Friday words #267

By | May 7, 2021

Today’s new-to-me word is so new and so topical that it’s reasonable to wonder whether it will survive the month. The word is to Basecamp. This showed up (where else?) on Twitter:

Screenshot of a retweet. The original tweet from a zoo in New Orleans reads "The keepers and the diversity/inclusion advisory board didn't know about this and are pissed." The comment on the retweet reads "a zoo in New Orleans just Basecamped their employees by telling the public about the pro-cop fundraiser before the people who would staff it."

The event that upset the employees is a 5-day event to celebrate police officers that apparently came as news to the staff. As we can deduce, to Basecamp means something like “to announce something publicly before telling your employees.” The employees have thus “been Basecamped.” We might further speculate that to be Basecamped means to learn about something publicly that might be controversial or want employee discussion.

Why Basecamp? If you follow tech and/or entrepreneur news, you might already know this story. On April 26, the software company Basecamp announced some wide-ranging policy changes to their company culture in the form of a blog post. The changes included “no more paternalistic benefits” like fitness, wellness, and continuing-ed allowances; no more committees; and no more peer reviews. The #1 change, though, and the one that elicited the most discussion, was “No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account.” As eventually emerged, this prohibition came out of internal strife about a list of “funny names” that had circulated inside the company for many years.

In the aftermath, about a third of the company ended up quitting, including people in senior roles. The whole thing was terrible PR for Basecamp management. (They’ve published another blog post that acknowledges that the announcement “blew things up.”)

What’s interesting to me, of course, is that to Basecamp emerged as a new verb less than a week after the original announcement.  It’s also interesting how specific the new verb is. It doesn’t refer to making policy changes per se; other companies have enacted similar policies. To Basecamp pertains to how a company communicates policy. It’s hard to say whether to Basecamp in this sense has much potential, in part because there probably aren’t a lot of instances of this type of public-first communication. (I might be wrong about that.) And if the verb survives, will it lose its capital B?

I also note that the neologism reflects the infamy of someone who did something dumb. Historically we have eponyms like quisling, chauvinism, bowdlerize, and boycott. There’s also the Streisand effect, in which an attempt to quash information backfires. (Update: On Twitter, @VintageReader reminds me of the term dooced, meaning to be fired for something you write about your company on your blog.) I don’t know if there’s a word for this type of negative fame enshrined in a word or expression, but maybe there should be.

On to origins. I recently ran across a company named Igneous Systems. This made me think back to the days of junior-high Earth Science class. Igneous, that’s a type of rock, right? I guess a company might want to be suggestive of something rock-based? (Like the well-known Bible verse “upon this rock I will build my church” that seems to be based on a kind of pun on the nickname for the apostle Simon Peter.)

And it’s true that igneous is a type of rock, one of several types. But the name also suggests the geological origin of this type of rock: the ign- part is based on Latin ignis, meaning “fire.” So an igneous rock is a fiery one. How can that be? Because igneous rocks are formed when molten rock—lava—cools. They are in effect the “ashes” of rock-fire.

We have a few other ign- words in English: ignite and ignition, plus gelignite, a type of explosive (gelatine+ignite). It might be surprising that we don’t have more. But as Danny Bate points out, the Romance languages from which we got so much vocabulary didn’t inherit the word ignis from Latin. Instead, their words for fire are based on the Latin word focus, meaning “hearth.” (French feu, Spanish fuego.) Somehow focus got to be a mathematical term, apparently due to Kepler. In English, we have words like fuel, foyer, fusilier, and curfew (!) that all came into the language from this root.

I’m still not clear on what the Igneous of Igneous Systems is supposed to convey, but it would hardly be the last time that a company name is more suggestive than descriptive.

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