Fritinancy

Whoops

Nobody’s perfect, but some people on some days are less perfect than others.

 

New York Times Style section (print edition only), March 28, 2013.

The photographs were lying dormant. A very common error, but one I’d expect a professional copy desk to catch.

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A nicely printed invitation arrived in the mail a few weeks ago. It included this passage:

 

If you’re uncertain about the spelling of hors d’oeuvres, you could look it up. On the other hand, may I recommend the appetizers?

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At the movies the other evening* I watched a trailer for Danny Boyle’s new movie, Trance, which opens soon in the U.S. I wasn’t the only one who caught this blooper on the rating screen:

 

 

There are no bears in Trance. The word that’s wanted here is grisly.

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Finally, a really big goof, as in several inches high:

 

 

The great Chicago writer and radio man spelled his last name Terkel (it’s correct in the text beneath the headline). The erroneous spelling appears in an exhibit on the 103rd floor of the Willis Tower that’s been up for “about 14 years,” according to a Chicago Tribune story; no one mentioned the misspelling until this week, when media blogger Jim Romenesko published an item about it.

 

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Stoker, the first English-language film from Korean director Park Chan-wook. A nod to Hitchcock – two shower scenes, an Uncle Charlie, a whistled motif – minus the wit and plus a lot of arty gore.

December Linkfest

A new language quarterly, aptly called Babel, brings linguistics to a general audience without dumbing down the subject. Published at the University of Huddersfield (UK), the magazine covers “issues relating to many different human languages” – and some non-human ones, including, in the first issue, Venusian. I’m already looking forward to the second issue, which will include an article about “the secret linguistic history of brand names.”

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At Word Routes, Ben Zimmer recaps the year in words and picks his word of the year. (Surprise – it isn’t fiscal cliff.) I published my own list earlier this week.

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Do not ask science-fiction author John Scalzi to write for free. No, really – don’t even think about it.

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In the 1920s, when TV was still in its infancy, retailers used fake television broadcasts to trick customers into entering stores. Smithsonian magazine’s Paleofuture blog explains how it was done. 

Faked TV demonstration from 1926, via Smithsonian.

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From caucus to urbane: the words that spiked each week this year in look-ups at Merriam-Webster online.

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Catalog love: Your L.L. Bean Boyfriend. He’ll “build you a table and then have sex with you on it.” (Via Girls of a Certain Age.)

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From Jen Doll at The Atlantic Wire, the best (worst) typos, mistakes, and correrctions [sic] of 2012.

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Holly Buchanan of Marketing to Women Online picks the  commercials that did the best job of marketing women in 2012. She has strict criteria:

In order to pass The Buchanan Test a commercial must do three things. It must feature women who:

1. Are outside of the home
2. Are in a role other than that of "mother"
3. Are NOT doing yoga

(For comparison, see Bechdel Test.)

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“So it looks like the New Orleans Hornets are going to change their name to become the Pelicans.” A defense of the new team name by Barry Petchesky at Deadspin. (Naughty language advisory.)

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From my favorite info-viz site, Muckety (“Mapping the paths of power and influence”): The Trump Fund for the Gutting of Red Herrings and other think tanks we’d like to see in 2013.

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I grew up in Los Angeles and always wondered why the Ralphs supermarket chain didn’t have an apostrophe in its name. Now, thanks to Los Angeles magazine, I know: the business was founded (in 1873, at Fifth and Hill streets) by George Ralphs.

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“Twitter is a machine for continual self-reinvention”: Matt Haughey on why he loves Twitter and hates Facebook.

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Something to play with while you’re waiting in line to see The Hobbit, which opens in theaters today: the hobbit name generator and the Elvish name generator. (Via @Wordnik.)

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Like it or not, the “fiscal cliff” metaphor is here to stay. Linguist George Lakoff explains why.

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“I sculpt baby names from love, from hatred, from the reality of this hellhole of a world that you’re forcing an innocent life to endure.” Bob Powers, artisanal baby namer, at McSweeney’s. Yes, he jests. Mostly. (Via Karen Wise.)

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Over at The Atlantic, sociology professor Philip Cohen asks: Why don’t parents name their daughters Mary anymore? (Also via Karen Wise.)

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From Copyranter: The best men’s underwear commercial ever.

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According to Helen Sword, author of a column for the New York Times and creator of something called the Writer’sDiet test, a “zombie noun” is any noun (proliferation, formation, indication) that “cannibalizes” a verb. Now linguistics grad student Josef Fruehwald, blogging at Val Systems, delivers an incisive counterpoint. “Ain’t nothing like exploiting the collective dysmorphia of a nation to push your quarter-baked usage decrees,” says he.

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Via the brilliant Maria Popova at Brain Pickings: Alice in Wonderland as a subway map.

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And to all a good night.

Title Nine Scores, Fouls

I had some errands nearby, so I stopped into the Title Nine store in Berkeley over the weekend to see what was new with this local brand. 

A bit of background: Title Nine was founded in 1989, taking its name from Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex to any person seeking the benefits of any federally funded education program. Title IX opened doors to girls and women who wanted to play sports in school; Title Nine sells non-technical sports gear and clothing. The company has 19 retail stores—none in malls, the website boasts—243 employees, and a manifesto.

Appropriately, there’s a lot of playful, you-go-girl energy in a Title Nine store. This poster typifies the spirit:

“You are so busted!” is very cute. The medallion touts the company’s “bravangelists”: also nice.

I actually laughed out loud at this sign displayed above the entrance to the bra department—excuse me, the “Home for Unruly Girls Support Center.”

If you don’t get the joke in “unruly girls,” see the Online Slang Dictionary.

So far, so good. By the evidence, Title Nine is a company that makes a big investment in copywriting, and that’s a good thing. The attention to words carries over into the dressing rooms—or so I thought until I encountered this sign:

 

“Have a Fit!” is fun. So are the other headings: Containment, Mind the Strap, Be Smooth, Know the Terrain, and Think Straight. Then I read the very last sentence: “The bra should lay straight.”

Aha! So Title Nine’s editorial department has an Achilles heel after all: the lay/lie fault. The bra should lie straight, if you please.

(Listen, I get that a lot of people mix up lay and lie, and in fact I tolerate “lay” for “lie” in casual speech. But I can’t condone its appearance in published prose. And that includes marketing copy: See my critiques of the Hanes Lay Flat Collar, the SpeedSleep ad, the Back2Life back-pain “solution.” This is why professional copyeditors were invented. They know this stuff. They can help.)

I picked up a fall catalog to see whether the dressing-room sign was anomalous. Nope: The error is even worse in the catalog (insert, page 7), where in addition to the lay/lie error we have a comma splice:

“The bra should lay straight, if it rides up, it’s still too loose.”

There needs to be a period—a colon would be OK, too—after “straight.”

The “lay” error persists on the website:

I leafed through the catalog to distract myself from all this lay-ola. Unfortunately, my eye fell on an even bigger boo-boo—in a name with a trademark symbol, no less:

 

Page 19, fall catalog.

I was drawn to that “Wooliscious” headline because in all the time I’ve been tracking -licious compounds—see here, here, here, and here—I’d never come across a -liscious. It looked odd, and I wondered whether it was a clumsy attempt at a portmanteau with “luscious.” Nope again: In the product copy—and on the Web—the word is spelled “Woolicious.”

I’m guessing Title Nine’s lawyers have already pitched a fit over this mistake, so I’ll leave it at that.

In my crappy photo you can just barely make out the name of this garment: “The Swacket.” It’s “more than a sweater—not quite a jacket,” the copy says. Honestly, is that the best they could come up with? Because all I can think of is the poor sacrificial fracket.

I’ll have another post about Title Nine later this week.

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.)

On the Brand Trail: Portland, Oregon

When I travel, I turn into a brand anthropologist: I gawk at, and photograph, names and signs that locals take in stride. Last week’s brief trip to Portland via Coast Starlight was no exception.

1.

TheStandard (yes, one word), a division of StanCorp Financial Group (of course), is an insurance company that may or may not be based in New York—the website is maddeningly vague. I’d never heard of it before last week.

What caught my attention was the tagline: “Positively different.” The blue flag emblem suggests the “banner, pennant” definition of standard, but the word has multiple meanings, and I couldn’t help being slightly puzzled: Isn’t the whole point of a standard that it’s positively the same at all times?

2.

Food carts are at least as big a phenomenon in Portland as they are here in the Bay Area, with one major difference: Here the carts are nomadic; you need to follow them on Twitter to figure out where they’ll be heading next. In Portland, the carts are permanently parked along a couple of busy downtown sidewalks.

A small sampling of the dozens of food carts on Alder Street.

This takes a lot of the serendipitous fun out of the whole affair; but, on the other hand, it’s in keeping with Portland’s polite, orderly vibe. (Such courteous drivers!)

One cart’s name reminded me that I haven’t written about “Mr.” businesses in a while. (See my May 2008 post, “Mr.-y Spot.”)

As the Food Carts Portland blog notes, “Shouldn’t it be Senor Taco?” Good question.

3.

I saw a second Mr. in Southeast Portland; a friend was driving so I couldn’t shoot the sign, but I later found it online.

I’m sure top hats are a big hit with today’s prom-goers.  

Mr. Formal operates stores in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Arizona; its slogan is “Tuxedos for All Generations.” Isn’t it cute the way the cross-bar on the F resembles a bow tie?

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Finally, at the Portland Art Museum—the oldest art museum in the Pacific Northwest—I spotted this sign.

Photography is verboten, but the very nice security guard made an exception for me.

It seems to me that if you go to the effort and expense of building a center of modern & contemporary art, you could at the very least spell contemporary with all its syllables. And maybe spell out “and.”

I do, however, like the way the museum’s logo highlights “art”:

Yes, it’s another cartouche museum logo!

Read my March 2010 post about brand sightings in another very polite American city, Minneapolis.

Oh, the Errors You’ll Make!

They have so much fun, / Those employees at Spanx!

 

It’s a pity misspelling / Is one of their pranks.

(And not just any old word: Theodor Seuss Geisel’s nom de plume, for crying out loud.)

I still like Spanx’s nomenclature, though.

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Photo of a freshly embellished wall in Spanx's Atlanta headquarters via the @SpanxINC Twitter feed.

How Many Errors...

...can you spot in the home-page copy for MovieHD.net?

Welcome to MovieHD.net Here you can watch movies online for free We update our site everyday with new movies, Keep visiting us often, Bookmark us and tell all your friends and family! Enjoy!

Thanks allot, your MovieHD.net administrator...

I count 9 errors in 38 words: a 23.6 percent error rate.

The Airing of Grievances

Happy Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us! The aluminum pole has been lofted, the Feats of Strength admired. Now it's time for the Airing of Grievances, my favorite ritual of all. I've been saving up grievous examples for more than a month in anticipation of this special day. Too negative for you? Go watch It's a Wonderful Life.

Grievance the First. This Bloomingdale's ad, which ran in the New York Times on Dec. 7, merits a citation from the Apostrophe Abuse posse:

Its, dammit. Its. You may send me a free pair of overpriced shoes for my troubles.

Grievance the Second: From an online ad for "Copywriting Experts (Native English Writer Only)" on the Pro Freelance Projects site: 

Do you know how to write web copy that make people click? Do your words make people inch until they do what you want them to do? We’re looking for an on going copywriter and willing to pay great rate for the right person…

Are you inching to know what that "on going" "great rate" might be? A less-than-princely $250 to $750. (Hat tip: Richard Pelletier.)

Grievance the Third: From a story in the Your Home section of the Toronto Star about actor-turned-DIY-instructor Mag Ruffman:

To that end, she has created a pyramid based on Mazlo's hierarchy of needs, that she "heard in first-year university" and then applied to home shows.

The story was published Dec. 5, and Abraham Maslow's name is still misspelled. (Hat tip: Sherry Noik.)

Grievance the Fourth: From a brief story about actor James McAvoy published in the Los Angeles Times on Dec. 3:

[McAvoy]... may be best known for ... "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" (as Mr. Tumnus, the fawn)...

That would be faun, a creature that's half human, half goat. A fawn is a young deer. (Hat tip: Carroll Lachnit.)

Grievance the Fifth: A Dec. 3 story about memoirist Rhoda Janzen written by Cathy Horyn, longtime style reporter for the New York Times, contained this gem of an eggcorn in the lede*:

The New York Hilton. It is the breakfast hour, the day before Thanksgiving, and the lobby is busy with clean-looking families who are up and Adam, ready to set off in their varsity-letter jackets and Rockports for some holiday shopping, maybe a show.

The idiom is "up and at 'em." Even in Manhattan.

Grievance the Sixth: This one comes, once again, from the sharp-eyed Carroll Lachnit, who spotted it in a press release titled "Networking Strategies for the Holiday Office Party, Do's and Don'ts." I'll let Carroll set it up for you:

I get a lot of PR pitches, and the bad ones are usually bad for all the usual reasons. This one is a little worse: 1) a misspelling of "liquor" as "liquer" (or maybe for "liqueur," if people get blasted on Chambord at holiday parties), and 2) signing off with "All Heart." Ick.

And then there's this, smack in the middle of the release:  

•  Use the Introduction as a Segway. The end game here is to open the door for follow up.  You want to be able to connect with the Boss after the party, one-on-one. 

Carroll asks:

Does the PR person actually not know that the word is actually "segue"? Or has she just opted to fuse the word with its product persona so the reader will visualize that with this introduction in hand, she can effortlessly (if somewhat geekishly) glide her way to a new job?

My two cents: If I have to motor around on a ridiculous two-wheeler to meet Bruce Springsteen after the party, so be it. (What? He's the Boss, right?)

Also: "end game" is not a synonym for "goal."

And one more thing: I wrote about the worldwide Complaints Choir phenomenon last year. I'm pleased to report that the movement continues to gather momentum, and if we're lucky we'll soon see the Complaints Choir movie. Here's the trailer:

 

For additional examples of grievous newsroom malfeasance, see John McIntyre's compilation, "Save Money: Cut Back on Editing."

And do try to have a holiday that's perfect in every way. See you next week.

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* Lead paragraph. "Lede" is the way journalists spell it. 

DISCLAIMER: All errors in this post are corollaries of Muphry's Law, a k a McKean's Law.

(Festivus magnet sold at Cafe Press.)

August Linkfest

A late-summer harvest of idioms, acronyms, neologisms, and hench-words:

"At the drop of a heartbeat." "A bull in a candy shop." "Green behind the ears." They're all odd amalgamations of familiar idioms collected at Conflation, whose editors write:

The purpose of this website is not to provide an inert list of expressions that can be chuckled at and then put aside. We have compiled this collection with the genuine hope that readers will deliberately use conflations in their day-to-day lives. These expressions should be studied and memorized to the point where the reader is comfortable using them in proper context without hesitation or awkwardness. It should be pointed out that conflations are not to be slipped into conversation with the intention of fooling the uninitiated. Conflation is not an inside joke. Any pleasure gained from successful conversational usage should be derived from the knowledge that you are activating the evolution of language toward a vernacular of resistance.

Could be a fun party game, too. (Via ThatWhichMatter, which does not appear to have a website but is well worth following on Twitter if you're interested in language. UPDATE: And which just launched a Tumblr log.)

A different species of neologism is the specialty of Mark Peters, curator of Wordlustitude. Guest-posting at the Oxford University Press blog, Peters writes about the "underrated prefix" hench-, which turns up most famously, but hardly exclusively, in henchman. (The title of the post is "Send in the Hench-poodles!") To wit:

I’ve found uses of henchblob, henchboob, hench-chicken, hench-Cylon, henchdemon, henchgoat, henchidiot, hench-lady-men-partners, hench-monster, henchscum, hench-wench, plus spokeshenchman, sub-sub-henchman, under-henchlings and many others.

Who doesn't love a "hench-wench"? By the way, hench comes from Old English hengest, meaning horse or stallion: a henchman was originally a groom.

Ben Schott, author of the Schott's Miscellanies and occasional contributor to the New York Times op-ed page, writes a Times blog, Schott's Vocab, where he documents new words and phrases. Once a week he hosts a contest in which readers submit their own inventions. Read the results of the most recent competition, to devise "weasel words, euphemisms, dysphemisms and circumlocutions for items in the news."

I recently discovered Beg to Differ, the bright blog produced by Brandvelope Consulting in Ottawa, and couldn't resist subscribing. Two posts sealed the deal: "The 25 Worst Acronyms in the World" (RUMPS? WinCE? MANPADS?) and "25 Meaningless Tag Lines" (Exxon: "We're Exxon.").

Another new discovery, this one via Editrix: Funny Typos, Misspellings, Bad Grammar & Engrish, which delivers the goods, or the bads. Examples: a DeLonghi coffeemaker with a "permanent god filter" and a hand-lettered sign for a "Hugh Sale." Hugh Sale, meet Hugh Reductions.

Speaking of errors, NPR's Page Not Found page transforms a wrong turn into a jolly adventure.  "It's a shame that your page is lost, but at least it's in good company," the page consoles. "Stick around to browse through NPR stories about lost people, places and things that still haven't turned up." Links go to stories about Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa, "Your Luggage," and other missing people and things.

The Estonian language uses lots of umlauts and is related to Finnish and not much else. That was all I knew about Estonian until I found this well-written (in English), gorgeously illustrated Brief Guide to Estonian, which made me want to learn more. Did you know that Estonian has 14 grammatical cases, no grammatical gender, and no articles (definite or indefinite)? Or that there's an Estonian Sign Language, used by about 2,000 people? Just knowing that sort of thing makes me happy.

December Linkfest

Lights! Camera! Links!

Business Pundit proposes 15 corporate logos redesigned for the current economic crisis, a k a Epic Fail. I can't resist wanting to tweak the LG makeover: since the original slogan is "Life's Good," how about maintaining acronym consistency with "Life's Grim" or "Life's Galling"? (Hat tip: Catch This.)

Thinking about publishing a book to boost your career? Not so fast. Penelope Trunk at Brazen Careerist offers five reasons you don't need to write a book. No. 1: "People who have a lot of ideas need a blog, not a book." So now you know my excuse.

On the other hand, there's no excuse for the purple prose that won its perpetrators this year's Bad Sex in Fiction Awards, presented Nov. 25 at the In & Out Club (of course!) in London. This passage from inexplicably mega-best-selling author Paulo Coehlo's Brida ("the story of a young girl's quest through the mysteries of life to answer questions about who she is and seek her destiny"*) proves that 135 million people can indeed be very, very wrong:

Brida kissed him. She felt the taste of his mouth, the touch of his tongue. She was aware of every movement and sensed that he was feeling exactly the same, because the Tradition of the Sun always reveals itself to those who look at the world as if they were seeing it for the first time.

Read about last year's BSIF awards.

Your own writing, of course, is nothing like that. No, no: it's the equal at least of Poe or Austen, Shakespeare or Hemingway! Let O'Faust tell you exactly which great writer your work most closely resembles; just enter your blog's URL or cut and paste a passage of your writing. My own writing, it seems, is 17 percent similar to that of Oscar Wilde. At least it's not even 1 percent similar to that of Paulo Coelho. (Hat tip: Everything You Know About English Is Wrong.)

Everyone makes errors. Some people make funnier error pages than others. Here are 60 "really cool and creative error 404 pages," and here, via SwissMiss, are a whole bunch more. Love this one:

 

 

Happy solstice, Chanukah, and Festivus (the festival for the rest of us)! Let the airing of grievances commence! And may the Tradition of the Sun reveal itself to you in all of the good ways and none of the bad.

Menorah cork: Pop Judaica.

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* Surely I'm not the only one who read that line and immediately thought of Rochelle, Rochelle:  A Young Girl's Journey from Milan to Minsk, from Seinfeld.