Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Creepers

Creepers: Shoes with thick soft soles, usually made of crepe rubber.

“Smiley Face Unicorn Glitter Mega Platform Wedge Hand Made Collaged Art Creepers” on Etsy. The platform is 4 inches high at the heel.

 

The Smithsonian blog Threaded traces the history of “creepers” to a 1953 name-of-the-dance hit song, “The Creep,” recorded by British big-band leader Ken Mackintosh. “A slow shuffle movement, it was embraced by a subculture called the Teddy Boys, who became known as creepers”:

In addition to distinguishing themselves by their musical preferences, Teddy Boys made themselves known through their dandy-like sartorial choices that referenced the early 20th century. A popular look included drainpipe pants with exposed socks, tailored drapey jackets, button-down shirts, brogues, Oxfords or crepe-soled shoes. Those ridged, thick-crepe-soled shoes with suede or leather uppers became known as “creepers”  because of their association with the Creep dance (and maybe because if you misspelled crepe, you got creep?).

Maybe, but crepe (or crêpe) and creep are unrelated etymologically. Crepe comes via French from a Latin root meaning “curled.” (Yes, it’s the same word whether you’re talking about a thin pancake, crinkly paper, or rubber with a corrugated surface. Because of the crumpled look of its petals, crape myrtle is related, too.) Creep comes from Old English créopan, which meant pretty much what it does today: “To move with the body prone and close to the ground, as a short-legged reptile, an insect, a quadruped moving stealthily, a human being on hands and feet, or in a crouching posture.” (OED)

Creepers became known as brothel creepers when British soldiers returned home from fighting World War II. From Smithsonian.com: “Still wearing their crepe-soled, military-issued boots, they hit the London nightclubs.”

Creepers’ popularity declined in the 1960s but re-emerged during the punk scene of the 1970s. They’re back again in exaggerated styles similar to the flatforms of several seasons ago.

Retailer Urban Outfitters currently sells 37 styles of creepers on its website – all for women, interestingly. One brand, T.U.K., based in Poway, California, accounts for about 40 percent of them.

T.U.K. Oil Slick Mondo Creeper. The company was founded by a Brit who originally named it Tredair United Kingdom.

 

Footwear footnote: Sneakers or sneaks to mean “soft-soled footwear” is very similar in connotation to creepers but much older. According to the OED, sneaks was used in this sense at least as early as 1862 (“The night~officer is generally accustomed to wear a species of India~rubber shoes or goloshes on her feet. These are termed ‘sneaks’ by the women [of Brixton Prison]”. Sneakers is classified as “orig. and chiefly U.S.”; the earliest citation is from an 1895 edition of Funk’s Standard Dictionary of the English Language. In 1900 the American humorist George Ade wrote in More Fables: “His Job on this Earth was to put on a pair of Pneumatic Sneakers every Morning and go out and investigate Other People's Affairs.”

The Changing Names of California's Freeways

Historian Kevin Starr writes:

Freeways were initially given poetic-evocative names, drawn from historic, literary, or geographical sources: the Cahuenga, the Bayshore, the Redwood, the Ramona, the Cabrillo, the James Lick, the Nimitz. In the second phase of development, freeways tended to take on the names of their destinations—the Hollywood, the Long Beach, the Santa Ana, the San Bernardino—as in August 1954 when the Arroyo Seco Parkway became the Pasadena Freeway. In the third phase of development, freeways were to become known primarily by their numbers—the 10, the 5, the 880, the 101—for they were now part of an integrated state grid, scheduled for integration into an interstate system.

-- Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963. Golden Dreams is one of eight volumes in Starr’s Americans and the California Dream series; Kevin Starr is a professor of history at the University of Southern California and the former state librarian of California (1994-2004).

In the Bay Area, many residents (and traffic reporters) still refer to the Bayshore and the Nimitz (and to the Warren Freeway, State Route 13). No one in Northern California, however, would call the Nimitz Freeway “the 880”: up here, we prefer our freeway numbers anarthrous. For more on that subject, see the second half of my 2011 post “Thinking, Doing, Engineering, Amazing.”

Lysol and Healthing

I’d missed the new marketing campaign for household brand Lysol until a column by New York Times advertising writer Stuart Elliott brought it my attention. Earlier this week, Elliott wrote in one of his regular “20 Questions” columns:

Will a new campaign for the Lysol line of products sold by Reckitt Benckiser, which is centered on the word “healthing,” prove to be the biggest bugaboo for English teachers and grammarians since R. J. Reynolds infuriated them with the jingle “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should”?

 

“Cleaning is hoping you’re killing germs. Healthing is knowing it.”

 

My answer: Nah. In the nearly six decades since that Winston jingle provoked an epidemic of pearl-clutching we’ve become blasé about (or unaware of) advertisers’ “bad” grammar (see “Lay Flat Collar,” “To Each Their Own,” et al.) and parts-of-speech-play (see “Tonight We Tanqueray,” “Let’s Merry,” “I Zappos to Get Noticed,” “Plus Your Life,” “Step into Awesome,” et al.). I suspect that some people even look forward to the next flight of language fancy from advertisers. I certainly do.

Still “healthing” bears comment – as does the Lysol brand itself.

Operation Fortitude

During the lead-up to D-Day—June 6, 1944—the Allied nations undertook an elaborate deception strategy designed to mislead the Germans about the real date and location of the Normandy invasion. The overall plan was called Operation Bodyguard; one of its more bizarre elements—the creation of a decoy army, complete with inflatable tanks and fake artillery—had the code name Operation Fortitude.

Why Fortitude? As Ben Macintyre writes in Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, his 2012 history of the plan:

The choice of code name for this particular operation—the crux of Bodyguard—was much debated. [British Prime Minister Winston] Churchill had given instructions that no code name should be selected that might seem flippant in retrospect or give a hint of the individual or action involved. But he also disliked code names that meant nothing at all, which is why the original choice, “Mespot,” was rejected. Also vetoed were “Bulldog,” “Swordhilt,” “Axehead,” “Tempest,” and, obscurely, “Lignite.” Finally, a name was selected that seemed to evoke the resolution required to pull it off: Operation Fortitude.

The story of Operation Fortitude is told in a new documentary by Rick Beyer, “The Ghost Army,” that had its premiere Tuesday night on PBS. (Repeat broadcasts are scheduled throughout the week.)

It wasn’t only the operations that were deliberately named. The code names of the double agents who worked for MI5, the British intelligence agency, were also chosen with care and a hefty dash of dry humor. Dusko Popov, for example, a risk-loving Serbian playboy, was dubbed “Agent Tricycle.”

Macintyre explains:

This may have been, in part, a reference to Popov’s insatiable appetites and his reputed but probably apocryphal taste for three-in-a-bed sex. It also recognized that the Tricycle network now consisted of one big wheel—Popov—supported by two smaller ones, Agents Balloon and Gelatine.

The Americans took a different approach to code names. When Popov came to Washington in 1941 on an assignment from MI5, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who regarded foreign spies as “just another species of criminal,” was not amused. “The FBI did not go in for jocular code names,” Macintyre tells us. “Popov was ‘Confidential Informant ND 63,’ an austere title that aptly reflects the bureau’s chilly attitude.”

Double Vornado

Spotted in San Francisco’s Financial District:

 Vornado Realty Trust, Montgomery Street.

 

Spotted in my storage closet:

Vornado whole-room air circulator, acquired during an unfortunate mildew episode.

 

The name duplication isn’t coincidental. The two brands are  related.

Vornado fans were first manufactured toward the end of World War II; the inventor of the original technology, an Oklahoma man named Ralph K. Odor (really), had started experimenting in the 1920s with improved airplane-propeller efficiency. In 1931 he introduced the Vornado Plane.

 

Ralph Odor’s 1931 test flight of the Vornado, via YouTube.

 

The Vornado name comes from “vortex action” plus a suffix, probably from “tornado.” (A 1936 news account of the plane said it would “roar through the skies on the wings of a span of man-made tornadoes.”)

In the 1940s Odor partnered with a Kansas entrepreneur, O.A. Sutton, and after the war ended the O.A. Sutton Corporation produced the first Vornado fans. Odor quit not long afterward over a patent-rights dispute, and the O.A. Sutton Corporation went bankrupt in the 1950s. The Vornado brand and company were resurrected in Andover, Kansas, in 1989.

As for Vornado Realty Trust, it traces its history to an appliance chain originally called Two Guys from Harrison, founded in 1946 by brothers Sidney and Hubert Hubschman of Harrison, New Jersey. In 1959, Two Guys bought the defunct O.A. Sutton Corporation and renamed the merged company Vornado. At the company’s peak, according to a Wikipedia entry, there were more than 100 Two Guys locations nationwide. Profits began declining in the 1970s, and in 1980, Vornado was acquired by Interstate Department Stores, Inc., which changed its name to Vornado Realty Trust and began selling the retail stores and leasing their physical locations.

Today, Vornado Realty Trust is a publicly traded company and one of the largest owners and managers of commercial real estate in the United States. And Vornado fans for home, business, and industrial use are sold at Sears, Costco, Lowe’s, Home Depot, and other retailers worldwide.

Nonplussed

A few observations about the new marketing campaign for the Bay Area’s Sutter Health medical group.

 

Outdoor ad, Van Ness Avenue at Filbert Street, San Francisco.

First, who says “with child” in 2013? Even on Downton Abbey, set between 1912 and 1922, characters were constantly saying that so-and-so was “pregnant.” (The casual use of the word was almost certainly anachronistic: the Online Etymology Dictionary tells us “pregnant” was a taboo word until the mid-1950s. “Expecting” and “in the family way” were far more common.)

“When you’re with child, we’re with you” is earnest but clunky: “with child” and “with you” aren’t really parallel here.

But what will puzzle most people about the ad is the slogan: “We Plus You.”

Here it is on the website:

The logo? Your guess is as good as mine.

 

It isn’t intended as a mathematical statement, with plus as a conjunction: “We plus you equals good health,” or something like that. No, plus is clearly a verb here: “It’s how you plus us, and we plus you.”

 

“Because you plus us … and we plus you.”

 

I remember some talk about to plus a couple of years ago, when Google launched its social-media service Google Plus. To give a stamp of approval to something on Google Plus, you click a “+1” icon. Users started referring to the action as “plussing.”

But it turns out Walt Disney had Google beat by almost 70 years. According to How to Be Like Walt: Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life, a chatty/motivational 2004 biography that refers to its subject by his first name, Walt Disney emphasized “the plus factor” to his artists and designers:

Sometime during the 1940s, Walt coined the term “plussing.” Normally, the word “plus” is a conjunction, as in “two plus two equals four.” But Walt used the word as a verb—an action word. To “plus” something is to improve it. “Plussing” means giving your customers more than they paid for, more than they expect, more than you have to give them. … He began by plussing Mickey Mouse with sound, then plussing the Silly Symphonies with color. Walt plussed the skills of his artists by sending them to art school at his own expense. Walt’s relentless quest for excellence kept him at the leading edge of his industry—and left his competitors, well, nonplussed.

Sutter Health may be using “plus” in this “improvement” sense. Or maybe it’s saying “You complete me.”

“We Plus You” isn’t the only bit of peculiar wordplay in the Sutter Health campaign. Here’s a full-page print ad in the March issue of San Francisco magazine:

 

 

“We specialize in You-ology.”

You-ology? Right down the hall from Your-ology, where you can get that prostate exam.

 

___

Re the title of this post: nonplussed does not mean nonchalant, although a lot of people think it does.

Word of the Week: Behindativeness

Behindativeness: The exaggerated rear shape created by a large dress bustle: “That lady has got a deal of behindativeness.” – Passing English of the Victorian Era, a Dictionary of Heterodox English, Slang and Phrase, by J. Redding Ware, published in London in 1909.

Bustled ladies with a deal of behindativeness, 1885-1886. From Digital Changeling.

You could easily pass several delighted hours in the company of Passing English of the Victorian Era, which is reproduced in its entirety at the Public Domain Review, a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation. (Other worthy time-wasters on the site include a 1912 illuminated version of Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur, a 1888 edition of Curiosities of Puritan Nomenclature, and Dennison’s Bogie Book for Halloween, from 1920.) The dictionary’s introduction sets a lofty tone: “‘Passing English’ ripples from countless sources, forming a river of new language which has its tide and its ebb, while its current brings down new ideas and carries away those that have dribbled out of fashion.” (“Passing” here means “ephemeral,” I think.) But the contents are more anecdotal than scholarly; the entry for chortle, for example, neglects to mention that Lewis Carroll coined the word in Through the Looking-Glass (1872).

But that’s a tiny quibble. The offhandedness of the dictionary is one of its many pleasures. Here I learned, for example, that the following words and phrases were Americanisms still regarded in early 20th-century England as rustic novelties: bark up the wrong tree, have an axe to grind, filibuster, fuss (“a dispute without serious consequences”) cold snap, lobby (the political verb), guess (“think”), thusly (introduced by humorists in the 1860s), tickle to death (“to delight in the extreme”), and enthuse (“not yet accepted in England,” sniffs Mr. Ware; the OED still calls it “an ignorant back-formation”). Americans of the Victorian era were also fond of enthuzimizzy to mean “enthusiasm,” and they liked to affix ker- to many words to imply movement: kerwallop, kerslap, kerflummox, kerbang. (I can’t help wondering whether the more recent ka-ching! – the sound of a cash register – owes something to this tradition.)

Passing English is full of synonyms and euphemisms for drinking: play camels, wash one’s neck, colour the meerschaum, and tickle one’s innards all meant “to get drunk.” So did N.Y.D., short for the euphemistic “not yet diagnosed.” Going to see a man meant “going to get a drink,” while going to see a dawg meant going to see a woman “whose social position may be assumed by her association with ‘dawg’.” But going to see a man about a dog is sadly omitted, even though it dates back to the 1860s.

If you need proof that initialisms weren’t born in the Age of Texting, look no further. To our Victorian forebears an N.N. was a “necessary nuisance” (that is, a husband), K.A.B.G.N.A.L.S. was reverse-spelled “back slang,” P.C. meant not “politically correct” but “poor classes,” R.M.D. was “ready money down,” and X.X. meant “double excellent.” I’m particularly fond of the abbreviation N.F., which stood for “no fool.”

As for the ladies’ bustle depicted above, it isn’t defined in Passing English, presumably because every reader would have understood it. The word’s origins are murky: it may come from German Buschel (a bunch or pad) or from another sense of bustle: a rustling motion.

Slightly related: this 2012 post about uppertendom.

(Hat tip for the Passing English link: The Hairpin.)

On the Visual Thesaurus: XOXO for Valentine’s Day

In honor of Valentine’s Day, my new column for the Visual Thesaurus is all about XO, the abbreviation for “kiss and hug” (or is it “hug and kiss”?). A recent article in The Atlantic commented on the rise of xo (and xoxo and even xoxoxo) in women’s workplace email. My own focus is on kissy-huggy brands: xoJane, the women’s “lifestyle website” founded by Jane Pratt; XOXO wine (from Canada!), the XOXO Festival in Portland, Oregon, and many others.

XOXO: lipsticks in the March 2013 DHC skincare and cosmetics catalog.

As a Valentine’s Day gift, access is free to all (but of course you’ll want to subscribe anyway). Here’s an excerpt:

How did X and O come to represent affection? Circuitously, it seems. The OED’s earliest citation for X meaning “kiss” is from 1763, in the signature on a letter from Gilbert White, a minister: “I am with many a xxxxxxx and many a Pater noster and Ave Maria, Gil. White.” But Stephen Goranson, a researcher at Duke University, is skeptical about that citation. He noted recently on the American Dialect Society’s listserv that White’s X’s may have in fact been crosses that represented not “kisses” but “blessings.” The “kiss” interpretation evolved from the “blessing” one; “unimpeachably kiss-identified” uses of X’s, wrote Goranson, didn’t appear until the late 19^th century. (“Sealed with a kiss,” Goranson added, “is much older, but those sealings are generally direct kissing not epistolary.”)

Read the rest of the column.

And here’s a little blog bonus. Have you ever wondered why XOXO means “kisses and hugs” but OXO doesn’t? So have I. I did some research into OXO brands in the U.S. and U.K. and learned these interesting tidbits about the U.S. OXO, maker of ergonomic household tools:

• “OXO’s founder, Sam Farber, chose the name ‘OXO’ because whether it’s horizontal, vertical, upside down or backwards, it always reads ‘OXO’.”
• OXO employees are called OXOnians, which is also what students or former students at the University of Oxford (England) are called.
• People who are fanatical about OXO tools are called OXOniacs.
• OXO owns a beauty-products company called Helen of Troy. which sells products with some brand names you may have heard of, including Vitalis, Final Net, and Brut.

The Names of Fine-Art Book Presses

On Sunday I attended the CODEX International Book Fair, an annual exhibition and sale of artists’ books and fine-art editions. It’s a spectacular event—nearly 200 exhibitors from all over the United States and several other countries—in a magnificent setting: Richmond’s Craneway Pavilion, at the edge of the bay. Although Craneway is only about 15 miles north of my house, this was my first visit. It won’t be my last. The 525,000-square-foot sawtooth-roof structure, designed by the prolific German-American architect Albert Kahn, housed a Ford Motor Company assembly plant, the largest on the West Coast, from 1932 through 1955. It originally produced Model “A” cars; during World War II it was retooled to produce tanks and jeeps. Women—the inspiration for “Rosie the Riveter”—made up much of the plant’s wartime workforce. The Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park is adjacent to the pavilion, in the old Kaiser shipyard, which built Liberty ships.

The building was severely damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. In 2004 it was bought by a development company; the renovation, by Marcy Wong Donn Logan Architects, resulted in a 2008 National Trust for Historic Preservation award. (Here’s a Flickr set of the building taken with a kite-lofted camera.)

The light-filled pavilion made an inspired and inspiring setting for the hundreds of art books on display. My artist friend Susan Bercu has written about the aesthetic highlights of the CODEX show; I’ll focus here on memorable names of presses and book designers. These are names that truly serve as the titles of stories—names that make you want to strike up a conversation.

Brand Name from the Past: Sorosis

I learned about the defunct American shoe brand Sorosis from Manolo the Shoeblogger, who posted this 1905 ad on his blog last year:

Original source: All-American Ads 1900-1919.

Manolo was interested in the style of the shoe; my own interest is in the Sorosis name. How did a word that sounds like a disease (cirrhosis? psoriasis?) become a brand of “the most distinctly fashionable shoes that are on the market”? Was there a relationship, I wondered, between Sorosis and “sorority”? Or with the Sorosis clubs for professional women, which had been founded in New York in 1868 and are still thriving in some U.S. cities?

Or maybe (I wondered whimsically) with Yiddish tsuris?

Here’s what I found out.