HOHO: Acronym for “hop-on hop-off.” (Sometimes spelled HoHo.) Describes a type of sightseeing bus that allows passengers to disembark whenever they reach a stop that interests them, then re-board when it’s convenient. Tickets are valid for a specified period of time, typically 24 hours.
Hop-on hop-off buses are used by tour operators in many cities around the world (and even in the Grand Canyon), but the use of HOHO as a semi-official acronym appears most frequently in connection with the Indian tourist industry.
Q : Can you explain me what is “Hop On Hop Off” A : Hop-On Hop-Off tour, you have the freedom to spend time at each sightseeing. Your ticket will allows you to board any bus.
There are indications that the HOHO acronym is spreading to other parts of the world; see, for example, this query on TripAdvisor about a “HoHo bus” in New York City and this post on The Rome Toolkit, which notes that there are “no less than seven hop on, hop off tour (HOHO) sightseeing buses operating daily in Rome.” The London Toolkit also refers to “two major operators of the standard HOHO buses.”
A British visitor to New York City reported in 2012 that “the HoHo bus” delivered “excellent value for money” and was “a brilliant way to see the city and get your bearings.”
HOHO buses are typically double-decker with open tops and a lowered rear platform for easy boarding and disembarking. One of the newer HOHO buses in London is officially called the New Bus for London (NB4L) and unofficially called the Boris bus, after Boris Johnson, the city’s mayor.
This time around we kicked off with a newish underwear-ish word, cheekini. Today we travel from the orchestra to the balcony, so to speak, to see what a nice bra company like True & Co. is doing with a naughty acronym like MILF.
“Mom I’d Love to Fit” temporary tattoo, free during the promotion.
True & Co. MILF ad.
It’s for Mother’s Day, you see. Truly! AdFreak called the campaign “odd” and advised True & Co. to “apologize, act contrite and enjoy the attention.” Instead, True & Co.’s blog went on the offensive about the offensive term:
MILF – the term brings to mind pervy frat boys but who says they should own an acronym? MILF (Moms I’d Love to Fit) is about the best people in the world taking 5 minutes out of their busy day to treat themselves to a proper bra fitting and get a new bra. … We meant the pun and we meant it in good fun. We think there’s nothing objectifying about a woman owning her sexuality. We’d be proud to be considered a MILF (Mom I’d Love to Fit).
San Francisco-based True & Co. was born in 2011 after Michelle Lam, a former principal at Bain Capital Ventures who became frustrated after trying on “20 different bras, one after the other, in what seemed to be a random trial-and-error sequence,” according to a profile in Fortune. Lam and a partner developed a quiz to help women shop for bras from home. The company was originally called Bra & Co. but launched in May 2012 as True & Co.*
This is not the first time an advertiser has attempted to “reclaim” MILF. Back in 2007, Spirit Airlines advertised a “Many Islands, Low Fares” sale with fares as low as $9 for flights between Fort Lauderdale and the Bahamas. When asked whether he’d known about MILF’s offensive connotation, Spirit’s director of communications claimed to be shocked, shocked. “The most obscene thing we’ve noticed,” [he] said, “is what other carriers have charged to fly the Caribbean before Spirit’s $9 fares.”
* Before the MILF kerfuffle, True & Co.’s major claim to newsworthiness had been a lawsuit filed by True Fit, maker of personalized-fit technology used by Macy’s and Nordstrom, which asserted that “True & Co.” infringed on its mark. True Fit also sought to prevent any use of “true” in connection with personalized-fit technology. In March of this year, the U.S. District Court denied the motion.
It’s funny how you can go for months without seeing “squirrel” in print, and then, bam, two sightings within three days.
The first squirrel is a red herring. It appears in Joseph Epstein’s Wall Street Journalreview of Yip Harburg: Legendary Lyricist and Human Rights Activist, a biography by Harriet Hyman Alonso of the man who wrote the lyrics to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “April in Paris,” and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” Harburg was born Isidore Hochberg in New York City in 1896; he changed his name to Edgar Y. Harburg in 1934 but was generally known as E.Y. Harburg or Yip Harburg.
Why “Yip”? In his review, Epstein says the nickname “came from the Yiddish word for squirrel, yipsl, which his parents called him when he was a child.” But the Yiddish word for squirrel is actually the Slavic-derived veverke; no Yiddish dictionary contains yipsl. According to Alonso, who devotes the first chapter of her book to the origin of “Yip,” Harburg related the yipsl-squirrel story to the oral historian Studs Terkel. Alonso passes it along without further comment, as does Epstein.
It’s entirely possible, though, that Harburg was pulling Terkel’s leg – or being squirrelly (“cunningly unforthcoming or reticent”). Because while yipsl has no meaning in Yiddish, the acronym YPSL is both meaningful and relevant: it stands for Young People’s Socialist League, which was founded in 1907 as the student arm of the American Socialist Party and whose members were known as – yep – “Yipsels.” In a 2004 column for The Jewish Daily Forward, the pseudonymous language columnist Philologos wrote that “Harburg was a political radical who was blacklisted in Hollywood in the 1940s, and it is possible that he was nicknamed ‘Yipsel,’ subsequently shortened to ‘Yip,’ because of his YPSL-like views even if he never was a YPSL member.” Other distinguished Yipsels or sympathizers included the political scientist Daniel Bell, the literary and social critic Irving Howe, the writer Saul Bellow, and the journalist (and eventual neoconservative) Irving Kristol.
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The second squirrel is a semi-secret one.
Secret Squirrel Cold Brew Coffee is a bottled coffee concentrate; one 16-ounce bottle makes six to seven eight-ounce drinks. The company is based in Studio City (Los Angeles County), but according to the clumsily written FAQ the name has a different geographic origin:
Growing up in Washington DC area a secret squirrel was something like knowing a shortcut around traffic, or knowing the hideaway parking spot, or knowing the unknown electrical outlet in the coffee shop. It only seemed fitting for this centuries old method for brewing coffee that few people know about.
(That awkward dangler at the beginning of the paragraph is one good argument for editors. Another is knowing how to hyphenate compound adjectives. Elsewhere on the website, a proofreader would have caught “anyway” for “any way,” sentences that end without periods, and introductory clauses without commas. But I digress.)
I have no idea whether the D.C. story is true – anyone care to confirm? I do know, however, that “Secret Squirrel” was the title character of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon that aired for a few seasons in the mid-1960s and was briefly revived in the 1990s. The character was a spy; whether it got its name from the Washington shortcut or vice versa, I cannot say.
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Finally, a few squirrel tidbits:
The Latin word for squirrel, sciurus, translates to “shadow tail.”
In many Germanic languages the word for “squirrel” translates to “oak kitten.” (It’s Eichhörnchen in German.)
The Spanish word for “squirrel,” ardilla, translates to “like a flame.” (From arder, to burn.)
See “squirrel” translated into almost 300 languages, including Klingon, here.
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And here’s my favorite cinematic squirrel sighting, or near-sighting:
Politics and economics made 2012 a target-rich environment for us word-of-the-year trackers. Republican presidential-primary candidate Rick Santorum alone gave us blah, guillotine, snob, and non-faith. (Santorum’s surname has achieved its own scandalous notoriety.) From the Mitt Romney campaign we picked up tithing, retroactively, wazzock, Romneyshambles, and binders. Vice President Joe Biden made malarkey memorable, President Obama spoke sharply of bayonets, and the Republican convention spawned Eastwooding, from actor Clint Eastwood’s surreal dialogue with an empty chair.
Meanwhile, we struggled to remember the fiscal definition of sequestration – not to be confused with jury sequestration – and marveled at all the people looking up socialism and capitalism in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. We shopped for tribal prints and smoking slippers and earnestly practiced chewdaism. We worried about the Rampture and distracted ourselves by GIF-ing compulsively. “YOLO,” we said, shrugging.
But enough runners-up. My list of 14 WOTY nominees follows the jump. I limited my list to U.S. usages, and I adhered to the American Dialect Society’s criteria for selection, which stipulate that nominees be:
demonstrably new or newly popular in 2012
widely and/or prominently used in 2012
indicative or reflective of the popular discourse
In addition, a nominated word can’t be “a peeve or complaint about overuse or misuse.”
Prepper: A person who is actively preparing for large-scale emergencies such as natural disasters and the breakdown of the social and political order. A more moderate and positive-sounding synonym for “survivalist.”
Preppers have been featured in at least two national newspapers in the last week. “For Preppers, Every Day Could Be Doomsday,” was published November 17 in USA Today:
The number of preppers is unknown, but a poll done for National Geographic Channel in September indicated that 28% of Americans knew one. Preppers meet-up networks are proliferating on social networks. Doomsday Preppers is the network's most-watched series[.]
An article in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, “How to Survive Societal Collapse in Suburbia,” focused on the mainstreaming of the survivalist movement. The article includes a photograph of Ron Douglas, his wife, and their six children, surrounded by a year’s worth of disaster-preparedness supplies. The reporter, Keith O’Brien, accompanied Ron Douglas to a Starbucks near Denver:
Many so-called survivalists would take pride in keeping far away from places that sell espresso drinks. But Douglas, a 38-year-old entrepreneur and founder of one of the largest preparedness expos in the country, isn’t your typical prepper.
The modern-day prepper movement has its origins in the Cold War, when American families were encouraged to stock personal fallout shelters for an expected nuclear attack. The movement, which has waxed and waned over the years, got a big boost in the late 1990s amid (groundless) fears about a Y2K computer bug. The preparedness industry is thriving again, reports Keith O’Brien, spurred by the 9/11 attacks, Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and even the Mayan calendar. A subspecies of preppers believes that the presidency of Barack Obama (almost always referred to as Barack Hussein Obama or BHO) is a sign of the apocalypse.
The prepper movement has its own jargon, which is heavy on acronyms. One of the most popular terms is TEOTWAWKI, which stands for “the end of the world as we know it” and is pronounced tee-ought-wah-kee. (A Y2K glossary, still online, defines it as “shorthand for a predicted calamity involving the breakdown of society, whether due to Y2K or any other perceived threat.” The term was borrowed from the title of the 1987 song by R.E.M.)
The very extensive glossary on SurvivalBlog (“The daily web blog for prepared individuals living in uncertain times”) includes this basic prepper vocabulary:
BOB: Bug-Out Bag (a survival kit for leaving in a hurry)
G.O.O.D. kit: Get Out of Dodge Kit, synonymous with BOB.
MOOC: An acronym for “massive open online course,” an educational offering in which students and instructors are distributed (i.e., not in the same geographic location), enrollment is unrestricted (“open”), and course materials are dispersed across the Web.
MOOCs (rhymes with “flukes”) are seen by advocates as tools for democratizing education:
While the vast potential of free online courses has excited theoretical interest for decades, in the past few months hundreds of thousands of motivated students around the world who lack access to elite universities have been embracing them as a path toward sophisticated skills and high-paying jobs, without paying tuition or collecting a college degree. And in what some see as a threat to traditional institutions, several of these courses now come with an informal credential (though that, in most cases, will not be free). – “Instruction for Masses Knocks Down Campus Walls,” by Tamar Lewin, New York Times, March 4, 2012.
The oldest player in the MOOC world is Khan Academy, founded in 2006 by Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard. Khan Academy currently offers more than 3,200 free videos on a wide range of subjects in the sciences and humanities. Newer rivals include Udacity (“You learn by solving challenging problems and pursuing udacious projects”; founded in 2011 as an outgrowth of free computer-science classes at Stanford); edX (a joint venture between MIT and Harvard that will offer its first classes in Fall 2012); Udemy, a platform for taking and creating courses (both free and paid), launched in 2010 by two Turkish developers who moved to Silicon Valley; and Coursera (founded in 2011 by two Stanford computer-science professors; most classes are free). Last week, Coursera announced a major expansion in which a dozen major research universities—including Caltech, Duke, and UC San Francisco—will participate.
Related: MOOSe, a massive open online seminar. “Next year,” wrote the Times’s Lewin in her March 4 article, “Richard DeMillo, director of Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities, hopes to put together a MOOSe, or massive open online seminar, through a network of universities that will offer credit.”
The “massive” in MOOC and MOOSe may be influenced by the “massive” in MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) and MMOG (massively multiplayer online game). Those acronyms first appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively.
So I’m browsing the accessories section at the Nordstrom Rack in San Francisco and I see a display of handbags with a “DKNY” sign on top. Naturally, I expect the merchandise in the display to be from Donna Karan New York.
Surprise! Those bags in the foreground? They all had this tag:
The difference between DKNY and KDNY isn’t just the order of the initials. DKNY handbags are leather; KDNY’s are “pleather” (technically PU, short for polyurethane). A DKNY bag retails for $300 to $400; a KDNY bag costs about $100.
There are 42 live trademarks for DKNY in the USPTO database, zero for KDNY.
Of course, there are times when you might prefer an inexpensive plastic bag, as my Twitter friend Kevin pointed out.
A few miscellaneous items for the first full day of (Northern Hemisphere) winter. Tomorrow: Festivus! I’ll present my annual Airing of Grievances.
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The Japanese word of the year, announced by the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation on December 12, is kizuna. The word, which means “bonds between people,” was frequently used to express the solidarity and support shown by Japanese people in response to the disastrous earthquake and tsunami in March.
(Hat tip: Rochelle Kopp of Japan Intercultural Consulting.)
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Every year since 2006, expatriate American linguist Lynne Murphy, who blogs at Separated by a Common Language, has selected two words of the year: the most useful import from American English into British English and the most useful import from British into American. This year, the most useful UK-to-US word is kettling, which happens to be a word I nominated! (You may recall that it was a Fritinancy word of the week in October.) The most useful US-to-UK word is FTW, an abbreviation of “for the win.” And yes, initialisms are words. Be sure to read Lynne’s thoughtful and well-informed defen{s/c}es of her selections.
A little comic relief: You may recognize Christopher McDonald, David Koechner, Maria Bamford (the crazy Target Christmas lady), and Andre Royo (Bubbles from The Wire) in Funny or Die’s spot-on spoof of campaign commercials. Yes, let’s restore the dignity and the tradition of our Founding Santas!
Now that we’ve taken a swig of swagger, the current word of the week, let’s look at swagger’s siblings, swag and schwag.
First, we’ll dispense with a bit of etymythology: swag is not an acronym for “stuff we all get,” no matter what the New York Times Sunday Styles section tells you. (Indeed, a correction to that effect was published Sept. 26.) It can, however, be an air force acronym (U.S. or Canadian) for Scientific, Wild-Assed Guess (distinguished from the layperson’s WAG, your basic wild-assed guess).
Chalk it up to overwork or brain stasis, but when I learned about an iPad/iPhone app named FLUD, I went completely blank. I couldn’t pronounce the name or make sense of it.
The all-capitals spelling means it’s an acronym, right? But what do the letters stand for? At first I thought FLUD was a play on FUD, the popular business acronym for “fear, uncertainty, and doubt.” FUD was, famously, what IBM salespeople instilled in the minds of their potential customers—because, as we know, “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.”
So maybe FLUD stood for “fear, loathing, uncertainty, and doubt”? I wished Hunter S. Thompson were still around so I could ask him.
Then I remembered one of my favorite Gary Larson cartoons.
Cat Fud, by Gary Larson (1985)*
CAT FLUD: for really clueless felines.
I pondered this for a while and then had a new insight. Could the FLU in FLUD mean “we’re viral and contagious”? But what about the D? Diagnosis? Deadline? Drama?
Reading FLUD’s self-description didn’t help much:
FLUD is a personalized mobile news ecosystem with a vision to empower its users to interact with each other to access, engage and broadcast content that is relevant to them.**
The company, which is based on San Diego, uses words like “sexiness,” “awesomeness,” and “robust” on its website. “FLUD” suggested none of those things to me.
I finally got my light-bulb moment about 55 seconds into a relentlessly perky local-news clip on the FLUD homepage. I’ll cut to the Big Reveal:
The name is pronounced flood—as in “a flood of news,” I suppose.
Just one reader’s opinion, but a “flood” of news sounds like the problem, not the solution. And “FLUD” looks like one of those Awesomely Bad Military Acronyms that Wired.com is fond of mocking.
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* Gary Larson (The Far Side) has never authorized the online publication of his cartoons, so what you see here is a photo of a Far Side mug that was sold on Etsy. Here’s a view of the original cartoon panel.
** In this “news ecosystem,” it appears that copyeditors are an endangered species.
