Fritinancy

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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Facebook's Meta-morphosis

After teasing us for months with talk of a corporate name change and of a “metaverse” that will bring physically distant people closer together, Facebook sent shock waves around the world by …

Just kidding, folks! Facebook founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg shocked precisely no one who was following the company’s October 28 Connect conference. Instead, his company did what it always does: something predictable, clunky, and imitative. It’s staking a claim in the “metaverse”; ergo, the new corporate name is Meta. (Product names, including the Facebook social-media platform, remain unchanged.) From the new About page: “The metaverse is the next evolution of social connection. Our company’s vision is to help bring the metaverse to life, so we are changing our name to reflect our commitment to this future.”

If you think you’ve seen logos like this one before, you’re right. Read James I. Bowie’s analysis of how the Airbnb “loop” logo, introduced in 2016 to general disdain, has triumphed in the design world.

 

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.

August linkfest

The rise of rifle logos in American branding: “[T]he terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 … put the US on a war footing for the next two decades and boosted the rifle’s prominence in the national psyche. While pistols have been the chosen weapons of traditional pop culture stars like spies, cops, and gunslingers, military combat prioritizes the rifle, and today’s gun logos reflect that.” (By James I. Bowie for Emblemetric)

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Speaking of guns (h/t Iva Cheung):

Here you go. The most American possible explanation of the Delta variant, and why it means you should get vaccinated and wear a mask, more than ever. pic.twitter.com/3dkSBLxWeX

— Dylan Meconis (@dmeconis) August 12, 2021

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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!).

Cleveland's baseball team is now the Guardians

They could have been the Spiders. Instead, Cleveland’s major-league baseball team, known for more than a century as the Indians, will be called the Guardians. The change will take place at the end of the 2021 baseball season.

The “Guardians” name pays tribute to a Cleveland landmark: the twin Guardians of Traffic statues on the Hope Memorial Bridge, near the team’s home ballpark, Progressive Field. Sports Illustrated provided some historical detail:

The Guardians of Traffic statues have flanked both sides of the Hope Memorial Bridge since 1932. Each of the four-winged Art Deco figures sports winged helmets and crowns, and each statue holds a different vehicle to signify "the spirit of progress in transportation," per bridge engineer Wilbur Watson. Each guardian stands 43 feet tall, and they remain the only public Art Deco monuments in Cleveland.

Abrdn? Srsly?

Vowels: Who needs them?

That, it seems, was the guiding principle behind the name change, announced April 26, of Standard Life Aberdeen PLC, an asset-management firm based in Edinburgh. The company name will henceforth be rendered as Abrdn—but pronounced, as in days of yore, as “Aberdeen.”

In an official statement, the company’s chief executive, Stephen Bird, said: “Our new brand Abrdn builds on our heritage and is modern, dynamic, and, most importantly, engaging for all of our client and customer channels.” He also said the new brand “reflects the clarity of focus that the leadership team are bringing to the business as we seek to deliver sustainable growth.” 

Many, many people begged to differ.

Aunt Jemima rebrands as Pearl Milling Co.

The pancake-products brand known for 130 years as Aunt Jemima—and criticized for that name for almost as long—has announced a name change. Beginning in June, the brand will be called Pearl Milling Co.

Via PepsiCo

July linkfest

This month’s book recommendation is Becoming Duchess Goldblatt, by Anonymous. Duchess Goldblatt—Her Grace or DG to her thousands of Twitter followers, myself included—has been an indelible, wholly invented presence on Twitter for some eight years. Her avatar is a 1633 portrait by Frans Hals, and her distinctive voice—firm yet loving, barmy yet authoritative, warm yet tinged with acid—has inspired endless speculation about her “real” identity. You won’t learn that secret from this memoir, but you will learn how the anonymous author (now a woman of perhaps middle age) came to create her, during a terrible period in her life during which she lost her marriage, her house, her job, and most of her friends. The Duchess became her 81-year-old alter ego: an escape from loneliness and an outlet for her considerable writing talent. The book combines memoir with selected DG tweets, and if you choose the audiobook—try your local library system—you’ll enjoy not just the primary narration by Gabra Zackman but also the wonderful actress J. Smith Cameron reading the tweets and singer/songwriter/actor Lyle Lovett reading the Lyle Lovett parts. (Lovett and Her Grace have a mutual admiration society, and if only DG would deign to follow me back on Twitter we could make it a threesome.)

 

Writers can be a lot of fun at parties, but word to the wise: Keep an eye on your good memories. They’ll strip them down for parts.

— Duchess Goldblatt (@duchessgoldblat) December 5, 2017

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Remember when the owner of that professional football team in Washington, DC, said he would NEVER change the team’s name? “Daniel Snyder surely meant NEVER to mean forever,” writes trademark lawyer Steven Baird in Duets Blog, “but in 2013, he could not have foreseen how quickly the world has changed over the last six weeks.” A thorough review of what led up to Snyder’s promised “thorough review of the offending team name.

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