Fritinancy

Put Me In, Coach

I'm reading the sports section these days because the only sport I follow, swimming, is at last getting its quadrennial day in the sun. (And what a day it is! Two words: Dara Torres. Okay, two more: Michael Phelps.) Good news for me; bad news for newspaper sportswriters who regard swim-meet assignments as hardship duty. (Except for the ogling of the nearly naked bodies.) For four years they cover big-money sports that involve balls and the verb "to play," and then, just before the Olympics, they're shuttled off to some natatorium in Nowheresville--this year it's Omaha--and plunged into a weird subculture whose rituals include full-body shaving. They don't understand swimming technique or training, they can't tell the players even with a scorecard, and when they try to dash off some savvy-sounding copy they flail like beginning butterflyers.

I'm willing to overlook most of that. I'm grateful just to read names and race results. But I do get ticked off when I have to read painful usage errors that would have been caught by a copyeditor if all the copyeditors hadn't gotten the axe in the last round of layoffs (or been outsourced to India).

Here, for example, is the San Francisco Chronicle's Scott Ostler in this morning's paper with a wrapup of yesterday's Olympic trials.

Example #1:

Dara Torres isn't held together with bubblegum and bailing wire.

Dumb, dumb sentence, but what really made me cringe was bailing. It's baling wire, as in "wire that's used to tie bales of hay together."

Example #2:

[Amanda] Beard: "I can't get to sleep at night, so I take sleeping pills." Doesn't that make her loggy?

Loggy? No, logy--pronounced with a long o. ("Loggy" would necessarily be pronounced with a short vowel.) It means lethargic or sluggish.

Neither error was corrected in the online edition, by the way. Sigh.

S.O.B. Story

Roy Blount Jr. in the July Esquire on why "son-of-a-bitch" is better than "asshole":

"Son of a bitch" carries gravitas accumulated over centuries. An asshole is just an asshole, a hapless chump, a pointlessly obnoxious hindrance. An asshole can be an evil schemer, but he or she can't be a worthy opponent. If an asshole gets over on you, you feel dumped on. If a son of a bitch beats you, you can live with it. You've probably learned something.

... Hold your nose and say "asshole." Sounds like, takes one to know one. The second syllable, if it stood alone, would sound expansive, like whole, soul, roll, from pole to pole, and goal. The emphasis, however, is on the first syllable: that flat-to-nasal a and the hissy two s's.

"Son of a bitch," on the other hand, starts with a little hiss but goes on to rhyme with gun and then luvvah, rolls over a solid b bump, picks up that tight-tough it -- as in git, hit, and chickenshit -- and then comes down on that great crunchy ch sound, as in you betcha, snatch, crotch, and hootch-a-ma-cootch.

Elsewhere in the issue: more on the A-word, the last word on douchebag¹, and an appreciation of faygeleh. The print edition has an impressive chart of the relative frequency of various epithets, 1996 through 2006.

Read my own consideration of words formed from ass.

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¹ With an unfortunate apostrophe error in the intro. R.I.P, copy desk.

In So Many Words

Slate founding editor Michael Kinsley--now a columnist for Time--writes about the Tribune Co.'s "brilliant new scheme for measuring the productivity of journalists": by the number of column-inches they produce. Kinsley does his damnedest to rise to the new standard:

For many, many years, the Los Angeles Times was known for its verbosity, or tendency to use more words than other newspapers to say roughly the same thing. More recently, this habit of writing many, many words when far fewer could make the point as well or nearly so (which is the essence of verbosity) was discouraged at the Los Angeles Times. It is no longer like the old days, when stories used to jump from one page to another, and then to yet another, and then another still, snaking endlessly around ads—this was back when newspapers had ads—and rarely reached a conclusion except for an announcement that Part XIII would appear the next day. But apparently this new discipline was a terrible, terrible mistake. Or, to put it a different way, it was a bad idea. At any rate, it is yesterday's idea. Today's idea is that a writer should produce as many words as possible, because that means you need fewer writers to produce the same number of words.

The last time I remember paying serious attention to column-inches was when I was a cub reporter at my college newspaper, The Daily Californian. We were paid by the column-inch; 15 cents was the going rate, I think. I do remember that it was a great day when I netted $3 for my inflated account of the infighting at a Berkeley City Council meeting. Conversely, when I graduated to the paper's copy desk--a coldbed of disgruntlement if ever there was one, proving beyond all doubt the accuracy of "because the stakes are so low"--I took evil pleasure in cutting reporters' copy (according to the best practices established by Associated Press and Strunk & White, of course), knowing full well I was taking pizza money out of their grubby, sophomoric paws.

Where there's a stupid system, there are smart gamers of said system. As Bertrand Russell once said, "I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible."

(Via Matthew Stibbe, who offers some of his own suggestions for planning and measuring writing output.)

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.

May Linkfest

Lots o' links this month, so make yourself comfortable.

Haikuvies: Tell a movie's plot/In seventeen syllables/Spoilers? Sure--why not? (Actually, you get 17 times seven.)

It took about 24 hours for a meme called When Obama Wins to make the leap from Twitter to the whole wide web. Gather round, children, and hear Andrew Crow of Adaptive Path tell the origin story:

I'm never sure about how internet memes start, but this one started with a typo.

Dan was twittering something about Alabama, but wrote "Alambama". He joked that when Barack Obama wins the election, certain states will probably be renamed Alobama, Califobama, Nevama, Massabama, New Yobama. Of course, I thought that was hilarious and started thinking about other things that would change once Obama wins. So, a few of us started twittering silly little things, thinking of it as an inside joke.

Overnight, a few people caught on giving it a life of its own.

Jason Kottke took this and mashed it up to create this really cool microsite.

I think what interests me the most about these is how fast they spread. It's been less than 24 hours and there are already over 500 tweets about it. Certainly taken on a life of it's own.

Which is the perfect segue to my favorite WOW so far: "When Obama wins ... everyone will know the difference between its and it's." (By 111archeravenue.)

I considered saving this for Halloween, but death is always in season at Fatal Utterances, "a glossary of slang, jargon, euphemism, and cant as used by undertakers, criminals, consumer activists, and the ordinary people." Some favorite entries: bier baron (a funeral-parlor owner), Mrs. Z (a corpse), and Stare Number 12 ("the look that passes over a man's face as he regards another man as a meal").

The idea behind Brand Tags is that a brand is whatever people say it is. Go there and give your one-word impressions of brands like Gap, Starbucks, Yahoo, Greenpeace, Whole Foods, and many more. (It's all over Twitter now, but I heard it first from Rowland Hobbs, whose tags I follow on Del.icio.us.)

The Big Word Project is selling words at $1 a letter. "Search for your word and link it to your website. Your website is then the new definition." Started by a couple of graduate students in Northern Ireland.

You probably know about Stuff White People Like, which reportedly is being turned into a book. (What do white people like? Coffee, Asian girls, Ivy League schools--stuff like that.) Now Andrew Hammel, an American in Germany, offers Stuff White Germans Like: #3 Balkan disco music, #5 custom-designed bookshelves, #11 Paul Auster. (Really? Paul Auster?)

Roy Peter Clark is serializing his next book, The Glamour of Grammar, on his Poynter Online blog (Poynter's slogan: "Everything You Need to Be a Better Journalist"). He's inviting readers to make suggestions and correct errors. His goal is to present "not a comprehensive grammar, but an essential grammar: those elements of language that the reader and writer can use today and every day." Even if you groan at the mention of grammar, read this series: it's lively and engaging and wildly informative. (Yes, glamour of grammar. You knew the two words were related, didn't you? Roy explains in his first installment)

Mike Pope on the seven stages of being edited:

3) Anger

I'm starting to get irritated. What the -- ? That's a stupid edit. And so's that one. Ha! That's just wrong! Smartypants editors, think they know everything! Well, let me just set that editor straight ...

And speaking of anger, here's the Baltimore Sun's John McIntyre on "Those Damn Copy Editors," in which he addresses the complaint of "someone named Seth Godin"¹ that a copy editor "totally wrecked" his work:

Unfortunately, Mr. Godin does not supply a single instance of the copy editor's destructiveness, so it is up for discussion whether he is an injured author or a fulminating boor. (The other texts at his blog do not suggest that revision of his prose would be a cultural catastrophe.)

Catching his breath, McIntyre offers some very sensible suggestions for improving relations between writers and copy editors.

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¹ Guru Supremo of hip marketing manifestos and, according to one of McIntyre's commenters, "author of the most popular ebook ever."

"Welcome to the New, Post-Female American Cinema"

Manohla Dargis writes in the New York Times about the dearth of women on the big screen:

Nobody likes to admit the worst, even when it’s right up there on the screen, particularly women in the industry who clutch at every pitiful short straw, insisting that there are, for instance, more female executives in Hollywood than ever before. As if it’s done the rest of us any good. All you have to do is look at the movies themselves — at the decorative blondes and brunettes smiling and simpering at the edge of the frame — to see just how irrelevant we have become. That’s as true for the dumbest and smartest of comedies as for the most critically revered dramas, from “No Country for Old Men” (but especially for women) to “There Will Be Blood” (but no women). Welcome to the new, post-female American cinema. ...

Last year only 3 of the 20 highest-grossing releases in America were female-driven, and involve a princess (“Enchanted”) or pregnancy (“Knocked Up” and “Juno”). Actresses had starring roles in about a quarter of the next 80 highest-grossing titles, mostly in dopey romantic comedies and dopier thrillers. A number of these were among the worst-reviewed movies of the year, including “Premonition” (Sandra Bullock) and “The Reaping” (Hilary Swank) ... The days of “Million Dollar Baby,” for which Ms. Swank won an Oscar, and “Speed,” which rocketed Ms. Bullock to stardom in the summer of 1994, feel long gone.

Well, maybe all the women in Hollywood were otherwise engaged in the remake of The Women, scheduled for an October release. In the fabulously bizarre 1939 original, directed by George Cukor (and based on Clare Boothe Luce's smash-hit stage play), all the performers (even the animals!) were female. I could happily re-watch it every couple of years for the snappy dialogue and the gloriously over-the-top performances by Joan Crawford and a very young Rosalind Russell, among many others. The remake is directed by Diane English, perhaps best known as the executive producer of TV's Murphy Brown. And the cast is a Who's Who of Hollywood actresses, most of them at least 20 years older than their counterparts in the original version: Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Candice Bergen, Cloris Leachman, Carrie Fisher, Bette Midler, etc., etc.

Cintra and the Red Soles

Cintra Wilson on the impossible shoes of Christian Louboutin:

The Christian Louboutin boutique is a small, low-key spectacle, dominating a black-and-chrome storefront on Madison Avenue. Imagine the footwear wing of Frederick’s of Hollywood, if it had tottered away to seduce the Wonka factory: wall-to-wall red carpet, mirrors, disco sequins and modular Lucite cubbies all showcasing a loopy series of variations on lickably shiny, nosebleed-high hooker pumps (the cheap American cousin of which is commonly known, in fetishistic eBay galleries, as “the Pleaser”).

Hence, the mystique: Louboutin pumps look right at home in the rarefied air betwixt chrome poles and mirrored ceilings, only they are around $900. This makes them not hooker shoes, but merely French.

I have mentioned the fabulous Cintra before. She just keeps getting better. Any week in which one of her "Critical Shopper" pieces appears in the Times Thursday Styles section is a good week in which to be alive.

Photo of Christian Louboutin pumps from Kuwait-Style.com.

Good News, Bad News

Good news: the San Francisco Chronicle's meaning-packed headline on this morning's story about the Olympic torch's surprise route change in San Francisco (print edition only--aha! print isn't dead yet!):

TORTUOUS JOURNEY

In just two words, the headline writer conveyed the route's unexpected detour (tortuous: twisting, circuitous) and punned on torch's. And if readers also heard an echo of "torture"--as in, what's happening in Tibet, Burma, and Darfur; or as in, "I traveled for miles to witness this historic event, and all I got was this lousy blister"--well, that was probably not unintentional.

Bad news: The Los Angeles Daily Journal, a legal newspaper, lays off its entire copy desk. Editor Martin Berg told the blog L.A. Observed--stop me if you've heard this one before--"It will take some adjustments, but we're going to find ways to continue to serve our community with the resources we have." Yeah. Do more with less. Besides, automated spellcheck and grammarcheck always work perfectly, right? (Hat tip: Verbatim and Bill Walsh's Blogslot.)

The Language of Luv

Vocabulary lessons from the Eliot Spitzer affair and related peccadilloes, by way of New York magazine (warning: may offend dainty sensibilities):

GFE: Girlfriend Experience. What "#1 escort service" NY Confidential offered clients ("The $2,000-an-Hour Woman," by Mark Jacobsen, July 10, 2005). According to Jason Itzler, NY Confidential founder and self-described "King of All Pimps," "GFE is about true passion, something genuine. A facsimile of love." (Translation: mouth-kissing permitted.) At the time of the interview, Itzler was six months into a two-and-a-half-year sentence on Rikers Island for money laundering and running a house of prostitution. Itzler's current claim to fame is that he put Spitzer's tootsie, "Kristen," into the business.

PSE: Porn-Star Experience. What most escorts have.

DATY: "Dining at the Y," a synonym for cunnilingus. ("Secrets of the Megapimps," also by Mark Jacobsen, in the March 24, 2008, issue, which has a crude but effective cover).

BBBJ: "Bareback Blow Job." Ibid.

The Luv Guv: Nickname for Eliot Spitzer.

Big Spit: Ditto.

More Spitzeriana here.

And just to prove that if you can make it there, you can indeed make it anywhere, here's a quote from Real Life Romance, San Francisco Chronicle gossip columnist Leah Garchik's amusing compilation of overheard-in-the-Bay-Area quotes:

"I can't believe you pay for sex but you think popcorn is too expensive."

-- Movie-lover to movie-lover, at multiplex cinema.

Boilerplate

Some of the funniest writing in the New York Times appears at the very end of movie reviews, in the italicized ratings information. Like this, from a two-thumbs-down review by Jeannette Catsoulis:

“Under the Same Moon” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has bad white people, hard-working brown people and morally ambivalent people of mixed race.

I've long believed that boilerplate copy represents an excellent opportunity--usually overlooked--to connect with an audience. If you can add something interesting, amusing, attention getting, or just plain human to the standard text, why pass up the chance?

For example, here's the setup message I got when I downloaded Google's Web Accelerator:

Privacy Policy. Please read this carefully. This is not the usual Yada Yada and is different from the Google Toolbar Yada Yada you may have seen before.

To be sure, most readers probably click right past that paragraph. But those who spend just three seconds reading it are rewarded with a smile.

By the way, have you ever wondered where the term boilerplate comes from? Here's what Wikipedia says:

The term dates back to the early 1900s, referring to the thick, tough steel sheets used to build steam boilers. From the 1890s onwards, printing plates of text for widespread reproduction such as advertisements or syndicated columns were cast or stamped in steel (instead of the much softer and less durable lead alloys used otherwise) ready for the printing press and distributed to newspapers around the United States. They came to be known as 'boilerplates'. Until the 1950s, thousands of newspapers received and used this kind of boilerplate from the nation's largest supplier, the Western Newspaper Union.