Fritinancy

New writing on Medium

Since the beginning of the year I’ve been experimenting with publishing on Medium about once a week. It feels different from blogging here, although I can’t pinpoint exactly why—maybe it’s because I don’t yet have a clear sense of who my audience is there, so I’m trying subjects and approaches that are different from what I’ve become accustomed to during my almost 17 years (!) of publishing Fritinancy.

This week’s new Medium story is about what I call the Festival Suffix: the -stock in Woodstock that begat Artstock, Wordstock, Winestock, Zoostock, and all the other -stocks. Lately, some festival organizers have attempted to work the same magic with the -chella of Coachella, and the Coachella festival’s organizers are not amused.

Read: Coachella, Woodstock, and the Festival Suffix (friend link)

You’ll find links to all of my Medium stories here. Some of my other recent Medium stories include:

The Second-Biggest Brand-Naming Myth

Pepsi’s Weirdest Logo (not the new one—the 2008 design)

Some of the more “experimental” pieces I’ve published include:

The Monetized Life

When I Was Anglo-Saxon

My Name and I: A Hate/Love Story

Hanging Out with the Godless (the first piece I published on Medium, back in 2018)

If you like a story, don’t forget to “clap” for it. You can clap up to 50 times per story, and every clap contributes to my monetized life.

I’m also considering other writing outlets—a Substack newsletter, maybe? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Word of the week: -ussy

There are two kinds of people: those for whom the American Dialect Society’s selection of -ussy (and the related ussification) as the 2022 word of the year comes as gratifying vindication; and those who are saying WTF? or words to that effect.

I admit it: When the vote came down—no runoff required—on the evening of January 6, 2023, I was in the latter group.

2022 was, after all, the year of Dobbs, of AI, of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, of the Chinese Olympics, of the Qatari World Cup, of a major breakthrough in fusion ignition. It was the year of the January 6 hearings, for crying out loud! The 200-odd attendees at the American Dialect Society session—a large percentage of them, if the past is any guide, linguistics graduate students or recent PhDs—mostly ignored those world-historic, linguistically productive phenomena in favor of a whimsical, Extremely Online, and slightly smutty word part.

The final ADS vote, by way of Kirby Conrod’s Twitter feed. “Rizz”—also new to me!—is a clipping of “charisma.”

 

Word of the week: Sportswashing

I first heard sportswashing in a story that aired in mid-March on NPR’s 1A program, “How Countries Use Sports to Improve Their Image.” The story provided a definition:

Sportswashing is the practice of laundering one’s reputation through sports; whether that be through team ownership, hosting a major tournament, or sponsorship. A country or politician gets involved with the hope that some of the sport’s popularity will improve their image.

Although it was unfamiliar to me, neither the word nor the practice is new. Sportswashing (or the British English variant sportwashing) was coined in 2015 by Sport for Rights, an Azerbaijani campaign to expose that country’s “attempt ‘to distract from its human rights record with prestigious sponsorship and hosting of events’, including the European Games hosted in Baku that year,” as the Oxford Words blog put it.

 

Protesters in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 2015. Image via Frontline Defenders.

 

In the seven years since, there have been plenty of other examples of sportswashing: Saudi Arabia buying the English Premier League team Newcastle United in 2021; China hosting the Winter Olympic Games in February 2022; Qatar hosting the next World Cup in November 2022. Earlier this year, American professional golfer Phil Nickelson admitted to biographer Alan Shipnuck that his association with the Saudi Golf League was “sportswashing.” (“They’re scary motherfuckers to get involved with,” Mickelson said of the Saudi regime. Perhaps he said it approvingly; who knows.) Reaching further back, NPR pointed to Adolf Hitler's reasons for hosting the 1936 Olympic games.

Word of the week: Bookchella

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, first held in 1996, returned to the USC campus last weekend after a two-year Covid hiatus. Because April 22 through 24 was also the final weekend of this year’s Coachella Music Festival, held 130 miles away in Southern California’s Colorado Desert, someone—maybe the person in charge of the Times’s Twitter feed—decided it would be cute to call the literary festival #Bookchella.

And just like that, -chella became the new -stock: a portable suffix denoting “festival.”

Except it wasn’t exactly “just like that.” And watch your back, LATFOB: the music festival in the desert has a history of refusing to give up its -chella without a legal fight.

I don’t remember anyone calling it #Bookchella in 2019, when I attended, but that already feels like 50 years ago, so who knows.

Wrecked

Or should it be rekt, as the kids spell it?

OK, that’s probably not what these companies had in mind when they chose their names. (Keep reading for alternate theories.) Still, it’s what I can’t help thinking every time I pass one of their billboards or bus advertisements, narrowly avoiding a wreck as I pause to ponder.

Word of the week: Socialite

How to succinctly describe Ghislaine Noelle Marion Maxwell, the French-born, UK–reared former associate of financier Jeffrey Epstein (1953–2019) who was convicted last week in federal court on five charges of sex trafficking and sex abuse?

Wikipedia tells us she’s a “former socialite.”

The French TV network France24 calls her a “defrocked socialite,” which evokes both priesthood and striptease. The Mirror (UK) labels her a “shamed socialite” who “faces decades behind bars,” although the accounts of Maxwell’s courtroom behavior—she declined to testify on her own behalf—suggest impassiveness or nonchalance rather than shame. San Angelo LIVE! [sic] went with “disturbed socialite.” Other media outlets were more neutral: “UK socialite,” “British socialite.” Naomi Fry, in her post-conviction analysis for the New Yorker, “The Relentless Ego of Ghislaine Maxwell,” used “socialite” three times. (She also used “sangfroid,” “hauteur,” and “Epstein’s right-hand woman.”)

So socialite it is, by consensus, and not “real estate saleswoman” or “property manager” (both of which Maxwell once was, technically speaking) or any of the other words that might be attached to her: “a fixture of society’s upper echelons,” “paramour,” “confidante,” “accomplice,” “madam” (all from the France24 story linked above).

Here is another word—old-fashioned but apt--that might suit.

“The Procuress” (1548) by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Female pimps were a popular theme in Renaissance art.

Word of the week: Pandemicide

In a February 18 opinion piece for Foreign Policy, the Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Laurie Garrett accuses former President Trump of pandemicide, a word she does not define but which in context clearly means “causing death by means of the COVID-19 pandemic.” 

 

Garrett writes:

Had I been a member of the House of Representatives during the body’s impeachment deliberations, I would have added to Trump’s indictment the crime of pandemicide, naming him as responsible for most of the COVID-19 deaths that transpired while he, the nation’s leader, was preoccupied with damning Joe Biden’s election victory. Trump’s failure to, as he vowed in his oath of office, “faithfully execute the office of president of the United States” promulgated a scale of lives lost exceeding anything experienced in the country since the Civil War, 160 years ago.

Pandemicide is a new word, although Garrett is not the first person to use it. In September 2020, David Bookbinder, a psychotherapist who lives near Boston, published an essay (also released as a free e-book) titled “Pandemicide,” in which he makes an argument similar to Garrett’s: that throughout the pandemic, “Trump & Company have encouraged the virus’s spread”:

This was not denial, not incompetence, not accidental. Not even manslaughter, because manslaughter is unpremeditated. It is pure, cold-blooded murder-by-virus.

Word of the week: Cottagecore

Around the world, clothing sales have plummeted since mid-March, when shops closed their doors to slow the spread of COVID-19 and “slob-chic” became the order of the day. According to one estimate published in early August, US apparel sales could shrink by as much as 50 percent in 2020.

There was one odd, notable exception: a frilly, glittery, hyperfeminine, wholly impractical pink dress, printed all over with red strawberries, that became “a viral sensation,” according to Glamour reporter Adrienne Matei, with sales spiking 1,000 percent between late July and mid-August. Created by a 24-year-old designer from Kosovo with the lyrical name Lirika Matoshi, “the strawberry dress,” as it became known, costs $490 and has inspired TikTok tributes, anime fan art, and, inevitably, cheap knockoffs on Amazon and Etsy. The dress is “a bright spot in a dark year,” Matei writes: a perfect representation of “one of 2020’s most popular trends: the ‘cottagecore’ aesthetic, a sweetly pastoral paean to the countryside popularized by the internet’s young romantics.”

 

Strawberry-print midi dress by Lirika Matoshi.

Corona brands: Steak-umm

Third in a series of posts about US brands that are thriving during the COVID-19 pandemic.

My previous posts in this series looked at Lysol and Zoom, brands that have filled real-world needs—for sanitizing and for video-meetings, respectively—during the pandemic. This post is about Steak-umm, a brand whose claim to pandemic fame isn’t its product—although that product has its fervent fans—but its soothing, amusing, occasionally bemusing Twitter account.

many brands haven’t meaningfully responded to this crisis due to internal bureaucracies, self-preservation, or overthinking their “image,” so by the time any message gets out it’s just a watered-down ambiguous ad that’s like “in these uncertain times we’re still here ok”

— Steak-umm (@steak_umm) April 22, 2020

 

Word of the week: Suffragist

2020 is the centennial of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibits the states and the federal government from denying women the right to vote. The amendment was finally ratified by the required 36 states—Tennessee was the final one, after a hard-fought campaign—in August 1920, 42 years after it was first introduced in Congress.

19th Amendment centennial pin via Etsy. Purple, white, and yellow were the colors of the 20th-century suffrage movement; they symbolized loyalty, purity, and hope.

 

Small groups of American women had been organizing and fighting for the right to vote since the 1830s. (Before the American Revolution, women in some colonies could vote.) In 1870, after African American men won the vote through the 15th Amendment, the word suffragist—which earlier in the century had been a generic term for any advocate for voting rights—began to be associated specifically with those who advocated for woman suffrage by peaceful, lawful means. The OED’s earliest citation for this usage, in a May 13, 1870, edition of the Boston Post, is typical of the mocking tone that would persist for decades in discussions of women’s rights: “A lady suffragist out West brands as slanderous the charge that strong-minded women have big feet.”

“Looking Backward,” an anti-suffrage illustration by Laura E. Foster. The steps lead away from love, marriage, and children and toward suffrage, strife, anxiety, and loneliness. Published in Life magazine, August 22, 1912. From the collections of the Library of Congress.