Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Tragus

Tragus: A small projection of cartilage in front of the ear canal. From Greek tragos, meaning “goat,” because its undersurface is often covered with a tuft of hair resembling a goat’s beard. Pronounced (trgs).

The tragus serves at least a couple of contemporary purposes: it holds earbuds against the concha (the innermost part of the external ear); and it can be pierced for ornamentation (“tragus piercing”).

A few observations about tragus piercing:

• “Some people report hearing a ‘pop’ sound in their ear during the procedure, although this is not always the case. This sound can startle you, so be prepared and try to relax.” (About.com)

 

• “The Tragus becomes very swollen and will bleed and ooze fluids for the first week. Proper cleaning and sanitization is crucial in the healing of this piercing.” (Wikipedia)

If that sounds appealing, perhaps you’d also go for a Monroe piercing just off center on your upper lip. It’s named for Marilyn Monroe, who had a beauty mark in that location. Also known as a Madonna or [Cindy] Crawford piercing because, like Monroe, those women have upper-lip beauty marks.

Weekend Reading

Choice passages from articles that have appeared in recent issues of The New Yorker.

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I should be used to the way Americans dress while travelling, yet it still manages to amaze me. It’s as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge, saying, “Fuck this. I’m going to Los Angeles!”

— David Sedaris, “Standing By: Fear, Loathing, Flying,” August 9, 2010 (subscription required).

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The good thing about Halo 3: ODST is . . . I don’t know. If I was fonder of nineteen-seventies cast-concrete architecture, I’m sure I would have enjoyed the experience more. The game seemed to me to be both desolate and repetitive, with incomprehensible Biblical and race-war undermeanings. I flipped through the game guide, published by an imprint of Random House, and read a list of some of the medals you can earn. Killtacular is what you get if you kill five enemies in quick succession in firefight mode; Killtrocity if you add a sixth; Killimanjaro if you reach seven. “Dash about with the Gravity Hammer,” I read, “killing large groups of enemies for lengthy kill chains and hammer sprees before swapping to the Magnum and running to the next group of foes, plugging Grunts and Jackals in the head to keep the kill chain going.” Forget it.

— Nicholson Baker, “Painkiller Deathstreak: Adventures in Video Games,” August 9, 2010 (subscription required).

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The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender when he couldn’t, someone who understood that the damage is greatest if all you do is fight to the bitter end.

— Atul Gawande, “Letting Go: What Should Medicine Do When It Can’t Save Your Life?”, August 2, 2010.

Domain Mastery: Guest Post at DuetsBlog

Today I’m over at DuetsBlog, the trademark-law blog of Minneapolis law firm Winthrop & Weinstine, with a guest post about Internet domains. You say all the .com domains are taken? Dry your tears: I have creative solutions.

Read “Mastering Your Domain.”

P.S. Over at the Catchword naming blog, CatchThis, Laurel Sutton offers another take on finding the right domain (video).

Gargoyles

This brand name certainly got my attention.

First things first: Is that not some seriously beautiful typography? I'm especially taken with the stylized stencil font for “coffee.”

But “Gargoyle”?

Gargoyle, Notre Dame de Paris.

According to GoAntiques.com, which is selling the coffee tin, Gargoyle brand coffee was produced in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, by the O.R. Pieper Company. A bit of online sleuthing revealed that O.R. Pieper was a wholesale grocery company incorporated in 1918. The History of Milwaukee, City and County, Volume 2 (published in 1922) informs us that Mr. Pieper “always carried goods of the highest quality—goods known for their superiority and excellence.”

So it’s a good gargoyle.

Actually, gargoyle is a neutral term. The word comes from French gargouille, which means “throat” or “gullet.” (English gargle has the same origin.) In architecture, a gargoyle is a spout that carries water away from a building; the grotesque designs are mostly ornamentation that over time became a convention. According to a Wikipedia entry, gargoyles often are designed as elongated fantastic animals “because the length of the gargoyle determines how far water is thrown from the wall.”

I wish I knew the reasoning behind O.R. Pieper’s choice of “Gargoyle” for a coffee brand, but the trail goes cold after GoAntiques and the history book. If any Milwaukee historians wish to enlighten me, please leave a comment.

Hat tip to my brother Michael, who discovered an ad for Gargoyle  among our late mother’s effects. She was a Milwaukee native.

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Related: Read my post about MJB Coffee. More items from the Friedman Museum of Vintage Products here and here.

Booty Pageant

When did booty cross the line from vulgarism to acceptable—even ubiquitous—marketing lingo? No doubt the 1997 Jamie Foxx vehicle Booty Call—which critic Roger Ebert called “the raunchiest sex comedy I can remember”—popularized what had previously been primarily street slang.* And the poster provided a helpful visual definition.

 

In 2010, however, brand booty-fication is less salacious than simply—well, cheeky.

 

Word of the Week: 99er

99er: (U.S) A person who has exhausted his or her 99 weeks of unemployment benefits.

“99 Weeks Later, Jobless Have Only Desperation” reads the headline on a front-page article by Michael Luo in the New York Times on August 3. The primary subject of the article is Alexandra Jarrin, a 49-year-old college graduate who, “not that long ago, had a corporate job near New York City and was enrolled in a graduate business school, whose sticker is still emblazoned on her back windshield.” Luo continues:

Ms. Jarrin is part of a hard-luck group of jobless Americans whose members have taken to calling themselves “99ers,” because they have exhausted the maximum 99 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits that they can claim.

For them, the resolution recently of the lengthy Senate impasse over extending jobless benefits was no balm. The measure renewed two federal programs that extended jobless benefits in this recession beyond the traditional 26 weeks to anywhere from 60 to 99 weeks, depending on the state’s unemployment rate. But many jobless have now exceeded those limits. They are adjusting to a new, harsh reality with no income.

Long-term unemployment in the United States stands at record high levels. Luo reports that in June, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 1.4 million people were out of work for 99 weeks or longer. (Read the full article; read the nearly 700 comments.)

The “unemployment” sense of 99er is recent; the earliest citation I found is dated March 21, 2010. In Urban Dictionary: “Tom’s a 99er and I don't know how much longer he’ll be able to pay his bills if he does not get a job or some help.” The term began gaining popularity soon afterward. In late April, Change.org, the website of Poverty in America, published a five-part series by Megan Cattrell titled “The 99ers” that put a human face on the problem:

That's where Louise is today. Ninety-nine weeks and no job in sight. She's not alone — though there aren't hard numbers yet, an estimated one million people could become "99ers" by the end of 2010. There are between five and six job seekers for every opening, and it is now taking people longer than ever before to find employment; the average unemployed person is out of work for a record 31.2 weeks. A quarter of the unemployed — equivalent to the population of Connecticut — have already been out of a job for more than a year.

See also a previous Word of the Week, mancession.

The 99er nickname may owe some of its stickiness to the parallel (and stark contrast, expectations-wise) with “49er”—a first-wave prospector who came to California after gold was discovered in 1848.

A Google search turns up additional definitions for 99er:

• A collector or aficionado of the TI-99/4A home computer, a popular model in the 1980s. The 99er.net site is dedicated to this fan base.
• A person “who knew absolutely nothing about cycling prior to Lance Armstrong’s first Tour De France victory in 1999.” (Urban Dictionary.)
• “A person who lives or was born in the areas surrounding route 99 [a k a U.S. Highway 99] in California.” (Also Urban Dictionary.) (This usage of “99er” is news to me, and I’m a native Californian.)

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If Your Skin Looks Like Shiitake…

… Origins has the solution:

 

 

 

From the website: “This patent-pending, clinically-proven serum features Dr. Weil’s famed mega-mushroom blend now fortified with Chaga and Pleurotus Mushrooms and Sea Buckthorn.”

I had pleurotus once, but I made a full recovery.

My thanks to Girls Sent Away, who posted the photo on Twitter with the caption: “Suffer from facial mega-mushrooms? This product is for you!”

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In unrelated mushroom branding: Chocorooms.

Oh, the Errors You’ll Make!

They have so much fun, / Those employees at Spanx!

 

It’s a pity misspelling / Is one of their pranks.

(And not just any old word: Theodor Seuss Geisel’s nom de plume, for crying out loud.)

I still like Spanx’s nomenclature, though.

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Photo of a freshly embellished wall in Spanx's Atlanta headquarters via the @SpanxINC Twitter feed.

Ambiguous Words

Quick, define “memorialize.” If you said “to preserve the memory of a deceased person,” you are correct—unless you’re speaking contemporary Corporatese. In my latest Visual Thesaurus column, “Weird Words from the Corporatese Lexicon,” I provide a translation service.

Note, please, that my “weird words” are not the clichés everyone loves to hate: no “value-added,” no “low-hanging fruit,” no “level playing field.” (I’ve written about those terms previously.) Instead, I look at words with double meanings: one for the corporate cognoscenti and one for civilians. The list includes actionable, agile, cadence, conquesting, socialize, and the aforementioned memorialize.

Full access is behind a paywall; here’s an excerpt:

 

 

 

Word of the Week: Glurge

Glurge: Cloyingly sentimental stories, testimonials, and object lessons frequently sent as email or chain letters. (Source: WiseGeek.) Rhymes with “purge.”

Glurge was invented in 1998 by Patricia Chapin, a member of the urban legends discussion mailing list run in conjunction with Snopes.com, the website that fact-checks urban legends. According to the Snopes glossary, Ms. Chapin, “at a loss for words to describe the retching sensation this then-unnamed category of stories subjected her to, … fashioned a word that simultaneously named the genre and described its effect.”

Glurge can be applied to any one story or to the genre as a whole. On the Snopes home page, Glurge is given its own section, along with other categories such as 9/11, Fraud & Scams, and Cokelore. The introduction to the Glurge Gallery begins:

What is glurge? Think of it as chicken soup with a cup of sugar mixed in: It’s supposed to be a method of delivering a remedy for what ails you by adding sweetening to make the cure more appealing, but the result is more often a sickly-sweet concoction that induces hyperglycemic fits.

Examples include the story of the poem “Daddy’s Day,” supposedly written in response to the September 11 attacks (false), the tale of the pastor who encountered a stranger who hands out bibles (true), and the parable of the ant that “fortuitously retrieves a contact lens lost by a hiker” (classified as having “multiple truth values”).

“Many of us,” Snopes concludes, “cannot overcome the urge to glurge.”

According to Word Spy, glurge first appeared in the press in 2000, in a review of the movie Anywhere But Here, starring Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman, in The Australian. “Thankfully,” wrote reviewer Kerrie Murphy, “it’s not as glurge-ridden as it could have been, but it’s a pretty soulless piece, saved from a fate worse than mediocrity by the good performances of the leads.”

My thanks to Panavia999, whose comment on my post about Snopes.com last month sparked my investigation into glurge.