Fritinancy

July linkfest

Lots of news about Twitter this month; if you don’t care or are already saturated, feel free to scroll down to my Twitterless content.

The bluf: Twitter’s dark overlord, Elon Musk, announced on Saturday, July 23, that “soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” And lo, by the following day the Twitter logo and name—but not the word “tweet”—had disappeared from the platform, replaced by a grim, spindly “X,” Musk’s favorite letter. (In 2000, he wanted to rebrand PayPal as X. He was ousted as CEO, but bought back X.com and went on to found SpaceX, name the Tesla Model X, and sire a child named, alas, Æ A-Xii.)

It’s not quite the end of Twitter, but it sure ain’t what it used to be. I wrote for Medium about what I’ll miss—and am already missing—about Twitter, which I started using in 2008, a lifetime ago.

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Word of the week: Pink

When I Googled “Barbie movie” yesterday, my screen blushed pink, with the Google wordmark standing out in darker pink.

 

Thanks to the movie-based-on-a-doll that opened last weekend, pink is the unofficial color of the year. It’s there in the bubble-gum-hued capital B on the movie poster.

It’s even the title of Lizzo’s contribution to the soundtrack.

“When I wake up in my own pink world / I get up outta bed and wave to my homegirls…”

 

I haven’t yet seen the film, but I’ve read thousands of words about it—enough to know that pink is its “signature vibrant aesthetic,” as Scientific American put it. (SciAm was interested in the psychological angle. “If Barbie was exposed to a single color her whole life, she wouldn’t necessarily register the world as pink but would instead likely see it as gray or neutral,” the magazine reported.)

I did my own research into pink and came up with these findings:

June linkfest

A quick audiobook recommendation: I thoroughly enjoyed So Many Steves: Afternoons with Steve Martin, a series of conversations between Martin and his longtime friend the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. (Gopnik is everywhere, isn’t he? He was also “in conversation with” the fictional Lydia Tár in last year’s Tár.) Martin, who will turn 78 in August, has spent more than 60 years plying his various trades: magician, musician, comedian, actor, novelist, librettist. Gopnik elicits charming stories and surprising revelations, and gently nudges Martin toward a discussion of craft and motivation. The book—audio only, with some delightful banjo music—is available from Pushkin Industries and the usual online merchants. Or, if your public library supports the Libby app, you can borrow it free for three weeks. (By the way, the title is a twist on the E.E. Cummings poem “So Many Selves.” Martin is a big fan of Cummings, it turns out.)

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Word of the week: Fig

This post was going to be a short riff on a line in that Inauguration poem by Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman—the line about the vine and the fig tree, which got me thinking about figs. Mmmm, figs. But one fig led to another, and next thing you know I was way down a figgy rabbit hole from which there was no escape. Go figure.

Word of the week: Fidget

The fidget spinner – a handheld, two- or three-pronged gadget with a ball bearing in its center that makes the prongs go around very fast – is this year’s toy fad, popular with school-age kids and sometimes touted as a stress reliever for people of all ages. Versions are available for as little as $1, or you can spring for this $24.95 Triune Spinner, which is said to have “a high-speed Si3N4 Hybrid Ceramic Bearing that provides fast smooth easy fidgeting and long spin times that will impress your friends.”

 

Triune Spinner via Amazon.

 

There’s even a two-pronged spinner called the Torqbar that will set you back as much as $200, not including the fancy leather carrying case.

Accounts of the fidget spinner’s invention vary as widely as the spinners themselves. But how about the word fidget – what does it mean, and where does it come from?

October linkfest

The origins of cinema terms like blockbuster, cliffhanger, and McGuffin. (Oxford Dictionaries blog)

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Test your knowledge of advertising slogans. (Mental Floss)

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The return of Spy magazine – the great satirical publication of the 1980s and 1990s – as an Esquire pop-up, and not a moment too soon.

 

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After the second presidential debate on October 9:

"Unproud," top lookup @MerriamWebster, goes back to 1500s, but has never before been applied to Twitter follower counts. #makinghistory

— Kory Stamper (@KoryStamper) October 10, 2016

 

Naming a company? Don’t worry about snagging a dot-com domain. (A Hundred Monkeys)

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What if you lose the right to your company name … and the name is your own? When it happened to fashion designer Kate Spade, she changed not only the brand name but her own. (The Fashion Law, via Catchword)

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“What it is about the name ‘Trump’ that sells, and would it sell if it were changed a bit” – to, say, “Thwimp”? (Sound symbolism from linguist George Lakoff for Alternet)

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Meflection, merkining, cookie-grubbing, and other neologisms for the Trumpian Era. (Lili Loofbourow for The Week)

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The strange case – as in legal case – of the Hasbro toy hamster named Harris Faulkner and the Fox News anchor named Harris Faulkner: “either a really weird coincidence or some very niche cross-marketing on Hasbro’s part.” (Consumerist)

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Green’s Dictionary of Slang – “quite simply the best historical dictionary of English slang there is, ever has been […] or is ever likely to be” – is at last online. You can browse headwords gratis; full access is an exceptionally reasonable $60 a year. Read Ben Zimmer’s post for Language Log; read Stan Carey’s review.

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I love the OED entry for owsell. How did such a useful word become obsolete? pic.twitter.com/1VeSIXA3es

— Simon Horobin (@SCPHorobin) October 7, 2016

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Sixteen “amazing” beer names from the 2016 Great American Beer Festival, as ranked by Porch Drinking (not to be confused with the Porch of the item below). (Via @OurBoldHero)

 

Trump Hands IPA from Cannonball Creek Brewing Company: “light bodied and finishes dry with a moderate hops bitterness.”

 

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British swear words ranked in order of offensiveness. (The Independent)

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Thirteen Seattle entrepreneurs tell the stories behind their brand names, including Tune, Socrata, and Porch. (Geekwire)

 

Worth Your Support

I’m supporting these worthy endeavors and encourage you to join me:

1. Schwa Fire is a new digital publication “that will marry language geekery with long-form journalism,” according to its founder, the journalist, linguist, and author Michael Erard. (I wrote about Michael’s first book, Um…, in 2007.) Here’s how he describes the project:

I’ve been saying that Schwa Fire is going to be like This American Life, but for language. We’ll look at life through a linguistic lens, and look at lives and circumstances in the language world.

Stories will be relevant to the times and accountable to the facts, and you won’t have to become a linguist to understand them. We don’t profess; we inquire. We’ll commission pieces from people who know both story-telling and language because they've been involved in both for years. This expertise will allow them to dive into the language-related implications of a story while keeping readers asking “What happened next?”

Yes, Schwa Fire will pay its contributors! Hurrah!

Michael is raising money for the first issues via Kickstarter, and he’s off to a promising start. You can learn more and chip in as much as you’d like on the Kickstarter page.

Why “Schwa Fire”? Michael Erard explains: “Because everybody likes to say ‘schwa’ (which, by the way, is the name of a mid-central vowel that’s usually not stressed in English)” and because “if you’re reading Schwa Fire, it’s because you love all aspects of speech, language, and communication. ‘Fire’ points to passion and enthusiasm.”

2. Word Detective is one of the longest running (since 1995!) and most enjoyable online sources of information about words and language. Check out, for example, this recent post about Formica, a brand name that has nothing to do with ants or Ender’s Game. Evan Morris, the sole author of Word Detective (and author of an excellent little book about brand names, From Altoids to Zima), has kept up his monthly publication schedule despite being diagnosed about seven years ago with primary progressive multiple sclerosis ... and despite the loss of revenue from newspapers and magazines that no longer pay their contributors. (Unlike Schwa Fire!)

Long story short: If you value solid research and witty writing about words and language, how about subscribing or donating to Word Detective? It’ll help a lot, and it’s the right thing to do.

3. GoldieBlox is an Oakland toy company with a twist: Its founder and CEO, Debbie Sterling, is an engineer who wants more girls to get excited about math and engineering. So she set about “disrupting the pink aisle”—all those princess dolls and costumes in the toy store—with her clever and appealing construction sets for girls. “We don’t have a national shortage of princesses,” Debbie Sterling points out, “but we do have a national shortage of engineers.”

Here’s the best part: GoldieBlox is one of four finalists in Intuit’s “Small Business Big Game” contest, which will award a free ad during the 2014 Super Bowl* broadcast (worth something like $4 million) to the winner. The other contenders—a Minnesota egg business, a North Carolina dog-treat company, and a business in Idaho that makes “natural dairy compost”—are all worthy in their own ways, I’m sure. But GoldieBlox gets my vote because it’s local, it’s educational, and it supports girls. Not for nothing, I love the GoldieBlox name.

You can vote once a day through midnight (PST) December 1. Go GoldieBlox!

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* Yes, “Big Game” is what Intuit is calling it, because the NFL is a trademark bully. Well, fie on them. In my neighborhood “Big Game” means only one thing: the Cal-Stanford matchup.

June Linkfest

The headline calls them “30 Most Overused Buzzwords in Digital Marketing,” but one of them, “P-commerce” (“participatory commerce” or “Pinterest commerce,” depending, I suppose, on context), is underused in my world: it was new to me. I’ve definitely seen a lot of “gamification,” though.

Full Dilbert comic here.

“I’m sorry to say that gamification (a verbing in -ify from the noun game) is not some twisted invention of Scott Adams’s,” linguist Arnold Zwicky wrote in a May 20 post on his blog. Zwicky devoted most of his post to a discussion of “garbage,” and concluded: “So the pointy-headed boss’s gamification rewards count as garbage, trash, and rubbish, maybe junk as well, and are on their way to becoming waste and refuse.”

One of the words on the “30 most overused” list, “showrooming,” was a Fritinancy word of the week in April 2012.

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If you live in the United States, there’s an excellent chance you live in Emmaland or Sophialand.

I remember when all women named Sophia were about 90 years old, like Dorothy’s mother on “Golden Girls.” And in a few decades, it shall once again come to pass.

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Prosecutor, Lariat, Ranger, Roundup: What are all those macho herbicide names telling us?

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“The Art of the Brick,” Edward Sawaya’s new exhibit at Discovery Times Square, is “a Legoistic survey of art masterpieces,” according to a recent New York Times review that introduced me to the acronym AFOL: Adult Fan of Lego. AFOL and many other Lego terms – but not “Legoistic,” which is wonderful – are defined in the Lego Glossary. (“SNOT: Studs Not On Top. A building technique that places LEGO elements on their sides or even upside down to achieve the shape or structure the builder wants in their creation.”)

“Lego,” in case you didn’t know, is a contraction of Danish leg godt: “play well.” It’s never pluralized. Here’s the Lego Glossary entry for “Legos”:

Oh no you didn’t! Technically, the official plural form for more than one element of LEGO is “LEGO® brand building bricks”. That’s ridiculous, though, so most LEGO fans refer to one or more bricks as “LEGO”, following the grammatical convention of “fish” and “sheep.”

Insisting on all capitals, however, is just silly.

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Linguist Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages, looks at 12 old words – kith, wend and eke among them -- that have survived by being fossilized in idioms.

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After 60 years of sanctions, Coca-Cola is back in Myanmar (Burma). How to sell Coke to people who’ve never tasted it? “They had to keep it simple, and they had to find the right message. A message, it turns out, that was hidden more than a hundred years back in the Coca-Cola archives.”

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“Dear NSA: Those slides are hideous.” Designer Emiland De Cubber suggests a radical remake for that PRISM presentation.

Mister, Mister, Mister

It’s time once again for a round of mister-y brand names!

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Mr. Tomato Bloody Mary mix (“the mix with an attitude”) is distributed by Crosby Lake Spirits Company.

I haven’t been able to enlarge the mascot sufficiently to tell whether it’s a smirking tomato or a sneering pepper.

Hat tip to Jessica Stone Levy, who blogged recently about another brand from Crosby Lake Spirits: Kinky Liqueur. (“To enter this site you must be of legal drinking age. And irresistibly fabulous.”)

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No cutesy mascot or winking copy for Mr.Beer (spacing sic). No About Us or FAQ, either. Just kits and gear for the home-brewing aficionado, who – if the community forum is an accurate guide – is likely to answer to “mister” himself.

Mr.Beer was acquired last April by 150-year-old Coopers Brewery, Australia’s largest brewery and the world’s largest maker of home-brew beer.

(Via MJF.)

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If you like your upcycled products with a Scandinavian aesthetic and a dash of cuuuute, you’ll love mr Tedi. If you care about writing and editing ... not so much.

Available for $80 each on Etsy.

Charming design. Lovely photography. But those words are spelled “whether” and “lovable” (or “re-lovable”) …

mr Tedi (capitalization and punctuation sic) is made by a company called mrs [sic] Jermyn. The company’s founder, Annika, is from Finland but now lives in Brooklyn; perhaps she wrote her own copy and isn’t 100 percent fluent in English, but that doesn’t explain the failure to hire a proofreader. (Penny wise, Euro foolish.) And it definitely doesn’t excuse the biggest error of all: misspelling your own company’s name:

Here’s my standard rant: Polishing your copy is not optional. Language is every bit as much a part of your brand identity as your name, your logo, your website, and your product design. Carelessly written, unedited copy tells me you’re not serious about your professional image.

Betty James, 1918-2008

In 1943, when her husband Richard asked her to name a toy he'd created from a piece of coiled metal, Betty James consulted a dictionary and discovered slinky, which means sleek and sinuous. Twenty-seven years later, after the Slinky toy had become a nationwide success, Richard James abandoned his family to join a religious cult in Bolivia. Left with six young children and "a business in shambles," according to her obituary in the Los Angeles Times, Betty James mortgaged her house and gambled everything she had to attend a toy show in New York in 1963. When orders began pouring in, she moved the James Industries factory to Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, near her Altoona home, and guided the company until she retired in 1998. Upon retiring she sold James Industries to Michigan-based Poof Products.

Betty James died in Philadelphia last Thursday at age 90.

The Slinky was named the Official State Toy of Pennsylvania in 2001. Last year, Wired Magazine named the Slinky toy No. 1 on its list of "10 Things We Love": "One patent, a 400-unit debut in a Philadelphia department store, and 300 million toys later, we still can't take our hands off the awesomely simple, mesmerizing little benders."

According to this Wikipedia article, "one or more Slinkys used together can form the basis of a shortwave radio antenna." The Slinky can also be used as a solenoid to induce a magnetic field.

Watch a Slinky TV commercial from the 1960s and sing along (EARWORM ALERT):

Who walks the stair without a care/and makes the happiest sound? /Bounce up and down, just like a clown/ Everyone knows it's Slinky!

(Hat tip: Judith K.) 

UPDATE: And speaking of walking the stair (CAT VIDEO ALERT).