Fritinancy

June linkfest

This month’s book recommendation, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, by Kathryn Schulz, is ten years old and as timely as ever.

I wrote last month about Schulz’s excellent pieces for the New Yorker, and I’m here to tell you that Being Wrong is every bit as well researched, witty, and graceful. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that I’m fascinated by failure, but hey—everyone has a story to tell about wrongness petty or vast. Schulz’s catalog of errors includes explorers undone by mirages, buyers beset by remorse, the famous gorilla-on-the-basketball-court experiment, the impossibility of saying “I am wrong” (as opposed to “I was wrong”), and the ’Cuz It’s True Constraint (a name I love). She dips into cognitive psychology, history, philosophy, aesthetics, and religion; Newsweek called the book “intellectualism made fun!” and it is.

I listened to the audiobook, and immediately discovered that I’d been wrong for ages about the pronunciation of the author’s last name. It rhymes with pools, not cults.

You can read an excerpt from Chapter 1 here.

April linkfest

This month’s book recommendation is The Plague and I, published by Betty MacDonald in 1948. The book is a lightly fictionalized account of MacDonald’s nine-month stay in a Seattle tuberculosis sanatorium in the late 1930s, when TB was known as “the white plague”; there were no effective vaccines; and treatment entailed rigorous bedrest, hearty meals, and an occasional session of artificial pneumothorax, in which gas was injected into the pleural cavity. Survival was far from certain and recovery times were long: many of MacDonald’s fellow inpatients remained at the sanatorium for years.

 

Sounds grim, right? Here’s the thing: it’s a hoot. MacDonald is sadly overlooked now—she died in 1958—but she was one of the foremost comic writers of her era, and The Plague and I is sharply observed, un-self-pitying, and downright chipper. (One of the chapters is titled “I’m Cold and So Is the Attitude of the Staff.”) I guarantee it will make you feel much more upbeat about our own current predicament.

On the Visual Thesaurus: The language of suffrage

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which gave women the right to vote. My February column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at the linguistic legacy of the long, persistent effort that led to the amendment.

Full access to the column is paywalled for three months. A subscription is still just $19.95 a year; if you’re hesitating, here’s an excerpt:

Pronouns played a surprising role in the right-to-vote fight. For centuries, grammar guides had insisted that the masculine pronouns he, him, and his were “inclusive” or “generic” — that is, they referred to women as well as to men. This assumption “has even been enshrined in British and American law,” writes Dennis Baron in his new book, What’s Your Pronoun?, adding that “both the UK Act of Interpretation (1850) and the US Dictionary Act (1871) declared that, in the law, words referring to men also include women.” But only when it was convenient to do so and when “the context shows that such words were intended to be used in a more limited sense,” as the Dictionary Act put it. Suffragists seized on this contradiction to argue for their rights. “If you insist on this version of the letter of the law, we shall insist that you be consistent,” the pioneering suffragist Susan B. Anthony argued in 1873: Government should “exempt women from taxation for the support of the government, and from penalties for the violation of laws.” In the end, Baron writes, women in both the UK and the US “won the vote without any explicit legal concession that he includes she.” The 19th Amendment includes no pronouns at all — only the neutral word “citizens.”

Read the rest of the column.

Related: Suffragist or suffragette?

December linkfest

The Namerology blog picks the defining baby names of the last decade—“The names that were not just hugely popular from 2010-19, but vastly more popular than in decades past…and future. They’re flying high, yet as the ’10s draw to a close they’re already starting to decline from their dizzying popularity peaks.”

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Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn combed his newspaper’s archives for the first mentions of products, technologies, ideas, and terms that have become part of life since late 2009. His chronological list goes from A (Angry Birds) to Y (YOLO), and includes a bunch of words and brands you read about here first, including showrooming, FOMO, trigger warning, and antifa.

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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On the Visual Thesaurus: The character of our content

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at content, a ubiquitous word with a long history and some specific contemporary senses.

Full access is restricted to subscribers; here’s an excerpt:

What are you reading right here, right now? A sentence? A paragraph? An article? Yes, yes, and yes, but think more globally and generally. In the universe of 21st-century media and marketing, these words on this website, and the image that accompanies them, are content.

And not only here on the Visual Thesaurus: content is all around. As the old dishwashing-liquid ad used to tell us, we’re soaking in it. Blog posts are content. YouTube videos are content. For the cookware retailer Williams-Sonoma, recipes are content. For General Electric and thousands of other companies, Instagram posts are content. White papers, graphs, podcasts, webinars, e-books: all content.

Content is produced by content creators and content providers, some of whom toil in content farms or content factories. It's distributed through content management systems and shaped by content strategists who may report to a chief content officer for whom content marketing is — as the business author Seth Godin put it in 2008 — “the only marketing that’s left.”

Read the rest of “The Character of Our Content.”

Word of the week: Fellow

Can a woman be a fellow?

That was what puzzled several people who responded to a tweet last week from U.S. Representative Katie Porter, D-California.

Hi Katie...I’m a fan but just curious...why assumed wounded vet would be a fellow?

— Tasha R Wiehe (@TashaWiehe) June 21, 2019

Fellow OR female...

— SFLiberal (@gee3knee) June 22, 2019

"fellow" = noun - a man or boy (https://t.co/HW8oNW0Q0q) You don't really mean this, do you?

— Pamela O'Neill (@pamoneill6) June 22, 2019

As others correctly pointed out, fellow here means “a person receiving a fellowship”—a financial grant. This is just one of many historical senses of fellowship; others include “companionship,” “alliance,” “spiritual communication,” “the crew of a vessel,” “trade guild,” and “sexual intercourse.”

In the title of the first volume of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, fellowship signifies a “company” or “association.”

 

It’s true that “man, male person” is one of the senses of fellow, but it’s not the original one. The OED includes that sense only after many others, including “partner, companion,” “accomplice,” “comrade,” “a member of a company, college, or society,” and “something that resembles another specified thing.” In Old English, as in the Scandinavian languages from which it derives, fellow meant a companion of either sex; its sources are fé (property, money; related to modern fee) and lag (that which is laid down, an arrangement; related to law). The “man” sense of fellow didn’t come along until Middle English, in the late 14th century. The casual pronunciation feller was first recorded around 1825; fellah – attested from 1864 – was eventually shortened to fella.

June linkfest

Happy solstice, and a few self-serving announcements:

1. You can now follow me on Instagram, where I post an average of one image a day—never a selfie, and never a “Story,” an Instagram feature I find annoying.

2. Over on Medium, I published “The Sound of a Name,” about the effects and uses of sound symbolism in naming.

3. I’m quoted in Heather Schwedel’s story, for Slate, about why Postmates shouldn’t use “Postmate It” as its slogan.

And some other-serving links:

On the Visual Thesaurus: “Deep” Thoughts

In my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, I take a deep dive into deep, a word with a surprisingly tenacious hold on our shallow 21st-century minds. Deepfake, deep state, deep learning, Deep Throat: whether we want to convey complexity or mystery, we turn to a word with deep roots in the English language.

“Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey,” a series of deadpan, slightly surrealistic epigrams, originated on National Lampoon and became a recurring feature on Saturday Night Live between 1991 and 1998. Handey maintains a Deep Thoughts website with merch and a Deep Thought of the Day. Sample: “Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.”

 

Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers. Here’s a taste:

Some recent writing

I’m stepping away from my desk until the middle of next week, so I’ll leave you with links to some of my recent (and in the case of the Visual Thesaurus, not-so-recent but finally un-paywalled) writing.

For Strong Language:

• “Sluts,” a deep-ish dive into the history of a wanton word that’s being reclaimed in brand names. This post expands on my 2012 exploration of the same topic.

F*ck Trump liquid lipstick from Lipslut

 

For Medium:

• “Don’t Focus-Group That Name”
• “What Makes a Bad Name Bad?”
• “Writing Lessons from Warren Buffett”
• “The Forbidden Letters”

For the Visual Thesaurus (released from paywall):

• My February column on the changing meanings of influence and influencer.