Fritinancy

How Time Magazine Got Its Name (and Its Peculiar Style)

In "Untimely," her essay in the April 19 New Yorker, Jill Lepore writes about the decades-long spat between the founders of Time and The New Yorker, Henry Luce and Harold Ross. Luce and his Yale classmate Briton Hadden started Time in 1923, but not before dithering about the magazine's name:

Luce and Hadden thought about calling their magazine Destiny, which hints at the size of their dream. They also tried out What’s What, and for a long time they called it Facts. What Time became is lavishly celebrated in “Time: The Illustrated History of the World’s Most Influential Magazine” (Rizzoli; $50), by Norberto Angeletti and Alberto Oliva. Luce came up with the name after a late-night subway ride, during which he found himself staring at an advertisement that read “Time for a Change.” “That’s it,” Hadden said. “Time” was perfect, since the magazine’s strategy was twofold: it would be a history of our time, chronicling the events of the day, and it would save readers time.

(In 1930, Luce launched Fortune. He had wanted to call it Modern Business, but after the 1929 stock-market crash, Lepore writes, he changed the name "to something that allowed for twists of fate.")

Hadden was Time's first editor; Luce ran the business side:

The idea was that they'd rotate. They agreed, though, that the magazine had to have a language of its own: Timestyle. “You’re writing for straphangers,” a former professor of theirs advised them. “You’ve got to write staccato.” Hadden marked up a translation of the Iliad, underscoring compound phrases, like “wine-dark sea.” (A “sea as dark as wine” dragged.) No longer did events take place “in the nick of time” but “in time’s nick.” Everything was epic. Homer is why Time’s story about the Scopes trial began this way: “The pens and tongues of contumely were arrested. Mocking mouths were shut. Even righteous protestation hushed its clamor, as when, having striven manfully in single combat, a high-helmed champion is stricken by Jove’s bolt and the two snarling armies stand at sudden gaze, astonished and bereft a moment of their rancor.”. . .

Hadden liked to coin words, compounds like “news-magazine.” He imported “tycoon,” “pundit,” and “kudos” into English. He filled a notebook with lists. Famed Phrases: “flabby-chinned.” Forbidden Phrases: “erstwhile” (use “onetime” instead). Unpardonable Offenses: failing to print someone’s nickname. He was fond of middle names, of inverted subject and predicate phrases, of occupations as titles: “famed poet William Shakespeare” and “Demagog Hitler.” (What next? one reader wanted to know. “Onetime evangelist Jesus Christ?”) Hadden was uncompromising and, not infrequently, explosive. His Timestyle manual listed his cardinal rules: “Be specific. Be impersonal. Appear to be fair. Be not redundant. Reduce to lowest terms. You cannot be too obvious.” Scowl-faced was Editor Hadden, forgotten mag-man, called by the boys “the Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang.”

Meanwhile, at The New Yorker—whose mission was to be "interpretive, not stenographic"—reporter Wolcott Gibbs published a parody of Timestyle. "Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind," Gibbs wrote. The article concluded: "Where it will all end, knows God!"

Read the rest of Lepore's article.

Then read Janet Maslin's review of a new biography of Henry Luce, The Publisher, in the New York Times. "He made up in pretension what he lacked in personal charm," Maslin writes about Luce.

Adios, Operation Iraqi Freedom

As of September 1, the U.S. military engagement in Iraq will be renamed Operation New Dawn. The Washington Post reported last weekend that the new name was "designed to symbolize the dramatic drawdown of U.S. forces that is planned and to 'recognize our evolving relationship with the government of Iraq,'" according to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

The article continued:

Names are important, especially in war. Like a good advertising jingle, war names must be catchy and concise. But above all else, they have to sell -- all sorts of things, to all sorts of people: inspiration to the troops, righteousness to Americans at home, partnership to allied countries, peace and promise to non-combatant civilians.

And, to the enemy: We're-coming-to-kill-you aggression.

The key question: "Who is your target audience?" said Brig. Gen. Sean Macfarland, who is credited with helping turn around the insurgent violence in Ramadi, the provincial capital of Iraq's Anbar province. "If it's just internal consumption, you want to give a name the soldiers and Marines will get pumped up about. But if it's more for Iraqi consumption, it has to translate well. And if it's going to be in newspaper headlines and be commented about on op-ed pages, then you have to give it a more politically correct name."

Read the rest of the article, which includes a link to a list of Iraq operations compiled by GlobalSecurity.org. It doesn't go beyond 2007, but it nevertheless includes some interesting specimens, including Operation The Three Kings (named for the movie about the first Gulf War, perhaps?), Operation Determined Fury, and Operation Machete Harvest.

Read about the history of named U.S. military operations in this 1995 article, published in Parameters magazine.

I've written in the past about military terminology; see "Whatchamacallit Is Hell," "From CHUville to REMFland," and "Beyond Snafu and Fubar."

Hat tip: Laura Scheflow.

Humpday Links

I'm on jury duty this week and up against multiple deadlines, so posting will be less frequent than usual. In my temporary absence, I suggest that you peruse these fine posts by friends, colleagues, and strangers for whom I have the utmost respect:

Just in time for the Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, SherryGrammarian instructs us about loonies, toonies, two-fours, and other features of the Canadian language.

What happens when you blend two overlapping two-word idioms—say, sweet tooth and tooth fairy? You get a sweet tooth fairy, of course. UK actor/marketing guy Graham Hidderley/Burgess (he prefers the slash to the more mundane hyphen) has compiled a slew of the coinages at his blog, The Illustrated Sweet Tooth Fairy. A few of my favorites: pistol whipped cream, unrequited love handles, and—speaking of international sporting events—Olympic torch song. (Via Erin McKean's The Word column in the Boston Globe.)

John McIntyre has a word for the defenders of the no-split-infinitives faux rule, and the word is mumpsimus. It's a word I'm fond of myself.

Here's some sweet news: According to Information Week, Google is naming its Android versions after desserts. In alphabetical order. So far, there's Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, and Froyo (frozen yogurt). No, I don't know what happened to A and B, but I'm definitely looking forward to Zabaglione.  Hey, it's better than Nexus One. (Via On the Button.)

Feeling Passionate about Excellence

GoodCopyBadCopy, the blog of London agency DAC Creative, has been publishing "Scenes from Corporate Life," a series of original cartoons poking fun at corporate jargon. This one has a familiar ring:

 

Ah yes, our old friend corporate passion! 

More Fritinancy posts about corporate passion here. More Scenes from Corporate Life here. This post, about how a self-described "artistically incompetent" person developed the cartoons, provides interesting background.

And more corporate cartoons at Business Guys on Business Trips, a mordant Monday-morning skewering of creative-department folly.

P.S. Speaking of cartoons, I miss The Red Phone, Mxrk's sardonic political series.

Twitter's Language Problem

Last week I gave a brief presentation about Twitter to a Bay Area business group, many of whose members weren't using Twitter because they found it perplexing, silly, or pointless. In preparing, I read a lot of articles about using Twitter for business, and I thought back to my own mystified antipathy when I first learned about Twitter two years ago (one year after it launched). And I asked myself: What makes Twitter so hard to understand and to explain to others?

I came up with my own primary reason, which I'll get to later. But two days after my presentation I chanced upon the best explanation of all. In The Other Blog with No Name, English blogger Tim J asks "Why is Twitter so confusing?" and concludes: because the way Twitter describes itself is misleading.

In short, Twitter has a language problem.

Here's the evidence.

An Economy of Words

At least one growth industry has emerged from the current downturn/recession/whatever: the manufacturing of new words (and recycling of old ones) to describe it. Just within the last week I've discovered a raft¹ of word lists for recessionistas:

1. Grant Barrett shares "a few recessionary, depressionary, econolyptic terms" on his blog, The Lexicographer's Rules. New to me: diworsification ("diversifying one's investments too much"), financial incest ("telling one's children about family financial affairs in such a way or to such a degree that they learn too much and become overly concerned") and HENRY ("High Earner but Not Rich Yet"). For updates, check out Grant's indispensable Double-Tongued Dictionary; new lingo delivered fresh daily.

2. At Visual Thesaurus, Ben Zimmer has compiled "A Brief Glossary of Recession-Speak," which includes some terms I've discussed in previous posts (bankster, zombie bank, clawback) and some you'll find handy for general conversation. (I especially like furcation, which sounds like sending the pets to the kennel, but isn't.) By the way, Ben's "Word Routes" columns are free content, unlike my own fancy-shmancy behind-a-paywall articles.

3. "What to Call This Econo-Geddon?" asks energetic and witty wordsmith Mark Peters.  Is it a Bush depression or an Obama depression? Or just an economic pickle? (You can also find Mark Peters at Wordlustitude, a compendium of ephemeral or nonce words; at Babbel, where he writes Jabberwocky, the urban parenting dictionary; and, yes, at Visual Thesaurus, where he specializes in euphemisms. And he recently published an excellent and funny book.)

4. The New York Times news blog, The Lede, zeroes in on financial metaphors: an economic Pearl Harbor, falling off a cliff, financial weapons of mass destruction. (Hat tip: Cathy Curtis.)

5. Elsewhere in the online NYT, there's a fascinating interactive word train that captures readers' current mood about the economy, color coded for "employed," "unemployed," and (somewhat mystifyingly) "neither." Retired? "Just looking"? (Hat tip: Anne Szustek.)

6. What do you call "cost-saving recipes for cooking in a recession economy, most likely prepared by a recessionista"? Why, recessipes, of course. (Hat tip: NextMoon.) For actual meal suggestions, check out the Recessipes! blog.

7. You can thank the U.S. government for the FinancialStability.gov Decoder, "frequently used terms and acronyms" in discussions of finance and the economy. Besides TARP and TIP and CAP and CPP, the list includes the moderately alarming SSFI, or Systemically Significant Failing Institution Program, "established to provide stability and prevent disruptions to financial markets from the failure of institutions that are critical to the functioning of the nation’s financial system."

8. Finally, a monograph: Slate Moneybox columnist Daniel Gross on the Orwellian quality of legacy loans: "Word sleuths advise me that legacy derives from an ancient In­do-Aryan root meaning, 'It wasn't my fault, and I should still get a bonus this year even though we lost billions of dollars.'"

Want more? Use the "Economy" tag in the Categories column at right to read my previous posts.

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¹ Raft, collective noun: more than a passel, fewer than a boatload.

December Linkfest

Lights! Camera! Links!

Business Pundit proposes 15 corporate logos redesigned for the current economic crisis, a k a Epic Fail. I can't resist wanting to tweak the LG makeover: since the original slogan is "Life's Good," how about maintaining acronym consistency with "Life's Grim" or "Life's Galling"? (Hat tip: Catch This.)

Thinking about publishing a book to boost your career? Not so fast. Penelope Trunk at Brazen Careerist offers five reasons you don't need to write a book. No. 1: "People who have a lot of ideas need a blog, not a book." So now you know my excuse.

On the other hand, there's no excuse for the purple prose that won its perpetrators this year's Bad Sex in Fiction Awards, presented Nov. 25 at the In & Out Club (of course!) in London. This passage from inexplicably mega-best-selling author Paulo Coehlo's Brida ("the story of a young girl's quest through the mysteries of life to answer questions about who she is and seek her destiny"*) proves that 135 million people can indeed be very, very wrong:

Brida kissed him. She felt the taste of his mouth, the touch of his tongue. She was aware of every movement and sensed that he was feeling exactly the same, because the Tradition of the Sun always reveals itself to those who look at the world as if they were seeing it for the first time.

Read about last year's BSIF awards.

Your own writing, of course, is nothing like that. No, no: it's the equal at least of Poe or Austen, Shakespeare or Hemingway! Let O'Faust tell you exactly which great writer your work most closely resembles; just enter your blog's URL or cut and paste a passage of your writing. My own writing, it seems, is 17 percent similar to that of Oscar Wilde. At least it's not even 1 percent similar to that of Paulo Coelho. (Hat tip: Everything You Know About English Is Wrong.)

Everyone makes errors. Some people make funnier error pages than others. Here are 60 "really cool and creative error 404 pages," and here, via SwissMiss, are a whole bunch more. Love this one:

 

 

Happy solstice, Chanukah, and Festivus (the festival for the rest of us)! Let the airing of grievances commence! And may the Tradition of the Sun reveal itself to you in all of the good ways and none of the bad.

Menorah cork: Pop Judaica.

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* Surely I'm not the only one who read that line and immediately thought of Rochelle, Rochelle:  A Young Girl's Journey from Milan to Minsk, from Seinfeld.

Tank Think

No doubt you've been reading a lot of headlines like these lately:

U.S. stocks tank again; Dow point drop second-biggest ever (MarketWatch, Oct. 15, 2008)

eBay issues gloomy forecast as tech stocks tank again (CNet, Oct. 15, 2008)

Stocks Tank After Wall Street Shake-Up (CBS, Sept. 15, 2008)

"Tank" is a vivid, headline-friendly of saying "plunge" or "drop precipitously." But then there's this expression:

Is Ben Bernanke in the tank for Obama? (Blogging Stocks, Oct. 21, 2008)

In the Tank for Ethanol: GM Takes Its Case to China (Wall Street Journal's China Journal, Oct. 20, 2008) 

A Debate 'Moderator' in the Tank for Obama (Michelle Malkin, Real Clear Politics, Oct. 1, 2008)

That last reference is to NewsHour anchor Gwen Ifill, who moderated the vice-presidential debate; right-wing commentator Malkin, fulminating over Ifill's forthcoming book about race and presidential politics, fired this zinger: "She's so far in the tank for the Democratic presidential candidate, her oxygen delivery line is running out."

And then there's this less-frequent variation¹:

Arnold Schwarzenegger Is Disgracefully in the Tank with Big Biotech (Secondhand Smoke, a bioethics blog, Sept. 29, 2008)

Veep Debate Moderator in the Tank with Obama (Advance Indiana, Oct. 1, 2008)

"There are seven sharks in the tank with the economy" (Kevin Phillips, guest on "Bill Moyers Journal," Sept. 19, 2008)

So ... what is this tank, and what's it filled with? Water? Gasoline? Ethanol? Or is it "tank" as in "slang for prison"? What does it mean to be "in the tank for" someone or something? How is that different from being "in the tank with" someone or something? And what does this "tank" (noun) have to do with "to tank" (verb)?

Unfortunately, I could come up with only some general conclusions, none of what clarify the difference between "for" and "with."

Back in April, language guy William Safire (who, let the record show, is in the tank for McCain), wrote about in the tank in his New York Times Sunday Magazine column:

The primary meaning is evident from the context: to be in the tank is to be “lovingly enthralled; foolishly enraptured; passionately bedazzled.” A more sinister meaning, however, hovers in the shadows: “self-interestedly involved; surreptitiously supportive” and in extreme cases “corruptly influenced.”

Although the phrase has proliferated during this campaign season, it isn't new; Safire provides a 1992 citation from President George H.W. Bush: “My opponent’s [i.e., Bill Clinton's] campaign is being backed by practically every trial lawyer who ever wore a tasseled loafer. He’s not in the ring with them; he’s in the tank.”

That apposition suggests that the term comes, like much of our slang (knockout, in my corner, on the ropes), from the world of boxing. Safire consulted a sports-slang maven, Paul Dickson, who followed that thread back to a 1930 story in the Los Angeles Times, about a boxer who admitted to taking a dive--an expression that, like in the tank and to tank, suggests deep water. Here's Safire:

A tank was the 19th-century term for what we now call a swimming pool; the metaphor evoked a picture of diving to the ring’s canvas-covered floor — as if into a pool — to feign loss of consciousness. “By extension,” Dickson reports, “when a fighter or anything else (including a stock) takes a nose dive he or she has tanked.”

Eric Zorn, blogging for the Chicago Tribune, rounded up a bunch of links to analysis of in the tank and concluded that the boxing connection was legit. But the boxing term is in the tank, not in the tank for. Could there possibly be another etymology?

Here's a little background. The word tank came into English in the early 17th century from Portuguese tanque, "reservoir," which is either a borrowing from Gujarati tankh, "cistern," or the source of the Indian word. (The Portuguese, you will recall, spent about four centuries on the Indian subcontinent as colonizers.) Tank became the term for "fuel container" around 1902; tanker, for "ship carrying oil," emerged around the same time. The military adopted tank in 1915 as a code name for armored vehicles that resembled benzene tanks, and the code name slipped into general usage. A tank suit (1920s) got its name because it was worn in a swimming tank, or pool; today tank-type apparel can be any sleeveless, scoop-necked garment.

All those meanings provide plenty of potential clues to the meaning of in the tank. One of Zorn's commenters said the expression comes from commercial fishing: "Nothing is guaranteed until the day's catch is 'in the tank' -- meaning permanently 'hooked'." Someone else thought it meant "in the gas tank." And one commenter came up with a clever suggestion that clarifies the political connection: "I thought 'in the tank' meant someone who actively supported Dukakis even after this photo was published":

 

It was this failed photo op, some of you may remember, that turned Michael Dukakis's 1988 presidential bid into joke material. If "Dukakis in the tank" is shorthand for bad political PR, perhaps in the tank for means, by extension, "willing to go to embarrassing lengths, even at the risk of compromising one's dignity, to further a cause." And while in the tank for suggests overt advocacy, in the tank with seems to indicate only correlation. Those "sharks in the tank with the economy" are swimming around together, but they haven't made an endorsement.

At least that's how I see it. Any other ideas? Tanks in advance.

UPDATE: In a comment, Grant Barrett referred me to an explanation of "in the tank" that he'd written for the discussion forum of his radio show, A Way with Words. He also included a link to a Slate.com article, published just a few days ago, about the expression, for which Barrett contributed research. His conclusion, as summed up by Slate: "Aquatics by way of pugilism"

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¹ Many hits for "in the tank with" turn out to be links to Sea World or to plumbing how-to sites.

Word of the Week: Steezy

Steezy (adj.): Elegantly effortless; used in particular to describe the execution of something difficult. Originally a snowboarding term, a portmanteau of stylish and easy.

Steezy evokes the concept expressed in Italian by sprezzatura, the art of making the difficult look easy.

More definitions of steezy at Urban Dictionary.

Word of the Week: Disemvoweling

Disemvoweling (also disemvowelling): Removing all the vowels from offensive text posted on the internet by a troll, spammer, or other vandal. The reference is to disemboweling, or evisceration.

According to the NationMaster encyclopedia:

The disemvoweled text can still be read, or rather puzzled out; but it is clearly marked as deprecated, and is no longer susceptible to being automatically read by every passer-by who happens to glance at it.

The technique of disemvoweling appears to have been invented in 2002 by Teresa Hayden Nielsen to defuse offensive comments left by Philip Shopshire on her blog, Making Light. She explained her actions at comment #40; at comment #48, Arthur Hlvaty dubbed the practice "disemvoweling."

Disemvoweling also comes up in "The Trolls Among Us," an August 3, 2008, story by Mattathias Schwartz in the New York Times Magazine. From page 6 of the online article:

If we can’t prosecute the trolling out of online anonymity, might there be some way to mitigate it with technology? One solution that has proved effective is “disemvoweling” — having message-board administrators remove the vowels from trollish comments, which gives trolls the visibility they crave while muddying their message.

Other troll-related words used in the Times article: lulz ("a corruption of 'LOL' or 'laugh out loud,' “lulz” means the joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium") and malwebolence, a blend of "malevolence" and "web." According to the article, troll was first used in the late 1980s to describe someone who intentionally disrupts internet communities.