Fritinancy

Electable Collectibles

The first presidential debate will be held tonight, in Denver; the general election is less than five weeks away. So it’s time to ask a serious question: How are the campaigns shaping up tchotchke-wise?

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At 7-Eleven stores in 34 states, you can let the caffeine do the talking – and the predicting. And you get to keep your cup as a souvenir. Last Friday, you didn’t even have to pay for the coffee.

 

 

According to 7-Eleven’s 7-Election website, President Obama cups have a substantial lead over Mitt Romney cups everywhere except Idaho and West Virginia.

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Berkeley’s family-owned Virginia Bakery is holding its own consumption contest. To cast your vote, buy a photo-decorated sugar cookie.

Guess who’s winning?

According to a report on the Berkeleyside news site, the bakery has sold presidential cookies in previous elections, but this is the first time it’s tracking the results. As one commenter observed, “Finally … a chance to eat the rich.”

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From tasty to tasteless:

 

 

This “Obama reusable cloth pantyliner pad,” sold by Mimi’s Dreams on Etsy, is “the perfect size for teenagers and petite women.” Ladies, don’t you want a muumuu made of that fabric? (Via Buzzfeed.)

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Speaking of the curse, here’s SNL’s ad for g.o.b. tampons—made for women by the men of the GOP. (“Now with wings!”)

The brand name is a parody of o.b. tampons, which were developed in the early 1960s by a German gynecologist, Judith Esser. “o.b.” name is an abbreviation of “ohne binde,” German for “without napkins.”

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And staying in the nether regions, Say It With a Condom is back with the 2012 edition of candidate condoms.

 

Obama condoms: “Intended to get the general public laid, not laid off.”

Romney condoms: “For the elitist penis.” Four years ago, according to my notes, it was the Obama condoms that made that “elitist” claim.

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A concept only, but what a great concept: Barack Obama, the Blue Note years, from the British pop-culture blog Voices of East Anglia.

Lots more album covers at the link. (Via Girls of a Certain Age.)

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The Sassy Gator, another Etsy seller, is offering this embroidered T-shirt in babies’ and children’s sizes for $20.

 

“Mitt Romney Is My Homeboy”

“Homeboy”? Really? A tip for Sassy Gator: Mitt Romney ain’t your homeboy unless your home has a car elevator.

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This Obama Birther Certificate Tray from Fishs Eddy* proved so popular that it’s now backordered until December. 

Perfect for serving pupu to your Democratic friends … or crow to the Republicans.

Fishs Eddy is also selling this 10-ounce Barack Obama mug  and a companion Michelle Obama mug. Nothing for the competition except a Republican elephant puzzle.

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Wish it would all just stop already? I feel your pain. And I have just the remedy: this political ice pack, available at Uncommon Goods.

Freeze, use,  repeat until Election Day.

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* The story behind the Fishs Eddy name: “It was 1986 and we were driving around the back roads upstate New York (code for lost). We stumbled upon a small hamlet called Fishs Eddy. It was a perfectly odd name so we borrowed it for our just-opened shop near Gramercy Park.”

Short Takes

Remember MEN-trepreneurs, man irons, and manllows? It’s been a while since I’ve reported on a new man-word sighting, but now Brut steps up with its Mantervention Facebook app, in which (according to AdFreak) “some guy with George Michael stubble lectures you about spending too much time on Facebook.” I can’t say for sure, but I’m guessing the Mantervention movie scheduled for 2013 release is about something else.

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I have so far managed to resist the 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon—although yes, I am aware there will be a movie—but a display at a local Barnes & Noble store (inner goddess! sex whisperer!) did exert a certain pull.

Fifty Shades of American Women Who Love the Book and Live the Life, the magazine, is a must for completists. (For more on “The X Whisperer,” read Jan Freeman’s recent blog post, “Whisperer Campaign,” which covers a lot of ground but doesn’t answer the question “Is a young, sadistic, cranky sex whisperer a sex whisperer-whipper-snapper?”)

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If you’ve ever worked on the creative side of advertising or marketing, you’ll laugh through your tears, or weep through your guffaws, at “A Candid Proposal from an Advertising Firm’s Creative Director,” by Andrew Gall at McSweeney’s. One of the imaginary deliverables:

A dozen made up words related to your product that will “draw consumers in.” These shall include, but not be limited to, words with the following suffixes: “-tastic,” “-tacular,” and “-riffic.” Also, while you probably already know this, I was the one who came up with the word “crumbelievable” in 2007 to describe the Keebler company’s new line of coffee cake cookies.

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And speaking of crumbelievable and similar madeupical words, Ben Zimmer pointed me to two articles in The Onion that have some fun with FritoLay: “Munchtrosity Created in Fritolayboratory” (“an evil of cheddarclysmic proportions”) and “Fritolaysia Cuts Off Chiplomatic Relations with Snakistan” (the fateful summit was held, of course, in München, Germany).

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A tiny pluglet: I’ve been using Pinterest to illustrate some of the naming trends I’ve written about here. Check out my boards: Names That End in –ly, Brand Names with Gratuitous Umlauts, and Shop at X&Y!

September Linkfest

New York City gangs take their names very, very seriously, according to “Gang ‘Slang’ers,” in the New York Post. “It took us about a month to come up with our name,” said Piff Montana, a member of the Get Touched Boyz of Jamaica, Queens. … We wanted a name that would make an impact.” The full list of 300 or so gang names reveals a preoccupation with numbers and precinctspercentages: there are gangs called 5 Precinct Percent, 10 Precinct Percent, 40 Precinct Percent, and so on up to 122 Precinct Percent. (Hat tip: NameFlash. And thanks to Dave for correcting me on "precinct.")

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New additions to World Wide Words: eastwooding, mirror fasting, underbragging, and gramping. No, gramping is not a misspelling of glamping.

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Looking for a title for your book? You can’t go wrong with “The Elements of ___,” says Poynter.org’s Roy Peter Clark, who lists more than 25 knockoffs of the Strunk and White original. Here’s the one that inspired his post:

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Before she founded the online dictionary Wordnik, Erin McKean worked on the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, a reference that isn’t just for writers but is also by writers—i.e., various writers were invited to contribute notes on words that interested them. One of the writers assigned to McKean was the late David Foster Wallace, who, she writes, approached the copyediting phase as if “someone invited him to an all-day grammar seminar (with celebrity photo signings and vendor's expo hall), combined with a debating society picnic, where the topic was ‘RESOLVED: This Comma Should Be Removed.’ (You're not surprised, are you?)” Read the whole delightful account at “It was wonderful, marvelous, magnificent, superb, glorious, sublime, lovely, delightful ...”

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The Chamomile Tea Party was formed in 2010 as an alternative to “the rancor between the political left and right” in the US. It’s using modified World War II posters to get the point across, and you can view and download the posters on Flickr.

 

By outtacontext.

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In brand naming, many clients panic if a name is more than five letters long. According to Baby Name Wizard, there’s a contrary trend in baby-boy naming, at least in the US: fear of short names. Finn becomes Finnegan, Quinn becomes Quinlan, and—most boggling of all—Levi becomes Leviathan (“the twisted serpent to be killed at the end of time”) or Leviticus (the third book of the Old Testament, notable mostly for its litany of laws about skin diseases, sacrifices, and genital discharges).

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Fellow name developer Chris Johnson (aka The Name Inspector) has created my new favorite Pinterest board: the Wall of Namifying, “logos of companies whose names end with -ify (or, in one case, -efy).” As you probably know, I share his obsession. (And speaking of Pinterest, I’m trying my hand at a similar project: cataloguing the many, many -ly names and logos.)

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Linguist Arnold Zwicky collected some wonderful names of minor-league baseball teams, including the Albuquerque Isotopes, the Colorado Springs Sky Sox, the Fort Wayne Tincaps, and the Lansing Lugnuts. Then he followed up with an imaginary list of his own. I’m rooting for the Baton Rouge Compacts.

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From the Autoextremist blog, a slightly jaundiced guide to the latest auto-industry terms. An “accidental tourist” describes “executives devoid of the qualifications necessary to properly perform the duties assigned to them”; “greenage” is a program’s environmental potential. (Hat tip: Lance Knobel.)

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Speaking of jaundiced, there’s nothing like a Condescending Corporate Brand Page to say “We're a big corporate brand using Facebook. So look out for us asking you to like and share our stuff in a faintly embarrassing and awkward way.” Read more about the CCBP in Fast Company. (Note: the CCBP is British in origin—its URL contains “corporate bollocks”—but the themes are, alas, universal.)

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He is the very model of an amateur grammarian.

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I attended the Brand New Conference last year, when it was held in San Francisco, but couldn’t make it to New York for this year’s conference. Thankfully, organizer Armin Vit has compiled the best quotes and tweets from the event. Here’s a provocative opinion from UK designer Miles Newlin: “Stories have an end, and unless you want to think of your brand as having an end, then forget the storytelling idea, and forget people who talk about brand storytelling.”

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See what happened when New York Magazine sent a reporter to TechCrunch Disrupt SF to ask startup founders about their “chronically misspelled” company names. It’s, uh, Osom. (Thanks, Jessica!)

July Linkfest

If you’ve been following the big science news of the month/year/century/millennium, you know that the “Higgs” in “Higgs boson” is British physicist Peter Higgs. But you may not be aware that“boson” was named for an Indian scientist, Satyendranath Bose. (Note: The Higgs boson is not to be confused with the Higgs bos’n or the Herrgs berson.)

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Ten weird rules that control how planets are named.

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Five words with surprising etymologies. I knew the “California” story, but was indeed surprised by “partridge.”

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Guest-blogging at Midlife Mixtape, Alexandra Rosas of Good Day, Regular People teaches us some useful Colombian idioms. I’m partial to ¿Y quién pidió el pollo? which translates literally to “And who ordered the chicken?” but is infinitely more versatile.

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Moving north of the border now: Studio360Redesigns assigned Toronto-based Bruce Mau Design the job of rebranding the Canadian national identity. The Brand New blog reports on Mau’s “Know Canada” redesign.

I think “Know Canada” is a brilliant slogan. Inexplicably, though, Studio360Redesigns conducted a separate contest, open to nonprofessionals, and chose a different slogan. I can’t say I share the judges’ enthusiasm for “Canada: We’re Not Just Colder, We’re Cooler.” Meh.

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“I call them the Liquid Names: they flow smoothly, like water down a glass streambed with no rocks or branches to impede its path.” Baby Name Wizard reports on “a new class of girls’ names” that has “taken hold in the past generation.”

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What if language magazines were sold at supermarket checkouts? Two hypotheticals, one from Mignon (Grammar Girl) Fogarty (pictured below), the other from an opinion piece by John McWhorter in theNew York Times.

I especially like “What to do when he ‘begs the question’.”

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“On Newsroom, every word is expertly crafted by an genuine genius of dialogue. In a newsroom, people alternate between exhaustion and caffeinated hysteria.” And other differences between the HBO seriesThe Newsroom and an actual newsroom.

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Need a rhyme or a near-rhyme? RhymeBrain is one of the better online dictionaries I’ve seen. (Hat tip: John McChesney-Young.)

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Destination weddings, destination birthdays, destination funerals: How did “destination” become a modifier, anyway?

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The Project Twins’ illustrated dictionary of “unusual words,"     from acersecomic to zugzwang. (Via Culture Desk.)

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This is swellacious: The Oxford English Fictionary, “Defining words that aren’t real. Yet.” (Via this tweet from Our Bold Hero.)

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Spin magazine’s list of the 40 greatest band names of all time. (Via@VerbID.)

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How well do you know carny lingo? Trucker lingo? Show-biz lingo?

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Q: What’s the correct pronunciation of “Moleskine”? A: Whatever you like.

 

Names in the Wild: The Little Shop of Hoarders

Yes, I do love a good pun.

The Little Shop of Hoarders, 6397 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland.

 

Window display.

I don’t care that it isn’t a wholly original name* or that the sign is hand-lettered. I love the pun and I love the merchandise. And I am thrilled that the owner spelled “sneak peek” correctly on her blog.

Not to mention that I couldn’t have been happier for the excuse to troll YouTube for clips from Little Shop of Horrors, one of my all-time-favorite movie musicals. Frank Oz directed; Alan Menken wrote the great songs. And that cast! Steve Martin, Rick Moranis, Ellen Greene, Bill Murray, Christopher Guest, John Candy, John Belushi.

Here’s one of my favorite songs, “Skid Row” (“where depression’s jus’ status quo”):

 

And you know you want to hear Steve Martin do the dentist song again, amirite? Knock yourself out.

*UPDATE: Alas, it appears that the Oakland shop is stepping on the toes of another Little Shop of Hoarders (see comment). Defending a trademark is a full-time job.

June Linkfest

Each week, the New Yorker’s Culture Desk blog posts a Twitter contest with the hashtag #tnyquestion. The June 1 contest asked readers to contribute a new word to the English language; the results have been compiled in a handsome PDF dictionary. The June 8 contest—invent a corporate-literary mashup—resulted in more than a thousand responses, including “Of Mice and Mennen,” “A Tale of Two Citis,” and (from yours truly) “50 Shades of Grey Poupon.” Winners revealed here. (Note: I cannot claim credit for “Pninterest”; I only retweeted it.)

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It’s Silicon Valley’s next hot IPO. It’s called Ponzify. What could possibly go wrong? (Satire alert.)

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The ass-fication of American branding continues apace: “Six print ads that use ass imagery (not actual asses, sorry) to sell stuff.” Safe for work, but may provoke loud groans.

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Steve Jobs really, really liked the name “MacMan.” He lost the battle; Apple won the war.

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Go ahead and say “the Internets,” you irony-overloaded hipster, but never, ever say “vinyls.”

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You don’t need a designer when the copy’s this good: a Flickr set of copywriter Joe D’Allegro’s signs for Synergy Fitness in Jersey City. (Via AdFreak.)

 

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Glossed Over saves you the annoyance of reading the July issue of Glamour. “Less than zero: Likelihood that I will ever use Glamour’s Word of the Month, ‘frizzle’.” 

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What not to name your spaceship. (By the way, did you know that Greece’s Olympic Airlines was originally called Icarus? What were they thinking?)

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Derek Lowe, who blogs about science and the pharmaceutical industry for In the Pipeline, asks: “What’s the biotech/pharma company out there with the worst name” (other than Abbott Labs’ new AbbVie)? His commenters gleefully ante up.

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David Crystal’s long list of words first used by Charles Dickens includes kibosh, unyielding, dustbin, devil-may-care, flummox, and sawbones.

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More from Crystal: “Dickens worked at his names: he tried out Martin Sweezleden, Sweezleback, Sweezlewag, Chuzzletoe, Chuzzleboy, Chubblewig, and Chuzzlewig, before ending up with Martin Chuzzlewit.”

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The Obama 2012 campaign slogan is “Forward,” but Americans would rather go in the opposite direction, argues advertising creative director Judith Grey.

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“My great-grandfather started this business with one simple mission that we abandoned decades ago.”

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A defense of undictionaried (aka madeupical) words by lexicographer and Wordnik founder Erin McKean.

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Why is it the United States and the Netherlands … but just plain Ukraine? Etymologist Anatoly Liberman explains to the BBC.

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“Logic is the enemy of a successful brand name,” writes veteran marketing strategist Al Ries. Example: “Search.com is shorter (one syllable instead of two), more memorable and a lot more credible than Google.com. Should Google.com change its name to Search.com?” (Hat tip: @IgorNaming.)

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An evil spelling test, courtesy of Teresa Nielsen Hayden.

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Naming your company is just the first step. Catchword Branding lists five factors to consider when launching a company name.

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Grexit, Geuro, neuro, and other words spawned by the Greek debt crisis. (And yes, that is the 84,573rd sighting of a “What’s in a Name?” headline.) (Via @WordLo.)

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Prosign, rag-chewing, umpty, and other telegraph lingo. (And check out the link to more telegraph and radio slang.)

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Twitter’s Fail Whale has spawned a menagerie of social-media fail pets. Mike Pope provides a taxonomy.

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And as long as we’re on the subject, I’m loving these social media propaganda posters by Etsy vendor Aaron Wood. Available individually or as a compilation. Via @mightyredpen.

April Linkfest

If you’re interested in English-language slang from the early 19th century—and who wouldn’t be?—you’ll want to follow @Vulgar_Tongue, which tweets citations from Francis Grose’s 1811 Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue. A few examples: scandal broth (tea), sir reverence (a turd), and sea lawyer (a shark). The entire book is available online, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

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“Eight-point type? I’m sure that’s legible” and other encouragement copywriters can give to art directors: Go Art Director Go. (Hat tip: Lori Burwash.)

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Cartoonist Brian McFadden totally nails the naming style of social-media startups in his Sunday New York Times strip. “Slackify”? Perfect.

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Past naming trends—remember all those “tronics”?—hold clues to the future of naming. Alan Brew, a principal at brand strategy firm RiechesBaird, makes the case.

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“Stop talking about names, start talking about characteristics of names”: good advice from Nancy’s Baby Names that works for the company- or product-naming process too.

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Episode 6 of Lexicon Valley, the linguistics podcast on Slate.com, is about how Scrabble, “a math game disguised as a word game,” reveals “the essential beauty of English.” The podcast features an interview with Word Freak author Stefan Fatsis. (All of the Lexicon Valley podcasts are well worth your time. Each one is about 30 minutes long.)

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What makes a movie quote memorable? A team of Cornell University computer scientists compared short, memorable lines from about 1,000 movies and compared them to other lines spoken by the same characters in the same films. Read about their findings at Technology Review (I love the title of their paper: “You Had Me at Hello: How Phrasing Affects Memorability”), then take the test yourself.

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To atone for her absence from blogging, trademark lawyer Lara Pearson of Brand Geek researched SORRY trademarks. She found 22 registered marks and 19 pending marks with SORRY in their names, including the famous board game, an apparel brand, and SORRY FOR PARTYING, “a lifestyle brand connecting those who need an elegant way to apologize for doing everything wrong, yet so right.”

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What’s the connection between hood, hoodlum, and hoodie? Jan Freeman of Throw Grammar from the Train investigates.

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Twitter’s “Who to Follow” feature is grammatically OK, writes Stan Carey. “Not only that: it sounds natural and normal, whereas whom in the same context runs the risk of sounding fussy, affected, and pretentious.”

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The hidden messages in 28 famous and not-so-famous logos.

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“The name of these cookies was changed from Blueberry Craze to the more prosaic Blueberry Cookie, so the sweets were less appealing to children.” A naming lesson from a marijuana bakery, via The Hairpin.

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Mike Pope is conflicted about typos. Or spelling errors. Or whatever you want to call them.

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URGENT REQUEST FROM MOOR OF VENICE and other Shakespearean spam from comedy writer Megan Amram, who(m) you should follow on Twitter, too. She had me at Bravest Avatar Ever.

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“When copywriter Robert Pirosh landed in Hollywood in 1934, eager to become a screenwriter, he wrote and sent the following letter to all the directors, producers, and studio executives he could think of.” It begins “I like words,” and it’s delicious. From Lists of Note. P.S.: Pirosh went on to win a screenwriting Oscar in 1949. 

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Fifteen minutes of literary bliss: former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins talks about the collaboration that turned some of his poems into short animated films. One of the best TED Talks I’ve seen.

March Linkfest

It’s been a good month for numbered lists about names and naming. Starting with the longest list: Paola Norambuena, senior director of verbal identity at the global branding agency Interbrand, identifies 10 of the most common naming mistakes, including one that tops my own list: “Forgetting that naming is as strategic as it is creative.”

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In a guest column for Fast Company, Matt Gordon and Nick Foley of Landor’s Chicago office enumerate eight principles of product naming, from “Make it memorable” to “Expect its story to involve.” The title’s a bit misleading, because they cover corporate names, too—including one of Landor’s own, Accenture. Sneaky devils. (Via @operativewords.)

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Catchword’s Beth Gerber, a brand strategist and creative director, points out five ways in which product naming differs from company naming. “A company name is an umbrella,” Beth writes. “A product name, a hat.”

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Trademark lawyer Jessica Stone Levy just received her first Birchbox delivery of cosmetic samples. Gather ’round as she opens the lid and reveals the branding hits and misses within. Like Jessica, I snickered over “For hair on days of unwash,” the legend on Lulu Organics Hair Powder.

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I’ve been sending Ben Yagoda’s “Rules for Quotes” to a lot of people who probably wish I’d just shut up already. But a) it’s excellent advice from a language expert and b) for some reason, writing quotes is trickier than you’d think. Even if you’re in the business (*cough* *publicists*) of writing quotes.

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You may have noticed that slut has been in the news a lot lately, thanks to a certain bloviator whose name rhymes with Flush Flimflah. (Not to brag or anything, but I was totally ahead of the slut curve.) Language mavens and cultural critics have been quick to offer analysis and opinion. I especially liked linguist Geoff Nunberg’s recent commentary on “Fresh Air”: “Maybe someday ‘slut’ will be as comically dated as ‘bounder’ or ‘cad,’” Nunberg observed. “But in recent times, it has actually become stronger and more offensive”—to the point that it’s sometimes spelled with an asterisk replacing the U.

Not here, though.

I’m predicting that “slut” will be on the short list for Word of the Year.

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My new favorite Tumblr, ANIMALS TALKING IN ALL CAPS, also got on the slut bandwagon: “HELLO, AND WELCOME TO PLANNED PARENTHOOD, YOU SLUTTY SLUT. WHAT’S THE PROBLEM TODAY? YOU WANT A SLUTTY MAMMOGRAM TO DETERMINE WHETHER OR NOT YOU’VE GOT SLUTTY BREAST CANCER?” Go see the whole thing. (Hat tip: Nancy Nall.)

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Would you buy a condo in a building named Vertigo? The very thought makes The Name Inspector a little queasy.

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And speaking of queasy, not to mention crappy:

 

 

Yes, that’s Crapi Apartments, and no, it isn’t PhotoShopped. A dyslexic version of “Capri”? No budget for a proofreader? You tell me. The building is on Overland Avenue in West Los Angeles, and you can look it up. (Thanks, Judith!)

February Linkfest

The “Downton Abbey” anachronisms story certainly has legs. I wrote about one out-of-place usage, “to contact [someone],” in January; this week Ben Zimmer compiled a video of several ahead-of-their-time usages and wrote about them for the Visual Thesaurus. Graduate student Ben Schmidt goes further and deeper in a post on his Sapping Attention blog that summarizes the results of feeding “every single two-word phrase through the Google Ngram database to see how characteristic of the English [l]anguage, c. 1917, Downton Abbey really is.” (Via Language Hat.) “Black market,” “shortages,” “mitral valve prolapse,” and even “wartime” and “peacetime”? All rare or unheard-of in England in the nineteen-teens. (“To have legs” = to show potential for a long run. First documented in 1930, “orig. and chiefly U.S.,” according to the OED. Keep that in mind when you write your Civil War novel.)

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Meanwhile, the Wordnik blog looks on the bright side, identifying some fusty (or simply odd-to-American-ears) words and phrases that “Downton Abbey” got right, like penny dreadful, dropsy, and sprat to catch a mackerel.

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What’s a “cryppie”? A “day lady”? A “Korling”? A guide to the just-declassified lingo of the National Security Agency.

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From another subculture, a dictionary of Western slang, lingo, and phrases, wherein I learned that a “banjo” is a miner’s term for a short-handled shovel and “goat meat” is venison killed out of season. As far as I could ascertain, the lexicon is free of Deadwood-esque naughty words.

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A whole bunch of US newsroom lingo, slang, and catchphrases, from the universal (nut graf, gutter, downstyle) to the hyperlocal. My favorite in the latter category: “Arnie Pye,” used by the New Jersey Jewish News to refer to a jokey lede or headline that isn’t all that funny. Arnie Pye (in the sky) is the helicopter traffic reporter on “The Simpsons.”

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Besides our sun, how many stars can you name? (Via TYWKIWDBI.) One that didn’t make the list: Gomez’s Hamburger.

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Here’s a quiz for you: Westminster Dog Show champion dog name or line from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”? Exactly as tough as you’d think. (Via @BeautyMarks.)

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I’ve written previously about how Twitter got its name. Now read how the company bought Twitter.com from a bird enthusiast for the bargain price of $7,500.

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How to pronounce things hilariously. (Via Kottke.)

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Henry Hitchings, author of The Language Wars, talks to The Browser about “stupid myths” about the English language, e.g., “that Americans are ruining English or that American English is worse.” That, says Hitchings, “is just an absurd thing to say.”

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Speaking of stupid myths, did your fourth-grade teacher tell you there was a “rule” about never ending a sentence with a preposition? Then I implore you to listen to Slate’s new Lexicon Valley podcast, “Where Did That Sentence-Ending Preposition Rule Come From?” And worry no more about what you end your sentences with.

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And speaking of sentences and endings, here’s an appropriate cartoon by Wiley, via Mighty Red Pen:

 

Word of the Week: Grandiosity

Grandiosity: Greatness of scope or intent; feigned or affective grandeur or pomposity; excessive use of verbal ornamentation.

In the mental-health disciplines, grandiosity is a disorder: “an unrealistic sense of superiority, a sustained view of oneself as better than others that causes the narcissist to view others with disdain or as inferior. It also refers to a sense of uniqueness, the belief that few others have anything in common with oneself and that one can only be understood by a few or very special people.” (Source: the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, 2000.)

In last Thursday’s Republican presidential primary debate, held in Charleston, South Carolina, former US Senator Rick Santorum sniped at fellow candidate Newt Gingrich:

“Grandiosity has never been a problem with Newt Gingrich,” Santorum said of his opponent’s shameless self-promotion. “A month ago, he was saying, ‘Oh, I’m inevitable.’ It was, ‘I’m destined to do it.’”

Gingrich’s smiling response seemed to suggest that he approved this message and perhaps thought “grandiosity” was a favorable assessment.

Santorum: Grandiosity Never a Problem For Gingrich

 

Gingrich went on to win the primary on Saturday. Santorum finished third.

When grandiosity and grandiose entered English dictionaries, around 1840, the words already had both positive and negative connotations. As time went on, the disparaging meanings prevailed. George Eliot wrote in Daniel Deronda (1876) of a character’s “grandiose air” that “was making Mab feel herself a ridiculous toy to match the cottage piano.” In 1892, Augustine Birrell compared Gibbon and Milton: “as one is our grandest author, so the other is our most grandiose.” And in a 2011 column in the Wall Street Journal, Al Lewis said of Ayn Rand, a darling of the antigovernment crowd:

She crafted philosophical arguments and wrote bizarre works of fiction to prove their premises. Then, in the delusional grandiosity that only chemicals can inspire, she declared herself, “the most creative thinker alive.”

Newt Gingrich has also declared himself to be a creative thinker. Some of his publicly shared ideas include establishing a moon colony to extract minerals, firing federal judges with whom he disagrees, and changing the labor laws to allow children to work (as school janitors, for example).

Predictably, there's a parody Twitter account.