Words of the Day 2026-05-21

On this day (1917): Leo Pinckney is the first American drafted during WWI. No monument, apparently.

Spruik. From my OED app: “spruik /spruːk / ▸ verb [with object] Australian English informal promote or publicize (something): the company forked out $15 million to spruik its digital revolution she shared a video of herself looking fresh-faced and spruiking a rejuvenating facemask. ▪ [no object] speak in public, especially to advertise a show: men who spruik outside striptease joints. – DERIVATIVES spruiker /ˈspruːkə / noun – ORIGIN early 20th century: from German Sprüche ‘persuasive talk, sales pitch’.”• A Guardian headline, now vanished, came across my feed with “spruik” in it, and I had to find out what it meant. The sound is great, but the meaning is a bit of a letdown. Usage example, in the original German: Also spruiked Zarathustra.

“How to get an influencer to spruik your product? Make it theirs” [Australian Financial Review (2021)]. “When David Krupp was made redundant last March from his job at modelling and marketing agency IMG due to COVID-19, it took 24 hours for the shock to clear and for the 38-year-old to spring into action. His day job had been to link brands such as L’Oreal and Swarovski with social media influencers, but for three years he had been obsessing over an idea to work directly with influencers to develop unique products to spruik directly to their followers.” • Commentary:

“How to Make Housing Affordable (1)” [Steve Keen, Patreon]. “As soon as businesses stopped borrowing, Australian banks spruiked debt to households instead.” • Because of course they did.

“Hello Betty | HSBC German Film Festival 2026” [On The House]. “Many of us would be familiar with Betty Crocker, the fictional American character used to spruik cake mixes.” • Or Aunt Jemima, Mr. Clean, or any other commodity fetish.

“A calamitous queer love story at the weirdest job in town” [Melbourne Fringe]. “[Lygon St is] the only street in Melbourne where restaurants employ people whose sole job is enticing/harassing passing pedestrians. We call that spruiking. Enticement can mean a lot of things - waving, dancing, yelling, begging, betting, bribing, joking, grabbing, hugging - whatever it takes to get asses in seats. It also means fending off the rival spruiker at the neighbouring restaurant. SPRUIK! is a romantic comedy following Riley and Staz, two twenty something girls who were close in high school but never confessed their (mutual) romantic feelings. When Staz shows up for a trial shift on Lygon St, she sees Riley not ten metres away, doing the same thing she is — for the competition. As the night evolves, Staz proves a natural, but old problems soon bubble out and over. In the emotional chaos the pair break a years-old truce between the restaurants not to pursue the same customers at the same time. This drags the management, passers by, and exes into the drama, swirling together until years of repressed romantic tension come to a head.” • Review.

“The word spruik is a valid scrabble word, except in North America” [1word]. One anagram: PRUSIK; one cousin: SPRUIT • News you can use!

Dad Joke of the Day: What do you call a fish with no eyes? A fsh. (This one for the cryptic solvers out there.)

Haptic. From my OED app: haptic /ˈhaptɪk / ▸ adjective technical relating to the sense of touch, in particular relating to the perception and manipulation of objects using the senses of touch and proprioception: haptic feedback devices create the illusion of substance and force within the virtual world. – ORIGIN mid 19th century: from Greek haptikos ‘able to touch or grasp’, from haptein ‘fasten’.” • Not a lot you can “touch or grasp” when all that is solid melts into air.

“How buttons show our society’s priorities” [The OO Dev]. “They built a new tram in my town, and it is pretty fantastic…. But for some reason, the engineers that designed this tram thought it would be a good idea to make the door buttons “detect” your press rather than actually get pressed down. This means that even though you have pressed the button, the feeling under your finger is that nothing has moved! So naturally, you try again, harder, but obviously the button doesn’t move any bit more….. The only things in place to tell you ‘the button is ready to be pressed’ are a measly flashing green light that quickly turns red as you press (like did I do something wrong?) and a repeated beep. These two things are definitely unclear as I’ve seen countless people trying to press on the button before the door could be opened and then panic that they won’t be able to get down and start pressing frenetically until the door finally opens. And I mean, of course you would do this, it’s the morning, the tram is full of people, you are tired and maybe a bit late, you ain’t gonna pay attention to the flashing light or notice the beep over the sound of people talking… But like come on, you could at least have given me some haptic feedback right? A vibration to tell me it has worked or something like that. But I guess that’s just not the world we live in, I’m sure the designers didn’t mean to create a bad experience for the user, it’s just that “user delight” is pretty low on the company’s priorities list. It’s a thing in life in general though, human happiness isn’t really put at the forefront of things. For some reason, we have decided that time and money would be more important and we have all accepted that fact!” • Indeed!

“Honda patents fake clutch for electric motorcycles and it might actually make sense” [Eletrek]. “One of the biggest advantages of electric motorcycles has always been their simplicity. No clutch, no gears, no stalling – just twist the throttle and go. They’re basically big, fun scooters, at least in terms of operation. But Honda appears to think there’s still something worth preserving from the old-school riding experience, especially for off-road riders. A newly revealed Honda patent shows the company developing a simulated electronic clutch system for electric motorcycles, complete with torque-boost launches and even haptic feedback designed to mimic the feel of a combustion engine…. According to the patent as reported by AMCN, riders could preload the throttle while holding in the clutch lever, then rapidly release the lever to trigger a burst of torque – essentially simulating the hard launches motocross riders rely on with gas bikes. Honda believes that could be useful in competitive riding situations where precise power modulation matters, especially on loose terrain or during aggressive starts. Honda also appears to be working on recreating the feel of a gas bike, not just the control inputs.” • Sounds delightful!

“Come at the king, you best not miss” [Unsung]. “[The iPod] was also a close-to-ideal union of software and hardware, admirable in its simplicity and attention to detail. This is where Apple practiced momentum curves, haptics (via a tiny speaker, doing haptic-like clicks), and handling touch programmatically (only the first iPod had a physically rotating wheel, later replaced by stationary touch-sensitive surfaces) – all necessary to make iPhone’s eventual multi-touch so successful.” • I loved the wheel!

Fortune: “Anyone can become angry — that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way — that is not easy.” —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Minor. From my OED app: “minor /ˈmʌɪnə / ▸ adjective 1 lesser in importance, seriousness, or significance: she requested a number of minor alterations. 2 Music (of a scale) having intervals of a semitone between the second and third degrees, and (usually) the fifth and sixth, and the seventh and eighth. Contrasted with major ▪ (of an interval) characteristic of a minor scale and less by a semitone than the equivalent major interval. Compare with diminished: the E flat clarinet sounds a minor third higher than the written notes. ▪ [usually postpositive] (of a key or mode) based on a minor scale and tending to produce a sad or pensive effect: Concerto in A minor. 3 British English dated (following a surname in public schools) indicating the younger of two brothers: Smith minor. 4 Logic (of a term) occurring as the subject of the conclusion of a categorical syllogism. ▪ (of a premise) containing the minor term in a categorical syllogism. ▸ noun 1 a person under the age of full legal responsibility: the court would take account of the minor’s wishes. 2 Music a minor key, interval, or scale. ▪ Bell-ringing a system of change-ringing using six bells. 3 (minors) North American English the minor leagues in baseball or American football: Salinas was one of six teams in the minors. 4 North American English a student’s subsidiary subject or course: a minor in philosophy. 5 Logic a minor term or premise. 6 Bridge short for minor suit: a bid of two no trumps shows strength in the minors. 7 a small drab moth which has purplish caterpillars that feed on grass. Genus Oligia, family Noctuidae. ▸ (minor in) verb [no object] North American English study as or qualify in a subsidiary subject at college or university: Clark had minored in Animal Science. – PHRASES in a minor key (especially of a literary work) understated: only Britain’s poetry, composed in a minor key, is disregarded – ORIGIN Middle English: from Latin, ‘smaller, less’; related to minuere ‘lessen’. The term originally denoted a Franciscan friar, suggested by the Latin name Fratres Minores (‘Lesser Brethren’), chosen by St Francis for the order.” • So many distributaries, we might call them, flowing from the headword through the delta of connotation to the great ocean of discourse. Very much unlike “spruik” and “haptic.”

“First Impressions of a Venice Biennale Torn Apart by the Present” [ArtNet]. “I’m having difficulty settling on my first impressions of ‘In Minor Keys,’ the main exhibition at the 61st Venice Biennale, which opens to the public on Saturday. I’m torn between a lot of different feelings. Which maybe makes sense, because the world is in escalating chaos, and the biennial itself is being torn by it from all sides.” And: “The team’s introductory statement promised art concerned with ‘thresholds between lifeworlds and temporalities,; with ‘experiential and metaphorical gardens,’ with ‘collective resistance and healing.’ And in the vast, densely packed exhibition spaces of the Central Pavilion and Arsenale, you find many works conjuring healing spirits or mournful rites, or trying to look like devotional objects. Much clay, and textile, and assemblage from charged materials. A lot of focus on sound as a pathway to embodied experience. So much painting and sculpture conjuring hybridized mythic bodies. Many works about artists’ family histories. Many works about colonialism and the afterlives of slavery. Unbelievable amounts of work about plants, and water, and farming.” But: “Having just written about the last four years of biennials, I can tell you this is a concentration of basically all the themes at the heart of the recent global conversation. The minor key of this show is the major key of recent art history. The global dominance of this climate of work is owed to a meeting of pressure currents: demands for representation by the Global South (what legendary Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam calls the ‘Majority World’) and the Global North’s time-honored habit of looking to non-Western wisdom in its own moments of spiritual crisis. It’s worth emphasizing that this is a style, not the style of anything. And: “With Gaza reduced to rubble and now the U.S.-Israel war in Iran and Lebanon, I knew the 61st Biennale would make visible the further collapse of Western cultural authority. I just assumed this would happen outside, in the national pavilions, since this main show was curated a whole year ago. It turns out that this collapse is so total that it reaches into the main galleries too, where the tone of retrospection breaks down and the present breaks in.” • Hmm.

“‘Your Party Created EPSTEIN!’: Fierce Backlash Hits Rep. Ro Khanna After He Blames ‘Epstein Class’ for Rep. Thomas Massie’s Loss in Kentucky” [Nerd Stash]. “In the post, Khanna attributed Massie’s loss in the state’s 4th Congressional District to his willingness to confront the ‘Epstein class’ and oppose certain wars, while inviting younger voters to join a cross-party coalition focused on working-class issues. The message quickly prompted a wave of critical replies highlighting partisan divides over Epstein’s associations and political loyalties….. Several users pushed back on Khanna’s mention of the ‘Epstein class,’ with one writing, ‘Your party created EPSTEIN!!! The vast majority of his friends were/are Democrats… Democrats across the country are literally passing laws to make it easier for pedos to have sex with minors.’” • Dude. Mossad is completelly bipartisan! Also, the use of “literally” is never a good sign.

“The Emerging AI Policy Consensus’ [Jared Hayden, Compact]. “In the wake of several high-profile lawsuits related to teen suicides allegedly encouraged by AI chatbots, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously advanced a bill earlier this month to protect kids from AI-related harms. The GUARD Act, co-sponsored by Sens. Josh Hawley (R.-Mo.) and Richard Blumenthal (D.-Conn.), seeks to safeguard minors by age-gating AI companions designed to simulate human relationships. In addition to advancing young people’s online safety, the bill embodies the best of American federalism, drawing from the strengths of enacted state policies while correcting their weaknesses. The move by the Senate Judiciary committee reflects a growing popular demand to govern AI in a way that advances human flourishing.” • But on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a minor, so how is the “age-gating” to be done, and at what cost?