Fritinancy

Man-Word Watch: Dudeoir

The last sentence of the lede in a San Francisco Chronicle “Style” feature caught my attention:

When you think of boudoir photography, the picture that probably comes to mind is women striking pinup poses in classic Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie. But what if, instead of a woman, it’s a man seducing the camera in his skivvies? Then it’s dudeoir, of course.

Sure enough, the subject of the story, Oakland photographer Mariah Carle, devotes a section of her website to “Men Dudeoir” (sic; content reproduced verbatim):

Boudoir is for men too, Call it Dudeoir, call it nude photos, call it anything you like. You and your partner will love seeing professional high quality photos of you in your best-dressed or undressed look.

That capital D notwithstanding, “dudeoir” isn’t a trademark, and it isn’t unique to Mariah Carle. A Google search turned up more than 1,900 matches for “dudeoir,” including Dudeoir by Rouge in Hong Kong (“Portraits for real men”); Dudeoir Scotland (“Bespoke portrait and boudoir photography for blokes”); and Dudeoir Photography in Derby, England. I also found “dudeoir” used as a noun denoting “a guy’s private bedroom, dressing, and sitting room.”

Why dudeoir and not, say, boydoir? Your guess is as good as mine; maybe the rhyme with boudoir makes dudeoir irresistible. The French word boudoir—“a lady’s private sitting room or bedroom”—comes from an Old French verb, bouder, that means “to sulk,” so it’s literally “a room for sulking.” “Boudoir photography”—in which the (female) subject is scantily clothed, softly lit, and posed (sulking?) amid bedroom trappings—is as old as photography itself, but the term seems to have been created in recent decades. According to a thinly researched Wikipedia entry, a California studio, Motherlode Photography, coined “boudoir photography” in 1980. No link is provided, but there’s a Motherlode Photography in California Gold Country—which explains but doesn’t excuse the name—that was established in 1976 and still lists “boudoir photography” among its services.

The Airing of Grievances

Yes, I’m observing Festivus a few days early this year. The aluminum pole is looking handsomely unadorned (I find tinsel distracting), and I’m feeling confident about my chances in the Feats of Strength. But first, my favorite part of the Seinfeld-inspired holiday: The Airing of Grievances.

I’ll start with the most grievous of my 2012 grievances. Stick around – they get funnier and less lethal, I promise. (Past grievances: 2011, 2010, 2009.)

Declension

Maxim

 

 

Maxima

 

 

Maximus.

Maximus is a Polish vodka brand acquired last year by Brown-Forman Corporation, which also owns the Jack Daniels and Southern Comfort brands.  If you think “man throat” and “rise and conquer” are suggestive, you should see the old European TV spots, which really put the gluteus in the Maximus.

See more kitschy-cool Maximus print ads by 81-year-old Civil War painter Mort Künstler at Buzzfeed.

Short Takes

Remember MEN-trepreneurs, man irons, and manllows? It’s been a while since I’ve reported on a new man-word sighting, but now Brut steps up with its Mantervention Facebook app, in which (according to AdFreak) “some guy with George Michael stubble lectures you about spending too much time on Facebook.” I can’t say for sure, but I’m guessing the Mantervention movie scheduled for 2013 release is about something else.

*

I have so far managed to resist the 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon—although yes, I am aware there will be a movie—but a display at a local Barnes & Noble store (inner goddess! sex whisperer!) did exert a certain pull.

Fifty Shades of American Women Who Love the Book and Live the Life, the magazine, is a must for completists. (For more on “The X Whisperer,” read Jan Freeman’s recent blog post, “Whisperer Campaign,” which covers a lot of ground but doesn’t answer the question “Is a young, sadistic, cranky sex whisperer a sex whisperer-whipper-snapper?”)

*

If you’ve ever worked on the creative side of advertising or marketing, you’ll laugh through your tears, or weep through your guffaws, at “A Candid Proposal from an Advertising Firm’s Creative Director,” by Andrew Gall at McSweeney’s. One of the imaginary deliverables:

A dozen made up words related to your product that will “draw consumers in.” These shall include, but not be limited to, words with the following suffixes: “-tastic,” “-tacular,” and “-riffic.” Also, while you probably already know this, I was the one who came up with the word “crumbelievable” in 2007 to describe the Keebler company’s new line of coffee cake cookies.

*

And speaking of crumbelievable and similar madeupical words, Ben Zimmer pointed me to two articles in The Onion that have some fun with FritoLay: “Munchtrosity Created in Fritolayboratory” (“an evil of cheddarclysmic proportions”) and “Fritolaysia Cuts Off Chiplomatic Relations with Snakistan” (the fateful summit was held, of course, in München, Germany).

*

A tiny pluglet: I’ve been using Pinterest to illustrate some of the naming trends I’ve written about here. Check out my boards: Names That End in –ly, Brand Names with Gratuitous Umlauts, and Shop at X&Y!

Word of the Week: Preglimony

Preglimony: Financial support paid to a pregnant woman by the father of the unborn child. Coined from pregnant and alimony.

Alimony came into English in the 1650s from Latin alimonia, meaning “nourishment.” (The same root also gave us “alimentary.”) Preglimonyappears to have been coined by Shari Motro, a law professor at the University of Richmond who has been using the word since 2010 in scholarly articles and op-ed columns like the one published in the New York Times on July 7:

Former spouses are often required to pay alimony; former cohabiting partners may have to pay palimony; why not ask men who conceive with a woman to whom they are not married to pay “preglimony”? Alternatively, we might simply encourage preglimony through the tax code, by allowing pregnancy-support payments to be deductible (which is how alimony is treated). – “Responsibility Begins at Conception”

The need may be evident, but preglimony doesn’t roll off the tongue as smoothly as the earlier X-imony coinage, palimony, does. Palimony made headlines in 1977, when divorce lawyer Marvin Mitchelson used it to describe the demand of his client, Michelle Triola Marvin, who sued the actor Lee Marvin for spousal support although the pair had never legally married. (With all those Marvins, it really could have been marvinomy.) But the OED cites a much earlier first usage, in 1927, when the word meant “alimony paid to a former spouse with whom one remains on friendly terms.” As late as 1961, the Newport (Rhode Island) Daily News observed that “[d]ivorces are getting so friendly … that alimony should be called ‘palimony’.” Both senses are “chiefly North American.”

See also gal-imony (“Celeb Women Who Pay in the Divorce”—ABC News, April 17, 2009) and man-imony (man-word alert!), “in which [non-celeb] women are court-ordered to pay alimony to their husbands.” The man-imony “rising trend” was covered by Anderson Cooper in “a daytime exclusive” earlier this year.

 

December Linkfest

The A.V. Club looks back at the year in band names. It was a good year for punctuation themes: W-H-I-T-E, Friend Slash Lover, TL;DR. (Hat tip: Henry Alpert.)

*

In Word Routes, Ben Zimmer looks at the year in words. His list partially overlaps mine, but he also singles out a few I didn’t catch: twinkling, lip dub, and narb, for starters.

*

A different take on words of the year: Merriam-Webster reports on the words that spiked in online lookups over the last 12 months. From April 15: ersatz, after the US Postal Service admitted that the new Statue of Liberty stamp mistakenly features a photograph of the half-size replica at the New York New York Casino and Resort in Las Vegas.

*

Laura Wattenberg of  Baby Name Wizard announces the name of the year for 2011. It represents, she writes, “the rise of the virtual name.”

*

Why are informers called “rats” and spies called “moles”? The Explainer, at Slate.com, explains.

*

Buzzfeed picks the 90 best Twitter accounts of 2011. Yeah, they overlooked Fritinancy again.

*

Trendwatching’s list of “12 crucial consumer trends for 2012” includes, as usual, some over-the-top coinages, including flaw-some (“To consumers, brands that behave more humanly, including exposing their flaws, will be awesome”), eco-cycology (“Brands will increasingly take back all of their products for recycling … and recycle them responsibly and innovatively”), and emerging maturialism (“Expect frank, risqué or non-corporate products, services and campaigns from emerging markets to be on the rise”).

*

Last year the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan organization that lobbies for government transparency, published a tongue-in-cheek name generator for political action committees (PACs). The generator randomly spews out names like Fanciful Floridians Against Cruella de Vil and Captains of Industry for Growth—names you’d never expect to see in real life. Except … it turns out that dozens of real PACs lifted their names from the Sunlight Foundation generator.

*

Linguist Lauren Gawne, who blogs as Superlinguo, recently presented what may be the world’s first academic paper on LOLcats and language. (“Don’t call it kitty pidgin!”) Watch the presentation.

*

Speaking of linguists doing cool stuff, Erin McKean wrote earlier this month about “the secret language of bros”—aka the dudeification of English—for the Boston Globe. “Perhaps the most unlikely bro- blend,” she reports, “is Bronies, used to refer to male fans of the ‘My Little Pony’ television cartoon and toys.”

*

And speaking of manly lingo, Old Spice has a new holiday ad campaign that brings back the original “man your man could smell like,” Isaiah Mustafa. As “MANta Claus,” Mustafa promises to buy gifts for all 7 billion people on Earth. See all 36 MANta Claus videos here, and read my February 2010 post on Mustafa’s original work for Old Spice.

*

Lowering the Bar, the legal blog, reports (in a post titled “Assorted Stupidity #32”) on two new government-project names. PRODIGAL is being developed by Georgia Tech for the Pentagon; the name is an acronym for “Proactive Discovery of Insider Threats Using Graph Analysis and Learning.” (LtB: “Translation: it reads your mail.”) And Palantir is the name of a company that’s working with the CIA on data-mining. LtB: “Nerds like myself will know that palantir is taken from ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ in which a palantir is a crystal-ball-type item that was created with good intentions but virtually always deceived and corrupted the user. And that’s the name they picked.”

*

Real Android phone name or silly, randomly generated Android phone name? Honestly, it’s hard to tell. (Via @ahundredmonkeys.)

*

Where does the term “stocking stuffer” come from? Former Boston Globe language columnist Jan Freeman investigates.

*

“There is nothing inherently disrespectful about Xmas,” writes Dawn McIlvain Stahl at Copyediting.com. “Those who use it are not putting an X where Christ used to be. You could even say that those who use Christmas are putting a Christ where X used to be.”

*

On the other hand:

Via John McChesney Young; also here.

Dude, Where's My Fruity Pink Cocktail?

Misty Harris, a reporter for Canada’s Postmedia News, got in touch yesterday after she read my post about the Man Iron.* She said she’d recently noticed that Earls Kitchen and Bar, a chain with locations throughout Canada (and in a few US cities), offers a weekly special for men.

 

Here’s the fine print from the bar menu:

Earls White Peach Bellini | $4.50 | made with all natural peach syrup, appleton estate vx rum, peach liqueur and sparkling white wine

Earls White Peach BRO-llini | $7.25 | same great Bellini - always a double, always in a man glass

I’d venture to say it takes a whole lot of confidence—or a heaping helping of man irony—to step up to the bar and order a BRO-llini. By the way, if you need to ask what a “man glass” is, you probably should stick to cream soda.

(Yes, that’s Patrick Gallagher, who plays Ken Tanaka on “Glee.”)

___

*Read Misty’s article about the Man Iron, BRO-llinis, and manbags, which includes a few comments from yours truly. For more bro- compounds, please refer to the Encyclopedia BROtanica.

The Man Iron

Now that home-economics classes have been relegated to the dustbin of history and modern clothes dryers are equipped with an “ironing” setting, does anyone iron clothes anymore? Not from the looks of it, according to my highly subjective survey-by-looking-around. My findings were confirmed by a Writer’s Beat discussion forum, which tipped its hand by asking, “Why do people iron their clothes?” Representative response: “If god wanted us to iron, why make clothes with Dry Clean Only labels?” And a bit further off topic: “If you spray Pam on an iron you can make really great grilled cheese sandwiches with it.”

Well, I think ironing is important, and I enjoy doing it; in fact, it’s my favorite household chore. Also, as regular readers know, I like a good man-brand. (See my posts on ManQuarium, MANdle candles, and manscaping.) So it was with considerable interest that I read a recent Jezebel post about the Man Iron, aka the GC4490, from Philips, the Dutch electronics manufacturer.

 

 

The Man Iron: how Darth Vader maintains his wrinkle-free appearance?

The Jezebel post refers to a testosterone-drenched press release for the iron (“robust black casing …. exudes masculinity … practically unbreakable … crushes the opposition … intense 100g of steam … bulldozing [!] creases”). However, the post lacks a link to that press release, so I couldn’t verify its accuracy.* Nor could I find it on the Philips website. I did find a PDF of the product manual which calls the GC4490 an “anodilium soleplate man iron for an endless excellent gliding experience.” (I think Philips made up “anodilium”—I found a cancelled trademark filing for the term in the USPTO database.) The product manual also refers to the GC4490 as a “2400 W power tool for ironing” that “helps you blast all creases away easily.” I counted eight references to “power” or “powerful.”

The GC4490 was introduced in Europe last year; a May 2010 report in Springwise.com noted that the iron comes in a solid case “like a new hammer drill” and retails for about €80 ($96). Last week’s flurry of coverage by Jezebel and other outlets seems to portend a US debut, but I didn’t see the product in Philips’s online store.

Naturally, the Man Iron news has prompted some Iron Man word play as well as some scoffing. Here’s Glamour.com’s Tracey Lomrantz:

I find this almost as ridiculous as “Safety Girl” tools, which make home improvement so much more fun because they’re pink! For the record, I learned to iron from a former boyfriend and my dad handles most of the wrinkle-releasing duties at my parents’ house, and they both managed just fine without the premium sports car of steaming.

Sex-role stereotyping aside, what to say about the Man Iron name? It’s certainly consistent with a naming trend that began in 1969 with Hunt-Wesson’s Manwich. (I wrote about Manwich and its namer, ad man Edward Gelsthorpe, for the Visual Thesaurus back in 2009.) Man-brands and coined man-words—from Seinfeld’s mansierre and man-fur to Borat’s mankini and the U.S. economy’s mancession—serve a couple of purposes. As language maven Mark Peters has observed, “most man words are coined to describe men behaving like women, or at least stereotypical women. Men aren't supposed to worry about cancer, receive alimony, or get Brazilian waxes, so manogram, manimony, and manzilian”—and Man Iron—“are created.” Man-words are also a jokey way to relieve tension—to say, in effect, “Dude, why so serious?”

I do think, though, that Philips missed an opportunity to revive the ultimate in high-performance de-wrinkling technology: the electric mangle.

Mangle photograph from here.

A mangle presses fabric between heated rollers; it’s a staple of commercial laundries but used to be made for household use, too. (In fact, Miele still makes a home mangle but calls it a “fold-down rotary iron”; at $1,999, it requires a major commitment to crispness.)

The pressing-type mangle is unrelated, etymologically, to the verb meaning “to mutilate or disfigure; to ruin.” The verb comes from Old French mangoner, “to cut to bits.” The noun comes from Dutch and Middle High German and ultimately from Late Latin manganum. Here’s the wonderfully relevant part: manganum means “catapult” and derives from Greek manganon, “war machine.” Besides “mangle,” manganon gave us “mangonel,” “a military engine used during the Middle Ages for hurling stones and other missles.” 

Need I point out that the first syllable of all these words is man?

The mangle: an industrial-strength answer to a man-sized problem. Gentlemen, start your crease-bulldozing engines. 

___

* UPDATE: I am now in possession of the original Philips press release and can confirm every word. Unfortunately, the release is in Word so I can’t link to it.

___

P.S. If you really want to get serious about it, buy Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, by Cheryl Mendelson, which devotes an entire chapter to the science and craft of ironing. Ms. Mendelson, who lives in New York City with her husband and son, has a PhD in philosophy and a Harvard law degree and still found time to write—elegantly and persuasively—an 896-page guide to contemporary housekeeping. From the introduction to the chapter on ironing: “There is nothing like keeping the hands busy with some familiar work to free the mind. You can learn Italian while you iron, as a friend of mine did, or you can simply think.”

Word of the Week: Muffler Man

Muffler Man: A larger-than-life-size fiberglass statue used for commercial purposes, often by gas stations to promote muffler sales. Muffler Men are found throughout the United States in various guises; they stand between 18 and 25 feet tall and have hollow bodies, broad shoulders, “well-chiseled” facial features, and big, blocky shoes.

 

Muffler Man with muffler, Escondido (Southern California). From Weird California.

 

The definitive source for Muffler Man lore is the Roadside America website, which features photo galleries, a guide to subspecies (Noble Savage, Happy Half-Wit, etc.), and an interview with Steve Dashew, whose company, International Fiberglass in Venice, California, created hundreds of Muffler Men between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s, when Dashew retired. Dashew told Roadside America that the first Muffler Man was a Paul Bunyan figure built for the PB Café in Flagstaff, Arizona, in about 1962. After Dashew bought the company in 1963, he signed agreements with Texaco, Phillips, and Uniroyal, as well as with restaurants and retail stores, to make branded versions of the original mold.

 

Muffler Man with hot dog. (Wikipedia.)

 

How to identify a Muffler Man. (Roadside America.)

 

The Uniroyal Gal, rumored to be modeled after Jacqueline Kennedy, came in two versions: bikinied or beskirted.

 

Beskirted Uniroyal Gal in Peoria, Illinois. (Roadside America)

I’ve seen Muffler Men from time to time over the years and never given them much thought. (Disclaimer: I grew up in Los Angeles, where early and frequent exposure to restaurants shaped like hats, doughnuts, and owls no doubt made me a jaded observer of surreal real estate.) It wasn’t until I read a recent post in Brave New Malden—a British blog, I am chagrined to report—that I learned the term “Muffler Men” and realized that the big statues I’d been blithely disregarding all this time were a recognized folk-art medium.

One of the oddest and most endearing subspecies of Muffler Man is Chicken Boy, who loomed for many years over an eponymous restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. (Broadway between Fourth and Fifth streets, for those who know the territory.) Chicken Boy—a chicken-headed man holding a symbolic bucket of deep-fried chicken parts, something you probably don’t want to think about too deeply—was customized from an International Fiberglass mold in the late 1960s. When Amy Inouye moved to L.A. in the mid-1970s, she took an immediate shine to Chicken Boy; as she writes on the Chicken Boy website, “he communicated to me that if he could be okay living in LA, I could be okay living in LA.”

Cover of an early Chicken Boy catalog, featuring the Boy himself.

The restaurant closed in 1984, and Amy Inouye set about saving the statue, which she calls “the Statue of Liberty of Los Angeles.” It took 23 years, but Chicken Boy at last found a new home atop Inouye’s design studio in Highland Park, just north of downtown L.A. In the interim, Inouye published the Chicken Boy Catalog for a Better World, “a catalog of gift items including Chicken Boy logo merchandise and things Chicken Boy would be proud to have in his home or give as a lovely hostess gift.” (I was an early subscriber to the catalog, and I’m happy to say you can still buy many CB items here.)

 

One more digression: In addition to the beefy, humanoid Muffler Men, there’s a different species of muffler men that are actually crafted from mufflers and other auto parts. Muffler Men, published by the University of Mississippi Press in 2000, is a scholarly examination by folklorists Timothy Corrigan Correll and Patrick Arthur Polk of the handmade muffler sculptures that take the form of “cowboys, dogs, robots, space aliens, and a host of other creatures.” This breed of muffler men is not exclusive to the United States; Correll and Polk report that they’ve heard of sightings in Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Holland, and elsewhere.

What Men Want: Fours and Sevens

Last month, the British publishing company Bauer Media introduced a new weekly magazine for men, Gaz7etta, described online as “the perfect mix of news and style, with a healthy dose of business, politics and sport.” The magazine itself is not online; the 60-page pilot issue was distributed free in department stores and as a supplement within Bauer’s other magazines, including Gaz7etta’s counterpart for women, Grazia.

I’ll get to the odd spelling of Gaz7etta in a minute. But first, a few words about Gaz7etta’s intended readership.