Fritinancy

August linkfest

I’ve been reading some excellent books—more about them soon—but right now I want to tell you about a couple of interesting podcasts for language lovers.

• Word Matters is “a show for readers, writers, and anyone who ever loved their English class”; it’s hosted by four Merriam-Webster lexicographers: Emily Brewster, Neil Serven, Ammon Shea, and Peter Sokolowski. Episodes have tackled singular kudo, the pronunciation of antennae, and everyone’s favorite bugaboo, irregardless (which is definitely “a word” even though my editing software red-squigglies it. Yes, “red-squigglies” is also a word. Because I said so, that’s why.)
• Science Diction is “a bite-sized podcast about words—and the science stories behind them,” brought to you by the folks at NPR’s “Science Friday” and hosted by Johanna Meyer. Did you know that restaurant originally meant “a medicinal soup”? Do you know “the linguistic reason why ‘Rocky Road’ sounds so dang delicious”? How about the connection between cobalt and German folklore? Lots more like that, too.

The kobold. (Source)

Silicon Valley maps

This hand-painted map from 1981 is believed to be the earliest map of Silicon Valley to highlight the region’s technology companies. It was created by Corbin Hillam, a designer and illustrator of children’s books.

 

Via the David Rumsey historical map collection

There are lots of hidden treasures in the map. (Golf! Baseball! Wineries! Skiing! Wait—skiing?) What I’m looking at, though, are the company names, which are perfectly of their era, meaning they sound like they were spit out by a room-size UNIVAC computer: Ampex, Memorex, Acuronex, Siliconix, Measurex, Litronix. (An even more famous x-suffixed company, Xerox PARC, is mysteriously missing. It was in founded in 1969 near Stanford University—PARC stands for Palo Alto Research Center—and in 1981 the company’s 8010 Star Information System became the first commercial computer that uses a mouse.) In that environment, the eponyms—Fairchild, Lockheed, Hewlett Packard before it became HP—are the standouts.

(Watch a 2019 interview with artist Corbin Hillam.) 

Over the next decade, print maps continued to be popular marketing devices for Silicon Valley tech companies—and the names on the maps continued to illustrate naming trends.

Soap

Is our modern obsession with showering just another form of hygiene theater? That’s the premise of James Hamblin’s new book Clean: The New Science of Skin, which Brooke Jarvis reviews in the August 3 & 10 issue of the New Yorker. (In May, the New Yorker published Jarvis’s wonderful piece about eels. No matter what you think you think, or don’t think, about eels, you should read that piece.)

James Hamblin stopped showering five years ago (he still washes his hands, you’ll be glad to know), and is doubtful, Jarvis writes, “about all the scrubbing and soaping—not to mention moisturizing and deodorizing and serum-and-acid application—to which we subject the rest of our body’s largest organ, and about the companies that spend a lot of money to convince us that we must do so to be clean.”

It’s those companies, and their massive marketing budgets, that interest me.

Links for shut-ins

Here in California, we’re closing in on four weeks of shelter-in-place. Cancellations and closures began even earlier. I’d had tickets to the International Ocean Film Festival, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the San Francisco International Film Festival, the San Francisco Ballet’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and Loot at the Aurora Theatre—all canceled. (The silent film festival will take place in November instead of April.) I’d signed up for a class on the musical-theater genius Stephen Sondheim (happy 90th birthday, Mr. S.!): canceled.

And work? Clients went dark. They’re struggling, too.

We’re all coping in different ways. Here are some of things I’m finding helpful.

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.)

 

Every. Thing.

Books and podcasts that focus on one thing are so early-21st-century. In 2020 the way to grab eyes and ears is by promising every. damn. thing.

Here’s a long list that undoubtedly doesn’t include everything.

Huge

The title of Diane Ravitch’s new book about American schools, Slaying Goliath, struck me right between the eyes. Hadn’t I seen something like it very recently?

 

 

January linkfest

I’ll get to the regularly scheduled links in a bit, but I wanted to lead off with some recommendations from my 2019 media diet (a term I’ve borrowed from Jason Kottke, whose blog always makes for tasty consumption).

All over the place

I suppose it was inevitable that the 2018 post-apocalyptic horror film A Quiet Place, which was shot on a relatively small budget and subsequently made a boatload of money, would require a sequel. And so it has come to pass that A Quiet Place Part II will open in theaters in March. (Tiny spoiler: There’s more out there than the noise-hating creatures.)

As I watched the trailer I started thinking about (a) the unimaginativeness of the title, which suggests an unimaginative sequel; and (b) how popular the word place is in movie and television titles. And it isn’t just a recent fad: the trend goes back decades.

Words of the decade 2010–2019: Fritinancy edition

In a few weeks, members of the American Dialect Society (and of the word-loving public) will gather in New Orleans and vote on the words of the year and the decade. Ten years ago, the American Dialect Society picked google as its overall winner; my own list back then included blog, Ground Zero, terrorism, and PTSD.

New decade, new list. As before, I’m following ADS criteria. To qualify for my list, a word must be:

• demonstrably new or newly popular in the decade in question
• widely and/or prominently used in the decade in question
• indicative or reflective of the popular discourse
• not a peeve or a complaint about overuse or misuse

I confess a bias toward my interests in technology, business, and social media (just as the ADS has a bias toward words of specifically linguistic interest).

I welcome your own nominations in the comments. You can also submit words of the year and decade to ADS: woty@americandialect.org.

As for WOTY, I’ll post my own nominations soon—see last year’s list here—and have already posted my choices for brand names of the decade.