Fritinancy

Abso-Booking-Lutely

I caught this new spot from Booking.com during a “Portlandia” commercial break:

 

The ad is cleverly plotted and well acted (the expression on the face of the teenage girl as she shleps down the hotel corridor is pure bershon), and the multiple payoffs at the end are satisfying. What stands out, though, is the repeated appropriation of the company name as an almost-expletive:

It doesn’t get any booking better than this!
Look at the booking view!
This is exactly what you booking needed!
Bask in the booking glory!

As a general principle, associating your brand name with an obscenity is a bad idea. But as AdFreak says in its review of the commercial, “the fact that it's vaguely explicit makes it just self-deprecating enough to not be too abrasive.”

Here’s another thing about booking: it’s a Britishism that’s infiltrated American English only in the last 20 years or so. (Americans have traditionally preferred to reserve restaurant tables and make reservations for theater seats and vacation travel.) When Ben Yagoda wrote about book (tickets, table, room) in an October 2011 post on his Not One Off Britishisms (NOOBs) blog, he noted that the usage started surging in the US around 1993, “the sweet spot for NOOBs.”

Booking.com is owned by Priceline, an American company, but it’s based in Amsterdam; the ad agency that produced the spot is the Amsterdam office of Portland-based Wieden + Kennedy. That European perspective may have influenced the choice of the company name and the push to fully Americanize booking.

Speaking of euphemistic expletives and brand-name dropping, a play I saw last night at Berkeley Rep is gloriously full of both. Troublemaker, by Dan LeFranc, is a live-action adventure comic featuring a posse of 12-year-olds who speak an idiosyncratic lingo filled with invented profanity. The play’s subtitle—“The Freakin Kick-A Adventures of Bradley Boatright”—gives you a taste; two minor characters are listed in the credits as A-Hole #1 and A-Hole #2. Tween tough-gal Loretta Beretta (great name!) snarls some of the best lines: “I’ll rip off your breadstick and shove it up your Olive Garden.” “Shut your St. Francis and move your Assisi.” “You’re lucky I don’t break your banana, remove it from your republic, and shove it up your gap.” In his review for Theater Dogs, Chad Jones wrote that it’s “pretend swearing taken to such an outrageous level that it’s actually beautiful in its own poetic way.” The play ends its Berkeley run on Sunday; if it shows up in your city, go see it.

Word of the Week: Malarkey

Malarkey: Nonsense, horsefeathers, bushwah, humbug, bunkum, rubbish, twaddle, exaggeration, lies. Originally US slang, first seen in print in 1924 in the Indiana Gazette (“The rest of the chatter is so much malarkey …”). Its origin is unknown; attempts to connect slang malarkey to the Irish surname Malarkey or to modern Greek malakia (“soft”) have proved fruitless.

Malarkey was all over the news after last Thursday’s debate between Vice President Joe Biden and his Republican challenger, Congressman Paul Ryan. Biden used the word twice: “With all due respect, that’s a bunch of malarkey” and—clarifying his characterization of Ryan’s comments as “a bunch of stuff”—“We Irish call it malarkey.”

Malarkey bumper sticker, Café Press.

Malarkey was the most looked-up word after the debate, according to Peter Sokolowski, a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster. It is the 2012 campaign’s quaint-euphemism equivalent of 2008’s cockamamie, which GOP candidate John McCain used in reference to … Joe Biden.

Malarkey T-shirt, Café Press.

 

On Friday, the Visual Thesaurus devoted a column to malarkey. “Biden certainly knows his way around a colorful Irish expression,” wrote Ben Zimmer:

The word malarkey, meaning “insincere or exaggerated talk,” originally found favor in Irish-American usage, though its exact origin remains unknown. We can likely thank a cartoonist of Irish descent, Thomas Aloysius Dorgan (“TAD” for short), for popularizing the word.

Romney-Ryan Malarkey campaign button, Café Press.

The Atlantic Wire also devoted a column to malarkey. (“Adding a ‘With all due respect’ to the phrase, [Biden] is clearly insinuating, or outright stating, that Ryan’s words are not to be taken as truth, that it’s just a bunch of hooey, right?”) At The Daily Beast, Andrew Sullivan called malarkey “literally, the word of the night.” (The “literally” was a sly reference to Biden’s repeated use of that word in his Democratic National Convention speech.) And in The Economist’s language blog, Johnson, Robert Lane Greene said he was skeptical of the Irish-origin story: “Giving English words Irish etymologies is a proud Irish and Irish-American pastime,” he wrote, adding, “Whether malarkey’s putative Irish origin is malarkey, bunkum, hokum or legitimate may be lost to history.”

Big Malarkey/Little Malarkey T-shirt, Zazzle.

 

By Friday morning the Obama campaign had embraced malarkey:

 

And a hyperkinetic gif made malarkey mesmerizing.

Although malarkey has American roots, it occasionally shows up in the UK. Helen Dunmore, a British poet and novelist, titled her recent poetry collection The Malarkey. (“You looked away just once / as you leaned on the chip-shop counter, / and forty years were gone. / You have been telling them forever / stop that malarkey in the back there!”)

In the US, malarkey has been used as a trademark, most often as an eponym (Malarkey Roofing Products, Malarkey’s restaurant). But I also found a Malarkey clothing brand, originally registered to a company called Shenanigans. Shenanigans (trickery, skulduggery, a prank, an exhibition of high spirits) is another charming and mysterious American word. It first appeared in print in 1855, in a San Francisco publication called Town Talk; the next two citations (dated 1856 and 1857) are also from California. According to Online Etymology Dictionary, the word may have come from Spanish chanada, a shortened form of charranada “trick, deceit.” Lacking corroborating evidence, though, lexicologists throw up their hands and declare shenanigans, like malarkey, to be “of uncertain origin.”

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UPDATE:  Lucy Ferriss considers malarkey at the Chronicle of Higher Education’s  Lingua Franca blog:  “We have waded through misstatements, false claims, and fiery pants. And finally we have arrived at malarkey, which has the extra advantage of being fun to say.”

Long Reads for a Long Weekend

We have a three-day weekend here in California, in honor of the holiday called Columbus Day (traditionally), Indigenous People’s Day (in Berkeley and elsewhere), and Exploration Day (according to a group of scientists who are petitioning the government for an official name-change). It’s a good opportunity to catch up on some long-form reading. Here are three pieces I recommend.

“Villager and Me” is Andrea Lee’s reminiscence—sparked by an encounter with an ad in a 1969 issue of The New Yorker—of the “proto-preppie” women’s fashion brands Villager and Ladybug. “Up and down the East Coast,” Lee writes, “in that American provincial period before the invasion of international brands, before ‘Love Story’ had graven the word ‘preppie’ into the national consciousness, boarding-school girls and country-club wives swathed themselves in Ladybug and Villager. Until, of course, the zeitgeist swept them off to become hippies.”

A typical Villager dress—which I remember well from my own West Coast girlhood—looked like this:

“Rustling softly downwards, like the quality of mercy…”

The clothes were demure, but the ad copy and color names could cause an impressionable girl to swoon with desire. The real story here, though, is about the man behind Villager and Ladybug, Max Raab, “a brilliant mercurial Jewish Philadelphian, son of a garment manufacturer whose ambition was to make the cheapest blouse in town.” Here’s Lee on Raab:

A lifetime maverick with a passion for jazz and movies, Raab flunked out of high school, fought in the Korean war, pumped gas, delivered mail, and sold televisions and Fuller brushes before coming up with the idea that made his—first—fortune. I like to imagine that he built the Villager and Ladybug concept on his wistful outsider’s view of the style Philadelphia débutantes were after when they borrowed their boyfriends’ Oxford cloth shirts. By the time I was mooning over the ads, there were over a hundred Villager shops with rustic wooden floors nationwide, and his line of upscale feminine sportswear had earned a hundred and forty million dollars. “I know women better than they know themselves ” Raab said in a New York Times interview. “The Waspy girls all want that country look, and the Jewish girls want to look like the Wasps. I knew I had a winner.”

Raab enjoyed “a long, sublimely quirky career” that included producing out-of-the-mainstream movies such as A Clockwork Orange. (Lee: “When I read that, I just sat for a minute imagining Shetland cardigans and A-line skirts mingling in his brain with Malcolm McDowell and his droogs.”) When he died, in 2008, Raab was working on a film about Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya.

Andrea Lee used to contribute regularly to The New Yorker; this article—online only—is the first writing of hers I’ve seen in quite a while. More, please!

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In a very different elegiac vein is this interview in The Awl with the writer Fran Lebowitz, who achieved meteoric success in the late 1970s and has been famously afflicted with writer’s block—but not talker’s block—ever since. If you’ve seen the 2010 HBO documentary about her, Public Speaking, you’ll be familiar with some of the territory covered in the Q&A—in particular, the gay culture of the 1970s and the effect of the AIDS epidemic on the New York arts audience. Lebowitz is so quotable that it’s hard to pick just one excerpt, but I’ll try: “The memories of people are very short. As we know, because otherwise we certainly wouldn't still have Republicans in office.”

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The British author and journalist Steven Poole is fed up with the cult of foodism. Poole’s excellent rant in the Guardian (UK), “Let’s Start the Foodie Backlash,” is an excerpt from his new book, You Aren’t What You Eat; in it, he takes on “food raves,” “feastivals,” cooking shows, and the language of menus: 

It is an interesting question, meanwhile, why the word “baby” in menu descriptions does not disgust us. Surely the last things we want to eat are babies. But perhaps once we are lulled into an imaginative world where a “baby” lamb or the “baby” queen scallop can be “resting” (in the scallop’s case, resting itself on another baby, this time a “baby gem”, since vegetables too – baby carrots, baby greens – can share in the general babyhood of all nice things, and participate in tottering towers of babies all stacked up for our gastric enjoyment), we are cocooned in such a euphemistic dream that the incipient act of putting these “baby” organisms into our mouths doesn’t register as the horrific dissonance it otherwise might.

Poole traces the word “foodie” back to 1982 and “foodist” to the late 19th century—for hucksters selling fad diets, “which is quite apt,” he tartly observes.

Happy exploring!

A Good Year for “Bad-Ass”

Actually, it’s been a very good year for every iteration of the A-word. According to the media-news site Romenesko, which pays attention to such things, “ass” has appeared 22 times on NPR in the last year, only three times “in reference to the animal.” And there’s been little objection among booksellers to the barely taboo-avoiding title of linguist Geoffrey Nunberg’s latest book, released in August.

 

Book cover with wall of assholes.

 

The subtitle—“Assholism, the First Sixty Years”—makes it clear that Nunberg’s A-word is “asshole,” a word Nunberg says originated among American GIs during World War II and entered everyday language in the 1970s.*

I haven’t (yet) seen “asshole” in brand language, but—as noted in this space on several previous occasions—“ass” has been steadily gaining ground in the marketplace. In fact, “bad ass,” noun and adjective, has become practically a badge of brand honor.

Here, for example, is a box of Charles & Charles Washington State rosé, photographed at Berkeley Bowl Marketplace, a generally family-friendly establishment:

 

“Yes you can drink rosé and still be a bad *ss.”

 

The winery’s own website, however, compares the taste of Charles & Charles rosé to Jolly Ranchers, which seems kind of candy-ass to me.

Down in Los Angeles, there’s a food truck—excuse me, “gourmet mobile burger concept”—that puts “badass” right up front in the name: Baby’s Badass Burgers.

 

 

(Hat tip: Michael.)

Indeed, LA may want to change its acronym to “BA.” TechCrunch reported last month on an infusion of cash for online retailer Nasty Gal, whose offices are in the 213.

 

 

Nasty Gal takes its name from the album by Betty Davis, “the patron saint of badass women,” according to the About Us page.

In other news, a movie called Ass Backwards, starring Clueless’s Alicia Silverstone, is currently in post(erior)-production. The film’s writers raised more than $50,000 in funding on Kickstarter but haven’t sent updates to backers in more than 15 months, which sounds downright A-wordish.

And because if I don’t include it I’m sure to hear from several of you, here’s your Big Ass Fans mention. The company, whose logo is a donkey’s behind, is based in Lexington, Kentucky; the ad is in the September 17 issue of the New Yorker and may represent the first time “bespoke” and “ass” have appeared together in a commercial context.

 

 

Previously featured on Fritinancy: Bad Ass Booty Balm diaper ointment (“Got a bad ass in your crib?”).

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* I heard Nunberg talk about Ascent of the A-Word last month at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, where his interviewer was Robert J. Sutton, author of The No Asshole Rule. Because the event was being taped for public-radio broadcast, both gentlemen had to sidestep actual A-words in favor of “A-word.” It was an impressive exercise in forbearance, although Nunberg did slip in a D-word.

Junk and Pride

A couple of language notes from San Francisco Pride, the annual celebration that culminated yesterday with the Pride Parade from Market and Beale streets to Civic Center.

I spotted “Touch Our Junk!” on the marquee of the Nob Hill Theatre (not on the parade route). The façade was festooned with rainbow bunting.

 

Nob Hill Theatre, 729 Bush Street, San Francisco. (Shot through my windshield.)

“Junk” as a slang synonym for “male genitals” became a “cri de crotch” (as the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus put it) in late 2010, after a software engineer named John Tyner refused the full-body security scan at San Diego International Airport. “If you touch my junk, I’m gonna have you arrested,” Tyner told the screener. The trope quickly evolved into “Don’t touch my junk!” The Nob Hill Theatre marquee playfully inverted (ahem) the quote, turning a threat into an invitation.

As Ben Zimmer wrote in a December 2010 “On Language” column in theNew York Times, “junk” had been introduced into the lexicon of genital euphemisms in 1983, in a gay-themed short story by Ethan Mordden called “The Hustler”:

Since it’s doubtful that the young popularizers of junk were familiar with Mordden’s fictional forerunners, something about the sound and sense of the word must have made it ripe for reinvention. Tom Dalzell, whose latest book is “Damn the Man!: Slang of the Oppressed in America,” sees junk catching on euphemistically: “To diminish the shock, we call the genitals childish names or use vague and sometimes coy euphemisms —down there, unit or thing.” The Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky concurs, adding stuff as another euphemistic model forjunk. Unlike these other terms, however, junk is a harsh monosyllable evocative of four-letter taboos.

The other language innovation I observed was Bay Area OccuPride, whose name is a nifty blend of occupy (the American Dialect Society’s 2011 Word of the Year) and pride, the one-word tag for “celebration of gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender identity and achievements.”

 

OccuPride’s adaptation of the gay rainbow flag.

OccuPride was formed to protest the commercialization and corporatization of the Pride observances.

As for “gay pride,” the phrase first appeared in print in the Washington Post’s June 29, 1970, coverage of a march that “was the climax of what its organizers called ‘Gay Pride Week’.” (Note the use of quotation marks around Gay Pride Week.) “Pride” was chosen because it’s the antithesis of “shame”; earlier slogans had included “gay is good” and “gay liberation.” The success of “pride” is often credited to Brenda Howard, an activist in New York City who helped organize the first-anniversary commemoration, in 1970, of the Stonewall riots.

“Pride” is also, of course, the collective noun for a group of lions. This association has been made explicit in some usages of “gay pride.”

Gay pride of lions bracelet. Flickr photo by itsalovelycake.

 

According to the OED, “pride” is also an obsolete term for sexual desire (“esp. in a female animal; heat”). It’s also one of the seven deadly sins. Columnist and author Dan Savage wrote in a June 1999 issue of The Stranger:

Webster’s defines pride as “inordinate self-esteem,” or “a reasonable and justifiable self-respect." Whether inordinate or justifiable, pride was an effective antidote: as more gays and lesbians committed the sin of pride, fewer were victimized by shame.

 

Words of the Year 2011: Fritinancy Edition

In 1999, the American Dialect Society’s word of the year was “Y2K.” In 2007 it was “subprime.” Now that we’re almost finished with the current year, it’s time to ask ourselves: Which word best communicates the spirit of ’11?

I have my own suggestions both for an overall winner and for runners-up and special-category winners. The list appears after the jump; first, though, a bit of explanation.

I followed the ADS’s criteria for selection, in this case:

• demonstrably new or newly popular in 2011
• widely and/or prominently used in 2011
• indicative or reflective of the popular discourse
• not a peeve or a complaint about overuse or misuse

Submissions need to meet only one of the criteria to qualify. Note, too, that “word of the year” is broadly defined as “vocabulary item”: it doesn’t have to be a single word. And because this is the American Dialect Society, words need to have been popular or prominent in the United States.

By the way, anyone can play this game. Check out the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year page to see how to submit your words via email, Twitter, or Facebook. If you’re planning to be at the society’s 2012 meeting in Portland, Oregon, you can participate in the voting at 5:30 p.m., January 5 6, at the Hilton Portland & Executive Tower.

And now for my list, presented in alphabetical order. Linked words have been featured in this space during 2011.

November Linkfest

Is it time to rename the beleaguered Euro? The IPKat blog, which covers intellectual-property issues in Europe and the UK, wants your opinion. At this writing, voting is almost evenly divided among Neuro, BizMark, and Tenax (“Latin for frugal, grasping, obstinate and stingy”), but some of the runners-up are pretty clever, too: the Meou (“Memberstate European Operating Unit”), the Markel (a blend of the German mark and “Merkel”), the Ohno (no explanation required). You have till midnight (GMT) Sunday to vote. Via @igornaming.

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“Consider Tide detergent, Taizi, whose Chinese characters literally mean ‘gets rid of dirt.’ (Characters are important: the same sound written differently could mean ‘too purple.’)” – “Picking a Brand Name in China Is a Business Itself,” New York Times, November 12. Pinyin News begs to differ: “Nope. The Mandarin name for Tide detergent is Tàizì. On the other hand, ‘too purple’ would be ‘tài zǐ,’ which is close but not the same.” (Hat tip: Ben Zimmer.)

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I’m loving Word Soup, the new Wordnik series that covers “strange, obscure, unbelievable (and sometimes NSFW) words” heard on television. A few from the October 28 post: Apparition American (a euphemism for “ghost”), turfucken (“sex with ducks”), and volumptuous (a Snooki-ism that blends “voluptuous” and “lump”). And from November 9: Moneyed American (a euphemism for “rich person”) and jägerbar (a were-bear that hunts). Say, Wordnik, how about turning Word Soup into a book?

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Speaking of TV, here in the US we’re impatiently awaiting Season 2 of Downton Abbey, coming to PBS January 8, 2012. In the meantime, Oxford Dictionaries gives us a guide to the language of the series, which is set in England just before and during World War I. No spoilers, thankfully, but plenty of interesting word histories—and some anachronisms, like “when push comes to shove,” which was primarily used in the US until 1958.

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A hat tip to the Wordnik Twitter feed for the link to “10 Words You Might Think Came from Science (But Are Really from Science Fiction).” On the list: robotics, zero gravity, blast off.

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Speaking of science fiction (not really), the Spaceage Portal of Sentence Discovery is a database of “interesting language patterns and elements,” including figures of speech, grammatical-syntactic structures, and “rhetorical maneuvers.” Search under the “clincher sentences” tag, for example, and read examples by Adam Gopnik, Todd Purdum, and Bill Bryson. Or: “Be of service to the universe by submitting examples that you yourself have discovered.” Fun and very, very useful. Via Sentence First.

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Do you believe it’s a cardinal sin to begin a sentence with a conjunction or end a sentence with a preposition? You are, in a word, wrong. Paul Brians, keeper of the indispensable Common Errors in English Usage website, has compiled a list of non-errors: “those usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually standard in English.” Included: “over” vs. “more than,” “raise” vs. “rear,” “between vs. among,” and—of course—”hopefully” and “momentarily.” (The late William Safire called these non-errors “incorrections,” a label Language Log has adopted.)

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I rarely post links to advice about writing because so much of it is tedious, dumb, or both. J. Maureen Henderson’s “How to Improve Your Writing,” which was published in Forbes last month, is different: it’s smart, practical, and funny. (First tip: “Do more of it. Maybe.” Second tip: “Read more. Possibly.”) The best piece of advice in the column: Edit other people’s work.

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“[S]lang is always doubting. It’s always questioning, it’s always cynical, it’s always undermining and it’s always been negative.” Lexicographer Jonathon Green, author of Green’s Dictionary of Slang (which retails for a decidedly upmarket $625), talks about his favorite subject with The Browser.

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Baby Name Wizard went shopping and discovered a nursery’s worth of shoes named Bella, Madison, Chloe, and Olivia. Surprisingly, “there’s almost no relationship between the style of name and the style of shoe.”

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Downtown Los Angeles once had streets named Faith, Hope, and Charity. “This last one, Charity Street, was a nonstarter. No one wanted to ‘live on Charity,’ so it was renamed with the grand title of Grand Avenue.” More on L.A. street names in L.A. Downtown News.

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Following up on my Tech Jargon of Yore post, here are more than 30 tech ads from that paleolithic era, the 1990s. Despite the weird kerning, this Radio Shack ad made me smile.

WTH, ING?

I spotted this sign last week at the ING Direct outpost* in San Francisco’s Financial District (Post at Kearny):

 

 

Huh? “H… E… double hockey sticks”? A prissy euphemism for “hell” that I associate with the likes of Ned Flanders? Kind of anachronistic in an invitation to take a photo of a QR code, isn’t it? But maybe stop-you-in-your-tracks incongruity is what ING Direct is, um, banking on.

Of course, if that fails, there’s always shouting.

 

Dear ING: Few things make me less likely to patronize your institution than being addressed as “Hey” before we’ve been introduced. Or after. (When I receive emails from strangers that begin “Hey, Nancy!” I immediately delete them.) As for  “Why not be a stopperby,” I have a limit with cutesy made-up words, and you, ING, just crossed it.

But wait! ING is willing to try another tactic: the Zen koan.

 

I have absolutely no idea what this means. But hey (!), I’m for it!

 

Then there’s this “Declaration of Financial Independence” on the corner:

 

What do you mean “we,” Direct Man?

It’s a manifesto, but not ING’s: it’s intended for “us” passersby. Apparently “we” are supposed to solemnly intone the declaration until we’ve committed it to memory. Because, after all, it was “our” naughtiness that caused the financial mess in 2008, right? Certainly no fault of the financial institutions. Heavens, no.

I wanted to go inside the building and find out more about the signs, but the storefront was locked and vacant. Back in March, ING—the world’s largest direct bank, with US headquarters in Delaware—had announced that the 17,000-square-foot property at Post and Kearny would become an “ING DIRECT [more shouting!] Café” in partnership with Berkeley-based coffee retailer Peet’s Coffee and Tea. From the press release:

The Cafés are designed to educate, inspire and share the values of ING DIRECT by providing a face-to-face and interactive retail experience. In addition to information about ING DIRECT and talking to knowledgeable Associates, the Café will offer free Wi-Fi Internet access and office space for local information technology developers to work. It will also serve as a location for community meetings and events, including local consumer, lifestyle, arts, social and non-profit organizations.

Sounds groovy, doesn’t it? But here we are, nearly seven months later, and all is silent behind the big orange signs. What the H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks, indeed.

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* It can’t be a “branch” if it’s direct banking, can it?

Word of the Week: Buxom

Buxom: Healthily plump and ample of figure; full-bosomed.

From an AP story dated May 25, 2011, and headlined “Lawyer Objects to Buxom Woman at Trial”:

A Chicago lawyer says his opponent in a small claims case is using an unfair tactic by sitting a buxom woman next to him at counsel’s table.

Attorney Thomas Gooch says the woman’s sole purpose “is to draw the attention of the jury away from the relevant proceedings” — a dispute over a used car. He asks Cook County Circuit Judge Anita Rivkin-Carothers to order the woman to sit in the gallery with other spectators.

The legal blog Lowering the Bar points out that buxom here is a family-friendly-ish euphemism for “large-breasted.” The connection is clarified a couple of paragraphs down in the AP story, where Mr. Gooch is quoted as saying, “Personally, I like large breasts.”

Fruit-crate label (c. 1940s) from Etsy.

Courtroom etiquette aside, what about buxom? Today, the word is used only in reference to women, and specifically to their chestal areas. You might deduce, therefore, that buxom was originally something like buck-some (was buck an archaic term meaning “breast,” perhaps?) or even bust-some.

Well, it was once spelled bucksome. As for the rest, guess again.

A Bin Laden Lexicon

Some of the words and phrases that caught my attention in coverage of Osama bin Laden’s death:

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Abbottabad:  The city in northern Pakistan where bin Laden was found and killed is named for a British army officer, Major James Abbott (1807-1896), who founded the town in 1853. It’s pronounced with the stress on the second syllable: ah-BAHT-ah-bahd. The –abad suffix, also found in place names such as Islamabad and Hyderabad, comes from a Sanskrit word meaning “dwelling” or “town.” 

New York Times

James Abbott dressed as an Indian nobleman, 1847. (Hat tip: @johmcquaid)

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Double tap: “After bursts of fire over 40 minutes, 22 people were killed or captured,” writes Marc Ambinder in “The Secret Team That Killed bin Laden” (National Journal). “One of the dead was Osama bin Laden, done in by a double tap -- boom, boom -- to the left side of his face.” (Via @stevesilberman.) GunTec Dictionary defines “double tap” as a “colloquial term for the firing of two shots one immediately after the other at the same target.” UPDATE: As I note in a comment, below, the double tap technique is credited to two British police chiefs in 1930s Shanghai. They devised the method to overcome the limits of full-metal-jacketed ammunition. 

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SEAL: The bin Laden mission was carried out by “the specially trained and highly mythologized SEAL Team Six, officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group” (Ambinder). SEAL is a navy acronym for “sea, air, and land.”

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DevGru: A compression of “development group.” Ambinder writes that SEAL Team Six “was known even to the locals at their home base Dam Neck in Virginia as just DevGru.” DevGru is part of the Joint Special Operations Command, “an extraordinary and unusual collection of classified standing task forces and special-missions units” (Ambinder).

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Kinetic: Military euphemism meaning “lethal.” From the Ambinder article:

Recently, JSOC built a new Targeting and Analysis Center in Rosslyn, Va. Where the National Counterterrorism Center tends to focus on threats to the homeland, TAAC, whose existence was first disclosed by the Associated Press, focuses outward, on active “kinetic” -- or lethal – counterterrorism missions abroad.

Related: Read my April 2008 post on “post-kinetic development.”

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“Killed in training accidents in eastern Afghanistan”: Department of Defense code for “died in a JSOC operation that went bad” (Ambinder).

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Triumphalism: An attitude or feeling of victory or superiority. From the Whatever It Is, I’m Against It blog:

I’m not sorry to see bin Laden dead, but I can’t share in the triumphalism currently flooding the airwaves, nor do I feel any sense of relief, since I don’t expect this to change anything.

Related: Read my April 2011 post on triumphalism’s opposite, declinism.

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Honorific: “A title, phrase, or grammatical form conveying respect, used especially when addressing a social superior.” (American Heritage Dictionary) Media blogger Jim Romenesko reported this morning that the New York Times would no longer use the “Mr.” honorific in front of Osama bin Laden’s name, at the request of News Managing Editor Jill Abramson and Executive Editor Bill Keller. From the associate managing editor’s memo: “Without a ‘Mr.’ in front of his name, it was decided that we should capitalize the ‘B’ in Bin Laden on second references.”

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Halo effect: “How Big Will the Osama Halo Effect Be for Obama?” reads the headline on a post by Stephen J. Dubner on the Freakonomics blog. Dubner writes: “The halo effect is often short-lived — but will it, in this case, live long enough to power Obama through an election cycle?” The halo effect is “an effect whereby the perception of positive qualities in one thing or part gives rise to the perception of similar qualities in related things or in the whole” (American Heritage Dictionary). It was first described in a 1920 paper by the American psychologist Edward L. Thorndike, “A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings.”

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Also see this Visual Thesaurus compilation of notable words from President Obama’s May 1 announcement of bin Laden’s death.