Fritinancy

April linkfest

This month I’ve been reading Stiffed: The Roots of Modern Male Rage, by Susan Faludi. Actually, I’ve been re-reading it; the book was originally published in 1999 with the subtitle The Betrayal of the American Man and was reissued in 2019 with a new author’s foreword that adds a Trump-era, #MeToo perspective. Faludi is a superb researcher, interviewer, and writer (and believe me, that’s a tough trifecta), and Stiffed—what a perfect title—holds up shockingly well. Faludi’s mid-1990s reporting took her to Vietnam veterans, diehard Cleveland Browns fans, an Alternatives to Violence group, laid-off defense workers, and meetings of Promise Keepers, a Christian men’s association. She investigates the post-World War II redefinition of masculinity as “something to drape over the body, not draw from inner resources” and to be “displayed, not demonstrated.” I couldn’t help reflecting on Stiffed when I read a recent New York Times roundtable discussion with eight men who described themselves as politically conservative and who repeatedly expressed a wistful longing for days gone by—the same days, some 25 years ago, that Faludi wrote about: a time of layoffs and gang violence and painful domestic rifts. Moral: Beware the nostalgia trap and the Golden Age fallacy; there never were any good old days, except for the ones that seemed good because you were a little kid and didn’t know any better. (You may also be interested in the letters to the editor about that roundtable discussion. I’ve unlocked both links so that nonsubscribers can access them.)

 

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Why A-list names often aren’t A+ clients. (Nora Trice for A Hundred Monkeys)

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Attention, all you skinflints frugal people! Here are some of my Visual Thesaurus columns that are now unlocked and available to non-subscribers: All about the -core suffix; my picks for brand names of the year for 2021; the lingo of film noir. Don’t you wish you’d read them earlier? You can—a subscription is just $19.95 a year! Give a gift to yourself, or to Mom for Mother’s Day!

February linkfest

After 22,000 submissions and 60,000 votes, the Minnesota Department of Transportation announced new names for six additional snowplows, including The Big Leplowski and Betty Whiteout. (Hat tip: Lynne Murphy)

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Some commentary on “Commanders,” the recently announced name of the Washington Football Team:

• “While it’s not surprising that a team in the NFL, a league that festoons itself in camouflage every November for its ‘Salute to Service’ campaign, would adopt a military-theme name, most of the American public likely identifies more with the boots on the ground than the brass giving them their marching orders.”  (James I. Bowie for Fast Company)
• “Fans will surely get used to Coms, but for most folks now that word solely means ‘communications’ (comms is commonly used in that way, particularly in the military).” (Catchword blog)

I wrote about the controversy over the team’s original name back in 2014.

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You’re already playing Wordle, right? How about Globle and Worldle, the geography guessing games? Or the Broadway word game created by Broadway World?

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The ten worst company-naming mistakes, from “imitating successful brands and following trends” to “focusing on the specifics of today rather than on your core purpose.” (Catchword blog)

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I was once a typesetter, and I still maintain an interest in typefaces, but I’d never heard of a typeface called Jim Crow. Sarah K. Kramer writes about its history and how it came to be renamed Ruby, in honor of school-desegregation pioneer Ruby Bridges. (Believer Magazine)

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“The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of Writer’s Block:”: a paper published by the Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis in 1974. (Kottke)

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“The Biden team — and the Democratic Party — could learn a lot from what Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump accomplished with their embrace of strong branding. Plainly put, it’s time for the White House to wake up. Or we are screwed.” (Julio Vincent Gambuto for Medium)

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Here’s your semi-regular reminder that you can follow me on Twitter and on Instagram, and read more of my writing on the Visual Thesaurus, the Strong Language blog, Medium, and—just once so far, but there’s more to come!—in EatDrinkFilms.

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“People sometimes poke fun at me for my unhealthy obsession with naming things: workism, hygiene theater, everything shortage. Naming things is a gimmick, and I am not strictly pro-gimmick. But I am an extreme partisan for memorable writing. I want people to read my words, and recall them, and use them, and talk about them.”: Derek Thompson’s tips for nonfiction writers. (I wrote about workism in 2019.)

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The 57 in the Heinz’s  “57 Varieties” slogan is a completely madeupical number, but it’s been a great brand-booster for more than a century. (CNN Business, via Michael F.)

A 1902 Heinz advertisement that lists far fewer than 57 varieites.

 

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Nothing to do with names or brands, but I know I’m not the only one who was strongly affected by Jennifer Senior’s story for The Atlantic about friendship. A short excerpt:

You lose friends to marriage, to parenthood, to politics—even when you share the same politics. (Political obsessions are a big, underdiscussed friendship-ender in my view, and they seem to only deepen with age.) You lose friends to success, to failure, to flukish strokes of good or ill luck. (Envy, dear God—it’s the mother of all unspeakables in a friendship, the lulu of all shames.) These life changes and upheavals don’t just consume your friends’ time and attention. They often reveal unseemly characterological truths about the people you love most, behaviors and traits you previously hadn’t imagined possible.

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Rebranding for the 13th century: Designer Ilya Stallone imagines how famous logos would have looked in the Middle Ages.  (UX Design)

Via Ilya Stallone

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How to say “mansplain” in languages other than English? Read the whole thread!

 

poll time!

which language has the best version of the verb that means: “(of a man) explain (something) to someone, typically a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending/patronising”?

(and please do reply with other variants—these are just the four I’m familiar with)

— Dan Hicks (@profdanhicks) February 7, 2022

July linkfest

This month’s book recommendation is Becoming Duchess Goldblatt, by Anonymous. Duchess Goldblatt—Her Grace or DG to her thousands of Twitter followers, myself included—has been an indelible, wholly invented presence on Twitter for some eight years. Her avatar is a 1633 portrait by Frans Hals, and her distinctive voice—firm yet loving, barmy yet authoritative, warm yet tinged with acid—has inspired endless speculation about her “real” identity. You won’t learn that secret from this memoir, but you will learn how the anonymous author (now a woman of perhaps middle age) came to create her, during a terrible period in her life during which she lost her marriage, her house, her job, and most of her friends. The Duchess became her 81-year-old alter ego: an escape from loneliness and an outlet for her considerable writing talent. The book combines memoir with selected DG tweets, and if you choose the audiobook—try your local library system—you’ll enjoy not just the primary narration by Gabra Zackman but also the wonderful actress J. Smith Cameron reading the tweets and singer/songwriter/actor Lyle Lovett reading the Lyle Lovett parts. (Lovett and Her Grace have a mutual admiration society, and if only DG would deign to follow me back on Twitter we could make it a threesome.)

 

Writers can be a lot of fun at parties, but word to the wise: Keep an eye on your good memories. They’ll strip them down for parts.

— Duchess Goldblatt (@duchessgoldblat) December 5, 2017

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Remember when the owner of that professional football team in Washington, DC, said he would NEVER change the team’s name? “Daniel Snyder surely meant NEVER to mean forever,” writes trademark lawyer Steven Baird in Duets Blog, “but in 2013, he could not have foreseen how quickly the world has changed over the last six weeks.” A thorough review of what led up to Snyder’s promised “thorough review of the offending team name.

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October linkfest

Writing a book? (Maybe during NaNoWriMo?) Meghan Daum, whose latest book The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars was published last week, has a cautionary tale for you.

Look—“outrage” is right on the cover!

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August linkfest

The Ohio State University definitely wants you to associate it with the definite article: The institution has applied for trademark protection for THE for use on shirts and hats. (h/t Alex Johnson)

Don’t look so surprised, says trademark lawyer Ed Timberlake.

In case anybody's curious:

THE

is already a registered trademark
(for cell phone battery chargers)https://t.co/ZFrC8ZUuEN#trademarks pic.twitter.com/NpmUxrq7pW

— Trademarks Are Magic (@TimberlakeLaw) August 14, 2019

Meanwhile, the University OF Michigan would also like a word. 

™ pic.twitter.com/bx2vTBUtst

— University of Michigan (@UMich) August 14, 2019

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September linkfest

Mountain Dew, the neon-yellow-green soft drink brand owned by PepsiCo, evidently failed to consult anyone in Scotland before it introduced its new ad slogan, “Epic thrills start with a chug.” If it had, it would have learned that chug is Scottish slang for masturbate. (Jelisa Castrodale for Vice, via Language Log)

 

That word: It does not mean what you think it means. Not in Scotland, anyway. (Via @jaysebro)

July linkfest

Last week wine distributor Lot18 and MGM – producer of the Hulu streaming series The Handmaid’s Tale – announced one of the more harebrained merchandising collabs of recent years: three wines named after the show’s most prominent characters, Offred, Ofglen, and Serena Joy. It went about as badly as you might expect, and within 24 hours the wines had disappeared from the Lot18 website.

 

March linkfest

“Most verbs stay basically the same in different grammatical roles. ‘Walk’ looks like ‘walks’ and ‘walked.’ But the word ‘be’ looks nothing like the word ‘am,’ which looks nothing like the word ‘were.’” (Arika Okrent for Curiosity.)

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When I wrote about mansplain, in September 2010, the earliest citation I found for the word was from an April 2009 Urban Dictionary entry. Now lexicographers at the OED have antedated mansplaining to a May 2008 comment about the TV show “Supernatural.”Katherine Connor Martin, Oxford University Press’s head of US dictionaries, says the OED usually waits a decade or so before adding new words, but makes exceptions when a word “is deemed important enough.” (Quartz)

Mansplain magazine via Matt Round

August linkfest

Years ago, I named the world’s first “bidirectional” condom, so this story really spoke to me:

Diverse & Resilient, an LGBTQ organization in Milwaukee, decided to do something about the bland branding of free condoms. So it partnered with a local marekting agency, Cramer Krasselt, to create Naughty Bags, condoms designed by teens for teens. According to Adweek, the condoms are made “to be sex-positive, humorous, and cool” and feature “witty names like Pork Parka, Pelvic Poncho, Scuba Gear, Surge Protector and—our favorite—Papa Stopper.” Brilliant – in every sense.

May linkfest

Should you spend $1.5 million on a domain? Almost certainly not. As A Hundred Monkeys puts it: “While your emotions should guide you in naming dogs, kids, and boats, they need to take a back seat while you mull over dropping seven figures on a domain.”

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An illustrated glossary of typography terms. (Hat tip: Glen Turpin.)

From Canva.

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