Fritinancy

May Linkfest

Newt Gingrich—remember when he ran for president and talked about building bases on the moon?—now appears to be campaigning for Andy Rooney’s old slot on “60 Minutes.” “We’re really puzzled,” he tells his YouTube audience, a look of grave concern furrowing his brow, a familiar-looking device in his hand. “We spent weeks [!] trying to figure out whaddya call this.” This is what you and I call a cell phone or a mobile phone or a smartphone, but that doesn’t satisfy Gingrich. He’s soliciting new, more precise names for the gizmo he used to call “a handheld computer.” Commenters have been gleefully obliging; my favorite nominations are Talkie-Viewie (maybe “TV” for short?), roundcorner-camera-communicati­ons-email-apps-thingy, iMoon, and horseless telephone. (Via TechCrunch.)

Meanwhile, linguist Geoffrey Pullum, posting at Language Log, has “an inkling of what moved Gingrich to embark on his piece of burbling.” It’s all about the naïve lexical global Whorfianism, obviously.

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I caught this a few days too late for Underwear Week but can’t resist sharing it anyway. Triumph, the Swiss bra company, last week introduced its concept bra of the year at a Tokyo press conference. The theme: “branomics,” “a playful take on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ‘three-arrow’ economic revival plan,” according to Reuters. “We hope that as the Japanese economy grows, we can also help bust sizes to get bigger,” said a Triumph spokeswoman. (Via The 3% Conference.)

Image via AdFreak. Note arrows.

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Merriam-Webster, the dictionary company, is having a photography contest for word lovers that looks like a lot of fun. Deadline for submissions: May 26. (Via Emily Brewster.)

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Speaking of photography, here’s a pop song dedicated to stock photo clichés: “groom on phone with angry wife,” “bearded man is looking grave,” “black and white handshake,” and many more. (Via Igor blog.)

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And speaking of photography and contests, GeoGuessr combines street-view photos with a test of your geographical knowledge. Challenging and addictive. (Via PopeHat.)

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Maps! I love ’em. And I especially love maps that combine geography, history, biography, and name lore, like this interactive map of San Francisco place names, developed by Noah Veltman.

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This advice from Baby Name Wizard about overcoming naming remorse works for company and product naming, too.

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Andris Pone of Coin Branding, in Toronto, applauds Frogbox, a “green” moving company in more than one sense. It’s a great brand story, Andris writes: “The Frogbox positioning statement, From one pad to another, exemplifies the message of ease by creating a promise (completely delivered on) that one can move from their old home to their new one with all the difficulty of a hop.”

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Here’s a nifty infographic on how corporate logos evolve.

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Corporate buzzword-wise, “delight” is shaping up to be the new “passion.” (Via MJF.)

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You’ll need to subscribe to Visual Thesaurus to read Mike Pope’s excellent column, “What’s in a -Nym?”, which goes beyond antonyms and synonyms to more obscure and fascinating terms like contranym, retronym, and backronym. But of course you’re already a subscriber.

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From Idibon, a language-data company: how to name a racehorse.

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Finally, in honor of the return of the cicadas to the eastern U.S., here’s a reprise of my plug for Cicada-licious: Cooking and Enjoying Periodical Cicadas, the cicada cookbook produced by the University of Maryland cicadamaniacs (their term). Yes, I have a well-documented fondness for -licious names.

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I also can’t resist an opportunity to combine entomology, etymology, and a plug for Fritinancy. As language maven Ben Zimmer—my editor at Visual Thesaurus—observed in an email to me:

I noticed that the first OED cite for “fritin(i)ancy” is from Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, talking about cicadas. (In this edition, it’s actually “fritinnitus.”) Johnson defined “fritinancy” as “the scream of an insect, as the cricket or cicada” (citing Browne) and subsequent dictionaries used similar definitions. (Johnson didn’t define “cicada,” oddly enough.)

My original post about Fritinancy cited Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), which mentioned crickets but not cicadas. The post was written before I had access to the OED online, a weak defense but the one I’m sticking with.

In other cicada news, linguist Arnold Zwicky has written about “swarmageddon” and “cicadapocalypse,” and science writer Carl Zimmer, brother of Ben, examined the remarkable life cycle of this long-lived insect. Carl Z’s editors at the Times consulted with Ben Z to come up with a pronunciation guide: “cicadas (usually pronounced sih-KAY-duhz).”

But, Ben told me, “there are plenty of people who pronounce it KAH, and many dictionaries give it as an acceptable alternate. I don’t have a good sense of the regional distribution of the two pronunciations, though.”

Perhaps Fritinancy’s readers can help.

The Names of Fine-Art Book Presses

On Sunday I attended the CODEX International Book Fair, an annual exhibition and sale of artists’ books and fine-art editions. It’s a spectacular event—nearly 200 exhibitors from all over the United States and several other countries—in a magnificent setting: Richmond’s Craneway Pavilion, at the edge of the bay. Although Craneway is only about 15 miles north of my house, this was my first visit. It won’t be my last. The 525,000-square-foot sawtooth-roof structure, designed by the prolific German-American architect Albert Kahn, housed a Ford Motor Company assembly plant, the largest on the West Coast, from 1932 through 1955. It originally produced Model “A” cars; during World War II it was retooled to produce tanks and jeeps. Women—the inspiration for “Rosie the Riveter”—made up much of the plant’s wartime workforce. The Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park is adjacent to the pavilion, in the old Kaiser shipyard, which built Liberty ships.

The building was severely damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. In 2004 it was bought by a development company; the renovation, by Marcy Wong Donn Logan Architects, resulted in a 2008 National Trust for Historic Preservation award. (Here’s a Flickr set of the building taken with a kite-lofted camera.)

The light-filled pavilion made an inspired and inspiring setting for the hundreds of art books on display. My artist friend Susan Bercu has written about the aesthetic highlights of the CODEX show; I’ll focus here on memorable names of presses and book designers. These are names that truly serve as the titles of stories—names that make you want to strike up a conversation.

Squirrel!

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 Journal review 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:

Dug the Dog, from Up (2009)

Word of the Week: Lucky Ducky

Lucky ducky: An American who pays no federal income tax because his or her income level falls below the tax line after deductions and credits.

Lucky ducky was first used in this sense in “The Non-Taxpaying Class,” a Wall Street Journal opinion piece published November 20, 2002:

The actual number of people filing without paying comes to 16 million (after subtracting those getting earned income tax credits and thus, presumably, still somewhat sensitive to tax rates). So almost 13% of all workers have no tax liability and so are indifferent to income tax rates. And that doesn't include another 16.5 million who have some income but don't file at all.

Who are these lucky duckies? They are the beneficiaries of tax policies that have expanded the personal exemption and standard deduction and targeted certain voter groups by introducing a welter of tax credits for things like child care and education. When these escape hatches are figured against income, the result is either a zero liability or a liability that represents a tiny percentage of income.

(Emphasis added.)

The following month, Jonathan Chait parried in The New Republic that the WSJ editorial was based on “a giant factual inaccuracy—it completely ignores sales and excise taxes, which consume a huge share of the working poor's income.” He went on:

When I try to visualize the editorial meeting that produced this bit of diabolical inspiration, I imagine one of the more rational staffers—maybe Dorothy Rabinowitz—tentatively raising her hand and asking, “Isn't that idea a bit, you know, immoral?” Then Robert Bartley or Paul Gigot would emit a deep, sinister laugh and press a hidden button, depositing the unfortunate staffer into a tank of piranhas.

Cartoonist and political commentator Ruben Bolling seized on the Wall Street Journal’s language to introduce a new character, “Lucky Ducky,” to his long-running comic strip, “Tom the Dancing Bug.” In a 2003 strip that reran earlier this month, Lucky Ducky’s plutocratic nemesis, Hollingsworth Hound, fumes that because Lucky Ducky is in jail, he’s “eating a square meal on my dime.”

 

In the decade since its coinage, lucky ducky “has outlived its original use to become a part of the informal terminology used in the tax reform debate in the United States,” according to a Wikipedia entry. It was resurrected after last week’s release of secretly filmed video of a Mitt Romney fundraiser in which the Republican candidate dismissed “47 percent” of Americans as “people who pay no income tax” who are “dependent on government” and will vote for Obama “no matter what.”

Economist Paul Krugman has devoted several posts in his New York Times blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, to the fundraiser video. A September 18 post invoked “lucky duckies,” although Romney himself never used the term:

The “lucky ducky” trope is clearly, obviously nonsense; equally obviously, it was originally created in an effort to dupe people who didn’t know better. It was and is what Orwell called “prolefeed”, junk aimed at the ignorant masses (ignorant by design), the people who are ready to believe at a moment’s notice that we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

Why “lucky ducky”? The rhyme certainly helps, as does the fact that “duck” has been a term of endearment since at least 1600, when Shakespeare used it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“O dainty duck, o deare!”); in addition, “ducks” is a term of familiar address in British (and especially Cockney) slang. In American political slang, “lame duck” has referred to an elected official or legislative body whose term of office is nearing an end; it first appeared in print in 1910, according to Grant Barrett’s Hatchet Jobs and Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang.

For more animal metaphors used in American political discourse—including dog whistle, pork barrel, and vet—see my September 2008 column for the Visual Thesaurus, “Political Animals.”

What the Puck?

Professional hockey—minor league, but hockey nonetheless—is returning to San Francisco this fall. Which explains the presence of this billboard in North Beach (Columbus at Filbert).

 

But it doesn’t explain everything. And neither does the FAQ section on the SF Bulls website. So I’m going to woman up and do my best to answer your questions.

The Team Name, Part 1.  As far as I know, there’s no history of “Bulls” teams in the Bay Area—Chicago has that particular honor. So I surmised that the name was inspired by the team’s home rink, the Cow Palace, which opened in 1941 as a venue for livestock expositions and the Grand National Rodeo. The Cow Palace is not actually in San Francisco: it’s just south of the city and county limits, in Daly City. (It was originally called the California State Livestock Pavilion; according to one story, while it was still being built, during the Great Depression, one critic sniped that while people were starving, money shouldn’t be spent on “a palace for cows.” The name stuck.) “The San Francisco Cows” was evidently out of the question. But as San Francisco Chronicle reporter Peter Hartlaub wrote in October of last year, “You’ll sooner see a bull in San Francisco than a circumcision ban in Dallas. It’s a poor name, coupled with a logo that looks like a Carly Fiorina attack ad.” Hartlaub suggested seven improvements on “Bulls,” including The Bullitts and The Rock. Nevertheless, I’m sure the headline writers will have loads of fun with “Bulls Hit.”

The Team Name, Part 2: In a follow-up interview, Peter Hartlaub elicited this name story from team owner/general manager/coach Pat Curcio:

We looked into all kinds of names. We looked at The Rock. We looked at a lot of different angles. We really loved The Seals, and we loved The Sea Lions. Unfortunately we couldn’t get those names.

Then when we were downtown [sic] at Pier 39. There was a crowd of people this past spring. It was packed, and the sea lions were playing. We were talking to some people there, and someone says “A male sea lion is called a bull.” And we said “That’s a little tougher.” That’s how the Bulls came up. Then there was the connection with the Cow Palace. That’s how it developed.

The Team Colors. It’s all orange and black—San Francisco Giants colors--on the poster, but according to a Wikipedia entry the official colors are “old gold,” orange, black, and white. Gold and orange have symbolic significance locally: gold for the Gold Rush, which transformed San Francisco from a provincial backwater to a regional capital; and orange for the International Orange paint on the Golden Gate Bridge.

The League. The Bulls will play in the hitherto-unknown-to-me ECHL, which when it was founded in 1988 was called the East Coast Hockey League. In 2002 the West Coast Hockey League went out of business, and the ECHL took in a bunch of teams from Alaska, California, Nevada, and Idaho. There are some not-bad team names in the league, including the Orlando Solar Bears, the Bakersfield Condors, and—my favorite—the Florida Everblades. But all the names pale in comparison to roller-derby team names like the Traverse City Toxic Cherries, the Arkansas Killbillies, and the Taco Kickers.

The Owner/General Manager/Coach’s Nickname. In his blog, Pat Curcio calls himself “Coach Curdog.” Well played, sir.

The Ad Slogan, Part 1. No question that “Act like you got a pair” has the requisite bad-assitude for hockey. For starters, there’s the down-market grammar—like, not as if; you got, not you have or you’ve got. (I’ll get to “a pair” in Part 2.) If you doubt that got can be inflammatory, read Fitch O’Connell’s recent column for the Visual Thesaurus (subscription required): O’Connell was told by a teacher that got “isn’t a word” and by his grandfather that “it’s an Americanism.” (Both had been misinformed.) I’m not sure, though, who’s being addressed in that imperative statement. The fan? The aspiring team member? (Open player tryouts will be held in September.) The city of San Francisco generally?

The Ad Slogan, Part 2. “A pair” has been slang for “testicles” since … well, I can’t tell you. The OED doesn’t include the reference, although it does tell us that “a pair” has meant “women’s breasts” since at least 1919. In hisOfficial Dictionary of Unofficial English—an indispensable resource—Grant Barrett antedate s “grow a pair” to this 1994 Usenet citation: “My only response to diablo is to sack up and grow a pair.” In the Bulls billboard, “a pair” surely refers to the manly fortitude required to play hockey. But I’m not sure about “act like.” Maybe fans just need to pretend to be macho. Or maybe the target audience is women. Or maybe it’s “a pair of tickets,” and as long as you act as though you have them, you can get through the gate.

No, I didn’t think so.

“A pair” was used more effectively in an ad campaign for last year’s 50/50.

 

Here “a pair” has three overlapping meanings: machismo; the two friends portrayed by Gordon-Levitt and Rogen; and the “two-of-a-kind” meaning from cards (reinforced by “…to beat the odds”).

 

If You Give a Dog an Umlaut

I spotted this Yöghund display in the window of Holistic Veterinary Care here in Oakland.

 

 

Let’s zoom in on the logo:

The Yöghund website puts it slightly differently: “Yöghund is the first frozen yoghurt treat made for dogs.” A long-overdue breakthrough in gelato-lacto-canine nutrition, I’m sure you’ll agree.

But wait—is it yogurt or yoghurt? And what’s up with the dotted O—the Spot spots, you might call them?

As it happens, I’d just read Lynne Murphy’s recent post at Separated by a Common Language about “yog(h)urt,” so I was already pondering why Americans usually spell it yogurt and Brits spell it yoghurt. Here’s some background from Lynne:

This word comes to English from Turkish yoğurt, but English doesn’t have the letter ğ or the sound that goes with it, so we had to figure out what to do with it. I’m relying on Wikipedia here, but it says that in some dialect(s) ğ is not pronounced as its own sound, but instead lengthens the preceding vowel. That would explain why it turns up as yaourt in French (and has also made appearances with that spelling in English). In another dialect(s?), ğ is pronounced as [ɰ], which is a velar approximant. So, it’s like a [w], but without the lip-rounding. This is all to say that it's not a hard-g sound at all.

Hmm, no umlauts in evidence—just the little Turkish flourish over the G. As for the UK/US spelling distinction, Lynne writes:

I can't help but think that the relative popularity of the yoghurtspelling in the UK has something to do with how its pronunciation is evolving. … This is to say: a frequent, modern British pronunciation of the word has a first syllable that rhymes with dog (in the same dialect, at least. The [ɒ] vowel ofBritish Received Pronunciation (RP) does not really exist in American English.) …

Americans pronounce it more like the older pronunciation--except without that cent(e)ring of the vowel that RP does. And if you're still having a hard time imagining any of these sounds, listen to the first two pronunciations of yogurt at Forvo. The first is the modern British, the second American.  Actually, Forvo also has a Turkish pronunciation, the vowel of which doesn't directly correspond to any of the English ones (it's this one).

Still no umlauts! I think we may safely conclude that what we have with Yöghund is yet another case of gratuitous decorative dotting. The company that makes Yöghund isn’t in an umlaut-using country like Finland or Germany. And it isn’t in a “yoghurt” environment, either: it’s based in Exeter, New Hampshire.

Even without the dot-confusion, Yöghund poses a pronunciation challenge. The -hund suffix obviously signifies “dog,” but to aspirate the H you need something like a glottal stop after the Yög-, and that’s awkward for English speakers. (It starts to sound like “yoga-hund.”) Of course, if you take the umlaut literally you also have to pronounce the O through semi-pursed lips. And that’s a lot of work for lazy American mouths.

I don’t have a dog, so I can’t give you a report about the product itself. But in case you were wondering, here’s good news from the FAQ:

I thought dogs were lactose intolerant? Won’t Yöghund upset my dog’s stomach?

Dogs are lactose intolerant, but rather than upset a dog’s stomach, Yöghund may actually settle it!

Hürräh!

 

Totes Adorbs Dog Food

From the not-new-but-new-to-me files:

TV food-show host Rachael Ray, known for her bubbly manner, inventive vocabulary, and shortcut recipes, lends her name and image to a brand of dog food called Nutrish. The brand was introduced in mid-2008; all proceeds from its sale go to Rachael’s Rescue, which helps abandoned and mistreated animals.

 

If you think I’m going to mock the “Nutrish” name, think again. It’s just about perfect.

• It’s consistent with the casual, playful Rachael Ray brand vocabulary. On her cooking shows, Ms. Ray sprinkles abbreviations like “delish” and “stoup” (a hybrid of “stew” and “soup”). She refers to herself as “Rach.”
• It conveys a benefit—nutrition—in a lighthearted way that emphasizes the joy (rather than the chore) of dog ownership.
• It’s right in step with the vogue for truncations like totes (totally), adorbs (adorable), skedge (schedule), and obvs (obviously). For more on this trend, see Stan Carey’s “ ‘Ledgebag’ is totes amaze,” and Ben Yagoda’s “Totes cray-cray abbrevs.”

 

I like the simplicity and near-rhyme of this slogan, too.

 

Nicely named, Rachael Ray. Have a biscuit!

(Hat tip: MJF.)

Word of the Week: Skijoring

Skijoring: Cross-country skiing with the assistance of dogs (or, less commonly, horses). Sometimes spelled as two words: ski joring. Anglicized from the Norwegian ski-kjøring, “ski-driving.” The English word is pronounced with a hard j ((skjôrng); in Norwegian, the j is pronounced like y.

Photo from the 2011 Chuck & Don’s Skijoring Loppet by Keith Jones, via Flickr.

San Francisco Chronicle sports reporter Paul McHugh wrote in 2003 about skijoring’s history and requirements:

Scandinavians, eschewing sleds, would put light harnesses on reindeer and dogs, then, wearing their cross-country skis, they attached themselves to these animals to score a quick boost for winter travel. …

For effective skijoring, the animal should weigh at least 30-35 pounds. It can be almost any breed -- border collies, golden retrievers and Irish setters have all been successfully trained. However, northern breeds such as huskies and malamutes are preferred. The human participant should have a good level of cross-country-skiing experience -- the more, the better. Skaters do best at skijoring on groomed courses, but diagonal striders also can skijor; in fact, that gait is commonly used on rougher trails or wild snow.

Skijoring races are held around the world. The US national championship race, Chuck & Don’s Skijoring Loppet, will be held next Saturday, February 4, in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. (Loppet is a Swedish word that refers to a large, long-distance cross-country ski event, usually more than 35 kilometers.*) The championship race is a 7k one-dog competition; other events include a 14k two-dog event and 2.5k and 4.5k races.

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* Another useful Scandinavian word for would-be skijoring enthusiasts: pulk, a small, short toboggan. From Finnish pulkka.

Word of the Week: Painted Dog

Painted dog: A friendlier name for the African wild dog, whose numbers have dwindled from hundreds of thousands to a few thousand, mostly in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Tanzania, and South Africa.

Both "wild dog" and "painted dog" are misnomers, writes columnist Nicholas Kristof in last Thursday's New York Times:

Wild dogs are not dogs, which split off from wolves only in the last 30,000 years. In contrast, wild dogs last shared a common ancestor with dogs or wolves about 6 million years ago. They are the size of German shepherds and look like dogs, but they don’t bark and have different teeth and toes. And although many have tried, they have not been domesticated.

The species' scientific name, Lycaon pictus, means "painted wolf." And that's the nomenclature Greg Rasmussen drew upon when he established Painted Dog Conservation in Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park in 2002. Rasmussen, who grew up partly in Zimbabwe, is known among canid experts as "Mr. Painted Dog," according to a 2007 Smithsonian magazine article about efforts to save the species.

Kristof writes that Rasmussen recognized the need to rename the animals "so that they sound exotic rather than feral":

Do-gooders usually have catastrophic marketing skills. Pepsi and Coke invest fortunes to promote their products over their rivals, while humanitarians aren’t nearly as savvy about marketing causes with far higher stakes — famine, disease, mass murder.

Mr. Rasmussen is an exception, and his effort to rebrand the species as “painted dogs” caught on. The name works because the animals’ spotted coats suggest that they ran through an artist’s studio.

It's a story, writes Kristof, "that offers some useful lessons for do-gooders around the world, in clever marketing and 'branding,' and in giving local people a stake in conservation. For if it’s possible to rescue a despised species with a crummy name like 'wild dogs,' any cause can have legs."

A similar transformation occurred a couple of decades ago, when swamps were renamed wetlands and "the jungle" became "the rainforest." 

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Image of Lycaon pictus from BBC.

A Political Bestiary

My latest article for Visual Thesaurus, "Political Animals," is a little lexicon of zoological language used in politics, from earmarks and maverick to dog-whistle and bellwether. (And yes, I make a brief detour at lipstick on a pig.)

Full content is for subscribers only (just $2.95 a month or $19.95 a year!). Here's an excerpt:

Worried that your maverick candidate may not have what it takes to represent you? Then you'll want to vet him or her. A relatively recent arrival in American English—it was still unusual enough in 1980 that language columnist William Safire explained it to his New York Times readers—vet is nothing more than a shortening of the Latinate word for animal doctor, veterinarian. The verb form became popular in England in the late nineteenth century, when it meant "to check out an animal," in particular a racehorse; it got its more general meaning of "evaluate" in the early 1900s, and became very popular beginning in the 1930s. As recently as the 1980s it was used mostly in reference to documents: to "vet a manuscript" means to check its facts. It gradually came to apply to humans as well.

One of the very cool things about Visual Thesaurus is that each of the political-animal words in my story is a link to the thesaurus, which displays synonyms in a constellation pattern. You can try out the thesaurus free of charge here or on the home page: just type a word into the search field at the top of the page.