VIC MATUS

Washington Free Beacon

Weekend ///
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From Lehman’s concise translation of crime data to a concise translation of our fracturing language, Michael M. Rosen reviews Ben Schott’s Schott’s Significa: A Miscellany of Secret Languages.

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Ever wonder what the six teeth on all Venetian gondolas signify? (The six districts of Venice.) Or why and how chicken wing flats are stripped out to form a ‘meat umbrella’ during competitive eating contests? (Much easier to consumer them faster.) Or why some movie stars are credited as ‘with’ or ‘and’? (They indicate a major star playing a small but significant role.) Or where the ‘V for Victory’ originated? (Occupied Belgium in 1941, as a warning to the Nazis.) Then Ben Schott’s Significa is just the book for you.”

“Schott takes the reader on a tour of fonts and typefaces (the distinction between the two is extremely subtle), where we learn about ‘unicase’ (when upper and lowercase letters occupy the same height) and ‘test words’ like ‘squatchee’ (templates that typeface designers use to evaluate their creations—what one such designer called ‘a Swiss army knife for Thai font testing as it has all of the key shapes, such as straights, curves, diagonals, and basic vowel placements’).

“He ventures into the gym (’the Glorious House of Gainz’) to educate us about ‘January Joiners’ or ‘resolutionaries’ (self-explanatory), ... and the nuances between being ‘cut,’ ‘jacked,’ ‘swole,’ ‘yolked,’ and just plain ‘huge.’ Equally bro-coded are the crypto jockeys, who succumb to ‘hopium’ (blind optimism in Bitcoin positions), indulge in ‘JOMO’ (the joy of missing out on a bad investment), and mock nonfungible tokens as worthless ‘right-click-save-as’ digital copies. And he shows how foodies relentlessly mock ‘eat cutes’ (influencers who, for instance, refer to sandwiches as ‘sandos’), ‘instavores’ (those who cannot eat anything without first photographing and posting), or ‘hipster vegans’ (urbanites who survive on ‘limited-edition kale burgers and vegetarian chicharrones’).”

Considering it’s Sunday, I’ll pass on the vegetarian chicharrones.