Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Poisson d'Avril

Poisson d’avril: “April fish” (French): a person who is taken in by an April Fools’ Day prank. By extension, the prank itself.

Holidays that celebrate foolishness and pranking have antecedents in the Roman era and possible earlier. “Foolish” holidays are still observed in many countries around the world. The English custom goes back to the late 17th century; the French tradition appears to predate it by a century or so. One theory, according to the French-language Wikipedia entry, is that until 1564 the calendar year began on April 1; some traditionalists refused to accept the change, and they were mocked by being given fake gifts.

The poisson of poisson d’avril is a paper fish that is stealthily attached to the back of an unsuspecting person. In France, it’s a children’s game, although the trope is often appropriated by the media, as in this photo from 2012:

Via the Becoming Madame blog.

Former Prime Minister President Nicolas Sarkozy pins a fish on the back of his successor prime minister, François Fillon, while telling him (rough translation): “François, you’ll stay in Matignon [the prime minister’s residence] until 2012, I swear!” Hollande Fillon: “Cool!” (The joke: Sarkozy was defeated in May 2012.)*

Poisson d’Avril is also the name of a 1954 French film directed by Gilles Grangier.

The French newspaper Le Figaro has compiled the best French poissons d’avril of 2013, including “Drones to Distribute Newspapers” and “Sarkozy to Move to Belgium.” For technophile Anglophones, here’s TechCrunch’s annual “Great List of April Foolings.” 

My own favorite April 1 post of 2013 is this little masterpiece from Brand New: “Google Chrome Broken Image Icon Heals Broken Hearts.” On the more scholarly side, here’s a Wordnik list of April Fools’ Day words, including dupe, gull, and cat’s-paw.

My own past roundups of April Fools’ hoaxes: 2011, 2010, 2008, 2007, more 2007. And from today: my guest post at Duets Blog about the last naming advice you need.

UPDATE: PayWag, HondaHAIR, Snickettes, and other branding foolery in AdWeek’s “Super Bowl of Satire.”

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* One of you will surely be able to improve on my translation. UPDATE: Thanks to Pat in Toulouse! The fault lay not so much in my translation as in my ignorance of French political figures.

There Isn't Any Name That I Can't Rhyme

Let’s play the name game!

Boku! “BOKU enables people across the globe to pay for the things they love using the one device they’re never without.” Phonetic spelling of French beaucoup (much, a lot). Based in San Francisco, with offices in London, Berlin, and Singapore.

Loku!  “At Loku, we have built the first-of-it’s-kind [sic] local analytics technology that gathers and synthesizes local information from the web & social media.” Possibly from “location” plus “you.” Based in Berkeley.

Zoku!  “Zoku is dedicated to providing unique products for the home. We are a collective of creative individuals who create things that will make our lives better through intelligent design and engineering.” No name story provided, but zoku means “tribe,” “clan,” or “family” in Japanese. Based in Hoboken.

Roku!  “Roku launched the first product designed to deliver movies from Netflix instantly on TV, using the power of the Internet.” Based in San Francisco. Roku is the Japanese word for “six”; more about Roku here.

All together now …

 

Not What They Seem

Names that look like one thing and mean another.

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PaeDae: Not a K-pop rising star!

 

“Free stuff is awesome, but free stuff you want is even awesomer.”

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Snoxin: Not a mucus-based poison!

“Currently not available in the USA.”

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Vag Fresh: Not a feminine-hygiene product!

Via Regretsy (be sure to read the comments!) by way of Jessica Stone Levy.

"Oui, Oui, Oui" All the Way Home

There’s only one little piggy in this set of combat-ready bendable toys. Monsieur Tofu is a “soy boy.”

 

Front of package.

 

Back of package.

 

Naturally, I get a kick out of “Mr. Bacon”: as some of you know, I’m very fond of “mister” names. But why is the tofu dressed as Mr. Peanut? And what’s up with “Monsieur”?

Tofu is Asian, of course, not French, unless you think of tofu as soy cheese—which it is, sort of—and you think of all cheese as French. (Remember Bart Simpson’s “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”?) But does that explain “Monsieur Tofu”? I don’t think so.

Here’s my best guess: Tofu is stigmatized as fancy-pants food for pinky-bending snobs, and “monsieur” is code for “elite” and “effete.” Never mind that you can buy tofu at Walmart, or that a pound of tofu costs less than half of what a pound of bacon costs.

In a different decade, they might have gotten away with calling Mr. Bacon’s opponent “Tofu-San.” Today a Japanese stereotype is unacceptable. Caricaturing the French, though—that’s perfectly kosher. Which is more than you can say about Mr. Bacon.

I found “Mr. Bacon vs. Monsieur Tofu” at Powell’s Sweet Shoppe in Berkeley. You can also buy it from Archie McPhee.

Word of the Week: Minaudière

Minaudière: A small, hard-sided, often bejeweled evening bag meant to be carried in the hand. Pronounced min-oh-dee-AIR. From the French adjective meaning “affected” or “coquettish”; from the verb minauder, “to simper.”*

 

Genie lamp minaudière by Judith Leiber,  3 1/4"H x 5 3/4"W x 1 1/2"D. Covered in Austrian crystals and tiger-eye cabochons, it retails for $5,995 at Neiman Marcus.

The minaudière was invented and named around 1930 by the jewelers Van Cleef & Arpels. Here’s how Antique Jewelry University tells the story:

The minaudière is a type of vanity case. Constructed from gold or silver, it takes the form of a box. When opened, it reveals various lady-like essentials: a comb, a case for lipstick, a lighter, small compartments for cigarettes, change, and powder. The inspiration for the design came from a friend and client: Frances Gould, wife of American railroader Jay Gould. Gould apparently rushed to a meeting with Charles Arpels, throwing her necessities into a tin Lucky Strike cigarette case. Arpels took the idea and made it his own. He named it for his wife. The French verb minauder means, roughly, to simper or smile coyly. Madame Van Cleef’s simpering, especially at parties, was famous.

If the story’s true, it would be a rather backhanded tribute. (And there’s something wrong with the names. Charles Arpels was a founder, in 1896, of Van Cleef & Arpels with his brother-in-law Alfred Van Cleef; his wife would have been Mlle. Van Cleef but Mme. Arpels.)

The contemporary queen of minaudières is Judith Leiber (pronounced “Leeber”), who was born in 1921 and trained as a handbag maker in her native Budapest. She moved to New York after World War II. She made her first minaudière in 1967, when a different handbag design turned out to be poorly gold-plated; after Leiber covered it with rhinestones it became a hit with customers. Her designs are often elaborate and whimsical: dogs, birds, fish, a slice of cake. Leiber’s minaudières have been collected by museums around the world, including the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 

Side view of stacked-books minaudière by Judith Leiber, about 3" x 5". Collection of FIDM (Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising), New York.

“In Leiber’s world, the essentials are a handkerchief, a lipstick, and a one hundred dollar bill.” – FIDM.

Watch a short, wordless film about a minaudière with multiple marvelous compartments.

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* Totally off topic, but “simper” reminds me of “a simpering, whimpering child again” in “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” from Pal Joey. Here’s Patti LuPone singing the naughty original lyrics by Rodgers and Hart: “Horizontally speaking/He’s at his very best.”

FSHN STTMNT

Where does a style-savvy girl have to shop to buy a vowel nowadays? I’m looking at you, BLK DNM, the newish anti-fashion fashion boutique in downtown Manhattan that the New York Times profiled last week. (Reporter Jon Caramanica called BLK DNM “in essence an aggressively priced Uniqlo or Gap for the upper echelon of the invisible.”)

Is BLK DNM texting shorthand for “black denim”? Maybe. Maybe not. Urban Dictionary says “d’n’m” stands for “deep and meaningful.” Perhaps BLK stands for “bulk.” Or “blerk.” Or “bollocks.”

I’d dismiss BLK DNM as a pretentious anomaly if I hadn’t seen evidence that it is in fact part of an annoying trendlet. Let’s take a look:

• BHLDN, which I wrote about a year ago, is Anthropologie’s entry into the wedding-fashion market. As I said in the post, it begs to be backronymed. (“Beware Hardly Literate Dumb Names”?)
  
  
• Asmbly Hall, a new boutique on San Francisco’s Fillmore Street, scrounged up enough cash to buy a couple of A’s, but had to cut the E (and an S) out of the budget.

 

• JNSQ, “the first independent, multimedia style magazine for iPad,” takes its name for French texting shorthand for “je ne sais quoi,” which means “I don’t know what.” How we’re supposed to pronounce the name? Moi, je ne sais pas. The online version of the company, according to a TechCrunch post, is called Jenesqua. Gen-ess-kwa? Donnez-moi un break.
  
  
• The Gap is catching the consonantal drift, too. Its new online catalog, Styld.by, “taps fashion bloggers from popular sites including FabSugar, Lookbook.nu, and Refinery29, to style and showcase pieces of Gap clothing,” according to a post on Co.Create, Fast Company’s branding/entertainment/tech blog. (The “by” in the name looks like a country code, but isn’t: the URL is www.styld-by.com. There is no .by country code … yet.) Styld.by was created by a San Francisco agency called AKQA. AKQA doesn’t stand for anything except a certain JNSQ. 

Of course, the whole thing started several years ago when tech companies like Flickr, Plnnr, and Dlvr.it (RIP) eliminated vowels to obtain short domain names. It sends one message when a scrappy startup cheats on spelling and quite another when the vowelless name belongs to an image-conscious fashion brand. By belatedly jumping on the bndwgn, are retailers trying to sell us austerity? Or are they just moving too fast to vowel up?

Potty Humor

You have to hand it to Poo-Pourri.

“Forever changing the bathroom experience.” Note angel tooting on throne.

For starters, the product has a catchy rhyming slogan: “Spritz the bowl before you go and no one else will ever know!” You just don’t see enough versification in marketing copy nowadays.

I also give Poo-Pourri credit for coming right out and saying “stinky poop smell” instead of some wan euphemism.

And the brand extensions evince what one of my readers once called “dedication to the theme.” To name just a few: Trap-a-Crap (“a natural Before-You-Go spray that takes the odor away”), Déjà Poo (another “before-you-go” spray; what a name!), Heavy Doody (yet another “preemptive bathroom scent”), Pooch-Pourri (spray it on your pet’s coat), and Royal Flush (“the fresh essence of eucalyptus works in synergy with spearmint”). Do I need to add that most of these products are available in gift packaging? For that very special, thick-skinned someone, it goes without saying.

Poo-Pourri is, of course, a pun on “potpourri,” which since the mid-18th century has signified a miscellaneous collection. It often refers specifically to a fragrant medley of dried herbs and flowers. It didn’t start out that way, as the word’s etymology reveals: pot pourri literally means “rotten pot” in French (from Spanish olla podrida, ditto)—the English cognate of pourri is “putrid.”

Which makes Poo-Pourri even more … redolent than you’d first suspect.

More experiments in excremental branding here, here, here, and here.

Hat tip: Nancy Nall.

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P.S. Speaking of potty humor, I recently learned that American Standard, the toilet manufacturer, is headquartered in Piscataway, New Jersey. Yes, Piscataway. Piss. Scat. Away. Well played! Now, if only they had a branch office in Flushing, New York.

Chaise What?

An original box for a Barbie Go-Together Furniture Kit, circa 1963, is currently on display at the California Design, 1930-1965 exhibit at LACMA.^*

 

“Chaise longue & side table with 3-D garden setting and accessories!”

Mattel no longer sells this kit, but even if it did, I doubt the seating element would be called a “chaise longue,” which is the correct term. (It’s French for “long chair.”) eBay sellers don’t accept that spelling: they all call it a chaise “lounge,” and so do many other Americans. (In Britain, apparently, the chaise longue is seen only in museums.) In fact, hewing to the correct pronunciation and spelling is liable to tag you as (a) a stickler, (b) a snob, (c) an interior decorator, or (d) French.

But beware the recency illusion: “longue” began shifting to “lounge” at least 150 years ago, according to Michael Quinion of World Wide Words. In his terrific memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid^**, Bill Bryson, who was born in 1951, recounts this story from his childhood in Des Moines:

I remember one day my father came in, quite excitedly, with a word written down on a piece of paper.

“What’s this word?” he said to my mother. The word was “chaise longue.”

“Shays lounge,” she said, pronouncing it as all Iowans, perhaps all Americans, did. A chaise longue in those days exclusively signified a type of adjustable patio lounger that had lately become fashionable. They came with a padded cushion that you brought in every night if you thought someone might take them. Our cushion had a coach and four horses galloping across it. It didn’t need to come in at night.

“Look again,” urged my father.

“Shays lounge,” repeated my mother, not to be bullied.

“Well, it’s just ‘long,’” my father said gently, but gave it a Gallic purr: “Shays lohhhnggg,” he repeated. “Isn’t that something? I must have looked at the word a hundred times and I’ve never noticed that it wasn’t lounge.”

“Lawngg,” said my mother marveling slightly. “That’s going to take some getting used to.”

“It’s French,” my father explained.

“Yes, I expect it is,” said my mother. “I wonder what it means.”

For the record, my family also owned a shays lounge with covers that didn't need to come in at night.

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* LACMA is one of more than 60 arts institutions participating in Pacific Standard Time, a fascinating and multifaceted retrospective of Southern California art, architecture, and design from 1945 through 1980. I visited six of the participating museums last weekend: the Huntington, the Norton Simon, the Skirball, the Getty, the Hammer, and LACMA. Pacific Standard Time continues through May 2012.

** Highly recommended. The audiobook, which is read by the author, is especially wonderful: Bryson is as lively a reader as he is a writer.

Word of the Week: Claque

Claque: A group of people hired to applaud at a performance. Pronunced clack. Borrowed from French; from claquer, an onomatopoetic word meaning “to clap.”

The claque originally surfaced in ancient Rome and became an institution in 17th-century France. By 1820, according to a Wikipedia entry, an agency opened in Paris to manage and supply claqueurs. (They didn’t just applaud: pleureuses—they were mostly women—were paid to weep at appropriate moments, rieurs laughed uproariously, bisseurs shouted “Bis! Bis!—“Encore! Encore!”—and so on.)

The most famous claque took shape in the 1830s, when Louis Véron became director of the Paris Opera. As Jennifer Homans writes in her superb history of ballet, Apollo’s Angels, Véron, a medical doctor by profession, had a genius for marketing. He recruited Auguste Levasseur (“and paid him splendidly”) “to form and lead what became known as ‘the claque’.” Homans explains:

Levasseur consulted closely with Véron, attended rehearsals, and studied the score for a given production—but he also took bribes from artists and their supporters. On the night of a performance, he marked himself by sporting brightly colored clothing and strategically placed his men throughout the audience. (Véron and the artists provided the tickets, gratuit.) Levasseur carried a cane, which he tapped at the appropriate moment, unleashing a round of applause, bravos, and stomping by his men designed to carry the public in its enthusiasm. This was not resented; to the contrary, Véron’s claim that the claque was a moderating force that “put an end to all quarrels” and stopped “unjust coalitions” of fans from disrupting performances appears to have been widely accepted.

Claque is not to be confused with a similar and more widely used French word, clique: a small, exclusive group of friends.

Aside from the Homans book, I’ve encountered claque only rarely, so I was pleased to see it used effectively last week by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in his blog, Conscience of a Liberal. The setup: Krugman told his readers that he’d been getting mail accusing him of “consorting with Nazis.” He traced the accusations to his public support of the Occupy Wall Street movement; the right wing, he wrote, “is mounting a full court press to portray Occupy Wall Street as an anti-Semitic movement, based, as far as I can tell, on one guy with a sign.”

Krugman continued:

At the same time, the claque is claiming that OWS is responsible for a crime wave. To believe this, you have to believe not only that a few thousand non-violent protestors are deeply straining a police force with 35,000 officers, but that all the rapists and murderers in the outer boroughs are saying, “Hey, the police are busy chasing hippies! Let’s party!” Oh, well.

Word of the Week: Skive

Skive: To split or cut (leather, rubber, etc.); to shave or pare (hides). Source: OED.

Vintage Contour Hip Belt with Skived Edge from Linea Pelle

 

The splitting/cutting use of skive was first recorded in English around 1825, but its roots are much older, going back to Old Norse skifa. A related word, spelled shive or schive, was recorded in the mid-13th century as a noun meaning “a slice of bread.” In the 16th century shive meant (a) the kneecap or (b) a pane of glass.

By 1915, in New York at least, a shive was a razor. Very soon thereafter the terminal e was dropped and the word became shiv, a knife (especially one fashioned in prison). Both shiv and shive are variants of chiv(e), thieves’ cant for “knife.” That sense of chiv(e) goes back to 17th-century England.

Meanwhile, skive acquired several alternate meanings, too. Since 1843, according to the OED, it has meant “a revolving iron disk or wheel used with diamond powder in grinding, polishing, and finishing diamonds and other gems.” (The word was imported from the Dutch schijf, which rhymes with “life” and means a disk or wheel.) It was recorded in the mid-19th century as a dialect word of uncertain origins meaning “to move quickly or lightly; to dart.” Since 1919 or so, it’s been a British slang term meaning “to evade” or “to shirk.” It’s often seen as “skive off”; Wordnik gives this example:

“When he was a student at RADA, he would skive off (because it was ‘full of poofs and ponces’) and wander the streets ‘like a tramp.’”

That “shirking” meaning of skive may be related to the dialect word or have a different source altogether: French esquiver, to dodge or slink away. Or could it have a distant relationship to the shaving/paring meaning—as in American slang “to cut (classes, etc.)”?

Not related to skive, but included here because I knew you’d ask: skeevy (“disgusting”) is an American slang term that the OED says comes from Italian schifo (“disgusting”). It’s related not to skive but to “eschew.” Read more at Language Log.

As for skivvies (underwear), it’s North American nautical slang first recorded in 1932 as “skivvy shirt.” Origin? Unknown, alas.

And then there’s this: I once learned a few words of Afrikaans, and the only one I’ve retained is skafie (rhymes with “day fee”), which has the wonderfully specific meaning of “a segment of an orange, clementine, or tangerine.” Since Afrikaans is related to Dutch, the word probably comes from Dutch schijf (disk), but it seems to me just as likely to mean “to split or cut.”