Fritinancy

Taking the Piss

Who’s minding the store at Target? A week ago Consumerist reported that the retailer was selling a plus-size dress in a color unflatteringly called Manatee Gray. (A manatee is also known as a sea cow.) This week there’s been a cross-lingual dustup over a sandal style called “Orina,” which means “urine” in Spanish.

 

Image from Yahoo Shine. Target quickly removed the product page and is said to be renaming the style.

 

“Does no one speak Spanish at Target HQ or have access to this thing we call Google?” asked Consumerist reporter Mary Beth Quirk. No and no, apparently. Target’s initial defense was that “orina” means “peaceful” in Russian. As though Russian rather than Spanish were the second-most-spoken language in the United States, after English.

I learned about Target’s number-one problem via a tweet from Mighty Red Pen, who also sent me a link to Yahoo Shine’s coverage of the story. Full marks to senior editor Lylah M. Alphonse, whose recounting of other notable naming gaffes sets the record straight on the Chevy Nova “no-go” myth.

Target isn’t the only business with Orina issues. A similar etymological fallacy led to the naming of Café Orina in the Bay Area city of Concord, California.

 

When Maura Storace sent me the photo, she commented, “I wonder if the coffee they serve is amber-colored?”

The café’s About Us page includes this earnest explanation:

Meaning of Orina
Its source is Eirene, a Greek name meaning “Peace.”

Narrative: This was the name of the Greek goddess of peace. Until the 20th century, it was commonly pronounced in three syllables (i-REE-nee).

Very nice, but there are almost 700,000 native Spanish speakers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and only a relative handful of Greek speakers.

Moral: Check several bilingual dictionaries before committing to a lovely-sounding exotic name. And know your market.

And as long as this post is already in the toilet, here’s Kmart’s new TV spot, which – incongruously for a retailer not known for creative marketing – takes positive glee in its potty humor. The much-repeated tagline is “Ship my pants.”

 

 

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For more on the British idiom “taking the piss” – not to be confused with “taking a piss” – read this.

Brand Name from the Past: Sorosis

I learned about the defunct American shoe brand Sorosis from Manolo the Shoeblogger, who posted this 1905 ad on his blog last year:

Original source: All-American Ads 1900-1919.

Manolo was interested in the style of the shoe; my own interest is in the Sorosis name. How did a word that sounds like a disease (cirrhosis? psoriasis?) become a brand of “the most distinctly fashionable shoes that are on the market”? Was there a relationship, I wondered, between Sorosis and “sorority”? Or with the Sorosis clubs for professional women, which had been founded in New York in 1868 and are still thriving in some U.S. cities?

Or maybe (I wondered whimsically) with Yiddish tsuris?

Here’s what I found out.

The Airing of Grievances

Yes, I’m observing Festivus a few days early this year. The aluminum pole is looking handsomely unadorned (I find tinsel distracting), and I’m feeling confident about my chances in the Feats of Strength. But first, my favorite part of the Seinfeld-inspired holiday: The Airing of Grievances.

I’ll start with the most grievous of my 2012 grievances. Stick around – they get funnier and less lethal, I promise. (Past grievances: 2011, 2010, 2009.)

Fashion Word Watch: Smoking Slipper

I follow shoe trends pretty closely, for personal and professional reasons, and I’ve read a fair amount about shoe history. I know that since the beginning of time there have been only a finite number of shoe styles; all the rest is variation. (Even the briefly ballyhooed flatforms of Spring/Summer 2011 were just catchily rebranded Renaissance chopines.)

Which is why, when I started seeing references to something called “smoking slippers” a little over a year ago, I was more skeptical than surprised. I recognized the shoe style; it was the name that was completely new to me.

 

Yes/No smoking slippers from Stubbs & Wootton.

The earliest reference I could find to “smoking slippers” was in a March 28, 2011, WWD Footwear News article that declared smoking slippers to be a “must buy”:

The message for fall is about leisure and luxury, as the classic smoking slipper returns in rich velvet and suede, with quirky embellishments such as embroidery and rhinestones.

In July 2011 the ShopBop blog echoed the imperative in that very special dialect of English known as Fashionspeak. The smoking slipper is a “best bet” for fall, said ShopBop:

It comes with fashion’s return to the leisure class, and thanks to the industry’s obsession with androgyny, ladies are wearing the footwear once reserved for cigar-puffing, scotch-swilling men in velvet jackets.

I believe we’re meant to picture Hugh Hefner.

Image from ShopBop blog.

Smoking slippers circa 2011 were made of soft fabrics or plush leathers such as suede and haircalf. They looked casual yet luxurious, and definitely more covered-up than fashion’s previous footwear “obsession,” the ultrafeminine, barely there ballet flat.

You’ll notice that these smoking slippers share a distinctive profile: a raised vamp with a slight notch where it meets the side of the shoe. In standard footwear parlance, that qualifies them as Venetian loafers.

Now, that was a term I was familiar with. Venetian loafers have been a standard men’s style for years (see Robert Zur, John Varvatos, and Prada). Lands’ End uses “Venetian” to describe its women’s versions, too. It’s unclear why Venice is implicated; I once read something about the raised/notched vamp resembling the prow of a Venetian barque, but I’ve since been unable to find that reference. (“Loafer” to describe a shoe style has nothing to do with laziness, by the way: the word comes from German läufer, meaning “runner.” And “slipper,” at least in the US, usually means “house slipper.”)

“Smoking slipper” wasn’t the only name invented for this new/old style. Throughout the autumn and winter of 2011 I saw almost equal numbers of references to “smoking flat” and “slipper flat.” They all referred to the essentially the same thing.

Just as the name was solidifying, in the summer and fall of 2012, the criteria for “smoking slipper” began to relax. The style suddenly seemed to be everywhere, including on discount sites, and it covered a lot of fashion ground.

 

“Smoking slippers” on sale earlier this week at Neiman Marcus Last Call. All except the shoe at far right share that raised/notched vamp. The snake-print shoe is more accurately called a piped plain-toe loafer.

Soft, slipperlike materials, yes – but also leathers suitable for venturing outdoors, not to mention biker-chick embellishments.

Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal’s fashion reporter, Christina Binkley, called smoking slippers “power flats”:

A big look for upcoming seasons: smoking slippers, which begin where Cary Grant left off, puffing on a cigar before the fireplace. While the traditional velvet of smoking slippers might be too soft for power shoes, Stuart Weitzman and Elizabeth & James have them in sturdier materials such as patent, tweed and snakeskin. The look is wholly modern and fashion–forward.

There’s that cigar again! Clearly, there’s some connection between tobacco and these shoes. But what?

Well, there’s the smoking jacket, defined in the 1850s by The Gentleman’s Magazine of London as a “kind of short robe de chambre, of velvet, cashmere, plush, merino or printed flannel, lined with bright colours, ornamented with brandenbourgs, olives or large buttons.”

A. Sulka & Co. smoking jacket (1950) via Antique & Vintage Dress Gallery.

One can picture hard-soled, soft-uppered slippers, perhaps with a monogram or family crest, accompanying such a garment. Try as I might, though, I could not find any historical references to “smoking slippers.”

The association of “smoking slippers” with women’s fashion  may have more to do with the French couturier Yves Saint Laurent, who in 1966 introduced a women’s tuxedo he called “Le Smoking.” According to a Wikipedia entry, “In French and many other languages, the anglicism smoking is a generic colloquialism referring to any kind of tuxedo/black tie clothing.”

And today’s “smoking slippers” do resemble an item of men’s formalwear.

It’s called an opera pump. (Photo via SFGate; shoes available at Saks.)

Check It Out

Bergdorf Goodman ad in the New York Times, September 13, 2012:

 

So here’s what I want to know:

Does “men’s shoe library” mean you can borrow a pair of shoes, wear them once, and return them?

Or is it a reference room—a hushed hall for perusing shoes?

When they organize the stock, do they use the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress system?

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More on the shoe library in the Bergdorf Goodman blog.

Imperative-Adjective

Volkswagen started the game 50 years with its famous Think Small ads, and Apple imitated the slogan to great effect with Think Different. Lately, the imperative-adjective formula has proved irresistible to creative directors hoping for some borrowed interest.

I’ve written about Think Blue, Rethink Possible, Unleash Deadly, Let’s Tonic, Let’s Merry, Enjoy Better, and Let’s Pizza (which is actually the name of a company). The formula keeps chugging along. Here are two recent sightings of the imperative-adjective ad slogan.

Word of the Week: Strass

Strass: A hard, brilliant, lead-containing glass used in making artificial gems. Also called “paste” or “diamante.”

Sources agree that “strass” was named for its inventor, but not on who he was. The OED and Encyclopedia Britannica identify him as Josef Strasser, an 18th-century Viennese goldsmith. Wikipedia doesn’t mention Josef: it claims strass was named for an 18th-century Alsatian jeweler, Georg Friedrich Strass. Maybe both Strass and Strasser solved the problem simultaneously. In any case, the eponym is satisfyingly apt: Strasse means “street” in German, and strass is often used to create a pavé (paved) effect.

“Strass” (or French “stras”) has long been used in Europe to describe artificial gemstones, but its more-recent popularity in the United States appears to be linked to shoe designer Christian Louboutin, whose crystal-paved pumps—which can cost north of $3,000 a pair—have been a red-carpet sensation. Accordingly to the official Louboutin Twitter account, the designer has created a pump that’s strassed all over—even on the famous red sole.

I try to stay up-to-date on such things, but I admit that “strass” was new to me until I read a post by Dustbury about pavé women’s pumps from the shouty shoe brand HERSTAR that celebrate professional sports teams. Here’s the Los Angeles Lakers edition:

Yours for less than 10 percent of the cost of the Loubies!

The copy is as ostentatious as the ornamentation (punctuation sic):

Encrusted, dazzling, and intensely mesmerizing with every step, these elite pumps command a presence of their own. Fully hand strassed in luxurious, hand selected Middle Eastern crystals, then offset by a sky-high 6” heel and 3" internal platform; these glittering heels glisten on the court and off. They are simply magical to behold.

And that is how I learned that “strass” can also be a verb.

Other examples from around the Internet:

“I strassed my own wedding shoes using genuine swarovski crystals and saved a TON of money.” (Wedding Wire)

“Here are final pics and video of Emily’s Lady Peeps painted a custom color then strassed in crystal AB Swarovski rhinestones.” (Urban Bling)

“Sophie and Ava’s strassing service is perfect for the doll who wants a lot of bling for a lot less money than it would cost for the retail price!” (Shatterproof Glass Dolls)

The “strass” category on Etsy depicts some non-footwear options, too.

Early artificial diamonds were rock crystals gathered from the Rhine River. But “rhinestone” to describe those crystals or their imitations postdates “strass” by half a century: the first appearance of “strass” in an English-language publication was in 1820, while “rhinestone” didn’t appear until 1871. (The German Rheinkiessel, or “Rhein pebble,” first appeared around 1780.)

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Urban Dictionary has a different definition for “strass”: “Stress that is so annoying that it’s a huge pain in the ass.” Which, admittedly, might result from wearing a pair of six-inch stilettos.

 

Fuxy Lady

I knew about the fashion brand FCUK and the Australian wine brand Suxx. But Fux shoes? How had I managed to miss that one?

 

Listing on eBay.

And then it dawned on (or don don) me: “fux” was someone’s idea of “faux.” And not just one someone: there are more than 44,000 Google matches for “fux leather.”

That’s just fuxed.

By the way, if you spell it “fux leather,” be careful when you write about cologne.

They Got It Backward

I’ve written previously about badly named shoe styles: the Flubby, the Smirk, the Rodentia. But I hadn’t encountered a truly badly named shoe brand until I discovered GOLC Shoes.

GOLC. Yes, it’s all caps. And yet—hello!—it isn’t an acronym. Nor is it a foreign borrowing: GOLC Shoes is based in Tennessee. (The shoes are manufactured in Brazil.)

GOLC. You can’t say it without gagging.

And yet look at one of GOLC’s styles for Spring 2012, the Samantha:

 

 

Pretty! No gag reflex at all.

So what’s the story? Here’s what the website says:

The name GOLC is Clog spelled backwards. The first products developed were clogs and as the market needs changed new Brands were developed.

(Capitalization sic.)

“Clog spelled backwards” is a terrible explanation for a company name. “Clog” sounds bad enough spelled the right way.

To further confuse matters, all the shoes now bear the label “Mariana by GOLC.” “Mariana” is a blend, we’re told, of the founder’s wife’s name, Mary Frances, and the name of the lead factory in Brazil, Ana.

I have no quarrel with “Mariana” as a brand name. But GOLC should have been eliminated in the first round.

It’s not that backward-spelled names (ananyms) can’t be effective: See Aneres, Lorac, and Harpo. But to work as brands, they need to sound good—or at least appropriate. For a women’s fashion brand, GOLC is neither.

And, paradoxical as it may seem, backward-spelled brand names work best if they’re non-descriptive. (Descriptive names are always weak as trademarks; a backward-spelled descriptive name is still a descriptive name.)

To make matters worse, there have been two shoe companies with a visually similar name: Golo. (The new company; the 1960s-1970s shoe company, still well represented on eBay.)

Your customers don’t care that you’re capable of reverse-spelling a four-letter word. They do care that the resulting name sounds ugly and looks like the acronym for a government program.

 

(Hat tip: Barking Dog Shoes.)

November Linkfest

Is it time to rename the beleaguered Euro? The IPKat blog, which covers intellectual-property issues in Europe and the UK, wants your opinion. At this writing, voting is almost evenly divided among Neuro, BizMark, and Tenax (“Latin for frugal, grasping, obstinate and stingy”), but some of the runners-up are pretty clever, too: the Meou (“Memberstate European Operating Unit”), the Markel (a blend of the German mark and “Merkel”), the Ohno (no explanation required). You have till midnight (GMT) Sunday to vote. Via @igornaming.

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“Consider Tide detergent, Taizi, whose Chinese characters literally mean ‘gets rid of dirt.’ (Characters are important: the same sound written differently could mean ‘too purple.’)” – “Picking a Brand Name in China Is a Business Itself,” New York Times, November 12. Pinyin News begs to differ: “Nope. The Mandarin name for Tide detergent is Tàizì. On the other hand, ‘too purple’ would be ‘tài zǐ,’ which is close but not the same.” (Hat tip: Ben Zimmer.)

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I’m loving Word Soup, the new Wordnik series that covers “strange, obscure, unbelievable (and sometimes NSFW) words” heard on television. A few from the October 28 post: Apparition American (a euphemism for “ghost”), turfucken (“sex with ducks”), and volumptuous (a Snooki-ism that blends “voluptuous” and “lump”). And from November 9: Moneyed American (a euphemism for “rich person”) and jägerbar (a were-bear that hunts). Say, Wordnik, how about turning Word Soup into a book?

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Speaking of TV, here in the US we’re impatiently awaiting Season 2 of Downton Abbey, coming to PBS January 8, 2012. In the meantime, Oxford Dictionaries gives us a guide to the language of the series, which is set in England just before and during World War I. No spoilers, thankfully, but plenty of interesting word histories—and some anachronisms, like “when push comes to shove,” which was primarily used in the US until 1958.

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A hat tip to the Wordnik Twitter feed for the link to “10 Words You Might Think Came from Science (But Are Really from Science Fiction).” On the list: robotics, zero gravity, blast off.

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Speaking of science fiction (not really), the Spaceage Portal of Sentence Discovery is a database of “interesting language patterns and elements,” including figures of speech, grammatical-syntactic structures, and “rhetorical maneuvers.” Search under the “clincher sentences” tag, for example, and read examples by Adam Gopnik, Todd Purdum, and Bill Bryson. Or: “Be of service to the universe by submitting examples that you yourself have discovered.” Fun and very, very useful. Via Sentence First.

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Do you believe it’s a cardinal sin to begin a sentence with a conjunction or end a sentence with a preposition? You are, in a word, wrong. Paul Brians, keeper of the indispensable Common Errors in English Usage website, has compiled a list of non-errors: “those usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually standard in English.” Included: “over” vs. “more than,” “raise” vs. “rear,” “between vs. among,” and—of course—”hopefully” and “momentarily.” (The late William Safire called these non-errors “incorrections,” a label Language Log has adopted.)

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I rarely post links to advice about writing because so much of it is tedious, dumb, or both. J. Maureen Henderson’s “How to Improve Your Writing,” which was published in Forbes last month, is different: it’s smart, practical, and funny. (First tip: “Do more of it. Maybe.” Second tip: “Read more. Possibly.”) The best piece of advice in the column: Edit other people’s work.

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“[S]lang is always doubting. It’s always questioning, it’s always cynical, it’s always undermining and it’s always been negative.” Lexicographer Jonathon Green, author of Green’s Dictionary of Slang (which retails for a decidedly upmarket $625), talks about his favorite subject with The Browser.

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Baby Name Wizard went shopping and discovered a nursery’s worth of shoes named Bella, Madison, Chloe, and Olivia. Surprisingly, “there’s almost no relationship between the style of name and the style of shoe.”

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Downtown Los Angeles once had streets named Faith, Hope, and Charity. “This last one, Charity Street, was a nonstarter. No one wanted to ‘live on Charity,’ so it was renamed with the grand title of Grand Avenue.” More on L.A. street names in L.A. Downtown News.

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Following up on my Tech Jargon of Yore post, here are more than 30 tech ads from that paleolithic era, the 1990s. Despite the weird kerning, this Radio Shack ad made me smile.