Fritinancy

Names in the News

Officials in Incheon, the city in South Korea, announced plans this week to transform a small fishing island off the country’s west coast into a gambling and tourism center. According to a report in the Washington Post, the project will be called EIGHTCITY – Bloomberg News reported a different spelling, “8-City” – and will be built in the shape of the number 8, which has connotations of good fortune in several Asian cultures.

Read my previous post about the significance of the number eight.

(Hat tip: Benjamin Lukoff on ANS-L.)

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California’s new health-insurance exchange, formed in compliance with the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), won’t be called Avocado after all. Instead, the five-member exchange picked a safe choice, Covered California, the Los Angeles Times reported this week. (The tentative tagline is equally bland: “Your destination for affordable healthcare.”) The stated rationale for the name is on shaky grammatical ground: “Covered is an action verb, and if we do our job, that’s what we want to happen,” exchange-board member Robert Ross told the Times. Actually, in this construction “covered” is an adjective.

Other rejected names included Eureka (the state motto) and Ursa (a Latin word for bear, in honor of the state animal).

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The cable company Comcast, which already owns faster, has applied for trademark protection for UPWARE. According to the industry publication Fierce Cable, the name would be used to market software as a service (SaaS). I suspect many Comcast customers are already using UPYOURS.

(Hat tip: MJF.)

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Two things I learned from a Daily Candy email this week: that there is a salon in San Francisco called Lonni’s Punani, and that the salon employs “body hair stylists,” a job title that was new to me. Lonni is the first name of the salon’s owner; she’s originally from New Jersey. And “Punani”? “Not Lonni’s last name,” Daily Candy said coyly. Further research revealed that punani is a Hawaiian word meaning “heavenly flower” and a Pacific Islander slang term for “vagina” or “vulva.” 

You gotta admit that “Lonni’s Punani” sounds classier – and rhymier – than “Virginia’s Va-jay-jay.”

Not-So-Crazy Eights

In Chinese culture, the number eight has associations of good fortune: the word for eight, bā in Pinyin, sounds similar to words meaning “wealth” and “prosper” in Cantonese and other Chinese languages.

That’s why you’ll see an unusual number of symbolic eights in the Bay Area, which is home to large Asian and Asian-American populations.

 

Eight Orchids condominiums (Oakland), 88% sold.

This mixed-use development on the site of a former Howard Johnson’s motel in Oakland calls itself “Chinatown’s happiest community.” The “88% sold” sign has been displayed for many months, and may or may not be strictly accurate. Shortly after the project’s completion, in early 2008 (surely no coincidence), an article in the San Francisco Chronicle explained the Eight Orchids name:

The numeral 8 … was not chosen randomly. To the Chinese, eight is a lucky number that stands for prosperity and good fortune. When you take the numeral and turn it on its side, it becomes the symbol for infinity - forever. Triple it and you’ve got 888 - three times the luck and the last three digits of the price tags on the condos.

Speaking of 888:

888 Brannan (at 8th Street), San Francisco.

This South of Market building houses the Giftcenter and Jewelrymart (yes, that’s how they spell those words). It’s open only to the trade.

Double eight has its own symbolic meaning in Chinese culture. According to Wikipedia, the two digits resemble 囍, “the ‘shuāng xĭ’ (‘double joy’), a popular decorative design.”

 

88 Kearny St., San Francisco.

88 Kearny is an office building in San Francisco’s Financial District, a short walk from Chinatown. The double eights create a striking logo.

The Kearny and Brannan buildings may not have begun their lives as 88 and 888, respectively. Street addresses are assigned by city or county agencies, but developers and owners sometimes petition to have the numbers changed. You may recall that that’s what Ronald and Nancy Reagan did when they moved to Bel-Air, California, in 1989. Their house number was originally 666 St. Cloud Road, but Nancy Reagan had it changed to 668 because in the New Testament Book of Revelation, 666 is “the number of the Beast.” Of course, 888 would have been even better, but that would have required buying a different house on a different block.

To -er Is Human

You can’t blame Kentucky distillery Maker’s Mark for wanting to pile on the superlatives in an ad for Maker’s 46, the company’s first new bourbon in more than half a century. “Bigger, “bolder,” “spicier”—sure. But “Maker’s-er”? Er … what’s up with that?

 

Financial District, San Francisco, Sept. 10, 2011.

To me, “Maker’s-er” sounds like something you might slur to the bartender on your way to being 46ed—sorry, 86ed—from the saloon. It looks peculiar, too, because of the possessive -’s butting heads, or tails, with the comparative -er. Of course, “peculiar-looking-and-sounding” can be a good thing if it enhances memorability—or even, best of all possible worlds, becomes a meme.

The trouble is, this particular meme isn’t new or original. Like it or not, “Maker’s-er” follows a comparative-and-superlative-coining trend that’s been sputtering along for a few years. Back in 2008, Ben Zimmer wrote a Language Log post about an Android campaign that invented connecteder, smarterer, and funnerer. In July 2010 I wrote about closerer (in an ad for BlackBerry Messenger) and deliciouser (in a campaign for Captain Morgan Lime Bite). And in March of this year Ben Zimmer wrote in the Visual Thesaurus about a TV spot for the laundry detergent Gain that caused a little fuss with its use of gooder. Phrases such as “the decay of our youth” were mobilized.

Oddest of all was Old Spice’s 2010 commercial for “new fresh scents” described as fresh, fresher, freshest, and freshershist. That’s right—not “fresherest” but freshershist. You can now look it up in Urban Dictionary, which means at least a couple of people found it worth preserving. (Not so much the accompanying slogan: “Where Freshness Smells From.”)

But back to Maker’s 46, which has tinkered with the coin-a-superlative formula by appending -er to its own brand name rather than to some other adjective. (Brand names are adjectives, legally speaking.*) The new bourbon has gotten some good reviews (Alcohology: “a body matured like Sophia Loren in her late 30’s”; Drink Spirits: “builds on the excellent foundation of Maker’s Mark and represents a big step forward”); it retails for $35 to $40 for a 750ml bottle. Where, I wondered, did the name come from? The number of years it took to develop the bourbon? No. Alcoholic proof? Nope. (It’s 94, or 47 percent alcohol by volume.) The number of some rural route in Loretto, Kentucky, where Maker’s Mark is located? No again. Here with the answer is an Associated Press story about the brand’s 2010 release:

The product’s name is a tip of the cap to the brand’s barrel maker and one of its top executives, who came up with the unique idea of using seared French oak planks inside the barrel to draw out more flavors. The product’s name reflects the profile number attached to the process.

UPDATE: Thanks to commenter Nate Davis for the link to Clueless in Boston and “Makah’s Maahk.” 

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* Actually, they’re attributive modifiers. See this 2004 Language Log post by linguist Geoffrey Pullum. The gist: “Attributive modifiers are nearly always optional, so if you have dutifully used your trademarks as attributive modifiers throughout, you should find that when you leave the trademark words out, things still make sense without any change in the grammatical structure of what is said.” Hat tip: Ben Zimmer.

Word of the Week: Piem

Piem: A mnemonic device for learning the digits of pi; a sort of poem—piem is a portmanteau of pi and poem—in which pi’s digits are represented by the number of letters in each word.

In “Try to Remember,” a Talk of the Town piece about pi in the April 4, 2011, New Yorker, Calvin Trillin writes:

The best-known piem renders the first fifteen digits of pi as “How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy chapters involving quantum mechanics.” Piems are unwieldy for the longer distances.

Piems are one sub-specialty of a discipline known as piphilology (a blend of pi and philology, the study of languages). The Wikipedia entry on piphilology gives pi-memorizing devices in 15 languages other than English, including this one in Irish:

Níl i mata, a shaoi, eolaíocht nó feidhm. (“Wise one, mathematics has neither science nor use.”)

A section on pi memorization on the Ludism.org* site gives several other examples in English, including one that starts “May I have a large container of coffee?”

I regret not having timed this word of the week to coincide with Pi Day, March 14 (aka 3.14, but only in the US, where dates are customarily written in the month-day-year format). However, today, 4.4, is a semi-Square Root Day (the next true Square Root Day won’t occur until 4.4.16), and that’s math-y enough for me.

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* Ludism is either “a conscious embrace of the play drive as creator of meaning”—see a previous word of the week, ludology—or, according to the Uncyclopedia, “a quickly growing religion based on the teachings of the Grand High One, Ludacris,” whose followers are known as Ludites.  

Word of the Week: Octane

Octane: A saturated hydrocarbon (alkane) with the chemical formula C₈H₁₈. The word is formed from octo- (eight, as in eight carbon atoms) and –ane (a suffix denoting a hydrocarbon).

Used with a prefixed numeral or adjective (e.g., “high-octane”), octane is a truncation of octane number, “a number indicating the anti-knock properties of a motor or aviation fuel.” (Oxford English Dictionary). Octane number is often expressed as octane rating, a measure of “a fuel’s tendency to burn in a controlled manner, rather than exploding in an uncontrolled manner” (Wikipedia). An octane rating of 90 originally represented a fuel blend containing 90 percent iso-octane; other substances with similar anti-knock properties may be substituted for iso-octane.

Chevron station, Oakland, Feb. 27, 2011

Since at least about 1989, octane has also been used metaphorically to signify power, vigor, excitement, or “oomph,” as in this rather odd example: “People were suffused with the Judeo-Christian octane of individual destiny...” (“A Plunge into the Present,” by Ron Suskind, New York Times Magazine, Dec. 2, 2001.)

With rising gasoline prices in the news again, I’ve been thinking about octane, a word I’d been aware of since childhood but had never really understood. When I thought of it at all, I imagined octane as a magical additive (like Techron, perhaps), that was mixed into gasoline to make it more powerful. I may have associated it with knocking—the explosive sound made by inefficient combustion in a car engine—but I’d never really contended with knocking, so I couldn’t say for sure.

As it happens, I’ve been reading Deborah Blum’s fascinating The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. In her chapter on mercury poisoning, Blum includes a digression on tetraethyl lead (TEL), the original antiknock compound. Two General Motors employees, Thomas Midgley Jr., and Charles Kettering, discovered in 1921 that TEL “smoothed out the rough patches in gasoline combustion.” That was good news for drivers but very bad news for workers in Standard Oil’s TEL processing plant, nicknamed “the looney gas building.”

The men who worked there, in the clanking heat and drifting vapors, had become a little odd—moody, short-tempered, unable to sleep. They’d started getting lost on the familiar plant grounds, sometimes had trouble remembering their friends. And then in September 1924 the workers started collapsing, going into convulsions, babbling deliriously. By the end of October, thirty-two of the forty-nine TEL workers were in the hospital, and five had died.

Standard Oil’s response was to claim that the men “probably went insane because they worked too hard.” In subsequent years, most of the research into lead poisoning was funded by the lead industry. It wasn’t until the 1940s and 1950s, when TEL was first associated with environmental pollution, that pressure to remove TEL from gasoline began to mount. And it wasn’t until 1972 that the newly created US Environmental Protection Agency ordered a phasing out of leaded gasoline. The phaseout was completed in 1986, but TEL continued to be used outside the United States for many years. In the United States and elsewhere, various substitutes, including ethanol and synthetic iso-octane, are used as antiknock agents. (This post-Jazz Age history comes from a Wikipedia entry.)

“Octane” turns up occasionally in a metaphorical sense—signifying “energy” rather than “efficiency”—in brand names such as Octane Fitness, a manufacturer of elliptical machines for home or gym use; Octane, a British magazine covering “the world’s greatest classic & performance cars”; and Octane (tagline: “Fuel the Hunt”), a maker of archery paraphernalia.

Octane is also the name of a hard-rock band and the title of a 2003 movie about a woman who “must save her rebellious teenage daughter who runs off with a bizarre group of blood-letting psychos.”

UPDATE: The US gas-station chain 76 (formerly Union 76) takes its name from 76 gasoline, introduced by Union Oil in 1932. The numeral refers both to the American “Spirit of 76” and to the gasoline’s octane rating in 1932. Phillips 66, owned by the same parent company (ConocoPhillips) as 76, was named for Highway 66, on which the fuel was originally tested in 1927, and for the speed at which the test car was driving: 66 miles per hour.

You Only Live Twice

Territory Ahead is having a sale, and I am having a headache.

 

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.

Word of the Week: 99er

99er: (U.S) A person who has exhausted his or her 99 weeks of unemployment benefits.

“99 Weeks Later, Jobless Have Only Desperation” reads the headline on a front-page article by Michael Luo in the New York Times on August 3. The primary subject of the article is Alexandra Jarrin, a 49-year-old college graduate who, “not that long ago, had a corporate job near New York City and was enrolled in a graduate business school, whose sticker is still emblazoned on her back windshield.” Luo continues:

Ms. Jarrin is part of a hard-luck group of jobless Americans whose members have taken to calling themselves “99ers,” because they have exhausted the maximum 99 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits that they can claim.

For them, the resolution recently of the lengthy Senate impasse over extending jobless benefits was no balm. The measure renewed two federal programs that extended jobless benefits in this recession beyond the traditional 26 weeks to anywhere from 60 to 99 weeks, depending on the state’s unemployment rate. But many jobless have now exceeded those limits. They are adjusting to a new, harsh reality with no income.

Long-term unemployment in the United States stands at record high levels. Luo reports that in June, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 1.4 million people were out of work for 99 weeks or longer. (Read the full article; read the nearly 700 comments.)

The “unemployment” sense of 99er is recent; the earliest citation I found is dated March 21, 2010. In Urban Dictionary: “Tom’s a 99er and I don't know how much longer he’ll be able to pay his bills if he does not get a job or some help.” The term began gaining popularity soon afterward. In late April, Change.org, the website of Poverty in America, published a five-part series by Megan Cattrell titled “The 99ers” that put a human face on the problem:

That's where Louise is today. Ninety-nine weeks and no job in sight. She's not alone — though there aren't hard numbers yet, an estimated one million people could become "99ers" by the end of 2010. There are between five and six job seekers for every opening, and it is now taking people longer than ever before to find employment; the average unemployed person is out of work for a record 31.2 weeks. A quarter of the unemployed — equivalent to the population of Connecticut — have already been out of a job for more than a year.

See also a previous Word of the Week, mancession.

The 99er nickname may owe some of its stickiness to the parallel (and stark contrast, expectations-wise) with “49er”—a first-wave prospector who came to California after gold was discovered in 1848.

A Google search turns up additional definitions for 99er:

• A collector or aficionado of the TI-99/4A home computer, a popular model in the 1980s. The 99er.net site is dedicated to this fan base.
• A person “who knew absolutely nothing about cycling prior to Lance Armstrong’s first Tour De France victory in 1999.” (Urban Dictionary.)
• “A person who lives or was born in the areas surrounding route 99 [a k a U.S. Highway 99] in California.” (Also Urban Dictionary.) (This usage of “99er” is news to me, and I’m a native Californian.)

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Word of the Week: Subitize

Subitize: To immediately apprehend, without counting, the number of items in a small sample. Pronounced with a short u; stress on the first syllable. From Latin subito, sudden.

<<< Do not attempt to subitize the candy corn.

Subitize was coined in 1949 by E. L. Kaufman, et al., in "The Discrimination of Visual Number," published in the American Journal of Psychology. Later research found that babies can subitize quantities up to three. Adults don't do significantly better: most can subitize only four or five items. Chimpanzees can subitize up to six.

Can you subitize faster than a chimp? Take the test.

The End, with Popcorn

Now that 09/09/09 is behind us (and 9/11 almost behind us), Seekers of the Eternal Verities are casting their eyes toward 2012, the year in which, according to the Mayan calendar, the world purportedly ends. William Gladstone has written a novel, The Twelve, based on the prediction; Roger Ebert reports in his blog that plans are afoot to turn it into a movie, to be released in early 2012. But another twelve-ish end-of-the-world movie, 2012, will be released this year, on Friday the 13th of November. (All together now: Ooooh.)

Roger Ebert gets right to the point, as usual:

Meanwhile, have you wondered why, if the Mayans were able to pinpoint the end of time in 2012, they were unable to see that their own civilization would collapse in the ninth century?