Fritinancy

From My Twitter Files

I've been using Twitter to post quick links to blogs and articles I find interesting. Here's a roundup of about a week's worth of my tweets about names, brands, and language (okay, and politics, too):

Convivium Brands, a California company specializing in "on-demand private-label wine and spirits brands," has introduced four varietals under a new wine brand: Lipstick on a Pig. Each bottle is available with a red (presumably Republican) and a blue (Democratic) label. According to the website: "Lipstick On A Pig Wines allow consumers to weigh in and voice their opinions with their palates!" (In case you missed it, you can read here about the political flap over the expression "lipstick on a pig.")

I got a kick out of Newsweek columnist Joe Klein's nickname for Alaska Governor Sarah Palin: "Embarracuda." Other nifty words in the column: "nothingburger" and "empretzeled."

Anyone else catch the name of the Treasury Department guy who'll be overseeing the $700 million financial bailout? It's Neel Kashkari. Yeah. Cash and carry. That's going to be everyone's motto pretty soon.

Writer Anne Lamott misses the late, great newspaper columnist Molly Ivins this campaign season. Me too. (Never heard of Ivins? Read my tribute to her.)

John McCain and Sarah Palin are fond of calling themselves mavericks. But a descendant of 19th-century Texas rancher Samuel Maverick--whose unbranded cattle were known as Maverick's--warns them to put a lid on it. Terellita Maverick, 82, a  member emeritus of the San Antonio chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, says McCain "is in no way a maverick, in uppercase or lowercase." "He's a Republican," she said. "He's branded."

Jay Rosen, who's on the journalism faculty at NYU and whom I follow on Twitter, suggests that Gov. Palin's speech patterns were influenced by her brief stint on a television news program, and directs us to Michael Kinsley's 2001 essay for Slate about "what TV news is doing to our precious verbs." Answer: they've been reduced to "universal gerundiciples." Judge for yourself. Here's Kinsley, in full parody mode:

I suspecting the trend of TV news talking in headline-ese traceable to Rupert Murdoch, who buys the New York Post many years ago and founding Fox TV News more recently. The Post famous for its brilliant headlines. Fox News, though hypocritical about denying its brazen right-wing politics, the most creative of the TV news networks.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on Sarah Palin's "pompom patois and sing-songy jingoism."

Language Log's Mark Liberman takes issue with Dowd's assertion that one of Palin's spoken sentences--“It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there"--defies diagramming. He manages to wrangle it into shape. Other Palin sentences don't fare so well.

Two more Language Log posts on Palinesque predilictions: one on the governor's affection for affective demonstratives--the point words "this" and "that"--without referents ("loaning us these dollars," "trying to forge that peace," "craving that straight talk"), and one on her curious use of also as semantic glue, especially at the end of sentences.

And while we're in LanguageLogLand, here's Geoff Nunberg commenting on Steven Pinker commenting on Ms. Palin's pronunciation of nuclear: 

Palin has to be aware that many people consider her pronunciation nonstandard, and she (or her handlers) seems to have made some effort at correction, which is presumably why she pronounced the word as "new clear" when reading off the teleprompter in her convention speech. Since then, though, it's been "nucular" all the way, which may be part of the "let Palin be Palin" strategy. 

I'm learning the most interesting things from fashion blogs. For example, The Thoughtful Dresser (in the UK!) led me to www.270toWin.com, an interactive Electoral College map with current projections and actual results going back to 1789. And Je Ne Sais Quoi posted a nice graphic that compares the presidential candidates' tangible assets.

One more, then back to work: Critic Roger Ebert watched last week's vice-presidential debate and was reminded of Fargo. But he couldn't decide whether Sarah Palin was channeling Marge Gunderson or Jerry Lundegaard.

Sarah Palin, Poet

As you watch tonight's vice-presidential debate—remember, it's the one and only, the one you'll tell your grandchildren about—you may want to skip the buzzword bingo and instead simply think of it as a poetry reading.

That's right: Gov. Sarah Palin is a poet. Just ask Hart Seely. While other listeners struggle to diagram Palin's sentences, Seely hears not bafflegab but "intensely personal verses, spoken poems that drill into the vagaries of modern life as if they were oil deposits beneath a government-protected tundra."

Now Seely—who five years ago compiled the "found poems" of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—brings us the poetry of Sarah Palin, compiled verbatim from three interview transcripts. Here's a sample:

"Befoulers of the Verbiage"

It was an unfair attack on the verbiage
That Senator McCain chose to use,
Because the fundamentals,
As he was having to explain afterwards,
He means our workforce.
He means the ingenuity of the American.
And of course that is strong,
And that is the foundation of our economy.
So that was an unfair attack there,
Again based on verbiage.

(To S. Hannity, Fox News, Sept. 18, 2008)

(Note: For this poem to scan properly, verbiage must be pronounced in the Palin dialect: verbidge.)

And here's an example of Zen Palin:

"Haiku"

These corporations.
Today it was AIG,
Important call, there.

(To S. Hannity, Fox News, Sept. 18, 2008)

Because the raw material is in the public domain, Palin poems are an open-source project. Here's my own contribution to the oeuvre:

"Priorities"

These are critical

and again it’s

a matter of prioritizing

and a matter of

government understanding

its proper role in public safety,

is health care,

so it’s a matter

of priorities.

 

- Alaska gubernatorial debate sponsored by AARP, October 2006

 

 

Party Like It's 1066

Can you believe it's already been 942 years since the Battle of Hastings? Seems like only yesterday. Garrison Keillor is celebrating all week on his Writer's Almanac radio segment, with interesting bits about the influence of the French-speaking Normans on the English language. If you missed today's radio broadcast, you can read a transcript, listen, or download the podcast.

On today's segment, Keillor also reads "Windows Is Shutting Down," a  witty poem by Clive James, who's better known (to me) as a critic and essayist. I liked the poem so much that I'll be seeking out more of James's poetry. Here's the first stanza:

Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,
Proving the only one in step are you.

Read the rest of the poem here.

And as long as we're waxing nostalgic--it's the first day of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, after all--here's the Billy Collins poem "Nostalgia." It's the one that begins:

Remember the 1340's? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Lots More Dislike Accumulation!

So the comedian Margaret Cho, who's known for her bawdy, omnisexual humor and left-wing politics, wrote a naughty blog post about Sarah Palin titled "I Want to Steam Up Those Glasses." (If you're at work, read at your own risk. The lone photo appears to depict Governor Palin during her until-now-little-known barmaid days, but maybe I'm excessively judgmental, or maybe the image was PhotoShopped.)

But here's what made me chuckle. Amid the 175 comments is a trackback from a blog called Still Stirring the Pot:

[…] The comedian is bound to get lots more hate mail with her latest blog post! […]

That link apparently circled the globe until it turned up (in India, it seems) rendered thus:

[…] The comic is extremity to intend lots more dislike accumulation with her latest journal post! […]

That's either one heckuva machine translation or Jonathan Safran Foer's thesaurus-loving Ukrainian protagonist from Everything Is Illuminated, Alex ("Stop spleening me!") Perchov, doing a little moonlighting. It definitely has that Perchovian ring.

(Thanks for the link, Ari!)

Start Spreading the Nu's

There was a bit of discussion on the American Dialect Society listserv recently about the Ladies Professional Golf Association's decision to make English its official language--the latest salvo in an ongoing debate over official language(s) in the United States. (Last week, the LPGA reversed its decision.) ADS-L member David Bergdahl, who I think is associated with Ohio University, cried basta!¹ and posted this, which I share with you:

There may be those among you who support including Spanish as our national language. I for one am dead set against it!

We should preserve the sanctity of the English language.

To all the shlemiels, shlemazels, nebbishes, nudniks, klutzes, putzes, shlubs, shmoes, shmucks, nogoodniks, and momzers that are lurking out there in the crowd, I just wanted to say that I, for one, get sentimental when I think about English and its place in our society.

To tell the truth, it makes me so farklempt, I'm fit to plotz. This whole schmeer gets me broyges. When I hear these mavens and luftmenschen kvetching about our national language. What chutzpah!

These shmegeges can tout their shlock about the cultural and linguistic diversity of our country and of English itself, but I, for one, am not buying their shtick. It's all so much dreck, as far as I'm concerned. I exhort you all to be menshen about this and stand up to their fardrayte arguments and meshugganah, farshtunkene assertions. It wouldn't be kosher to do anything else.

Remember, when all is said and done, we have English and they've got bubkes! The whole myseh is a pain in the tuchas!

By the way, Yiddish has lent more to English than colorful vocabulary. It's also responsible at least indirectly for expressions such as "Drop dead," "I should be so lucky," "take a bath" (to mean "lose a lot of money), "Don't ask!", "So sue me," and "I need it like a hole in the head." For more, take a look at Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yinglish.

But enough with the shmoozing already. Back to work for me.

P.S. I know someone's going to ask about the apostrophe in the headline. Believe me, I questioned it myself. I even polled the Editors (no apostrophe!) Guild listserv for guidance. Consensus was to go with common sense. Omitting the apostrophe in this particular plural might cause confusion: is it pronounced nuss? So I followed the example of the Oakland A's and other irregular plurals.

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¹Or, more likely, "Dayenu."

Colorless Green Is the New Black

Aliona Doletskaya, the editor of Russian Vogue, has a Ph.D. in linguistics:

As an editor, Ms. Doletskaya treads a fine line, hewing to the commercial demands of what is arguably the world’s most influential fashion franchise and, at the same time, catering to the tastes of her Russian readership.

An unlikely style maven, she holds a Ph.D. in comparative linguistics. And she strives to edit a magazine that reflects all that has historically defined the Russian style. The fashion pages in her September issue open with a portrait of Anna Selezneva, one of Russia’s most-sought-after models, photographed to resemble an icon — the religious kind.

That image is meant to reflect “the Byzantine past of the country,” Ms. Doletskaya said, “which, with its love of gilding, is really over [t]he top.”

Yet in Moscow, where Vogue has its offices, tastes are shifting, as reflected by the stepped-up presence of American designers in her magazine. “The full-on extravagance, the red lipstick, the diamonds, the furs, all that is passé,” she said firmly. “The Russians are getting far more sophisticated.”

Ms. Doletskaya herself is intent on fostering those newly cosmopolitan tendencies. “What I want to say now to my readers is that we are part of the world,” she said, “no longer wild unfriendly creatures sitting behind a wall.”

According to the Times article, Russian Vogue, which was launched ten years ago, has a circulation of 200,000. (American Vogue, according to Portfolio magazine, has a circulation of 383,833.)

Title credit: N. Chomsky.

I Think, Therefore I Mock

The Philosophical Lexicon makes me sigh, à la Tom and Ray Magliozzi, "Gee, I wish I were smarter." Or had taken more philosophy classes. Still, I've picked up  enough stray philosophical phacts to recognize these mock-definitions and etymologies as Advanced Funny:

A. Priori, n. A species of undeniable truth first discovered in New Zealand.

buber, v. To struggle in a morass of one's own making. "After I defined the self as a relation that relates to itself relatingly, I bubered around for three pages." Hence buber, n. one who bubers. "When my mistake was pointed out to me, I felt like a complete buber."

chomsky, adj. Said of a theory that draws extravagant metaphysical implications from scientifically established facts. "Essentially, Hume's criticism of the Argument from Design is that it leads in all its forms to blatantly chomsky conclusions." "The conclusions drawn from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle are not only on average chomskier than those drawn from Godel's theorem; most of them are downright merleau-ponty."

heidegger, n. A ponderous device for boring through thick layers of substance. "It's buried so deep we'll have to use a heidegger." Also useful for burying one's own past.

lakoff, v. To rub the deep structure of a sentence until it expresses its logical form. "Too much laking off can cause insanity."

levi strauss, (trade mark) Manufacturer of coveralls to which symbols, emblems and patches are usually applied. Originally levi strauss products were working hypotheses, then in the nineteen-sixties flaunting them in conventional settings acquired political significance. They are now accepted almost everywhere.

michiganer, adj. Insane (a derogatory term typically, but not exclusively, applied to ethical doctrines). "Well, I wouldn't say it is michiganer, but it's certainly off the wall."¹

quine, v. (1) To deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant. "Some philosophers have quined classes, and some have even quined physical objects." Occasionally used intr., e.g., "You think I quine, sir. I assure you I do not!" (2) n. The total aggregate sensory surface of the world; hence quinitis, irritation of the quine.

rand, n. An angry tirade occasioned by mistaking philosophical disagreement for a personal attack and/or evidence of unspeakable moral corruption. "When I questioned his second premise, he flew into a rand." Also, to attack or stigmatise through a rand. "When I defended socialised medicine, I was randed as a communist."

A guide to the perplexed: Thomas Aquinas, Martin Buber, Noam Chomsky, Martin Heidegger, George Lakoff, Claude Lévi-Strauss (cross-reference: Levi Strauss), and Ayn Rand.

The Philosophical Lexicon was started in 1969 by Daniel Dennett at UC Irvine. The current edition is the first update since 1987 (and probably the first online edition, though I can't vouch for it).

Via David Weinberger (a Lexicon contributor) at Joho the Blog.

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¹ Actually, I'm not sure what this refers to--something to do with the philosophy department at U. of Michigan? But I do know that the joke depends on the pronunciation: the stress goes on the second syllable, with a Yiddish inflection--meshuggener (crazy). My late father used to refer to people from Michigan--Michiganders--as meshuggeners. In a caring, loving way, of course.

Technorati's Homeric Infixation

For about a week now, every time I've used the Technorati ping form I've seen two ads urging me to

Maximimize your advertising revenue.

Am I the only one who's noticed that extra syllable in "maximize" and wondered whether it's intentional?

It could be intentional, you know. Blame Homer Simpson.

For proof, I give you Alan C. L. Yu of the University of Chicago's department of linguistics. Yu's copiously footnoted "Reduplication in English Homeric Infixation," presented in 2005 (?) 2003 (thanks, Q. Pheevr!), assigns a scholarly name to Homer's habit of inserting a syllable (an infix) into words of three or more syllables such as telephone and saxophone, which become telemaphone and saxomaphone, respectively.

What--you think this is trivial stuff? Just wait till you get to the part about "serious implications on the interpretation of schwa epenthesis." Hoo-boy. It's quite an edumacation.

(I first wrote about Homeric infixation in this 2007 post. For much, more more on "edumacation," see this 2005 post by linguist Ben Zimmer on the American Dialect Society's listserv.)

Update, July 26: The Technorati ads now say "Maximize." You think the Technoraticians read Fritinancy?

 

You Don't Have to Be Jewish...

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

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

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

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

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

Via Polyglot Conspiracy.

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

___

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

June Linkfest

It actually feels like summer around here for a change, as opposed to the customary June Gloom, so these solstice links are even more solsticious:

1. I've submitted captions to the New Yorker cartoon-caption contest but have never come close to winning. Obviously, what I needed was a system like the one used by recent winner Patrick House, who reveals his secrets in "How to Win the New Yorker Caption Contest," in Slate. His mantra: "You are not trying to write the funniest caption; you are trying to win The New Yorker's caption contest."

2. Q. Pheevr's swell "What Mama Don't Allow, Linguistically Speaking" is a treat for blues-loving linguistics geeks. Here's a verse to give you a taste; be sure to read all the comments, too:

Mama don't allow no back-formation round here.
No, Mama don't allow no back-formation round here.
Well, we don't care what Mama don't allow;
Gonna back-formate anyhow.
Mama don't allow no back-formation round here.

(I have a few verses of my own I'd like to add, but I'm confounded by Q. Pheevr's comment format, which seems to be in Swedish. If you're reading this, Q, please send help!)

3. I'm still having fun with Twitter, the microblogging service that limits posts, called "tweets," to 140 characters. (Try it yourself: sign up--it's free--and then follow my tweets by typing Fritinancy in the search field.) Twitter has a serious side, too, as Craig Stoltz explains in How Twitter Finally Taught Me to Be an Editor. Craig writes: "I find that every time I sit down to write a meaningful Tweet I hone my craft a bit more."

4. Twitter has also spawned a subgenre: Twaiku, or haiku posted on Twitter. Take a look at this fan wiki for definitions and inspiration.

5. Discover the meanings of balatronic, croodle, pinquescence, and more at Obsolete Word of the Day.

6. More fully researched, and thus more conducive to frittering, is Worthless Word for the Day (or WWFTD, pronounced "wifted"), which recently posted guerdon ("reward"), the winning word in the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee. Use the drop-down menu in the upper-right-hand corner to search the WWFTD dictionary, read the "worthless disclaimer," and pleasantly waste more time. (Update: link has been fixed, per comment.)

7. Lifehacker's "Best Online Tools for Word Nerds" includes some resources previously acknowledged in this blog as well as some that were new to me, including What Does That Mean? and Definr. (Hat tip: Kirinqueen.)

8. Wordcraft claims to have the largest list of eponyms on the web, but that's just the beginning. Wander around and discover lists of Christmas-carol words (gladsome, roundelay, swathe, etc.), "German lingo of mental states" (Anschauung, sprachgefühl, gemütlich, etc.) and "words concerning anti-black discrimination" (redlining, Beulah land, DWB, etc.). Excellent discussion board, too. (Hat tip: Goofy, via the Wordcraft discussion board.)