Fritinancy

Fewer Calories

We’ve been seeing a lot of this:

Spotted at Costco and on the StriVectin website

 

And this:

From the Economist’s Johnson blog, Jan. 12, 2012

 

And let’s not forget the Mercedes “less doors” ad, which I wrote about in November.

So it was mildly amazing (as presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is fond of saying) to see this ad in the New York Times today:

 

Not less calories: fewer. Courageous trend-bucking and traditional-rules-of-grammar-obeying, American Beverage Association!

Of course, as count nouns go—nouns that can be modified by a numeral and which occur in both singular and plural form, and which therefore “require” fewer—you can hardly get more countable than “calories.” But there’s another consideration: When you’re peddling expensive sugar water, you want to project a virtuous image. The beverage folks could have gone with “less”—as Stan Carey points out in his language blog, there’s plenty of historical precedent for that choice—but then they would have risked the wrath of traditionalists.* No one will write angry letters over the choice of “fewer” here. Sugary sodas: the wholesome, grammatical choice!

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* In the body copy of the ad (too small for legibility here), there’s another “fewer” that strikes my ear as hypercorrect: “While New York City had its own school program, our industry’s efforts in New York State and across the country have led to 88% fewer beverage calories in schools overall.” (Emphasis added.) Percentages are generally included among the exceptions to the less/fewer “rule” (more like a guideline); since the reference here is to a decrease in aggregate calories, I’d have gone with “less.”

"To Contact" in 1918?

Like millions of TV viewers in the US and the UK, I’ve been under the spell of Downton Abbey, the period drama originally produced for Britain’s ITV and rebroadcast in the US on PBS. We’re now three episodes into Season 2, which opens in the middle of World War I and shuttles between a grand Yorkshire estate and the trenches of war-torn France. The attention to detail in clothing, automobiles, home furnishings, and telephones is extraordinary. The dialogue, however, isn’t always quite as authentic.

One out-of-place usage caught my attention in Episode 3, which aired last Sunday: contact as a verb meaning “to communicate with.” I heard it spoken twice: once by Cousin Isobel Crawley (at 10:09*: “I’ll try to contact Captain Crawley and explain to him what happened”) and once by Lord Grantham (at 25:35: “I don’t know how to contact her”).

By coincidence, I had recently researched the history of to contact for a column in the Visual Thesaurus, so I knew its use in Downton Abbey wasn’t just slightly amiss but grossly anachronistic. Contact has been documented as a verb since 1834, but for decades it had a single meaning: to place in a such a manner that surfaces are touching. (That’s the literal meaning of the Latin root words.) The metaphorical sense of to contact—“to communicate with”—wasn’t recorded until 1927, and then only as an American colloquialism. The colloquial usage was still scandalous in Britain in 1935, when Sir Alan Patrick Herbert wrote What a Word! (wonderfully subtitled “Being an account of the principles and progress of ‘the word war’ conducted in ‘Punch’, to the great improvement and delight of the people, and the lasting benefit of the king’s English, with many ingenious exercises and horrible examples”). “A charming lady in the publicity business shocked me when we parted,” wrote Sir Alan, “by saying ‘It has been such fun contacting you.’”

Brits continued tsk-tsking about to contact for years. Here’s Eric Partridge in Usage and Abusage, first published in 1947:

If you feel that without this American synonym for ‘to establish contact with’ or, more idiomatically, ‘get in(to) touch with’ [a person], life would be too unutterably drear and bleak and ‘grim’, do at least say or write ‘to contact a person’, not contact with … Extremes of fashion bring their own corrective, and contact, the great word of the era of sales promotion and consolidation, shows signs of retiring to its proper place.

Fat chance, although the No Contact crowd had plenty of sympathizers on this side of the Atlantic, too. In The Careful Writer, originally published in 1965, Theodore Bernstein dismissed contact as “a fad word.” And Wilson Follett found it necessary to devote two hand-wringing columns to “contact, verb” in Modern American Usage (1966). An excerpt reveals the emotional valence of the dispute:

Persons old enough to have been repelled by the verb contact when it was still a crude neologism may as well make up their minds that there is no way to arrest or reverse the tide of its popularity. Persons young enough to have picked up the word without knowing that anyone had reservations about it may as well make up their minds that a considerable body of their elders abominate it and would despise themselves if they succumbed to the temptation to use it. …

If in doubt, contact your physician — this locution is as natural to the American of thirty as it is grotesque to the American of sixty, for whom the idea of surfaces touching is the essence of contact. The elderly can therefore see no fitness and no use for the word in its new sense, when the vocabulary already provides consult, ask, approach, get in touch with, confer with, and simply see.

“Repelled,” “crude,” “abominate,” “despise, “grotesque”—if those were the adjectives being applied to contact in 1966, one can scarcely imagine the pearl-clutching, if not outright apoplexy, that would have resulted from its utterance in 1918.

Today, of course, we’ve made our peace with to contact and shifted our contempt to reach out. “Why not just say contact?” the peevers complain. Plus ça change.

For a discussion of other anachronistic language in Downton Abbey, see this article in the Daily Mail (UK), which considers the idioms “everything is rosy in the garden,” “get knotted,” and “logic pills,” all of which were unfamiliar to me. Meanwhile, in a recent Language Log post, linguist Mark Liberman took a look at “Just sayin’,” which was spoken in a DA episode set in 1916. Oh, and here’s that Visual Thesaurus column I wrote about reach out and contact.

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* The current episodes will be online through the end of the season. After that, you’ll have to rent or buy the DVD.

That Word

It does not mean what they think it means.

Liquid Gold Twined Necklace by Alexis Bittar, from alexisbittar.com.

Jack the Ripper was infamous. Bernie Madoff is infamous. Alexis Bittar—a charming and talented jewelry designer whom I once met at a Saks Fifth Avenue trunk show—is not infamous. What he is is famous (First Lady Michelle Obama is a fan) if not yet quite a household word.

The Bittar copywriter made a surprisingly common error: assuming that the addition of in- to famous would create a superlative meaning “intensely famous.”* As I wrote in a May 2008 post, infamous is never a favorable word; it means “notorious, ill-famed, having an exceedingly bad reputation.” In legal contexts, it may mean:

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.

And speaking of treason, I’d also have suggested a substitute for treacherously in the second sentence of the necklace copy. The word means “hazardously” or “in a manner capable of betrayal”; in this context it suggests, all too unpleasantly, “puncture of the carotid artery by means of pointy costume jewelry.” I think what’s intended here is something closer to “enticingly” or “thrillingly.” Or maybe the little daggers “quiver” from pendants, suggesting not only their delicacy but their resemblance to arrows.

UPDATED at commenter Elisa’s suggestion:

 

More words in the That Word series: shrinkage, cliché, arriviste, bupkus, unrequited, sophistry.

 

* Likewise, some people seem to think that penultimate means “the pinnacle of ultimate,” when in fact it means “next to last.”

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Yes, the “That Word” reference is to The Princess Bride, which turns 25 this year. Inconceivable!

"X Just Got Better"

Here’s a twofer: a full-page ad from Corning in the January 22 New York Times Sunday Magazine that features a snowclone and a nouning.

 

(For new visitors to Fritinancy: a snowclone is a particular type of formulaic cliché, the original of which was “If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z.” Scores of snowclones have been documented; for a comprehensive list, see the Snowclone Database. I’ve written from time to time about snowclones in advertising.)

The snowclone here is “X just got better,” a formula frequently employed by headline writers short on time and imagination. (“The Best Flying Toy Just Got Better”; “Your Chances of Getting Hired Just Got Better”; “Dodge Ball Just Got Better.”) It has also made it into the trademark database. Here are some of the slogans I spotted:

Garlic Just Got Better (for a distributor of black garlic)

Breastfeeding Just Got Better (for nursing bras)

Your Weather Just Got Better (for Weatherbug, a forecasting service)

Beef Just Got Better (for Tomer Kosher Foods)

Life Just Got Better (for home entertainment and security systems)

Bigger Just Got Better (for Taco Bell)

Pleasure Just Got Better (for the Trojan Vibrating Mini Personal Massager)

A Great Car Wash Just Got Better (for Country Stores Wash-n-Fill Express)

Fishing Just Got Better (for a maker of fishing lures)

Wrestling Just Got Better (for Full Speed Productions)

My favorite variation, though, comes from the dead trademark database: “The Oldest Virgin Around Just Got Better.” It was registered to the California Olive Corporation between 1997 and 2005. The California Olive Corporation is (was?) doing business in Salem, Massachusetts, which makes no sense at all unless witchcraft was involved.

Sometimes “easier” replaces “better” in the “X Just Got Y-er” formula: Photo Editing Just Got Easier, Local Searching Just Got Easier, Home Networking Just Got Easier, and this crudely funny twist that uses emojis: Sexting Just Got Easier.

In all of these examples, “just” is a constant: It suggests breaking news, breathlessly imparted. Get it while it’s hot!

As for the nouning in the Corning ad, it’s the use of “tough” as shorthand for “the quality of toughness.” This particular adjective-as-noun device has been turning up a lot in ads lately. See, for example, Lexus’s “Engineering Amazing,” AT&T’s “Rethink Possible,” and Chex Mix’s “A Bag of Interesting.” On the American Dialect Society’s email list, Jonathan Lighter recently noted “Leave ordinary behind” (for South Africa tourism), “Tired sucks” (for 5-Hour Energy drinks), and this string of nouned adjectives in a Grant Thornton ad:

“Genuine wins. Uncommon wins. Original wins.”

(Ad from here.)

Back to the Corning ad: Although the headline recycles out a shopworn formula and the photography is cluttered and confusing (reflections! gradients! bananas!), I admire the name and the concept. “Gorilla Glass” is a vivid and effective apposition of strength and fragility, and the alliteration makes it fun to say. This brand is a gorilla in the room that isn’t likely to be overlooked.

Word of the Week: Grandiosity

Grandiosity: Greatness of scope or intent; feigned or affective grandeur or pomposity; excessive use of verbal ornamentation.

In the mental-health disciplines, grandiosity is a disorder: “an unrealistic sense of superiority, a sustained view of oneself as better than others that causes the narcissist to view others with disdain or as inferior. It also refers to a sense of uniqueness, the belief that few others have anything in common with oneself and that one can only be understood by a few or very special people.” (Source: the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, 2000.)

In last Thursday’s Republican presidential primary debate, held in Charleston, South Carolina, former US Senator Rick Santorum sniped at fellow candidate Newt Gingrich:

“Grandiosity has never been a problem with Newt Gingrich,” Santorum said of his opponent’s shameless self-promotion. “A month ago, he was saying, ‘Oh, I’m inevitable.’ It was, ‘I’m destined to do it.’”

Gingrich’s smiling response seemed to suggest that he approved this message and perhaps thought “grandiosity” was a favorable assessment.

Santorum: Grandiosity Never a Problem For Gingrich

 

Gingrich went on to win the primary on Saturday. Santorum finished third.

When grandiosity and grandiose entered English dictionaries, around 1840, the words already had both positive and negative connotations. As time went on, the disparaging meanings prevailed. George Eliot wrote in Daniel Deronda (1876) of a character’s “grandiose air” that “was making Mab feel herself a ridiculous toy to match the cottage piano.” In 1892, Augustine Birrell compared Gibbon and Milton: “as one is our grandest author, so the other is our most grandiose.” And in a 2011 column in the Wall Street Journal, Al Lewis said of Ayn Rand, a darling of the antigovernment crowd:

She crafted philosophical arguments and wrote bizarre works of fiction to prove their premises. Then, in the delusional grandiosity that only chemicals can inspire, she declared herself, “the most creative thinker alive.”

Newt Gingrich has also declared himself to be a creative thinker. Some of his publicly shared ideas include establishing a moon colony to extract minerals, firing federal judges with whom he disagrees, and changing the labor laws to allow children to work (as school janitors, for example).

Predictably, there's a parody Twitter account.