Crowdsourcing a name for a new apple-flavored Mountain Dew beverage seemed like such a good idea. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, plenty. “Suddenly, its gallery of suggestions featured such winners as ‘Gushing Granny,’ ‘Diabeetus,’ and my personal favorite, ‘Fapple’.” Mountain Dew now says the campaign was created by a local customer, not the company; the “offensive content”—created by unknown pranksters—has been scrubbed from the “Dub the Dew” website.
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My two posts about the origins of the expression “the whole nine yards” (here and here) continue to be among the most-searched entries on this blog. But the story isn’t finished: New research has unearthed a couple of citations that go back to the 1950s, a full decade earlier than previously assumed. Read Ben Zimmer’s Word Routes column about the new findings, “Stretching Out ‘The Whole Nine Yards’.”
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Speaking of idioms: Absolutely nobody knows where the phrase “round robin” comes from.
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The most-loathed words in the English language, according to readers of The Atlantic, include moist (of course!), curate, slacks, and artisanal.
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Love logos? Love data? Check out Emblemetric, a new blog by James I. Bowie about trends in logo design. No seat-of-the-pants stuff, this: Bowie bases his reports on more than 1.2 million logos in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database. Sample finding: “The use of two stars as a design element in US logos increased by 170 percent in 2011 over the preceding five-year period. Looking back over time, we can see that, following a pronounced dip in the 1970s, logos with two stars have been claiming an increasing share of new trademark filings for the last three decades.” Be still, my geekish heart.
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Set aside several hours to wander happily through the History of Advertising Trust, “the largest archive of British advertising in the world.” There’s also a lovely gallery of ghost signs. (Via @boswellaffleck.)
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At Union Square Café, a “K1” is a diner who will be proposing to his date. At Michael’s New York, “Lawn” is a chopped salad chopped extra fine. Ben Schott deciphers these and other secret codes used in the dining rooms and kitchens of some well-known New York City restaurants, .
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Eleven wonderful words with no precise equivalent in English. Quite a few are new to me, including bilita mpash (Bantu for “the opposite of a nightmare”) and ya-arburnee (Arabic for “may you bury me,” i.e., the expressed hope that you die before your beloved does). (Hat tip: @ourboldhero).
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What’s the nerdiest preposition of them all? Nope, not “notwithstanding.” Not even close.
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Lexicographer Kory Stamper on color definitions in Webster’s Third International Dictionary: “You could spend an hour alone getting lost in ‘cerise’ (‘a moderate red that is slightly darker than claret (sense 3a), slightly lighter than Harvard crimson (sense 1), very slightly bluer and duller than average strawberry (sense 2a), and bluer and very slightly lighter than Turkey red’). No doubt people did. That may explain why we don’t define colors this way anymore.”
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I want a wall-size poster of this Is the New diagram, which documents “every instance of the phrase ‘is the new’ encountered from various sources in 2005.” Samples: “October is the new December,” “staying in is the new going out,” and “flat is the new round.” (Via Diane Fischler.)
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“Ms. and Mrs.,” a small personal-care-products company, was constantly being misidentified, usually as “Mr. and Mrs.” So the founders hired professionals to come up with a new name. Smart move. (Via @alanbrew.)
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A wonderful list of paradoxes from virtually every discipline. I’m still pondering the Service Recovery Paradox: “Successfully fixing a problem with a defective product may lead to higher consumer satisfaction than in the case where no problem occurred at all.” (Via @operativewords.)
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I’m sure you’ll have quibbles and additions, but this Digital Trends list of “The top 10 worst car names of all times” includes some incontestable champions, like the Studebaker Dictator and Isuzu’s Mysterious Utility Wizard. (Via @lexiconbranding.)
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From the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog, Mary Norris on “Semicolons; So Tricky”: “I thought semicolons were just inflated commas, and I realized that I had no idea how to use them, and was afraid it was too late to learn, so I decided to do without them. I stuck with what I knew: the common comma, the ignorant question mark, the occasional colon, the proletarian period.”
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From the New York Times’s Opinionator blog, Ben Yagoda on “The Point of Exclamation”: “A friend’s 12-year-old daughter once said that in her view, a single exclamation point is fine, as is three, but never two. My friend asked her where this rule came from and the girl said, ‘Nowhere. It’s just something you learn.’”
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Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl and transformative editor of Cosmopolitan, died Monday. From the New York Times front-page obit: “She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger.” Ouch. It’s easy to mock Brown, and Cosmo, but let’s not forget that in the early years of Brown’s editorship the magazine published work by Patricia Highsmith, John Fowles, and Tom Wolfe, as these covers from the 1960s attest. And brava to Brown for saying this in 1964:
I personally don’t feel that the world is going to the dogs or that young people are inferior to their counterparts of a previous generation. Our moral codes have changed slightly, but what we have now is a lot better than the days of stricter moral codes when there was child labor, no equality for women, no federal aid for destitute people, plenty of robber barons and lynching.
Source: Bad Girls Go Everywhere, Jennifer Scanlon’s 2009 biography of Brown. (Hat tip: The Hairpin.)
