Fritinancy

Futuramarama

Good news for us Futuramaphiles--a new, feature-length DVD, Bender's Big Score (with Sarah Silverman as one of the voice actors), went on sale this week; it's the first of four DVDs with all-new material that will be released over the next year. Wired magazine is celebrating with a feature story in the print edition of the December issue along with a trio of online-only treats: a behind-the-scenes slideshow, a sidebar about the show's unabashed geekery, and a fascinating story about the original Futurama--the famous ride in the General Motors Pavilion in the 1939-40 New York World's Fair. There are even video excerpts of To New Horizons, a documentary about the Futurama ride.

GM's Futurama--known as the Futurama--"presented a utopia forged by urban planning," according to the online article (un-bylined, but probably by Chris Baker, the author of the feature story. No, not that Chris Baker). It also had an influence on language: Although -arama had been used to create new English words since the early 19th century, the Futurama brought the suffix into widespread use. (Read more about -arama at The Straight Dope.)

Television's Futurama (1999-2002), while best known for its math and science in-jokes, also played with language. In the world of the show--set in the 31st century--French is a dead language. (When the show was dubbed in French, German was the dead language.) In other linguistic developments, the word "Christmas" has been replaced by "Xmas" (and evergreens by palm trees) and "ask" has been replaced by "axe." "Slurm," the name of a ubiquitous beverage on the series, will be recognized by computer folk as an acronym for Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management.

According to the Wired article (print edition):

Some jokes in Futurama were written in a strange alphabet that fans had to decrypt. "Most were jokes about aliens eating people," [show co-developer David X.] Cohen says. "Like, an alien sign on a restaurant says TASTY HUMAN BURGERS." He checked the Web a few hours after the pilot aired and discovered that the freeze framers had already cracked the code. A trickier alien alphabet was devised.

For those of you who really want to read the signs in the background, Omniglot provides a decoded version of that alien alphabet.

Read my previous post about the original Futurama taglines.

Well Played, Om Malik

Very tasty headline:

To Save Its Bacon, Facebook Weakens Beacon

Malik's post--on the serious privacy issues raised by Facebook's new Beacon program, which allows companies to gather data from Facebook users and send them targeted ads--is worth reading as well.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year Contest

Take a break from holiday shopping to vote for Merriam-Webster's word of the year (WOTY). The 20 nominated words -- "culled from frequent hits to Merriam-Webster OnLine and some popular submissions to Merriam-Webster's Open Dictionary" -- are:

• apathetic
• babymoon
• blamestorm
• charlatan
• conundrum
• cruft
• eleemosynary
• facebook
• hypocrite
• linkability
• melancholy
• Pecksniffian
• pretentious
• pugnacious
• quixotic
• sardoodledom
• sputum
• subpoena
• vanity sizing
• w00t [those are zeros, not O's]

On the M-W site you can click on each word to read its definition, but I'd have appreciated a little context as well. Why did Pecksniffian, sardoodledom, and quixotic--three wonderful eponyms--make this year's list? Subpoenas are in the news every year; why is subpoena a 2007 WOTY candidate? And wot's up with w00t--any clues, readers?

My vote goes to babymoon, a travel-industry term defined as "a short vacation for a couple before the birth of their child." The Doubletongued Dictionary has antedated the word to 1995, when childbirth educator and author Sheila Kitzinger claims to have coined it, but it went truly mainstream this year with a May 13 New York Times article.

Away With Words readers will recognize cruft as the noun form of this week's Word of the Week.

Last year's M-W WOTY was truthiness.

Update: Forgot to mention that the deadline for voting is Friday, Dec. 7.

(Via Language and Humor Blog.)

Flights of Fancy

I hadn't known that some airlines bestowed names on individual planes until I chanced upon FlyerTalk, "the world's most popular frequent flyer community." A while back the forums were full of posts about JetBlue plane names; as it happens, all of that airline's 134 planes are named, mostly using "blue" in some playful way. Some of my favorites:

Bada Bing, Bada Blue

Bippity Boppity Blue (anyone else recognize the misspelled song title from the Disney Cinderella movie?)

Blue Kid in Town

Mo' Better Blue

Wild Blue Yonder

And later researched on Wikipedia:

The Name Is Blue, Jet Blue

Sacre Bleu!

Whole Lotta Blue

Absolute Blue

Also according to Wikipedia, there are two exceptions to the blue-name rule: tail number N190JB is "Luiz F. Kahl", named for the former chairman of the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, and tail number N533JB is "Usto Schulz", named for JetBlue's former VP of safety.

Plane names are selected from employee suggestions; winners of past years' contests have received trips to Toulouse, France, to tour the Airbus hangar. And each gets to fly home in his or her namesake plane.

My favorite plane name, however, isn't in the JetBlue fleet. It's the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 that recently made it onto a list of top 10 ugliest commercial airplanes. "Sporting the glimmering image of a wild Alaska king salmon," the plane, is naturally, called the Salmon Thirty Salmon. Brilliant. (Hat tip to Sore Eyes.)

The Hound, the Caspian Pizda, and the Pulpy Furred Wetness

Is there any writing as bad as bad writing about sex? To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, the clichés are laughable, the positions are untenable, and the pleasure--if any--is strictly schadenfreude. Yet year after year, the bad sex scenes continue to pulse, throb, and heave across the pages of so-called literary novels. Luckily for readers, for the last 15 years the Literary Review magazine has seen fit to recognize (point at with alarm? snicker at with thinly disguised contempt?) the best of the worst with its Bad Sex in Fiction Award, said to be the most dreaded literary prize in Britain.

The 2007 winner, announced last night, will suffer no embarrassment: he is Norman Mailer, and he died last month. His winning words came from a passage in The Castle in the Forest in which Adolf Hitler's parents, Alois and Klara, engage in an act of conception:

The Hound began to come to life. Right in her mouth. It surprised her. Alois had been so limp. But now he was a man again! His mouth lathered with her sap, he turned around and embraced her face with all the passion of his own lips and face, ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety.

Elsewhere in the passage, Mailer compares the Hound to "a coil of excrement."

"It was the excrement that tipped the balance," admitted Philip Womack, assistant editor of the Literary Review, whose editorial staff judge the annual prize. "That, and the line about Alois [the male character] being 'ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety'. That was pretty awful."

Mailer bested, or worsted, seven other shortlisted authors. A few fragrant passages:

Anne Hathaway's cow-milking fingers, cradling my balls in her almond palm, now took pity on the poor anguished erection, and in the infinite agony of her desire, guided it to the quick of the wound. At the same time I searched wildly with the fingers of my left hand, groping blind as Cyclops, found the pulpy furred wetness, parted the old lips of time and slipped my middle finger into the sancta sanctorum. It welcomed me with soft sucking sounds, syllables older than language, solace lovelier than words. --Christopher Rush, Will, a novel about William Shakespeare et ux.

Her vagina was all that, as they say in the urban media - a powerful ethnic muscle scented by bitter melon, the breezes of the local sea, and the sweaty needs of a tiny nation trying to breed itself into a future. ... I find it clichéd when couples insist that they have "the perfect fit," but between the busted-up, zigzag, Broadway boogie-woogie of my maligned purple khui and the all-encompassing nature of her Caspian pizda, we reached a third way, as it were. -- Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan.

We were blades, were a knife that could cut through myth, were two knives thrown by a magician, were arrows fired by a god, we hit heart, we hit home, we were the tail of a fish were the reek of a cat were the beak of a bird were the feather that mastered gravity were high above every landscape then down deep in the purple haze of the heather were roamin in a gloamin in a brash unending Scottish piece of perfect jigging reeling reel can we really keep this up? -- Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy.

You can read all the nominated passages here.

The ceremony was held at London's In & Out Club. But of course.

(Hat tip to Linda Grant, author of the excellent blog The Thoughtful Dresser.)

What the Other Naming Blogs Are Saying

(In other words: yeah, I'm still catching up from five days off.)

Catch This on Amazon's new wireless reading device: "On the one hand Kindle has a positive and evocative meaning. As a verb it’s active and suggests exciting or arousing an interest in books. ... On the other hand ... the primary definition means to burn or light on fire. Because this is the first meaning I associate with the word, I immediately thought of book burning, Fahrenheit 451, and kindling."

Name Wire on national slogans: "The UK has never had an official slogan. Even the Spice Girls' era 'Cool Britannia' was more of a proposed and failed media tagline. This may be due to the fact that England 'did not have the same grand cataclysmic moment of creation that other countries did' and thus a rallying cry was not really necessary. And as one student says, 'We're British; we don't do slogans.'"

Igor on bizarre naming practices: "A popular restaurant in Taipei, named 'Modern Toilet' serves up hot and steamy food in a unique kind of bowl."

Thingnamer on automated naming: "I do like name generators. They can help get minds unstuck. When quantity without context is needed they're a great source. But I don't think I would ever have a firm I worked for named by one. And it isn't because I'm a namer. It's because I don't have faith that a machine can understand the complexities of my business, my audience, my goals, and the complexities of developing a name that works."

The Name Inspector on unglamorous metaphors: "It’s interesting to compare the name Twine to the name Apple, which The Name Inspector wrote about some time ago. Both names make technical, abstract things more accessible by associating them with everyday objects. But the name Apple gets a certain glamour from the beauty and the cultural and literary significance of apples. Twine, on the other hand, is decidedly unglamorous. Apples are things you polish and proudly display in a bowl, but twine is something you throw in a drawer or a car trunk and forget about, until you need to use it."

Word of the Week: Crufty

Crufty: Badly designed, redundant, or obsolete; used to describe computer programs and devices.

According to David English's dictionary of computer jargon, the noun and verb forms ("cruft") were backformed from the adjective. The word may be a play on "craft" (as in "hand-crufted for your computing pleasure"). Or maybe not, English writes:

This term is one of the oldest in the jargon and no one is sure of its etymology, but it is suggestive that there is a Cruft Hall at Harvard University which is part of the old physics building; it’s said to have been the physics department's radar lab during WWII. To this day (early 1993) the windows appear to be full of random techno-junk. MIT or Lincoln Labs people may well have coined the term as a knock on the competition.

In her own online jargon dictionary, Jennifer Nine proposes an additional meaning for the noun form of "cruft":

5. [University of Wisconsin] n. Cruft is to hackers as gaggle is to
geese; that is, at UW one properly says "a cruft of hackers".

The jargon term "cruft" is not to be confused with Crufts, an international dog show held every March in Birmingham, England.

Photo of Harvard Cruft Hall by Brett Stilwell.

Top Japanese Buzzwords of 2007

Pink Tentacle passes along a list of 60 Japanese terms nominated for buzzword of the year. They're listed in no particular order; some of the most interesting ones include:

Dried-fish woman [himono onna]: Himono onna (“dried-fish woman”) is an expression used in the movie Hotaru No Hikari to describe the main character, a woman in her 20s who has renounced the pursuit of romance. She spends her evenings reading manga and drinking at home alone, and she spends her weekends lazing around in bed. She’s a dried-fish woman.

“Status-gap marriage” [kakusakon]: A “status-gap marriage” is one in which there is a clear gap in income, pedigree, social status, etc. between the husband and wife. The phrase usually refers to marriages in which a woman marries “beneath herself,” such as the marriage between actress Norika Fujiwara and her husband, the lesser-known comedian Tomonori Jinnai. 

Monster parents: The term “monster parents” refers to Japan’s growing ranks of annoying parents who make extravagant and unreasonable demands of their children’s schools. [More]

Dark website [yami site] : Yami sites ("dark websites”) are online networking sites where people can take out hit contracts on others, make illegal transactions (drugs, fake bank accounts, hacked cellphones, prostitution, etc.), and meet suicide partners. Japan has seen a recent rise in the number of murders arranged through these web-based hotbeds of criminal activity.

Food fighter: “Food fighters” are people with extraordinary eating skills that allow them to consume food in large quantities and/or at high speeds. Like athletes, food fighters train everyday in order to win eating competitions. The popularity of gluttonous TV celebrity (and freak of nature) Gal Sone has helped fuel this boom. 

Motepuyo: Motepuyo, a term that means something like “chubby cute,” describes women who are plump, small in stature, and cute. With a fine line between motepuyo and chubby, some say the only difference is whether or not a woman has a cute face. [More]

The top 10 will be announced Dec. 3.

(Via Kottke.)

November Linkfest

I'll be posting less frequently this week because of the Thanksgiving holiday. Here are a bunch of links to keep you amused while I'm incommunicado.

The very latest in space-age slang, circa 1962, as reported back then in Time magazine. A sampling: "Creeps" is "itchy skin caused by low pressure in a space capsule." "Sitting fat" means "successfully in orbit."

What do "akimbo," "flippant," and "jumble" have in common? They're all standard English words with a Scandinavian etymology.

The Online Slang Dictionary and Thesaurus is a collaborative project and far from comprehensive, but it's fascinating nonetheless, not least for the way it categorizes words. Under "Things," for example, we have "accomplishment," "gross substance," "limp," "medicine (related to)," and "nothing." Jorge Luis Borges would find himself right at home.

Each Friday the WordPlay Café posts a neologism challenge and invites readers to submit answers. This week's contest: find a better substitute for the awkward verb "to text," as in "I texted him a message." Deadline: Friday, Nov. 23. (Via Mr. Verb.)

Looking for ready-made neologisms? Check out the Unword Dictionary, where you'll find "quat" (past tense of "quit"), "meetnik" (a person who enjoys attending meetings), and "zipple" (a broken poptop on a beverage can). And lots more.

The Phrontistery is where you must go forthwith to find the Compendium of Lost Words, a handy list of two- and three-letter Scrabble words, and wonderful glossaries of terms for fabric, dance styles, contour lines, divination and fortune-telling, unusual animals, and names for names. (A caconym, for example, is a wrongly derived name. I'm sure you'll be able to work it into a sentence.) And, oh yes, much, much more. (What's a phrontistery? "Literally, a 'thinking-place.'")

I've been playing with Randomainer for several days and confess I'm still on the fence, although I find the concept promising. This domain generator creates semantic relations with any word you enter and then uses an algorithm to find available domain names. In my own experiments, I've found Randomainer to be mostly random--it found 48 available domains associated with "naming," but for the life of me I can't see how multdoub.com or droplesb.com (to cite just two of the finds) would burnish my reputation. Your mileage, of course, may vary. And it's worth a try just to fire up your creative synapses. For a long list of free name generators--and remember: with naming, as with most things, you get what you pay for--see Thingnamer's helpful compilation.

Name Those Turkeys!

Perhaps you already know, if only from watching West Wing reruns, that every year around this time the U.S. president publicly spares the life of two turkeys that otherwise would become Thanksgiving dinner. But perhaps you didn't know that the public is invited to choose the gobblers' names. This year's options (from the evidence, possibly selected by bored White House interns):

Wing & Prayer

May & Flower

Gobbler & Rafter*

Wish & Bone

Truman & Sixty

Jake & Tom

Via Whatever It Is I'm Against It, who says these choices are even less creative than those of years past and who offers his own pair of sobriquets: Water & Board.

By the way, "Truman" and "Sixty" have their origin in the widely publicized story that President Harry S Truman was the first president to pardon a Thanksgiving turkey, in 1947 ( i.e., 60 years ago). However, Snopes lays that claim to rest. Truman did receive a turkey that year, but it arrived on Dec. 15, in time for Christmas, not Thanksgiving. And there are no records of any presidential poultry pardons that year. On the contrary, Truman seems to have mentioned to reporters that he planned to eat the gift.

Snopes continues:

Surprisingly, the tradition which now everyone remembers as having gone on forever apparently began with President George H.W. Bush in 1989. At that year's Thanksgiving presentation of a bird for the First Family's table, in his remarks to those assembled, he said, "But let me assure you--and this fine tom turkey--that he will not end up on anyone's dinner table. Not this guy. He's been granted a presidential pardon as of right now, allowing him to live out his days on a farm not far from here."

____

* A "rafter" is a flock of turkeys.