Fritinancy

In Merger Talks with Dunder Mifflin?

I don't envy the person in charge of recruiting at Boring Business Systems, an honest-to-God company in Lakeland, Florida. Boring has a Boring tagline--"Your One Stop Business Solution"--and Boringly bad web copy: "For over 80 years now, we have made it our business to meet and hopefully exceed, your business needs."

On the other hand, wouldn't you love to see them play softball against the gang from The Office?

Thanks to Igor International for identifying this candidate for a What Not to Name makeover.

Word of the Week: Visual Guilt

Visual guilt: The tendency of employees to opt for cheaper choices than corporate travel agents or administrative assistants do, simply because the employees saw lower prices on an online booking screen. According to The Wall Street Journal, "one reason...employees look for lower-cost options when they book travel themselves is because they have no one else to blame for a more-luxurious option. If you book through a corporate travel agent, you always can say the agent was responsible for booking a more expensive trip. But booking yourself means you have no cover if the procurement department, finance department or your boss questions the expenditure."

A Synonym for 'Thanks'

This blog got a generous plug today from the folks at Visual Thesaurus, the very nifty interactive tool for exploring word relationships. The site has lots of other good info: interviews with writers, words of the day, writing tips. Check it out.

Interview with the Word Wrester

Grant Barrett's The Lexicographer's Rules is my daily cup o' lingo java. I admire Grant, the editor of The Double-Tongued Word Wrester Dictionary and the new book The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English (and the project editor for Oxford's Historical Dictionary of American Slang), for his rigorous scholarship and his badass, take-no-prisoners attitude. So thanks, Grant, for letting us know about this interview with you on a new-to-me blog, #1 Hit Song. If you'ved always wanted to know more about diachronic dictionaries or the etymology of "squick," start here. And here's a heads-up to you word sleuths out there: Grant says he's "always on the lookout for new military slang."

What I'm Reading

Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show, by Geoffrey Nunberg. Linguist Nunberg, a professor at UC Berkeley, frequent commentator on NPR's "Fresh Air," and contributor to the wonderful Language Log blog, uses wit, intelligence, and historical perspective to analyze why words are failing Democrats (aka liberals, aka progressives). "Words like elite, values, and traditional didn't work for the Republicans because they came with suitable frames already attached to them," Nunberg writes, "--rather, the words acquired their charged meanings in the context of the stories they were used to tell." Semi-frivolous aside: I was tickled to discover, in the middle of a riff on populism, a reference to Banana Republic's "populist pants" of the late 1980s. I had a hand in those pants, so to speak: I was Banana Republic's editorial director back then, and Nunberg's mention sent me back to my catalog archive. (Yes, children, 20 years ago BR was known for its witty illustrated catalogs and safari-themed stores where animal calls emanated from the speakers.) There they were, in the Fall 1987 book: Populist Pants, in khaki and navy, 100% cotton twill, $36. As I recall, we weren't making the "fashion statement" Nunberg disparages, but rather raising consciousness about a nearly forgotten high point in U.S. history. The copy began: "'Raise less corn and more hell!' So admonished a tough-spirited slogan of the Populist movement, back in the 1890s. Styles have come and gone since then, but certain values [aha!] persist. Our Populist Pants, steeped in grass-roots sensibility and the simple good sense of solid workmanship, are case in point. ..." Those pants were made in the U.S.A., by the way.

  One Tough Mother, by Gert Boyle. I'm talking with a former CEO about ghostwriting his memoir, so I'm surveying the competitive landscape. This little book by Columbia Sportswear's "ChairMa" is a rule-breaking charmer from start (its unconventional size and format) to finish (a recipe for "Gert's Finger Apple Pie"). Beginning in 1984, Columbia started running attention-grabbing print ads that featured a chunky, unsmiling, gray-haired woman next to a big headline that said something like "My Mother Wears Combat Boots." That woman was Gert Boyle, nee Lamfrom, who fled Nazi Germany with her family in 1937, settled in Portland, Oregon, and, after her husband died suddenly in 1970, took over the company with her son Tim, then 21. They nearly drove the business into the ground before making a pivotal decision that reversed their fortunes. The text is straightforward and self-deprecating (shout-out to ghostwriter Kerry Tymchuk, who also wrote Bob and Elizabeth Dole's joint autobiography), and it's a treat to see a whole bunch of those classic ads reproduced here.

Shooting Water by Devyani Saltzman. The Canadian-Indian production Water is the most extraordinary film I've seen this year. Gorgeous and heartbreaking, it tells the story of a group of widows in 1930s India condemned to mendicancy and ostracism because of strict Hindu precepts that forbade widows to marry or mingle in society. The back story is even more astonishing: filming began in 1999 but was shut down after thousands of religious fundamentalists protested (they even burned an effigy of the director, Deepa Mehta); it resumed four years later in Sri Lanka with a mostly new cast. Mehta's daughter, Devyani Saltzman, was a 19-year-old cinematography assistant when shooting began, and she rejoined the production in Sri Lanka. She recounts the experience as an ambivalent outsider--she grew up in Toronto with her Jewish father--who has deep emotional ties to her mother's country. There's a fair amount of teenage mooniness here (Devyani loves Vikram, Vikram has a girlfriend), but the book is also a fascinating and intelligent account of the persistence of artistic vision despite almost inconceivable challenges.

The Secret Universe of Names, by Roy Feinson. The subtitle is "The Dynamic Interplay of Names and Destiny"--how woo-woo can you get? But I admit I'm drawn to this hefty tome (458 pages) for its insights into the relationship between sound, meaning, and emotional impact--three important elements of name development. Each page analyzes a consonant cluster (e.g., JN as in Jane, John, or Jonah) and teases out its associations: "the letter J's ability to impart a sense of integrity" (from justice and judgment) countered by "the influence of the negative letter N." A lot of this stuff is too close to astrology for my taste ("With their ability to lead and influence others, G people enjoy above-average success in business and politics"), but there's also a good deal of useful etymology and name history. And I defy you not to turn immediately to the page that analyzes your own name.

How 2 B Kewl

Are you wondering what those dadburn whippersnappers are forever typing into their electronic gizmos? Well, R U? Wonder no longer: there's new hope for old farts. A neat-o translation tool called TransL8IT! helps you make sense of text lingo. Just type in any standard English phrase (e.g., "The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain") and TransL8IT! instantly renders it into something suitable for texting ("d rain n Spain falLz mAnlE n d pln"). Works in reverse (text-to-English), too.

Thanks to Writer's Blog for the tip.

luv & }xx,

Nancy

Eats, Shoots & Leaves a Bad Taste

Geek Squad has a great brand story: the black-and-white Geek Mobiles, the orange-and-black police-barricade identity, the "agents" in retro short-sleeve dress shirts. Word is, they even do a pretty good job of fixing "any PC problem anytime, anywhere" and saving "victims of rogue technology."

The rules of English spelling, however, must not be in the Geek Squad manual.

Case in point: a full-page ad in the August issue of Wired (page 020 of the "How To" insert). The headline reads: "Your Right to Computer Support Supercedes Our Right to a Social Life."

Cute. But wrong. It's supersedes, not "supercedes."

"Supersede" is an odd word with an orphan spelling--an exception to the -cede rule that used to be universally taught in, oh, eighth-grade English. Perhaps the Geek Squad guys were playing D&D instead of paying attention to the teacher, so here's the makeup class:

Unlike "recede," "intercede," and "precede"--in which -cede comes from the Latin word meaning "to go"--"supersede" (meaning "to replace") incorporates the Latin root "sedere," which means "to sit." To supersede originally meant "to sit higher than"--as in a sedan chair (same root), a conveyance in which a rich person could sit while being transported by lackeys.

This isn't a six-of-one-half-a-dozen-of-the-other matter, or an arguable point such as till and until. "Supercedes" is just wrong. Teeth-gnashingly wrong when displayed in 30-point type.

What have we learned? If you're doubtful about how to spell it, look it up. Yes, in a dictionary. Don't trust your spell-checker, which has the vocabulary of a six-year-old. (TypePad's spell-checker usually isn't even that smart--although it did flag "supercedes.") And, as Patricia T. O'Connor relates in Words Fail Me, your speller won't stop you from making miss steaks if their spelled wright.

And while we're at it, Geeks, why so stingy with the hyphens? You need at least one in your tagline, "24 Hour Computer Support Task Force" (between "24" and "Hour," to create a compound adjective; I'll let you slide on "Computer Support," which is also an adjective here).

Believe it or not, I'm not nearly as cranky as Lynn Truss on this subject; if people don't care about spelling and punctuation in their personal correspondence, that's OK with me. But in a full-page national ad, presumably created by a high-priced ad agency and vetted by $400-an-hour attorneys? Sorry, fellas: I'm going to have to issue a citation. Next time, hire a proofreader (see below).

Proof Positive

There's a beautifully written essay by Melissa Holbrook Pierson in today's Salon about the pains and occasional pleasures of being a proofreader, the indispensable person who's paid (very poorly) to clean up writers' messes--or as Pierson puts it, "the literary equivalent of wiping the tables at Burger King." Like many in the word trade, I began my career on the proofreading desk, and I know firsthand the indomitable solidarity of the unsung and underpaid. I also know the deep satisfaction of setting a phrase aright and creating a tiny, artificial world of perfect spelling and punctuation.

Here's a snippet, but do read the whole piece. It's a gem.

...I love catching those little inconsistencies, love putting the point of my freshly sharpened red pencil on top of a comma that needs to be a semicolon, and inscribing the delete symbol, like the letter "S" with a flourish, that will herald the disappearance of anything it touches. This I do with care and precision, two qualities I rarely exemplify in any other part of my life, and here is where proofreading allows me to better myself. I become someone who gets things done. Someone with good handwriting. Someone who pays attention, with great focus, and lets nothing get by her.

He Could've Had a V-8

Fill 'er up with vegetable oil? That's what Jim Norman and Ginger Gordon did with their 2001 Volkswagen Jetta TDI; Norman then wrote about it in the New York Times. On a 160-mile trip, the couple used only two cups of diesel fuel as a supplement to three gallons of soybean oil. (Don't try this at home unless one household member is a mechanic skilled in converting diesel engines to oil-burners, a transformation that tends to run about $2,000.)

And here's the reason the item appears in this space: After Norman and Gordon modified their Jetta, they decided it needed a new name. And so (drumroll, please), say "wilkommen" to the Volksvegan.

Air Crafty

Now that US Airways is planning to print ads on barf bags, it's time to take a look at the full potential of this valuable bit of airborne real estate. Thanks to Matthew Stibbe at Bad Language for alerting us to Airtoons, the parody airline safety messages (tagline: "Please Familiarize Yourself or Perish in Flame"). Hold the cursor over each picture to see an alternate caption. Warning: some of these messages are rather naughty. Not to mention snarky.