Fritinancy

Get Thee to a Dictionary

If you're going to go churchy on us, watch thy pronouns.

Thou: subject ("Thou said WHAT?")

Thee: object ("Yeah, I'm talkin' to thee.")

Thy: possessive ("I see by thy outfit that thou art a cowboy.")¹

For shame!

___

¹ Update: As the Rev. Michael Penn Moore pointed out in an e-mail, that sentence should begin "I see by thine outfit..."Thy becomes thine in front of an open vowel. Aren't you glad English dropped the second person informal several centuries ago?

(Photo taken at Bay Street shopping center, Emeryville.)

Mr.-y Spot

I've been collecting photos of "Mr." brand names for more than a decade. (Not names like "Mr. Brown's Restaurant"; the formula has to be Mr.+ Product or Mr. + Service.) I was inspired to begin the project when a friend pointed out a Chinese restaurant on San Pablo Ave. in Berkeley called Mr. Eggroll. The "O" in "Eggroll" had fallen off, and all the remaining letters appeared to have been handcut from white sticky tape, but still--you had to admire that plucky honorific and applaud the attempt at dignity. (Both the friend and the business are now defunct, alas.)

I went on to document Mr. Lumpia X (a take-out place in San Francisco specializing in the Filipino specialty called lumpia; I have no idea what the "X" stood for), Mr. Hot Dog Rancho Burgers (confusing, yes, but a very handsome sign: Geary Blvd., San Francisco), Mr. Convenience (a Japanese store on Mason St. in San Francisco; "Mr. Convenience" was the only English in the sign), Mr. Sushi (Grand Ave., Oakland), and the unabbreviated Mister Softee, the ice-cream-truck franchise in New York and the Northeast.¹ Except for Mister Softee, none of these businesses appears to have survived. All of the photos are from my pre-digital period and thus unavailable for posting; one of these days I'll have them scanned.

Meanwhile, here are some current examples of Mr. monikers.

I shot this San Francisco establishment in 2005. But this photo, from the Yelp review, gives more context:

There's a #1 in the sign because there's also a #2 store, in Hayward. And the bling-bling in question is the kind you have installed in your mouth. As one satisfied customer put it on Yelp: "Listen, at some point in your life you may need to buy some gold teeth, and when you do, Mr. Bling Bling will be waiting like a prodigal friend. Seriously, this is the place."

On Fairfax Ave. near Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles:

   

Quite the dapper gent, eh? He's not to be confused, of course, with Mr. Clean®, a registered trademark of Procter & Gamble:

This Mr. is also in Los Angeles, on Santa Monica Blvd. near Western Ave.:

A coffee wholesaler in downtown Oakland, near Jack London Square:

I love that snazzy streamlined font. However, the company's logo on its web site is completely different. Time to hire a sign painter?

 

On University Ave. in Berkeley. Another fine retro typeface. I'm indebted to one of the Messrs. Rooter for his heroic efforts in removing a small forest from my sewage system a few months ago.

Anybody out there have a favorite Mister?

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¹ "Mister Softee" is also stockbroker slang for Microsoft, whose ticker symbol is MSFT.

Signs from the Mysterious Southland

Test your L.A. IQ:

You are driving 35 miles per hour on Santa Monica Boulevard near La Cienega Boulevard in West Hollywood when you see this large sign:

What is the sign advertising?

A. A belly-dancing academy.

B. A cosmetic surgery clinic specializing in the rejuvenation of lady parts.

C. An ambitious one-named Brazilian model hoping to become a model-actress.

The correct answer is (D) None of the above. If you're curious enough about the sign, as I was, that you find a parking space, cross either of the very busy boulevards, and zoom in for a closer inspection, you see this:

Kind of downmarket-looking for a "premium experience." And "Famima" strikes me as too perilously close to "famine" to suit a sandwich joint.

Then there's the punctuation. I'd seen single exclamation points in business names--for example, BevMo!--but the double exclamation point is new to me, and peculiar looking.

The big green sign also displays a URL, which I neglected to photograph. When I got to a computer and searched for "Famima," I discovered the Japanese parent company's website, in Japanese. Famima USA is a little more helpful: I learned that the company has 13,000 outlets throughout Asia, and that Famima USA was established in 2004. The "Famima!! Difference" amounts to "redefining the convenience store." For example:

We don't just have soup, we have soup!!

Now!! I!! Get!! It!!

As for the name, here's the official story:

About 35 years ago, Famima!! started in a small Japanese neighborhood as FamilyMart. In fact, the name Famima!! comes from an abbreviation of FAMIlyMArt. Since then, FamilyMart has remained virtually the same, offering fresh goods, a selection of grocery items and popular quick-foods that can be eaten on the run or taken home as a meal.

"Famima" may sound yummy to a native speaker of Korean, Thai, or Japanese, but like several other imported names, in English it's ... not so good.

Nameless in Oakland

Taken on Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. near 51st Street. The place was closed when I stopped to shoot the photo; I haven't been able to do any follow-up research because, you know, it's nameless.

(Across the bay, Sausalito's No Name Bar--no web site, either--has been pouring drinks and hosting  jazz gigs for at least half a century.)

Don't Know Much About History

This billboard really irks my inner peevologist:

For those of you who need a refresher course, that's George Washington directly below the space between "Behind" and "Every." The painting is Emanuel Leutze's 1851 Washington Crossing the Delaware, which, as every schoolchild used to know, commemorates the beginning of a surprise attack on Hessian forces in the Revolutionary War, Dec. 25, 1776. 

George Washington may have been first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen--and indeed a land surveyor in civilian life--but one thing he was not was an "explorer."

The advertiser is Mio Digiwalker. If I can't trust their research, how can they expect me to trust their technology?

(And yes, the painting itself is full of inaccuracies, too. For one thing, the actual crossing took place at night.)

Photo taken at 8th and Mission streets, San Francisco.

Drinking Problem

"Refreshing's OK, but it's been done to death. Wait a sec--how about death? You think we could get dead in there somehow? Because, hey--alcoholic beverage plus dead equals awesome!"

 

San Francisco Civic Center, Jan. 4, 2008.

Needless to Say

So much to cherish about this sign:

There's the aggressive product name, the unsettling associations, the weirdly rendered rooster, the odd punctuation (staccato, then breathless), the jagged tape job, "the best know," "two ways," and, of course, "needless to say."

And look--they got the apostrophe right in "it's"!

Photographed at Piedmont Lumber Company in Oakland, where the guys behind the counter seemed only mildly amused by my interest. Apparently I'm not the first to shoot the sign.

The "Language" of Advertising™

Here's a game to play while you're waiting for the cable guy. How many usage gimmicks can you spot?

(Photographed at the Westfield San Francisco Centre.)

My answers:

1. Anthimeria--substitution of one part of speech for another. "Faster" is an adjective (a faster rate) or an adverb (let's go faster!), but here it's being used as something ownable: a noun. (My previous posts on anthimeria in marketing are here, here and here.)

2. Pompous capitalization. Faster isn't just a noun here, it's a proper noun, like Tom, Dick, Harry, and Comcast.

3. Pretentious TMing. Using the trademark symbol after "Faster" makes you think (erroneously) that Comcast has managed to corner the intellectual-property market on this one word. In fact, Comcast may or may not have filed for trademark protection of the entire "We own Faster" phrase; the only symbol that signifies actual trademark registration is ®. Registered slogans (as opposed to names) are usually denoted by ^SM for "service mark."

4. Unnecessary quotation marks. Are they visible air quotes? Is sprees meant to be ironic? Perhaps Comcast is saying to us, "You call that a spree? We laugh contemptuously at your so-called 'spree'! We spree ever so much Faster™ ourselves!" Your guess is as good as mine.

5. Gratuitous fictional secret sauce. PowerBoost: Now with NoSpaceBetweenWords.

This ad is just one example of a Comcastian effort to reinvent the English language. I'd noticed "Karaocasting" on a billboard, and reader Dave Blake pointed me to a new TV commercial that features "snurfing" (sneakily surfing the Internet while on the phone). The gangly new words are called "Triple Slanguage," part of Comcast's "Triple Play" campaign. Go here to view flashcards with definitions for phoruption, splurjobbing, and the rest of the Comcastictionary.

If you're feeling a little cynical about all this, you're not alone. As a commenter wrote on the Broadband Reports forum, "I wish they'd stop making up words for marketing purposes and just add more HD [high-definition] channels."

Inventive Editing

Reader Michael Schneblin, a Californian who lives and works in Morocco, e-mailed this photo of a shop sign in Casablanca. He writes:

The original sign was "American Pizza."  That became a political and business liability, post Iraq, so some clever guy did this to it:

If you stare at the image, you can just make out the whitewashed "M."

I think Effen vodka is the perfect accompaniment to A Frican Pizza.

More "huh?" signs in this Flickr pool (via Rob Walker, who has started posting some nice Flickr interludes on his blog, Murketing).

I'm rather partial to this one, which seems to indicate U.S.-Canadian language barrier, or perhaps just an idiomatic tin ear on the part of the ad agency:

Gosh, this is turning out to be a themed post in more ways than one, isn't it?

August Linkfest

Fun with language from the wide world o' blogs:

The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks (Making Fun of Bad Punctuation Since 2005) is exactly as advertised: a collection of signs, ads, and articles festooned with random inverted commas. An example: The "last" person to leave "dont forget" to close the door. Blogkeeper Bethany comments: "While I'm sure they appreciate the reminder, I wonder how you know if you are the 'last' person or not?"

Along the same lines, lowercase L asks the plaintive question, "Ever notice hand-written signs with letters in all-caps, except for the letter L? It looks like an uppercase i ... WHY DO PEOPlE WRITE lIKE THIS?"

More peevology (thanks, Mr. Verb, for that useful term!) over at Mother Tongue Annoyances, written by amateur linguist Tim Warner. Actually, Tim is more tickled than annoyed with "tits" as an adjective ("How was the movie?" "It was tits.")

Literal-Minded consists of commentary from linguist Neal Whitman, "a guy who takes things too literally." Here's a timely post from the archives about "back to school" as a noun phrase, as in "Getting Ready for Back-to-School."

One of my favorite fashion blogs, Une Femme d'un Certain Age, considers the definition of flattering in the realm of style:

Very few people in our culture question the desirability of wanting to appear "thinner/taller/younger" so when you say something is flattering, that's usually shorthand for accentuating at least one of the Appearance Holy Trinity. But what if you lived in a culture with a different aesthetic?

A Roguish Chrestomathy (chrestomathy: a collection of choice passages from an author or authors, esp. one compiled to assist in the acquirement of a language) considers the case of the New Zealand couple who wanted to name their son 4Real. The Registrar-General of that country disallowed the name on grounds that the dictionary definition of a name was "a sequence of characters." Not so fast, says RC:

A name is not "a sequence of characters." (And, of course, not all sequences of characters are names.) Here's the OED's first definition of the noun name, which strikes me as a good deal more accurate: "The particular combination of sounds employed as the individual designation of a single person, animal, place, or thing." In other words, names are primarily sounds, not letters.

And besides:

"4real" is a sequence of characters, dammit! So even if we accept the Registrar-General's definition, it provides absolutely no basis for rejecting the name.