Fritinancy

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.)

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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.

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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.

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

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

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

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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”).

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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

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

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“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.”

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On the other hand:

Via John McChesney Young; also here.

Swag and Schwag

Now that we’ve taken a swig of swagger, the current word of the week, let’s look at swagger’s siblings, swag and schwag.

First, we’ll dispense with a bit of etymythology: swag is not an acronym for “stuff we all get,” no matter what the New York Times Sunday Styles section tells you. (Indeed, a correction to that effect was published Sept. 26.) It can, however, be an air force acronym (U.S. or Canadian) for Scientific, Wild-Assed Guess (distinguished from the layperson’s WAG, your basic wild-assed guess).

Word of the Week: Swagger

Swagger: “To behave with an air of superiority, in a blustering, insolent, or defiant manner; now esp. to walk or carry oneself as if among inferiors, with an obtrusively superior or insolent air” (OED). Also a noun: a swaggering movement or gait; boastfulness; braggadocio (American Heritage Dictionary). 

Shakespeare may have been the first to use the verb in print, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600):

What hempen homespunnes haue we swaggring here, So neere the Cradle of the Fairy Queene?

Jonathan Swift turned swagger into a noun in his 1725 poem, “A New Song on Wood's Halfpence”:

The butcher is stout, and he values no swagger;
A cleaver’s a match any time for a dagger...

Swagger may derive from the much earlier swag, which also was a verb before it was a noun. In the early 1520s swag meant “to move with an unsteady gait”; it probably came from Old Norse sveggja, to swing or sway. I’ll have more to say about swag (and also schwag) in another post later this week. Meanwhile, let’s take a look at swagger in the news and in the ads.

Fancy Shmancy

Jessica Simpson, the singer-turned-actress-turned-shoe-and-clothing-designer-turned-parfumieuse, has loaned her name to a new fragrance, I Fancy You, introduced in July. It’s the latest variation on a Simpsonian fragrance-nomenclature theme that began with plain old Fancy (2008) and now includes Fancy Love and Fancy Nights. All of the fragrances are made by Parlux.

 

 

According to Fragrantica:

The fragrance opens with fruity notes of Fuji apple and pear. The heart is made of white flowers such as tuberose and lily of the valley, settling at the woody - musky sandalwood base.

Woman’s Day positively gushes:

A soft, velvety floral musk, I Fancy You naturally expresses the charming ‘Girl Next Door’ side of Jessica Simpson: delightful, kind, loving and innocent with just a hint of flirtatiousness. In the graceful tradition of young courtship, I Fancy You is like a love letter proclaiming the joy of discovering the perfect someone to share a first romance.

In other words, it’s a whole lot of nose candy.

But it’s the name that smells off to me. It’s not that I don’t accept “to fancy” as meaning “to like” or “to be attracted to”—I just don’t accept it as authentic from a 31-year-old woman from Abilene, Texas. It’s too British.

At one time, about 100 years ago, the verb “to fancy”—a contraction of fantasien, to fantasize about—was about equally popular on both sides of the pond.* Today, Americans use “fancy” mostly as an adjective. (Exceptions include the mocking “Fancy that!”, the frequently misquoted Tennyson line “In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,” and Cat Fancy magazine.) Wikipedia’s “list of words having different meanings in British and American English” has this to say about “fancy” the verb:

US colloq. equiv. of “to fancy” is “to like” something or someone (or regarding tastes and preferences, “to love”); “fancy” as a verb is now used in the US almost solely by UK ex-pats, but was once oft-used by Southern gentility (landed gentry)

Or as a blogger for the Amarillo (Texas) radio station KISS-FM put it, somewhat more crudely, in a review of “I Fancy You”:

Who say’s [sic] “I fancy you” anymore? Anybody? Can anybody think of the last time they’ve said that while trying to be serious? I told my grandma about this and even she thought it was dated!

Sometimes an American writer will exploit that sense of fustiness for effect, as in this contemporary (as in, yesterday) account of a date with an unhappy ending:

Right before my friend flirted her way into a life-long relationship, she pushed me into a young lad whom she thought I would fancy. 

“I Fancy You” is definitely miles, if not continents, away in tone from the title of Ms. Simpson’s 1999 hit, “I Wanna Love You Forever.” I wonder whether someone in the Simpson entourage was under the influence of a more recent minor hit, “Do You Fancy Me?”, which was featured on Season 6 (2009-2010) of the American TV series Grey’s Anatomy. The singer, Kerry Leatham, is originally from Colchester and now lives in London.

Do you fancy me, or am I living in make believe?
Am I someone just to pass your time?
To pass lonely hours ’til your heart can be free,
Then you'll forget all about me

Listen to the song in context and on its own.

Do You Fancy Me? was also the name of a short-lived British TV series.

As for me, this what I think about when I think about “fancy.”

 

Naturally.

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* See, for example, the Ngrams for British and American usage of “you fancy.”

 

The Fffff Words

Irregular spellings are old news in brand names. Sometimes the spelling is simplified or compressed: Google (modified from googol), Millenia (an erstwhile Mazda luxury model), Flickr, Segway. Occasionally the spelling is tweaked to make the name stand out or to finagle an available URL: Qollage, Topix, Digg, Gliider.

Lately, though, I’ve noticed a new spelling trend: the doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling of one particular letter—F—at the beginning of the name.

Here are the names I’ve encountered:

Christmas at the Movies

As is the custom of my people, I’ll be spending part of today in a movie theater. But you don’t have to be Jewish to play along. Here are some great videos to fill the intervals between gift-unwrapping, eating, caroling, and other festivities.

 

The Christmas Can-Can, by Straight No Chaser

Love these guys! (Hat tip: Bobbie Altman.)

 

Hip-Hop Meets Swing

That’s not generic swing but Lindy Hop. I used to do a bit of Lindy myself, but not like this. Alas. (Hat tip: Manolo the Shoeblogger.)

 

Filmography 2010

The year’s movies—270 of them—expertly edited into what the creator calls “one giant-ass video.” (Hat tip: Russell Meyer.)

 

But wait, there’s more! Embedding has been disabled for this Dancing at the Movies video, but I urge you to click through and watch it. Again, the editing is breathtakingly good. (Hat tip: MJF.)

Merry Christmas!

Word of the Week: Completist

Completist: Someone who wants to make something, such as a collection of books or records, complete. The OED puts it more strongly: “An obsessive (and often indiscriminate) collector.” And Encyclopedia Dramatica is even more judgmental:

A completist is a fanboy or fangirl that must prove their devotion to a band, television show, movie or comic book by collecting every piece of Chinese made crap sold at Wal-Mart that relates to said media. Symptoms include lining up at midnight to buy a new record, DVD, or toy, constantly searching eBay for imports of the same exact crap from Japan and camping in line for years just so they can get tickets to a show before you. There is a significant overlap between completists and fans of Pokémon and similar franchises, and this is expected given Pokémon's catch phrase “Gotta catch ’em all”.

Completism is sometimes called an “affliction” or a “pathology.”

Completist appeared in the first sentence in an article in last Friday’s New York Times holiday gift guide: “Completists with deep pockets can revel in the 2010 bounty of boxed sets.”

Merriam-Webster online gives 1951 as the date of the first known use of completist, but doesn’t provide a citation. The OED moves the date to 1955, citing an article in the New York Times Book Review: “Perhaps the one point of interest here, even for the Holmesian completist, is the effort in the introduction to identify Watson as Doyle’s secretary, Maj. Alfred Wood.”

The Very Model

Today is Election Day in the United States. It’s been an ugly campaign season, so here’s a little something to lighten the mood.

 

I do love me some Gilbert and Sullivan.

The spoof was created by L.A. actor/filmmaker Ron Butler. Thanks to Ad Broad for the original post!

Mythfire

There’s something supernatural about the fourth-generation Honda Odyssey van.

It’s a myth and a legend! Can you prove that it exists?

 

I noticed this billboard here in Oakland, then happened to catch one of the new 30-second national TV spots for the Odyssey. The ads’ tagline—“The Van Beckons”—avoids the myth/legend theme altogether, although there’s the usual mythmaking in the storylines, which are crafted to dispel the, uh, myth that vans aren’t sexy.

The ads are cleverly and expensively produced, but this one set off my internal alarm system.

 

That’s the Platters on the soundtrack. Note that the lyric cuts off right before “… smoke gets in your eyes.” Still, I found it impossible not to think about engine fires, which probably is not what Honda intended.

Watch the other spots (“Vanquility” and “Rock Van”) on Honda’s U.S. website. Agency is RPA, based in Santa Monica.

Word of the Week: Filk

Filk: Broadly speaking, the music of fandom. Filk encompasses parody songs, with original lyrics set to familiar tunes; and original music with science fiction or fantasy themes. A program of filk music is called a filksing¹.

Xeni Jardin wrote about the genre in a 2005 article for Wired magazine, “Filk Music for Nerd People”:

Accompanied by acoustic guitars, clarinets and the quacking of kazoos, the group sounds much like a traditional folk ensemble. But the lyrics and rituals set the music far apart. With its heavy sci-fi themes, this isn’t folk – it's “filk,” a distinctive genre that took root on folk’s fringes about two decades ago and is now gaining broader attention thanks to internet radio and web downloads.

“You want minors [sic!] on the moon who need a labor union? We got songs about that. You want asteroid truckers with broken-down ships? We got songs about that. If you want cats in space we got that too,” explains Mary Creasey, an organizer, producer, vendor and performer of filk music with her son Richard and her husband, John.

Filk is actually older than Jardin purports. The earliest recorded appearance of the word was in the title of an article written in the mid-1950s by one Lee Jacobs, “The Influence of Science Fiction on Modern American Filk Music,” in which filk was a typo for folk. The article, which Jacobs submitted to Spectator Amateur Press Society, was never published, but, according to Filk.com, Jacobs showed it to his friends and the misprint caught on among science fiction fans in the 1960s.

Attempts to define filk often resort to explaining what the genre isn’t. Here is Filk.com’s explanation of “What Is Not Filk”:

Instrumental pieces do not fall into the category of filk; filk music contains both music and lyrics. Holst’s THE PLANETS, Mozart's JUPITER SYMPHONY, and John Williams’ numerous scores for blockbuster science fiction movies do not, therefore, count as filk music. Drug songs are NOT filk songs. The Moody Blues’ Floating, the Byrds’ Eight Miles High, and Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit are full of space or fantasy references, but these are references for people who need to take drugs to experience space flight or flights of fancy. The rest of us read science fiction.

There is a filk track at this year’s Dragon*Con, which concludes today in Atlanta. The convention, now in its 24th year, bills itself as “the largest multi-media, popular culture convention focusing on science fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and film in the universe.” Here’s how DragonConFilk’s home page describes filk:

Filk is the music of science fiction, fantasy, and horror fandom. That being said, the only thing that is certain about Filk is its inherent uncertainty. There are original filks, parodies, and “found filks” from both independent and mainstream music. There are acapella filkers, acoustic instruments, electronic instruments, gear and gadgets. Filk’s musical styles cross all ages and cultural boundaries. Egalitarian by nature, Filk also includes all musical abilities. Some of us prefer to sit and listen. Some of us are seasoned musicians. Some of us are divas. Some of us are divos (not kidding). Some of us are just learning.

Watch a six-minute video about filk from Georgia Public Broadcasting, via FanStuff.

 

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¹ According to Interfilk.org, “Most filksings take one of two forms: Bardic Circle or Chaos.”