Fritinancy

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.

 

Word of the Week: Foie-kage

Foie-kage: A fee charged by a restaurant to prepare foie gras purchased elsewhere. “Foie-kage” is a blend of foie (French, “liver”) and corkage, the fee restaurants charge to open a bottle of wine that isn’t bought on the premises. Sometimes called quackage (see Erin McKean, "Week in Words," Wall Street Journal).

Foie-kage was inspired by California’s statewide ban on foie gras, which was signed into law in 2004 by former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and went into effect July 1, 2012. (The eight-year grace period gave the industry time to find an alternative to the force-feeding of fowl.) The bill had been backed by a coalition of animal-rights groups and sponsored by former State Senate President Pro-Tem John Burton, who wrote an op-ed column defending the law for the Los Angeles Times in April 2012:

Foie gras, French for “fatty liver,” is produced from the diseased and grossly enlarged liver of a duck or goose that has been force-fed grain. Multiple times each day for several weeks before slaughter, a pipe is shoved down the birds' throats and they're pumped full of mash, causing their livers to swell to more than 10 times normal size. The resulting fatty liver is served in fewer than 1% of California's restaurants. Most people would find it hard to stomach eating any part of a diseased animal, but in the case of foie gras, it's the diseased organ itself on which consumers dine.

Some restaurateurs have protested the ban, and that’s where foie-kage comes in. Bloomberg.com reported last week:

Mark Pastore, owner of Incanto, a San Francisco restaurant, said he’s open to charging a “foie-kage fee,” akin to corkage, to prepare the meat purchased in another state.

“Any law like this is bound to be full of loopholes,” Pastore said in a telephone interview. “There’s always going to be ways around something, which is part of the reason that passing laws like this is futile.”

NPR’s “Morning Edition” made foie-kage its “last word in business” on June 28.

Other unfamiliar words you may have seen in connection with this story include:

Foiemageddon, the hyperbolic term used by some liver- lovers who bewail the ban as a gastro-tastrophe. (See Gawker’s story, “Californians Would Slit Their Mamas’ Throats for a Bite of Foie Gras as ‘Foie-mageddon’ Looms.”) The -mageddon suffix has worked overtime in recent years: seesnowmageddon and carmageddon, for starters.

Faux gras, an alternative to foie gras. The Los Angeles Times reported that some restaurants may serve “a vegan pate made from lentils, walnuts and onions.”

Duckeasy, a restaurant “where diners can order foie gras using certain code words.” Formed in imitation of speakeasy. (Wall Street Journal)

Gavage, the traditional term for the force-feeding of geese. It comes from the French verb gaver, “to stuff,” and is etymologically related to gavotte, the 17th-century French court dance. “Gavotte” now suggests something stately, even pretentious*, but it was originally a peasant dance performed by gavots—residents of the Alps whose name means “gluttons” or “boors.”

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* “You had one eye on the mirror as you watched yourself gavotte.” – Carly Simon

 

June Linkfest

Each week, the New Yorker’s Culture Desk blog posts a Twitter contest with the hashtag #tnyquestion. The June 1 contest asked readers to contribute a new word to the English language; the results have been compiled in a handsome PDF dictionary. The June 8 contest—invent a corporate-literary mashup—resulted in more than a thousand responses, including “Of Mice and Mennen,” “A Tale of Two Citis,” and (from yours truly) “50 Shades of Grey Poupon.” Winners revealed here. (Note: I cannot claim credit for “Pninterest”; I only retweeted it.)

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It’s Silicon Valley’s next hot IPO. It’s called Ponzify. What could possibly go wrong? (Satire alert.)

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The ass-fication of American branding continues apace: “Six print ads that use ass imagery (not actual asses, sorry) to sell stuff.” Safe for work, but may provoke loud groans.

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Steve Jobs really, really liked the name “MacMan.” He lost the battle; Apple won the war.

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Go ahead and say “the Internets,” you irony-overloaded hipster, but never, ever say “vinyls.”

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You don’t need a designer when the copy’s this good: a Flickr set of copywriter Joe D’Allegro’s signs for Synergy Fitness in Jersey City. (Via AdFreak.)

 

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Glossed Over saves you the annoyance of reading the July issue of Glamour. “Less than zero: Likelihood that I will ever use Glamour’s Word of the Month, ‘frizzle’.” 

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What not to name your spaceship. (By the way, did you know that Greece’s Olympic Airlines was originally called Icarus? What were they thinking?)

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Derek Lowe, who blogs about science and the pharmaceutical industry for In the Pipeline, asks: “What’s the biotech/pharma company out there with the worst name” (other than Abbott Labs’ new AbbVie)? His commenters gleefully ante up.

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David Crystal’s long list of words first used by Charles Dickens includes kibosh, unyielding, dustbin, devil-may-care, flummox, and sawbones.

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More from Crystal: “Dickens worked at his names: he tried out Martin Sweezleden, Sweezleback, Sweezlewag, Chuzzletoe, Chuzzleboy, Chubblewig, and Chuzzlewig, before ending up with Martin Chuzzlewit.”

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The Obama 2012 campaign slogan is “Forward,” but Americans would rather go in the opposite direction, argues advertising creative director Judith Grey.

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“My great-grandfather started this business with one simple mission that we abandoned decades ago.”

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A defense of undictionaried (aka madeupical) words by lexicographer and Wordnik founder Erin McKean.

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Why is it the United States and the Netherlands … but just plain Ukraine? Etymologist Anatoly Liberman explains to the BBC.

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“Logic is the enemy of a successful brand name,” writes veteran marketing strategist Al Ries. Example: “Search.com is shorter (one syllable instead of two), more memorable and a lot more credible than Google.com. Should Google.com change its name to Search.com?” (Hat tip: @IgorNaming.)

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An evil spelling test, courtesy of Teresa Nielsen Hayden.

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Naming your company is just the first step. Catchword Branding lists five factors to consider when launching a company name.

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Grexit, Geuro, neuro, and other words spawned by the Greek debt crisis. (And yes, that is the 84,573rd sighting of a “What’s in a Name?” headline.) (Via @WordLo.)

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Prosign, rag-chewing, umpty, and other telegraph lingo. (And check out the link to more telegraph and radio slang.)

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Twitter’s Fail Whale has spawned a menagerie of social-media fail pets. Mike Pope provides a taxonomy.

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And as long as we’re on the subject, I’m loving these social media propaganda posters by Etsy vendor Aaron Wood. Available individually or as a compilation. Via @mightyredpen.

Word of the Week: Blazerati

Blazerati: Officials of amateur sports associations who are identified by their colored blazers. Formed from blazer + -ati, a Latin plural suffix seen in literati (men and women of letters) and illuminati (enlightened ones; free-thinkers). Sometimes capitalized. Singular form: blazerato.

Blazerati was first documented in 1998 (source: 20th Century Words). By then the English-speaking world had grown accustomed to literati spinoffs such as glitterati (celebrities; earliest citation in a 1956 issue of Time magazine) and digerati (the elite of the computer and online industries, 1998). In 2008, Stephen Baker published a nonfiction book, The Numerati, about the sometimes dark uses of data capture and analysis.

The first and (so far) only appearance of blazerati in the New York Times occurred in a May 28 article about preparations for this summer’s Olympic Games in London:

John Biggs, a member of the London Assembly who represents East London, said he was most annoyed about the V.I.P. road lanes, which he said would cater to fancy-jacket-wearing “Blazerati,” at the expense of regular Londoners.

The term is much more common in the UK and Commonwealth countries than in the United States, and is almost always used disparagingly. In a 2001 book, Amateurism in Sport: An Analysis and Defence, British sports academic Lincoln Allison wrote caustically about the blazerati:

[T]he introduction of the term ‘blazerato’ and its plural must be accompanied by a certain amount of conceptual and political caution. The ‘blazerati’ are, literally, those who wear blazers, more generally, officials of broadly based sports associations. It is natural to associate them with the amateur ethos; they are, for the most part, unpaid and part of their role is normally to represent the interest of their sport as a whole against the interests of commerce. But it would be quite wrong to allow the assumption that the blazerato therefore represents the interests of amateurism in any morally significant sense. A model derived from public choice theory which suggests that men in blazers will be mainly interested in their own status and self-preservation seems to work all too well. It is the corruption of the blazerati which has done more to denigrate the image of the Olympics than anything else.

(Source: Google Books.)

Word of the Week: Rampture

Rampture: The traffic congestion that’s expected to ensue after the closing of Wilshire Boulevard on- and offramps to (the) northbound I-405 on Los Angeles’s Westside. Rampture is a humorous blend of ramp and rapture; in certain Christian belief systems (the) rapture represents the “carrying away” of believers after Jesus’ return to Earth.

Some background: Over the coming year, all eight Wilshire ramps will be replaced as part of the $1 billion I-405 Sepulveda Pass Improvement Project. Last year, work on the project required the temporary shutdown of 11 miles of freeway, an event that gave rise to another religiously themed coinage, Carmageddon. (The work went smoothly, and the predicted apocalypse failed to materialize.)

This year’s ramp closings are a much bigger deal, according to most sources. Here’s the lede from a May 11 post, “The Rampture on the 405 is Real and It Starts June 22,” on Curbed LA:

The Westside and Valley are just about to prove how far they'll go for a carpool lane on the northbound 405. LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky's blog announced today that the Rampture ramp closures will commence June 22, and they will continue to inflict pain on the Wilshire Boulevard access to the 405 over the next year.

Yaroslavsky does not use “Rampture” in his discussions of the closures. (His being Jewish may or may not be a reason.) He prefers the more secular, rock-’n’-roll-tinged “Ramp Jam.”

UCLA Today, a generally even-toned publication that covers faculty and staff news, did use “Rampture” in the headline of a May 18 story about the ramp demolition, which is taking place in the university’s neighborhood. The article quoted Bruce Taylor, a UCLA professor in urban planning and director of the Institute for Transportation Studies:

“It would be easier if we could just shut everything down,” Taylor said. “Instead, we have to do this while we’re still moving 300,000 vehicles through there a day. ... There are going to be incredible delays.”

Dave Karwaski, UCLA’s senior associate director of transportation, told UCLA Today: “It’s a good time to take a vacation.”

You can follow the progress of the Sepulveda Pass work via Los Angeles County’s dedicated Twitter feed, @I_405.

Word of the Week: Ganja-preneur

Ganja-preneur: “An American capitalist profiting from the recent pseudo-legalization of marijuana in the U.S. by opening up a dispensary that sells the plant in smokeable form to registered medical marijuana patients.” (Urban Dictionary, Jan. 15, 2010.) Also spelled ganjapreneur.

 

San Francisco Chronicle, May 19, 2012. Headline was changed in the online version.

 

Ganja, a synonym for marijuana, is the English spelling of gānjhā, the Hindi word for “hemp,” which comes from Sanskrit gañjaḥ (“hemp”). According to the OED, ganja first appeared in print in 1800, in a letter from the Duke of Wellington. In recent years it has become a prefix in many slang terms, including ganjacologist, ganjanomics, ganjarrhea, and ganj o’clock. (Thank you, Urban Dictionary!) 

Ganjapreneur T-shirt from Etsy.

 

For many other -preneur blends, including ecopreneur, funpreneur, mommypreneur, and warrior-preneur, see my 2009 post “Enterprising Language.”

May Linkfest

The new-to-me verb “to knoll” comes from Knoll, the furniture brand named for founders Florence and Hans Knoll. Mike Pope writes in his Evolving English II blog that knolling refers to “aligning or squaring things (as on a desk), or more broadly, in what might be thought of as arranging things in an uber-anal-retentive way.” Mike’s post includes an “Always Be Knolling” video clip. I am a non-knoller—an anti-knoller, even—but I do like knowing the word and its origin.

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Pinterest is a dream medium for visual thinkers, but lately I’ve been seeing it used in some distinctly verbal ways. See, for example, Dipika Kohli’s board about naming that includes links to posts about taglines, the naming process, and common naming mistakes. I was especially pleased to discover “How to Name Things,” a thoughtful post on the ribbonfarm blog about naming and numbering. And I love the story about how ribbonfarm got its name.

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Worry more about creating a strong brand than about concocting a “pure” URL, advises Jay Jurisich of naming agency Zinzin. (Hear, hear!)

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Monday was “Name Day” in the U.S.: the day the Social Security Administration released its 2011 baby-name data. Read Nancy’s Baby Names and Baby Name Wizard for comprehensive coverage. (Each link goes to the first of several posts about the name data.) Some high/low points: Sophia is the number-one girl’s name for the first time; Tyler, Jayden, Isabella, and Miley are finally falling out of favor; and the girl’s name Harper rose in rank from 118th in 2010 to 54th in 2011. Also from Baby Name Wizard, the best sibling name set ever.

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The misuse of “whom” only seems like a recent problem. Language Log reminds us that the humorist James Thurber, tongue planted firmly in cheek, addressed the problem in 1929: “Take the common expression, ‘Whom are you, anyways?’ That is of course, strictly speaking, correct – and yet how formal, how stilted!”

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The University of Minnesota’s James M. Pilcher, who has been studying the origin of the taco for 20 years, tells the Smithsonian magazine that the name for the food item may have originated in the 18th century, in the silver mines of Mexico, where “taco” referred to little charges used to excavate the ore. “Taco” first appeared in print in the U.S. in 1905. Lots more fascinating history in that article, including the story of Taco Bell, named for its founder, Glen Bell. For more taco history, read the recent New York Times article about Gustavo Arellano, author of a new book, Taco USA.

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The Millions on books with one-word titles: “At their best, one-word titles distill content to its purest essence, which is what all titles strive to do, and then they stick in the mind. Sometimes, of course, they fall flat, and much of the time they’re just lukewarm and vague or, worse, falsely grand.”  (Hat tip: Diana Landau.)

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On the other hand: One hundred books whose titles start with “The Man Who…”

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Need to name a beverage? Just add zero.

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“A company needs a new name and it decides to engage its employees to come up with a new name,” writes guest blogger Mark Prus at DuetsBlog. “What could go wrong?” Plenty.

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Quick: How many fictitious brands from “The Simpsons” can you name?

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Bill Gardner of Logo Lounge identifies the most significant logo trends of 2012, and the names he gives the trends are as interesting as the designs. A sampling: Potato Chip, Anaglyphs, Sphere Carving, Peel.

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Why does the sentence adverb “hopefully” carry a stigma in some quarters while “obviously,” “seriously,” and “honestly” don’t? Linguist Geoff Pullum casts a gimlet eye on “five decades of foolishness,” hopefully put to rest now that the AP Stylebook permits “the modern usage of hopefully”—i.e., “it is hoped that.”

Word of the Week: Grasstops

Grasstops: The leadership in a community or organization. First documented in 1992 in a Public Relations Quarterly article, where the word was spelled “grassTOPS” to emphasize the coinage. Usage has increased since 2007, according to a Google Insights graph.

Here’s a recent sighting, in a May 5, 2012, job listing posted by California Right to Know:

Experience and qualifications:

• Minimum 2-5 years experience in grassroots and grasstops organizing …

The Word Spy entry for grasstops provides some historical background:

This term is a play on grassroots, the ordinary people of a community or organization. Since at least 1912 the word “grassroots” has been used mostly in a political context, where it refers to the rank-and-file of the electorate, a political party, or some other political organization. If the grassroots form the base of the political pyramid, the grasstops form the apex, the small group that consists of the elite and powerful members of the body politic.

See also: Astroturfing.

(Thanks to Deborah Gavrin Frangquist for the tip.)

Word of the Week: Wantologist

Wantologist: A coach who sells his or her assistance to people unclear about what they want. A blend of want and -ologist (“specialist”). Derived from Want-ology, a trademark registered in 2008 to Dr. Kevin B. Kreitman, “cybernetician & Renaissance woman.” (“That’s Kevin—just like the man’s name. And yes, I am female.”)

Here’s how the Want-ology website explains it:

To get what you really want, you have to know what you really want. Feel really secure that your dream job won't trap you in a nightmare. And feel confident that you can avoid jumping “out of the frying pan into the fire” when you decide to go for it.

Want-ology^TM is the fundamental course that will focus you on what you truly want in a way that will enable you to make your dreams come true.

In a new book, The Outsourced Life: Intimate Life in Market Times, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild examines wantologists and their kin: dating coaches, wedding planners, Rent-a-Grandmas, photo-album assemblers, nameologists (who will name your baby for a fee), and so on. This passage comes from an excerpt published in yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Review:

After a 20-year career as a psychologist, Ms. [Katherine] Ziegler expanded her practice to include executive coaching, life coaching and wantology. Originally intended to help business managers make purchasing decisions, wantology is the brainchild of Kevin Kreitman, an industrial engineer who set up a two-day class to train life coaches to apply this method to individuals in private life. Ms. Ziegler took the course and was promptly certified in the new field.

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Ms. Ziegler explains that the first step in thinking about a “want,” is to ask your client, “ ‘Are you floating or navigating toward your goal?’ A lot of people float. Then you ask, ‘What do you want to feel like once you have what you want?’ ”

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Ms. Ziegler provided a service — albeit one with a wacky name — for a fee. Still, the mere existence of a paid wantologist indicates just how far the market has penetrated our intimate lives. Can it be that we are no longer confident to identify even our most ordinary desires without a professional to guide us?

Hochschild wonders whether wantology represents “the tail end of a larger story”:

Consider some recent shifts in language. Care of family and friends is increasingly referred to as “lay care.” The act of meeting a romantic partner at a flesh-and-blood gathering rather than online is disparaged by some dating coaches as “dating in the wild.”

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The very ease with which we reach for market services may help prevent us from noticing the remarkable degree to which the market has come to dominate our very ideas about what can or should be for sale or rent, and who should be included in the dramatic cast — buyers, branders, sellers — that we imagine as part of our personal life. It may even prevent us from noticing how we devalue what we don’t or can’t buy.

Hochschild is not the only author asking these questions. Michael J. Sandel, a professor of government at Harvard, has just published What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, which is also about what money can buy—a prison-cell upgrade and the right to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, to name just two examples. An excerpt from Sandel’s book appeared in the April issue of the Atlantic.

Word of the Week: Copypasta

Copypasta: Text or data (such as lines of code) copied and pasted from one website to another. Also a verb: to copy text or code from one site and paste it into another. Coined from copy plus paste; “pasta” is pronounced like the Italian food. Possibly influenced by spaghetti code, a term from the early days of programming that describes a hard-to-understand mass of code. (See this 2008 Urban Dictionary entry.) According to Know Your Meme, copypasta “shares some characteristics with spam in the sense they’re both unsolicited (and often considered a nuisance),” but “copypastas are mainly spread through human operators whereas the latter is automatically generated by electronic messaging systems.”

Copypasta is documented in the Winter 2011 installment of “Among the New Words” in American Speech, a linguistic quarterly (subscription or article fee required). The theme of the article, by Ben Zimmer and Charles E. Carson, is descriptors for Internet memes.

The earliest citation Zimmer and Carson found for copypasta is an August 2006 post on the Wasted Talent forum:

Then proceeded to spam the number for HOURS with memes and copypasta (large ridiculous stories that are copied and pasted (hence copypasta) over and over again)…

Copypasta was eventually picked up for non-Internet references, as in this 2009 article in the automotive blog Speed:Sport:Life about BMW designer Christopher Bangle:

He has saved BMW from a Jaguar-esque retro-fate, re-imagined the way cars are styled in the twenty-first century, and lived to see his critics either dwindle into irrelevance or voluntarily engage in shameless “copypasta” of his ideas.

Since then, references to copypasta have dispensed with definitions and quotation marks. Here’s a BoingBoing post dated April 21, 2012:

A Washington Post blogger resigned after plagiarizing others’ work on two separate occasions. The copypasta, however, was done under working conditions that make the newspaper look worse than her.

Other terms in the “memes” edition of “Among the New Words” include honey badger, rickroll, Advice Animal, manbaby, Teabonics, and Swede. Two have been featured previously here at Fritinancy: Droste effect and photobomb.

(Hat tip to Dustbury, who introduced me to the copypasta concept.)