Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Streisand Effect

Streisand Effect: The backfiring of an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information. It was “named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt in 2003 to suppress photographs of her residence inadvertently generated further publicity” (Wikipedia).

“Streisand Effect” was coined in 2005 by Mike Masnick of TechDirt in a post about, believe it or not, photographs of urinals:

How long is it going to take before lawyers realize that the simple act of trying to repress something they don’t like online is likely to make it so that something that most people would never, ever see (like a photo of a urinal in some random beach resort) is now seen by many more people? Let’s call it the Streisand Effect.

On June 6, 2011, The Caucus—the New York Times’s politics and government blog—invoked the Streisand Effect in its coverage of one angle of a story about Sarah Palin’s confused account of the Paul Revere story (“By ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free”*).

Since Ms. Palin described the ride last week while she was visiting Boston, Wikipedia’s Paul Revere article page has been the site of a mini “edit war.” And the page has gone from a little-visited one — 2,000 or so page views a day — to a more heavily trafficked one, with 54,000 on Saturday when Ms. Palin’s comments were gaining the most news attention. …

As a result, the Revere article has become much longer, and much better sourced -– a version of what Wikipedia users call the “Streisand Effect,” which is described as when “an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely.”

A blog called TheStreisandEffect.com collected other tales of information-suppression backfires. The blog has been dormant since March 2010.

Read about the Bradley Effect. Read about other eponymous effects: Coolidge, Droste, Forer, Fujiwhara, Martha Mitchell, McGurk, and Meissner.

(Wiki link via ADS-L.)

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* Boston Globe, June 6.

The Wide Blue Yonder

Spotted at a bus stop on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco:

 

The “worldwider” coinage is, as we say in my narrow world, the brandable element. It seems to me to be built not from “worldwide” but from “wider”: you wouldn’t say “We’re getting worldwide,” but you might say “We’re getting wider.”

Naturally, I couldn’t help remembering this exchange from “24 Minutes,” the 399th episode of The Simpsons:

Principal Skinner: Just how wide is the Web?

Lisa: World.

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The title of this post is meant to be a pun on “Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder,” the US Air Force Song (lyrics and music here). Nevertheless, when I searched for “wide blue yonder” I got more than 180,000 hits, including the title of a movie, the title of a novel, the title of an Oysterband album, and the name of a web-design company. In fact, it isn’t clear which is the eggcorn: “wide” or “wild.”

Bloggiversary 5

It was exactly five years ago today that I published this blog’s first post. (The blog was originally called Away With Words; I changed the name to Fritinancy in February 2008.) And you know what five years of blogging means: It means, my friends, that this is my Wood Bloggiversary.

For history buffs, here’s my very first post—a challenge to name a 16-atom cluster of gold atoms.

And here’s a brief profile of Fritinancy readers, based on visitor statistics:

You want to know how the Volkswagen Tiguan got its name. You want to know how the Kindle got its name. You want to know how Superdry got its name. You want to know what Main Street means. You want to know what “urban” means. You want to know what “monumentous” means. You want to know what Givacolor means. You want to know what “bershon” means. You want to know how to name a golf course. You want examples of gross-out names. After the British royal wedding in April, the fashion-curious among you wanted to know what “gazar” and “fascinator” mean. Another group of the fashion-curious wants to know about Teenflo, the oddly named Canadian brand.

And year after year, people who read Fritinancy crave more information about desire paths.

You’ll find lots more links in my previous chapters in this series:

Bloggiversary 1

Bloggiversary 2

Bloggiversary 3

Bloggiversary 4

Now on Visual Thesaurus: Sketchy Branding

In my new Candlepower column for Visual Thesaurus, I look at the shifting meanings of sketch (originally “a rough drawing or performance”) and sketchy (originally “incomplete, lacking details”). For some time I’ve puzzled over how these terms of art—literally—came to become terms of disparagement, at least among younger Americans. And because my beat is the language of commerce, I tackle the question by way of two brand names: Etch A Sketch and Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School.

An excerpt:

Google “sketchy neighborhood” and you get more than 67,000 results. “Sketchy area” yields more than 70,000. Both references are to what Urban Dictionary’s contributors agree is a synonym for “unsafe,” “creepy,” “not kosher,” or “someone or something that gives off a bad feeling.”

And “sketchy” doesn’t even need the adjectival -y suffix to carry this newer meaning. “Sketch,” which historically has been a noun and a verb, is now also an adjective with a meaning identical to “sketchy”: questionable, of dubious character.

Access to the full article is restricted to subscribers; columns more than three months old are free at Visual Thesaurus’s sister site, Vocabulary.com.

Word of the Week: Buxom

Buxom: Healthily plump and ample of figure; full-bosomed.

From an AP story dated May 25, 2011, and headlined “Lawyer Objects to Buxom Woman at Trial”:

A Chicago lawyer says his opponent in a small claims case is using an unfair tactic by sitting a buxom woman next to him at counsel’s table.

Attorney Thomas Gooch says the woman’s sole purpose “is to draw the attention of the jury away from the relevant proceedings” — a dispute over a used car. He asks Cook County Circuit Judge Anita Rivkin-Carothers to order the woman to sit in the gallery with other spectators.

The legal blog Lowering the Bar points out that buxom here is a family-friendly-ish euphemism for “large-breasted.” The connection is clarified a couple of paragraphs down in the AP story, where Mr. Gooch is quoted as saying, “Personally, I like large breasts.”

Fruit-crate label (c. 1940s) from Etsy.

Courtroom etiquette aside, what about buxom? Today, the word is used only in reference to women, and specifically to their chestal areas. You might deduce, therefore, that buxom was originally something like buck-some (was buck an archaic term meaning “breast,” perhaps?) or even bust-some.

Well, it was once spelled bucksome. As for the rest, guess again.

Naming Notes

Pfizer’s exclusive patent rights to Viagra begin to expire next year, and the pharmaceutical company is taking what you might call prophylactic measures. This month the company will introduce generic Viagra in New Zealand under the name “Avigra”—an anagram of “Viagra.” “Avigra will be a fascinating experiment in branding and pricing strategy,” writes Bnet’s Jim Edwards, “and rival companies will observe it for clues as to how to compete when generic Viagra comes to the U.S. and other large regional markets.” Pfizer has also introduced a chewable form of the drug, Viagra Jet, in Mexico. (Hat tip: @AHundredMonkeys.)

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Preparing for its initial public offering, the real-estate website Zillow, founded in 2005, last week applied for a Nasdaq listing under the ticker symbol “Z.” If it’s approved, it will be the first one-letter Nasdaq symbol, but not the first use of “Z” as a stock symbol. That distinction used to belong to Woolworth, the five-and-dime chain that went out of business in the US in 1997. The New York Stock Exchange has almost an alphabet’s worth of one-letter stock symbols; here’s a list. (Pandora Media has applied for P, which was last used by Phillips Petroleum.) Related: “Ticker Shock,” my 2006 post about about the value of a memorable ticker symbol.

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Ford Motor Co. asked its 1.4 million Facebook fans for help in naming a new Mustang V6 performance package, and more than 3,000 of them went to work. The winning submission, “Mayhem Mustang,” came from Jeremy Marler of Charlotte, North Carolina. Unlike some companies that turn to crowdsourcing, Ford had the grace to compensate the winner: Mr. Marler will receive a three-year lease on a 2012 Mustang equipped with the Mayhem Mustang Package. (Hat tip: @WordLab.)

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Why is a telephone jack called a jack? “With all the making and breaking of connections, switch-pins wore out quickly. An early improvement was a hinged two-inch plate resembling a jackknife: the ‘jack-knife switch,’ or as it was soon called, the ‘jack.’” —The Information, by James Gleick.

Argosy

I know many of the colleges and universities in the Bay Area, but just last week, driving through Oakland on southbound 880, I was surprised to see a billboard for one I’d never heard of and whose name captured my attention: Argosy University.

Argosy University’s motto is “The better way to earn your degree.” They could do better.

The campus being promoted on the billboard is in Alameda; when I called to check facts, the lady on the phone said she thought it had moved there from Point Richmond in 2006. Although both of those cities are in the East Bay, the university calls this campus “San Francisco.”

Argosy is a four-year, private, for-profit university with campuses in 13 states. It’s had its share of controversies involving fraud, deceptive practices, and plagiarism. According to the online backgrounder, the Argosy system was established in September 2001 through the merger of three colleges: the American School of Professional Psychology, the University of Sarasota, and the Medical Institute of Minnesota. Among the university’s “notable alumni” is Sonja Fisher, who was crowned “Mrs. Corporate America” in 2009*.

So: What about the university’s name? Why “Argosy”?

In the Cloud

Thanks to everyone who voted for Fritinancy in this year’s Bab.la/Lexiophiles Language Lovers contest! I’m pleased to report that this blog placed ninth out of the 100 blogs in the Language Professional Blog category.

Of the top 25 blogs, 19 are about translation or interpretation. Fritinancy is the only blog about names and brands to have made the cut!

Also on the list: Word Routes (linguist Ben Zimmer’s Visual Thesaurus blog), Separated by a Common Language (linguist Lynne Murphy’s blog about British and American English), and A Walk in the WoRds (“a place to share linguistic rants and raves”). All three of those blogs are in my blogroll and are well worth your attention.

In addition to the #9 ranking in the Language Professional Blog category, Fritinancy placed 60th in all combined categories.

Thanks for voting, and for reading.