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.

Year-End Roundup: The Names, Logos, Words, and Maps of 2012

Lots of late-breaking X-of-the-year news:

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Laura Wattenberg, astute observer of baby-naming trends, selected Blue Ivy as the Baby Name Wizard name of the year. The story of the name, she writes, is “all about the essence of intellectual property rules: invention, identity, exclusivity and control.”

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In a commentary for NPR’s “Fresh Air,” linguist Geoffrey Nunberg defended “Big Data,” his choice for the 2012 word of the year: “It’s responsible for a lot of our anxieties about intrusions on our privacy, whether from the government's anti-terrorist data sweeps or the ads that track us as we wander around the Web. It has even turned statistics into a sexy major.” Nunberg also talked about the political buzzwords of 2012 – right to work, entitlement, evil, and more – in a Bill Moyers Q&A.

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The Australian National Dictionary Centre’s word of the year is green-on-blue: “(used in a military context) an attack made on one’s own side by a force regarded as neutral.” It beat out qubit, fourth age, brotox, and fossil farming – none of which, I’m fairly confident, are on any US WotY lists.

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Collins Dictionary (UK) didn’t pick a single word of the year: it picked 12, from broga (yoga for men) to fiscal cliff.

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From the Wordnik blog: the best TV words of 2012, from anaphor to unwindulax, and the best language stories of 2012, from Rick Santorum’s “blah people” to the New York Times’s “offensive adjective inappropriate for family newspaper” – which wasn’t an adjective at all.

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In the New York Times, Grant Barrett’s annual roundup of the year’s notable words and expressions includes some by-now-familiar contenders – Eastwooding, 47 percent, Gangnam style – as well as some surprises, including doga (yoga with a dog), nomophobia (a Fritinancy word of the week in February), and pet shaming.

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Lynne Murphy of Separated by a Common Language picked the best American-to-British import (“wonk”) and the best UK-to-US counterpart (“bollocks”). Influencing her choice of “bollocks” was Newcastle Brown Ale’s “No Bollocks” ad campaign – used in the US but not in the UK.

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The Brand New blog identified the year’s best visual identities (logos) and the worst.

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The year in maps, from The Atlantic Cities, includes, at #5, the delightful Metrophors map of geographic X-is-the-Y-of-Z metaphors (“THE Ukraine is THE Ohio State University of European countries”). (Hat tip: Lance Knobel.)

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Coming next week: the American Dialect Society’s word-of-the-year vote. If you’re in Boston on Friday, January 5, get yourself over to the Marriott Copley Place to support your favorite words. Everyone’s welcome, and it’s a total hoot. I attended the January 2009 vote in San Francisco and wrote about it here.

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And in case you missed my earlier posts, here are my words of the year, brand names of the year, (other) names of the year, and (possibly) the name of the year.

October Linkfest

Forget everything you know about Banana Republic as it is today, and try to imagine the company in its crazily unconventional youth, when the stores had animal-call soundtracks and Jeeps in their windows and the mail-order catalogs—this was pre-Web, kiddies—featured sly, literate copy, interviews with famous-ish and once-famous people (James Fallows; the American-born former crown princess of Sikkim), and illustrations instead of photographs. I don’t have to imagine any of this, because I worked for Banana Republic back then*, after it was sold to the Gap but before Gap-ization eliminated every last whiff of creativity from the endeavor. Now, though, we can all return to that khaki-hued era, because BR’s founders, Mel and Patricia Ziegler (who, by the way, hired me), have written a history of their time with the company. In alternating first-person voices, Wild Company: The Untold Story of Banana Republic tells how an unemployed newspaper reporter (Mel) and artist (Patricia) used their powers of storytelling to spin heaps of military surplus from the far corners of the earth (but mostly the British Commonwealth) into gold. For a preview, listen to an interview with the Zieglers on the public-radio show Marketplace. (“I wish they’d changed the name,” Mel says of BR’s current incarnation.) And to get a sense of the hold the original Banana Republic still has on loyalists—including a few who are too young to have shopped in the 1980s—see Scott C. Adams’s blog, Abandoned Republic, which lovingly reproduces and annotates every one of the old catalogs.

And before we move on, please allow me to correct a common misconception: Banana Republic, founded in 1978, came first; J. Peterman, which appropriated the copy and illustration style and was parodied during several seasons of “Seinfeld,” was founded in 1987.

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If the comic site xkcd baffles you, help is on the way: Explain xkcd is the “For Dummies” of xkcd-dom, providing an earnest exegesis of every panel of almost every strip.  

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Speaking of humor and not getting it, let’s see how stories from The Onion (satirical!) would look on Facebook (credulous!). Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Literally Unbelievable. (Via Karen.)

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The book-recommendation site Goodreads polled its users about their presidential-candidate preferences and then analyzed reading habits across party lines. The result is the fascinating infographic “You Are What You Read.” There’s some crossover between the two camps, but I bet it doesn’t surprise you that Romney supporters think much more highly of Atlas Shrugged than Obama supporters do.

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Did you miss the recent kerfuffle over Britishisms (a k a Briticisms) in American speech? Catch up right here! The first salvo was fired by the fabulously named Cordelia Hebblethwaite of BBC News (“Bit by bit British English is invading America”), which prompted two responses from Geoff Nunberg on the linguistics blog Language Log and one from Mark Liberman. Then came “Americans Are Barmy Over Britishisms” in the New York Times (the print edition had a better hed: “And Bob’s Your Uncle”), and a Times blog post that rounded up tweets with Americans’ favorite Britishisms. The Atlantic Wire and The Economist’s Johnson blog eagerly piled on, while Lynne Murphy at Separated by a Common Language attempted to bring some academic rigor to the discussion.

Meanwhile, Ben Yagoda continues to add entries to his Not One-Off Britishisms blog. Lately, “toff,” “twee,” and “snarky” have been hotly debated in the comments section.

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Calling all peevologists: Ragan.com has published a list of “9 completely pointless corporate words” that will rally your blood pressure. (Decisioning! Solutionize! Planful! And, as suggested by multiple commenters, the ever-unpopular reach out!) For lots more—in dictionary form, no less—see Learnings.org, “where corporate speak goes to die.” (Via Deborah Schneider.)

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Mazel tov to Lena (“Girls”) Dunham on selling her essay collection for $3.5 million. For that kind of dough, Ms. Dunham can afford a less generic title than Not That Kind of Girl, which is not that distinctive. (Via Jessica Testa.)

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Why are men’s nicknames on the decline? Possibly because there’s more diversity in first names nowadays—and thus less need to distinguish one Jim or Joe from another.

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Today is National Dictionary Day in the US. Let’s celebrate with a “30 Rock” dictionary that goes from Avian Bone Syndrome to zing. And who could forget EGOT, fun cooker, and KDate?

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The titanic taxonomy of wrestler names. Suitable for framing! (Via @Catchword.)

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Got 15 minutes? Check out Milking “Got Milk?”: “A photo essay of the ad campaign that won’t go away.”

 

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“I hate beverages with names that tell me how to drink them.” – Impulsive Buy.

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Finally: Thou shalt not commit logical fallacies.

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* In fact, I interviewed Mr. Fallows—I woke him up in his Kuala Lumpur home, to my chagrin—and Ms. Hope Cooke, the former crown princess who had divorced the prince and was leading walking tours of Manhattan.

More Campaign Lingo 2012

Part 2 of my lexicon of presidential-campaign buzzwords—guillotine to super PAC—was published today on the Visual Thesaurus. You’ll have to subscribe to read it (and Part 1), and of course I hope you will. Meanwhile, here’s an outtake from the column, cut to keep the list to an even dozen:

Meh. The monosyllabic expression of disappointment has been used for the Republican contest in general and especially for candidate Romney, who has failed to generate much enthusiasm among voters. Punning on the candidate’s name, reporters and humorists started referring to “Meh Romney.” (There’s even a Tumblr blog where you can download a Meh Romney poster.) Meh was popularized by a 1995 episode of “The Simpsons” (“Lisa’s Wedding”), but Visual Thesaurus executive producer Ben Zimmer has traced it further back to a Yiddish source.

Read the rest of Campaign Lingo 2012: Part 2!

On the Visual Thesaurus: Presidential Campaign Lingo

In my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, published today, I consider some buzzwords and catchphrases of the current U.S. presidential campaign, which is entering the general-election phase. It’s the first of two columns, organized alphabetically, so if you don’t see one of your favorite words or phrases, check back in a week or so.

Here’s an excerpt from this week’s installment. You’ll need to subscribe to read the rest!

Forward. The Obama campaign's slogan — “Forward” — made its debut in late April. Pundits immediately parsed it as if it were the Rosetta Stone. Buzzfeed claimed the slogan was borrowed from the left-ish news channel MSNBC (“Lean Forward”); Slate saw a connection with a 2005 slogan used by Britain's Labour Party (“Forward, Not Back”). Other observers pointed to the centrist Israeli political party Kadimah (which means “forward” in Hebrew), to old Soviet slogans, and to the Jewish Daily Forward, which launched in New York in 1897 as a Yiddish-language newspaper and led many fights for social justice. The slogan also revived an old Democrats vs. Republicans joke: “If you want the car to go forward, put it in D; if you want to go backward, put it in R.”

Read the rest of “Campaign Lingo 2012.”

Flashback: Read my 2008 campaign-lingo column for the Visual Thesaurus!

Follow-Ups

Revisiting a few topics I’ve blogged about previously:

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Yet another happy-umlaut-embellished brand name to add to the list: BüK (“pronunciation: boook”).

A BüK is an actual paper product that costs $1.49 and is 16 to 32 pages long. Choose from a variety of themes, including CookBüK, WordBüK, and SpookBüK (horror stories). If you’re in the hospitality business, you can order some PillowBüKs (love that name and all it implies) to leave in guest rooms.

BüK joins Füd, güd, Häagen-Dazs, and other brand names in which the umlaut serves no purpose other than decoration.

(Hat tip: Suzanne Mantell.)

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By now, Dunkin’ Donuts should really be called Dunkin’ Toroids: the chain is, believe it or not, the number-one retailer of bagels in the United States. Last week the company jumped on the “artisan” bandwagon and introduced Artisan Bagels, which feature “a soft and chewy texture with bolder flavors.” Dunkin’ Donuts is now positioned to compete with Domino’s Artisan Pizzas, Starbucks Artisan Style sandwiches, Tostitos Artisan Recipe chips, and Panera Bread’s “artisan fast food” for top honors in the Culinary Buzzword Olympics. More about the artisaning of American brands here and here. (Via The Impulsive Buy.)

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In a January post about “slut” in brand names, I mentioned Eggslut and Bookslut but neglected to include the most venerable slut of all, Los Angeles’s Retail Slut (“Rude and Nasty Clothes for Chicks and Dicks”). The original store opened in 1983 “as one of the first shops to bring punk and gothic style to Melrose [Avenue].” Over the years it changed locations four times; the Wikipedia entry says it finally closed in 2005. There’s no merchandise available on the website, which appears not to have been updated in a while but which does include a long list of celebrity shoppers, among them Andy Warhol, Madonna, Pat Benatar, Iggy Pop, Ice-T, and one Buster Bloodvessel.

Word of the Week: Infidel

Infidel: An unbeliever with respect to a particular religion, especially Christianity or Islam. (This definition is labeled “offensive” by the American Heritage Dictionary and the OED.) Also, one who has no religious beliefs; or one who doubts or rejects a particular doctrine, system, or principle. Merriam-Webster’s first definition for infidel is “One who is not a Christian or who opposes Christianity.”

Infidel came into English (from Old French infidèle, “disloyal”) during the mid-16th century; it appears twice in the Tyndale Bible (1526), in 2 Corinthians and 1 Timothy. (From the latter: “The same denyeth the fayth, and is worsse then an infydell.”) For the next five centuries it served as a scathing insult.

But in the 20th century the meaning began to drift, writes Thomas Frank in “Semper Infidelis,” his editor’s column in the January 2012 issue of Harper’s.* Beloved Infidel, Sheilah Graham’s 1958 biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, was one sign that infidel had begun to mean something closer to “spunky rebel” than “contemptible unbeliever.”

Today, writes Frank, infidel has taken a surprising new turn: It has become “very much the buzzword of the political moment,” flaunted at political gatherings by Americans—churchgoers, self-professed patriots—who don’t give a fig about Merriam, Webster, the OED, or anyone’s tender sensibilities:

September Linkfest

Case study: The rebranding of Hell. Logo, tagline, the works. From Chris Herron Design.

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What’s a pump? A ballet shoe? A trainer? Depends which side of the Atlantic you’re on. Linguist Lynne Murphy at Separated by a Common Language offers some British-to-American translation tips for shoe buyers; her commenters provide even more.

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Brave New Malden, “freelance copywriter with over a million years’ experience,” spots a trend in ad copy: “At A, we know how important B is. That’s why we C, which gives you D.” The two key words: “That’s why.”

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That’s why you’re sad: You’re suffering from jalopia, “fatigue with the laborious maintenance of having a body, a piñata of meat that’s incompatible with the Legoland rationality of the modern world, which was built for beings whose indestructible parts lock onto the Earth with a satisfying ‘click,’ whose emotions are standardized, whose mistakes are best measured in parts per million.” More flavors of melancholy—all invented, all invaluable—at the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. (Via @Wordnik and @Bookbench.)

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The reviewer calls the book “edgy,” “unflinching,” and “long-awaited.” What he means: “contains no adult voices of reason,” “has a lot of bad words,” and “late.” A helpful lexicon of publishing buzzwords from Janice Harayda and friends at One-Minute Book Reviews. (A few years ago I attempted a similar decoder for film-festival buzzwords like “haunting” and “bleakly beautiful.”)

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Linguist Geoffrey Pullum, the author of The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, responds in Lingua Franca to the latest nonsensical rant about the (mythical) decline of the English language:

What on earth comes over people when they write about language? It’s not just their ability to use dictionaries that disappears, it’s their acumen, their numeracy, their common sense. Show some people a single unfamiliar word and they’ll whip themselves into a paroxysm of fury, shaking their fist at what they see as a tsunami of black lexical filth sweeping in to destroy the whole of their native tongue.

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The entire Facebook terms of service in bro-speak. (“This is the Internet, bro; it’s like the fucking Wild West out there.”)

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This one’s for real: In 1986, Disney’s executives changed the title of the studio’s next animated feature from Basil of Baker Street to The Great Mouse Detective. In pissed-off response, reports Letters of Note, the film’s animators issued a fake memo announcing “the retroactive renaming of the entire Disney back catalogue, bar The Aristocats, in a similarly bland style.” Guess which title became The Girl with the See-Through Shoes? Via The Hairpin.

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Mashable reveals how Hipmunk, Zynga, and seven other tech businesses got their names. Most startups flop in this department, reports tech analyst Jeremiah Owyang, who attended TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco earlier this week and brought back dispiriting news from the branding front: “I strolled down the aisle with one VC friend of the 200 startups, we noticed they had ridiculous company names missing vowels and cutesy logos. The biggest set back, is the lack of positioning or even tag lines. A majority of the banners lacked a descriptor of what the company did. This is a big opportunity for PR firms to assist this early market.” (Spelling and grammar errors are Mr. Owyang’s. And by “PR firms,” he mostly means “name developers and design agencies.”)

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Finally, a name game to carry you through the weekend: Name That Thing, a visual vocabulary  test from Merriam-Webster. Each time you play, you get a new set of questions. “Addiction counseling not included,” warns M-W lexicographer Peter Sokolowski.

“I'm Sorry, I'm a Little Confused. What's the Name of Your Company?”

 

Brushfire Media? Dis Crunk Media? KUM Digital? Devil’s Deuce Interactive? Angel Dump LLC? Christmilk Digital? Cranky Lesbian Digital?

One thing we know for sure: Absolutely no brandcuffs.

Source: College Humor, via @lalorek.

December Linkfest

Because you’ve been good all year, I have a blogsack full of links for you. Happy solstice!

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Literary society

Give Me Something to Read selects the best long-form essays of 2010. I’d already read a few of them, and am looking forward to catching up on the rest. (Via Kottke.)

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Just about everyone knows that Shakespeare invented many words and idioms we consider indispensable today. But the great poet John Milton (1608-1674) was also a prolific neologist. Read about Milton’s coinages, which include dreary, terrific, and fragrance.

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Buzzwords, jargon, and clichés

If you haven’t yet seen Inside Job, Charles Ferguson’s mesmerizing, enraging documentary about the financial crisis, I recommend you do so. This lexicon of the film’s financial jargon will prove helpful.

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“Extensive experience,” “innovative,” and “motivated” top the list of LinkedIn’s overused buzzwords of 2010. I was surprised and gratified not to see “passion” on the list.

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Brave New Malden, one of my new favorite language blogs, has been collecting a certain type of sloganclone: the kind the fits the formula “X-ing the world, one Y at a time.” See his very long list, which includes a teeny Fritinancy contribution and a game at the end. (I wrote about sloganclones, including “X-ing the world,” back in 2007.)

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Here’s what appears to be a comprehensive lexicon of computer jargon. It’s far from humorless: see the entry for “I for one welcome our new X overlords.” The home page provides links to a rich trove of information on hacker culture, hacker slang, hacker speech style (“dry humor, irony, puns, and a mildly flippant attitude are highly valued”), and much more.

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Good lists

From Forbes.com, 50 names you need to know in 2011. More precisely, names and concepts—the list includes malaria vaccine, floating bicycle, and urban farming and well as Tan Le, Robert Khuzami, and Honestly.com. There’s even a Friedman: Milton’s grandson Patri, who wants to build “‘start-up countries’: autonomous dwellings in the middle of the ocean, starting with a brand new independent city-state off the California coast.”

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“Food writer and dilettante” Gary Allen wondered why they were so many collective nouns for animals—an exaltation of larks, a murder of crows, et al.—and so few collective nouns for plants. So he set about creating his own list. Among the best: a cliché of chestnuts, a duke of daisies, a pursing of tulips. Read the complete list, titled “A Wreck of Hesperus.”

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You’re fired: Nine of the most absurd trademark attempts in recent U.S. history. Via BeautyMarks.

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End-of-year traditions

The UK word of the year, chosen by Oxford University Press, is “big society.” 

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The top 10 Japanese phrases of 2010. (“Munchable chili oil”?)

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Baby Name Wizard’s name of the year for 2010 is . . . a doozy.

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In his word of the year nomination, linguist Geoff Nunberg says nay to vuvuzela, refudiate, and guidette.

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Language arts

How’s about some video tutorials on how to speak Hoosier? (That’s Indiana-talk, for you auslanders.)

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Or maybe you’d rather learn to speak Canadian English, “the offspring of a queen and a cowboy”? (By Sherry Noik of SherryGrammarian.)

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If you’re headed south rather than north, you’ll want to bookmark The Antarctic Dictionary: A Complete Guide to Antarctic English, Bernadette Hince’s comprehensively researched reference. The first entry—“aaaa, aaaaah, aaahh, ah (see ahh)”—turns out to be a sled-dog command, “usually softly called,” that translates to “halt.” Via Kottke.

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On boredom and writing

I was thrilled to discover that the incomparable William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well, is posting a weekly contribution to The American Scholar’s website. Here’s a recent Zinsser essay, “Bring Back Boredom!” Via word maestro John McIntyre, whose own blog, You Don’t Say, is also well worth reading and bookmarking.

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And speaking of boredom, here’s the always-delightful Normalarkey (Nancy Davis Kho) on “Boredom and the White Cloth of Surrender”:

I regard a bored child as I do a youngster who coughs on me without covering his mouth or touches all the cookies on a plate before selecting one. It’s not necessarily the child’s fault; they just need some redirection from an attentive adult.