October linkstack
San Francisco boosterism, asteroid names, crypto names, and more.
Some San Francisco movers and shakers, including crypto billionaire Chris Larsen and Gap scion Bob Fisher1, have decided that old-fashioned boosterism is what’s needed to shake The City (as it’s locally styled) out of its doom loop. And so this week sees the launch of a “It All Starts Here,” a $4 million civic pride campaign designed “to engage, activate and inspire San Franciscans to articulate their love of our City and send a message to the country that we refuse to be defined by our challenges.” The campaign, developed by San Francisco agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners, includes a 60-second video—watch it here—narrated by Peter Coyote, the voice of countless Ken Burns documentaries and a resident not of San Francisco but of semi-rural Sonoma County, about 60 miles north.
A few self-boosterish links
If “It All Starts Here” has you thinking about other city and state promotions, read my story about the “I ❤️ NY” campaign.
I’ve been scribbling away on non-Substack platforms. For Strong Language (the sweary blog about swearing), I wrote “Asterisks for the F*n of It,” about how asterisks can sometimes make a swear word funnier (f**k yeah!). For Medium, I wrote “Naming Your Characters” (inspired by a re-watching of the 2015 film Ex Machina); “What Makes a New Word Successful?” (inspired by the addition of 690 new and newish words to the Merriam-Webster dictionary); and “Let’s Get One Thing Straight About the Chevrolet Nova” (aka the branding myth that refuses to die). Those Medium links bypass the modest paywall.
Names and naming
“The hard part about naming isn’t coming up with the name,” name developer Anthony Shore tells the hosts of the FiredUp podcast, but in “getting a roomful of people to agree that this word should be your future.”
How asteroids get their names. (Washington Post gift link)
Margaret Wolfson, a naming specialist at River + Wolf, points out the challenges of naming a cryptocurrency in a glutted sector. (Representative sample: Exosphere, Stratosphere, Handshake, Lucid, Polymath, Polygon, Polynomial, Tether, Galactic, Valence, Quarry, Starfield, Cosmos, Blazon, Scaffold, Avalanche, Alchemy, Defiance, Trillion, Singularity, Boolean, Tether, Atlas, Republic, Salt, Thor, Hermes, Medici, Oxygen, Spatial, Mantle, Optimism, Stellar, Arcana, Starship, and Pinion.) “We advise our clients against fixating on a solitary, cool sounding English word with relevant meaning,” she writes. (Emphasis added.)
Words
, on boob, booby, booby hatch, and booby prize. “This [post] takes the cake, running the gamut from nursery slang to Elizabethan drama to seabirds to nautical justice to the Free Silver movement and ending up with Civil War-era pornography.”On his Not One-Off Britishisms blog, Ben Yagoda looks at range, custom, and look after, commerce-related British terms that he’s spotted on this side of the Atlantic.
“It surprised me to learn that the word fall is a later addition to our lexicon than autumn.” Mike Pope looks at autumnal vocabulary and answers the question, What was the Old English equivalent of autumn and fall?
On her Separated by a Common Language blog, linguist Lynne Murphy examines the differences between UK and US terms for fire and firefighting. There’s even more on her monthly Separated by a Common Newsletter.
A dictionary of Victorian slang. “Gone through Hades with his hat off” (= “bold”) is marked as “American—just understood in England.”
Other good stuff
The excellent Subtitle podcast, “about languages and the people who speak them,” is returning November 1 for its fourth season.
Jason Kottke published his blog for 25 years without a comments section. Earlier this month he announced that he’s now accepting comments on selected stories—but only from paying members. (Memberships start at a very reasonable $30 a year.) An October 20 post inviting members to introduce themselves has 315 comments so far.
Speaking of Kottke, he’s the one who alerted me to the fact that the Whole Earth Catalog—founded by Stewart Brand in 1968 and dubbed “Google before Google existed” by none other than Steve Jobs—is now available online. Read a Wired story about the catalog.
Style
The latest -core to entice the fashion minded is litcore. “You can almost build an outfit exclusively out of literary merch,” the Guardian tells us. (The article also introduces us to “bookishnista.”) For more on the -core suffix, see my January 2022 post and the linked column in the Visual Thesaurus.
And finally: If you think high fashion is rubbish, Balenciaga has a bag for you. “The reviews are worth your time,” advises Farran Smith Nehme, aka
.
Full disclosure: I used to say hello to Bob in the offices of Banana Republic when our stints there overlapped.