Fritinancy

Halftime Show

In honor of  Big Game weekend, a couple of football-related items.

You've heard of the Rose Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl. (Gooooo, naming rights!) But you may not have known—I didn't—that some two-year colleges have bowl games, too. In the Bay Area, we have the Eagle Bowl, the Bulldog Bowl, and the Silicon Valley Bowl. And in the Central Valley, Modesto Junior College will host its 17th annual Graffiti Bowl tomorrow. Where does "Graffiti" come from? Well, Modesto is the home town of director George Lucas, who memorialized his high school experience in the 1973 film American Graffiti. The movie was actually shot not in Modesto but a couple of hours north, in Petaluma; nevertheless, Modesto has adopted "Graffiti" in a slew of civic names, including Graffiti Night (the first Saturday after high school graduation), the American Graffiti Festival (sponsored by the Kiwanis), and Graffiti Summer.

Seems like a good enough opportunity to revisit my all-time favorite graffiti cartoon. And here's a list of college bowl names present and past.

Modesto also has the most poetic city slogan in the United States:

Photo by Thomas Hawk.

Joan Didion wrote about that sign in Slouching Towards Bethlehem; it's how you distinguish Modesto from its Central Valley neighbor Merced, she said.

While going a-googling for that Modesto info, I discovered the Versus Channel, which is what Outdoor Life Network became in September 2006. As OLN, the channel focused on fishing and hunting; now it's an indoor-outdoor network that broadcasts extreme sports, hockey, "combat sports," and even darts. It's owned by Comcast.

I like Versus as the name of a sports channel: it speaks directly to the competitive spirit, even echoing gladiators and chariot races. (Versus is Latin, after all.)

But I found myself veering away from TV to ponder "versus," the word. In fact, I've been waiting for a branding moment to share these thoughts.

Versus is a preposition; in English, it doesn't change form. Or isn't supposed to. However, back in 2005 Neal Whitman wrote in his blog, Literal-Minded, about what he thought was his young son's idiosyncratic use of "versing" as a participle to mean "fighting against in a contest." It turns out that "to verse [someone/something]" isn't all that rare. Language Hat wrote about it, too, and one of his commenters (a Canadian, for what it's worth) offered that he'd been using "to verse" since the late 1970s or early 1980s.

But wait, there's more! I've been hearing a lot of constructions like one LeBron James used in a radio interview: "The Cavaliers verse [some other team]." (Apologies; I haven't been able to find the clip. I'll post a link if I locate it.) James was using verse the way another speaker might use versus, to mean against, but he was ... what? Conjugating it? Inflecting it? Truncating it? Imposing some hypercorrect notion of subject-preposition agreement?

This non-poetic verse shows up in print, too. It's a multi-sport infraction: See "Yankees verse the Phillies," "Lions verse Rams," "the avalanche verse the flyers" (anonymous commenter at 10:17 a.m.).

Clearly, verse is versing versus for the upper hand. (For the win?) Which will prevail? Perhaps one of you linguists—Mr. Whitman? Mr. Verb? Mr. Hat?—would care to weigh in.

Bad Brand Names: Teenflo

Here's a little quiz. I say "Teenflo," you say:

A. "For those really hard-to-wean babies!"

Evenflo bottle-feeding products.

B. "For that time of the month ... with wings!"

Carefree thong liners.

C. "For chic, contemporary Canadian fashion!"

Image from BetseyJenney, Boston and Newton.

Give up? The correct answer is "C." Teenflo: the most misleading brand name in retail.

Naming the Wild Things

In Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, the "wild things" are nameless; in Spike Jonze's movie version, which opens tomorrow, they're called Carol (a male, voiced by James Gandolfini), Alexander, Judith, Ira, and Douglas. Jonze and Sendak talk about monster-naming in a roundtable interview in the October 19 issue of Newsweek:

How did you name them?

Jonze: Dave [Eggers, the screenwriter] and I named them. We took the book and went to Kinko's and blew up big poster-size images of each spread. Our dining-room walls were covered with every spread of the book. As we'd write, we'd look at the images, just sort of soaking it in. It was a process of going back to the book and sitting and listening to the character. You realized how certain characters came and went in the book. The characters appearing and disappearing, it makes it more wild.

Maurice, you never had names for the characters?

Sendak: I never wanted them to have names. When it was an opera and the director and I were working on it during rehearsal, we had to have names to tell them when they were screwing up. They had Jewish names: Moishe, Schmuel. You have to remember this is an English opera house. We were all speaking Yiddish. It was very funny. But the names were dropped after the opera. They never had names until they became movie stars.

Which is most effective (scary or funny): ordinary Jewish names, ordinary Anglo names, or no names at all? Would you have preferred that the wild things be given traditionally scary names from folklore and fairy tales: Igor Grendel, Ichabod? Or should the names have been invented, such as Voldemort and Cruella?

Read outtakes from the interview at Pop Vox, Newsweek's culture blog.

Friday Names Roundup

It's been an omnium-gatherum kind of week, so let's finish in the same spirit.

1. A highly subjective (and very amusing) list of the ten worst restaurant names in Houston. My favorite: a sushi restaurant named Todai. I imagine the food is to die for. (Via @she_eats). See also "Nine of the Weirdest Restaurant Names in Existence." Although the latter list first appeared in the SF Weekly, the editors missed a famous local landmark, the Fly Trap. (It's now called Zaré at Fly Trap, but they can't fool me.)

2. Does global warming need a porn name? A New Scientist blog wonders whether a sexier appellation would "provoke a ... passionate response from the apathetic masses." Apparently "global burning" is popular with Christian groups. (Via Jon Carroll.)

3. Speaking of smut, Isabella Rossellini has produced Green Porno, a series of short films about animals' reproductive habits. Watch here, on the Sundance Channel site. Then get yourself a new name from the Green Porno name generator. I'm Linda Larvae!

4. I'm probably the last person in the Bay Area to learn that there's a pitcher for the San Francisco Giants named Merkin Valdez. I realize he was born in the Dominican Republic, but still: couldn't someone have told his parents what "merkin" means? (Hint: It doesn't mean this.)

The End, with Popcorn

Now that 09/09/09 is behind us (and 9/11 almost behind us), Seekers of the Eternal Verities are casting their eyes toward 2012, the year in which, according to the Mayan calendar, the world purportedly ends. William Gladstone has written a novel, The Twelve, based on the prediction; Roger Ebert reports in his blog that plans are afoot to turn it into a movie, to be released in early 2012. But another twelve-ish end-of-the-world movie, 2012, will be released this year, on Friday the 13th of November. (All together now: Ooooh.)

Roger Ebert gets right to the point, as usual:

Meanwhile, have you wondered why, if the Mayans were able to pinpoint the end of time in 2012, they were unable to see that their own civilization would collapse in the ninth century?

Nine Nine Nine

Oooh, look! All the numbers on the calendar are the same today! It must mean ... that it's the day after September 8!

Significant or not, the symmetry evidently proved irresistible to film producer Tim Burton, whose new animated thriller 9 opened today. 

And Burton's isn't the only nine-ish title in the multiplex. Cloud 9, from Germany, and District 9, from South Africa, opened last month and are still playing in some theaters. (I saw District 9, an alien-invasion movie with some very interesting twists, last weekend. Sci-fi isn't a genre I usually favor, but I give this one two thumbs up.) In June, an Israeli movie called $9.99 was released in the United States; it closed before I had a chance to see it ... or was even aware of it.

Ari Karpel of the Los Angeles Times took note of the trend a couple of weeks ago, asking (tongue in cheek), "Is the proliferation of nines in movie titles a coincidence, or could it be part of a mystical master plan?" Naturally, Karpel turned first to a numerologist:

"Nine is considered the number of endings and the number of transformation and completion," says Kay Lagerquist, who ought to know; she co-wrote the book "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Numerology." That, Lagerquist says, may explain the duration of pregnancy ("Nine months brings it to fullness, to fruition") and the number of Supreme Court justices ("Nine is the largest number, allowing you to transcend to a higher understanding").

That theory may clarify the title of the Burton movie, Karpel writes, "in which mechanical 'stitch-punk' creatures made by a scientist and named 1 through 9 are left to sort things out when Earth has been poisoned to the point that humanity is dying."

Another number theory explains Nine, the movie adaptation of the Broadway musical that was in turn adapted from Federico Fellini's 1963 film 8 ½. The film, directed by Rob Marshall (Chicago), will open November 25. According to the Times story, the main character becomes creatively blocked while workng on his ninth film. Wikipedia tells it differently:

Fellini had entitled his film 8½ in recognition of his prior body of work, which included six full-length films, two short films, and one film that he co-directed. Yeston's title for the musical adaptation adds another half-credit to Fellini's output and refers to Guido's age in his primal hallucination. Yeston called the musical Nine, explaining that if you add music to 8½, "it's like half a number more."

(Why not just go all the way to eleven?)

From a branding standpoint, the nine-a-palooza poses a bit of a problem. Karpel once more:

Still, one has to wonder if all these nines aren't causing confusion in the marketplace, especially with "9" and "Nine." "['Nine'] couldn't be further from our movie" in terms of plot, explains Acker, who says there was a "conversation I wasn't privy to" among the producers of the two films, setting up a "two-month buffer" between the releases. (Neither Focus Features, which is distributing "9," nor the Weinstein Co., producers of "Nine," would comment).

Other movie and TV titles:

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999)
The Whole Nine Yards (2000)
Nine Queens (Nueve Reinas) (2000)
Nine 1/2 Weeks (1986)
Nine to Five (1980; the Broadway musical adaptation, 9 to 5, closed last Sunday)
Nine Months (1995)
Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959; widely considered to be one of the worst movies ever made)

(Hat tip: MJF.)

"The Pink Elephant in the Living Room"

From an interview with the actress Jennifer Aniston in the September issue of Elle:

On being labeled a “lonely girl”: "I'm not going to ignore the pink elephant in the living room. It's fine. I can take it. If I'm the emblem for 'this is what it looks like to be the lonely girl getting on with her life,' so be it."

Ms. Aniston colorized the idiom, which is usually stated as "the [color-unspecified] elephant in the room." Its meaning: "an important and obvious topic, which everyone present is aware of, but which isn't discussed, as such discussion is considered to be uncomfortable." (Source: The Phrase Finder.) The room is usually unspecified, too—when used in a business context, the room may be a conference room. The "living room" association was first made in the title of a 1984 book, An Elephant in the Living Room: A Leader's Guide for Helping Children of Alcoholics.

Speaking of alcoholics, "seeing pink elephants" is a euphemism, reportedly coined by none other than Jack London*, for "hallucinating while in a drunken stupor." When the title character in Disney's Dumbo accidentally drinks a bucket of booze, he dreams about "pink elephants on parade":

In the absence of any inside info about her experience with liquid intoxicants, I will venture to guess that Aniston simply conflated the two idioms.

For more celebrity malapropisms, see Celebrity Usage and Celebrity Grammar. Yes, I know that the most recent posts are dated June 2006 and that all three sites are supposed to redirect to Celebrity English, but Celebrity English n'existe pas. And the archives, with their combination of inane celebrity blather and deadpan academic critique, are still fun to read.

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* That post, written by a "Cocktail Shaker & Barware collector, amature [sic] mixologist, cocktail enthusist [sic], and all around lover of good food and drink" in the blog Shaken & Stirred, is a trove of pink elephantiana.

Mastering the Art of Book Titling

Julie & Julia, the movie based on the memoirs of Julia Child and Julie Powell, opened today. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott opened his admiring review with a description not of a cooking scene but of the discussion over the title of Child's landmark cookbook:

It’s not an especially suspenseful moment — pretty much anyone who has cooked an omelet knows what the book is called — but it gives [director Nora] Ephron and the audience a chance to savor the precise nature of Julia Child’s achievement.

The book is “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” — not “How To” or “Made Easy” or “For Dummies,” but “Mastering the Art.” In other words, cooking that omelet is part of a demanding, exalted discipline not to be entered into frivolously or casually. But at the same time: You can do it. It is a matter of technique, of skill, of practice.

The title of Julie Powell's book, based on Powell's attempts to cook every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, strikes a very different note: Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. It's a memoir, not a cookbook, and it's based on Powell's blog, which explains the first-name-basis, just-a-couple-of-gals main title. The numeral-heavy subtitle reflects a contemporary trend: compare Ammon Shea's Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages.

Need help with the title of your own literary classic? I've worked with authors and led workshops on trends and techniques in book titling. Here's something I wrote about one of those techniques; contact me if you want a consultation.

Word of the Week: Dictionaraoke

Dictionaraoke: A musical form in which an instrumental (karaoke) version of a song is accompanied by online dictionary-pronunciation audio files. A portmanteau of dictionary and karaoke, which is itself a portmanteau word. Its literal meaning is "empty orchestra," from the Japanese word kara, "empty," and ōkesutora, the Japanese rendering of orchestra.

Dictionaraoke was invented in 2001 by the Snuggles Collective, which a press release describes as "a diverse group of musicians communicating through the Internet" who were "inspired by the recent addition of spoken word audio clips to the Merriam-Webster and Microsoft Encarta online dictionaries." (The Dictionaraoke logo, above left, and website design appear to owe more than inspiration to Merriam-Webster online.)

Listen to Dictionaraoke here.

I learned about Dictionaraoke on the public-radio show "To the Best of Our Knowledge," which recently devoted an hour to the karaoke phenomenon. Also discussed during the hour: Gomeroke, the invention of The Gomers, "a comedy-rock/experimental music/progressive rock band based in Madison, Wisconsin." In Gomeroke, live music replaces recordings.

Other karaoke-isms:

In Seattle, there's a monthly movie sing-along called Cineoke!. (Hat tip: Seattle resident and trivia master James Callan, who blogs at Quiz Quiz Bang Bang.)

Martha Brockenbrough, founder of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, responded to my Twitter query about karaoke with a coinage of her own: scary-oke. "You'll know it when you hear it." I asked whether she wanted credit for the word, and she demurred: "It just describes the way I sing." Nevertheless, well played!

Finally, I spotted this sign in the window of the gym around the corner:

UPDATE: I just learned about Whuff-aoke, a "karaoke across America" tour to promote The Whuffie Factor, a new book by San Francisco community-marketing consultant Tara Hunt.

UPDATE #2: James Callan (again) alerted me to stripparaoke, which James says "was apparently in vogue in Portland [Oregon] for a while."

For the curious: The first karaoke machine was developed in the 1970s by a Japanese musician, Daisuku Inoue, who never patented his invention. The true spread of karaoke is credited to a Filipino inventor, Roberto del Rosario, who patented his Minus-One machine in the 1980s. More information here.

"Art & Copy"

Yesterday at the San Francisco International Film Festival I saw a terrific new documentary: Art & Copy, about the people behind some of the most influential and inventive advertising campaigns of the last half century. The film, which was commissioned the ad-industry nonprofit One Club, focuses on living members of the Creative Hall of Fame Advertising Hall of Fame, including the profane and combative George Lois, who created many groundbreaking Esquire covers as well as the equally groundbreaking "I Want My MTV" campaign; Phyllis K. Robinson, the copywriter who helped found Doyle Dane Bernbach and who conceived and wrote the "It Lets Me Be Me" campaign for Clairol; and Hal Riney, the creator and voice actor behind campaigns for Perrier, Saturn, Crocker Bank ("We've Only Just Begun" was written expressly for that campaign), and—most notoriously—the "Morning in America" campaign for Ronald Reagan. Riney was interviewed on camera before his death last year.

Among the earliest work shown are the legendary Volkswagen ads created by Doyle Dane Bernbach in an era when the VW was widely regarded as "Hitler's car." It's not only the finished ads that are revolutionary; it's also the process that created them. DDB was, amazingly, the first agency in which copywriters and graphic designers worked in teams; previously, advertising was driven by copy, which was written first (I admit I'm sorry I never experienced this primacy of the word) and then shipped upstairs or downstairs to the art department, which laid it out and added pictures. "Creatives," as we're now called, weren't considered true "advertising men": that title went to the account executives—the suits.

The film makes a compelling case that the center of creative gravity has shifted in the last couple of decades from New York City to the West Coast. Besides Riney, whose agency lives on in San Francisco under the corporate aegis of European ad giant Publicis, the Left Coasters in the film include San Franciscans Rich Silverstein and Jeff Goodby, whose "Got Milk?" campaign transformed the milk industry and who memorably associated amphibians with beer; Lee Clow, whose L.A. agency, TBWAChiatDay, has been making wildly creative ads for Apple for a quarter-century; and Dan Wieden and Dave Kennedy of Wieden + Kennedy in Portland, the team that came up with "Just Do It" for Nike as well as memorable work for Coca-Cola and other clients.

Art & Copy would be enjoyable and worthwhile even if it consisted only of interviews and portfolio pieces, but it goes further. Director Pray puts advertising in a larger context, throwing compelling statistics onto the screen (global spending on advertising is expected to reach $544 billion by 2010) and folding in a couple of fascinating side stories. One is about a "sign rotator," a fourth-generation billboard worker whom we see at his vertigo-inducing labor. The other story covers the global satellite phenomenon, which has transformed how, and how often, the world sees TV ads.

The best part of seeing movies at a film festival is often the Q&A with the director afterward. The post-screening session with Doug Pray did not disappoint. I was glad someone asked about the satellite launch we see, in snippets, from preparation through execution. Pray told us he'd wanted from the outset to film a launch, but was turned down by U.S. companies and agencies. He finally found a willing participant in, of all places, French Guyana. His crew flew down there to shoot, and made an astonishing discovery: just a short distance from the launch pad was a series of prehistoric petroglyphs. Communication then: communication now. The petroglyphs found their way into the film, too.

Watch a couple of short clips from the film: one about George Lois here and another one—the dazzling opening sequence—here.

Immediately after the screening I attended a panel session with Silverstein, Goodby, and Wieden, who talked about their lives in advertising and screened more ads, some familiar, some new. One of them—this piece for a nonprofit I'd never heard of, The Girl Effect—consists only of words against blank backgrounds. It is nothing short of thrilling.

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Volkswagen "Lemon" ad from here, where you can also read the story behind the campaign.