Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Kettling

Kettling: The corralling of demonstrators by police into a limited area, where they are contained as if in a kettle. The tactic is controversial—the kettled civilians may be denied food, water, and access to toilets—and occasionally dangerous: demonstrators may be confined so closely that they risk being crushed.

The term originally came to public notice during the G20 summit in London in April 2009. The tactic, however, is considerably older: It was used during a 1995 wheelchair protest in London’s Parliament Square and a decade earlier in Germany during an antinuclear demonstration.

In fact, World Wide Words suggests that kettling may be a direct translation of a German word:

The most plausible suggestion is that the word is from German, in which Kessel is the everyday word for a kettle or similar vessel, such as a central-heating boiler (it is sometimes translated as the more evocative cauldron). The derived verb einkesseln (“to enkettle”) means to encircle or surround, principally in the military. This may come from an older sense of Kessel for a semi-circular ring of hunters driving game before them. The best-known example of the military sense is the Stalingrad Kessel of 1942, so called at the time by the German forces besieged in the Russian city. …

German police employ the same technique as the British, calling it Polizeikessel. The term is older than the English kettling (it appears in the publications Die Zeit and Der Spiegel in June 1986 and may well be earlier). Might it be that sharing knowledge of the technique between the national police forces lead to kettling being created by the British police as a loan translation?

However, a retired senior member of the Metropolitan Police tells me that the word isn't used by the UK police, practitioners calling it containment; he suggests that the term is a media construct, which may suggest that the use of it by the German police is irrelevant and that it came into use through reporters’ memories of the films.

Or not. An April 16, 2009 article in BBC News quoted former London policeman Andy Hayman, who wrote in a Times (UK) blog a day before the G20 summit:

The tactics are to herd the crowd into a pen, known as “the kettle”... the police will not want groups splintering away from the main crowd.

Which suggests that the police weren’t taking linguistic marching orders from the press or anyone else.

Kettling was employed again in the UK during the student protests of November and December 2010. In response, some computer programmers created an anti-kettling communications network called Sukey. (The name came from a line in a nursery rhyme: “Polly put the kettle on / Sukey take it off again.”)

This autumn kettling made its first appearance in the United States. Here’s the lede of a Gawker story published October 1:

Having, apparently, nothing better to do, NYPD spent Saturday allowing Occupy Wall Street protesters to halfway-cross the Brooklyn Bridge before cutting the marchers off and arresting several people, a controversial crowd-control tactic known as “kettling.”

For more about the history of occupy as used in “Occupy Wall Street,” as well as related words and slogans from the current protests, see Ben Zimmer’s recent Word Routes column, “Occupy Word Street,” and his interview on NPR’s “On the Media.” I’m betting on occupy as a contender for 2011 Word of the Year, but kettling could have a chance at one of the sub-categories (Most Creative? Most Euphemistic?).

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Image: Cover of Kettled Youth by Dan Hancox, an e-book published by Random House and available for Kindle download.

Word of the Week: Failover

Failover: The capability of switching to a redundant or standby computer server. Also a verb; sometimes spelled fail over: To switch to a standby server.

Last week’s BlackBerry outage affected an estimated 35 million global customers, including me*. An October 12 Talking Points Memo story quoted a service memo from BlackBerry parent company Research in Motion’s chief information officer, Robin Bienfait**:

Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested. As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible. We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused to many of you and we will continue to keep you informed. – October 11, 21:30 (emphasis added).

When I tweeted that failover was new to me, my tech-speaking Twitter friends quickly set me straight:

 

I found no definitions for failover in standard dictionaries. Here are the Wiktionary definitions (via Wordnik):

1. A means for ensuring high availability of some critical resource (such as a computer system), involving a parallel, backup system which is kept running at all times so that, upon detected failure of the primary system, processing can be automatically shifted over to the backup.
2. An automatic switch to a secondary system on failure of the primary system.

As you can see, the verb “to failover” (or “to fail over”) hasn’t yet been included—but not because it hasn’t been used. “To failover” yields 140,000 Google hits. (“To fail over” produces more than 3 million results, but most of them use the “failover” spelling.)

The opposite of failover is failback: “the restoration of a system in a state of failover back to its original state (before the failure occurred).” (Wordnik).

I found a couple of dead trademarks with failover (Auto Failover and One-Click Failover) and one dead trademark with failback (Failback, from eNetica Solutions, Inc.). There’s an apparently live product called Simple Failover, from JH Software, with no record of a trademark application.

 

Comb-over fail = failover? From FailBlog.

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* I use a BlackBerry, but I hardly depend on it. I wasn’t aware of the service problem until I read about it on Twitter, where someone (sorry, can’t remember who!) linked to the TPM story.

** Bienfait translates to “well made” or “well done.”

October Linkfest

I haven’t written about Kindle Fire, the name of Amazon’s new tablet device (although I have written about how the Kindle got its name). But that’s mostly because a couple of my colleagues covered the territory so well on their own blogs. The Name Inspector called the Kindle Fire name “redundant” and “metaphorically incoherent.” But Catchword gave the name an A and said it was “short, catchy, evocative, and stands out in the marketplace.” Me? I agree with the Name Inspector’s logic, but I don’t think customers will approach the name logically. Kindle Fire is a good-enough name. 

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Not many national retailers dare to name their wares as esoterically as Anthropologie does. If you’ve wondered where names like Varvara Maxi Dress and Hypsometric Tint Cardi (from the current season) come from, the style blog In Pursuit of Pretty Things is here to help with a helpful Anthropologie primer. (I took a stab at decoding Anthropologie product names myself in a 2009 post.)

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Need more Anthro? A new blog, Anthroparodie, does a nice job of spoofing the genre. I liked the Bucolic Spider Crusher: “Constructed of pure, river-washed stone from an Appalachian rivulet, this invention—ancient, yet ever-effective in its simplicity—allows you to leisurely macerate arachnids and insects of all varieties into a silky pulp.”

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How did we go from the disparaging X of Brand X to the “entertainment-focused, tech-forward” X of X Games and X Prize? Lexicon Branding’s director of linguistics, Will Leben, analyzes the evolution of X in brand naming and makes a few predictions.

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At first blush, the story sounds like David v. Goliath: Suburban mom starts a skin-care brand for girls, names it for her daughter (awwww), and gets sued for trademark infringement (oh noooo) by big, similarly named cosmetics company. But there’s more to Willa v. Wella than meets the sentimental eye. Trademark lawyer Lara Pearson sorts out the issues on her Brand Geek blog: “It’s nice to want to name your product line after your daughter, but that doesn’t mean you can. If my kid were named Nikey, do you really think I could name my clothing store that too?” (UPDATE, Oct. 14: Willa company founder Christy Prunier settled the trademark dispute with Procter & Gamble, which owns Wella, and won the right to use the Willa name. According to an earlier article, Prunier’s legal fees amounted to an estimated $750,000—substantially more than the average small business could have afforded.)

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Laurel Black thought she’d come up with a really clever name for her design business: Anaglyph. I think you can tell where this story is headed; read the sadder-but-wiser conclusion on Laurel’s blog.

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The new operating system for the Windows Phone boasts that it’s “a smarter way to app.” On his Evolving English II blog, Mike Pope notes that this verbification may represent a first for the very versatile app,which was voted 2010 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society.

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Are you ready for alphalux, blingamalism, freesumerism, and menaissance? They’re all real coinages found on a UK style sheet that covers future trends. There are many more, and I had to look every damn one up. See the whole list on Rantings of a Sub-Editor.

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A new book, The Wage Slave's Glossary, is a compilation of words we use to describe work in 21st-century America: from Blackberry prayer to Xerox subsidy, giganomics to microboredom. Here’s a sampling in The Atlantic. (Hat tip: aem76us.)

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NASA’s two robotic spacecraft, code-named GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B (for Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory), need real names “that capture the spirit and excitement of lunar exploration.” So the agency is holding a contest, open to U.S. students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Names must be accompanied by a short essay explaining your choices. Deadline: November 11. The winner(s) and their teacher(s) will be invited to participate in a teleconference with GRAIL mission team members. (Via A Hundred Monkeys.)

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Robert Lane Greene, author of You Are What You Speak and contributor to The Economist’s language blog, Johnson, dispels 10 myths about language, including “You can’t end a sentence with a preposition” and “English has spread because it is flexible and open to new words.” I wrote about Greene and You Are What You Speak in an April 2011 post.

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Here’s a sweet idea: Turn your first name into a candy brand, courtesy of the NameCandy candy-name generator. I’m Nanchoco-Rocks (“hunks-o-chocolate with real Nancy!”). And you?

Shrinkage

Spotted in Oakland (and on the Boost Mobile website):

 

 

I have to ask the obvious: Hasn’t anyone at Boost Mobile watched “Seinfeld”?

 

 

Bonus definition: In retail jargon, “shrinkage” is a reduction in inventory due to shoplifting, employee theft, paperwork errors, or supplier fraud.

Strikeouts

Sometimes a cover-up works to a brand’s benefit.

 

National Jewish Health. “She’ll Never Dance Again.” (New York Times Sunday Magazine)

The National Jewish Health ad is an elegant marriage of words and image: the dancer’s leg, lifted en attitude, blocks out most of “never.” The copy supports the concept:

Doctors said Karen’s lung disease meant she would never dance again. But that was before she came to National Jewish Health. Here, we never say never…

Another medical institution, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, uses the strikeout device in ads…

 

WSJ magazine, October 2011. “Cancer” is, in fact, part of the institution’s name.

…and in online copy:

 

Strikeouts can be striking online, too:

Go to Duarte.com to see how animation transforms this home-page headline.

Here’s a strikeout that swings and misses:

Meredith Corporation: “There Are No Guarantees in Life.” (New York Times)

Meredith owns many nationally distributed magazines, including Family Circle, Ladies Home Journal, and Parents. The torn-paper effect is nice, but the concept here is less successful than with “Dance Again,” mostly because of the jargon-y copy that takes too long to explain the headline:

Introducing the Meredith Engagement Dividend

Powered by Nielsen, this ground-breaking ROI tool quantifies the direct impact of your Meredith media investment on product sales. And that’s not all. Because we believe so strongly in the power of our magazine brands, we’re offering the industry’s first and only proof-of-performance guarantee.

They lost me after “ground-breaking ROI tool.”

Does “Reach Out” Make You Retch?

In my new column for the Visual Thesaurus, I take a long look at the reach out idiom, as in “We’ve reached out to the WHO to see what they know” (a line of dialogue from the new Steven Soderbergh movie Contagion). I wondered why reach out was both so widespread and so derided as “euphemism,” “jargon,” “useless verbiage,” or “a dramatic way of saying a very mundane thing.”

 

Ngram for reach out, showing a steady increase in usage since about 1970, when Diana Ross released her single “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand).” Ngrams draw on a corpus of published books.

 

 

When I searched for reach out, reached out, and reaching out in the last 30 days of the New York Times, I got a total of 117 results, almost all of them metaphorical rather than literal. They include “In Egypt, Islamists Reach Out to Wary Secularists,” “Reaching Out to the Tea Party in S.C.,” and “Then last summer, something surprising happened—the Pentagon reached out to him.”

I found exactly one use of reach(ed)(ing) out in the literal “touching with fingers” sense, in a Sunday Magazine article about a young man with autism:

“Oh,” Justin said reverently, reaching out his hand to touch it. “That’s beautiful.”

You’ll need to subscribe to read the entire Visual Thesaurus column, which includes references to Ambrose Bierce, Marshall McLuhan, and the Four Tops. Here’s an excerpt:

 

Reach out doesn’t fit the pattern of other widely loathed business words. It isn’t one of the -izes (e.g., incentivize, monetize, productionalize). It isn’t borrowed from a specialized vocabulary (bandwidth, Six Sigma, synergy). It isn’t misleading (actionable, conquesting, agile, and other words I discussed in a 2010 Candlepower column, “Weird Words from the Corporatese Lexicon”). It isn’t a neologism (user-centric, near-shoring, proactive).

On the contrary: reach and out are two of the oldest, commonest words in the language. Both have Old English roots, and reach has had figurative meanings—“to understand,” “to arrive at a destination or goal”—for centuries. Far-reaching, to mean “extensive,” was first recorded in 1824 (“the dusky heath far-reaching”); overreaching speech appeared in print in 1579. And reach out in the sense of “communicate with” is at least a century old; the OED gives this 1912 example: “Groups and agencies which are planning to reach out to low-income families with educational efforts in the area of sound family life.” Note, too, that we use many other tactile words in figurative senses: Our feelings can be hurt, we’re seized by terror, a story touches us.

But apparently it’s one thing to hear Robert Browning’s “Ah, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp/Or what’s a heaven for?” and quite another to open an email from a colleague and read, “Let’s reach out to Sales for feedback.” It’s not the message; it’s the corporate medium that contaminates reach out.

Read the full article, “Does ‘Reach Out’ Overreach?” Do you agree with the commenter who wrote, “The only time I ‘reach out’ is to strangle the person who said it?” 

UPDATE: Language columnist Jan Freeman, who blogs at Throw Grammar from the Train, offers another angle on reach out: the “NYPD Blue” connection.

Bonus for my blog readers: sing along to one of the original (1979) “Reach Out and Touch Someone” commercials for the Bell System. 

 

Word of the Week: Ring Fencing

Ring fencing: The legal walling off of certain assets or liabilities within a corporation. (Source: Wall Street Words.)  “It is usually legal, but there are limitations, such as maximum amounts that may be protected.” (Source: Farlex Financial Dictionary.) This metaphorical sense, which the OED traces back to 1870 (“I would not be sold, nor rounded off, nor ring-fenced”), was preceded by the literal sense of “surrounding (ringing) a piece of property with a fence to keep stock from escaping,” a usage that goes back in the UK to the 18th century. According to The Phrase Finder, which focuses on British usage, ring fencing “has been in use since the 1980s to denote the funds that are set aside for a project and cannot be spent on anything else.”

A more general sense of ring fencing, meaning “protection,” came up last week during the testimony of Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News International, before the British Parliament. Brooks is quoted at 23:03 in this live blog by The FirstPost, an online British news daily:

Brooks said that she was “ring-fenced” from any investigation after her own voicemail was accessed in 2006. She did add, “I was on the editor, and it happened on my watch.”

“I'm Sorry, I'm a Little Confused. What's the Name of Your Company?”

 

Brushfire Media? Dis Crunk Media? KUM Digital? Devil’s Deuce Interactive? Angel Dump LLC? Christmilk Digital? Cranky Lesbian Digital?

One thing we know for sure: Absolutely no brandcuffs.

Source: College Humor, via @lalorek.

A Bin Laden Lexicon

Some of the words and phrases that caught my attention in coverage of Osama bin Laden’s death:

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Abbottabad:  The city in northern Pakistan where bin Laden was found and killed is named for a British army officer, Major James Abbott (1807-1896), who founded the town in 1853. It’s pronounced with the stress on the second syllable: ah-BAHT-ah-bahd. The –abad suffix, also found in place names such as Islamabad and Hyderabad, comes from a Sanskrit word meaning “dwelling” or “town.” 

New York Times

James Abbott dressed as an Indian nobleman, 1847. (Hat tip: @johmcquaid)

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Double tap: “After bursts of fire over 40 minutes, 22 people were killed or captured,” writes Marc Ambinder in “The Secret Team That Killed bin Laden” (National Journal). “One of the dead was Osama bin Laden, done in by a double tap -- boom, boom -- to the left side of his face.” (Via @stevesilberman.) GunTec Dictionary defines “double tap” as a “colloquial term for the firing of two shots one immediately after the other at the same target.” UPDATE: As I note in a comment, below, the double tap technique is credited to two British police chiefs in 1930s Shanghai. They devised the method to overcome the limits of full-metal-jacketed ammunition. 

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SEAL: The bin Laden mission was carried out by “the specially trained and highly mythologized SEAL Team Six, officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group” (Ambinder). SEAL is a navy acronym for “sea, air, and land.”

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DevGru: A compression of “development group.” Ambinder writes that SEAL Team Six “was known even to the locals at their home base Dam Neck in Virginia as just DevGru.” DevGru is part of the Joint Special Operations Command, “an extraordinary and unusual collection of classified standing task forces and special-missions units” (Ambinder).

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Kinetic: Military euphemism meaning “lethal.” From the Ambinder article:

Recently, JSOC built a new Targeting and Analysis Center in Rosslyn, Va. Where the National Counterterrorism Center tends to focus on threats to the homeland, TAAC, whose existence was first disclosed by the Associated Press, focuses outward, on active “kinetic” -- or lethal – counterterrorism missions abroad.

Related: Read my April 2008 post on “post-kinetic development.”

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“Killed in training accidents in eastern Afghanistan”: Department of Defense code for “died in a JSOC operation that went bad” (Ambinder).

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Triumphalism: An attitude or feeling of victory or superiority. From the Whatever It Is, I’m Against It blog:

I’m not sorry to see bin Laden dead, but I can’t share in the triumphalism currently flooding the airwaves, nor do I feel any sense of relief, since I don’t expect this to change anything.

Related: Read my April 2011 post on triumphalism’s opposite, declinism.

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Honorific: “A title, phrase, or grammatical form conveying respect, used especially when addressing a social superior.” (American Heritage Dictionary) Media blogger Jim Romenesko reported this morning that the New York Times would no longer use the “Mr.” honorific in front of Osama bin Laden’s name, at the request of News Managing Editor Jill Abramson and Executive Editor Bill Keller. From the associate managing editor’s memo: “Without a ‘Mr.’ in front of his name, it was decided that we should capitalize the ‘B’ in Bin Laden on second references.”

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Halo effect: “How Big Will the Osama Halo Effect Be for Obama?” reads the headline on a post by Stephen J. Dubner on the Freakonomics blog. Dubner writes: “The halo effect is often short-lived — but will it, in this case, live long enough to power Obama through an election cycle?” The halo effect is “an effect whereby the perception of positive qualities in one thing or part gives rise to the perception of similar qualities in related things or in the whole” (American Heritage Dictionary). It was first described in a 1920 paper by the American psychologist Edward L. Thorndike, “A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings.”

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Also see this Visual Thesaurus compilation of notable words from President Obama’s May 1 announcement of bin Laden’s death.

January Linkfest

A little more year-end business, and then it’s in with the new.

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Brand New picks the best and worst identities (that’s “logos” to you civilians) of 2010.

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WTF is the word of the year, declares Dennis Baron on his blog, Web of Language. OMG, he has a point!

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It was a very good year for “jargon, mixed metaphors, and ridiculous euphemisms,” writes the Financial Times’s Lucy Kellaway. Read her 2010 Management Guff Awards (reprinted in the Irish Times). (Via The Name Inspector.)

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DTF, mantrum, and other top terms we learned on reality TV in 2010. (Via my brother Michael.)

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Voting is still open for Macquarie Dictionary’s 2010 Australian words of the year. Winners are traditionally announced in early February. I’d like to see screwage—a cynical synonym for “corkage”—gain wider acceptance up in this half of the world. (Via Ben Zimmer.)

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Let’s bury the not-a-word myth, writes Mark Peters in GOOD magazine. “These not-a-word claims are silly, illogical, and can mostly be summed up like so: ‘I hate this word, therefore it is not a word. So there.’ This makes as much sense as a deranged birdwatcher who, for some reason, decided warblers were the devil’s work and therefore lacked bird-ness.”

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How eight famous cheeses got their names. I’ve eaten Monterey Jack practically my entire life and never known who Jack was.

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How to get anyone to do the dishes—or, by extension, to buy whatever you’re selling. On the always-readable Copylicious blog.

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The problem with student writing isn’t slang or texting abbreviations, writes Ben Yagoda in the Chronicle of Higher Education: it’s literalness, ornateness, excessive length, and “train-wreck” punctuation. Read “The Elements of Clunk.” (Via Ron Charles.)

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I’m loving this new blog, Things Real People Don’t Say About Advertising.

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Why are Z and X so popular in drug names? Hint: Think Scrabble. (Via Our Bold Hero.)

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Should I work for free? Probably not, but check the chart anyway.

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Department of Meta: The most amazing press release ever written.

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And just for fun: What were the best-selling books on your birth date? If you were born on January 14, 1965, works by Saul Bellow, Louis Auchincloss, Gore Vidal, General Douglas MacArthur, and Jean-Paul Sartre occupied top positions on that week’s best-seller list. Last week’s equivalents on the New York Times nonfiction and fiction lists? Dean Koontz, Tom Clancy, Justin (Shit My Dad Says) Halpern, Glenn Beck, and Sarah Palin. Draw your own conclusions. Oh, and happy birthday.