Fritinancy

The Cherpumple* of Holidays

Happy Halloween – or, as online coupon site RetailMeNot would have it, a joyous OctoNovemCember! You know they’re very, very serious about their holiday mashup because they’ve given it a “dictionary definition” and a gratuitous pronunciation aid:

 

 

OctoNovemCember has an official mascot, Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus, with its own Twitter feed.

 

From the website:

Who is Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus? Why he’s the King of OctoNovemCember, that magical shopping season when the great deals from one-day-only holiday sales are available every day. He embodies all that is good about the holidays, from the pleasant glow of a jack-o-lantern to the comforting warmth of a Thanksgiving turkey to the gift-giving spirit of old St. Nick.

OctoNovemCember is a newly minted gimmick, but the faux-holiday tradition goes back many years. For more on Festivus, Grouponicus, and other fake fêtes, see my 2010 post, “Holidays for the Rest of Us,” which links to a Visual Thesaurus column, “Happy Made-Up Holidays.” And for more on Christmas-creepy holiday marketing, see “Calendar Says October; Retailers Say It’s Christmas.”

__

* Cherpumple … or turducken?

Word of the Week: Postapocalit

Postapocalit: “Novels set in an imaginary North American wilderness after the unthinkable happens” (John Seabrook, “Love Among the Chickens”). A blend of postapocalyptic and lit, short for literature.

“Postapocalit” appears to have been coined very recently – last week, to be precise – by New Yorker writer John Seabrook. In his October 26 post for the magazine’s Page-Turner blog, Seabrook writes that he’s “been reading a lot of postapocalit.” He explains:

While the category is new, the genre isn’t; it goes back to Stephen King’s 1979 novel “The Stand,” and beyond, to sci-fi classics like “On the Beach,” “I Am Legend,” “Day of the Triffids,” “Planet of the Apes,” and the forgotten “Alas, Babylon,” by Pat Frank. The genre was revitalized by Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel “The Road,” which made postapocalit safe for serious fiction, and recent years have brought several estimable contributions to this corner of my bookshelf, including Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” trilogy, Justin Cronin’s “The Passage,” (the recently published sequel, “The Twelve,” is on my digital beside table), and Peter Heller’s wonderful “The Dog Stars,” which is my subject today.

First British paperback edition of Alas Babylon, via Existential Ennui.

“Postapocalit” combines two word-blend trends: the “lit” blend (see “shtick lit” and its kin, which I wrote about in December 2009) and the “apocalypse” blend (see Inaugulypse and related words, which I wrote about in January 2009; also see this Word Routes post by Ben Zimmer about “snowpocalypse” and other snowmanteaux).

Word of the Week: Curlbro

Curlbro: “A pejorative slang term referring to gym-goers [who] focus on training their arms when weight lifting.” (Source: Know Your Meme.)

Despite being closely associated with the Jersey Shore aesthetic, “curlbro” first appeared in a UK fitness forum, The Student Room, on November 11, 2010. An Urban Dictionary definition was posted on December 10, 2010: “The word curlbro consists of the two words curl (for biceps-curl, a popular isolation exercise in hypertrophy training) and bro (brother, but here: fake tan, borderline-retarded, gel-in-hair, unintelligent person).”

“Curlbro” gained traction after Time magazine released a set of photos of Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan working out. Something about the pose, the facial expression, the backward baseball cap, and the earbuds proved irresistible to amateur caption writers.

 

(Source.)

“Paul Ryan is a total curlbro,” wrote Caitlin in “Dissecting the Cult of the Curlbro,” an October 16 post on her Fit and Feminist blog:

You know who they are. They are the men who line up in front of mirrors in gyms all across the United States, who pass hours curling their way into oblivion, who look at a squat rack and see not a squat rack but a really fancy contraption in which they can do curls. Every day is arms day for these guys.

The female counterpart of a curlbro, I learned from Caitlin, is a “cardio queen”:

The sadly ironic thing is that the curlbro has more in common with the cardio queen than just about anyone else in the gym. In fact, I’d say the two are photo negatives of each other. Each one is so focused on making their body look a specific way – a way that is defined strictly according to their gender – that they completely ignore all of the things that actually make for a strong, healthy body. I mean, who cares if you have twenty inch biceps if you can’t run a mile or you can’t bend over at the waist. And big deal if you can fit into a size 0 but you can’t even open your own damn jar of pickles.

That Word

They keep using it. It does not mean what they think it means:

No, not “lubricating,” although I’ll get to it in a bit. First, though, I want to talk about “servile.”

The “Servile Brands” headline is from Trendwatching, a global brand-analysis company. In its October 2012 trend briefing, Trendwatching defines its terms this way:

Yes, consumers are more demanding, time-starved, informed, and choice-saturated than ever-before (we know you know). For brands to prosper, the solution is simple though: turn SERVILE. This goes far beyond offering great customer service. SERVILE means turning your brand into a lifestyle servant focused on catering to the needs, desires and whims of your customers, wherever and whenever they are.

(Their emphasis.)

Is that in fact what “servile” means? No, it is not. Unlike most Trendwatching lingo—keep reading for examples—“servile” is a real word with real definitions and connotations. It isn’t a neutral term meaning “of service”; rather, it means “abjectly submissive,” “slavish,” “relating to servitude or forced labor.” Its synonyms are “obsequious,” “toadyish,” “sycophantic,” and “fawning.” 

Not a positive association in the bunch. Indeed, the strong whiff of slavery that attends “servile” should disqualify the word from the marketing lexicon. It’s an adjective best reserved for Uriah Heep, one of Dickens’s least admirable characters, and others of his ilk.

Trendwatching—which calls itself “one of the world’s leading consumer trends firms”—has a decade-long record of coining attention-getting names, many of them peppy portmanteaus, to describe marketplace phenomena. Back in October 2010, the company devoted a trend briefing to what it  called Brand Butlers. From what I can tell, “Servile Brands” is just a more offensive twist on “Brand Butlers.”

You can’t accuse Trendwatching of not trying. Its trend archives include a heap of isms—Newism, Maturialism, It-ism, Foreverism, and Nowism—and a river of sumers: Tasksumers, Twinsumers, Citysumers, Trysumers, Sellsumers, Transumers. Trendwatching has also given us Minipreneurs and Teenpreneurs*, Insperiences and Cribtimonials, Perkonomics and Excusumption,

Trendwatching’s motto might as well be “X Is the New Y.” One trend briefing was titled “Catching-up is the new looking ahead.” Brand Butlers: “Serving is the new selling.” Nowism: “Why currency is the new currency.” And Servile Brands? “Why for brands, serving, assisting, and lubricating is the new selling.”

(A few words about “lubricating”: Back in 2004, Trendwatching used “daily lubricants” as a category title for “the fast growing class of products and services that cater to consumers' need for simplicity, and that literally lubricate daily life.” Um, OK. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of “lubricating” and “servility” can’t help sounding slightly smutty.)

Once in a blue moon, Trendwatching coins a term that catches on: Pop-up Retail (first used in January 2004), Massclusivity (November 2003). But for every one of those keepers there are 20 clunkers like Snobmoddities.

As for Servile Brands, off the top of my head I can think of several catchy-yet-more-appropriate alternatives: At Your Service, SuperServe Us, Serves You Right. Or, if they wanted to stay with the portmanteau theme, Servantage, Serveriffic, ServeAce, or Servalicious.

But “servile,” no matter how much you lubricate it, sticks in the craw.

Hat tip: LowDudgeon. “That Word” credit goes, of course, to The Princess Bride.

Elsewhere in That Word: Sophistry, infamous, arriviste, bupkus, unrequited.

___

* See more -preneur blends in my “Enterprising Language” post.

X-toberfest

Few German words are as popular or linguistically productive in the US as “Oktoberfest.” Here are some local variations on the theme, along with several out-of-town sightings.

*

Oakland’s fifth annual Oaktoberfest will be held on Saturday, October 6.

“Oaktoberfest” works very well orthographically—just add A. “Oakland” has also been rejiggered into Oaklandish (an apparel brand that “supports and represents” Oakland); and Oaksterdam University (“Quality Training for the Cannabis Industry”), named in honor of Amsterdam, where marijuana use is legal.

*

Sharktoberfest is an annual tradition at  the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The event celebrates “two perennial favorites—sharks and beer!”

I love the Academy but can’t help wishing Sharktoberfest were taking place in Boston, where the native nonrhotic rendering of the word would create a better rhyme with “Oktoberfest.”

*

Book’toberfest is the first annual (their presumption, not mine) book fair and local-beer tasting at San Francisco’s Mechanics’ Institute Library. It’s scheduled for October 5 and promises to “put the ‘pub’ back into ‘publishing’!”

And also the apostrophe into “Book’toberfest,” for reasons unclear to me. It interrupts the otherwise perfect Oktoberfest portmanteau.

*

Moving away from the bay, Buffalo’s Booktoberfest—no punctuation, thank you very much—was held September 13. The event was “an evening of bratwurst and brews, all in the name of literacy.”

*

Watchismo—nice name, by the way—is celebrating Clocktoberfest with 25 percent discounts on most German-made watches.

 

Note the German-flag colors and the echt Fraktur type, or something close to it.

*

Baracktoberfest is a Kickstarter project that celebrates the brewing of beer at the White House; the money goes to creating T-shirts, pint glasses, recipe cards, and postcards. (For more about the beer, see the last item in this August post.) The $300 goal was met in two and a half hours, and the project ultimately raised almost $3,000.

“Est. 2008” apparently refers to the year Obama was elected, not the year the project began.

The project’s creator, Matthew Potter, wrote a nice statement of purpose that begins:

First and foremost: This isn’t about politics. This is about portmanteaus and alcohol. If that’s not enough to get you excited, then I don’t know how you get out of bed in the morning.

 

During the 2008 presidential campaign Schlafly Beer in St. Louis produced a Baracktoberfest brew (and a Palin ale). This year, with one of the candidates a teetotaler, Schlafly appears to be abstaining.

*

I can’t resist including SocktoberFest, coming up this weekend in Osage, Iowa. It’s sponsored by a local company, Fox River, “maker of the famous Original Rockford Red Heel Monkey Sock”—de rigueur for all your sock-monkey needs—and the press release has this adorable lede: “Thousands of bargain shoppers will get to experience that new-sock feeling after SocktoberFest…”

*

UPDATE: The Pr*tty Sh*tty blog, which reviews examples of good and bad design, is observing Ktoberfest, “a weeklong celebration of the letter K” in logos.

*

UPDATE 2: Via a tweet from Our Bold Hero, Spocktoberfest, #1 on Cracked’s list of  “holidays they need to invent.” 

For additional X-toberfest affixoids (that’s the technical name), see this October 2008 post at the Mr. Verb blog, which includes mentions of Trucktoberfest, Rocktoberfest, Shocktoberfest, Lawtoberfest, Barktoberfest, Drunktoberfest, Puketoberfest, and many more.

Traditional Oktoberfest—the one in Munich—takes place from late September to early October. In the US, such calendrical strictures are often flouted: see Maytoberfest, Novemberfest, and Augtoberfest. Wondering how the original Oktoberfest came to be? Here you go.

And check out the comments below for additional -toberfests.

September Linkfest

New York City gangs take their names very, very seriously, according to “Gang ‘Slang’ers,” in the New York Post. “It took us about a month to come up with our name,” said Piff Montana, a member of the Get Touched Boyz of Jamaica, Queens. … We wanted a name that would make an impact.” The full list of 300 or so gang names reveals a preoccupation with numbers and precinctspercentages: there are gangs called 5 Precinct Percent, 10 Precinct Percent, 40 Precinct Percent, and so on up to 122 Precinct Percent. (Hat tip: NameFlash. And thanks to Dave for correcting me on "precinct.")

*

New additions to World Wide Words: eastwooding, mirror fasting, underbragging, and gramping. No, gramping is not a misspelling of glamping.

*

Looking for a title for your book? You can’t go wrong with “The Elements of ___,” says Poynter.org’s Roy Peter Clark, who lists more than 25 knockoffs of the Strunk and White original. Here’s the one that inspired his post:

*

Before she founded the online dictionary Wordnik, Erin McKean worked on the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, a reference that isn’t just for writers but is also by writers—i.e., various writers were invited to contribute notes on words that interested them. One of the writers assigned to McKean was the late David Foster Wallace, who, she writes, approached the copyediting phase as if “someone invited him to an all-day grammar seminar (with celebrity photo signings and vendor's expo hall), combined with a debating society picnic, where the topic was ‘RESOLVED: This Comma Should Be Removed.’ (You're not surprised, are you?)” Read the whole delightful account at “It was wonderful, marvelous, magnificent, superb, glorious, sublime, lovely, delightful ...”

*

The Chamomile Tea Party was formed in 2010 as an alternative to “the rancor between the political left and right” in the US. It’s using modified World War II posters to get the point across, and you can view and download the posters on Flickr.

 

By outtacontext.

*

In brand naming, many clients panic if a name is more than five letters long. According to Baby Name Wizard, there’s a contrary trend in baby-boy naming, at least in the US: fear of short names. Finn becomes Finnegan, Quinn becomes Quinlan, and—most boggling of all—Levi becomes Leviathan (“the twisted serpent to be killed at the end of time”) or Leviticus (the third book of the Old Testament, notable mostly for its litany of laws about skin diseases, sacrifices, and genital discharges).

*

Fellow name developer Chris Johnson (aka The Name Inspector) has created my new favorite Pinterest board: the Wall of Namifying, “logos of companies whose names end with -ify (or, in one case, -efy).” As you probably know, I share his obsession. (And speaking of Pinterest, I’m trying my hand at a similar project: cataloguing the many, many -ly names and logos.)

*

Linguist Arnold Zwicky collected some wonderful names of minor-league baseball teams, including the Albuquerque Isotopes, the Colorado Springs Sky Sox, the Fort Wayne Tincaps, and the Lansing Lugnuts. Then he followed up with an imaginary list of his own. I’m rooting for the Baton Rouge Compacts.

*

From the Autoextremist blog, a slightly jaundiced guide to the latest auto-industry terms. An “accidental tourist” describes “executives devoid of the qualifications necessary to properly perform the duties assigned to them”; “greenage” is a program’s environmental potential. (Hat tip: Lance Knobel.)

*

Speaking of jaundiced, there’s nothing like a Condescending Corporate Brand Page to say “We're a big corporate brand using Facebook. So look out for us asking you to like and share our stuff in a faintly embarrassing and awkward way.” Read more about the CCBP in Fast Company. (Note: the CCBP is British in origin—its URL contains “corporate bollocks”—but the themes are, alas, universal.)

*

He is the very model of an amateur grammarian.

*

I attended the Brand New Conference last year, when it was held in San Francisco, but couldn’t make it to New York for this year’s conference. Thankfully, organizer Armin Vit has compiled the best quotes and tweets from the event. Here’s a provocative opinion from UK designer Miles Newlin: “Stories have an end, and unless you want to think of your brand as having an end, then forget the storytelling idea, and forget people who talk about brand storytelling.”

*

See what happened when New York Magazine sent a reporter to TechCrunch Disrupt SF to ask startup founders about their “chronically misspelled” company names. It’s, uh, Osom. (Thanks, Jessica!)

Word of the Week: ZomBee

ZomBee: A honey bee that has been parasitized by the “zombie fly,” Apocephalus borealis. The word is a portmanteau of zombie (a reanimated corpse; originally from West African words meaning “fetish” or “god”) and bee.

“ZomBee” appears to have been coined by the researchers at ZomBee Watch, a citizen science project sponsored by San Francisco State University and the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History that is tracking the spread of ZomBees, According the project’s website, “Fly-parasitized honey bees become ‘ZomBees’ showing the ‘zombie-like behavior’ of leaving their hives at night on ‘a flight of the living dead’.” (Watch a video.)

Apocephalus borealis on the dorsal area of a honey bee, laying eggs in its host. Image from PLOS ONE.

“Zombie flies” are suspected to be a cause of Colony Collapse Disorder, first reported in 2006 and said to be responsible for the disappearance of nearly one-third of the honey bees in the United States. Without honey bees, many food crops cannot be pollinated. A research paper published in PLOS ONE in January 2012 provided documentation that Apocephalus borealis, previously known to parasitize bumble bees, “also infects and eventually kills honey bees and may pose an emerging threat to North American apiculture.”

For more about non-apian zombies, read my word-of-the-week post from January 2009. For another new twist on the zombie trope, read about the Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver, Esquire columnist Charles P. Pierce’s epithet for Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan.

___

Hat tip: ZombieLaw blog.

Word of the Week: Low Bono

Low bono: At a reduced fee or discounted rate. Formed in rhyming imitation of pro bono [publico], which means “performed at no charge for the public good.” Both pro bono and low bono were originally used by law firms and have spread to other professions.

The OED’s earliest citation for pro bono is in a 1774 letter. The term originally meant “reliable” or “trustworthy” and evolved into its current meaning of “free”; it’s considered chiefly a US legal usage. The American Bar Association says that lawyers “should aspire to render at least (50) hours of pro bono publico legal services per year.” The ABA has no comparable advice about low-bono work.

The origins of “low bono” are harder to pin down. The term appears to have first appeared in the 1990s. Luz Herrera, a law professor and pioneer in low-bono legal work, explained “low bono” in “Rethinking Private Attorney Involvement through a Low Bono Lens,” published in the September 2009 issue of the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review:

“Low bono” is the most popular term used to  describe discounted-rate arrangements between attorneys and clients, particularly those clients  who are underrepresented. …  Although “low bono” work is not new, it has gained more  recognition in the last ten to fifteen years due in  large part to law school initiatives primarily led  by the City University of New York (CUNY)  School of Law and the University of Maryland  School of Law.

Those law schools, and a number of others, are members of the Law School Consortium Project, a national nonprofit organization found on the Web at lowbono.org.

I discovered “low bono” not in the world of legal services but on the website of fellow name developer Margaret Wolfson, who does business as Lit Branding. She uses a variant spelling:

Additionally, I've been pleased to consult with non-profit organizations on a lo-bono basis.

That’s “lo” as in “lo-cal” or “lo-fat.”

Solutionism

A version of this message from Dow Chemical has been appearing all over my version of the Web:

 

 

“Solutionism. The New Optimism” is the name of a Dow multimedia campaign that launched in March of this year. (Draftfcb Chicago did the work.) According to B2BOnline, “The campaign illustrates how Dow provides solutions to help solve some of the world's most pressing global challenges, such as efficient energy and feeding the planet.”

New Yorkers got a preview of the campaign last September, when a giant chalkboard was erected at the corner of Crosby and Broome. Over several days, the chalkboard was filled with a mathematical equation, and on Day 5 a Dow banner was unfurled.

 

Photo from Right Brain, Left Brain blog.

Dow is now selling the “Solutionism” campaign in ads that run during the Olympics broadcasts. Those ads depict a featureless, leaf-covered creature called—I’m not making this up—“Hopeiary.” AdWeek called the “hedge man” the worst mascot of the 2012 Games.

Sorry. Where were we? Right: “solutionism.”

“Solutionism. The new optimism” is a variation on the very popular snowclone “X is the new Y.” (See “Bacon is the new chocolate,” “Green is the new black,” “Safe is the new sexy,” “Big is the new small,” et al.) According to the Snowclones Database, the origin of the saying was Vogue editor Diana Vreeland’s proclamation in the early 1960s that “Pink is the navy blue of India.”

Dow Chemical didn’t coin “solutionism.”* There’s a Wiktionary entry dated August 29, 2010, with two definitions (but no citations):

1. An aspect of technology or collection of products or services; a complex or nebulous collection of concepts.
2. The providing of a solution or solutions to a customer or client.

A 2009 web page on Coggins Marketing urges entrepreneurs to “Be a Solutionist.” And I found several firms that use “Solutionist” in their names, including Solutionist.biz, The Solutionist Group (whose business is “solutioneering”), and The Solutionist, Inc.

There’s also a line of Matrix hair products—possibly discontinued—called Solutionist.

 

“Solutionism” can have negative implications. In his 2006 book Prisoners: A Tale of Friendship and Terror, journalist Jeffrey Goldberg called solutionism “the American national religion, which holds that for every intractable problem there is a logical and available answer.” Writing in 2008 for Jewish Current Issues, Rick Richman observed that “[n]owhere has solutionism been applied with more fervor and fewer results than the Middle East, with a succession of logical ‘plans’ and ‘processes’ to ‘solve’ the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the last 15 years[.]”

Solutionism, wrote Saad Hafiz in 2001 in the news site CounterPunch, “means that for every intractable problem there is logical and available answer. H.L. Mencken, the American journalist and humorist[,] said ‘for every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong’.”

Clearly, Dow Chemical—forever linked in many people’s memories to the 1984 Bhopal disaster—is counting on Americans’ amnesia about that particular Mencken observation. Not to mention this one, from Mencken’s “Notes on Journalism” (1926): “No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

UPDATE, March 16, 2013: More on solutionism in World Wide Words, which uses as a news peg a new book by Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: “By solutionism,[Morozov] means the mistaken belief that technology can benignly and efficiently solve all our problems and produce a world that is trouble-free.”

__

* And it certainly didn’t coin “solution,” which is one of the most overused words in company names, taglines, and mission statements.

__

Isms previously on Fritinancy: quotationalism, endism, completism, presentism, declinism, triumphalism, Austerianism, resistentialism, Chewdaism.

Word of the Week: Wazzock

Wazzock: A stupid or annoying person; an idiot. British slang; OED’s earliest citation is dated 1976 (“Stood there like a wazzock on the pavement”). Origin officially unknown (but keep reading).

I’m familiar with many British insults—wanker, tosser, berk, chav, etc.—but wazzock was new to me until last Friday. That’s when I encountered it in a New Yorker blog post about Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s gaffe-fest in London. The headline on the post: “The Problem with ‘Mitt the Twit’: He’s a Wazzock.”

 

 

A recap: Romney arrived in England on Thursday, one day before the opening ceremony of the 30th Olympiad, and proceeded to shoot himself repeatedly in the foot. He told a US reporter that “there are a few things that are disconcerting” about London’s Olympic preparations; referred to the “backside” of 10 Downing Street; addressed Labour party leader Ed Miliband as “Mr. Leader” (this US convention is not OK in the UK; some Brits thought Romney had simply forgotten Miliband’s name); and bragged about his “Anglo-Saxon heritage.” (A roundup of Romney’s blunders here.)

“Mitt Romney is perhaps the only politician who could start a trip that was supposed to be a charm offensive by being utterly devoid of charm and mildly offensive,” wrote the Telegraph’s Alex Spillius. His colleague at the Telegraph, Lucy Jones, was the first to label Romney a wazzock. (“Who does Mitt Romney think he is?” Jones fumed.) When I checked Google on Monday morning, there were 114,000 results for “Romney wazzock.”

So what does wazzock mean? The New Yorker’s Cassidy, who grew up in Yorkshire, attempted an explanation:

According to some accounts, a wazzock, in the original usage, was a bull’s penis. When I was young, it was used to describe a hapless idiot who blunders around doing and saying things he or she shouldn’t. Wazzocks don’t necessarily have bad intentions, but they tend to bring trouble to themselves and others. Romney, for all his business success and Harvard degrees, sometimes seems to fit the description.

I’ve also come across some speculation that wazzock is derived from wiseacre (“know-it-all”), which came into English in the 1590s from Dutch wijssegger ("soothsayer").

There is no evidence whatsoever that wazzock is related to the Budweiser “Wassup?” commercials (or the parodies).

At least one other potential Word of the Year candidate surfaced in the coverage of Romney’s undiplomatic visit: Romneyshambles. It’s a pun on omnishambles, which was coined by the British writer/director Armando Iannucci, who specializes in political satire. (His first American TV show is Veep, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus.) In a 2009 episode of Iannucci’s BBC series The Thick of It, the hilariously vitriolic and profane communications director, Malcolm Tucker (played by Peter Capaldi), tells another character that she’s “a fucking omnishambles.” (Watch the scene here.)

“Omnishambles” entered the real-world political scene in April 2012, in the British House of Commons. World Wide Words reported that Labour leader Miliband called the coalition government

an omnishambles because of several serious policy and public-relations blunders, including some unexpected consequences of the Chancellor’s budget of the previous month. The Daily Mail commented that omnishambles “described the combination of tragedy and farce that characterises modern politics” and the word has been gleefully taken up by many commentators, some even in the Conservative press.

Unlike Barack Obama’s name, which produced dozens of riffs during the 2008 campaign and beyond—Obamamentum, Obamanomenon, Obamania, Barack the Vote, and so on—”Mitt Romney” has given punsters little to work with besides the “Mittens” nickname. “Romneyshambles”—a perfect pun on a splendid made-up word—may be the first name-game breakthrough of the 2012 campaign.*

Bonus link: A serious take on Romneyshambles from Paul Krugman.

__

* I refuse to count Santorum.