Fritinancy

March linkfest

This month’s book recommendation is I Like to Watch (2019), by the Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic Emily Nussbaum. The book collects a decade’s worth of Nussbaum’s reviews and essays for the New Yorker and other publications, including one written especially for the book. Nussbaum is such a good writer that she made me care about shows that hadn’t appealed to me (I’ve watched exactly one episode each, for example, of “The Sopranos,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and “Lost”). And she made me care even more deeply about subjects I was already drawn to, like the complicated career of Joan Rivers and the way the 2016 presidential election made “jokes” unfunny. (You can read the jokes essay—one of the best pieces of writing to come out of that twisted season—here.)

 

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.

December linkfest

The Namerology blog picks the defining baby names of the last decade—“The names that were not just hugely popular from 2010-19, but vastly more popular than in decades past…and future. They’re flying high, yet as the ’10s draw to a close they’re already starting to decline from their dizzying popularity peaks.”

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Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn combed his newspaper’s archives for the first mentions of products, technologies, ideas, and terms that have become part of life since late 2009. His chronological list goes from A (Angry Birds) to Y (YOLO), and includes a bunch of words and brands you read about here first, including showrooming, FOMO, trigger warning, and antifa.

Word of the week: Pizzazz

The NBCNews.com headline over Jonathan Allen’s story kvetched about the lack of “drama” on the first day of the impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives, but the person in charge of the Twitter account chose a more, well, pizzazz-y synonym for “drama.”

Analysis: The first two witnesses called Wednesday testified to President Trump's scheme, but lacked the pizzazz necessary to capture public attention. https://t.co/1UfkaeZ3I4

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 14, 2019

Word of the week: Boo

Halloween is over, but echoes of boo are still reverberating throughout the land, most notably when the current occupant of the White House ventures out of his safe spaces and into the unfiltered public domain. He was greeted with loud boos and chants of “lock him up” at Nationals Park in Washington during Game 5 of the World Series on October 27.

Meanwhile chants of “boos” & “lock him up” rang out when Trump was shown on the Jumbotron at tonight’s World Series game. Signs that read “Veterans for Impeachment” and “Impeach Trump” were also hung around the stadium by fans pic.twitter.com/Pzjjs4AI4t

— HOT 97 (@HOT97) October 28, 2019

 

And there were more boos at what would seem to have been an even friendlier milieu: an Ultimate Fighting Championship match in Madison Square Garden on November 2.

Trump was loudly booed during his arrival to this UFC fight — the second sports arena to boo him this week pic.twitter.com/Num0v1kiOP

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) November 3, 2019

As historian Kevin Kruse pointed out on Twitter, there is robust precedent for president-booing at sporting events.

And other presidents have been booed at baseball games, in case everyone suddenly forgot.

If I'm remembering correctly, Obama was booed at the All-Star Game in 2009, GWBush was booed at a Nationals game in 2008, and GHWBush was famously booed at the 1992 All-Star Game: pic.twitter.com/spZjEj1vqh

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) October 28, 2019

But enough celebration of our right to free and loud expression. What about that word boo? How did it come to signify disapproval (verb), surprise (interjection), and affection (noun) – and much more?

On the Visual Thesaurus: Prohibition's linguistic hangover

October 2019 marks the centenary of the Volstead Act, the federal legislation that led to the passage of the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution—and to the misguided 13-year social experiment known as Prohibition. From January 1, 1920, until Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inauguration in March 1933, the manufacture, sale, and importation of “intoxicating liquors” were officially outlawed. As everyone knows, all of those activities flourished illicitly.

And so did new vocabulary items.

I’m celebrating the anniversary—and the vocabulary—in my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, “Sidecars and Scofflaws: Prohibition’s Linguistic Hangover.” Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers; here’s an excerpt.

September linkfest

“Texting is not destroying the language” and five other things you may not understand about English. (John McIntyre for the Baltimore Sun)

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A study of 597 logos found that “descriptive logos more favorably impact consumers’ brand perceptions than nondescriptive ones, and are more likely to improve brand performance.” (Harvard Business Review)

Old descriptive logos (left) vs. new nondescriptive logos (right).

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.

February linkfest

Why are some companies, like publishers and fashion businesses, called “houses”? Includes a delightful explanation of how Random House got its name. (Grammar Girl)

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I’m a pushover for specialized slang dictionaries, and this is a good one: a guide to carnival lingo. Warning: many irresistible rabbit holes on that site. (Good Magic)

A razzle dazzle game (Stevens Magic Emporium)

Word of the week: Wimp

I never thought I’d say this, but: Mazel tov, Donald J. Trump! You have been officially inducted into the Wimp Hall of Fame.

Good news for George Herbert Walker Bush: As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp ever to serve as President of the United States.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) January 25, 2019

Immigrant-loathing scourge and recurring “Real Time with Bill Maher” guest Ann Coulter was referring, of course, to the president’s agreeing to end the 35-day government shutdown without receiving a single taxpayer dollar for a “beautiful,” “artistically designed” wall on the southern border of the U.S. (the wall that he promised, during his campaign, Mexico would pay for).

Although Trump insisted his cave-in was “in no way a concession,” many of his fellow Republicans begged to differ. A Tea Party founder, Mark Meckler, called Trump’s move “pathetic and disgusting.” Breitbart, the right-wing news outlet, called it a “short-term surrender to the Democrats.”

But the punchy, one-syllable wimp was the epithet that stung – and stuck. It was echoed by Senator Mazie Hirono, Democrat of Hawaii, who called Trump “an amoral, lying person,” and added: “I guess if Ann Coulter yells at him he turns into a wimp.” Ouch!

Wimp even made it into headlines outside the U.S.

 

The Times (UK), January 27, 2019