Fritinancy

On the Visual Thesaurus: Gun idioms

Guns, as we know, are pervasive in American culture. Unsurprisingly, they also pervade our everyday language. For my July Visual Thesaurus column—my parting shot, so to speak, after 16 years—I explore some of the idioms and metaphors borrowed from firearms, from riding shotgun to bullet train to firing line.

As always, full access is limited to subscribers for three months. Here’s a free sample, and keep reading for an explanation of why this is my parting shot:

Trigger

Following the June 24, 2022, US Supreme Court decision overturning federal abortion protections, some American states implemented trigger laws that limited or banned abortion within their jurisdictions. A trigger law is unenforceable when it’s passed, becoming enforceable only after one legal factor is changed, “triggering” the law’s implementation. A trigger warning is a statement that alerts a reader or viewer to the presence of content that may “trigger” distress; the term’s first published use, according to the OED, was in the title of a September 1993 Usenet group post: “possible movie trigger warning.” Trigger finger is a nickname for a medical condition in which a finger (or, frequently, thumb) becomes stuck in a bent position as though it were pulling on a gun’s trigger. The condition, also known as stenosing tenosynovitis, is caused by inflammation around the tendon in the affected finger.

Read the rest of Shoot! How Gun Idioms Color Our Speech.

Blog bonus!

Guns and gun-related lingo are also popular in branding. (In the column, I cover Quaker cereals’ long-running “shot from guns” ad campaign.) Here are a few examples of brand names borrowed from firearms:

On the Visual Thesaurus: Locker-room talk

For my June Visual Thesaurus column, “Clean Language,” I take a deep dive into three familiar words—words I see regularly in the Dolphin Club locker room, where I spend time before and after swimming in San Francisco Bay. The three words are TOILET, SHOWER, and SAUNA, and they tell interesting (even surprising) stories about the history of the English language.

Full access to the column is paywalled for three months. Here’s an excerpt:

On the Visual Thesaurus: Understanding 'Maven'

How did a Yiddish noun with Hebrew roots and a sardonic connotation become a popular brand name, a scientific backronym, and even a baby name?

That’s the question I address in “Understanding Maven,” my May column for the Visual Thesaurus. I trace the spread of maven in mainstream culture back to a regional ad campaign in the 1960s and to two widely read journalists, William Safire and Malcolm Gladwell. As for the “Maven” baby name, it seems to be an extension of the Irish girl’s name Maeve—even though “Maven” is a masculine noun in Yiddish.

Access to the column is paywalled for three months; here’s an excerpt:

Maven’s real tipping point was … well, The Tipping Point, the 2000 book by Malcolm Gladwell that asserted that “ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do.” Long before “influencer” became a job description, Gladwell divided influential people into three groups: connectors, salesmen, and—you guessed it—mavens. Mavens, Gladwell wrote, “are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know”:

The critical thing about Mavens is that they aren’t passive collectors of information. It isn’t just that they are obsessed with how to get the best deal on a can of coffee. What sets them apart is that once they figure out how to get that deal, they want to tell you about it too. 

The Tipping Point became a best-seller and a favored reference in leadership seminars and marketing courses. It also enhanced our vocabulary. Not only did it make “tipping point”—a term used mostly by scientists beginning in the late 1950s—a household phrase, it educated thousands of readers about maven. Many of those readers went on to start companies that they named “Maven,” often explicitly acknowledging their debt to Gladwell and The Tipping Point.

Read the rest of the column.

UPDATE, May 27: The software company Mavenlink, which I mention in the Visual Thesaurus story, has been renamed Kantata following a merger. According to the press release, the new name “was inspired by ‘cantata’ – a classical music composition that intricately and beautifully combines multiple voice and instrumentation elements. This style of classical music is a metaphor for the collaborative creation that is the foundation of all successful professional services organizations.” 

On the Visual Thesaurus: Street names

William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, introduced the numbered street grid and the custom of naming streets after “things that Spontaneously Grow in the Country.” (Which explains why there are so many Chestnut Streets in the U.S.) San Francisco has eleven sets of alphabetically named streets (Anza, Balboa, Cabrillo…). Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, cities around the world renamed streets to honor Ukrainian independence—and not just any streets, but the ones on which Russian embassies are situated.

For my April Visual Thesaurus column, “Street Smarts,” I take a tour of street-name lore like this, with a tip of the hat to Deirdre Mask’s fascinating The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power. Full access is paywalled for three months; here’s a sample:

“Modern street names do more than describe; they commemorate,” Mask observes. Mexico has more than 500 streets named for the peasant-revolution leader Emiliano Zapata; the capital has a major thoroughfare named 16 de septiembre, the date marking Mexico’s independence from Spain. After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, it took the Dutch city of Haarlem only a week to name a street after him. (It took MLK’s birthplace, Atlanta, eight years.) Today nearly 900 streets are named for King in the U.S.; still more can be found as far away as France, South Africa, and Israel.

Read the rest of the column.

On the Visual Thesaurus: The tales behind the Best Picture titles

For my March column for the Visual Thesaurus I take a look at the titles of this year’s Best Picture nominees, each of which represents a distinct style, from acronym to slogan to Biblical quote.

Full access to the column is paywalled for three months. Here’s an excerpt:

 

On the Visual Thesaurus: Talkin' Vegan

The “plant-based food industry,” which makes alternatives to meat and dairy products, is thriving and growing: The U.S. market was valued at $7 billion in 2021, and is expected to grow another 50 percent by 2027. That means lots of competition for product names as well as for shelf space. How can brands tell customers what their products are—and, more to the point, aren’t?

That’s the subject of “The Vegan Versions,” my February column for the Visual Thesaurus. As usual, the column is paywalled for three months. (Please subscribe!) Here’s a free and animal-free taste of one branding strategy: 

On the Visual Thesaurus: The -core corps

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at the increasingly common -core suffix, which has evolved from descriptions of music and pornography to what’s being termed “aesthetics”: personal style choices, from adventurecore to zombiecore.

Full access to the column is paywalled for three months; here’s a sample.

It was music that pushed -core into new directions. In their “Among the New Words” column in the Summer 2012 issue of American Speech, Ben Zimmer and Charles Carson traced this evolution back to speedcore, which first appeared in 1985. (It refers to hardcore rock music played aggressively at a fast tempo.) They identified a clutch of other musical -cores, including sad core, noise core, deathcore, and nerdcore. In his March 2012 keynote address at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, Bruce Springsteen wondered aloud at some of these offshoots: “Huh? I just want to know what Nintendo core is, myself.” (Wikipedia has the answer: “a broadly defined style of rock music that most commonly fuses chiptune and video game music with hardcore punk and/or heavy metal.”) The -core suffix “became a way to assign authenticity to a host of new musical genres from rock to dance music to hip-hop,” wrote Britt Peterson in a 2015 Washingtonian article headlined “-Core Is the Suffix of Our Time.” But, Peterson added, “as we discovered grindcore, thrashcore, skacore, breakcore, raggacore, crunkcore, and so on, ‘-core’ lost its hardness—and, in its ubiquity, became a pop-culture wink.”

Read the rest of the column to learn about the vast -core catalog at Aesthetics Wiki. And more!

Zombiecore: “an aesthetic based on the feeling, sensation, and visuals of being a zombie or surviving a zombie apocalypse.” Definition and image via Aesthetics Wiki.

Blog bonuses! I’ve written previously about mumblecore (2007), couplecore (2009), lardcore (2010), mid-core (2013), normcore (2014), and cottagecore (2020). And here’s a new one, via the Guardian: dystopia-core, “which is in direct opposition to ‘dopamine dressing’ – wearing overtly fun clothes to help lift your mood – can be seen as the next step of the grunge and goth revivals.” When the New York Times spotted the proto-trend back in 2018 B.C. (Before Covid), the editors dubbed it “war-core.”

Has -core jumped the shark? At least one person thinks so.

Stop suffixing thinks with -punk and -core, you fucking creepy assed normies with your shitty taste.

— Nolan Void (@HitlerPuncher) January 16, 2022

(Thinks or things? Unclear.)

On the Visual Thesaurus: Brand names of the year for 2021

My annual list of brand names that stood out in 2021 is now live on the Visual Thesaurus. To read the column you’ll have to subscribe—or wait for the three-month paywall to lift and risk being way behind the times.

There’s a little bit of overlap with my Words of the Year list, published yesterday, but plenty of new stuff, too. Here’s a free excerpt from the Entertainment section:

Games were on our minds in 2021. In January, a struggling chain of brick-and-mortar video-game stores called GameStop became famous when a group of mischievous day traders, noticing that big Wall Street hedge funds had shorted the chain’s stock, began buying it and driving up its price, from $4 a share to $150. Even Tesla CEO Elon Musk got in on the fun, punnily tweeting about “Gamestonk.”  (What’s a stonk? Read my explanation.)

A grimmer game caught our attention in November, when Netflix debuted the dystopian Korean drama series “Squid Game.” The title refers to a real-life children’s game popular in South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, in which the playing field resembles the body of a squid. By November, the show had become the streaming network’s most-watched series. The Korean title, “Ojing-eo Geim,” imports geim directly from English; the Japanese translation, Ika gēmu—a candidate for Japanese word of the year for 2021—also borrows the English word.

Read the rest of the column!

On the Visual Thesaurus: The lingo of film noir

For my latest Visual Thesaurus column I’m celebrating Noirvember—the monthlong tribute to film noir—with a lineup of classic noir slang.

The column is paywalled for three months; here’s an excerpt:

On the Visual Thesaurus: Where Do Place Names Come From?

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus is dated October 14 but in fact was published today, October 21. (Long story short: staffing issues.) It’s on a subject I’ve been researching for a while: the origins of place names. Full access to the column is restricted for three months to subscribers; here’s an excerpt:

The influence of commerce on place naming goes back at least to the 19th century. Company towns, where a single business is the main or sole employer, were often named for their benefactors: Fordlandia in Brazil, Grand-Hornu in Belgium, Manville in New Jersey. In 1845, the chief engineer of the Georgia Railroad, J. Edgar Thomson, took it upon himself to rename a tiny hamlet in northern Georgia that had been known first as simply Terminus and then as Marthasville, after the daughter of an ex-governor. “Certain ungallant railroad men,” wrote George R. Stewart in Names on the Land (1945), “looked upon Marthasville as a namby-pamby name for a place which was undoubtedly to become a great center.” Thomson had a better idea: “Atlanta, the terminus of the Western & Atlantic Railroad. Atlantic, masculine; Atlanta, feminine—a coined word—and if you think it will suit, adapt it.” They did.

Read the rest of the column, which includes the origin stories of Novi, Michigan; Truth or Consequences, New Mexico; and Selmer, Tennessee, among other colorful places.

And in case you missed it, here’s a story I wrote last month for Medium about the decision to change the name of the Squaw Valley Ski Resort—and other “squaw” names on the map.