twitter.

Via Adam Parker Writing

 

And speaking of Twitter, here’s what an apostrophe is not: It’s not a hyphen.