Paul Lukas’s H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright Typographic Mystery will be of interest to anyone with even a casual interest in typefaces; it’s well-written, suspenseful, and amusing. I got to it via chavenet’s MeFi post, which attracted plenty of good comments, including one linking to a handy comparison showing the (very few) differences between Arial and Helvetica. And the Lukas post introduced me to a word I didn’t know (or, he added cautiously, had forgotten): gunite, “A form of shotcrete in which a dry cementitious mixture is blown through a hose to the nozzle, with water injected only at the point of application.” Both Wiktionary and the OED have the obvious etymology (gun + -ite), but only the former adds the crucial information “originally a trademark from 1909.” The OED (entry revised 2024) defines it more wordily and more informatively:
A form of sprayed concrete in which a dry mixture of cement and sand is forced at high pressure through a hose, water being added as it passes through a nozzle at the end of the hose, allowing the resulting concrete to be applied at high velocity to surfaces for which poured concrete cannot easily be used. Frequently as a modifier, designating equipment used in the application of gunite, or something made or constructed using gunite, as in gunite hose, gunite pool, etc. Cf. shotcrete n.
The first citation:
1912 Sealing rock with gunite to stop disintegration at Panama.
Scientific American 27 January 44/2 (caption)
I can’t say I particularly like it, but it’s a short, memorable word, clearly fit for purpose.
The sign behind the podium in the White House press briefing room similarly has three of its four Hs upside-down, in addition to some other alignment and kerning mistakes. (Not a new thing—it’s been that way since the Bush II era.)
By coincidence, the word “gunite” just came up in conversation here last week. There’s a six-page history of mining and tunneling use of gunite in the Fall 2017 issue of Shotcrete, and there’s a photo of an old gunite sprayer car parked in front of the Bisbee Mining and Historical Museum on Flickr.
Very interesting, thanks! I love the photo of the “Original double-chamber gun developed by Carl Akeley in 1907” from the first link — what a contraption.
I don’t care about “gunite” but my eye was caught by the adjective “cementitious,” which I didn’t recall previously encountering and which sounded oddly hoity-toity. Consulting the google books corpus for uses I immediately discovered a 1996 tome titled _Pozzolanic and Cementitious Materials_ (Volume 1 in a series titled _Advances in Concrete Technology_) and immediately decided that “pozzolanic” was an even more impressive previously-unknown-to-me lexeme. (Its etymology takes you back to the Italian toponym Pozzuoli, which allegedly traces in turn to Lat. “puteus,” meaning “well, cistern.”)
Dilaria et al. (2023) report on the earliest established exploitation of pulvis puteolana pozzolan in northern Italy.
Better:–
_Pozzolanic and Cementitious Materia_
gunnite
Gunite’s moment was here: https://archeyes.com/ronchamp-chapel-le-corbusier/
(Under construction: https://www.mfab.hu/artworks/16567/)
Unexpected connection: glancing at Wikipedia on shotcrete, I see that it was invented by Carl Akeley, a naturalist and taxidermist with Chicago’s Field Museum. Hey, wait a minute, isn’t that… *checks biography* yes, Akeley was the leader of a 1921 gorilla-hunting expedition to the Congo, accompanied by his wealthy society friends the Bradleys — who brought along their six-year-old daughter Alice, later known as Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree, Jr.
Gunite’s moment was here
Wow. I don’t usually care for Le Corbusier (despite the fervent advocacy of our late friend AJP Crown), but that’s a glorious building.
The next post on the topic is, sadly, paywalled after a few teasing paragraphs.
The post after that is about butter containers and colors on the wrappers of the sticks of butter within, with respect to being salted or unsalted. The continuation of the post is paywalled, but it looks like Breakstone’s, Hotel Bar, and Keller’s all use the same wrapper!
The linked post links to a post on the capital H on signs that are meant to provide highway directions to hospitals, which are vertically slightly asymmetrical, and are often upside-down if you look carefully.
That post links to In Which I Learn a New Term for a Very Inconspicuous Type of Territory, which is paywalled, but the leading paragraphs explain that “a part of the territory of one country that can be conveniently approached — in particular, by wheeled traffic — only through the territory of another country ” is properly called a pene-exclave. The canonical example is Point Roberts, a legal part of Washington State (and thus the U.S.A.) that is geographically connected to the province of British Columbia (and thus Canada).