Fritinancy

Below the Belt

It seems to me that as the concept of "appropriate attire" vanishes from the public sphere--pajamas in the supermarket? why not, dude?--and the evidence of excessive caloric intake is ever more visible, our language for describing shameless bodily displays is becoming correspondingly more inventive, elaborate, and body-part-specific. I am naturally thinking of cameltoe (a k a "the other cleavage"), a startlingly apt and vivid metaphor, especially considering that its users are unlikely to be Bedouins or zookeepers. Then there's muffin-top (a k a "belly roll"), which seems to have originated in an Australian sitcom, "Kath and Kim"; it was named Australia's word of the year for 2006 and is now almost as international as "OK."

New to me, but well known to the cool kids for some time now, is FUPA, which I first encountered earlier this week in Kersten's comment on a You Look Fab post. It's an acronym, which allows for some definitional flexibility. Acronym Finder defines it as "Fat Upper Pelvic Area," while the most popular definition on Urban Dictionary is "Fat Upper Pubic Area." Both interpretations suggest gender neutrality. However, the group singing "The FUPA Song" (watch the YouTube video) assigns an unequivocally feminine meaning to the "P" in FUPA. (Read the comments for some alternate glosses.)

If you're still wondering what on earth I'm talking about, you can check out the photos at FUPA Hunter, but don't say I didn't warn you. This is raw, in-your-FUPA documentation. This is muffin-top on steroids, inhuman growth hormones, and a side of fries.

Word of the Week: BLAD

BLAD: Publishing-industry term for a short advance version of a book--usually the jacket art and several sample pages--that gives a publicist or distributor the gist of the contents and design. Said to be an acronym of Basic Layout And Design; however, it may be a backronym from blad, Scots dialect for "a section" or "a fragment."

Read more about publishing-industry jargon here.

The Fortunate Monogram

If you've got it, flaunt it:

Effective transformation of a personal name into a strong business name that's ideally suited to its field. Handsome web site, too. (Albany, California.)

The Language of Luv

Vocabulary lessons from the Eliot Spitzer affair and related peccadilloes, by way of New York magazine (warning: may offend dainty sensibilities):

GFE: Girlfriend Experience. What "#1 escort service" NY Confidential offered clients ("The $2,000-an-Hour Woman," by Mark Jacobsen, July 10, 2005). According to Jason Itzler, NY Confidential founder and self-described "King of All Pimps," "GFE is about true passion, something genuine. A facsimile of love." (Translation: mouth-kissing permitted.) At the time of the interview, Itzler was six months into a two-and-a-half-year sentence on Rikers Island for money laundering and running a house of prostitution. Itzler's current claim to fame is that he put Spitzer's tootsie, "Kristen," into the business.

PSE: Porn-Star Experience. What most escorts have.

DATY: "Dining at the Y," a synonym for cunnilingus. ("Secrets of the Megapimps," also by Mark Jacobsen, in the March 24, 2008, issue, which has a crude but effective cover).

BBBJ: "Bareback Blow Job." Ibid.

The Luv Guv: Nickname for Eliot Spitzer.

Big Spit: Ditto.

More Spitzeriana here.

And just to prove that if you can make it there, you can indeed make it anywhere, here's a quote from Real Life Romance, San Francisco Chronicle gossip columnist Leah Garchik's amusing compilation of overheard-in-the-Bay-Area quotes:

"I can't believe you pay for sex but you think popcorn is too expensive."

-- Movie-lover to movie-lover, at multiplex cinema.

Buzzwords of the Year

Grant Barrett's top buzzwords of 2007 are in the Week in Review section of today's New York Times. Nose bidet, global weirding, or mobisode, anyone? Or how about this acronym, which had escaped my attention until now:

FTW interj. For The Win. A bragging exclamation of approval, as in “K-Fed got the kids FTW,” or “I was able to open the file with Photoshop. FTW!!!” Originally part of the patter of the game show “Hollywood Squares” and later found in online games like World of Warcraft. Now largely used ironically and sarcastically.

Barrett's list is an edited version of his American Dialect Society Word of the Year (WOTY) nominations, posted here. Wayne Glowka, chair of ADS's New Word Committee, gives his favorites here; they include fenjoozler, celebutard, and--this is especially nice--nurdle (a microscopic bit of plastic found in the ocean; also called a mermaid's tear). The ADS vote will be held Jan. 4 during the organization's annual conference. Let the countdown begin!

Meanwhile, David Marc Fischer of the enjoyable Blog About Town provides an alternate list in this post. I've been wishing that efforting would eff off for more than a decade. And vajayjay (which I wrote about last month) certainly deserves at least a Sign-of-the-Post-Feminist-Times award.

How about you? Which words that gained currency in 2007 are destined for immortality? Which words do you never want to hear again?

Update: David Barnhart of Lexik House Publishers has added his words of the year to the ADS website. MRSA and crowdsourcing would be on my list, too.

The IKEA Naming System

Ex-Talking Head David Byrne blogged last month about his maiden voyage to IKEA:

Why does everything have weird names? Every container, shelf, cabinet or appliance had some odd name, as if people from Planet Sweden anthropomorphized these objects, naming each one they encountered as best they could:

BESTA
HEDDA
BJARNUM
LERBERG
INREDA
EKTORP
GRUNDTON
BERTA
KARNA

It turns out, Byrne writes, that the Wikipedians had already cracked the code:

Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish placenames (for example: Klippan)

Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names

Dining tables and chairs: Finnish place names

Bookcase ranges: Occupations

Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays

Kitchens: grammatical terms, sometimes also other names

Chairs, desks: men's names

Materials, curtains: women's names

Garden furniture: Swedish islands

Carpets: Danish place names

Lighting: terms from music, chemistry, meteorology, measures, weights, seasons, months, days, boats, nautical terms

Bedlinen, bed covers, pillows/cushions: flowers, plants, precious stones; words related to sleep, comfort, and cuddling [cuddling?]

Children's items: mammals, birds, adjectives

Curtain accessories: mathematical and geometrical terms

Kitchen utensils: foreign words, spices, herbs, fish, mushrooms, fruits or berries, functional descriptions

Boxes, wall decoration, pictures and frames, clocks: colloquial expressions, also Swedish placenames

I love discovering a nomenclature's inner structure; it's so satisfying to know that someone has taken the time and care to think creatively about the work that names do.

Still, the IKEA taxonomy is no less enigmatic for having been described. I'm sure there are several PhD theses waiting to be written about it. Music, chemistry, and nautical terms for lighting? Feminine names for curtains, masculine names for chairs and desks? And what subtle intra-Scandinavian tensions or harmonies are revealed by the assignment of Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish words to certain categories but not others? Is there some national stereotype about the Finns (for example) setting an especially attractive table? Or, more perversely, not?

The Wikipedia article continues:

Because IKEA is a world-wide company working in several countries with several different languages, sometimes the Nordic naming leads to problems where the word means something completely different to the product. A well known example was the bed frame GUTVIK. As the word can be pronounced Gootfick it invites German-speaking people to understand it like gut fick which is somewhat close to "good fuck" in German.

Then there's this tidbit:

Company founder Ingvar Kamprad, who is dyslexic, found that naming the furniture with proper names and words, rather than a product code, made the names easier to remember.

Take heed, O ye makers of automobiles and techno gizmos!

The name IKEA, by the way, is an acronym. IK stands for Ingvar Kamprad; the E stands for Elmtaryd, the farm where Kamprad grew up, and the A is for Agunnaryd, Kamprad's home village.

(Hat tip to Andy Sernowitz.)

How the Taser Got Its Name

Linguist Benjamin Zimmer reveals the whole shocking story:

[T]he brand name was coined by the inventor of the device, NASA scientist Jack Cover. Cover reportedly formed the name from the initial letters of Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle, after the 1911 juvenile adventure novel Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle. Since the protagonist Tom Swift never actually revealed his middle initial, we can guess that Taser is something of a backronym, i.e., a word that is “retrofitted” with an acronymic expansion after the fact. Taser appears to be modeled on an earlier acronym, laser (”light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation”), which in turn was modeled on maser (”microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”). Another possible inspiration for Taser is phaser, the name of a fictional weapon familiar to Star Trek fans. According to Jeff Prucher’s Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry originally wanted to call the weapon a laser but then opted for phaser instead.

The Taser went on the market in the early 1970s, but it took about 15 years for a verb--to tase--to emerge as a back-formation. (Previously, "to Taser" had been preferred.) According to Zimmer, it was the Rodney King incident, in 1991, that brought tase into wider circulation.

It's interesting to think about why some trademarks, such as Taser, are back-formed into lower-case verbs, while others, like Google, retain their full capitalized spelling: no one says I googed her.

Futuramarama

Good news for us Futuramaphiles--a new, feature-length DVD, Bender's Big Score (with Sarah Silverman as one of the voice actors), went on sale this week; it's the first of four DVDs with all-new material that will be released over the next year. Wired magazine is celebrating with a feature story in the print edition of the December issue along with a trio of online-only treats: a behind-the-scenes slideshow, a sidebar about the show's unabashed geekery, and a fascinating story about the original Futurama--the famous ride in the General Motors Pavilion in the 1939-40 New York World's Fair. There are even video excerpts of To New Horizons, a documentary about the Futurama ride.

GM's Futurama--known as the Futurama--"presented a utopia forged by urban planning," according to the online article (un-bylined, but probably by Chris Baker, the author of the feature story. No, not that Chris Baker). It also had an influence on language: Although -arama had been used to create new English words since the early 19th century, the Futurama brought the suffix into widespread use. (Read more about -arama at The Straight Dope.)

Television's Futurama (1999-2002), while best known for its math and science in-jokes, also played with language. In the world of the show--set in the 31st century--French is a dead language. (When the show was dubbed in French, German was the dead language.) In other linguistic developments, the word "Christmas" has been replaced by "Xmas" (and evergreens by palm trees) and "ask" has been replaced by "axe." "Slurm," the name of a ubiquitous beverage on the series, will be recognized by computer folk as an acronym for Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management.

According to the Wired article (print edition):

Some jokes in Futurama were written in a strange alphabet that fans had to decrypt. "Most were jokes about aliens eating people," [show co-developer David X.] Cohen says. "Like, an alien sign on a restaurant says TASTY HUMAN BURGERS." He checked the Web a few hours after the pilot aired and discovered that the freeze framers had already cracked the code. A trickier alien alphabet was devised.

For those of you who really want to read the signs in the background, Omniglot provides a decoded version of that alien alphabet.

Read my previous post about the original Futurama taglines.

How Ralston Purina Got Its Name

If you have pets, or if you've ever snacked on Chex party mix, you're probably familiar with the Ralston Purina brand and checkerboard logo (see left). Mostly known for its animal feeds, the brand is more than a century old; the human-food division, which included Chex cereals, was spun off in 1994; the pet-food company was acquired in 1999 by Nestlé and is now known as Nestlé Purina PetCare Company.

I'll bet you thought, as I did, that "Ralston" was the name of a company founder. Nope. It's an acronym:

In the book “The Ralston Brain Regime,” a turn-of-the-century human-diet guru named Webster Edgerly presented “a course of conduct, exercises and study designed to develop perfect health in the physical brain.” The name Ralston was itself an acronym of Edgerly’s seven life principles: Regime, Activity, Light, Strength, Temperation, Oxygen and Nature. One of the 800,000 “Ralstonite” acolytes Edgerly eventually attracted happened to be William H. Danforth, a young fitness fanatic and animal-feed entrepreneur who had begun to shovel together a mix of grain, molasses and salt that he sold under the brand name Purina, “where purity is paramount.” When Danforth approached Edgerly, the diet celebrity granted Purina an endorsement from “Dr. Ralston,” and the company took on a new name.

--From "They Eat What We Are," by Frederick Kaufman, in the New York Times magazine, Sept. 2, 2007.

Ralston Purina's checkerboard logo may have originated in the same human-potentialist philosophy as the Ralston name. According to this Wikipedia article:

Danforth proposed that four key components in life need to be in balance. In the illustration, "Physical" was on the left, "Mental" on top, "Social" on right and "Religious" on the bottom. To be healthy, you needed the four squares to stay in balance and one area was not to develop at expense of the other.

On the other hand, according to this site:

Ralston Purina’s famous “checkerboard” logo was a marketing decision by Danforth, based on his childhood memories of a family in which the mother dressed all of her children in clothing made from the same bolt of cloth. One year, her choice of material was the checkerboard design, and Danforth never forgot the distinctive red-and-white pattern.

Hey, you can never have too many creation myths.

By the way, one of William H. Danforth's grandsons is former U.S. Senator John Danforth, Republican of Missouri. 

WPF/E by Any Other Name

Surely by now you've heard of Silverlight, Microsoft's new "cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web." That's a direct quote from the official site; Steve at How to Split an Atom provides an MS-to-English translation: "Flash re-branded and re-factored by the Big M."

If you're hard core, you know that Silverlight's code name was the euphonious and memorable WPF/E.

Now Windows Vista tech insider Tim Sneath graciously discloses how Microsoft developed the Silverlight name:

It was a tough choice; we know that WPF/E was much loved by the community and that acronyms can be both inspiring and evocative, but we really wanted to try something radical and different.

We had some really great alternative choices that we considered before settling on Silverlight, and I thought now would be a perfect time to share them. I hope that after you see the other brand names we considered, you'll be happy with our final choice. So here goes... drum roll, please; here are the top 10 names we rejected before settling on Silverlight:

10. GrayLuminosity (close, but there was just something not quite right about it)

9.   AJAX - Asynchronous JavaScript And XAML (turns out that acronym was already taken)

...and finally:

1. Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation Live Rich Client ActiveX Player R2 Ultimate Edition Service Pack 1 CTP (or WPFLRCAPR2UESP1CTP for short)

The rest of the list is just as funny.

Hat tip to the indefatigable Mike Pope!