This acronym isn’t strictly new, but it was new to me when I saw it in the subject line of an email from California State Senator Scott Wiener, co-sponsor of SB 899, known as the Affordable Housing on Faith Lands Act. (Wiener, a Democrat, doesn’t represent my district, nor have I donated to his campaigns, but I get his emails anyway.)
The body of the email spelled out the acronym: “Yes in God’s Back Yard.”
Image via Giv4 Homelessness in San Diego
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One of the newest media outlets in the US has a very old name: Puck.
The digital publication, which launched in September, is owned and operated by a group of veteran New York journalists (Julia Ioffe, Barathunde Thurston, Jon Kelly, Matt Belloni, and others) and promotes itself as “a new media company dedicated to the power corridors of our culture: Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood” and as “a platform for smart, engaging (and, yes, occasionally dishy) journalism.” Its beats are Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Washington.
A pre-launch announcement from Puck.news.
You can read one article without paying, but if you want more dish you’ll have to dish out some cash. “A $100 annual fee entitles subscribers to personal emails from the authors and all the newsletters, features and breaking news; moving up to $250 brings all that plus access to conference calls with the authors, Q&As with the staff and invitations to events,” Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw reported on September 13.
What about the name? From the August 5, 2021, email announcement: “The name is a nod to Shakespeare—as well as to the building where humor magazine Spy was born.”
More about Spy in a bit. First, though, here’s the Puck Building.
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What does triplex mean to you? And how do you pronounce the word?
Until last week, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to ask those questions. A triplex, I would have told you with full confidence, is any three-unit residence on a single lot. It could be three units in a single building; a “big house” plus a duplex in the back; or three side-by-side units of equal or varying sizes.
My Platonic ideal of a triplex, in the Los Angeles neighborhood where I grew up (Miracle Mile). Big main unit upstairs, two smaller units downstairs.
And of course it’s pronounced TRY-plex, from Latin roots meaning “threefold.” The first syllable, I was certain, is the same tri- as in triangle, trinomial, trilateral, tripod, trimester, triathlon, tricycle, trisomy, triad, trisect, and Triceratops. The same long vowel as the du- in duplex, the two-unit variation.
I am not, it turns out, entirely wrong. But in many parts of the US and Canada, I am far from right.
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Suppose you built a condominium building in a certain Manhattan neighborhood and named it for an adjacent but different Manhattan neighborhood. Suppose the zoning laws wouldn’t allow a residential tower on the site, so what you actually were selling were rooms in a “condo-hotel.” Suppose you publicly claimed that 60 percent of the units had been sold when in fact the figure was 15.8 percent.
What to call these inaccurate public statements: Lies? Fraud?
Try puffery.
“World’s finest”? Hardly.
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Earlier this week, Washington-area news media reported that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, daughter and son-in-law of the president-elect, would be moving into a six-bedroom, six-and-a-half-bathroom house in the District of Columbia. The house, which sold on December 22 for $5.5 million, $400,000 under the listing price, is less than two blocks from where President and Mrs. Obama will live after they leave the White House. (It isn’t clear whether the Trump-Kushners had bought it or will be renting from the buyer).
The neighborhood is called Kalorama, which got my attention.
2449 Tracy Place NW. Built in 1923 by Waddy Wood, who championed Colonial Revival designs over the Craftsman style. Walk score: 50 (mostly car dependent).
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Pent room: An extra or attached room in a house or apartment. Sometimes spelled pent-room or pentroom.
Pent room has been cropping up with some regularity in San Francisco’s overheated real-estate market. The earliest usage I’ve found is in a 2007 book, Linda Applewhite’s Architectural Interiors: Transforming Your Home with Decorative Structural Elements. A caption accompanying a photo of a cozy sitting area reads: “This small pent-room on the top floor of a loft-like space on Nob Hill feels huge and wondrous with the City by the Bay as its backdrop.”
A December 5, 2009, story in SF Luxe about “the Pacific Heights dream house,” a seven-bedroom Victorian at 2311 Broadway, had this gushing comment about a pent room:
The bright and airy pent room on the top level features soaring cathedral ceilings, sparkling views sweeping across the City and Bay, a wet bar with refrigerator and an abundance of skylights and windows. It works beautifully as a combination media and family/game room –– and is a perfect spot to enjoy sunsets over the Golden Gate Bridge*.
*On fog-free days.
Listed at $6,950,000, this house sold in 2010 for $6,500,000. A current Zillow estimate places its value at more than $10.5 million.
There was a pent room in this year’s San Francisco Decorator Showcase, a Presidio Heights mansion whose architect was Julia Morgan, designer of Hearst Castle.
“For the adults, Jeff Schlarb of Green Couch Interior Design created the ‘Pent Room,’ a space for gathering, gaming, entertaining and relaxing.”
A pent room is the smaller cousin of a penthouse (first documented use: 1921), now defined as a luxury apartment on the top floor(s) of a skyscraper. According to a Wikipedia entry:
One of the earliest penthouse apartments in [New York] was publisher Conde Nast’s duplex penthouse at 1040 Park Avenue. The original 1923 plan for the building provided three units on each floor with additional maids’ rooms on the roof, but in 1924 the building’s upper spaces were constructed to provide a grand duplex for Nast. Connected by a staircase to the rooftop entertaining salons, the corner unit at the top floor was redesigned to be private family quarters.
But penthouse wasn’t coined in the 20th century. It first appeared in the early 14th century, when it was spelled pendize and referred to any attached building, often a simple structure. (According to Online Etymology Dictionary, in some Middle English homilies Jesus’ birthplace was called not a manger but a penthouse.)
The pent- of penthouse and pent room is unrelated to the pent in pent-up (confined), which is a past participle of pen. In fact, penthouse is an example of a false etymology’s influence on spelling. Here’s Daily Etymology:
The Middle English word “pendize” was changed over time to a combination of the more familiar English word “house” (a natural assumption since the original word indicated a somewhat house-like structure) and the Middle French “pente” meaning “slope.” In other words, the penthouse was originally an attached building with a sloping roof.
So a pent room is actually an appendage room – what might, in a less frenzied market, have simply been called a bonus room, attic, or garret.
There’s evidence of even further pent- drift in a 2011 listing for a Telegraph Hill (San Francisco) house with a “view pent level family room & spacious deck.” “View” is intended here as an adjective, and “pent” may be a shortening of “penthouse.” In Brooklyn, “pent level” can refer to something far more modest, as in a recent Craigslist listing for a “large pent level studio flat!!” with “modern flare [sic].” Rent: $1,925 a month. In San Francisco, that would be considered a bargain.
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I bring glad tidings for Festivus 2013! Last week Denver celebrated its second annual Beer Festivus (“A Beer Festival for the Rest of Us!”). There’s a Festivus pole constructed of Pabst Blue Ribbon cans inside the Capitol in Tallahassee, Florida, erected by “artist/protester/drinker of cheap beer Chaz Stevens” to protest the Nativity scene in the same government building. And I’m back for the fifth consecutive year with a public Airing of Grievances, one of the canonical rites of this defiantly non-canonical holiday.
If you go in for tradition, Festivus is celebrated on December 23. But we Festivusians say feh! to tradition. We also say, “I’ve got a lot of problems with you people!”
Continue reading "The Airing of Grievances: Fifth Anniversary Edition" »
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Whisper listing: An off-market real-estate deal marketed through word of mouth alone.
Whisper listings are becoming more common in New York, according to a September 22, 2013, article in the New York Times (“For Your Ears Only”):
Off-market deals, known as whisper listings, have long been the purview of the ultra-high-end market. Certain properties, often with price tags of $20 million or more, are shopped with a shroud of mystery among a small circle of well-connected agents instead of being put on the market for the world to see.
Now this hush-hush approach has spread to many price points, including apartments below $1 million, as sellers realize the advantage they have, thanks to the lack of apartments available for sale in Manhattan.
“Sellers feel cocky. Sellers feel like they have the ball,” said Brian K. Lewis, an associate broker at Halstead Property who in the last six months has taken on seven whisper listings from clients who do not want to list their apartments, but are willing to entertain offers. These range from a two-bedroom for $1.295 million on the Upper West Side to a downtown loft for $12 million. “In an improving economy with no inventory, they have the asset people want.”
In some cases it’s hard to tell a whisper listing from a conventional one. Here’s a blog post from a real estate broker in Tucson:
Brand new whisper listing: Across from the U of A stadium, this 3 bedroom, 2.5 bath condo is ideally situated ( Sam Hughes) for easy access to the U of A. With a roomy and coveted 2 car garage, this property will list for $475,000. Call for additional information, tenant occupied until 12/31/2013. This property will list for $475,000. Easily shown by appointment [phone number]
The earliest mention I found of “whisper listing” is in a November 2009 post on The Real Deal, a New York real estate site:
“Whisper listings” — properties that are for sale, but not officially on the market — are becoming more common, as sellers seek to avoid the perception that they are unloading properties because of financial distress. Also known as “quiet listings,” they are often among the most expensive properties in the city.
“Whisper” comes from an Old English word, hwisprian, that was probably onomatopoetic. “Whisper” shows up in a few other compound nouns, if Urban Dictionary is to be credited: “whisper yell” (to argue without raising one’s voice), “whisper alley” (a street populated by promiscuous women), “whispersation” (a conversation conducted in low tones).
See also my post on Whisper.sh, a social-media app that encourages users to share secrets anonymously.
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Spotted in San Francisco’s Financial District:
Vornado Realty Trust, Montgomery Street.
Spotted in my storage closet:
Vornado whole-room air circulator, acquired during an unfortunate mildew episode.
The name duplication isn’t coincidental. The two brands are related.
Vornado fans were first manufactured toward the end of World War II; the inventor of the original technology, an Oklahoma man named Ralph K. Odor (really), had started experimenting in the 1920s with improved airplane-propeller efficiency. In 1931 he introduced the Vornado Plane.
Ralph Odor’s 1931 test flight of the Vornado, via YouTube.
The Vornado name comes from “vortex action” plus a suffix, probably from “tornado.” (A 1936 news account of the plane said it would “roar through the skies on the wings of a span of man-made tornadoes.”)
In the 1940s Odor partnered with a Kansas entrepreneur, O.A. Sutton, and after the war ended the O.A. Sutton Corporation produced the first Vornado fans. Odor quit not long afterward over a patent-rights dispute, and the O.A. Sutton Corporation went bankrupt in the 1950s. The Vornado brand and company were resurrected in Andover, Kansas, in 1989.
As for Vornado Realty Trust, it traces its history to an appliance chain originally called Two Guys from Harrison, founded in 1946 by brothers Sidney and Hubert Hubschman of Harrison, New Jersey. In 1959, Two Guys bought the defunct O.A. Sutton Corporation and renamed the merged company Vornado. At the company’s peak, according to a Wikipedia entry, there were more than 100 Two Guys locations nationwide. Profits began declining in the 1970s, and in 1980, Vornado was acquired by Interstate Department Stores, Inc., which changed its name to Vornado Realty Trust and began selling the retail stores and leasing their physical locations.
Today, Vornado Realty Trust is a publicly traded company and one of the largest owners and managers of commercial real estate in the United States. And Vornado fans for home, business, and industrial use are sold at Sears, Costco, Lowe’s, Home Depot, and other retailers worldwide.
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