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: Meteotsunami

It’s always something here on the West Coast, isn’t it? If it isn’t wildfires—thankfully not a major problem last year—it’s flooding, if it isn’t flooding it’s earthquakes, and if it isn’t earthquakes it’s … a volcanic eruption? Not here, but close enough—5,300 miles away, off the coast of Tonga, one mile below the ocean surface. It was massive enough to trigger tsunami advisories throughout coastal California and to cause surges in places like Santa Cruz and Pacifica.

 

 

One of many permanent tsunami signs in San Francisco.

On the extremely micro level, that meant canceling my scheduled swim in San Francisco Bay. Not that I’m complaining: I may be crazy to swim in 51°F water, but at least I’m not the sort of idiot who thinks, “Oooh, a tsunami! Surf’s up!”

Stuck on high ground, I did some research into the language of tsunamis, and soon discovered the word of the week, meteotsunami, which was new to me. More about this word a little later. First, though, about tsunami. The word is, of course, borrowed from Japanese; its deceptively mild literal meaning is “harbor waves.” I learned from the OED that the transliterated word first appeared in an English-language text in 1897, in a collection of stories by Lafcadio Hearn titled Gleanings in Buddha-Fields: “‘Tsunami!’ shrieked the people; and then all shrieks and all sounds and all power to hear sounds were annihilated by a nameless shock … as the colossal swell smote the shore with a weight that sent a shudder through the hills.”

Word of the week: Cone of uncertainty

The science of predicting tropical storms and hurricanes has improved greatly in recent years, but it still isn’t exact. That’s why storm maps show not a straight-line path of a hurricane’s progress but a tadpole-shaped “cone of uncertainty.” The area inside the cone is the danger zone, and the size of each circle within it “is set so that two-thirds of historical official forecast errors over a 5-year sample fall within the circle,” according to a National Hurricane Center explanation.

The cone of uncertainty was in the news last week as Hurricane Dorian, a Category 5 storm, bore down on the southeastern United States after devastating the Bahamas. On September 1, President Trump tweeted that “in addition to Florida - South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.” Whoops. Alabama had never been included in the forecast, or positioned within many miles of the cone of uncertainty. Trump apparently invented the “prediction.”

The National Weather Service in Birmingham, Alabama, immediately reassured Alabamians that their state would “NOT see any impacts from #Dorian.” The NWS, as its name indicates, is an agency of the federal government. Nevertheless, Trump would not be contradicted. In a move that could have been dictated by Stalin, or Orwell, he made up his own alternative weather facts, and a map to support them.

 

On September 4, President Trump displayed a doctored National Hurricane Center map dated August 29 that depicts Hurricane Dorian’s cone of uncertainty along with a bulbous black-outlined annex of uncertain origin and dubious credibility. Source: Politico

Words of the year 2018: Fritinancy edition

It’s time to say good riddance to 2018 and to play #WOTY, the word-nerd’s favorite game. The score so far: Dictionary.com has chosen misinformation as its word of the year, with representation, self-made, and backlash) as runners-up; Oxford Dictionaries chose toxic (from a shortlist that included eight other words, one of them a former Fritinancy word of the week, gammon); Collins Dictionary selected single-use (runners-up: VAR, floss, and plogging); and Fresh Air language maven Geoff Nunberg picked nationalist. The Emmett Lee Dickinson Museum, an anonymous internet-based project, has been counting down the month of December with a daily WOTY; contenders so far have included thoughts and prayers, amorality, and, yes, flossing. (It’s a dance, in case you hadn’t known.) UPDATE: Mike Pope has posted his own very comprehensive list, which includes donugs, testilying, and TEDsplaining.

Here are my own candidates for #WOTY18, in alphabetical order.

On the Visual Thesaurus: Speaking of fire

By the time you read this, California may finally be getting some long-overdue rain – and some desperately needed clearing of the wildfire smoke that has been suffocating us for almost two weeks.

 

It’s been bad, but not as bad as in Butte County, where the Camp Fire is still not fully contained. Bay Area air-quality map via PurpleAir, November 19, 2018

 

For my latest Visual Thesaurus column I looked at how we talk about wildfires. (It’s a subject I’ve explored now and then here on the blog.) Full access is restricted to subscribers; (No longer paywalled!) Here’s an excerpt.

The November fires were caused in part by a drought so severe that it merits its own name: negative rain. “Every year we have a certain amount of rain that we expect as a result of historical patterns,” Andy Wood, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told The Daily Beast. “Negative precipitation [comes] when you have a departure from that.” When there isn’t enough rain, the air gets “thirsty” because it can’t pull enough moisture from the ground. A new tool developed by NOAA, the Evaporative Demand Drought Index, or EDDI, measures this “thirst.” It’s being used by farmers and ranchers in the West, and has also come up in analyses of the California fires.

 

 

Read the rest of the column.

Blog bonus: The Camp Fire has virtually leveled Paradise, a once-lovely city of nearly 27,000 in Butte County, northeast of Sacramento. It’s a pretty memorable name, not least for its irony. But Donald Trump got the name wrong – not once but twice.

 

'Pleasure, what a name': Donald Trump confuses wildfire-hit California town Paradise pic.twitter.com/Lt5cGZaUdy

— The Independent (@Independent) November 19, 2018

What's interesting to me is not that Trump sometimes misspeaks but how he reacts when he realizes. Rather than apologize, he'll always say "or (the correct word)," as if it's a subjective choice between the correct word and the equally valid word he used. https://t.co/4QFhIEGbJZ

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) November 19, 2018

UPDATE: The Baffler has a good story about the political and economic context for the fires, with a focus on the role played by the regional utility company Pacific Gas & Electric: “Despite the overwhelming evidence that PG&E has been responsible for some of California’s most grievous man-made disasters, time and time again, their executives have avoided substantive punishment in lieu of multimillion-dollar payouts to victims who have brought class-action lawsuits.”

November linkfest

This month we give thanks for WOTY, dictionaries, diet jargon, naming advice, and more.

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Word-of-the-year season kicks off in traditional fashion with the Oxford Dictionaries selection. This year it’s toxic, as in toxic masculinity and toxic chemical. Interestingly, toxic derives from the Greek term for word for “poisoned arrow,” but only the “arrow” part. Toxic won out over other words on the shortlist, including incel, gaslighting, big dick energy, and gammon, the last of which was a Fritinancy word of the week in May. Oxford’s word of the year is “a word of expression that is judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year, and have lasting potential as a term of cultural significance.” Read more.

 

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Big dict energy: The stupendously useful Green’s Dictionary of Slang – which was published in three volumes in the UK in 2010 and which moved online in 2016 – is now free to all users. Read more in Ben Yagoda’s post on Lingua Franca, and follow Jonathon Green on Twitter.

 

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This tweet is good, and the thread that follows (click on the date stamp) is even better.

Trump cereals:
- Total Witch Hunt
- Golden Shower Grahams
- Leerios
- ICE Krispies
- Porn Flakes
- Racism Bran
- Special KKK
- Your Votes Don’t Count Chocula
- Honeycombover

— The Volatile Mermaid (@OhNoSheTwitnt) November 15, 2018

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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

Names of the year 2017

On January 5, at its annual meeting in Salt Lake City, the American Name Society will select its names of the year for 2017. Names of the year are those “that best illustrate, through their creation and/or use during the past 12 months, important trends in the culture of the United States and Canada.” I won’t be attending this year, but I’ve made my own list and checked it at least twice. Feel like playing? I invite you to submit your own nominations in the four official categories.

September linkfest

“What linguists sometimes call ‘genericisation’ of brand names has a grimmer name among marketing types: “genericide”. The Economist’s Johnson on google, photoshop, xerox, and other examples of brand genericization.

 

A trademark-defense ad from Xerox, 2011. Yes, “zipper” used to be a trademark-protected brand name. Source.

 

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Related: The lawyers at Velcro® want you to know – in full-throated song – that the competitors’ product is properly called hook and loop tape. (Thanks, David!)

Word of the week: Asperitas

Asperitas: A cloud formation “made up of well-defined, wavelike structures in the underside of the cloud, more chaotic and with less horizontal organization than undulatus. It is characterised by localized waves in the cloud base, either smooth or dappled with smaller features, sometimes descending into sharp points, as if viewing a roughened sea surface from below. Varying levels of illumination and thickness of cloud can lead to dramatic visual effects. (Source: World Meteorological Organization.) Asperitas is a Latin word meaning “roughness” or “harshness”; the root is the source of asperity (harshness) and exasperate (to irritate or provoke).

 

Asperitas formation over Mesa, Arizona. Photograph via Cloud Appreciation Society.