Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Gundamentalist

Gundamentalist: A person who goes beyond the language of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and takes his or her unrestricted right to bear arms as a tenet of religious or quasi-religious faith. A portmanteau of “gun” and “fundamentalist.”

Jay Heinrichs, a rhetorician and author of books and a blog about figures of speech, used gundamentalist in his response to the mass shooting of children last Friday in Newtown, Connecticut. In his post, “It’s Not a Tragedy” (“‘Tragedy’ implies an act of the gods, something terribly sad but inevitable. Instead, call it a massacre”), Heinrichs wrote:

Keep the focus on the children. This was a massacre of children. Gundamentalists will try to focus on the shooter. That allows them to make a reasonable-sounding case for school prayer: As our morals deteriorate, more sick people will do horrible things. Frame the issue around making it harder to massacre children. You can’t pray away legally acquired assault weapons and large-capacity ammo clips.

In a comment, Heinrichs defined “gundamentalists” as “gun-loving fundamentalists with an unusual interpretation of Jesus’ peace message.”

Heinrichs didn’t coin “gundamentalist”; in fact, the word has been around for more than 80 years. I found a citation in the July 31, 1926, issue of The New Yorker in the “Of All Things” column, an un-bylined collection of news items (paywalled):

Down in Texas the shouting Baptist has evolved into the shooting Baptist. Rev. J. Frank Norris has now reached the position of America’s leading gundamentalist.

(Some context: In her 2006 book Rethinking Zion: How the Print Media Placed Fundamentalism in the South, Mary Beth Swetnam Matthews identifies Edgar W. Knight, a professor of education at the University of North Carolina, as the person who pinned the “gundamentalist” nickname on Norris, a flamboyant preacher who assailed alcohol, Catholics, Communists, and “that hell-born, Bible-destroying, deity-of-Christ-denying, German rationalism known as evolution.” In July 1926, Norris shot and killed an unarmed man in his church office. He was tried for murder and acquitted on grounds of self-defense, although no gun had been found on his victim or presented as evidence in the trial.)

“Gundamentalist” lay dormant and possibly forgotten for many decades. Then, about five years ago, it began appearing again – this time in connection with groups, not individuals, and with a new shade of meaning: not necessarily a religious fundamentalist who pulls a trigger but any person who venerates guns.

In 2007, Reverend Rachel Smith, founder of the God Not Guns Initiative, wrote in “A Meditation for God Not Guns Sabbath” that “Gundamentalism” was “a spiritual problem”:

Gundamentalism is a spiritual movement without spiritual grounding. It is rooted in the sale and promotion of violence.

Gundamentalism willfully ignores the loss of nearly 30,000 lives each year to gun suicide and gun homicide. The mantra, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” is a magnificent half-truth that attempts to absolve gundamentalism of responsibility for the uniquely American epidemic of gun violence.

Smith has also written of gundamentalism:

Its adherents believe that nothing is as important as the right to own a gun. Or many guns. Or many kinds of guns.

In 2008, Washington Post religion reporter David Waters wrote about a Baptist church in Oklahoma City that planned to give away a gun at an annual youth conference. Waters concluded:

I see people who are products of our gundamentalist culture, people who drape the cross with a flag, people who believe the Second Amendment should be one of the Ten Commandments, people who seem to have more trust in guns than in God.

“Gundamentalist” has occasionally been claimed with pride by those it’s meant to shame:

Today I was called a Gundamentalist.
I think it was meant to be insulting or belittling.  The more I think about it, the more I find it charming. – We the Armed, 2009.

Oh and I love the term “gundamentalist.” I’m so stealing that. – The Truth About Guns, 2011

For more on America’s veneration of guns, see “Our Moloch,” Garry Wills’s December 15 essay in the New York Review of Books.

And for additional context, see Pro Publica’s roundup of “The Best Reporting on Guns in America,” originally published in July 2012.

December Linkfest

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

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

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

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

Faked TV demonstration from 1926, via Smithsonian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(For comparison, see Bechdel Test.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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And to all a good night.

How Twinkies Got Its Name

Hostess Brands Inc., the 82-year-old snack-foods company based in Irving, Texas, announced today that it will close its plants and fire all 18,000 of its workers. The company had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January. The corporate website says the company “was forced by a Bakers Union strike” to shut down. The union says the claim is false.

Hostess—founded in Missouri in 1930 as Interstate Bakeries Corporation—had been the largest wholesale baker and distributor of baked goods in the United States. Its many brands included Wonder Bread, Dolly Madison, Ho Hos, Sno Balls, Ding Dongs, and Colombo, but the company’s most famous product name may have been Twinkies, the “golden sponge cake with creamy filling” with a seemingly limitless shelf life.

Why was it called “Twinkies”? Serendipity.

 

Via Chicago Tribune.

According to a Chicago Tribune story, the first Twinkies “bounced out of the ovens at Continental Baking Co.” in River Forest, Illinois, in 1930:

Plant manager James Dewar was looking to create a cheap, two-for-a nickel snack. So he grabbed some shortcake pans and got cookin’. Dewar got the name from a billboard for Twinkle Toe Shoes. He shortened it to Twinkies, and the rest is snack food history.

That history took a grim turn during the 1979 trial of Dan White, the San Francisco supervisor who assassinated Mayor George Moscone and a fellow supervisor, Harvey Milk. White’s defense lawyers argued that their client’s mental capacity had been damaged by his excessive consumption of junk food. No specific food product was ever mentioned in the courtroom, but reporters coined “Twinkie defense” as shorthand for the argument. The term survives “as a derisive term for an improbable legal defense” (Wikipedia).

The sausage-shaped character on the Twinkies package has a name: Twinkie the Kid. A registered trademark since 1971, it was used in commercials and in collectible products, which are probably going to become a little more collectible.

Today’s Chicago Tribune has a slide show of 15 “iconic” Hostess products, including Holsum bread, which at one point used this dandy slogan:

“If you had a million dollars you couldn’t buy better bread.”

According to a Wikipedia entry, “Holsum” was used by many retail bakeries in the early 20th century, when whimsical phonetic brand spellings were all the rage. (See my August 2011 Visual Thesaurus column, “Phood for Thought,” for more examples.) In 1908, the W.E. Long Company of Chicago acquired exclusive rights to the name. Holsum bread is still sold; its mascot, Mr. Slice, was created in 1976.

UPDATE: At Duets Blog, trademark lawyer Dan Kelly considers the post-dissolution fate of Hostess Brand’s many marks.

Argo

I saw Argo over the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. Directed by and starring Ben Affleck, it’s the smart, suspenseful, mostly true story of how six Americans were brought out of Tehran – “exfiltration,” often abbreviated to “exfil,” is the term of art – in 1980, in the middle of Iran’s Islamic revolution. (Fifty-two other US Embassy employees weren’t so lucky: They spent 444 days as protagonists in what became known as the Iran hostage crisis.)

I say Argo is mostly true because, like most narrative art, it takes some liberties with historical fact, telescoping and condensing and even inventing when it serves the story. For a more literal account of the real-life drama, whose details were declassified in 1997, you may want to read the memoir of Antonio Mendez, the CIA agent who masterminded the escape. (He’s played by Affleck in the film.)

Genuine publicity for a fake movie. Via Foreign Policy.

 

Or you can read “How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans From Tehran,” Joshuah Bearman’s 2007 article for Wired that’s getting a lot of new eyeballs this season. It’s a terrific read that fills in many of the blanks (such as the roles of some unsung or undersung Canadians). For my part, I was amused by one passage toward the end that’s omitted from the movie but appealed to my love of names, puns, and coincidences.

A little background: Argo was the actual title of the fake sci-fi flick that formed the cover for the exfiltration. And Anders is Bob Anders, a senior embassy officer who was one of the six Americans being exfiltrated.

Here’s the passage from Bearman’s story:

As they boarded the plane from the windy tarmac, Anders noticed the word AARGAU was printed across the fuselage — the name of the Swiss region where the plane originated was strangely similar to that of their cover story. He punched Mendez’s arm and said, “You guys arrange everything, don’t you?”

In Affleck’s movie, the Argo title is never fully explained. A minor character asks whether it’s a reference to the ship of Jason and his Argonauts. “Ar … go fuck yourself,” replies Lester Siegel, the (fictional) Hollywood producer played by Alan Arkin. And, according to an account in Foreign Policy of the actual events, that “profane ‘knock-knock’ joke” is in fact how Argo got its name.

An additional tidbit from Foreign Policy:

One “ironic coda” from the CIA account: “By the time Studio Six folded several weeks after the rescue, we had received 26 scripts.… One was from Steven Spielberg.”

In Canada, by the way, l’affaire Argo is known as “the Canadian Caper.”

Names in the Wild: Olvera Street

Olvera Street (Calle Olvera) is the oldest street in Los Angeles, dating back to the city’s founding in 1781. Situated opposite Union Station and named for Los Angeles County’s first judge, Agustín Olvera, the street has been a tourist-friendly “Mexican marketplace” since 1930. It’s artificial (the commercial strip was planned and executed by a wealthy Anglo, Christine Stirling) yet also authentic (several historic buildings still stand). In other words, it’s a living metaphor of Los Angeles.

On a recent trip to L.A. I visited Olvera Street for the first time in many years. I found much unchanged (a few establishments, like La Luz del Día restaurant, have been around since the 1950s), while other things have adapted to changing times.

There were lots of Día de los Muertos items for sale, including these same-sex wedding-cake toppers.

 

A “Who Would Jesus Deport?” T-shirt.

 

Painted-tile bathroom sign in Spanglish.

 

I’m not sure why it’s “Mr.” Churro and not “Señor,” but the name does fit the bilingual flavor of the rest of the sign. And of course I’m always happy to meet a Mr. business name in the wild.

 

This mug was one of many souvenirs bearing the “Latina – Proud, Educated and Powerful!” motto. It appeared to be a girls-only phenomenon.

 

If you haven’t found a parking sign with your child’s name, maybe you’ve been shopping in the wrong place.

 

Travel note: I recommend taking one of the Metro Line (rapid-transit) trains into Union Station and wandering around to admire the spectacular Spanish Colonial Revival architecture and décor. While you’re on Olvera Street, allow some time to view the long-hidden fresco by the great Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974). Originally unveiled in October 1932, the painting was whitewashed shortly afterward to obscure its “radical” subject matter. After more than 40 years of planning and preservation work, it reopened to public viewing earlier this month.

October Linkfest

Forget everything you know about Banana Republic as it is today, and try to imagine the company in its crazily unconventional youth, when the stores had animal-call soundtracks and Jeeps in their windows and the mail-order catalogs—this was pre-Web, kiddies—featured sly, literate copy, interviews with famous-ish and once-famous people (James Fallows; the American-born former crown princess of Sikkim), and illustrations instead of photographs. I don’t have to imagine any of this, because I worked for Banana Republic back then*, after it was sold to the Gap but before Gap-ization eliminated every last whiff of creativity from the endeavor. Now, though, we can all return to that khaki-hued era, because BR’s founders, Mel and Patricia Ziegler (who, by the way, hired me), have written a history of their time with the company. In alternating first-person voices, Wild Company: The Untold Story of Banana Republic tells how an unemployed newspaper reporter (Mel) and artist (Patricia) used their powers of storytelling to spin heaps of military surplus from the far corners of the earth (but mostly the British Commonwealth) into gold. For a preview, listen to an interview with the Zieglers on the public-radio show Marketplace. (“I wish they’d changed the name,” Mel says of BR’s current incarnation.) And to get a sense of the hold the original Banana Republic still has on loyalists—including a few who are too young to have shopped in the 1980s—see Scott C. Adams’s blog, Abandoned Republic, which lovingly reproduces and annotates every one of the old catalogs.

And before we move on, please allow me to correct a common misconception: Banana Republic, founded in 1978, came first; J. Peterman, which appropriated the copy and illustration style and was parodied during several seasons of “Seinfeld,” was founded in 1987.

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If the comic site xkcd baffles you, help is on the way: Explain xkcd is the “For Dummies” of xkcd-dom, providing an earnest exegesis of every panel of almost every strip.  

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Speaking of humor and not getting it, let’s see how stories from The Onion (satirical!) would look on Facebook (credulous!). Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Literally Unbelievable. (Via Karen.)

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The book-recommendation site Goodreads polled its users about their presidential-candidate preferences and then analyzed reading habits across party lines. The result is the fascinating infographic “You Are What You Read.” There’s some crossover between the two camps, but I bet it doesn’t surprise you that Romney supporters think much more highly of Atlas Shrugged than Obama supporters do.

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Did you miss the recent kerfuffle over Britishisms (a k a Briticisms) in American speech? Catch up right here! The first salvo was fired by the fabulously named Cordelia Hebblethwaite of BBC News (“Bit by bit British English is invading America”), which prompted two responses from Geoff Nunberg on the linguistics blog Language Log and one from Mark Liberman. Then came “Americans Are Barmy Over Britishisms” in the New York Times (the print edition had a better hed: “And Bob’s Your Uncle”), and a Times blog post that rounded up tweets with Americans’ favorite Britishisms. The Atlantic Wire and The Economist’s Johnson blog eagerly piled on, while Lynne Murphy at Separated by a Common Language attempted to bring some academic rigor to the discussion.

Meanwhile, Ben Yagoda continues to add entries to his Not One-Off Britishisms blog. Lately, “toff,” “twee,” and “snarky” have been hotly debated in the comments section.

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Calling all peevologists: Ragan.com has published a list of “9 completely pointless corporate words” that will rally your blood pressure. (Decisioning! Solutionize! Planful! And, as suggested by multiple commenters, the ever-unpopular reach out!) For lots more—in dictionary form, no less—see Learnings.org, “where corporate speak goes to die.” (Via Deborah Schneider.)

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Mazel tov to Lena (“Girls”) Dunham on selling her essay collection for $3.5 million. For that kind of dough, Ms. Dunham can afford a less generic title than Not That Kind of Girl, which is not that distinctive. (Via Jessica Testa.)

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Why are men’s nicknames on the decline? Possibly because there’s more diversity in first names nowadays—and thus less need to distinguish one Jim or Joe from another.

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Today is National Dictionary Day in the US. Let’s celebrate with a “30 Rock” dictionary that goes from Avian Bone Syndrome to zing. And who could forget EGOT, fun cooker, and KDate?

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The titanic taxonomy of wrestler names. Suitable for framing! (Via @Catchword.)

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Got 15 minutes? Check out Milking “Got Milk?”: “A photo essay of the ad campaign that won’t go away.”

 

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“I hate beverages with names that tell me how to drink them.” – Impulsive Buy.

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Finally: Thou shalt not commit logical fallacies.

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* In fact, I interviewed Mr. Fallows—I woke him up in his Kuala Lumpur home, to my chagrin—and Ms. Hope Cooke, the former crown princess who had divorced the prince and was leading walking tours of Manhattan.

Names in the News

Four new names that caught my attention:

Mansion is the unapologetically 1 percent-ish name of the Wall Street Journal’s new weekly section devoted to “high-end property.” In a letter to WSJ subscribers, managing editor Robert Thomson said Mansion would be “the home of both aspiration and real-estate realization.” I look forward to the quarterly spin-off, Car Elevator.

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What the fut was Alaska Telecom thinking when it renamed itself Futaris? This, apparently: “Based on the word future, Futaris represents limitless possibilities and progress.” Funny, because when I look at this sad excuse for a logo, I see “futility.”

(Hat tip: @IgorNaming.)

UPDATE: Reader Dan Freiberg suggests that “this variation helps with pronunciation, and works better with the symbol.”

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Juniper is a new subscription service for women who don’t own calendars. Oh, sorry: it’s “a monthly care package” consisting of tampons (five brands are offered) and a collection of “gourmet sweets and artisan savory treats.” (Yes, it’s that word!) “Never panic shop again,” says the home-page copy. The price, however, may cause cramping: $28 a month. I couldn’t find a story behind the name—which is lovely in its nondescriptive way—but I’m wondering whether founder Lynn Tao, young as she appears to be, is a Donovan fan. Remember “Jennifer Juniper,” who “longs for what she lacks”?

UPDATE: Mystery solved (although I’m still fond of my own theory):

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I’m even more mystified by Tassafaronga Village, a mixed-income residential development in East Oakland that I learned about this week via a New York Times story. There’s no explanation of the name in the story or on the website of the architect, David Baker, so I tried to dig deeper. I learned that Tassafaronga Point, on Guadalcanal (Solomon Islands), was the site of several naval engagements between US and Japanese forces during World War II. But that wasn’t very helpful: the housing project is meant to heal a troubled neighborhood, so why name it after a bloody, 70-year-old series of battles? And why the Melanesian reference in Oakland, where Pacific Islanders make up less than 1 percent of the population?

It’s certainly a distinctive name, fun to say if a little challenging to spell. Here’s hoping someone who knows the whole story reads this post and leaves a comment that clears up the mystery.

UPDATE: It took less than half an hour to get an answer to my question about Tassafaronga. See comments below from Gene, proprietor of the excellent Our Oakland blog.

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!

Word of the Week: Civility

Civility: Behavior or speech appropriate to civil interactions. Adopted from Middle French civilité in the late 14th century, but with a different sense: “civil order” or “citizenship.” Something closer to the current sense came into currency in the 16th century, but later fell out of favor for several centuries. A 19th- or even mid-20th-century speaker of English probably would be puzzled by the way “civility” is used, for example, by Allegheny College, which last week closed nominations for its second annual Prize for Civility in Public Life. The prize

seeks to honor elected officials who showed authentic, courageous civility in an important moment and/or those who have demonstrated steadfast respect for opposing points of view throughout their career. Each year, two awards will be given – one to a proud Republican and one to a proud Democrat. The award will be used to shine a bright light on passionate partisans, on both sides of the aisle, who have shown that meaningful civility is not incompatible with strongly held beliefs.

Last year’s winners were the columnists Mark Shields and David Brooks.

The Allegeny College sense of “civility” is surprisingly recent, according to Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist and professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. In his new book, Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years, Nunberg writes that  to Victorians “incivility suggested merely an impertinent coachman or a stall-keeper who addressed one as ‘boss’ rather than ‘sir’.” In the early 20th century “civility was merely a genteel term for a formally correct courtesy” — a sense we retain in the admonition to “keep a civil tongue in your head.” As late as the 1950s, says Nunberg, “critics writing about serious social concerns like juvenile delinquency spoke about a ‘breakdown of manners and morals’; incivility didn’t come into the picture.” The definition of civility as “respectful debate in a democratic society” had become, Nunberg writes, “effectively obsolete.”

So what brought civility back to life? Nunberg says the word was “disinterred” in the 1960s for a specific political purpose:

[To critics], the social upheavals personified by the hippies, anti-war protesters, and campus radicals offered provocations that transcended mere breaches of decorum or anything that could be conveyed by pallid old words like impolite, rude, and discourteous. With its musty connection to citizen and civic, a resuscitated incivility implied that the demonstrators’ dress and rude comportment was of a piece with their attacks on the political order.

In an editorial published just before the 1968 presidential elections, Nunberg writes, the Wall Street Journal “inveighed against what it called the New Incivility” of student protestors and “enraged Negro spokesmen.” In 1969 alone, civility and incivility appeared in more New York Times editorials than they had in the previous half-century, “nearly all of them dealing with campus turbulence. … By the Clinton years, the words were fifteen times as frequent in the press as they had been during Eisenhower’s presidency.”

Nunberg notes dryly that it’s no coincidence “that the new sense of incivility emerged at the same time that asshole came of age as a reproach for social misconduct.” He goes on:

For all that people invariably speak of civility as an abiding virtue, in its new guise it’s actually a sharp break with the past. To evoke civility is to presuppose that old-fashioned manners and politeness aren’t morally compelling by themselves… An age in which even moralists can speak of “mere manners” and “mere courtesy” is very different from the one that preceded it, despite the specious continuity of values that “civility” is supposed to provide.

See also Steve Baird’s post on trademark civility.

For more on asshole (and bad-ass in brand language), see my September 18 post.

 

Socialist Surrealism

In celebration of New York Fashion Week, which began yesterday, I present an article of clothing whose name expresses in a single word the blithe mishegas of la mode: the Bolshivek Dress.

It’s sold by All Saints, which spells it exactly that way and describes it thus:

The Bolshivek Dress features folded sequins in antique and matt black tones to create a lux 3D textured finish. Scattered beads in similar tones have been added to give additional depth and detailing. The Bolshivek Dress uses a fabric blend that contours the body to create a flattering silhouette.

Rise up, comrades, and recite the list of grievances!

1. It’s “Bolshevik,” not “Bolshivek.” The word means “majority” in Russian.

2. The Bolsheviks were a Marxist Communist party founded in 1903 by Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov in opposition to the czarist regime.

3. In the West during the Cold War, to label someone a Bolshevik was to disparage the person’s patriotism, loyalty, and personal hygiene.

4. Nothing about this dress suggests—to quote The Internationale—“workers  of all nations” or “oppressed of the earth.” In fact, the heavy ornamentation and slinky shape—not to mention the $250 price tag—make it seem suspiciously bourgeois if not shockingly aristocratic.

As for the descriptive copy: “matte” and “luxe,” dear writer, not “matt” and “lux.”

As George Santayana surely would have said, “Those who misappropriate history are condemned to look like ill-informed, trend-besotted twits.”

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For extra credit, read “Comradely Capitalists,” my December 2011 post about nouveau commie chic; and my What Were Those Fashionistas Thinking? posts about the Cohen shirt, the Barren skirt, Crazy B#@!h jeans, and oddly named shoes.