Fritinancy

You Don't Have to Be Jewish...

...to take this fascinating survey of "American Jewish language." Its authors, a pair of social scientists from Hebrew Union College, say it's "the first of its kind to ask North Americans about the words from Yiddish and Hebrew (and other languages) that they may use or recognize."

Part of the survey is a vocabulary quiz that includes words such as the well-assimilated chutzpah, shmooze, maven, and mensch. There's also a section on Jewish-flavored English idioms, some of which were completely alien to me: Sure, I've heard (and used) "Enough already," but not "Are you coming to us for dinner?" or "What do we learn out from this?"

Because trends in baby naming are a demi-obsession of mine, I particularly enjoyed the questions about names you'd consider for your hypothetical children. Options include what I'd consider über-goyish (Christopher and Christine, absolutely; but John strikes me as more culturally neutral than the other choices) to modern Hebrew (Matan for a boy, Noa for a girl) and old-school Yiddish (Moishe, Mende, Basya, Freydie).

And yes, they're curious about non-Jews' linguistic scope, too. (You'll get a shorter survey than the one I took.)

But I wasn't able to discern which "other languages" were in the survey besides Hebrew, Yiddish, and English. Anyone? *

Via Polyglot Conspiracy.

* Update: I figured it out. There's a least one Ladino term in the survey. (Ladino: Judeo-Spanish spoken by Sephardic Jews.)

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P.S. About the post title: "You Don't Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy's Real Jewish Rye" was a famous ad campaign created by advertising genius Bill Bernbach (he also dreamed up Volkswagen's "Think Small" slogan). Beginning around 1970, the posters--featuring models from all ethnic groups-- appeared all over the New York subway system. Here's one poster; here's another.

It Is. (What?) It Is!

Good thing I was on foot when I spotted this billboard:

Because if I'd been toodling by at 30 mph I'd have either (a) thought it was graffiti of zero interest, or (b) been so distracted by "Certified Pre-Owned" vs. "Used" (meaning? and so what?) that I'd have missed what's going on in the lower right-hand corner.

Oh yeah: Grape-Nuts.

You may need to click and enlarge to see the accompanying text: It is what it is in red, "hand-scrawled" type, and this URL: NoGrapesNoNuts.com.

Go ahead and click the link. I'll wait.

Back so soon? Have you recovered from the vertigo induced by that gently oscillating background? Have you decided whether the site is too cool for a brand that's been around since 1898? Not cool enough? Did it make you hungry for a big bowl of NoGrapesNoNuts? Did it answer your questions about the product's name?

OK, I'll spare you the tortured self-questioning and the NoAffectNoInfo Web experience. Here's Straight Dope (from way back in 1982) on how Grape-Nuts got its name. (Short version: grape sugar, nutty flavor.)

Because what really interests me about this Grape-Nuts campaign is the slogan: "It Is What It Is." Which means ... what, exactly? No, it isn't grapes. No, it isn't nuts. It's ... what it is.

Now, Grape-Nuts may be the first brand to appropriate "It is what it is" for commercial purposes (is it? actually, I don't know), but I'd be deeply disappointed to learn that a copywriter was paid and attaboyed to create it. Because selecting "It is what it is" is like playing buzzword bingo in the office. Haven't heard someone say it yet today? Don't worry; you will.

Besides, there's something sort of defeated-sounding about "It is what it is" for a century-old cereal brand. You want excitement, stimulation, flavor? Sorry. Not gonna happen.

Covering the Congressional steroid hearings a few months ago for Slate, Douglas McCollam called "It is what it is" "a sports cliché for our times." Coaches and players wield it shamelessly. Politicians, especially the Bush gang, love it, too: it allows them to sound thoughtful without, you know, having to think. McCollam couldn't identify a single point of origin for the phrase, but found published citations going back to 1996. And much earlier: "Indeed, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, philosopher John Locke wrote that 'essence may be taken for the very being of anything, whereby it is what it is.'"

Just last week, also in Slate, Ron Rosenbaum tackled the general subject of catchphrases, observing that "our language has become more catchphrase-driven, catchphrase-focused. So much so that catchphrase self-consciousness has become a phenomenon of its own." I urge anyone interested in language to read the whole article, which covers a lot of ground and, like all of Rosenbaum's writing, is laugh-out-loud funny (as they say). Here, though, I want to focus on Rosenbaum's four stages of catchphrase use: from Stage 1 ("when you first hear a phrase and take pleasure in its imaginative use of language on the literal and metaphorical level") to Stage 4 ("terminal obsolescence, dead phrase walking"). "At the end of the day" is in the latter category, Rosenbaum writes:

It kind of stuns me whenever I find someone still saying "at the end of the day" with a straight face. What are they, stuck on stupid, as they say?

But there's a worse fate than Stage 4, and "it is what it is" is consigned to it:

And then there's the danger that arises when Stage-4, zombie catchphrases that have previously been confined to a subculture escape their niche. We recently saw this happen with "It is what it is," which used to be an all-purpose coach-speak sports-night cliché. But since then, it's broken out and become a wise-sounding but profoundly empty surrogate for wisdom and perspective all too often used by idiot consultants and talking-head political pundits who seek to make themselves sound both worldly and gurulike: "It is what it is." To which one wants to say, using a monosyllabic catchphrase that is a particular favorite of mine and deserves its longevity: "Duh."

At least "It is what it is" doesn't suggest that the is-ness in question is good or bad; it's just that you can't argue it doesn't exist. Is "It is what it is" pop existentialism, at once an acknowledgement of the tragic immutability of being and a challenge to us to "take arms against a sea of troubles," as some well-known guy once said? Or is it an Eastern quietism, a rationale for resignation?

...A lasting catchphrase often earns its longevity because it has some philosophical question buried in it that hooks us. "It is what it is" is something I struggle with: How much should I accept in an "It's all good" way? Much of the time I'd much prefer if "it" isn't what "it" is. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. As they say.

So put that in your bowl of cereal and chew on it. Myself, I like my Grape-Nuts au nuke: cover with milk, heat in the microwave for about two minutes. Tasty! 

Bonus link #1: Andy Griffiths and Don Knotts in a 1964 Grape-Nuts commercial embedded into an episode of "The Andy Griffiths Show." You thought integrated advertising was something new? Hah!

Bonus link #2: Euell Gibbons shilling for Grape-Nuts ("reminds me of wild hickory nuts!") in a 1974 TV spot.

Carpenters in the Forehead

Some words for hangover, like ours, refer prosaically to the cause: the Egyptians say they are “still drunk,” the Japanese “two days drunk,” the Chinese “drunk overnight.” The Swedes get “smacked from behind.” But it is in languages that describe the effects rather than the cause that we begin to see real poetic power. Salvadorans wake up “made of rubber,” the French with a “wooden mouth” or a “hair ache.” The Germans and the Dutch say they have a “tomcat,” presumably wailing. The Poles, reportedly, experience a “howling of kittens.” My favorites are the Danes, who get “carpenters in the forehead.” In keeping with the saying about the Eskimos’ nine words for snow*, the Ukrainians have several words for hangover. And, in keeping with the Jews-don’t-drink rule, Hebrew didn’t even have one word until recently. Then the experts at the Academy of the Hebrew Language, in Tel Aviv, decided that such a term was needed, so they made one up: hamarmoret, derived from the word for fermentation. (Hamarmoret echoes a usage of Jeremiah’s, in Lamentations 1:20, which the King James Bible translates as “My bowels are troubled.”)

-- From "A Few Too Many," about the causes of, and putative remedies for, hangovers, by Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, May 26, 2008. One over-the-counter "all-natural prevention formula," NoHang, comes in several package sizes, including the Bender (12 tablets), the Party Animal (24 tablets), and the It's Noon Somewhere (48 tablets).

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*The Eskimos' nine words for snow? In the old formulation, it was always "hundreds" or "dozens." Perhaps linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum, tireless debunker of the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax, is finally making inroads.

X Is Like Y

From Blank is Like Blank, a blog of "analogies to live by":

Waterboarding is like freebasing:

They both sound like they should be summer-camp activities.

*

Using a semicolon is like barbecuing:

I'm never quite sure I'm doing it correctly.

From Justin Feinstein, a Brooklyn copywriter who also blogs at Guardedly Optimistic. (Check out his "If Taglines Were Honest" post from last October.)

(Hat tip: Swissmiss.)

Wandering Idioms

I'm not quite sure what to call the odd locutions I've been spotting lately. They're not exactly eggcorns, which are a type of logical spelling error based on mis-hearing ("eggcorn" for "acorn," for example). What I've been seeing--and, in one instance, hearing--are eggcornized idioms, not single words. The best term I've found to describe them is malaphor, defined in Michael Erard's excellent Um ... Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean as "two idiomatic expressions blended together, as in 'that was a breath of relief.'" Other examples include "You hit the nail right on the nose," and "We'll burn that bridge when we come to it."

And then there are these examples from my own reading and listening:

Pony up to the bar.  I heard this in "Tough Room," an episode of This American Life that aired last month. In Act Two, writer Rosie Schaap tells about her teenage experience of reading Tarot cards on the Metroliner commuter train in exchange for beer. At one point she says, "I didn't dare pony up to the bar." (It's at 24:44 in the podcast.) Not "pony up at the bar": it's definitely to on the recording. Now, the standard idiom that describes what young Rosie didn't dare do is belly up to the bar, as in "crowd so close to the bar that your belly presses against it." There's even a song, "Belly Up to the Bar," in the play and movie The Unsinkable Molly Brown. (Here's a video of Debbie Reynolds and cast performing it.) Of course, pony up is also a legitimate idiom, meaning "pay up" or "fork over." Word Detective says "pony" refers to "a small amount of money," and also to anything small--specifically a "pony keg," which explains the "...to the bar" logic. The Phrase Finder, a British site, also notes that the German verb meaning to pay is poniren. In "pony up to the bar"--which, by the way, yields 12,800 Google hits--the concepts of approaching the bar and paying for drinks are conflated. It's possible that using belly as a verb strikes some people, including Rosie Schaap, as uncomfortable or improbable, and so they substitute a word that seems more logical or familiar.

MixedMaxed. Scott Schuman, the brilliant photographer of street fashion who blogs at The Sartorialist, posted a photo last month under the title "On the Street ... MixedMaxed Plaids, NYC."  This may actually be an eggcorn for mismatched, although I'm not quite sure. (One commenter, Pase Rock, wrote in confusion, "is it mixed maxed? mixed matched? or mismatched? I've been trying to figure this out since I was a child. no luck yet.") There's an auditory overlap between mismatched and the fashion lingo mix and match, as in "This season, feel free to mix and match polka dots and plaids!" or "Mix and match separates to create 10 outfits from just 4 pieces!" (Can you tell I've written a lot of fashion copy?) There's something rather charming about "mixedmaxed" when it describes clashing oversize plaids, I have to admit. But its awfully hard to say--much harder than "mismatched." By the way, Google turns up 121 hits for "mixedmaxed," 45 hits for "mixedmatched" and more than 3,000 for "mixmatched." Clearly, many people have absolutely no idea of the meaning and function of the prefix mis-, nor do they recognize it when they hear it.

Glee abandon. Duncan Riley of the influential technology blog TechCrunch is partial to this malaphor, and he seems to be responsible for its modest spread. (I found 292 G-hits, only a few of which insert a comma between glee and abandon, indicating a series of nouns.) "Sucked is not a word I usually throw around with glee abandon," Mr. Riley wrote in January, after attending the Microsoft keynote address at CES, the big consumer electronics show in Las Vegas. Last September he wrote about "the period of glee abandon in which companies joined Second Life." The traditional idiom is gay abandon, adopted in an innocent era when "gay" meant "cheerful." ( Memory lane digression: I remember a wonderful newspaper comic called Rick O'Shay in which the saloon owner was a sassy gal named Gaye Abandon. All the characters had punny names: the town gambler was called Deuces Wilde, the doctor was Basil Metabolism, and Rick O'Shay's kid sidekick was Quyat Burp.) I understand that we have issues with "gay" these days, but turning it into "glee" (which admittedly has a related meaning, "jubilant delight") is pretty peculiar. "Gleeful" would work just fine, but I guess the extra syllable is just too much for Riley et al.

Has anyone else spotted malaphors in the wild? Or can you think of a better term to describe these idioms-gone-weird?

February Linkfest

In honor of leap year, an extra helping of links:

Real people are dreaming about presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And they're sharing their dreams on a couple of blogs known as I Dream of Hillary / I Dream of Barack. "A Christian Clinton-Hater" writes: We were in a car going somewhere. As we talked and things unfolded, I found myself liking her. By the end of the dream, I actually found her desirable. (Via Murketing.) (P.S. Does anyone else remember all the sexual dreams people--OK, women--reported having about Bill Clinton during the 1992 campaign? They were collected in a book, Dreams of Bill, now available online for as little as 20 cents.)

The Dictionary of Newfoundland English presents "the regional lexicon of one of the oldest overseas communities of the English-speaking world." As you might expect, it includes plenty of seafaring terms as well as holdovers from earlier British dialectical items such as droke, dwy, fadge, frore, keecorn, linny, nish, and suant. (Via Errata.)

"Sure as eggs," "get the chop, "up the gum tree": the British expatriate and Florida resident who blogs at A Gentleman's Domain explains those expressions and ten others in "13 British Idioms That I Have Never Heard in North America."

You too can possess a richer, more colorful vocabulary for insulting your enemies! Simply transport yourself to Wikipedia's Pejorative Terms for People, a compilation that includes macacawitz, jíbaro, and shoobie (a New Jersey insult applied to people from Philadelphia). (Hat tip: qwghlm.)

Jay Garmon at TechRepublic has compiled a list of 75 words every sci-fi fan should know. I recognized, um, about seven of them.

Here's how The Ad Generator explains itself: "Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed to generate invented slogans, which are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby creating fake advertisements on the fly." Provocative, beautiful, unsettling. (Via Verbatim.)

The Dictionary of American Regional English--known to fans as DARE--is nearing completion; the final volume will be published next year. In the meantime, you can visit the DARE website and take some quizzes on DARE terms. (Use the left-hand navigation.) Crimmy? Feest? Kiss-me-quick? Good luck! (Via Mike Pope.)

The "Dude" Lexicon

John Swansberg writes in Slate about the Bud Light TV commercials that depict "a day in the life of an unnamed man who communicates using the word dude and dude alone." Swansberg identifies "at least six distinct usages" of dude in the ads:

The admonitory dude: the dude deployed when your buddy won't stop humming "Umbrella" on a long car ride. As in, "Dude, enough."

The interrogative dude: useful for ascertaining whether you've dropped a call. "Dude? Are you still there?"

The deflated dude: the dude of bad news. "Dude. Tom Brady's wearing a boot."

The exclamatory dude: the dude of good news. "Dude! Tom Brady is no longer wearing a boot!"

The sotto voce dude: for classified briefings. "Dude: Here comes that tall drink of water from accounting."

The blissed-out dude: more accurately rendered as duhuhude. The dude issued upon rediscovering a long-lost Dead tape.

I counted a few additional variations in the "Dude Football" spot: the dude of disgust (in the restroom), the dude of distress (hitting crotch on turnstile), and the you-disappoint-me dude (at the very end).

Pictured: Jeff Bridges as Jeff (The Dude) Lebowski, in The Big Lebowski (1998). Image source.

A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with a Single Wingle

Meanwhile, in other car-branding news, Mark Liberman of Language Log conveys tidings of the Great Wall Wingle, "the first high-pressure common rail & high-end diesel pickup in China."

"Wingle" is purportedly a blend of "wind" and "eagle." (Liberman asks: "Shouldn't it be Weagle?")

You really must read the entire post, and refer to the Wingle website and to this press release, "Wingle Fever in Overseas," to savor the full character of Wingletude. But here's a taste:

Pick-up, which has top grade equipment and expensive price, is a very popular and fashionable type in the international market. Idea abroad is quite different from that of China. In foreign countries, driving a pick-up is not a lack of pride, but a symbol of fashion and identity. In many countries, the sale of pick-up is consistently on top, while market share of the high rank pickups has been monopolized by brands like Ford,General, Dodge and Toyota.

China has ignored this type for years and just regards it as a fractionizing part in motor market. However, it has created miracle that other types cannot achieve! The main symbol of it is that the foreign pick-ups can not be able to export in China since the 90s, because the independent brands leaded by Great Wall Motor have built a solid “Great Wall” to resist the foreign brands.

May a thousand Wingles bloom!

The Cat's Pajamas

A few weeks ago I wrote about the French idiom "to call a cat a cat"--the equivalent of "to call a spade a spade" in English. Thanks to commenter Tim Hicks, I now know that the French also say "a cat in the pocket" to mean "a pig in a poke." (In German it's "a cat in a sack.") And I learned that when a French person has a cold, he has a cat--not a frog--in his throat. (No frog jokes, please.)

Now Jon Carroll points me to Beginning With I, a blog by Deirdré Straughan about Italy, India, and the Internet. Deirdré has some wonderful lore about Italian baby names (common, uncommon, and old-fashioned), an instructional dictionary of Italian slang and swear words, and a guide to Itlish (English terms commonly appropriated into Italian). And she considers a few Italian animal idioms, including this lost-in-translation gem:

"Non c'e' trippa per gatti."

Literally, it means "There's no tripe for cats," and Deirdré  notes that it's used "when there's absolutely no hope that you'll get what you want." (I imagine the closest English equivalent would be "There's no rest for the weary," but it's a poor comparison.)

The deal is this: Tripe (that's mammal tummy to you picky eaters out there) is evidently so prized by Italians--and so coveted by their feline companions--that the humans feel compelled to guard it jealously and gloat about it. (Clearly, "trippa" lacks the secondary meaning of "tripe": utter nonsense.) I loved this story Deirdré tells:

At the European football championships in Athens (spring 2007), a group of Italian Milan fans unfurled a banner saying (in English) "There's no tripe for cats," meaning that there was no hope for the other team to win, though probably only the Italians understood it that way.

Indeed--although while investigating this idiom I discovered The Cat's Tripe, a British blog whose tagline is "What's left after the Cat is gone." But its author seems to have vegan tendencies. I cannot speak for his cat.

P.S. The English language is replete with feline idioms, too, including the one I've used in the title of this post. ("The cat's pajamas"--an American expression meaning "a remarkable person or thing"--dates back at least to 1900, as does "the cat's meow.") For a long list of cat expressions, see this entry in The Mavens' Word of the Day, from Random House. Update: that link is broken now, so try this list of cat idioms from The Free Dictionary. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, originally published in Great Britain in 1870, lists about 50 cat idioms, including "a cat may look at a king," "no room to swing a cat," and "enough to make a cat laugh." According to Gerald Cohen of the University of Missouri-Rolla, a participant in the American Dialect Society listserv and editor of Studies in Slang, the expression "more than one way to skin a cat" actually refers to catfish. 

Call It Like You See It

I was reading this Wall Street Journal interview with Jean-Pierre Garnier, chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline--recently in the headlines because of its controversial diabetes drug Avandia--when I came across an expression that struck me as both familiar and odd. Garnier was talking about Glaxo's donation of 50 million flu vaccine units to the World Health Organization:

Dr. Garnier: It's probably the largest vaccine donation ever. The company could have sold possibly those 50 million units. They [Glaxo] decided to set them aside because frankly those countries are not going to buy any pandemic vaccine. Some of them have no commitment to health care.

Let's call a cat a cat. They'll buy a lot of other things including Kalashnikovs before they allocate enough money for health care in their own countries. ...

Garnier is French, and "Let's call a cat a cat" is the French equivalent of the English "Let's call a spade a spade." My grasp of French idioms is spotty at best; I admit I'd never encountered this one. So I did a little, um, spadework.

Both "cat" and "spade" idioms mean "to speak frankly" and were first documented around the same time, about 400 years ago. The French version is attributed in some sources to the satirist Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux (1636-1711), who wrote in his Satires:

Je ne puis rien nommer si ce n'est par son nom;
    J'appelle un chat un chat, et Rollet un fripon
(I can call nothing by name if that is not his name; I call a cat a cat, and Rollet a rogue.)

The first written appearance of the English version was in 1542, in Nicholas Udall's translation of the Latin proverb "Ficus ficus, ligonem ligonem vocat," which itself was based on a misunderstanding of the Greek original: "To call a fig a fig, and a trough a trough," first recorded in Aristophanes'  "The Clouds"  (423 B.C.E.) and still used in modern Greek. The Greek words for "trough" and "digging tool" are related (skaphe and skapheion).

But how did the French get from skaphe to chat--if indeed that was the route they took? I have no clue. Any suggestions?

In Spanish, by the way, the idiom is expressed "Llamar al pan, pan y al vino, vino"--"to call bread bread and wine wine." In German the proverb is about as plainspoken as it could be: "Das Ding beim rechten Namen nennen"--call a thing by the right name. (I've also seen "Das Kind beim namen nennen"--"call the child by his name.")

In recent decades, "To call a spade a spade" has been clouded by mistaken racial implications (spade being a slur for Negro, derived from "black as the ace of spades," a phrase that wasn't documented until 1928). To be on the safe side, perhaps we should follow Dr. Garnier's lead and switch to cat-calling. As they say, 50 million Frenchmen can't be wrong.

P.S. If you know of equivalent idioms in languages other than the ones I've mentioned, please share them in a comment!