Fritinancy

Je Ne Sais Quoi

I love fashion. I've had fashion clients for years. And yet every so often I find myself banging my head on my desk over some bizarre bit of language wielded by an overreaching fashion copywriter. Last week it was the "Barren" skirt from Diane von Furstenberg. This week: two headdesk moments from the new J. Crew catalog. Naturally, the website is in the accursed Flash* so I can't show you photos here. You'll have to use the links, or your imagination.

Exhibit A: The Curator pant, "a work of genius [sic!] in matte jersey with an incredibly flattering [sic!] (and so chic [sic!] right now) slouchy fit that deftly [sic!] tapers to a skinny fit at the ankle." Let me be plain: That crotch is drifting dangerously southward, suggesting that the eponymous curator is wearing jumbo Depends. Even J. Crew Aficionada, usually an unabashed partisan, wrings her hands:

Call them "curator pants" all you want, but those are harem pants. No one can rock these. No one. And to call them a "work of genius" makes me really question you sometimes J.Crew. Seriously, you can do better.

Now, we know that curate is a trendy word right now. We are all curators in the fabulous galleries of our lives, are we not? But this particular appropriation is just inartful.

(I know someone is going to point out that it should be pants, not pant. Well, obviously Someone isn't fluent in Retailese. What we have here is the Fashion Singular, a grammatical number familiar to readers of Vogue and watchers of What Not to Wear. Sample sentences: "We love a platform shoe!" "Yes, you can wear the new romper!" "The sequined short: Hot or not?")

Exhibit B: The Suckered Gingham Shirt. Now, you may assume that the name was taken from the customer's suspicion that she's being duped into paying $69.50 for an item of clothing that looks like it's spent the last month balled up in the back of a drawer. But what J. Crew has in mind is an oh-so-chic (and oh-so-wrong) verbification-truncation of seersucker, which is a noun borrowed from Hindi sīrsakar (which in turn was borrowed from Persian shīroshakar). The word literally means "milk and sugar," and it refers to the bumpy texture of the cloth. There is no process called suckering. I could have tolerated "puckered"—which is, in fact, the descriptor used in the copy. But I will not be suckered into suckered.

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* That link goes to a post about the use of the accursed Flash by restaurants, but it holds for fashion sites as well—indeed, for almost all websites.

It's All About YOU

My latest Visual Thesaurus column, "The You Decade," was published yesterday. In it I revisit the changing meaning of you in marketing, a theme I've touched on in a couple of blog posts: "The City • The Committee • And You" (about Philadelphia's new city slogan) and ("Life • Liberty • And You") and this post about the marketing campaigns of Yahoo and HTC.

Access to the column is restricted to subscribers (do it!). Here's an excerpt:

For better and worse, the new You can be found throughout the culture. Dr. Mehmet Oz and Michael Roizen have penned a series of best-selling YOU books that tell you all about the world's most fascinating subject. A partial list includes YOU: The Owner's Manual; YOU: On a Diet; YOU: Staying Young; and YOU: The Smart Patient. They may have been following the advice of numerous business-writing guides that urge "you-attitude" — putting yourself in the customer's shoes and addressing him or her directly.

And the you focus goes all the way to the top. President Obama's version of a fireside chat is called Your Weekly Address — and you can watch it on (what else?) YouTube.

 

Now a confession. In a comment, Richard P.—whom I know through Twitter and through his fine copywriting business, Lucid Content—noted that he'd read a similar article several years ago by Christopher Hitchens. A few hours later, Richard tweeted me with the link.* Honestly, I hadn't seen the article (which has the same title, "The You Decade," as my column) until yesterday. And I did do some searching.

That aside, the article is well worth reading, and only partly because the opinions expressed therein coincide with my own. Hitchens is always fun to read. Here's a bit of what he has to say:

A room-service menu, for example, now almost always offers "your choice" of oatmeal versus cornflakes or fruit juice as opposed to vegetable juice. Well, who else's choice could it be? Except perhaps that of the people who decide that this is the range of what the menu will feature. Fox TV famously and fatuously claims, "We report. You decide." Decide on what? On what Fox reports? Online polls promise to register what "you" think about the pressing issues of the moment, whereas what's being presented is an operation whereby someone says, "Let's give them the idea that they are a part of the decision-making process."

You have a good day now, OK?

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* Richard says he'd had no luck finding the article until he hit on the search term "Hitchens on the second person pronoun." Teh Google, it is a most demanding mistress.

He's on a Horse

You've seen the new Old Spice commercials, right? No? Then watch the 30-second version right now. In fact, I'm going to join you.

Everybody back here now? I first saw that spot a couple of weeks ago, during the Super Bowl, and thought it was nutty and brilliant . . . and probably cooked up on a computer. I mean, a bathroom, a boat, a horse? How else could they have done it?

Well, Leo LaPorte of Twit.TV asked the same question, and to get the answer he went to the source: copywriter Eric Kallman and art director Craig Allen of Portland ad agency Wieden+Kennedy. Watch the 19-minute video to learn how the ad was really made. And then keep reading for more Old Spice-y lore.

As promised:

1. Want more of The Man Your Man Could Smell Like? You know you do. Here's an L.A. Times interview with The Man himself, football player-turned-actor Isaiah Mustafa. Oh, and you can follow him on Twitter. (His location: "On a horse.")

2. When I wasn't looking at TMYMCSL, I was thinking about two (G-rated) things. The first was the Lyle Lovett song "If I Had a Boat," which includes the line, "If I had a pony, I'd ride him on my boat."

3. And the second thing was "Roger and Elaine," by Dave Barry. Because of ... well, just read it.

4. I am old enough to remember a version of this black-and-white Old Spice commercial, with its pineapple-bottomed mermaids and the mysterious-to-my-young-ears word "bo'sun." Hear the whistle? That's Toots Thieleman, better known as a jazz guitarist harmonica player.

5. The Shulton Company, which created Old Spice, was founded in 1934. Its original product was a women's fragrance, Early American Old Spice. Old Spice for men, packaged in the distinctive buoy-shaped bottle, was introduced in 1938. Procter & Gamble bought the Shulton Company in 1990.

6. Other actors who have been featured in Old Spice ads have included Bruce Campbell, Neil Patrick Harris, and John Bennett Perry, father of Friends co-star Matthew Perry.

7. OK, back to the original ad. See the page title? Manmercials! And they said all the good man-words were taken.

(Manmercials link via Martin Bishop.)

City of Logos

Over the weekend I finally did something I've wanted to do every year for many years: I saw all of the Oscar-nominated short films, animated and live-action. These movies are, on the whole, labors of love (or film-school degree candidacy) that don't get distribution deals; if you're not a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, you won't see them. Not, that is, unless you hop to it and make a date at a Landmark Theatres cinema near you, where the movies are being screened for a week at a time.

I liked a lot of what I saw, although, as others have noted, the films are pretty dark this year: Chernobyl, modern-day slavery, serial killers. (Even Wallace & Gromit fall prey to a homicidal scheme.) My top pick, though, is the startling and hilarious Logorama, from the French studio H5 (although the R-rated dialogue is in English). It's 16 minutes of high-speed action set in a phantasmagorical Los Angeles landscaped with corporate logos—2,500 of them, by one count. Part of the fun is to see how many you can recognize; another part is speculating about how many lawsuits the filmmakers will face for their blithe appropriation of intellectual property. The film caused a minor sensation when it was screened at Sundance last month, and it's been the talk of the ad blogs ever since. Here's what David Gianatasio said about it at AdFreak:

The concept is played for laughs (there are car chases and a hostage crisis, among other things), but it's no huge leap to envision such a world. We already walk around covered head to toe in designer logos, and phrases like "Turn left at the Citgo sign" and "It's two blocks down from Petco Park" increasingly help us find our way. It's just a matter of time before life-size animated avatars stroll down Main Street, humming jingles and chanting taglines.

I found the film online here, but it may not be there by the time you read this; it's been removed from some other sites because of copyright issues. (It may be available soon as a paid download from iTunes.) If you're in a cubicle, you might want to turn down the speakers (remember: R-rated language). The trailer is safe for work.

Word of the Week: Flou

Flou: Softness, haziness, blurriness; also an adjective meaning foggy, fluffy, or indistinct. French; pronounced floo.

Flou is one of those French words that occasionally appear in fashion journalism—for example, in this Women's Wear Daily review of the designer Sophie Theallet's Fall 2010 collection, which Theallet showed at New York Fashion Week:

The lineup, said Theallet several days before the show, was about lost girlhood memories. Namely, “the first time you fell in love with a princess dress,” she said. “I tried to give that feeling to a grown-up woman.” And she did, but not with a lot of flou and frou; instead, her dresses were mostly short, done in tiny florals or soft blue and pink and green, and trimmed in velvet or leather.

And what is that rhyming noun, frou? Usually seen reduplicated (frou-frou), it's an onomatopoetic French word meaning "the rustling of silk." Here, though, it's used in its metaphorical sense to mean "excessive ornamentation."

French-born Sophie Theallet, who now lives and works in Brooklyn,  is one of the formerly obscure designers whose star has risen since being singled out by First Lady Michelle Obama.

Flou is also the name of an Italian bed manufacturer and an alternative rock/metal band in Paraguay. As far as I can tell, flou has no specific meaning in Italian or Spanish; in both cases, it may be a borrowing from French. 

February Linkfest

Short takes for a short month:

A couple of weeks ago, Time magazine—galled and galvanized by Comcast's name change to Xfinity—published its 10 Worst Corporate Name Changes. (Also on the list: Syfy and Xe.) Before you dash of a congratulatory letter to the editor, read "The New Laws of Naming," Alan Brew's response to the list. Brew, a veteran brand strategist at RiechesBaird in Southern California, reminds us, first and foremost, that "all name changes are going to be controversial." No. 2 on Brew's list: "There will always be people who don't like a name change for whatever reason, and newspapers will always find them for a quote." Amen, brother.

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Two beautifully written pieces on the movie critic Roger Ebert: a profile by Chris Jones in Esquire, and journalist/blogger Nancy Nall's terrific tribute. They aren't eulogies; Ebert is very much alive. But he lost his jaw to thyroid cancer and has been unable to eat, speak, or drink since 2006. Cancer can't touch his love of movies or his writing ability, though. He tweets all day, every day, and writes a blog about movies (mostly) for the Chicago Sun-Times. Read Ebert's response to the Chris Jones piece. (The photo may shock you, but, as Ebert says, "That's how I look, after all.")

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More journalism to make you stop, think, and support your local paper: This column by SF Gate's Mark Morford on the disappointingness of it all. Morford writes: "Hell, what with the economy and job situation, the housing market and the overall feel and texture of the nation right now, it's no wonder Americans are, by and large, a goddamn miserable bunch. We don't like anything right now. No politician, no decision, no situation, no inhale, no exhale. We are sick to death of all of it, including ourselves." Read the rest.

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The portmanteaus keep on coming! Ben Zimmer examines snow portmanteaus—snowpocalypse, snowmageddon—at Visual Thesaurus. In a comment, Jan Freeman of the excellent Throw Grammar from the Train blog contributed snowdenfreude and snow-how.

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The Wall Street Journal (you read that right) asks: Are all the good band names taken? My response: Not as long as there's a Band Name Generator to create names like Order of the Happy Cat and Fistful of Thumbs. Hat tips to Mike Lipsey (@StoicMike) for the former and to Chris Smith (@CSWriter) for the latter.

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Finally, here's one for everyone in the 510, with a special shout-out to those of the geekish persuasion: a Facebook petition to make "hella" the SI Prefix for 10^27. (Via Benjamin Tseng.) For those of you outside the Bay Area: a definition of "hella." 

Conspicuous Consumption

Eric Wilson in today's New York Times on the menswear shows at New York Fashion Week:

When your name is Thom Browne, it might not be the best idea to use your initials as a logo.

And yet, there they were, TB logos on the elbow patches of jackets and the knee patches of britches in the fall collection Mr. Browne showed in the wood-paneled salons of the Park Avenue Armory. Were the models coming from tubercular quarantine? I point this out with love and commiseration, Mr. Browne. My initials spell “EW.”

Portmanteaupia

It's been a good week for portmanteau sightings. I snapped the first two pics in my neighborhood:

Apologies for the blur. The Tanknology truck—the company name is a portmanteau of tank and technology—was making a pit stop at a local service station.

I spotted the State Farm Insurance billboard not far from my house. Spendage is coined, but, curiously enough, costage (cost, expense) was familiar to Chaucer in the 12th century.

I saw a different State Farm portmanteau ad on the side of a Muni bus in San Francisco:

There was a Snacktrition (snack plus nutrition) display at the checkout at Marshall's in San Leandro:

A mouthful . . . in every respect.

In other portmanteau news, word maven Mark Peters devotes a column to word blends, including one I hadn't heard of: pizzly (the offspring of a polar bear and a grizzly). I did, however, know about pizzled, a portmanteau of "puzzled" and "pissed off," and pizzle, which is something else altogether.

To blend, perhaps to croak: Linguist Arnold Zwicky on the giant portmantoad.

Here's how I knew portmanteaus would loom large this week: Monday's poem of the day on public radio's Poetry Almanac was "Portmanterrorism," by Nick Lantz. It starts like this:

Would it make a difference to say we suffered
from affluenza in those days? Could we blame
Reaganomics, advertainment, the turducken
and televangelism we swallowed by the sporkful,
all that brunch and Jazzercise, Frappuccinos
we guzzled on the Seatac tarmac, sexcellent
celebutantes we ogled with camcorders while
our imagineers simulcast the administrivia
of our alarmaggedon across the glocal village?

Read the rest, which includes one of my all-time favorite portmanteaus—anticipointment—and ends with a poignant twist.

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More word blends at A Daily Portmanteau, which accepts original submissions.

Palm Pilot Redux

It turns out I have even more to say about that zombie brand Palm Pilot. Hop over to Duets Blog, where I contributed today's guest post.

In related news, in a couple of weeks I'll be traveling to Duets Blog HQ—Minneapolis—to speak about names and branding at a trademark-law seminar. It isn't often that lawyers and branding types get together to swap stories and information; I'm grateful to Stephen Baird of Winthrop & Weinstine for this opportunity.

The Waistland

Dear Diane von Furstenberg,

Count me among your many admirers. You revolutionized women's ready-to-wear in the 1970s with your chic, simple wrap dresses. As the current president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, you're helping to raise money for Haiti earthquake relief. Just this week you announced the first DVF Awards, which are supported by your Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation and which recognize women around the world "whose leadership, courage, vision and commitment to producing positive change have transformed the lives of other women around the world."

However, my admiration for your work does not extend to the name of this skirt, the "Barren."

True, the model is so skinny that her fertility may be impaired. But to ask her—and us, your customers—to wear a garment whose name means "fruitless," "unproductive," and "incapable of producing offspring"? That's just cruel.