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.

Who Are You Calling ‘Rock Star’?

Enough already, says culture critic Carina Chocano:

A cursory search of the Internet reveals that people and things referred to in the media as ‘‘rock stars’’ include Rand Paul, the archbishop of Canterbury, the Samsung Galaxy S 4 smartphone, the Swedish mystery writer Camilla Lackberg and Pope John Paul II. Clearly, it’s high time we bought the term a watch and retired it.

—“On Rock Stars and ‘Rock Stars,’” New York Times Sunday Magazine, March 31, 2013. (The article is a bonus feature available in the replica edition to subscribers only. Here’s the accompanying article about business “superstars.”)

That Word

Alas, it does not mean what they think it means.

 

 

Alas: An expression of grief, compassion, or alarm; also used to express sorrow, regret, or apprehension of danger or evil.

I think what the copywriter may have been searching for was voilà! or aha! or presto! Alas, we’ll never know.

Now that my holiday jolliness has curdled, I may as well unload a few more complaints:

1. Why is she getting dressed the night before the party?

2. Enough with the ’twas-the-night-ing – and all the other rusty holiday clichés. (The subject line on this particular email, I’m sorry to say, was “’Tis the Season for Super Duper Shaping.” No, ’tain’t.)

3. If you’re going to parody a well-known poem*, you must at a minimum get the rhyme and meter right. “Snug” does not rhyme with “glove.”

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Previously in That Word: Sophistry, servile, infamous, arriviste, bupkus, unrequited.

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* Tip: Don’t.

Don't 'Tis Me, Bro

The ’tis-the-seasoning continues, and continues, and continues. Oh yes, I have evidence. In an attempt to be charitable—and to keep the list at a manageable length—I’ve omitted the many examples I’ve seen from consultants and individual blogs. Next year I may not be so lenient: you’re on notice.

Herewith, a week’s worth of ’tis from my in-box and mailbox.

'T'ain't

Do you hear what I hear? Yes, ’tis a seasonal chorus of ’tis-the-seasoning. And ’tis just getting started.

From Madewell:

 

P.S.: The preferred spelling of “woolly” has two Ls.

From Jigsaw:

An additional demerit for the backward apostrophe on ’tis.

 

From Starbucks:

“It is three reasons”? It is bad grammar.

 

From Bacardi (spotted on Gawker): 

Brand-name verbing (“to Bacardi”) duly noted.

 

From Verizon:

Downsized expectations: from “season” to “weekend.”

 

And many more examples to come, I have no doubt.

Here’s a timely caveat from John McIntyre about this most persistent of holiday clichés. He addressed it to newspaper editors, but it’s equally relevant for copywriters:

“’Tis the season”: Not in copy, not in headlines, not at all. Never, never, never, never, never. You cannot make this fresh. Do not attempt it.

He adds: “’Twasing is no more defensible than ’tising.”

A Man Walks into a Cliché…

No, really: That’s the name of the bar.

 

Harrah’s Club, Stateline, Nevada. Photo by Larry&Flo.

 

So very elegant. And exciting. And “knowledgable.”

I’m not detecting a shred of self-aware irony here.

Photo by Jeffry M. at Yelp.

Let’s eavesdrop on the brainstorming session that led to Cliché:

“Think upscale, dude. Think hip ultra lounge.”

“Also knowledgable.”

“Don’t you mean knowledgeable?”

“Whatever.”

“French would be good.”

“Oh yeah. They have those cool accent marks, don’t they?”

“Awesome, dude.”

“Something Frenchy, yet familiar. Really, really familiar.”

“Like exactly what you’d expect in a casino that’s in Nevada, but not in Vegas.”

“Where everybody knows your name.”

“And everything looks just like everyone’s idea of a Nevada casino.”

“Hey, I’ve got it…”

If you prefer your clichés to include flashing lights and unclad young women, Harrah’s has a weirdly named attraction for you, too. Behold the VEX Nightclub.

Does nobody over there own a dictionary?

According to a case study on the Philips Color Kinetics website, the club’s design involved “the latest in LED lighting technology,” especially on “the club’s signature Go-Go dancer catwalks.” The LED sources are controlled by something called a Video System Engine and a DMX system, so maybe—I’m trying to be generous—VEX is some sort of abbreviated acronym.

Or maybe the dancers just pout a lot.

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Hat tip to my knowledgeable friend Vicky for telling me about Cliché.

Snowclones Happen

Join.me, the new virtual-meeting service of LogMeIn¹, has blanketed the MacArthur BART station in Oakland with text-only ads. You might call it a blizzard, because each ad is a snowclone.² 

 

“X is just so Y,” or the simpler “X is so Y,” shows up millions of times in search results. The expression conveys jaded hipness, or hip jadedness, with an undertone of are-you-still-wearing-THAT? A few examples: Dead Is So Last Year, a novel by Marlene Perez; “Stealing Is So Last Season,” a New York Times headline; “Outrage Over Executives’ Pay Is So Last Quarter” (headline in the Seattle Times); “Twitter Is So Last Week” (headline on a Gartner blog post); “BP’s Oil Spill Is So Last Month” (Geeks Who Drink blog post title).

In Join.me’s case, the specificity of “Q3 2010” heightens the insider-ish quality (Q3 is business jargon) and the humor.

 

This snowclone—“Every time [an] X Ys, a Z Ns”—originated with the line in It’s a Wonderful Life: “Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.”³ Snowclone variations include “Every Time a Bell Rings, a Communist Gets a Foothold” (Mother Jones headline); “Every Time a Bell Rings, a Volunteer Gets His Wings” (Association Advocacy Chick blog post headline); “Everytime [sic] the Cubs lose, an angel gets their [sic] wings” (Facebook page); and “Every Time a Bell Rings a Wizard Drinks a Shot” (Facebook page). And of course there’s “Every time you watch this Capra classic, an angel gets his wings” (scroll down through the listings to “Big-Screen Evergreens”).

The substitution of fairy for angel struck me as odd, but then I discovered this image at SomeECards:

The intent of this variation is clearly derogatory: “real men” supposedly don’t use smiley faces. Join.me may have been influenced (somewhat perversely) by this artifact, or the copywriter may be confusing “clapping for Tinkerbell” with “bell-ringing for angels.” In either case, I find Join.me’s version too peculiar to be an effective snowclone—I found myself thinking, distractedly, about fairy divas and fairy = homosexual.

 

The “X happens” snowclone probably originated with “shit happens,” which the Yale Book of Quotations antedates to an article by Connie Eble, “UNC-CH Slang,” published in Spring 1983. “Shit happens” inspired a much-duplicated theological “shit list” (Taoism: “Shit happens”; Judaism: “Why does this shit always happen to us?”, etc.). Innumerable variations on “shit happens” include Shift Happens (a much-viewed slide presentation from 2006); Cheat Happens (“your number one source for game cheats and codes”); Love Happens (title of a forgettable 2009 movie); Knit Happens (“nirvana for knitters”); Compost Happens (a home and garden blog); and Disability Happens.

Join.me subverts the formula—“X” is usually a short, punchy word, often a pun on “shit”—by assigning a long, multisyllabic term to “X.” The new construction slows the reader down and makes comprehension anything but spontaneous. It’s a risky twist that pays off.

 

The .me domain extension in Join.me is the Montenegro country code.

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¹ Every time I see “LogMeIn,” I think it’s an item on a Chinese menu. “Join.me” is a lot clearer.

² From the Snowclone Database: “A snowclone is a particular kind of cliché, popularly originated by Geoff Pullum. The name comes from Dr. Pullum’s much-maligned ‘If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z’. An easier example might be ‘X is the new Y.’ The short definition of this neologism might be n. fill-in-the-blank headline.”

³ Screenwriters: Frank Capra, Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and Jo Swerling. Screenplay here.

The Airing of Grievances

Today is Festivus, a holiday for the rest of us, which means it’s time once again for the annual Airing of Grievances. I’ve made my list; how about you?

Airing of Grievances form may be downloaded here.

Grievance the First: Spotted at Bed Bath & Beyond.

There must have been 300 of these Draftdodger® door cozies at BB&B when I visited a store in San Francisco in early December, and as far as I could tell, every single one had the same misspelling on its package. (P.S. There’s no hyphen in drawstring.)

Grievance the Second: From a story about private jets in the Sunday New York Times Magazine.

Marketing critic Rob Walker writes the “Consumed” column, but I don’t blame him for the appearance of imminently where a near-homophone, eminently, is called for. I blame the copy desk. (Imminently means “about to occur.” Eminently means “extremely.”)

Grievance the Third: The taint of ’tis. Since Thanksgiving I’ve received seven e-mails from online merchants with “’Tis the season” in subject line or body copy.

 

I defer to John McIntyre, who lays down the copyediting law against clichés at the Baltimore Sun and on his blog, You Don’t Say:

“’Tis the season”: Not in copy, not in headlines, not at all. Never, never, never, never, never. You cannot make this fresh. Do not attempt it.

The only thing worse than a “’Tis the season” headline is a “’Tis the season” headline with a backward apostrophe.

Grievance the Fourth: The following phrases are expressed in two words with a space between the words: in spite, never mind, all right (also all righty), at least, more so, a lot. I don’t give a fig what the album title was or what the band’s name is. If you want my attention, use the standard spelling.

Grievance the Fifth: On the other hand, intact is one word. Keep it intact, you might say. That is my advice to the “homeschooling examiner” who criticized a “democrat candidate” for misspelling lobbyist—and proceeded to misspell “intact” and mis-punctuate everywhere. It is also my advice to Read Write Web.

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.

November Linkfest

The New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year, announced yesterday, is refudiate. Runners-up included vuvuzela, bankster, and nom nom. Read all about it. For the curious: my archived posts about NOAD’s words of the year for 2007, 2008, and 2009.

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If you, like me, see red when you find misspellings, errors of fact, and grammatical mistakes in published books, help is at hand. Typoze allows you to report typos online, thereby contributing to “improving the overall quality of published material.” I’ve done it; it’s easy and satisfying. My only question: Where do I report the typos in Typoze’s own web and blog content?

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After 94 years, beloved spokeslegume Mr. Peanut finally, um, speaks. And he sounds a lot like Robert Downey, Jr. (Ad Broad.)

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Rob Beschizza was struck by how the New York Times’s stories about the Iraq War Wikileaks material “could get through such gruesome descriptions — fingers chopped off, chemicals splashed on prisoners — without using the word ‘torture.’” So he created a torture euphemism generator. Why should Times reporters have all the fun? (Via Mark Peters.)

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If you’d lived in Chaucer’s time, you’d have known what sort of work a cautioner, a pannarius, and a tapley did. Find definitions for those and other trade names on this fascinating list. Despite the list’s title, the names are not “Old English”; they’re old, and they’re from the British Isles, but their etymologies are variously French, Latin, German, and Middle English. (Via Kevin Smokler, aka Weegee.)

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The New York Times blog Schott’s Vocab has been performing an invaluable service by reprinting archived entries from American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society. Here, from 1934, is one of my favorities: a glossary of shoe-salesman lingo. A brief excerpt: “The widths of the shoe, A, B, C, D, and E, are called Al, Benny, Charley, Dave, and Eddie. These names are used to conceal the size from the customer.”

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The Gobbledygook Grader reveals how much of your writing (or a colleague’s) is ridden with “gobbledygook, jargon, clichés and over-used, hype-filled words.” Just copy and paste a passage into the window to receive your grade—and tips for improving it.

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“Wants pawn term, dare worsted ladle gull . . .” Surely you know the rest of the “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut” tale, right? Hint: read it aloud, slowly. (Or listen to the recording.) From San Francisco’s wonderful, one-of-a-kind Exploratorium. (Hat tip: Mighty Red Pen and Trochee.)

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How do you pronounce Cthulhu? Linux? Mister Mxyzptlk? To the rescue, from Geekosystem, comes the ultimate geek pronunciation guide. Mister Mxyzptlk, by the way, is not to be confused with the hip New York store Mxyplyzyk, named for the same Superman character but spelled differently and pronounced “mix-ee-pliz-ik.” (Hat tip: Karen.)