Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Austerianism

Austerianism: An theory of economics that advocates slashing government spending and cutting deficits during a time of economic weakness or recession.

Austerianism was coined from “austerity” with a possible hint of “hysteria” and a linguistic wink to the Austrian School of economics, whose 19th-century founders—notably Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises—were born in the Habsburg Empire. The Austrians’ theories about the subjective nature of economic value and diminishing marginal utility were further developed in the 20th century, notably by Friedrich Hayek, who, together with the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, was awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics. Austrian economics also holds that business cycles are “caused by distortion in interest rates due to the government's attempt to control money.” (Source: Investopedia.) Today, followers of the Austrian School are often associated with libertarian political philosophies.

Credit for coining Austeria and Austerian has been claimed by Rob Parenteau, who blogs about economics at Naked Capitalism and edits the monthly Richebächer Letter. (Kurt Richebächer was a member of the Austrian School.) Parenteau used Austeria in a June 10, 2010, interview with Business News Network (Canada). “I think they’ve renamed the Eurozone to Austeria now,” Parenteau quipped (at 3:17). He used Austeria and Austerian economics the following day in a Richebächer Letter article (link unavailable).

The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (himself a Nobelist in economics—and an anti-Austrian who advocated strongly for a much larger economic stimulus than the Obama government delivered) began using Austerian  in his blog, Conscience of a Liberal, in August 2010. In an August 3 post he imagined a dialogue between an Austerian and a Stimulist. More recently he’s called Austerianism “a failed doctrine.” On July 7, 2011, in a post titled “More Anti-Austerianism,” he cited a report about “four famous alleged cases of expansionary austerity”:

The expansionary austerity thing has, in short, been about as thoroughly refuted as one could imagine. Naturally, then, the Obama administration has taken to full-fledged embrace of the confidence fairy.

I found an earlier use of austerianism with a more microeconomic meaning, something close to plain old “thriftiness.” Shlomo Maital, a senior research fellow at Israel’s Technion Institute of Management, wrote in March 2008 about the resurgence of fixed-gear bicycles in cities from Dubai to San Francisco:

Fixed-gear 60’s bikes are part of what is known as the ‘austerian’ movement – austere is good, less is more, and do with cheap and simple rather than expensive, showy and conspicuous. Austerianism, in turn, is part of the new pro-environment green movement. 

 

July Linkfest

So, what do you think of Google Plus (G+ to the cool kids)? More to the point, what are you doing about “+1,” G+’s version of Facebook’s “Like” button? Google devotes a page to explaining the spelling conventions of +1 (summary: use an apostrophe). Motivated Grammar delves more deeply into the history of apostrophe’d verb forms: “Apostrophe-d used to be a more general suffix, up until around the middle of the 19th century.” And The Next Web offers the Google+ guide for punctuation pedants. (Hat tip: Ben Zimmer.)

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Speaking of conjugated modern media, why is texted the past tense of text? As David Crystal reveals, the answer isn’t as simple as you may think.

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Here’s a lovely thing from the University of Nottingham’s School of Modern Languages and Cultures: Words of the World, a series of short videos in which language experts tell the stories of words adopted into English, from aficionado to zeitgeist. Click on a word in the crossword-like grid to learn its story. (Via Language Hat.)

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But wait, there’s more! The History of English in 10 Minutes is a lively canter from Anglo-Saxon through Global English. Here’s the first chapter, and here’s a page with links to all 10 videos. (Via Mr. Verb.)

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And speaking of the history of English, whatever happened to the passival tense? Jane Austen used it in 1807 when she wrote in a letter: “The garden is putting in order.” But by the end of the 19th century that construction had been replaced by the progressive passive we use today (“The garden is being put in order”). Not without a lot of sturm und drang, though. I learned about it from Mike Vuolo, until recently the producer of NPR’s On the Media; he’s developing a podcast called Lexicon Alley to explore the byways of language and devotes an installment to the passival—much more fascinating than you’d guess. And here’s an older Language Log post about 19th-century outrage over the newfangled progressive passive. It was ever thus: language always changes, and people always hate change.

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Back in the world of commerce, the Olive Garden restaurant chain tried to introduce new dishes with Italian-sounding names—soffatelli and pastachetti—that turned out not to be Italian at all, just “rooted in Italian inspiration,” according to a spokeswoman. The fake names (falsetti?) flopped. Linguist Arnold Zwicky twirls a fork around the issue, and for good measure investigates pepperoni (another American invention) and diavolini.

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Cloth diaper brands: real or fake? Take the quiz at The Hairpin. (Footnote: For several years I wrote copy for a diaper-cover company called Biobottoms. I see the brand still exists, although under new ownership. Good product. And yes, we got endless grief over the Biobottoms name, for which I was not responsible.)

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And from A Hundred Monkeys, a brief essay on why names matter more than you think. Here’s one reason:

Imagine the silver panorama of an Apple storefront bearing, not that infamous pome,  but a name like “Quantum Technical Solutions.” No mystery, no style, no cult following. No story to draw people in.

Carmageddon

It’s not just a video game anymore.

This weekend, 11 miles of the I-405 freeway in Los Angeles will be closed for 53 hours for the demolition of the 51-year-old Mulholland Bridge. The freeway connects L.A.’s Westside and the San Fernando Valley; on an average weekend, it carries 500,000 cars.

Even the New York Times is calling it Carmageddon. (Predictably, the Times misspelled “Westside.” It’s one word in L.A.)

L.A.’s mayor didn’t sugarcoat his warning at a June 6 press conference:

“There’s gridlock on the 405 virtually any time of the day, but particularly during the rush hour, and if you think it's bad now, let me just make something absolutely clear: On July 16 and 17, it will be an absolute nightmare,” said Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Other city leaders are doing their best to sound upbeat. On Metro.net, L.A.’s public-transit hub, two Metro officials offered soothing reassurances that “the project is on schedule” and if Angelenos will just stay home over the weekend, “everything will go smoothly.”

Readers may be less than heartened to learn that one of those officials, Metro’s executive director of highway projects, is named Doug Failing. I did not make this up. 

This is the second coming for carmageddon: The word was reportedly coined (from car and Armageddon) by a KNX Newsradio anchor, Denise Fondo, for the August 2010 visit to L.A. by President Obama. As you may have heard, Los Angeles survived that event.

This year’s Carmageddon has its own Facebook page and an app, powered by Israeli startup Waze, that relies on crowdsourced traffic information. There’s a website and Twitter feed that encourage bars and restaurants in the Carmageddon Zone to offer discounts “to weary travelers.” Oh, and the L.A. Times has a special Carmageddon Twitter feed, too. (“Two words: surface streets.”) 

Another local paper, the LA Weekly, has been counting down to Carmageddon with almost unseemly glee. On June 30, the Weekly published a Carmageddon Q&A headlined “Will It Suck? Yes It Will.” A sample exchange:

Q: What if I have a medical emergency?
A: Plan ahead.
Q: But --
A: Plan ahead.

And it wouldn’t be an impending disaster without a Hitler-meme video, would it? This one is particularly well executed (you should pardon the expression), and extra-hilarious if you know L.A. well enough to catch all the Southland references.

 

(Hat tip: MJF)

For extra credit, see Snowmageddon and Wordgeddon. And for “disaster news and end-of-the-world scenarios,” see Armageddon Online.

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Ever wonder why Southern Californians put “the” in front of freeway numbers and Northern Californians don’t? Language Hat provided a semi-official explanation back in 2008.

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I-405 graphic from CarMageddonLA. Yes, you can buy a T-shirt.

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Anthimeria

Let’s sing an anthem to anthimeria, the linguistic magic trick by which verbs become nouns, interjections turn into adjectives, and advertisers grab eyeballs.

Here are three current examples from the world of frozen dairy treats. The first two are from Crystal, which calls itself “California’s dairy since 1901.” Originally based in Sacramento, the company was independent until 2001 and is now a subsidiary of Foster Farms Dairy in Modesto.

 

Billboard in Oakland, California.

 

Billboard in Oakland, California.

“Full of wow” and “full of yum” carry echoes of “full of win” (“It’s good!”). Linguist Neal Whitman wrote in July 2009 about the conversion of “win” (and “fail”) into mass nouns:

We’re not seeing uses like This team is hungry for win, or Fail is a dish best eaten cold. More typical are the frames full of or made of, or references to boxes, buckets, or bags of whatever the new mass noun is referring to.

Be sure to read the comments on Neal’s post, too. For further study, see Ben Zimmer’s Word Routes August 2009 column, “Fail for the Win!”

Meanwhile, Ben & Jerry’s is truncating “greatness” in an ad slogan.

 

Ad on San Francisco-bound BART train.

“Committed to great” may grate, but let’s be honest: “Committed to greatness since ’78” wouldn’t rhyme, and “Committed to acting ethically and producing excellent ice cream” would be wordy ... and boring.

Word of the Week: Butler Lie

Butler lie: A lie that allows for polite initiation or termination of a conversation, particularly in electronic communications such as instant messaging. The term was coined by a team of Cornell University researchers for a paper (“Butler Lies: Awareness, Deception,and Design”) presented at the 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

From the abstract:

Instant messaging (IM) is a common and popular way for co-workers, friends, and family to stay in touch, but its “always-on” properties can sometimes lead people to feel overexposed or too readily available to others for conversation. This, in turn, may lead people to deceive others about their actual status or availability. ... We present results from a field study of 50 IM users, in which participants rated each of their messages at the time of sending to indicate whether or not it was deceptive. About one tenth of all IM messages were rated as lies and, of these, about one fifth were butler lies. These results suggest that butler lies are an important social practice in IM, and that existing approaches to interpersonal awareness, which focus on accurate assessment of availability, may need to take deception and other social practices into account.

“Like butlers, [butler lies] act as social buffers, telling others that we are at lunch when we are just avoiding them,” writes Austin Considine in a July 10, 2011, article in the New York Times (“New Technology, but the Same Old Lies”):

Being constantly reachable makes butler lies necessary to many people, and the Cornell researchers concluded in a subsequent study that ambiguities inherent in traditional texting also made them easier. Texters typically do not know when outgoing messages are read, where their recipients are or what they are doing.

However, writes Considine:

[T]echnology is already laying siege to the butler lie. Services like BlackBerry Messenger enable mutual users to track when their texts are read, effectively torpedoing the “sorry, phone died last night” excuse. “Friend tracking” applications like Google Latitude allow people to geographically pinpoint their friends’ mobile phones. So much for “stuck in traffic” when you really overslept.

Distinguished Service

This truck was in my neighborhood earlier this week. I’d never heard of the company, but I became an instant fan.

 

Love the name: it’s alliterative, memorable, and a bit of a pun. (Got general junk? Hire the Junk General!)

Love the military-style stencil font.

And the phone number? Genius.

I chatted briefly with the driver, who told me the owner had started the business after he got out of the army (where he was not a general). Yeah, the driver said with a smile, a lot of people chuckle over the phone number.

Let this be a lesson to businesses of every size: You don’t need nonsense words, kree8tive spelling, or complicated, expensive graphics to brand your company effectively. You do need to be consistent, and you do need to recognize that your brand is more than your name: it’s the entire customer experience.

Now, if Junk General would hire a proofreader to clean up the language errors on its website, I’d award the company five stars. As it is, I give it an admiring salute.

That's What She-She Said

After three man-posts in a row—on fratire, the Man Iron, and BRO-llinis—I thought it was time for something girly.

 

She-She Nail Spa, West Portal Ave., San Francisco

Pink awning, two feminine pronouns: definitely girly. So what’s the problem? Just this: I’m almost positive that what the owners were aiming for was chichi, the French word that’s pronounced “she-she.”

Chichi is both a noun (“frills” or “pretentiousness”) and an adjective (“precious,” “over-elaborate”), although you’re more likely to hear English speakers use it as a modifier meaning “fancy”: a chichi nightclub, a chichi boutique. The word has traditionally connoted artifice and affectation, although that may be changing: The online dictionary Wordnik gives “chic and stylish” as one definition. (Wordnik also gives a wonderful usage example from a 1994 Newsweek article: “But a fad New York jewelry line using old bottle caps may be the first to mix P.C. with chichi.”)

It wasn’t only “She-She” that fascinated me. I’m perfectly OK with sentences that end with prepositions—and you should be, too—but “Blow Away Prices Of” is just peculiar. Am I supposed to read it as “Blow Away Prices Of Waxing Packages” and mentally switch “of” to “on”? Well, I didn’t. Instead, I had unsettling thoughts about waxed packages.

Finally, what to say about “50% Off and Up”? Does that phrase indicate that I might sometimes expect a discount greater than 50%, or does it mean some “waxing packages” are half-price and for others the price goes up? Earlier this year, Language Log discussed a similar instance of “mathematically annoying advertising”—the phrase “up to X and more,” where X equals some number—but I searched in vain for guidance on “X% Off and Up.” At She-She, it appears, we’ve departed the realm of mere mathematical annoyance and ventured off and up into quantum confusion.

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Elsewhere in the world of beauty-shop names: Sophistry Skin Care, Polish on Piedmont, Aveida. And if title of this post mystifies you, read this.

Dude, Where's My Fruity Pink Cocktail?

Misty Harris, a reporter for Canada’s Postmedia News, got in touch yesterday after she read my post about the Man Iron.* She said she’d recently noticed that Earls Kitchen and Bar, a chain with locations throughout Canada (and in a few US cities), offers a weekly special for men.

 

Here’s the fine print from the bar menu:

Earls White Peach Bellini | $4.50 | made with all natural peach syrup, appleton estate vx rum, peach liqueur and sparkling white wine

Earls White Peach BRO-llini | $7.25 | same great Bellini - always a double, always in a man glass

I’d venture to say it takes a whole lot of confidence—or a heaping helping of man irony—to step up to the bar and order a BRO-llini. By the way, if you need to ask what a “man glass” is, you probably should stick to cream soda.

(Yes, that’s Patrick Gallagher, who plays Ken Tanaka on “Glee.”)

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*Read Misty’s article about the Man Iron, BRO-llinis, and manbags, which includes a few comments from yours truly. For more bro- compounds, please refer to the Encyclopedia BROtanica.

The Man Iron

Now that home-economics classes have been relegated to the dustbin of history and modern clothes dryers are equipped with an “ironing” setting, does anyone iron clothes anymore? Not from the looks of it, according to my highly subjective survey-by-looking-around. My findings were confirmed by a Writer’s Beat discussion forum, which tipped its hand by asking, “Why do people iron their clothes?” Representative response: “If god wanted us to iron, why make clothes with Dry Clean Only labels?” And a bit further off topic: “If you spray Pam on an iron you can make really great grilled cheese sandwiches with it.”

Well, I think ironing is important, and I enjoy doing it; in fact, it’s my favorite household chore. Also, as regular readers know, I like a good man-brand. (See my posts on ManQuarium, MANdle candles, and manscaping.) So it was with considerable interest that I read a recent Jezebel post about the Man Iron, aka the GC4490, from Philips, the Dutch electronics manufacturer.

 

 

The Man Iron: how Darth Vader maintains his wrinkle-free appearance?

The Jezebel post refers to a testosterone-drenched press release for the iron (“robust black casing …. exudes masculinity … practically unbreakable … crushes the opposition … intense 100g of steam … bulldozing [!] creases”). However, the post lacks a link to that press release, so I couldn’t verify its accuracy.* Nor could I find it on the Philips website. I did find a PDF of the product manual which calls the GC4490 an “anodilium soleplate man iron for an endless excellent gliding experience.” (I think Philips made up “anodilium”—I found a cancelled trademark filing for the term in the USPTO database.) The product manual also refers to the GC4490 as a “2400 W power tool for ironing” that “helps you blast all creases away easily.” I counted eight references to “power” or “powerful.”

The GC4490 was introduced in Europe last year; a May 2010 report in Springwise.com noted that the iron comes in a solid case “like a new hammer drill” and retails for about €80 ($96). Last week’s flurry of coverage by Jezebel and other outlets seems to portend a US debut, but I didn’t see the product in Philips’s online store.

Naturally, the Man Iron news has prompted some Iron Man word play as well as some scoffing. Here’s Glamour.com’s Tracey Lomrantz:

I find this almost as ridiculous as “Safety Girl” tools, which make home improvement so much more fun because they’re pink! For the record, I learned to iron from a former boyfriend and my dad handles most of the wrinkle-releasing duties at my parents’ house, and they both managed just fine without the premium sports car of steaming.

Sex-role stereotyping aside, what to say about the Man Iron name? It’s certainly consistent with a naming trend that began in 1969 with Hunt-Wesson’s Manwich. (I wrote about Manwich and its namer, ad man Edward Gelsthorpe, for the Visual Thesaurus back in 2009.) Man-brands and coined man-words—from Seinfeld’s mansierre and man-fur to Borat’s mankini and the U.S. economy’s mancession—serve a couple of purposes. As language maven Mark Peters has observed, “most man words are coined to describe men behaving like women, or at least stereotypical women. Men aren't supposed to worry about cancer, receive alimony, or get Brazilian waxes, so manogram, manimony, and manzilian”—and Man Iron—“are created.” Man-words are also a jokey way to relieve tension—to say, in effect, “Dude, why so serious?”

I do think, though, that Philips missed an opportunity to revive the ultimate in high-performance de-wrinkling technology: the electric mangle.

Mangle photograph from here.

A mangle presses fabric between heated rollers; it’s a staple of commercial laundries but used to be made for household use, too. (In fact, Miele still makes a home mangle but calls it a “fold-down rotary iron”; at $1,999, it requires a major commitment to crispness.)

The pressing-type mangle is unrelated, etymologically, to the verb meaning “to mutilate or disfigure; to ruin.” The verb comes from Old French mangoner, “to cut to bits.” The noun comes from Dutch and Middle High German and ultimately from Late Latin manganum. Here’s the wonderfully relevant part: manganum means “catapult” and derives from Greek manganon, “war machine.” Besides “mangle,” manganon gave us “mangonel,” “a military engine used during the Middle Ages for hurling stones and other missles.” 

Need I point out that the first syllable of all these words is man?

The mangle: an industrial-strength answer to a man-sized problem. Gentlemen, start your crease-bulldozing engines. 

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* UPDATE: I am now in possession of the original Philips press release and can confirm every word. Unfortunately, the release is in Word so I can’t link to it.

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P.S. If you really want to get serious about it, buy Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, by Cheryl Mendelson, which devotes an entire chapter to the science and craft of ironing. Ms. Mendelson, who lives in New York City with her husband and son, has a PhD in philosophy and a Harvard law degree and still found time to write—elegantly and persuasively—an 896-page guide to contemporary housekeeping. From the introduction to the chapter on ironing: “There is nothing like keeping the hands busy with some familiar work to free the mind. You can learn Italian while you iron, as a friend of mine did, or you can simply think.”

Word of the Week: Fratire

Fratire: “A literary genre that features books written by men and focusing on young male protagonists who engage in drunkenness, promiscuity, and loutish behavior. [Blend of fraternity and satire.]” – Word Spy

Fratire’s first appearance can be precisely traced to “Dude, Here’s My Book,” an article by Warren St. John published on April 16, 2006, in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times. The article began as a profile of Tucker Max, who had recently published I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, “a collection of supposedly autobiographical stories,” Mr. St. John explained, “that typically involve Mr. Max getting extremely drunk, hooking up with strangers and, as often as not, making a fool of himself.” The audience for the book, the article continued, was primarily young men.

“For a certain age of guys, when they think about drinking and sex, they think about me,” Mr. Max said with typical humility. “I'm acutely aware that I’m benefiting from a moment in time.”

The article then widened its scope to describe a newish literary genre:

With titles like “Real Ultimate Power,” a satirical ode to the masculine prowess of ninjas; “The Modern Drunkard,” a paean to getting hammered; and “The Game,” a manual for manipulating and bedding women, they collectively represent the once-elusive male counterpart to so-called chick lit, and so perhaps deserve a cheesy epithet of their own. How about: fratire.

A couple months after the Times article was published, Tucker Max responded to it in The Huffington Post. The headline on his story was “Pass the Beer: In Defense of ‘Fratire’”:

I’ll never forget the moment I first heard the word “fratire.” I was on the phone with Warren St. John answering some follow-up questions for his piece on me and Maddox [the nom de plume of the author of The Alphabet of Manliness] that was to run in the NY Times Style [sic] Section. I am paraphrasing, but I think the conversation went like this:

Tucker “So Warren, you going to give our fledging genre a cool new name?”

Warren “Yeah, I was thinking of calling it ‘fratire.’”

Tucker “Great Holy Jesus. Warren, that is awful. First off, I wasn't in a fraternity. Neither was Maddox. In fact, none of the writers you are profiling in your article was in a frat. Please, call it anything else...uh, how about Dick Lit?”

Warren “I don't think the Times will print that. We’re going with fratire.”

Fratire turned out to have legs. (However, dick lit gets twice as many Google hits.) It became the title of a 2008 book by Darren Bryce about (quoting Amazon’s “product description”) “a competitive college party town”; Fratire 2, Fratire 3, and Fratire 4 soon followed. There are Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary* entries for fratire, and I found a semi-scholarly essay on fratire, from February 2010, that describes Max’s book as “Nietszchean ethics gone awry.”

A couple of weeks ago, the Times returned to the subject with a profile of Chad Kultgen, author of the novels The Average American Male and The Lie, as well as a new book—“a conscious attempt to something more substantial”—called Men, Women and Children. Five years after Warren St. John coined fratire, reporter Nicole LaPorte put the term within quotation marks:

George (Maddox) Ouzounian, the author of “The Alphabet of Manliness,” whose “fratire” style is often compared to Mr. Kultgen’s, said that Mr. Kultgen “speaks the voice of our generation very authentically. And you rarely see that in the media today.” He said he saw the same truth in the Judd Apatow movie “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” in which male friends sit around playing video games and talking about sex and women’s bodies.

See also: shtick lit.

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* There’s a second UD definition, from 2007, that describes fratire as “the mode of dress traditionally accepted by fraternities.” Here the word is apparently blended from frat and attire.