Fritinancy

Word of the week: Nuts

Almost every day I get an email from a company called Oh! Nuts, a company based in Queens, New York, that sells kosher nuts, dried fruit, and candies for every Jewish occasion, including Tu B’shvat and Israeli Independence Day (and for non-Jewish occasions as well).

 

Oh! Nuts mixed nuts snack packs

I started thinking about the Oh! Nuts brand name, which led me down a nutty path indeed. You’ll find the fruits of my research over at the Strong Language blog, because—spoiler!—nuts and aw, nuts and nuts to you were at one time considered highly improper. Those words, along with their milder cousin nerts, were outlawed in Hollywood scripts beginning in the 1930s, when the Production Code held a tight grip on the movie industry.

Today, not so much.

Nuts to You!, by Lois Ehlert (1993). A picture book about a rascally squirrel, for children age 4 to 7. It wouldn't have made it into school libraries eight decades ago.

 

Although even in the 21st century some usages of nuts are decidedly raunchy.

Nuts, a British lad mag, published from 2004 through 2014. This issue is dated February 11, 2005. (Hat tip: Stan Carey)

 

Read my Strong Language post “When ‘Nuts’ Was Taboo.” If you stick with it to the end, you’ll be rewarded with a limerick.

 

New on Strong Language: You bet your asterisk!

My new post for Strong Language (the sweary blog about swearing) asks: When the old swears no longer shock, what’s an advertiser to do? One answer: swear-ify inoffensive words by inserting asterisks into them.

Read “You bet your asterisk!”

 

Wordy miscellany

The American Dialect Society, the OG Word of the Year anointer, usually holds its WotY contest in person, and it’s always a rollicking event. This year ADS is soliciting nominations and taking reservations online, and there’s a bonus pre-event event: On December 10 at 12 pm EST/9 am PST, famous word guy Ben Zimmer, in partnership with Washington’s new Planet Word Museum, will explain the nomination and selection processes and talk about his year’s likely candidates. Register here (free). Or you can skip directly to registration for the ADS livestream on December 17, and nominate up to five words while you’re at it.

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“What’s the word?/Thunderbird!/How’s it sold?/Good and cold.” More about the word (and the wine) at Modern Drunkard magazine.

New writing for Strong Language: Schiit and Douchebags

Word of the Week (WotW) is on hiatus, but I do have some new writing on the Strong Language blog, where I’m a contributor. I partnered with trademark lawyer Anne Gilson LaLonde for a virtual conversation about two sweary (or sweary-ish) brand names: Schiit, which makes audio equipment, and Douchebags, which makes … bags.

 

 

 

We talked about brand stories and the legal implications of “scandalousness” and “offensiveness.” And, as you might imagine, we had a lot of fun.

Read “Douchebags and Schiit: How do they get away with it?”

June linkfest

This month’s book recommendation, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, by Kathryn Schulz, is ten years old and as timely as ever.

I wrote last month about Schulz’s excellent pieces for the New Yorker, and I’m here to tell you that Being Wrong is every bit as well researched, witty, and graceful. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that I’m fascinated by failure, but hey—everyone has a story to tell about wrongness petty or vast. Schulz’s catalog of errors includes explorers undone by mirages, buyers beset by remorse, the famous gorilla-on-the-basketball-court experiment, the impossibility of saying “I am wrong” (as opposed to “I was wrong”), and the ’Cuz It’s True Constraint (a name I love). She dips into cognitive psychology, history, philosophy, aesthetics, and religion; Newsweek called the book “intellectualism made fun!” and it is.

I listened to the audiobook, and immediately discovered that I’d been wrong for ages about the pronunciation of the author’s last name. It rhymes with pools, not cults.

You can read an excerpt from Chapter 1 here.

“May your belly make you scream”

What could be more timely, more fitting, more historic, and more folkloric* than a post about disease-curses? They’re very much a thing in Dutch—where kanker (cancer) is just about the worst thing you could wish upon an enemy—and in Yiddish, where you might say about someone you despise, “He should have Pharaoh’s plagues and Job’s scabies.”

 

 

I write about those curses and many others in my latest post for Strong Language, the sweary blog about all kinds of swearing. Take a break from coronavirus coverage and those maddening Rose Garden briefings to learn a thing or two about imprecations with some real bite.

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* Thank you, Car Guys.

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.

 

Word of the week: Spanandry

I had not expected to be sent to the dictionary by “Schitt’s Creek,” the Canadian comedy series starring Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara as temporarily embarrassed multimillionaires Johnny and Moira Rose, who’ve been divested of all their assets except their fabulous wardrobes, their helpless adult children, and the town of the title, which Johnny had long ago bought—yes, the whole town—as a joke gift for his son. But the show, which originated on CBC, is full of surprises. (You can catch the first four seasons on Netflix; the fifth is currently airing on the Pop network.) It’s “a comedy sleeper hit” (Rolling Stone), “Canada’s kindest and wiggiest sitcom” (Vulture), and “so much more than its title” (Vox).

Catching up

I’m taking a breather from blogging while I catch up with some other projects. I expect I’ll return, but I’m not sure when. In the meantime, here are a few other pieces I’ve written recently. (The Visual Thesaurus columns have been released from their paywall.)

Teledildonics (Strong Language)

Swears in the news (Strong Language)

“Go” is the go-to word in branding (Visual Thesaurus)

The Name of the Year tournament (Visual Thesaurus)

The story of -o (Visual Thesaurus)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Word of the week: Shithole

It’s shaping up to be a shitty year, and I’m not talking about the weather or those ridiculous sleeves on women’s clothing.

So far we’ve seen shitpost anointed the digital word of the year by the American Dialect Society, and a list of “Shitty Media Men” making headlines when Harper’s announced plans to publish a story about it. Not to mention the shitty hits of 2017, shitburger, shit show, ripshit bonkers, and shit sandwich.

All that was prologue to the latest shit-storm: the revelation, in the Washington Post, followed by other media outlets, that President Trump on Thursday had attacked protections for immigrants from what he called “shithole countries” such as Haiti and El Salvador, as well as the entire continent of Africa.

 

“In the Hole,” by Anthony Russo.