Fritinancy

The Shadow of Hiscox

I don’t know how to put this delicately: I’m being followed by Hiscox.

Whose cox? you may well ask. (Also: plural?)

Allow me to explain.

I first noticed an ad for Hiscox on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago. I’d never heard of the company, so I clicked on the ad to check out the Hiscox website. In no time at all, thanks to the miracle of retargeting, I began seeing Hiscox everywhere. On retail sites. On Slate. On the New York Times home page.

What sort of business is Hiscox in? “Specialist insurance and reinsurance for businesses and individuals with unusual and often complicated insurance needs.” The company is traded on the London Stock Exchange  but incorporated and headquartered in Bermuda. It operates in 11 countries. Big-time, serious stuff.

So why was I giggling?

 

 

Well, wouldn’t you?

I’ll try to keep a straight face just long enough to explain that Hiscox is the surname of the company’s founder, Ralph Hiscox, and of its current president, the splendidly named Robert Ralph Scrymgeour Hiscox. It’s a very old surname, if this genealogy site is to be trusted (and it pays to be skeptical about most online genealogy sites)—as in Norman Conquest old. It’s derived, I learned, from Hitch, “a pet form of the name Richard,” and cock, “a medieval form of endearment” (hmm).

To sum up: a variation on Dick Cocks.

Oh, and “Scrymgeour”? It’s pronounced skrɪm-dʒər, according to this site. Wikipedia says the name is “believed to derive from the Old English word ‘skrymsher’ which means ‘swordsman’.”

Swordsman Hiscox. Ladies and gentlemen, I could not make this stuff up.

And it only gets better, at least if your brain works the way mine does.

Word of the Week: Streisand Effect

Streisand Effect: The backfiring of an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information. It was “named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt in 2003 to suppress photographs of her residence inadvertently generated further publicity” (Wikipedia).

“Streisand Effect” was coined in 2005 by Mike Masnick of TechDirt in a post about, believe it or not, photographs of urinals:

How long is it going to take before lawyers realize that the simple act of trying to repress something they don’t like online is likely to make it so that something that most people would never, ever see (like a photo of a urinal in some random beach resort) is now seen by many more people? Let’s call it the Streisand Effect.

On June 6, 2011, The Caucus—the New York Times’s politics and government blog—invoked the Streisand Effect in its coverage of one angle of a story about Sarah Palin’s confused account of the Paul Revere story (“By ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free”*).

Since Ms. Palin described the ride last week while she was visiting Boston, Wikipedia’s Paul Revere article page has been the site of a mini “edit war.” And the page has gone from a little-visited one — 2,000 or so page views a day — to a more heavily trafficked one, with 54,000 on Saturday when Ms. Palin’s comments were gaining the most news attention. …

As a result, the Revere article has become much longer, and much better sourced -– a version of what Wikipedia users call the “Streisand Effect,” which is described as when “an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely.”

A blog called TheStreisandEffect.com collected other tales of information-suppression backfires. The blog has been dormant since March 2010.

Read about the Bradley Effect. Read about other eponymous effects: Coolidge, Droste, Forer, Fujiwhara, Martha Mitchell, McGurk, and Meissner.

(Wiki link via ADS-L.)

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* Boston Globe, June 6.

Word of the Week: Bechdel Test

Bechdel Test: A method of evaluating the female presence in movies and television. To pass the Bechdel Test, a film or TV show must (a) have at least two women in it, who (b) talk to each other, about (c) something other than men. Also known as the Bechdel Rule, the Bechdel/Wallace Test, and the Mo Movie Measure.

The Bechdel Test is named for feminist cartoonist Alison Bechdel, creator of the comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For”  (1983-2008), who introduced the concept in a 1985 strip titled “The Rule.” Bechdel has said that she stole the idea from a friend, Liz Wallace; the character Mo, as in “Mo Movie Measure,” doesn’t appear in “The Rule”—in fact, she wasn’t introduced until 1987—but the name somehow stuck.

The Bechdel Test does not pretend to determine the cinematic merits of a film. Many excellent movies, from Stalag 17 to Das Boot, have no female characters; some mediocrities (Bring It On Again, 27 Dresses, et al.) pass the test with flying colors but probably aren’t worth a free download.

The TV Tropes Wiki*, an invaluable resource for everything television-related, has this to say about the Bechdel Test:

The test is often misunderstood. The requirements are just what they say they are - it doesn't make any difference if, for instance, the male characters the women talk about are their fathers, sons, platonic friends or mortal enemies rather than romantic partners. Conversely, if a work seems to pass, it doesn't matter if male characters are present when the female characters talk, nor does it matter if the women only talk about stereotypically girly topics like shoe shopping - or even relationships, as long as it's not relationships with men.

A video introduction to the Bechdel Test.

An annotated list of movies listed in chronological order from 1900 to 2011 and rated according to the Bechdel Test.

 

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Mean Girls still from FanPop.

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* I wrote more generally about TV Tropes in a 2007 post.

Putz Redux

After reading yesterday’s post about Putzmeister, my Twitter pal Arma Virumque sent me a link to this photo.

Oh, the entendres.

Putz’s Creamy Whip can be found on the World Wide Web, but it’s so proudly local that the home page bears no mention of the city in which it does business. I’ve done the research for you: it’s Cincinnati, the Queen City.

And Putz is, as you may have surmised, the name of the couple who opened this snack shop, back in 1938. The place became so popular that the street on which it’s located was renamed Putz Place. At the corner of West Fork Road. In the Cumminsville neighborhood.

Yes, the jokes write themselves.

Word of the Week: Veblen Goods

Veblen goods: Products whose appeal rises along with their price. Named for Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), the American economist and sociologist who famously defined “conspicuous consumption” as the chief activity of the leisure class.

Veblen goods are an anomaly: classical economic theory dictates that demand will decrease as price increases. The Veblen effect is related to the “snob effect” and the “bandwagon effect.”

Novelist, philosophy professor, and former diamond salesman Clancy Martin writes about Veblen goods in “All That Glitters” in the June 2010 issue of Harper’s (not online):

In our store in Arlington we used to have a large framed Thai rug—depicting a king on his elephant and spangled with cheap gems and gold and silver thread—that we bought in Bangkok for $5,000 and initially tried to sell for $25,000. It hung on the wall for three years as we slowly upped the asking price, and it didn’t sell until we were negotiating it down from $150,000; we closed the deal at $110,000. The worst case of a Veblen good I ever heard comes courtesy of my friend Dave, who was doing the pricing structure for Tiffany & Co. in their new Hong Kong flagship. He came across a bottle of perfume that sold for $12,000; Tiffany’s cost was around forty bucks.

Martin’s article—worth searching out in your local library—also introduced me to a few other diamond-industry terms. In industry-speak, an “enhancement” is a fake. Also:

Women who collect sparkly things as a passion are known in the industry as crows, and with a good crow it’s an addiction: you see her every month when she gets her paycheck. The wealthiest crows are called whales.

Read my other posts about the diamond industry: on the late diamantaire David S. Kwiat; and on selling diamonds in a downturn. If the subject interests you, I recommend reading The Heartless Stone: A Journey through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire, by Tom Zoeller, which explains the myth of diamond “scarcity” and reveals how the Veblen effect (and savvy branding) transformed formerly worthless brown stones into high-priced “chocolate diamonds.”

Names in the News: Kwiat

David S. Kwiat, former president of the Kwiat jewelry company, died August 9 at the age of 94. According to his obituary on the Kwiat blog, Mr. Kwiat was “an icon in the diamond industry and will be long remembered for his sharp mind, his love of diamonds and his reputation for integrity. …His clients included many of the world’s preeminent diamantaires and retail jewelers, including Harry Winston, as well as many in New York’s high society.”

I was interested in that word diamantaire, a French word that may mean “a professional in the diamond business,” “one who buys or sells diamonds,” or “a master diamond cutter.” But I was even more interested in the Kwiat name, which I’d seen in advertisements and in what-the-celebrities-are-wearing stories in magazines such as InStyle, but which was otherwise something of a mystery to me.

I hadn’t known, for example, that “Kwiat” was an eponym just like Shreve (a Bay Area institution) or Tiffany. I’d never encountered anyone with the Kwiat surname, and I wasn’t sure how to pronounce the name. (It’s KWEE-aht, according to “How Do You Say Kwiat?” on the company website.)

Here’s what Ancestry.com says about “Kwiat”:

Polish and Jewish (from Poland): from Polish kwiat ‘flower’, a metonymic occupational name for a florist or a gardener. As a Jewish name, this is generally of ornamental origin.

The Polish pronunciation would be closer to KVEE-aht.

“Kwiat” is a rare surname in the United States—the Ancestry.com map, taken from U.S. Census records, shows only a handful of Kwiats, most of them east of the Mississippi. But that’s a misleading picture, because “Kwiat” sometimes changed its spelling. Abel Kiviat, for example, a silver medalist in track and field at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, was the son of Moishe Kwiat, peddler, who Anglicized his name to Morris Kiviat. That tidbit comes by way of an email from linguist Marc Picard of the American Name Society listserv. Marc added:

The epenthetic vowel is not surprising given that /kv/ is an impermissible initial consonant cluster in English.

As for David Kwiat, he joined his father’s business at the age of 17, in 1933—not an auspicious year for luxury goods. Nevertheless, according to his obituary, “despite the difficult economic conditions of the Great Depression era, the business grew throughout the decade.” David Kwiat remained active in the business until the end of his life; his grandchildren now run the company.

Read my December 2008 post about selling diamonds in an economic downturn, “Stones.”

Word of the Week: Cunningham’s Law

Cunningham’s Law: “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.”

Submitted by Stephen McGeady of Portland, OR, in response to a Schott’s Vocab competition in which readers were invited to formulate novel eponymous laws.

McGeady went on to say that the law is named after Ward Cunningham, a colleague of McGeady’s at Tektronix:

This was his advice to me in the early 1980s with reference to what was later dubbed USENET, but since generalized to the Web and the Internet as a whole. Ward is now famous as the inventor of the Wiki. Ironically, Wikipedia is now perhaps the most widely-known proof of Cunningham's Law.

By the way, if you enjoy the Schott’s Vocab blog as much as I do, you’ll want to listen to “Saying the World,” the most recent program of To the Best of Our Knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio. The eponymous Ben Schott is the segment’s first interviewee; he talks about how he discovers his “miscellany of modern words and phrases,” mostly on the Internet.

Word of the Week: Pooter

Pooter: A suction bottle used to collect ants and small insects.

The origins of pooter are cloudy; the OED suggests that the device was named for an American entomologist, F.W. Poos (1891-1987), "with insertion of -t-, apparently for euphony."

I was introduced to pooter—in the United States, it's more commonly known as an aspirator—in a recent KQED radio report about the annual Bay Area Ant Survey being conducted by the California Academy of Sciences. The lead-in was melodramatic:

Ants. If your kitchen is currently under siege, chances are it’s by one particular species: Argentine Ants. These invasive insects have spread across California, forming one of the largest colonies on Earth and threatening native ecosystems.

This wasn't the first time KQED has covered the ant beat. A 2008 post on the station's science and environment blog was headlined "Never Used a Pooter?" Author Jessica Neely explained that a pooter "includes a small piece of gauze between the vial and the rubber tubing, so you don’t suck the insect all the way into your lungs." Nice to know.

The entolomological pooter is not to be confused with The World Famous Pooter Tooter: "Perfect for Reproducing Elevator Farts, or any Fart Gag Situation...The Ultimate Fart Joke Prank." ("Sounds so real, you can almost smell it.") No batteries required.

Photo from here.

Other Countries, Other Oscars

With last Sunday's Golden Globes ceremony, the Hollywood entertainment-award season got off to its official start. Nominations for the 82nd annual Academy Awards—the Oscars—will be announced Feb. 2; the awards ceremony will take place Sunday, March 7. In the meantime, many of the movie craft guilds have already announced their Oscar nominations, and critics have been publishing their best-of-2009 lists.

Well, hooray for Hollywood. What about the rest of the world?

Here's a little quiz to see how much you know about major film awards in countries other than the United States. In each case, the awards are considered "the Oscars of __." (I've omitted the obvious ones like BAFTA.) Match the award with the country. Answers after the jump. Extra credit if you can identify the source of the award's name.

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1. Ariel                                                            a. Germany

2. Blue Ribbon                                             b. Taiwan

3. Bogey                                                          c.  Spain

4. César                                                           d. Romania

5. David                                                           e. Canada

6. FAMAS                                                        f. Pakistan

7. Filmfare                                                      g. Mexico

8. Genie                                                           h. South Korea

9. Golden Horse                                           i.  Israel

10. Gopo                                                          j. India

11. Goya                                                           k. Italy

12. Grand Bell                                                l. Denmark

13. LuxStyle                                                   m. Philippines

14. Nika                                                           n. France

15. Ophir                                                          o. Japan

16. Robert                                                        p. Russia

                                            

November Linkfest

In honor of Thanksgiving, a multi-course menu of links.

Naming

Fellow namer Anthony Shore, formerly of Landor, has been writing terrific stuff on his blog, Operative Words. He recently published the English translation of his interview with Grasp, a Spanish naming blog. No permalinks (what's up with that, Anth?), so look for Part 1 on Nov. 9 and Part 2 on Nov. 10.

I've also been enjoying Beg to Differ, from Canadian brand consultancy Brandvelope. I recommend the three-part series on how to name a chicken sandwich, about Brandvelope's work with KFC Canada. (The link goes to Part 1; scroll down to find links to the other posts.)

Slang

In a recent column, Jon Carroll elliptically referred to the number 66 as "double boxcars," a term Jon says he learned from Herb Caen, the late Chronicle columnist. That sent me to The Google, where I discovered not just the origin of "double boxcars"—a rolled pair of sixes—but an entire glossary of craps terms. Did you know that "yo" means "eleven"? It's short for "yo-leven."

This glossary of narco-terms from Mexico's drug war is more macabre but no less fascinating. A plaza, for example, is "not the quaint public square you see in nearly every Mexican town, but rather any defined drug marketplace, such as a smuggling point." (Via my brother Michael.)

Simpsons

Remember "Jolly Gummi Bears: They Hibernate in Your Colon"? Revisit it and ten other ingenious signs from The Simpsons. From a blog called 11 Points, "because Top 10 lists are for cowards."

I've made something of a study of fake brands on The Simpsons (see my Brand-o-Rama posts from 2007, 2008, and 2009), but I wasn't familiar with some of "The 14 Most Awesome Fake Products on The Simpsons." TUBBB!, for example, consisted of "nothing but the white cream filling from Oreos." (Via Karen.)

Speaking of "awesome"

"Our generation is either in a state of near-perpetual awe, or in a state of a complete lack of awe. What’s more probable, and less tongue-in-cheek, is that the word’s meaning has simply devalued. And I mean no value judgement. It is arguably as pointless to bemoan a shift in lexical meaning as it is to gripe at the rising tide for turning your sandcastle into an amorphous lump." Irish blogger Stan Carey on the awe-purpose adjective: "How Awesome Is Awesome?"

Generators

Attention, academics: Use this sentence generator (from the U. of Chicago's writing program, believe it or not) for your next paper, or even your dissertation, and no one, including you, will be the wiser. Here's a sample: "The reification of pop culture opens a space for the ideology of linguistic transparency."

A generatorpalooza for writers! Name that gnome, that female French character, that Chinese restaurant, that "lurid imprecation." Generatrix Manon says: "Many of my generators deal either with the fantasy genre or with Les Misérables, of which I am inordinately fond." There are also links to off-site generators. Knock yourself out.

This title scorer from print-on-demand publisher Lulu claims to be based on the study of 50 years' worth of fiction bestsellers. Don't take it too seriously, though. The fine print says: "For all the work that went it, the Lulu Titlescorer is capable of giving high scores to titles that most of us would rate as weird, if not terrible. Meanwhile, of course, it also gives low scores to the titles of novels (e.g. The Da Vinci Code) which, in fact, topped the New York Times bestseller list for long periods." (Via NancyCC.)

Speaking of books

From College Humor, classic titles made sarcastic with quotation marks, e.g., The Red Badge of "Courage."  You'll need to create an account to view the comments. (Via Karen, again!)

LOLiterature: LOLcats humor for the literati. This one cracked me up.

And speaking of the literati

I'm honored to be included in "100 Best Blogs for the Literati," compiled by OnlineCourses.org. I'm in very impressive company, from The Warhol Influence (self-explanatory) to Diapsalmata (digital humanities, book history, writing technologies, and more), to Bookgasm ("reading material to get excited about"). The list also includes some of my favorite linguistics blogs: Language Log, Language Hat, Wordlustitude, and A Way with Words.

And for dessert

Peach Melba, Lady Baltimore cake, Charlotte Russe, Bananas Foster, and other eponymous desserts, explained (and charmingly illustrated) by CakeSpy. Recipes, too. Did you know that German chocolate cake isn't from Germany?