December linkstack

Maple syrup, mocha mousse, and other tasty year-end treats.

Happy first day of Chanukah and welcome to the final linkstack of 2024! Especially warm greetings to all of the new subscribers who’ve signed up in the 30 or so days since the publication of my November linkstack. I publish these link roundups at the end of every month — I started the tradition back at my old blog — and I’m always happy to receive tips about names, brands, and the language of commerce.

A reminder: The Fritinancy newsletter is entirely free and likely to remain so. My sole request: If you’re enjoying what you see here, click or tap the heart-shaped “like” button. Or bypass the Substack apparatus and buy me a virtual coffee or three!

Sweet!

I enjoyed The Sticky, the new six-part series on Amazon Prime with the great Margo Martindale and a fine supporting cast of Canadian actors who consult their Blackberrys — the show is set in 2011 — and occasionally let loose with a Québécois profanity (“Tabarnak!”). The show is extremely loosely based on an actual maple-syrup heist that took place in 2011–2012; read Rich Cohen’s diverting report for Vanity Fair, published in 2016, for the real story.

Do you speak 2024?

Test your knowledge of this year’s slang and neologisms with a New York Times quiz. I felt pretty confident going in but scored only 70 percent! (Archive)

A brown study

Pantone, the color-standardization company, has decreed that the color of the year for 2025 is “mocha mousse,” a muted brown that evokes “thoughtful indulgence,” “harmonious comfort,” and “feelings of contentment,” according to the company’s press release. On his Mashed Radish blog, etymologist John Kelly explores the origins of mocha and mousse — from Arabic and French, respectively — and notes that for some observers, Pantone’s choice “was less evocative than provocative, with many people humorously associating its cocoa with kaka—which they felt, in its way, also summed up 2024.” How did Pantone get to be the boss of color? NPR dug into the history. The 2024 color of the year, in case you’ve forgotten, was “peach fuzz.”

“Mocha mousse”: the color, the dessert.

Sloganeering

“Do you want your slogan to be liked or remembered? You can only pick one.” (Operative Words by Anthony Shore)

Word discoveries

Erin McKean closes out the year with eleven words she discovered while looking up other things, including limitarianism, scholasticide, and cincuentañera. Her newsletter is always a treat — subscribe!

Worldwide words of the year

Lynne Murphy, aka Lynneguist, publishes a monthly newsletter as a supplement to her excellent Separated by a Common Language blog. This month she offers a roundup of non-English words of the year, including Danish fedtemøg (“grease dung, an algal mess that is bad for waterways”) and Russian вайб (“vibe”).

Learning from words of the year

The major dictionaries’ WOTY choices “show not only how aspects of society are changing, but how the nature of words themselves evolves in unexpected ways,” writes Tony Thorne, a British lexicologist (word analyst). Read to the very end to see his own WOTY choice. (The Conversation)

The “tantrum” question

Tom Freeman, author of the Stroppy Editor blog, heard about a couple who named their son Tantrum, which sent him into research mode — not to learn what possesses grownups to do such an appalling thing but to find out where the word tantrum comes from. The OED says “of unknown origin,” but Tom found tantalizing evidence to the contrary. (By the way, my own research turned up a Texas-based “noise artist” who calls himself Danny Tantrum — real name Ethan Bernick — and who has made some exotic dining choices.)

Word on the street

Real estate developers reveal the secrets of street naming: “Before they break ground, developers submit a list of street names to municipal agencies for approval. Any names that duplicate or even sound like ones that are already in use in the area are typically rejected because of the potential to confuse emergency responders.” (New York Times gift link) I wrote about street names myself for the Visual Thesaurus in 2020.

The state of startup names

Honolulu-based naming consultant John Elliott analyzed the names of 600 startups funded by Y Combinator in 2024 and discovered some intriguing patterns, including “anthroponyms” (names conventionally used for humans, like the Claude and Hazel AI assistants); “noun/verb ambiguity” (Surge, Blaze, Forge); and “adjectival names” (Innate, Abundant, Tiny). (LinkedIn)

The brand mispronouncer

A fun reel from one of my favorite Instagram follows, Dan Rosen. He also co-hosts the Middlebrow podcast.

thedanrosen

A post shared by @thedanrosen

Accentuate the accent

Economist Paul Krugman retired this month from the New York Times, where he’d been writing opinion columns for 25 years. The good news: He’s revived his Substack newsletter, Krugman Wonks Out, so the opinions will keep coming. His December 24 offering, “This Is Not a Serious Post,” concluded with a “musical coda”: a video of a 1990 performance by The Roches singing “Winter Wonderland” in an exaggerated New York/New Jersey accent. (“Gone away is the blueboid . . .”) The clip could stand as an homage to the influential linguist William Labov, whose work focused on regional and social-class variations in American English and who died on December 17 at 97. (Philadelphia Inquirer obituary.) Every American linguistics student knows about Labov’s famous “fourth floor” study: The more expensive the New York department store, the more likely a salesperson was likely to pronounce the Rs in “fourth” and “floor.” In a Language Log post, linguist Mark Liberman linked to Krugman’s column and quoted from the preface to Labov’s 1964 Social Stratification of New York City. But you need no academic credentials to get a kick out of sisters Maggie (RIP), Terre, and Suzzy Roche going to town on a holiday classic.