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.

Squirrel!

It’s funny how you can go for months without seeing “squirrel” in print, and then, bam, two sightings within three days.

The first squirrel is a red herring. It appears in Joseph Epstein’s Wall Street Journal review of Yip Harburg: Legendary Lyricist and Human Rights Activist, a biography by Harriet Hyman Alonso of the man who wrote the lyrics to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “April in Paris,” and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” Harburg was born Isidore Hochberg in New York City in 1896; he changed his name to Edgar Y. Harburg in 1934 but was generally known as E.Y. Harburg or Yip Harburg.

Why “Yip”? In his review, Epstein says the nickname “came from the Yiddish word for squirrel, yipsl, which his parents called him when he was a child.” But the Yiddish word for squirrel is actually the Slavic-derived veverke; no Yiddish dictionary contains yipsl. According to Alonso, who devotes the first chapter of her book to the origin of “Yip,” Harburg related the yipsl-squirrel story to the oral historian Studs Terkel. Alonso passes it along without further comment, as does Epstein.

It’s entirely possible, though, that Harburg was pulling Terkel’s leg – or being squirrelly (“cunningly unforthcoming or reticent”). Because while yipsl has no meaning in Yiddish, the acronym YPSL is both meaningful and relevant: it stands for Young People’s Socialist League, which was founded in 1907 as the student arm of the American Socialist Party and whose members were known as – yep – “Yipsels.” In a 2004 column for The Jewish Daily Forward, the pseudonymous language columnist Philologos wrote that “Harburg was a political radical who was blacklisted in Hollywood in the 1940s, and it is possible that he was nicknamed ‘Yipsel,’ subsequently shortened to ‘Yip,’ because of his YPSL-like views even if he never was a YPSL member.” Other distinguished Yipsels or sympathizers included the political scientist Daniel Bell, the literary and social critic Irving Howe, the writer Saul Bellow, and the journalist (and eventual neoconservative) Irving Kristol.

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The second squirrel is a semi-secret one.

Secret Squirrel Cold Brew Coffee is a bottled coffee concentrate; one 16-ounce bottle makes six to seven eight-ounce drinks. The company is based in Studio City (Los Angeles County), but according to the clumsily written FAQ the name has a different geographic origin:

Growing up in Washington DC area a secret squirrel was something like knowing a shortcut around traffic, or knowing the hideaway parking spot, or knowing the unknown electrical outlet in the coffee shop. It only seemed fitting for this centuries old method for brewing coffee that few people know about.

(That awkward dangler at the beginning of the paragraph is one good argument for editors. Another is knowing how to hyphenate compound adjectives. Elsewhere on the website, a proofreader would have caught “anyway” for “any way,” sentences that end without periods, and introductory clauses without commas. But I digress.)

I have no idea whether the D.C. story is true – anyone care to confirm? I do know, however, that “Secret Squirrel” was the title character of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon that aired for a few seasons in the mid-1960s and was briefly revived in the 1990s. The character was a spy; whether it got its name from the Washington shortcut or vice versa, I cannot say.

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Finally, a few squirrel tidbits:

• The Latin word for squirrel, sciurus, translates to “shadow tail.”
• In many Germanic languages the word for “squirrel” translates to “oak kitten.” (It’s Eichhörnchen in German.)
• The Spanish word for “squirrel,” ardilla, translates to “like a flame.” (From arder, to burn.)
• See “squirrel” translated into almost 300 languages, including Klingon, here.

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And here’s my favorite cinematic squirrel sighting, or near-sighting:

Dug the Dog, from Up (2009)

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.)

Guest Post on Duets Blog: Nova Has Never Meant "No Go"

In a guest post for Duets Blog, I look at one of the most popular and persistent of all naming myths: the one about the Chevrolet Nova. The car hasn’t been produced since 1988, but the story about how the Nova name “failed” in Spanish-speaking countries—because it means “no go,” according to the legend—lives on.

Guess what? “Nova” isn’t “no va,” and the Nova sold well in Latin America.

Read the post to learn more about the “Nova” myth and why it has proved so surprisingly durable.

Some of my other guest posts for Duets Blog: white elephants, the Aveda trademark, Los Doyers, Festivus.

 

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.

The World in Other Languages

A couple of views from my bookshelf:

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Japanese used to have a color word, ao, that spanned both green and blue. In the modern language, however, ao has come to be restricted mostly to blue shades, and green is usually expressed by the word midori (although even today ao can still refer to the green of freshness or unripeness—green apples, for instance, are called ao ringo). when the first traffic lights were imported from the United States and installed in Japan in the 1930s, they were just as green as anywhere else. Nevertheless, in common parlance the go light was dubbed ao shingoo, perhaps because the three primary colors on Japanese artists’ palettes are traditionally aka (red), kiiro (yellow), and ao. The label ao for a green light did not appear so out of the ordinary at first, because of the remaining associations of the word ao with greenness. But over time, the discrepancy between the green color and the dominant meaning of the word ao began to feel jarring. Nations with a weaker spine might have opted for the feeble solution of simply changing the official name of the go light to midori. Not so the Japanese. Rather than alter the name to fit reality, the Japanese government decreed in 1973 that reality should be altered to fit the name: henceforth, go lights would be a color that corresponded to the dominant meaning of ao. Alas, it was impossible to change to color to real blue, because Japan is party to an international convention that ensures road signs have a measure of uniformity around the globe. The solution was thus to make the ao light as bluish as possible while still being officially green.

--From Through the Looking Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, by Guy Deutscher (Metropolitan Books, 2010).*

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Persian, Dilorom told me, had only one word for crying, whereas Old Uzbek had one hundred. Old Uzbek had words for wanting to cry and not being able to, for being caused to sob by something, for loudly crying like thunder in the clouds, for crying in gasps, for weeping inwardly or secretly, for crying ceaselessly in a high voice, for crying in hiccups, and for crying while uttering the sound hay hay. Old Uzbek had special verbs for being unable to sleep, for speaking while feeding animals for being a hypocrite, for gazing imploringly into a lover’s face, for dispersing a crowd.

It was all just like a Borges story—except that Borges stories are always so short, whereas life in Samarkand kept dragging obscurely on and on.

--From The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, by Elif Batuman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).**

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Note: I received a review copy of Through the Looking Glass from the publisher. I found The Possessed in the Oakland Public Library.

 

Photo from Personal Evolution blog.

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* I haven’t yet finished reading Through the Looking Glass, but I’ve been paying attention to the response to the book among linguists. Here, for example, is The Lousy Linguist’s critique (in a nutshell: “too light weight for me”); and here is Derek Bickerton in the New York Times Sunday Book Review (summary: Deutscher’s writing is “chatty and accessible” … but “he burdens his findings with more theoretical weight than they can bear”).

** I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of linked essays. Not only is Batuman an engaging and literate writer, but the back-cover description is very amusing: “If you’re going to read just one book about conference planning, Isaac Babel, Leo Tostoy, boys’ leg contests, giant apes, Uzbek poetry, the life of the mind, and resignation of the soul—seek no farther: THIS IS THE BOOK FOR YOU!!!” Also, the cover illustration was done by the peerless Roz Chast.

Names in the Wild: Putzmeister

This guy was blocking a big chunk of my street the other day. He took the word right out of my mouth.

 

Not just a putz—a putzmeister!

Oh yeah, the Stars and Stripes makes everything copacetic.

But seriously, folks: Putzmeister America, based in Sturtevant, Wisconsin, manufactures concrete and material-placing equipment. Its parent company was founded by Karl Schlecht in Germany in 1958 as KS-Maschinebau; according to the corporate timeline, the name was eventually changed to Putzmeister, which the website translates to “plaster master.”

In Yiddish, of course, putz means something rather different. Leo Rosten writes in The Joys of Yiddish, originally published in 1968:

Literally, putz is vulgar slang for “penis.” But the vulgarism is rarely used to designate the member; the word shmuck does that.

Rosten ends the entry with this postscript:

CAUTION: Putz is not to be used lightly, or when women or children are around. It is more offensive than shmuck; the latter may be used in a teasing and affectionate way, vulgar though it is, but putz has a pejorative ambience.

According to the Wikipedia entry for The Joys of Yiddish:

In 1998, Charles Schumer and Al D’Amato were running for the position of United States Senator representing New York. During the race, D’Amato referred to Schumer as a putzhead. The New York Times referenced the entry for putz in The Joy [sic] of Yiddish and maintained that the phrase did not merely mean “fool”, as D’Amato insisted, but was significantly more pejorative. Based on that entry, a better translation might be “dickhead”.

Here’s the original 1998 Times article. (Schumer defeated D’Amato, the three-term incumbent.)

For another example of a brand name that probably sounds better in its country of origin than in the U.S., see my post on Sikkens.

Ciao, Amore

Remember the hardworking farm boy of the Rosetta Stone ads?

He disappeared from magazines about six months ago. But his quixotic saga lives on. In January, Rosetta Stone asked fans to continue the story of the farm boy and the model. By Jan. 29, when the contest ended, there were 286 stories on the Rosetta Stone site, most of them with happy endings.

But wait, there’s more! In December 2008, Minnesota Public Radio’s Jeff Horwich wrote a song about the farm boy/supermodel romance that he performed at a company cabaret. Nice rhyming of “impress her” and “undress her,” Jeff!

And of course there was Ian Frazier’s hilarious parody in the New Yorker:

 

 

Are you aware that stalking a supermodel without her consent is a violation of Italian law?

 

Lei è consapevole che infastidire una top model senza il suo consenso è una violazione della legge italiana?

 

This pocket dictionary of Italian prison slang may be useful to you.

 

Questo dizionario tascabile di gergo carcerario italiano le potrebbe essere utile.

The hardworking farm boy even casts a shadow over a rival language-software company, Instant Immersion, which in recent weeks has been running this homage (oh, all right: low-rent knockoff) in The New York Times:

Yellow background: check. “One chance”: check. Hand-scrawled underscore: check.

Also: Apparently women do not ever buy foreign-language CDs. Nope, it’s totally a heterosexual guy thing. That’s been your experience, right?

No Sale

I’d never heard of the translation company that sent me this email, but now that I’ve read an example of its communication style, I’m unlikely to send it any work. Here’s what “Melissa” wrote (I’ve removed identifying names):

As a leading provider of multilingual localization services and solutions, we at ____ strive to further connect with people around the globe, from localization and linguistic enthusiasts to those merely curious about the generalities of this field of work.  With the onset of a blog in development, we are reaching out to you today to open up lines for dialogue in an effort to encourage communication, share ideas, and extend networks.

To briefly introduce ____ to you through a current project, for those interested, the chance to participate in the industry's first collaborative and customizable terminology management system, ____, could possible result in your very own iPad!

For further instructions, please visit ____.

In the name of good old-fashioned advertising, we would also appreciate any mention of ____ in your blog entries.  Likewise, we would be more than willing to return the favor.  Our blog is very much a work-in-progress at the moment, but future endeavors will include "spotlights" with freelance translators, linguists, or ardent supporters of localization development and technology—this could be you! 

I receive plenty of awkwardly written emails from strangers and companies I’ve never heard of. This one stood out because it came from a translation company—one that is, according to its blog,  “a multinational, top-tier localization vendor with 13 offices around the world” that has succeeded by “sticking to our quality guns.” (Quality guns?) The company is based in Beijing, which may account for some of the awkward English (“linguistic enthusiasts”; “open up lines for dialogue”; “those merely curious about the generalities of this field of work”; “in the name of good old-fashioned advertising”*; “the onset of a blog in development”; the entire second paragraph). But it also has six North American offices and, presumably, at least one native English speaker and proofreader.

Based on the email, would you trust this company with your next translation project? I’m guessing your answer is no, non, nein, and nyet.

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* I think Melissa means “free PR,” not advertising.

Bad Brand Names: Teenflo

Here's a little quiz. I say "Teenflo," you say:

A. "For those really hard-to-wean babies!"

 Evenflo bottle-feeding products.

 

B. "For that time of the month ... with wings!"

Carefree thong liners.

C. "For chic, contemporary Canadian fashion!"

Image from BetseyJenney, Boston and Newton.

Give up? The correct answer is "C." Teenflo: the most misleading brand name in retail.