Fritinancy

N.R.A. Mottos Then and Now

The National Rifle Association was founded in 1871 by a lawyer and a former New York Times reporter. “For much of its history,” writes Jill Lepore in the April 23 issue of the New Yorker, “the N.R.A. was chiefly a sporting and hunting association” that supported many gun-control measures. “In 1957, when the N.R.A. moved into new headquarters,” Lepore writes, “its motto, at the building’s entrance, read, ‘Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation.’ It didn’t say anything about freedom, or self-defense, or rights.”

That motto was changed in 1977 to the one the N.R.A. still uses: “The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed.” The motto is an excerpt from the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; the amendment reads in full: “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

The difference between 1957 and 1977, Lepore writes, was the “rights revolution”—a liberal, not a conservative, movement that sought to pursue civil rights through the courts:

In the nineteen-sixties, gun ownership as a constitutional right was less the agenda of the N.R.A. than of black nationalists. In a 1964 speech, Malcolm X said, “Article number two of the constitutional amendments provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.” Establishing a constitutional right to carry a gun for the purpose of self-defense was part of the mission of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which was founded in 1966. “Black People can develop Self-Defense Power by arming themselves from house to house, block to block, community to community throughout the nation,” Huey Newton said.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that the N.R.A. “began advancing the argument that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to carry a gun, rather than the people’s right to form armed militias to provide for the common defense,” and describing gun-safety legislation as an attack on a constitutional right.

Read the rest of Lepore’s article, “Battleground America.”

And for additional insight into America’s obsession with guns, read “New Fashion Wrinkle: Hiding the Gun” (New York Times), about the rise of “covert fashion” designed to conceal weapons. 

Soitenly Not!

I’m no Three Stooges expert, but I’m familiar enough with the canon to know there’s something funny about this New York Times headline:

 

 

Not funny ha-ha; funny peculiar. Even if you could somehow give “cointainly” a soft-C sound—violating the general rule of hard C before A, O, and U—what’s that first N doing there? What the heck does “coin-tainly” mean?

If I had written the headline, I’d have rendered that cherished Stoogeism as soitenly. That is in fact how it’s spelled on a six-DVD collection, Soitenly Stooges, and in headlines in the San Francisco Chronicle and on the CBS News website. Heck, you can even buy a “Soitenly” license plate.

 

 

I wasn’t the only one to raise an eyebrow over the Times headline. Diego Sorbara works on that paper’s national/foreign copy desk, whose long arm evidently does not stretch all the way to Arts & Leisure.

 

 

When I retweeted Diego, the response was prompt and, under the circumstances, predictable.

 

 

Read the Stooges story here. In the print edition “cointainly” appears a second time, in the headline on the jump page.

UPDATE, April 10: The headline has been changed to read “Three Stooges, Two Farrellys? Soitainly.” But there’s no mention of it in the online corrections column.

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:

 

The Versatile Blogger Award

Aw, shucks. The Wordnik blog has nominated me for the Versatile Blogger Award, which is like Stephen Hawking giving a trophy to the local Science Fair winner.

Thank you!

These are not the resting-on sort of laurels: I’m supposed to nominate 15 other blogs and tell you seven interesting (or, according to some versions of the rules, “completely random”) things about myself.

Here are the interesting/random things about myself. As Grammar Girl put it, “This will be easier if we all pretend you care.”

1. I made my television debut at age four on the Los Angeles version of “Romper Room.”
   
   
2. I’m very good at American-style crosswords and word spirals, but hopeless at acrostics and cryptic crosswords.
   
   
3. A story I wrote for New West magazine about tampons and toxic shock syndrome was nominated for a National Magazine Award. In her bestseller The Coming Plague, science writer Laurie Garrett cited my article as an “outstanding piece of investigative journalism.” That was better than winning the award.
   
   
4. I named a condom for Mayer Laboratories. (It’s not on their website, but you can read about it here, at least until I overhaul my website.)
   
   
5. I once wrote a sonnet in Spanish in the style of the Siglo de Oro poets.
   
   
6. I once wrote five original nursery rhymes for a company that made fancy furniture for children’s bedrooms.
   
   
7. I have swum from Alcatraz to San Francisco on two New Year’s Days—water temperature 50° F—and on many slightly warmer days as well. I don’t wear a wetsuit.

As for the 15 blogs, here are my choices. I also endorse the selections made by my predecessors in this chain (Wordnik, Grammar Monkeys, and Grammar Girl).

 

Baby Name Wizard Blog. Intelligent, BS-free analysis of baby names and naming trends. While you’re there, check out the highly addictive NameVoyager tool, too.

Beauty Marks. Commentary on trademarks and brands by the smart, funny Jessica Stone Levy, a trademark lawyer who really knows her stuff.

Brand New. Before-and-after analysis of visual-identity makeovers by the team at Under Consideration LLC.

Catch This. The naming blog of Catchword Branding, my esteemed colleagues here in Oakland.

Copyranter. Frequently angry, often profane, usually hilarious takes on advertising copy.

Figaro Speech. Figures of speech and rhetorical tropes in daily life, brought to you by Jay Heinrich, author of Thank You for Arguing.

Johnson. The Economist’s language blog, covering English on both sides of the Atlantic.

Language Log. Group-written linguistics blog. Sometimes academic, occasionally arcane, often very funny, always worthwhile.

Literal Minded. Linguist Neal Whitman takes on the big subjects, like ass/fucking intensification and why you can say “where to go” and “how to go” but not “why to go.”

Name Inspector. Christopher Johnson’s nom de noms; his blog is “a close look at names and what makes them tick – or tank.”

Not One-Off Britishisms. Ben Yagoda’s heroic pursuit of U.K. expressions that have seeped (or barged) into American English.

Sentence First. Stan Carey writes from Galway, Ireland, about crashblossoms, glottal stops, totes amazebags abbrevs, and much more.

Separated by a Common Language. American linguist Lynne Murphy, aka Lynneguist, writes about American and British English from her expatriate perch in the UK.

Throw Grammar from the Train. By Jan Freeman, former language columnist for the Boston Globe.

Word Routes. Ben Zimmer’s column for the Visual Thesaurus, “exploring the pathways of our lexicon.” Unlike my own VT columns, Word Routes doesn’t require a subscription (but you should subscribe anyway).

And because I’ve never met a rule I didn’t want to break, here’s a 16th nomination: Dustbury isn’t a language or branding blog, but it more than fits the “versatile” description. In a typical week, the sole author, C.G. Hill, might cover social media, automobile tires, basketball, My Little Pony, print magazines, transportation in Oklahoma, women’s shoes, and Zooey Deschanel—all with enviable literary skill and brio.

If the abovementioned nominees feel moved to play the game, here are the rules:

1. In a post on your blog, nominate 15 fellow bloggers for The Versatile Blogger Award.
2. In the same post, add the Versatile Blogger Award.
3. In the same post, thank the blogger who nominated you in a post with a link back to their blog.
4. In the same post, share 7 completely random pieces of information about yourself.
5. In the same post, include this set of rules.
6. Inform each nominated blogger of their nomination by posting a comment on each of their blogs. (Or tweeting.)

Naming the Wi-Fi Network

“Alexandra Janelli is a Wi-Fi detective,” writes Christopher Borelli in “The Weird World of Wi-Fi Router Names,” published in today’s Chicago Tribune. Specifically, Janelli hunts for colorful (or creepy) Wi-Fi names—names like Dain Bramage, Isthisthingon, and Stop Cooking Indian!!!—and posts them on her website, WTFwifi.com. Janelli explains on her About Us page:

The idea for WTFwifi was hatched at a bar on the Lower East Side back in early 2009 when my iPhone cordially invited me to join the wireless network ‘Alcoholics Shut In’. The irony was not lost. From that day on it became our mission to uncover the most exemplary shout out to the queerest, funniest, most bizarre, and quirky WiFi names in NYC!

Janelli—who used to be an environmental consultant and now has a day job as a hypnotherapist—was the subject of a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece, “The Tao of WiFi,” in December 2011. Writer Lauren Collins noted that Wi-Fi* names follow trends: “For a few months last year, Janelli kept seeing Pretty Fly for a WiFi; then it was FBI Surveillance Van.”

Janelli moved to Evanston, Illinois, in August 2010, and she continues her amateur research in the Chicago area. Reporter Borelli followed her around for his article:

On Monday morning, we walked west on Davis Street in Evanston, Wi-Fi sleuthing. Janelli, who has long, chestnut-colored hair and big, dark eyes, wore a turquoise scarf and held her iPhone before her, watching router names appear on the screen then vanish a second later, replaced by different names. She carried the phone like a divining rod, pulling in fragments of thoughts and nicknames and factory codings.

“‘WeltMeister,’” Janelli read off her phone. She considered that a moment. There were other names on her screen. Names like “2Wire808” and “Home 3.” But these didn't concern her — these said nothing. So we continued walking, then stopped at Ridge Avenue. “Ah,” she said, reading from the list of router names that had popped up on her phone: “Here we got ‘Daddy's Boat’ and ‘Sex Town.’” We took a few steps to the south. The names vanished and a new wireless name appeared:

“Sis Seduced the Family.”

She read it and made a face. “Ew,” she said finally.

Hat tip to Dennis McClendon of the American Name Society for the link to the Tribune story.

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* Janelli and the New Yorker spell it WiFi, but the term is a trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance and is correctly spelled Wi-Fi. I wrote about the Wi-Fi trademark in an October 2010 post.

Big Pink

“Pink” isn’t just a color, reports Natasha Singer in the New York Times; it’s a marketing strategy to raise money for breast-cancer prevention and research. And it’s a verb:

 

 

In marketing circles, “to pink” means to link a brand or a product or even the entire National Football League to one of the most successful charity campaigns of all time. Like it or not — and some people don’t like it at all — the pinking of America has become a multibillion-dollar business, a marketing, merchandising and fund-raising opportunity that is almost unrivaled in scope. There are pink-ribbon car tires, pink-ribbon clogs, pink eyelash curlers — the list goes on.

Call it Big Pink:

Like Big Oil, Big Food and Big Pharma, Big Pink has its share of critics. Some patient advocates complain that Komen and other pink-ribbon charities sugarcoat breast cancer, which kills about 40,000 American women and 450 men annually. Others complain that pink marketing, despite the many millions it raises for charities, is just another way to move merchandise and that it exploits cancer by turning it into an excuse to go shopping. And some pink-theme products have no relationship with any charities at all. (Consumers should check before buying.)

For a decidedly jaundiced take on pink-ribbon marketing, read Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 essay, “Welcome to Cancerland.”

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Image: Pink Ribbon Sparkle Centerpiece. See Google Shopping for more pink-themed tchotchkes.

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?

The New Yorker on Brand Names

Here’s how New Yorker staff writer John Colapinto begins “Famous Names,” in the magazine’s October 3 issue: with an edge-of-your-seat account of the naming process that resulted in … the BlackBerry! In 1998! Stop the presses!

That story was already well known to those of us in the branding business, and to many civilians as well, when Alex Frankel related it in greater detail in his book Wordcraft, which was published in 2004. It was repeated in newspapers and magazines. But maybe you haven’t heard it. In that case, read the New Yorker article. Yes, it’s behind a paywall. Sorry about that.

You should also read Colapinto’s article if you’ve never heard the story of Ford Motor Company and the branding of the Edsel. It occurred in 1957, and it’s been told in print about a zillion times. But maybe it was new to John Colapinto and his editors.

I wonder about those editors, though—or, more specifically, about the magazine’s vaunted fact-checkers. Maybe they were on vacation, or replaced by interns, when this quote from the story’s protagonist, David Placek, made it into print: “You want to name it something that the big guys—A.T.&T., Southwestern Bell, California Bell—would never think of.”

Memo from the Left Coast: there never was a “California Bell,”* only Pacific Bell. Oh, and while I’m being picky: New Yorker, may I introduce you to Snopes.com? I don’t believe you’ve met, because you clearly never read the authoritative debunking of the Chevy Nova myth. Nova does not mean “no go” in Spanish; that's no va, which has a stress on the second syllable rather than the first. As a matter of fact, the Chevy Nova sold quite briskly in Spanish-speaking markets.

Creative Contributions

This week I’m looking at microstyle and the way in which small bits of copy can make a big impact. Today: making donations less boring.

The inspiration for today’s post is the new Los Angeles Review of Books, “the first major, full-service book review to launch in the 21^st century, designed to exploit the latest online technologies in ways that respond to a significantly transformed publishing world.” LARB was founded in response to a serious problem:

The disappearance of the newspaper book review supplement (papers in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Des Moines, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington and elsewhere have shuttered or radically shrunk theirs) has been accompanied by an explosion of titles in the book market. The net result: twenty times as many titles are published each year than were in 1980, and we have one twentieth of the serious book reviews.

LARB intends to be “a largely self-supporting nonprofit institution” that pays “decent rates to our reviewers.” To that end, it’s inviting tax-deductible contributions. Nothing newsworthy here—except for the wording of the home-page prompt (“Help Us Build This Thing!”) and the names of the giving levels.

No “Silver,” “Gold,” and “Platinum” here. No, this online giving page is aimed squarely at its target audience, which cares deeply about books, literary criticism, and a vibrant marketplace of ideas. The giving levels, from plain old “Reader” up to “Founding Reader,” flatter your intelligence while challenging you to think not just about the size of your donation but also about the intensity of your commitment.

I attempted something similar when I worked with Children’s Fairyland, the oldest storybook theme park in the United States, on the language of a new adopt-an-animal campaign. Instead of leaving the donation field open-ended or simply suggesting dollar amounts, I created playful yet appropriate giving levels that suggested “helping our animals”: Companion, Best Friend, Caretaker, Keeper, and Guardian.

It’s easy to default to dollar increments when you create a donation form. But attaching meaningful, relevant names to giving categories transforms the act of contributing into something greater than writing a check or authorizing a funds transfer: it becomes an act of identification with a cause.

In Others' Words

I’m busier than usual this week, so instead of blogging I’m quoting some tasty passages from other blogs.

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“Thuuz? Oh, Pleez” (The Name Inspector)

But then we have the name Thuuz. The Name Inspector is not a fan. Clearly it’s built on the bones of the words enthused, enthusiasm, and enthusiastic. So far so good–apt, if a bit pedestrian. But that syllable is pretty weird sounding. It’s really the first consonant and the vowel together that sound odd. The Name Inspector talked about this in connection with the name Thoof a while back. He quite reasonably declared that the “Thoo-” part was a bit counterintuitive in English, and then this smartypants named John commented that it was an accident of history that there is no word thoof, and The Name Inspector held his ground, and John was all “what about enthusiasm”, and The Name Inspector was like “good point but what about at the beginning of a word”, and John was all “historical linguistics blah blah”. So clearly The Name Inspector won that one.

(Note from Fritinancy: For more on Thoof, read my own 2007 post.)

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“Your Friendly Global Villain” (Johnson)

What is it about very nasty people that makes us use their first names as though they were our buddies? And why some but not others? “Osama”, “Saddam” and “Fidel” are common, yet no “Josef” or “Adolf”. No “Muammar” either, not even after he started having citizens strafed from helicopters.

First-name terms are obviously a way to diminish a feared enemy, especially in the triumph of his death or downfall. But merely being a bad hat isn't enough, it seems: he has to be extensively demonised before meriting the treatment, so maybe Libya’s mad, bad colonel just hasn't been in anyone's sights for long enough. And if a man is too evil—on the massacre-of-millions scale—then such jolly familiarity apparently becomes bad taste. Stalin was Uncle Joe once, before the truth came out.

(Note from Fritinancy: See also “What to Name the Villain.”)

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“Park Bench” (Nancy Nall)

Do you have Critical Mass in your city? Doing a little research on it the last few days, I’m amazed at the diversity of its impact. I first heard of it via Jon Carroll’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle some years back, and I gather the Bay area is where it was born. Much of cycling culture has its roots there, and Critical Mass rises out of a certain obnoxiousness born out of unpleasant encounters with cars. We can go back and forth on this and probably will, but it’s fair to say that in cities like San Francisco, or Chicago, New York and a handful of others, motorists and cyclists are the Israelis and Palestinians of transportation, and Critical Mass is a monthly intifada, a deliberate traffic jam of hundreds of cyclists moving through them on a rush-hour Friday, blowing lights, in yo face, saying, essentially, Fuck you.

(Note from Fritinancy: Jon Carroll still writes an excellent column for the Chronicle.)

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Want more reading material? Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic has linked to “Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism” published in 2010, from the famous and predictable—Malcolm Gladwell, Atul Gawande, Clive Thompson, Zadie Smith—to the too-good-to-be-missed (Beth Kowitt on Trader Joe’s, Mimi Swartz on the sex trade in Houston, John Gravois on the closing of the marijuana frontier in Mendocino County, Jessanne Collins on what it’s like to work for the notorious content farm Demand Media). Plus great stuff from The Awl, Planet Money, This American Life, and The San Francisco Panorama (which published just one issue). Yes, it will probably take you the rest of 2011 to read them all. Better get cracking.