Fritinancy

The Worst Font in the World

Simon Garfield devotes the final chapter of Just My Type: A Book About Fonts (published in the US in 2011) to a rogue’s gallery of “the worst fonts in the world.” Number one on his list: the official typeface of the 2012 Olympic Games. In honor of the games, which open in London today, here’s an excerpt from Garfield’s critique:

The London 2012 Olympic Typeface, which is called 2012 Headline, may be even worse than the London 2012 Olympic Logo, but by the time it was released people were so tired of being outraged by the logo that the type almost passed by unnoticed. …

Like the logo, the uncool font is based on jaggedness and crudeness, not usually considered attributes where sport is concerned. Or maybe it’s an attempt to appear hip and down with the kids—it looks a little like the sort of tagging one might see in 1980s graffiti. It also has a vaguely Greek appearance, or at least the UK interpretation of Greek, the sort of lettering you will find at London kebab shops and restaurants called Dionysus. The slant to the letters is suddenly interrupted by a very round and upright o, which may be trying to be an Olympic Ring. The font does have a few things going for it: it is instantly identifiable, it is not easily forgettable, and because we’ll be seeing so much of it, it may eventually cease to offend. Let’s hope they keep it off the medals.

Sample of 2012 Headline via Fast Company.

 

You can read the entire “worst fonts” chapter at Fast Company. Believe it or not, the much-scorned Comic Sans (which Garfield calls “type that has gone wrong”) didn’t make the list. That’s how bad the eight worst fonts in the world are.

Read my 2007 post about the controversial 2012 Olympic Games logo.

Bonus link: “My Utter Lack of Olympic Spirit,” by British novelist Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy, A Long Way Down).

Names in the News: Recce

Recce is a new iOS app that provides a 3D, animated, aerial view of a city (just London for now; San Francisco and New York soon). The name mystified me at first: When I read the TechCrunch headline—“A Rich, Interactive Map That’s Also a Gaming Platform”—I took in “rich,” applied it to Recce, and concluded it was an Italian word, pronounced, like “bocce,” with a /ch/ in the middle. Retchie? Hmm.

Then I read reporter Ingrid Lunden’s lede, which explains for stoopid Yanks like me that recce is “pronounced ‘wreckie’, British slang for ‘reconnaissance’ (only English people would make slang out of a word like that).”

News flash! Americans also make slang out of “a word like that”: our version is “recon,” pronounced REE-con. Both abbreviations were originally military slang, but American “recon” is older by one whole war: It was first documented in 1918; “recce” surfaced (as “reccy”) in 1941.

One other item in the story caught my attention: Lunden writes that Recce was originally called Mapply “until a French company called Mappy called to say ‘Non!’” That’s one less faux-adverbial -ly name, one more sign that the British are coming, the British are coming.

Word of the Week: Blazerati

Blazerati: Officials of amateur sports associations who are identified by their colored blazers. Formed from blazer + -ati, a Latin plural suffix seen in literati (men and women of letters) and illuminati (enlightened ones; free-thinkers). Sometimes capitalized. Singular form: blazerato.

Blazerati was first documented in 1998 (source: 20th Century Words). By then the English-speaking world had grown accustomed to literati spinoffs such as glitterati (celebrities; earliest citation in a 1956 issue of Time magazine) and digerati (the elite of the computer and online industries, 1998). In 2008, Stephen Baker published a nonfiction book, The Numerati, about the sometimes dark uses of data capture and analysis.

The first and (so far) only appearance of blazerati in the New York Times occurred in a May 28 article about preparations for this summer’s Olympic Games in London:

John Biggs, a member of the London Assembly who represents East London, said he was most annoyed about the V.I.P. road lanes, which he said would cater to fancy-jacket-wearing “Blazerati,” at the expense of regular Londoners.

The term is much more common in the UK and Commonwealth countries than in the United States, and is almost always used disparagingly. In a 2001 book, Amateurism in Sport: An Analysis and Defence, British sports academic Lincoln Allison wrote caustically about the blazerati:

[T]he introduction of the term ‘blazerato’ and its plural must be accompanied by a certain amount of conceptual and political caution. The ‘blazerati’ are, literally, those who wear blazers, more generally, officials of broadly based sports associations. It is natural to associate them with the amateur ethos; they are, for the most part, unpaid and part of their role is normally to represent the interest of their sport as a whole against the interests of commerce. But it would be quite wrong to allow the assumption that the blazerato therefore represents the interests of amateurism in any morally significant sense. A model derived from public choice theory which suggests that men in blazers will be mainly interested in their own status and self-preservation seems to work all too well. It is the corruption of the blazerati which has done more to denigrate the image of the Olympics than anything else.

(Source: Google Books.)

Word of the Week: Stockist

Stockist: A retailer or distributor that stocks goods for sale.

The American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition (2000), says stockist is “chiefly British,” and the OED concurs: all four of its citations are from British or Irish sources, the earliest from 1922. Recently, though, I’ve noticed that stockist has crept into American retail jargon, replacing the more familiar “store locator” or “where to buy.” A sampling:

Litter, a San Francisco-based wholesaler of “body jewelry.” All but three of Litter’s “stockists” are in the US.

The Hundreds, a Los Angeles-based seller of street wear and skate wear. Its “stockists” include stores in Norman, Oklahoma; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Murray, Utah.

RGB, “a product line dedicated solely to nail color and care.” The company is based in Los Angeles; its “stockists” are mostly in the US.

Mishka, a designer/manufacturer of T-shirts. It’s based in New York City and sells throughout the US (Gretna, Louisiana; Providence, Rhode Island; Chandler, Arizona) as well as in the UK, Europe, and Asia.

Remedy Quarterly, an independent food magazine published in Brooklyn. From the home page: “Want to see Remedy in person? Check out one of our amazing stockists, some of the best community bookstores around.” Those “stockists” are in Maryland, California, Illinois, “Massachusettes.” and other states.

Billykirk, a maker of bags, wallets, and belts for men. The company is based in New York; it does business internationally but most of its “stockists” are in the US.

In January, Ben Yagoda included stockist in his Not One-Off Britishisms blog (NOOB), which tracks British expressions “that have got popular in the U.S.” (“Have got” is itself a Britishism. Americans say “have gotten.”) He cited some examples (crediting me—thanks!), and commented:

I am now convinced that stockist is indeed happening in the U.S. However, it has not yet appeared in the mainstream media, only, apparently, in commercial communication. This puts it in the same category as bespoke: a phony, hype-y word that exists–and one hopes will stay–in the realm of advertising and promotion.

The protest comes too late, I suspect.

I can only speculate about the reasons for the mini-trend toward stockist. Is it an attempt to reach a global audience? Did stockist appear in a cult movie I’ve yet to see? Is the usage influenced by other trendy -ist and -ista words (socialist, completist, gallerist, recessionist, frugalista)? Is there a Hipster Retail Dictionary that I’m unaware of, with stockist on Page 1? Does each of these companies has a resident Brit on its staff who’s paid to contribute (CON-tribute, that Brit might say) across-the-pond lingo to lend a high-toned air to the proceedings? In other words, I didn’t get the original memo, but I’m seeing its effects.

It’s still early days—another NOOB—but I predict that stockist will be on the ballot for the 2012 UK-to-US Word of the Year, a contest held annually by Separated by a Common Language.

Nicely Named: Beeminder

In Monday’s Word of the Week post I briefly mentioned Beeminder, a commitment device to help people overcome akrasia and achieve their goals.

 

 

I like the Beeminder name, I wrote, because it suggests industriousness. But there’s a lot more to say about the name,  and I’m pleased to report that the Beeminder said much of it in a September 2011 blog post.

Co-founder Daniel Reeves wrote that Beeminder was originally called Kibotzer, a blend of kibitzer (Yiddish for someone who gives unasked-for advice—accent on kib, please) and bot (“a machine or program that interacts with you in a vaguely human way”). Thus Kibotzer: “A bot that bugs you about how fat you are.”

That’s cute, but when the founders decided to turn their hobby into a real business, they acknowledged that the name had to go. “Kibotzer” turned out to be hard to pronounce, and not enough people knew what a kibitzer was.

So they cast about for a new name. I hope they started with a naming brief—the blog post doesn’t mention it, and I’m sorry to say that many startups skip this essential step—but at least they “filled pages with candidate names.” That’s good: you need a lot of names, in a lot of styles, before you start narrowing the field. And the also-rans mentioned in the post show a lot of good lateral thinking: Flakeproof, Goalbugger, even Funky Goal Medina.

I wasn’t surprised to learn, however, that Beeminder came from someone outside the core team: founders are often too close to the problem to recognize the most effective solution. Once Beeminder was on the table, its advantages were evident. Here’s how co-founder Reeves spells it out:

1. Beeminder is a “me-binder” — a self-binding tool.
2. “Beeminder” rhymes with “reminder”.
3. It’s about “minding your goals” in the “mind your p’s and q’s” sense. (“Bee-mindful”)
4. Our esteemed co-founder Bethany Soule goes by “Bee”.
5. Bees are just cute (and hard-working!).
6. Beeminder sends reminders with a motivational sting.
7. Beeminder helps you make a beeline for your goal.
8. You use Beeminder because you want to be minded.

It’s not just that Beeminder evokes multiple meanings, it’s that all of the meanings are positive and relevant. Together, they add up to a strong, clear story that’s fun to tell—and to repeat to friends.

By happy coincidence, Ben Yagoda of the Not One-Off Britishisms blog wrote earlier this week that “minder”—a Britishism meaning “a person in charge of something”—is increasingly popular among speakers of American English. He cites four recent “minder” appearances, including one in the TV show “Gossip Girl.”

BelVita vs. Velveeta

In the last couple of weeks two acquaintances, both American, independently sent me tweets about belVita breakfast biscuits. The product has been sold by Kraft Foods subsidiaries in Europe for more than a decade and in the UK since 2010; it launched in the US last month with a pre-game ad on Super Bowl Sunday and a huge sample giveaway in supermarkets and to bloggers. (Not this blogger, however.)

Both of my Twitter friends asked the same question: “Doesn’t belVita…

 

 

…sound a lot like Velveeta?”

 

 

It sure does. And it’s especially odd when you consider that both products—one a cookie-like biscuit, the other a processed cheese food—are made by Kraft. (In the US, BelVita is sold by Nabisco, a Kraft subsidiary since 2000.) Velveeta, the cheese product that’s been around since 1927—some of it probably still in the original packaging and still a pristine, vivid orange—isn’t sold in the UK or Europe. But with belVita now crossing the Atlantic, won’t there be some confusion between the two brands?

Dave Pool in Albuquerque, New Mexico, thinks so:

 

True, the names have different etymologies: “Velveeta” is meant to suggest “velvet-smooth texture,” while “belVita” is a compression of bella vita, Italian for “beautiful life.” But in a radio ad, I’d challenge you to hear the difference in their pronunciation. It’s of particular concern in Spanish-speaking markets: in spoken Spanish, there’s virtually no distinction between “b” and “v.”

I can only surmise that when it introduced belVita in France, more than 10 years ago, Kraft (or Lu, its French subsidiary) didn’t plan for an eventual US launch and didn’t concern itself about the belVita/Velveeta confusion. But I’d love to hear from someone closer to the source.

So why, all these years later, didn’t Kraft just rebrand the product for North America? Again, I have no inside info. After all, it’s not as though it couldn’t afford to: total Kraft Food revenue in 2010 was $49.2 billion; and the belVita brand alone brought in $100 million. And I doubt it’s because of brand equity: I don’t suspect belVita has built up a huge following among Americans who returned from the UK and Europe clamoring for those exquisite breakfast biscuits they’d bought at Sainsbury’s or the hypermarket.

BelVita faces another marketing challenge: For several decades Americans have willingly consumed breakfast bars like Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain, but the breakfast biscuit is unknown on these shores. Indeed, to most Americans, a “biscuit” is soft and fluffy and served with gravy. (Alternatively, biscuits are for teething babies or for dogs.) BelVita biscuits are hard and crunchy and lightly sweetened.* To overcome Americans’ confusion, belVita’s US site goes into a lot more detail than the UK site about nutritional benefits and the “newness” of the product. According to a MarketWatch story about the US launch, belVita products will be sold in the reassuringly familiar cookie/cracker aisle, not with the dog biscuits.

As for Velveeta, if you’ve ever wondered how it’s made, an article by Veronique Greenwood in Discover magazine reveals all. Did you know there was Velveeta fan fic? Now you do.

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* For more on British vs. American “biscuit,” I refer you to the authoritative Lynneguist of Separated by a Common Language.

Word of the Week: Nomophobia

Nomophobia: Fear of being without a cellphone. Coined from no + mobile + phobia.

The first documented usage of nomophobia appeared in Britain in March 2008 after a study commissioned by the UK post office found that nearly 53 percent of people surveyed felt anxious when they lost their phone or had no coverage. The syndrome “has been found to induce stress levels similar to those of wedding day jitters and trips to the dentist,” reported the Metro (UK).

A more recent survey conducted by SecurEnvoy, which specializes in digital passwords, found that the numbers have increased to 66 percent. The Los Angeles Times reported last week that “People 18-24 tend to be the most nomophobic (77%), followed by people aged 25-34 (68%). The third most nomophobic group is 55 and older.”

The Times story used the more-common American term cellphone. But as Ben Yagoda reported last year in his Not One-Off Britishisms blog, the British import “mobile” is on the rise in the US. “The traditional U.S. equivalents have been, in order of adoption, cellular phone, cell phone and cell,” Yagoda wrote. He pointed to a Google Ngram showing the soaring incidence of mobile in American English between 1998 and 2008.

If you’re going to do it right, Yagoda noted, you should pronounce mobile “to rhyme with so vile.” And he added: “For a true telephonic Britishism, use on (instead of at) before giving your number, as in ‘Ring me on 555-1212.’”

 

http://britishisms.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/mobile/

February Linkfest

The “Downton Abbey” anachronisms story certainly has legs. I wrote about one out-of-place usage, “to contact [someone],” in January; this week Ben Zimmer compiled a video of several ahead-of-their-time usages and wrote about them for the Visual Thesaurus. Graduate student Ben Schmidt goes further and deeper in a post on his Sapping Attention blog that summarizes the results of feeding “every single two-word phrase through the Google Ngram database to see how characteristic of the English [l]anguage, c. 1917, Downton Abbey really is.” (Via Language Hat.) “Black market,” “shortages,” “mitral valve prolapse,” and even “wartime” and “peacetime”? All rare or unheard-of in England in the nineteen-teens. (“To have legs” = to show potential for a long run. First documented in 1930, “orig. and chiefly U.S.,” according to the OED. Keep that in mind when you write your Civil War novel.)

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Meanwhile, the Wordnik blog looks on the bright side, identifying some fusty (or simply odd-to-American-ears) words and phrases that “Downton Abbey” got right, like penny dreadful, dropsy, and sprat to catch a mackerel.

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What’s a “cryppie”? A “day lady”? A “Korling”? A guide to the just-declassified lingo of the National Security Agency.

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From another subculture, a dictionary of Western slang, lingo, and phrases, wherein I learned that a “banjo” is a miner’s term for a short-handled shovel and “goat meat” is venison killed out of season. As far as I could ascertain, the lexicon is free of Deadwood-esque naughty words.

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A whole bunch of US newsroom lingo, slang, and catchphrases, from the universal (nut graf, gutter, downstyle) to the hyperlocal. My favorite in the latter category: “Arnie Pye,” used by the New Jersey Jewish News to refer to a jokey lede or headline that isn’t all that funny. Arnie Pye (in the sky) is the helicopter traffic reporter on “The Simpsons.”

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Besides our sun, how many stars can you name? (Via TYWKIWDBI.) One that didn’t make the list: Gomez’s Hamburger.

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Here’s a quiz for you: Westminster Dog Show champion dog name or line from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”? Exactly as tough as you’d think. (Via @BeautyMarks.)

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I’ve written previously about how Twitter got its name. Now read how the company bought Twitter.com from a bird enthusiast for the bargain price of $7,500.

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How to pronounce things hilariously. (Via Kottke.)

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Henry Hitchings, author of The Language Wars, talks to The Browser about “stupid myths” about the English language, e.g., “that Americans are ruining English or that American English is worse.” That, says Hitchings, “is just an absurd thing to say.”

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Speaking of stupid myths, did your fourth-grade teacher tell you there was a “rule” about never ending a sentence with a preposition? Then I implore you to listen to Slate’s new Lexicon Valley podcast, “Where Did That Sentence-Ending Preposition Rule Come From?” And worry no more about what you end your sentences with.

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And speaking of sentences and endings, here’s an appropriate cartoon by Wiley, via Mighty Red Pen:

 

Bad Names: The Last Roundup

The last roundup for 2011, that is. 

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Webctor may be the only purportedly English word I’ve ever encountered that contains the consonant sequence B-C-T. That’s because that particular sequence is unpronounceable. Which makes word-of-mouth advertising, or even answering the telephone, rather challenging.

In creating this breathtakingly bad name, someone—or someone’s automated name generator—evidently went no further than “web + doctor.” A similarly shaky command of English is evidenced in the writing. (“WebCTOR.com delivers valuable medical content the needy every day.”) And, in fact, WebCTOR was launched in Poland sometime in 2011.

Any resemblance of the WebCTOR name and logo to an older and better-known medical website is probably entirely intentional.

 

 

Via Amy Reynaldo, who tipped me off to A Little Pregnant’s tweets about WebCTOR (sample).

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You own a flower shop/restaurant/gift “shoppe” in “a sprawling turn-of-the-century home” in Pittsburgh, PA. Naturally, you name your business after a macabre, bestselling 1979 novel (and 1987 movie) about abandoned children and adolescent incest. Welcome to Flowers in the Attic!

 

“The horror begins…”

Hat tip: Coneslayer.

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Rochelle Kopp, who tweets as JapanIntercult, sent me this ad (originally tweeted by Hiroko Tabuchi) for a new brand of milk tea from Kirin, the huge Japanese beverage company.

Let’s pause to admire that gorgeous “g” in the logo. And then let’s collectively drop our jaws at the name. Pungency may sound dandy in Japanese (I honestly have no idea), but its associations in English are less than appetizing. Pungent is a synonym for “biting,” “penetrating,” or “caustic”; its Latin root means “to sting.” Burning rubber is pungent. Milk tea should not be pungent. Indeed, the blogger at Transmissions from Tokyo found the opposite to be the case:

Ironically, the drink is more or less the same as Royal Milk Tea. It's not strong tasting or strong smelling at all. Not in the least! You'd think that someone there at the company would have thought to argue against naming a beverage Pungency for the same reasons I'm mentioning now. Guess not.

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The language barrier is no excuse for Flubit, unless it’s that old separated-by-a-common-language barrier.

FlubIt is a London-based startup that finds discounts “on everything you buy.” The company’s founder apparently thinks “flub” is an invented word, when in fact—sorry to be the bearer of bad news—it’s a synonym for “botch” or “bungle.” Yes, the OED says it’s a US colloquialism, but it’s been around since 1924, for crying out loud. Surely it’s crossed the pond a few times.

But it seems never to have reached the ears of founder Bertie Stephens, who boasted to The Next Web about what a brilliant name he’d picked:

“[T]he name flubit preceded the actual business idea by a couple of years or so,” Stephens said, “and it just stuck with me until I eventually had the right product for it. So rather than putting a name to a product, we put a product to the name. … It was short, people would remember it, and it was a verb which, in my eyes, is hugely important. This meant I could run with the tagline ‘before you buy it, Flubit.’”

And then he said, still on the record:

“Also, it doesn’t have a pre-conceived meaning”, added Stephens. “So we can make it mean what we like – some find it silly, others cool.”

No preconceived meaning for someone who hasn’t consulted a dictionary, that is to say. FlubIt can go stand in the corner with Flubby, the badly named (but beautiful) shoe from Aquatalia. And, Mr. Stephens, the next time your entrepreneurial brain tells you to choose a name because it’s short and “a verb,” please seek professional advice.

Hat tip: Leslie Forman.

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Read all of my Bad Names posts, if you have the stomach for them. Here’s to better names in 2012!

This, That

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.

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Speaking of FTW, I’m flattered and delighted that my blog has been nominated for a Macmillan Dictionary “Love English” award in the blog category. I’m in excellent (read: daunting) competition: Separated by a Common Language, Language Hat, Johnson, Sentence First, Throw Grammar from the Train, Language Log—and several language blogs I’d been unaware of, which is always the most interesting thing, in my opinion, about contests like this one. If you’d like to cast a vote for Fritinancy, I’d be most grateful. There’s also a Best Website category; check out all the links, then vote for Visual Thesaurus.

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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!

Via AdFreak.