Fritinancy

Word of the week: Doryphore

Few of us are likely to duplicate the feat of Ammon Shea, who read all 21,730 pages of the Oxford English Dictionary and in 2008 published a book about his accomplishment. (I wrote about Reading the OED here and here.) But anyone with a spare 45 minutes can easily and pleasurably gambol through the 400 or so words in The Dictionary of Difficult Words, a pulchritudinous and edifying new book by Dictionary.com lexicographer Jane Solomon, with cheerful illustrations by Louise Lockhart.

The book’s primary audience is children between the ages of 7 and 12, but as Jane* writes in an author’s note, “it’s written to appeal to adults as well. … This book welcomes all readers, even those who would never sit down and read a traditional dictionary cover to cover.”

And even adults who are possessed of a reasonably expansive vocabulary and pretty good Scrabble skills will discover new words in The Dictionary of Difficult Words. I certainly did.

Case in point: doryphore.

New writing for Medium and the Visual Thesaurus

Looking for naming advice? Read my latest post on Medium, “How journalism can help you create a name.” (Free, but clicking on the clapping-hands icon may someday result in my earning a few pennies.)

Curious about the origins of the “__ Nation” formula—Live Nation, Pantsuit Nation, Side Hustle Nation? I dig deep (and explore the side routes of national and nationalism) in my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, “A Nation of ‘Nations‘.” Full access is restricted to subscribers; here’s an excerpt:

The political sense of nation—an organized community sharing a defined territory and government—emerged around 1400 and gradually predominated, although the earlier meaning survives in the use, since the 1640s, of nation to describe indigenous American peoples: Choctaw Nation, Cherokee Nation. (The specifically Canadian “First Nations” began to be used in the 1970s; it applies to indigenous peoples south of the Arctic Circle and replaces “Indian,” which is both inaccurate and, according to some people, offensive.) 

Nation didn’t turn into the adjective national until the 1590s (“the nationall assemblie”); the noun sense of national—a citizen or subject of a specified state—emerged in the mid-19th century. (Then there’s the Grand National, which is a horse race if you’re English, Irish, or Scottish, and a rodeo if you’re Californian.) Nationalism, defined as “advocacy or support of the interests of one’s own nation, usually to the detriment or exclusion of any other nation’s interests”) is a little older: The OED’s earliest citation is from 1798. An 1844 citation from Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country declares that “Nationalism is another word for egotism.”

Z Nation is an American action/horror/comedy-drama/post-apocalyptic television series that aired from 2014 to 2018 on the SyFy network. The Z stands for “zombie.”

On the Visual Thesaurus: “Influence” and “influencer”

Here’s something you probably didn’t know about me: I’m an influencer. At least Nordstrom thinks I am; I’ve racked up enough Nordy Club points to attain that semi-exalted status. But what does it mean?

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at ancient and contemporary meanings of influence and influencer, words that got a recent boost from a mysterious egg on Instagram and from Pope Francis’s Twitter account. Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers; here’s an excerpt:

The original “influencer” book was Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, published in 1936 and never since out of print. The “influence” in Carnegie's title is an old word, derived from the Latin for "flowing in," that was originally used in English in the 14th century to refer to the streaming of a fluid from the planets or stars that affected human behavior. (Astrology, in other words.) The viral disease known since the 1700s as “influenza” – Italian for “influence” – was originally attributed to occult or atmospheric influences; it started being abbreviated as “flue” around 1839, and as “flu” about six decades later. “Under the influence” (of alcohol) appeared in the 1860s; Mark Twain was one of the first to use the phrase. “Influence peddler” – a not-entirely-laudatory term for a person with the connections to arrange lucrative government contracts (for a fee) – entered the lexicon around 1949.

1964 edition

 

Today’s influencers are also selling connections, but those connections are measured in Instagram follower counts and YouTube “likes” instead of Senate votes. The professional influencer may be a teenager paid to promote juice or scented candles; it may even be an animal. (Yes, there are dogfluencers. And also fitfluencers, twinfluencers, and – my favorite spinoff – outfluencers, influential outdoors enthusiasts. For several years there was a parody Twitter account, @ProfJeffJarvis, that mocked the real Jeff Jarvis, a media and tech writer, as a “thinkfluencer.") The promotion – also known as “sponcon,” for “sponsored content” – isn't top down, like a TV commercial or billboard, but embedded in your social-media feed, “shared by someone who seems, on some aspirational level, like a peer,” as Annalisa Quinn wrote last year in the New York Times Magazine.

Read the rest of “Under the Influence.”

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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October linkfest

Duck Fart, Buttery Nipple, and other “yummy cocktails with nasty-sounding names.” (Dictionary.com)

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk made an April Fools’ joke about “Teslaquila.” Now the company has filed an intent-to-use trademark application for Tesla-branded tequila. (Bloomberg)

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Video explainer: How the Beatles got their logo. (Brand New)

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Moons can have moons and they are called moonmoons https://t.co/PsLixAufSS pic.twitter.com/mefZ7aFZ7X

— New Scientist (@newscientist) October 10, 2018

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I’m quoted in this article by Corinne Purtill on the difference between asshat and assclown. (Quartz)

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And here’s more about asshat. (Merriam-Webster)

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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.

 

April linkfest

You know how Google names its Android versions after sweets like Kit Kat and Marshmallow? Well, writes Justin Pot, Microsoft should name its updates after dogs. (How to Geek)

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Speaking of Kit Kat, the brand is hugely popular in Japan, in part because “Kit Kat” translates to “You will surely win.” (Fortune; h/t MJF)

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A century ago, dozens of American girls were named Milady because of the success of a new product: the Milady Décolleté Gillette safety razor, developed to remove underarm hair. (And did you know that “underarm” was coined as a euphemism for “armpit”?) (Baby Name Wizard)

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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

February linkfest

The Oscar-nominated 2017 film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri has inspired at least two real-world imitations, reports AdWeek. After the shooting massacre in a Parkland, Florida, high school, the group Progressive Turnout Project placed a billboard with a gun-reform challenge outside the Janesville, Wisconsin, office of House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has accepted $61,401 in contributions from the National Rifle Association.

“17 killed in their classrooms. Still no gun reform? How come, Paul Ryan?”

 

And in London, Justice4Grenfell placed three mobile billboards outside Grenfell Towers, the site of disastrous fire last year that killed 71 people.

 

“71 dead / and still no arrests? / How come?”

 

For comparison, here are the billboards that appear in the film, which stars Frances McDormand.

 

January linkfest

Is an Eataly ad for truffles offensive to Italians and Italian-Americans? (Chicago Tribune)