Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Arithmetic

Arithmetic: The science of numbers; the art of computation by figures. From Latin arithmetica, originally Greek arithmetike (“the counting art”). In English since early the 14th century, originally as “arsmetrike” because of the false Latin etymology ars metrica, “the art of measuring.” Standardized to arithmetic by mid-17th century. Arithmetic replaced Middle English tælcræft, literally “tell-craft,” in which “tell” meant “to reckon” or “to calculate,” a sense we retain today in “bank teller” and “to tell time.”

Arithmetic was in the news last week after former President Bill Clinton used the word six times in his fact-filled and rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte.

 

MinnPost.com, Sept. 6, 2012

Here’s the first usage (from the transcript of the speech as delivered):

Now, people ask me all the time how we got four surplus budgets in a row. What new ideas did we bring to Washington? I always give a one-word answer: Arithmetic. (Sustained cheers, applause.)

Arithmetic suited Clinton’s rhetorical purposes because—in contrast to, say, math—it suggests “elementary” and “basic.” Arithmetic is what we learn in grade school: it’s times tables, not quadratic equations; long division, not differential calculus. Clinton drove home that point in a later line about his differences with Republican opponents over the national debt:

It was a highly inconvenient thing for them in our debates that I was just a country boy from Arkansas, and I came from a place where people still thought two and two was four. (Laughter, applause.) It’s arithmetic.

(Emphasis added.)

If you missed the speech. here’s video with annotation from New York Times reporters.

Also of interest:

Clinton made so many changes to his written text—ad-libs and deliberate revisions—that the speech ran almost twice as long as scheduled. To see exactly how he altered the text, take a look at The Atlantic’s marked-up version. BuzzFeed offers a slightly different version, which contains a couple of changes sure to please print editors: Clinton’s correct lower-casing of “president” when it doesn’t precede a proper name (“the next president of the United States”) and of “bless” (“God bless America”).

“Fixin’ to Get Folksy,” an analysis of the speech’s homespun rhetorical devices. (Ben Zimmer at Word Routes.)

Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker says Clinton’s speech was “one of the greatest tours de force in convention history”:

In its intensity, in the palpable love between performer and audience, in its passion, in its earnestness, in its straightforwardness—in its politics, even!—this was the rhetorical equivalent of a Bruce Springsteen concert.

James Fallows at The Atlantic on why Clinton’s speeches succeed: “Because he treats listeners as if they are smart.” That’s a lesson for every speaker and speechwriter.

Update: Lucy Ferriss, writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Lingua Franca blog, takes a close look at some of Clinton’s rhetorical devices:

This call to “listen” to what’s “important” is the chief emendation Clinton makes to a text that might otherwise, rhetorically, echo what not only the First Lady but also the other pundits had been saying from the platform. Even more brilliant is the addition of the “some brass” line, which will haunt our impressions of Paul Ryan henceforward.

Socialist Surrealism

In celebration of New York Fashion Week, which began yesterday, I present an article of clothing whose name expresses in a single word the blithe mishegas of la mode: the Bolshivek Dress.

It’s sold by All Saints, which spells it exactly that way and describes it thus:

The Bolshivek Dress features folded sequins in antique and matt black tones to create a lux 3D textured finish. Scattered beads in similar tones have been added to give additional depth and detailing. The Bolshivek Dress uses a fabric blend that contours the body to create a flattering silhouette.

Rise up, comrades, and recite the list of grievances!

1. It’s “Bolshevik,” not “Bolshivek.” The word means “majority” in Russian.

2. The Bolsheviks were a Marxist Communist party founded in 1903 by Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov in opposition to the czarist regime.

3. In the West during the Cold War, to label someone a Bolshevik was to disparage the person’s patriotism, loyalty, and personal hygiene.

4. Nothing about this dress suggests—to quote The Internationale—“workers  of all nations” or “oppressed of the earth.” In fact, the heavy ornamentation and slinky shape—not to mention the $250 price tag—make it seem suspiciously bourgeois if not shockingly aristocratic.

As for the descriptive copy: “matte” and “luxe,” dear writer, not “matt” and “lux.”

As George Santayana surely would have said, “Those who misappropriate history are condemned to look like ill-informed, trend-besotted twits.”

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For extra credit, read “Comradely Capitalists,” my December 2011 post about nouveau commie chic; and my What Were Those Fashionistas Thinking? posts about the Cohen shirt, the Barren skirt, Crazy B#@!h jeans, and oddly named shoes.

 

Not Keeping Up

When “Jones” is the first word in your brand name, shouldn’t you know how to conjugate the word properly?

That seems not to be the case with Jones New York, the namesake brand of a Fortune 500 retail conglomerate.

 

Screen shot from the Jones New York website.*

The same image and headline appear in a two-page ad in the September issue of Vogue (pages 190-191). Lavish styling, pricey photography, expensive ad buy. Too bad a few dollars weren’t left over to pay a proofreader.

 

Here’s the thing: The idiom is “Keeping up with the Joneses.”** Joneses is the plural of Jones, and it follows the rule about regular plural formation: If a word ends in a pronounced S—as opposed to the silent S of some French names like “Dumas”—add -es.

Not an apostrophe.

So maybe this apostrophized name is a possessive? According to some usage guides (notably the Associated Press Stylebook), words that end an S become possessives with the addition of an apostrophe. According to others (notably the Chicago Manual of Style), they need an apostrophe and an S: Kansas’s, Dickens’s, Morris’s.

But whichever guide you follow, a possessive noun has to possess something. We might say, for example, that we’re keeping up with the Joneses' circus skills. In the ad, however, nothing is being possessed.

Enough? Enough. After all, I still have 770 pages of the Vogue September issue to plow through. Who knows how many usage goofs lie ahead?

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* The dress is $399, comes in sizes 2, 4, and 6 only, and won’t ship until September 14—and then it’s a final sale (no refunds or exchanges).

** According to the biographer of the novelist Edith Wharton, “keeping up with the Joneses” was coined in reference to Wharton’s very wealthy aunt, Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones.

The Magic of Spellcheck

The magic of Macy’s must be super-strong juju. It apparently blinds copywriters to squiggly red lines under misspelled words.

 

New York Times, page E6, August 16, 2012.

“Accordian”? Uh-uh. The dress has accordion pleats, so named because they resemble the bellows of the musical instrument.

 

Hohner accordion from Accordion-o-Rama.

Title Nine Scores, Fouls

I had some errands nearby, so I stopped into the Title Nine store in Berkeley over the weekend to see what was new with this local brand. 

A bit of background: Title Nine was founded in 1989, taking its name from Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex to any person seeking the benefits of any federally funded education program. Title IX opened doors to girls and women who wanted to play sports in school; Title Nine sells non-technical sports gear and clothing. The company has 19 retail stores—none in malls, the website boasts—243 employees, and a manifesto.

Appropriately, there’s a lot of playful, you-go-girl energy in a Title Nine store. This poster typifies the spirit:

“You are so busted!” is very cute. The medallion touts the company’s “bravangelists”: also nice.

I actually laughed out loud at this sign displayed above the entrance to the bra department—excuse me, the “Home for Unruly Girls Support Center.”

If you don’t get the joke in “unruly girls,” see the Online Slang Dictionary.

So far, so good. By the evidence, Title Nine is a company that makes a big investment in copywriting, and that’s a good thing. The attention to words carries over into the dressing rooms—or so I thought until I encountered this sign:

 

“Have a Fit!” is fun. So are the other headings: Containment, Mind the Strap, Be Smooth, Know the Terrain, and Think Straight. Then I read the very last sentence: “The bra should lay straight.”

Aha! So Title Nine’s editorial department has an Achilles heel after all: the lay/lie fault. The bra should lie straight, if you please.

(Listen, I get that a lot of people mix up lay and lie, and in fact I tolerate “lay” for “lie” in casual speech. But I can’t condone its appearance in published prose. And that includes marketing copy: See my critiques of the Hanes Lay Flat Collar, the SpeedSleep ad, the Back2Life back-pain “solution.” This is why professional copyeditors were invented. They know this stuff. They can help.)

I picked up a fall catalog to see whether the dressing-room sign was anomalous. Nope: The error is even worse in the catalog (insert, page 7), where in addition to the lay/lie error we have a comma splice:

“The bra should lay straight, if it rides up, it’s still too loose.”

There needs to be a period—a colon would be OK, too—after “straight.”

The “lay” error persists on the website:

I leafed through the catalog to distract myself from all this lay-ola. Unfortunately, my eye fell on an even bigger boo-boo—in a name with a trademark symbol, no less:

 

Page 19, fall catalog.

I was drawn to that “Wooliscious” headline because in all the time I’ve been tracking -licious compounds—see here, here, here, and here—I’d never come across a -liscious. It looked odd, and I wondered whether it was a clumsy attempt at a portmanteau with “luscious.” Nope again: In the product copy—and on the Web—the word is spelled “Woolicious.”

I’m guessing Title Nine’s lawyers have already pitched a fit over this mistake, so I’ll leave it at that.

In my crappy photo you can just barely make out the name of this garment: “The Swacket.” It’s “more than a sweater—not quite a jacket,” the copy says. Honestly, is that the best they could come up with? Because all I can think of is the poor sacrificial fracket.

I’ll have another post about Title Nine later this week.

Meddling

I couldn’t help myself: When I received this email last week from Jigsaw, the UK-based women’s retailer, I had to get involved.

“Gold Metal Winners of the Season,” read the headline. And yet…

… there were no metallic elements in evidence.

 

No gold in the rest of the email, either.

You’d think that with the incessant media harping on Olympic medal count, someone at Jigsaw—hello, proofreader!—would have recognized the erroneous homophone and fixed it. But no.

So I did what had to be done: I tweeted about the mistake. To its credit, Jigsaw promptly expressed chagrin.

 

Cute tweet—although I can’t help meddling one more time. There are two Ls in “metallurgist,” Jigsaw. (Yes, on both sides of the pond.)

Let this serve as a reminder to companies that send emails to their customers: Those emails are advertisements. They need to be professionally written and edited and proofread before they’re sent. (I bet you double-check the prices. The words are important, too.)

Careful with those tweets and Facebook posts, too.

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Does it seem as though I’ve picked on Jigsaw before? You’re right.

If You Give a Dog an Umlaut

I spotted this Yöghund display in the window of Holistic Veterinary Care here in Oakland.

 

 

Let’s zoom in on the logo:

The Yöghund website puts it slightly differently: “Yöghund is the first frozen yoghurt treat made for dogs.” A long-overdue breakthrough in gelato-lacto-canine nutrition, I’m sure you’ll agree.

But wait—is it yogurt or yoghurt? And what’s up with the dotted O—the Spot spots, you might call them?

As it happens, I’d just read Lynne Murphy’s recent post at Separated by a Common Language about “yog(h)urt,” so I was already pondering why Americans usually spell it yogurt and Brits spell it yoghurt. Here’s some background from Lynne:

This word comes to English from Turkish yoğurt, but English doesn’t have the letter ğ or the sound that goes with it, so we had to figure out what to do with it. I’m relying on Wikipedia here, but it says that in some dialect(s) ğ is not pronounced as its own sound, but instead lengthens the preceding vowel. That would explain why it turns up as yaourt in French (and has also made appearances with that spelling in English). In another dialect(s?), ğ is pronounced as [ɰ], which is a velar approximant. So, it’s like a [w], but without the lip-rounding. This is all to say that it's not a hard-g sound at all.

Hmm, no umlauts in evidence—just the little Turkish flourish over the G. As for the UK/US spelling distinction, Lynne writes:

I can't help but think that the relative popularity of the yoghurtspelling in the UK has something to do with how its pronunciation is evolving. … This is to say: a frequent, modern British pronunciation of the word has a first syllable that rhymes with dog (in the same dialect, at least. The [ɒ] vowel ofBritish Received Pronunciation (RP) does not really exist in American English.) …

Americans pronounce it more like the older pronunciation--except without that cent(e)ring of the vowel that RP does. And if you're still having a hard time imagining any of these sounds, listen to the first two pronunciations of yogurt at Forvo. The first is the modern British, the second American.  Actually, Forvo also has a Turkish pronunciation, the vowel of which doesn't directly correspond to any of the English ones (it's this one).

Still no umlauts! I think we may safely conclude that what we have with Yöghund is yet another case of gratuitous decorative dotting. The company that makes Yöghund isn’t in an umlaut-using country like Finland or Germany. And it isn’t in a “yoghurt” environment, either: it’s based in Exeter, New Hampshire.

Even without the dot-confusion, Yöghund poses a pronunciation challenge. The -hund suffix obviously signifies “dog,” but to aspirate the H you need something like a glottal stop after the Yög-, and that’s awkward for English speakers. (It starts to sound like “yoga-hund.”) Of course, if you take the umlaut literally you also have to pronounce the O through semi-pursed lips. And that’s a lot of work for lazy American mouths.

I don’t have a dog, so I can’t give you a report about the product itself. But in case you were wondering, here’s good news from the FAQ:

I thought dogs were lactose intolerant? Won’t Yöghund upset my dog’s stomach?

Dogs are lactose intolerant, but rather than upset a dog’s stomach, Yöghund may actually settle it!

Hürräh!

 

What Makes a Bad Name Bad?

I write about all kinds of names, including the bad ones. I believe every company and product deserves a distinctive, memorable name—and no company deserves a name that’s embarrassing or awkward.

But what makes a bad name bad? Well, unlike Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each bad name is not bad in its own unique way. Here are the badness patterns I see most frequently:

Counterintuitive spelling. A coined name like Nyoombl needs to be pronounced phonetically (if at all), but it isn’t—not by a long shot. Reasonable assumptions about English pronunciation dictate that Virgance be pronounced with a hard G, but it isn’t. We look at Brayola and mentally rhyme it with Crayola, but that’s not what the company wants us to do. Moral: Don’t make us work this hard. It’s a name, not a cryptography test.

Inappropriate connotation. If you know nothing about what Infegy actually does, you might deduce that it had something to do with “infamy,” “effigy,” or “infect.” When I look at Reniquity, all I see is “iniquity”—over and over again. FlubIt suggests failure, GloSmart evokes furniture polish … and those interpretations have nothing to do with the companies in question. (Don’t even get me started on Analtech.) Moral: Consult several dictionaries, not just one. Make one of them a slang dictionary. Then get some advice from someone who understands language.

Awkwardness. These are the names that put the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble or force incompatible sounds to cohabit. They’re a frequent consequence of machine-generated names, most of which simply fuse word parts into artificial blends without considering logic or ease of pronunciation. But humans can create awkward names, too: consider Herdict, Mathnasium, and AbbVie. (And see The Name Inspector for more examples.) Moral: If the name flunks the telephone test, it’s not going to inspire positive word-of-mouth.

The bandwagon effect. So many names end in -ly. So many names end in -ify. Remember, a name needs to be distinctive and memorable, and you won’t achieve those goals by doing what all the other kids are doing. Moral: Do some research into naming trends. And get a professional opinion.

What about cross-cultural naming gaffes, you may be wondering. Contrary to widespread belief, they are relatively rare. (That story about the Chevy Nova doing poorly in Spanish-speaking countries? It’s a myth.) If you’re taking your company or product global, you should certainly invest in a linguistic screen to rule out a major blunder. But, as we’ve seen, people can accept a brand name that means “cease and desist” in Swahili (Hulu) or one that suggests “oral sex” in Russian (Mondelez). The bad names I see—and I do see a lot of them—are making mischief in English, not Swahili or Thai or Malay.

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.

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.