Fritinancy

Mr.-y Spot

I've been collecting photos of "Mr." brand names for more than a decade. (Not names like "Mr. Brown's Restaurant"; the formula had to be Mr.+ Product or Mr. + Service.) I was inspired to begin the project when a friend pointed out a Chinese restaurant on San Pablo Ave. in Berkeley called Mr. Eggroll. The "O" in "Eggroll" had fallen off, and all the remaining letters appeared to have been handcut from white sticky tape, but still--you had to admire that plucky honorific and applaud the attempt at dignity. (Both the friend and the business are now defunct, alas.)

I went on to document Mr. Lumpia X (a take-out place in San Francisco specializing in the Filipino specialty called lumpia; I have no idea what the "X" stood for), Mr. Hot Dog Rancho Burgers (confusing, yes, but a very handsome sign: Geary Blvd., San Francisco), Mr. Convenience (a Japanese store on Mason St. in San Francisco; "Mr. Convenience" was the only English in the sign), Mr. Sushi (Grand Ave., Oakland), and the unabbreviated Mister Softee, the ice-cream-truck franchise in New York and the Northeast.¹ Except for Mister Softee, none of these businesses appears to have survived. All of the photos are from my pre-digital period and thus unavailable for posting; one of these days I'll have them scanned.

Meanwhile, here are some current examples of Mr. monikers.

I shot this San Francisco establishment in 2005. But this photo, from the Yelp review, gives more context:

There's a #1 in the sign because there's also a #2 store, in Hayward. And the bling-bling in question is the kind you have installed in your mouth. As one satisfied customer put it on Yelp: "Listen, at some point in your life you may need to buy some gold teeth, and when you do, Mr. Bling Bling will be waiting like a prodigal friend. Seriously, this is the place."

On Fairfax Ave. near Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles:

   

Quite the dapper gent, eh? He's not to be confused, of course, with Mr. Clean®, a registered trademark of Procter & Gamble:

This Mr. is also in Los Angeles, on Santa Monica Blvd. near Western Ave.:

A coffee wholesaler in downtown Oakland, near Jack London Square:

I love that snazzy streamlined font. However, the company's logo on its web site is completely different. Time to hire a sign painter?

 

On University Ave. in Berkeley. Another fine retro typeface. I'm indebted to one of the Messrs. Rooter for his heroic efforts in removing a small forest from my sewage system a few months ago.

Anybody out there have a favorite Mister?

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¹ "Mister Softee" is also stockbroker slang for Microsoft, whose ticker symbol is MSFT.

The Prefix Perplex

I was standing in a long, stationary line at the San Francisco Film Festival, indulging in my favorite waiting-in-line activity: eavesdropping. Directly behind me were a 50-something man and his 20-something daughter, good-naturedly arguing about the correct use of the word infamous. Dad maintained that infamous could mean extremely famous, while Daughter insisted that infamous really meant something more like heinous. The example they were using was footwear designer Christian Louboutin, whose shoes always have red soles. Dad called them "the infamous red soles," while Daughter claimed they were merely "famous."

Well, score one for Gen Y. Louboutin's soles would be infamous only if they were implicated in a triple homicide, or if toxic red dye seeped upward and caused horrific foot burns, or in some other equally dire scenario. Infamous means "notorious, ill-famed, having an exceedingly bad reputation." It even has legal definitions:

a. Punishable by severe measures, such as death, long imprisonment, or loss of civil rights.

b. Convicted of a crime, such as treason or felony, that carries such a punishment.

The overheard conversation got me thinking more generally about the way people use prefixes in English. As children, we were told never to use irregardless to mean regardless: the former, we learn,"isn't a word." (Of course, it is a word, probably blended from irrespective and regardless, but it's considered substandard and illogical, not to mention redundant: both the ir- prefix and the -less suffix have the same negative meaning.) Regardless, people still carry on saying irregardless. As with infamous, the extra syllable must make the word sound ... I don't know. Smarter? Stronger? Fancier?

Then there's penultimate, which means "next to last," as in, "Y is the penultimate letter in the alphabet." Yet penultimate is often used to mean "really, really ultimate--absolutely the very last word!"

I'm wondering whether some people think that adding any prefix to a word intensifies its meaning. Do some of us yearn to agglutinate words, to pile on the parts and make our language more Germanesque?

Maybe the prefixizers are following the example of invaluable, in which the prefix does act as an intensifier. Invaluable means not simply "of value"--for that, we could use valuable--but "beyond calculation," "incapable of being valued," "priceless."

Can anyone suggest other such words? Or additional examples of prefix abuse?

Word of the Week: Steampunk

Steampunk: A subculture that blends elements of Victorian-era design and technology with elements of science fiction and fantasy; Jules Verne and William Gibson. The movement was born sometime in the late 1980s and named by science fiction author K.W Jeter in imitation of cyberpunk. About a decade later, Paul Di Filippo published The Steampunk Trilogy, a work of fiction whose dramatis personae include Queen Victoria, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman.

Steampunk encompasses fashion and invention as well as fiction. For example, the Dihemispheric Chronaether Agitator, a steam-powered kinetic sculpture by Alan Rorie, is a steampunk creation that has been making the rounds of alt-festivals such as last weekend's Maker Faire in San Mateo. Its name mirrors the earnest descriptiveness of Victorian nomenclature.

For an article about steampunk in last week's Thursday Styles, New York Times reporter Ruth La Ferla interviewed Giovanni James, lead singer of a neo-vaudevillian performance troupe called the James Gang:

Yes, he owns a flat-screen television, but he has modified it with a burlap frame. He uses an iPhone, but it is encased in burnished brass. Even his clothing — an unlikely fusion of current and neo-Edwardian pieces (polo shirt, gentleman’s waistcoat, paisley bow tie), not unlike those he plans to sell this summer at his own Manhattan haberdashery — is an expression of his keenly romantic worldview.

Anthropologist and cultural observer Grant McCracken comments:

Victorians appeal to us in several ways, not only out of a faux nostalgia.  These were people who were profoundly crafty, inclined to working on combustion engines in the tool shed at the end of the garden.  It was a place where rank amateurs could make a contribution to knowledge in their spare time, a motive that is a great motivating hope here at This Blog.  Several institutions of the Victorian period, including the Oxford English Dictionary, and great swathes [sic] of the periods of natural history came from amateurs working together in a thoroughly distributed way.

McCracken adds:

[W]ho would have guessed how syncretic and cooperative punk was going to be.  This look was designed to be uncompromising, hostile to every other form of social life.  But it turns out that punk plays well with others.  We have had gothpunks, skater punks, almost as cooperative as hip hop.  True, still no hippie punks, or luncheon punks, or preppie punks.

On that last point, several of McCracken's commenters beg to differ.

It's on the Tip of My Tongue

You know that feeling you get when you've stayed just a little too long at a birthday party? It's not simply tiredness or boredom or buttercream-frosting-sickness. What is it?

Our friends in Estonia have the answer:

Sünnipäevanädalalõpupeopärastlõunaväsimus

In other words (as George W. is fond of saying), "birth.day.week.end.party.after.lunch.tiredness."

Remember: although Estonia was part of the former U.S.S.R., the Estonian language is unrelated to Russian or any other Slavic tongue. Estonian's closest linguistic relative is Finnish.

From the ever-illuminating Omniglot blog.

Update: The originator of the "word," Corcaighist, explains that it was all a linguistic joke.

Got Focus Groups? Lose 'Em.

The 1993 "Aaron Burr" spot for the California Milk Processor Board's long-running Got Milk campaign is considered one of the best TV commercials of all time. It's also the ad that made San Francisco's Goodby, Silverstein agency famous. And it almost didn't make it onto the air.

Here's how the San Francisco Chronicle tells the story in an article about the agency's 25th anniversary:

Goodby, Silverstein is synonymous, of course, with "Got Milk?" The campaign for the California Milk Processor Board tells of the horror of milk deprivation. The first of dozens of ads, "Aaron Burr," appeared in 1993: The host of a radio contest randomly calls an Alexander Hamilton specialist and asks him, "Who shot Alexander Hamilton in that famous duel?" Unfortunately, the Hamilton scholar - he has the bullet from the duel among his Hamiltonian paraphernalia - has stuffed his mouth with a peanut butter sandwich and is fresh out of milk. His correct response, "Aaaaawon Buuuuhh," is unintelligible, and there goes the $10,000 prize.

"Aaron Burr," like many other Goodby, Silverstein ads, bombed before a test audience. It was too arcane. People asked, "Who is Aaron Burr?" Goodby persuaded the client to go with it.

Smart client. Really smart agency. Really dumb focus group.

Vox populi is all too often vox boobus americanus. Buyer beware.

Watch the "Aaron Burr" commercial on YouTube.