Fritinancy

You can tell that it’s spooky season when there’s a spike in stories that feature macabre, which can mean “gruesome,” “tending to produce horror,” or “having death as a subject.”

I’ve been reading Dante’s Inferno for a Saturday-morning class taught by UC Berkeley comparative-literature professor Tim Hampton at ’s Books, here in Oakland.

Of all the fictions about brand names that have survived despite being repeatedly refuted, none is as persistent or as provably false as the one about the Chevrolet Nova, a compact car sold by General Motors for the better part of nearly three decades.

I could swear that until a couple of months ago I’d never seen or heard the term spooky season as a description for … well, what, exactly?

No matter how often I tell myself I will not write about pharmaceutical names — a sub-specialty I have gratefully avoided throughout my career as a name developer — I somehow find myself irresistibly if reluctantly pulled back to the subject again and aga…

There are few people with whom I agree less than Elon Musk, who has enriched himself beyond human imagination while enshittifying countless lives, spouting racist ideology, and behaving like a buffoon.

I wrote briefly in last month’s linkstack about Muse, the month-old Meta AI agent that, as the billboards put it, “gets it done.”1 I haven’t stopped musing about Muse, partly because those damn billboards are so ubiquitous here in the Bay Area and partly…

I’m turning the tables today and sharing this platform with readers who have sent me amusing or newsworthy items.

Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff popped up on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show last night.

Is money actually the root of all evil?

Word-of-the-year (WOTY) season is just around the corner.

Happy autumnal/vernal equinox, depending on your latitude, and welcome to the September linkstack, a compilation of interesting things I’ve spotted on Substack and elsewhere over the last four weeks.

Vig is a great old American slang word, short for vigorish (sometimes spelled viggerish, viggrish, vigerage, vigerish, or viggresh — thank you, !)

Dreamforce again?

The last time I wrote at length about rogue, in 2015, I was inspired by the release of Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, a big-budget summer release starring Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt.

I may have allowed this post and its many images to spiral beyond the bounds of email.

I’ve been toiling away on a long post about how everything and everyone is spiraling, but you know what?

Welcome back to Naming Briefs, the semi-regular feature in which I scrutinize and analyze new, notable, and/or perplexing brand names.

The worst, wrote William Butler Yeats, are full of passionate intensity: They’re zealous.

Welcome back to the linkstack, my monthly collection of interesting things I’ve read on Substack and elsewhere.

I cut the cable cord at home years ago, so I only rarely have an opportunity to paddle through the swamp of daytime cable TV.

This is the fourth post in my series on U.S. brands created at least a century ago.

I’ve been tracking the evolution and spread of -core — defined by the American Dialect Society in 2022 as a “productive suffix for aesthetic trends” — for almost two decades now.

Out in the American heartland there’s a grassroots movement to stop the spread of AI data centers.

This missive may be too long for some email clients.

Greetings to old and new subscribers!

The guillotine A couple of weeks ago I began seeing a spate of articles about how Anthropic, creator of the large language model (LLM) Claude, set out in 2024 to “destructively scan all the books in the world,” as an internal document put it.

These three words share an etymology — degen, pronounced dee-jen, is a clipping of degenerate — and have been appearing in my feeds lately in new contexts or with new senses.

If you’re just joining us1, Linkstack is my monthly roundup of interesting things I’ve read, watched, or listened to on Substack and beyond.

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