Fritinancy

Code Talkers

John McIntyre of You Don't Say reveals what's really meant by "grow the business," a phrase that sets certain sets of teeth on edge:

Grow the business, like all cant phrases, does have a meaning, but it’s not the ostensible one. It is a signal for people who sit in meetings and write memos. It is like the secret handshake or the foot-tapping on the floor of the men’s room stall; it signals I am one of you, and, having accomplished that, it need carry no further freight.

See also the observations of Editrix and Words to the Wise.

In related news, Mr. Verb answers a reader's question about another bit of corpspeak, to consense.

There Are Divas at the Bottom of My Garden

Wee twee divas spotted in the garden department of Long's Drugstore:

They're made by the very prolific Amy Brown, whose website is "dedicated to the Believers." Each ornament, made of polystone and standing about 5 inches high, retails for about $25. The opportunity to tell the world "Take your so-called good taste and shove it": priceless.

Extra credit to anyone who heard in my post title the singular trill of Beatrice Lillie (1894-1989) singing "There Are Fairies at the Bottom of My Garden," the song that made her the darling of le tout gay London in the 1920s. (No, I'm not that old; I just have a highly random store of useless knowledge.)

Word of the Week: Drunkorexia

Drunkorexia: A combination of self-imposed starvation (or bingeing and purging) and alcohol abuse. A blend of "drunk" and "anorexia."

The syndrome is described in the New York Times Style section, March 2, 2008:

Drunkorexia is not an official medical term. But it hints at a troubling phenomenon in addiction and eating disorders. Among those who are described as drunkorexics are college-age binge drinkers, typically women, who starve all day to offset the calories in the alcohol they consume. The term is also associated with serious eating disorders, particularly bulimia, which often involve behavior like bingeing on food — and alcohol — and then purging.

According to the report, related coinages include manorexia (the male version of anorexia, an affliction more commonly associated with women), orthorexia (an obsession with what is perceived as healthy food), and diabulimia (practiced by some diabetics who refused to take insulin, which can cause weight gain; however, it does not necessarily involve the purging associated with bulimia).

Mr. Verb is concerned that playful word-blends can minimize potentially fatal health problems:

Using blends here not only makes these terms distinctly non-clinical sounding, but it also feels awkward given concerns about glamorizing eating disorders (like here), not to mention that we surely don't want to do anything that sounds like it trivializes them.

Encyclopedia Baracktannica

Obamamentum is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to neologisms coined from Barack Obama's name. Chris Wilson of Slate presents the Encyclopedia Baracktannica, a random Obamalingo generator available as a widget. Smith writes:

It's hard to imagine that Barack Obama would be as big of a phenomenon if his name were, say, Tom Smith. As numerous fans, detractors, reporters, and bloggers have demonstrated, it's a name that lends itself to neologisms—everything from Barackstar to Obamania to Omentum.

I especially like obamanomenon, obamalaise ("the hangover resulting from repeated listenings to the 'Yes We Can' montages"), and Barack to the Future ("2008 film in which Barack Obama uses the flux capacitor to defy traditional partisan politics, race, gender, the 'Clinton Attack Machine,' and the space-time contiuum"--thanks to Timothy O'Brien for that humdinger!).

And yes--as Orange pointed out in a comment on my previous post, and as Dr. James Peykanu informed Slate--omentum is the anatomical term for a "big membrane in the belly that serves as the root by which the blood to the intestines flows."

No Commentum

Language guy Mark Peters writes in the Boston Globe about "-mentum," the political suffix du jour, especially in reference to Barack Obama:

Perhaps it bodes well for Barack Obama that his momentum has so many names: Barack-mentum, Mo-bama-mentum, Obama-mentum, Obama-rama-mentum, Oba-mentum, and O-mentum have all been used. O-mentum is a particularly delicious word: it rhymes with momentum, while bringing to mind Oprah, Obama's most famous supporter.

Earlier coinages have included Joementum (during the momentum-challenged 2004 Joe Lieberman presidential campaign) and Met-mentum, seen in New York in 2000.

Peters speculates that no-mentum, used as candidates drop out of the race,"may be a word with a future, since it could be applied to so many subjects besides politics. And a new, less catchy, addition to the -mentum lexicon emerged recently when no-mentum gained a semi-synonym: mutnemom, or reverse momentum, which Slate blogger Mickey Kaus coined to describe Hillary Clinton's sudden deceleration."

There's also faux-mentum, as in "nothing going on after all."

Thinking about -mentum got my name-mentum going. How about...

D'oh!mentum: Homer Simpson can't stop doing one stupid thing after another.

Eskimomentum: Global warming accelerates; Aleuts and Inuits step up their protests.

MoMAmentum: Museum fundraising exceeds goals!

Pianissimomentum: It's growing, but very, very quietly.

Mentosmentum: Ten million people want to see an eruption caused by dropping a lot of candy into a lot of Coke.

Yo-mentum: Use of a a gender-neutral pronoun first heard in Baltimore catches on nationwide.

Hey, it's monumentumous!

Frontiers of Science: The Quest for Corporate DNA

A while back I dipped a toe into the gene pool and asked: what the heck do companies mean when they talk about "our DNA"?

I'm delighted to discover that Keith Robison, a bona fide genomic scientist, recently posed the same question and proposed some suitably scientific answers:

Presumably they are trying to make a statement about deeply embedded values, but what does it really mean to have something in your DNA? For example, do they mean to imply:

• A lot of our company is unfathomable to the human mind
• There's a lot of redundancy here
• Often we often repeat ourselves often repeatedly, often repeating repetitiously.
• We retain bits of those who invade our corporate DNA, though with not much rhyme or reason
• A lot of pieces of the organization resemble decayed portions of other pieces of our organization
• Some pieces of our organization are non-functional, though they closely resemble functional pieces of related organizations
• Most of our organization has no immediate impact on routine operations, or emergency ones
• Most of our organization has no immediate obvious purpose, if any
• Our corporate practices are not the best designable, but rather reflect an accumulation of historical accidents

Or could it be, as an anonymous commenter suggested, "Our organization requires thousands of years to change in any significant manner"?

Photo credit: Sony ad from Vann's.

The Passion That Dares to Speak Its Name ... Again and Again and...

It's been a while since I've mentioned the scourge of corporate "passion," but that doesn't mean the P-word has withered on the vine. No, indeed.

London graphic designer Ben Terrett writes:

We had a printer turn up this morning, unannounced. He just knocked on the door. His business card assured us that he was "passionate about print". Which made me wonder how many other printers were "passionate about print".

Lots, as it happens.

In fact, Terrett found at least 11 companies that used the slogan "Passionate About Print." He has visual evidence.

And that's just in the UK. On this side of the pond, Corporate Printers (is that a passionate name or what?) in Cummings, GA, is "as passionate about print as you are." I can't resist quoting the first sentence of Corporate Printers' home page: "Nothing has the sheer emotional sizzle than a beautiful piece of printing." Tip: Less passion, more grammar.

PrintJuce.com [sic], in Las Vegas, is "passionate about print media and we pay attention to details." A new diagnostic category: obsessive-compulsive-passionate, or OCP.

Rosiedog Creative Services in Las Vegas is also "passionate about print." And lukewarm about web design, to judge from the insanely wide column width on its home page.

PrintPlace, in Arlington, TX, gives the slogan a creative twist: it's "passionate about printing."

And so on.

Read my original post on the topic, "Our Passion Is Your Problem," which includes my rhyming ode to corporate passion, suitable for setting to music. Still not satisfied? I've got lots more.

Hat tip to Qwghlm, who linklogs at Del.icio.us.

Xerox Goes Lower Case

After more than a century of all capitals, Xerox has introduced a new lower-case logo--or, as the company prefers to put it, "unveiled the most sweeping transformation of its corporate identity in the company's history."

Gone are the elegant, austere, sharply angled sans-serif capitals. In their place are "engaging and approachable" round letters, according to Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy, quoted in the New York Times. The chubby new logo, created by multinational branding agency Interbrand from a proprietary new font called Xerox Sans, comes with its own toy: a red ball marked with a white X. The ball will bounce around in multimedia presentations and, presumably, advertisements; it's supposed to suggest "forward movement and 'a holistic company,'" according to Interbrand strategist Maryann J. Stump. According to Xerox's Mulcahy, the ball "represents the connection to customers, partners, industry and innovation."

Also to stoopball, paddleball, jacks, and other childhood games.

Xerox may be a bubbling font of innovative goodness, but the press release announcing the new look is an insipid stew of corpspeak studded with clichés:

• customer-centric
• values-rich
• content-rich
• digital marketplace
• bold statement [is there ever any other kind?]
• sweeping statement [ah, yes--that kind]
• leveraging new technologies
• cutting-edge products
• unprecedented speeds
• tech-savvy

In other words, a Xerox copy of all the other Fortune 500 press releases you've ever received.

The Times story is accompanied by an interesting timeline of Xerox's brand evolution. I hadn't known, or remembered, that the company was officially "Haloid Xerox" until 1961.

(Hat tip to Brandflakes for Breakfast.)

Update: Mark Landkamer, a friend and colleague, notes that the Times timeline omitted the "digital X" logo that was created in the 1980s by branding giant Landor--"and which is still better and fresher than what Xerox just came up with":

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.

Top Japanese Buzzwords of 2007

Pink Tentacle passes along a list of 60 Japanese terms nominated for buzzword of the year. They're listed in no particular order; some of the most interesting ones include:

Dried-fish woman [himono onna]: Himono onna (“dried-fish woman”) is an expression used in the movie Hotaru No Hikari to describe the main character, a woman in her 20s who has renounced the pursuit of romance. She spends her evenings reading manga and drinking at home alone, and she spends her weekends lazing around in bed. She’s a dried-fish woman.

“Status-gap marriage” [kakusakon]: A “status-gap marriage” is one in which there is a clear gap in income, pedigree, social status, etc. between the husband and wife. The phrase usually refers to marriages in which a woman marries “beneath herself,” such as the marriage between actress Norika Fujiwara and her husband, the lesser-known comedian Tomonori Jinnai. 

Monster parents: The term “monster parents” refers to Japan’s growing ranks of annoying parents who make extravagant and unreasonable demands of their children’s schools. [More]

Dark website [yami site] : Yami sites ("dark websites”) are online networking sites where people can take out hit contracts on others, make illegal transactions (drugs, fake bank accounts, hacked cellphones, prostitution, etc.), and meet suicide partners. Japan has seen a recent rise in the number of murders arranged through these web-based hotbeds of criminal activity.

Food fighter: “Food fighters” are people with extraordinary eating skills that allow them to consume food in large quantities and/or at high speeds. Like athletes, food fighters train everyday in order to win eating competitions. The popularity of gluttonous TV celebrity (and freak of nature) Gal Sone has helped fuel this boom. 

Motepuyo: Motepuyo, a term that means something like “chubby cute,” describes women who are plump, small in stature, and cute. With a fine line between motepuyo and chubby, some say the only difference is whether or not a woman has a cute face. [More]

The top 10 will be announced Dec. 3.

(Via Kottke.)