Solstice greetings to all! Here’s a sampling of my recently published writing:
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Names of the year for 2024 (Moo Deng, Shohei Ohtani, Piper, and more)
Words of the year for 2024 (BlueAnon, snoafer, X-odus, and more)
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A few additional words of interest:
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When the artisan is artificial (Medium gift link)
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See you in 2025!
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Hello, and welcome to Old Fritinancy — Classic Fritinancy? — the blog I launched in 2006. In August 2023 I made the transition to the Substack platform, where I’m publishing new writing on names, brands, words, and the language of commerce.
Here’s a sampling of what you’ll find on New! Improved! Fritinancy:
Word of the week for April 15: Wankpanzer
Critiques of interesting brand names like Kagi, Aptos, and Sora.
And much, much more! Subscribe to Fritinancy on Substack and read my twice-weekly newsletters, plus Notes (similar to Twitter or Bluesky posts) and recommendations of other terrific Substack newsletters like Caitlin Barrett’s Naming for Everyone, Jack Shepherd’s On Words and Up Words, and Benjamin Dreyer’s A Word About . . .
See you there!
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Read all about greedflation on my Substack newsletter! And while you’re there, check out some other recent posts: on the -pilled suffix (redpilled, blackpilled, breadpilled, glitterpilled); on Phoebe Philo (what a name!); on pastness, a new-to-me word that isn’t new at all; on Kim Kardashian’s Ultimate Nipple Bra; and on the ubiquitous, ridiculous ’tis the season, which I’m not even a little bit jolly about.
And look: Here’s my November linkfest, now called a linkstack!
Wondering why I’ve moved over there? Here’s an explanation.
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For Halloween, I wrote about ghost- compounds, from ghost bike to ghost word. Subscribe to my Substack to read the post!
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It’s moved to Substack, and it’s a quadfecta this week: three words and one name, all beginning with the letter D. Read and subscribe—it’s free!
Here’s a preview of one of the words:
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You can find this week’s word, aesthetic injury*, in its new home on my Substack newsletter. Sign up for a free subscription!
* Yes, I know it’s two words, but it’s what linguists call a “lexical item,” which qualifies it as a word of the week.
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It’s migrated to my new digital home, Substack. Read about this week’s word now! And catch up on my reasons for changing platforms here.
Subscribe to my Substack—free!—to get every post delivered to your inbox or the Substack app with no annoying ads.
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How to tell when that nicely phrased but possibly bullshit-laden piece of prose has been generated by artificial intelligence rather than ordinary human intelligence? One possible solution, proposed by seven companies active in the AI space, is digital watermarking.
iStock photo of water with watermarks
According to a fact sheet released on July 21, the Biden Administration has secured voluntary commitments from Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI “to help move toward safe, secure, and transparent development of AI technology” and to alert people to deepfakes.
“It's currently unclear how the watermark will work,” Ars Technica noted in an article about the development, “but it will likely be embedded in the content so that users can trace its origins to the AI tools used to generate it.”
You can read more about how the watermark might in fact work in Mark Liberman’s July 25 Language Log post, which, to be honest, strains my extremely modest technical comprehension. So let’s look instead at that word watermark, which branched away from its original aquatic meaning more than three centuries ago.
In design, a watermark is “a distinguishing mark or design impressed into a sheet of paper during manufacture, typically visible only when the sheet is held up to the light,” according to the OED, whose earliest citation for this sense is from 1708. This type of watermark was “probably so called because the watermark, being less opaque than the rest of the paper, had the appearance of having been produced by the action of water.”
Author’s note: Until I researched this post, I’d assumed that water was somehow involved in creating watermarks. I’d envisioned a die being pressed into a watery slurry as paper was being manufactured. But no!
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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:
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“Welcome to the age of the cage match,” read the headline on a July 7, 2023, story by Joseph Bernstein in the New York Times. (Free link here.) The subhed: “These days, powerful men want to beat one another. Literally.”
The main event, as Bernstein put it, is between the CEOs of Twitter and Meta. On June 21, Elon Musk (in the Twitter corner) let it be known to his 148 million Twitter followers that he was willing to fight Mark Zuckerberg—CEO of Meta, which launched Twitter rival Threads on July 5—in a “cage match.”
I’m up for a cage match if he is lol
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 21, 2023
Musk, who has been at various times in the last two years the world’s richest human, later tweeted that such a match might take place in the Las Vegas Octagon, or on second thought, in Rome’s Colosseum. (The Italian minister of culture reportedly issued an invitation.) He also proposed “a literal dick-measuring contest.” Zuckerberg, a fellow billionaire whose wealth usually places him within grasping distance of Musk, is a student of Brazilian jujitsu. Musk has admitted that he almost never works out.
zuck wins the cage match without ever stepping into the ring pic.twitter.com/f2nLWD80v8
— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) July 10, 2023
Chalk it all up to the silly season, or to that male-primate-dominance thing, or to the “it’s just a joke lol” spirit of the age. (Neil Postman nailed it in 1985 with Amusing Ourselves to Death; Emily Nussbaum published a superb update in early 2017, “How Jokes Won the Election.”) In any event, I found myself wondering about the origin and history of cage match.
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