Fritinancy

More non-blog writing

In case you aren’t following me on the splintered social-mediascape*, here are links to two recent pieces I’ve published on Medium and my bloggish new home, Substack:

LinkedIn Is Actually Fun Now (no, really!)

On Collaboration (and old folks who swim the English Channel)

You can subscribe to my Substack for free, and my posts will arrive in your inbox, RSS feed, or Substack app with zero ads. How nice is that? Very nice.

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* Bluesky, Mastodon, Instagram, Threads (app only for now), LinkedIn. And I still maintain a ghostly presence on Xitter, pronounced Shitter.

Looking for Word of the Week?

It’s migrated to my new digital home, Substack. Read about this week’s word now! And catch up on my reasons for changing platforms here.

Subscribe to my Substack—free!—to get every post delivered to your inbox or the Substack app with no annoying ads.

Introducing Fritinancy, the Substack newsletter

Brand new from the Fritinancy family of fine wordcraft products: Fritinancy, the Substack newsletter!

Read all about it here. 

The tl;dr: After 17 years of blogging, and of increasing dissatisfaction with the Typepad platform, I’m ready to try something different. I’m pivoting—gradually, slowly—to newsletters.

I’m looking forward to a new, more flexible format for writing and for reading. I’m looking forward to continuing some fan favorites (word of the week, words of the year, linkfests) and experimenting with new subject matter. I’m also intrigued by Notes, a Substack feature that permits short-form comments and links. A replacement for Xitter? Maybe!

You can read the newsletter on your phone, your laptop, your desktop, or the convenient Substack app. (The app is one of the primary reasons I decided to make the switch.)

In addition to the introductory post, I’ve also published three additional posts, including one about a proposal to change the name of the Oakland airport and one that explains the Fritinancy name. Check them all out here. Subscriptions are free (for now), so please sign up. 

My long-term plan is to gradually phase out blog posts in favor of writing on other platforms (Substack and Medium, maybe others). But not to worry: the whole 17-year blog archive will remain here for your pleasure and reference. And yes, I intend to continue publishing on Medium until further notice.

Off to Substack!

My article on "the Big Lie" is now in "American Speech"

My short article about Big Lie for American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society, is now available online. You can read it by clicking the “PDF” button here.

The entry appears in the “Among the New Words” section, edited by Ben Zimmer, Kelly E. Wright, Brianne Hughes, and Charles E. Carson. This quarter’s new words were drawn from the nominations for 2021 Word of the Year, held January 7, 2022, via Zoom. (The overall winner was insurrection.)

The issue is dated May 2022, but the print edition was delivered in June and the online version was posted within the last couple of weeks. (For a while I was checking every day, but then I slacked off and voilà—there it was.)

My thanks to Ben Zimmer for inviting me to contribute—it’s my first-ever publication in an academic journal! I’ll have another entry in the August issue; I’ll let you know when it appears online.

Read the full Among the New Words article, which includes antiwork, no bones day, -core, and other noteworthy additions to the lexicon. (Read my Visual Thesaurus column on -core.)

New work: CIMA

The beauty-education industry serves a diverse, mostly female population of instructors, students, and beauty-school owners. Many students come to beauty-school programs with only a high school degree; instructors may have community-college backgrounds or four-year degrees; owners usually have a bachelor’s degree.

That educational diversity was one of my challenges when I was asked by Milady, a leader in beauty education and certification, to name the company’s new digital learning system. A second challenge: communicating “innovation.” Milady is well established and respected—it’s an industry pioneer—but not as closely associated with technological advances as some of its younger competitors.

Meet CIMA, a name to position Milady for a dynamic future while honoring the company’s heritage.

 

 

Stay home, save links

Lynne Murphy wrote about the original UK slogan coronavirus slogan—“Stay at home/Protect the NHS/Save lives”—and its replacement (“Stay alert”), which was “mocked relentlessly on UK social media within a day of its announcement.” My own thoughts went immediately to an old joke, which I see is still alive and well.

Via Zazzle

 

Because Lynne’s a linguist, she went deep on some interesting points of grammar. I hadn’t realized, for example, that at-less “Stay home” marks you as a speaker of American English.

It appears some of you idiots can’t follow a simple instruction so here’s THE NEW AND MUCH CLEARER Government COVID Slogan generator pic.twitter.com/t6tXmfp75E

— Olaf Falafel (@OFalafel) May 11, 2020

I’m a fan of this balanced two-part slogan from PassItOn.com: “Stay apart. Pull together.” Their other pandemic-related billboards—“First In. Second to None”; “Nursing a Country Back to Health”—are good, too.

 

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My American friend Diana Howard wrote about her experience of COVID-19 “confinement” in Aix-en-Provence, France, where she has lived for several years. Diana and I met when she was a graphic designer; we worked on a number of projects together. She’s now a full-time artist, and the accompanying illustrations are charming. 

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And speaking of France (h/t Jesse Sheidlower):

BREAKING NEWS: The Académie Française, the French language police, have just announced that while Covid19 *could* be a masculine word because of “le virus” that it’s preferable to be feminine because of “la maladie.” https://t.co/rsYWY97VEJ

— Dr. Jen Schradie (@schradie) May 8, 2020

 

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Erin Griffith interviewed me for a New York Times article about all those Zoom-y business names. And then she … zoomed away with it. It’s hilarious, and just the teensiest bit deranged. (Check out the URL.)

I wrote a few weeks ago about ten of those Zoom names.

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And speaking of me, my latest story for Medium is about my adventures in picking up trash during the pandemic. Medium says it’s a four-minute read, but you can stretch it out to six if you pace yourself.

 

Listen to me!

The witty and skillful Helen Zaltzman, host of The Allusionist language podcast, recently invited me on the show to talk about “novelty spellings for foods-that-aren’t-made-out-of-the-things-they-sound-like-they’re-made-out-of”—like chik’n, cheez, and mylk. The episode is now live and free for the listening here. You’ll hear me at the beginning and the end of the show (and in the coda, which Helen calls the Mini-llusionist). In between is a segment with the owner of a vegan restaurant in Ontario, Canada, who got into a bit of a bureaucratic dust-up over a menu item labeled “cheddar cheese.”

Image via The Allusionist

 

If you like what you hear, why not subscribe to The Allusionist and sign up for the newsletter? And check out the schedule of live Allusionist shows, possibly coming to a city near you (Portland, Oregon, September 5; London next week; back in the U.S. beginning mid-October).

More from me about food names here.

Some recent writing

I’m stepping away from my desk until the middle of next week, so I’ll leave you with links to some of my recent (and in the case of the Visual Thesaurus, not-so-recent but finally un-paywalled) writing.

For Strong Language:

• “Sluts,” a deep-ish dive into the history of a wanton word that’s being reclaimed in brand names. This post expands on my 2012 exploration of the same topic.

F*ck Trump liquid lipstick from Lipslut

 

For Medium:

• “Don’t Focus-Group That Name”
• “What Makes a Bad Name Bad?”
• “Writing Lessons from Warren Buffett”
• “The Forbidden Letters”

For the Visual Thesaurus (released from paywall):

• My February column on the changing meanings of influence and influencer.

 

New writing for Medium and the Visual Thesaurus

Looking for naming advice? Read my latest post on Medium, “How journalism can help you create a name.” (Free, but clicking on the clapping-hands icon may someday result in my earning a few pennies.)

Curious about the origins of the “__ Nation” formula—Live Nation, Pantsuit Nation, Side Hustle Nation? I dig deep (and explore the side routes of national and nationalism) in my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, “A Nation of ‘Nations‘.” Full access is restricted to subscribers; here’s an excerpt:

The political sense of nation—an organized community sharing a defined territory and government—emerged around 1400 and gradually predominated, although the earlier meaning survives in the use, since the 1640s, of nation to describe indigenous American peoples: Choctaw Nation, Cherokee Nation. (The specifically Canadian “First Nations” began to be used in the 1970s; it applies to indigenous peoples south of the Arctic Circle and replaces “Indian,” which is both inaccurate and, according to some people, offensive.) 

Nation didn’t turn into the adjective national until the 1590s (“the nationall assemblie”); the noun sense of national—a citizen or subject of a specified state—emerged in the mid-19th century. (Then there’s the Grand National, which is a horse race if you’re English, Irish, or Scottish, and a rodeo if you’re Californian.) Nationalism, defined as “advocacy or support of the interests of one’s own nation, usually to the detriment or exclusion of any other nation’s interests”) is a little older: The OED’s earliest citation is from 1798. An 1844 citation from Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country declares that “Nationalism is another word for egotism.”

Z Nation is an American action/horror/comedy-drama/post-apocalyptic television series that aired from 2014 to 2018 on the SyFy network. The Z stands for “zombie.”

The unfamiliarity principle

Here’s something do-it-yourselfers often overlook when they’re struggling to name a product or company: the importance of making something familiar seem unfamiliar or making something unfamiliar seem familiar.

I’ve written about branding’s unfamiliarity principle in a new story for Medium. You can bypass the paywall to read it by clicking this link.

I’m experimenting with Medium—an elegantly designed, ad-free platform for writers—as a way to reach a wider audience and (maybe, someday) earn a little money from my writing. The payout depends on subscribing members reading and “applauding” my work (note the little clapping-hands icon), so if you like what you see, please subscribe.

My other Medium stories:

Need an Inspiring Brand Name? Look Outside

Hanging Out with the Godless