Fritinancy

Word of the Week: HOHO

HOHO: Acronym for “hop-on hop-off.” (Sometimes spelled HoHo.) Describes a type of sightseeing bus that allows passengers to disembark whenever they reach a stop that interests them, then re-board when it’s convenient. Tickets are valid for a specified period of time, typically 24 hours.

Hop-on hop-off buses are used by tour operators in many cities around the world (and even in the Grand Canyon), but the use of HOHO as a semi-official acronym appears most frequently in connection with the Indian tourist industry.

Above: logo for HOHO Delhi. From the FAQ:

Q : Can you explain me what is “Hop On Hop Off”
A : Hop-On Hop-Off tour, you have the freedom to spend time at each sightseeing. Your ticket will allows you to board any bus.

There are indications that the HOHO acronym is spreading to other parts of the world; see, for example, this query on TripAdvisor about a “HoHo bus” in New York City and this post on The Rome Toolkit, which notes that there are “no less than seven hop on, hop off tour (HOHO) sightseeing buses operating daily in Rome.” The London Toolkit also refers to “two major operators of the standard HOHO buses.”

A la franglais: “L’OpenTour” HOHO bus in Paris.

 

A British visitor to New York City reported in 2012 that “the HoHo bus” delivered “excellent value for money” and was “a brilliant way to see the city and get your bearings.”

HOHO buses are typically double-decker with open tops and a lowered rear platform for easy boarding and disembarking. One of the newer HOHO buses in London is officially called the New Bus for London (NB4L) and unofficially called the Boris bus, after Boris Johnson, the city’s mayor.

Abso-Booking-Lutely

I caught this new spot from Booking.com during a “Portlandia” commercial break:

 

The ad is cleverly plotted and well acted (the expression on the face of the teenage girl as she shleps down the hotel corridor is pure bershon), and the multiple payoffs at the end are satisfying. What stands out, though, is the repeated appropriation of the company name as an almost-expletive:

It doesn’t get any booking better than this!
Look at the booking view!
This is exactly what you booking needed!
Bask in the booking glory!

As a general principle, associating your brand name with an obscenity is a bad idea. But as AdFreak says in its review of the commercial, “the fact that it's vaguely explicit makes it just self-deprecating enough to not be too abrasive.”

Here’s another thing about booking: it’s a Britishism that’s infiltrated American English only in the last 20 years or so. (Americans have traditionally preferred to reserve restaurant tables and make reservations for theater seats and vacation travel.) When Ben Yagoda wrote about book (tickets, table, room) in an October 2011 post on his Not One Off Britishisms (NOOBs) blog, he noted that the usage started surging in the US around 1993, “the sweet spot for NOOBs.”

Booking.com is owned by Priceline, an American company, but it’s based in Amsterdam; the ad agency that produced the spot is the Amsterdam office of Portland-based Wieden + Kennedy. That European perspective may have influenced the choice of the company name and the push to fully Americanize booking.

Speaking of euphemistic expletives and brand-name dropping, a play I saw last night at Berkeley Rep is gloriously full of both. Troublemaker, by Dan LeFranc, is a live-action adventure comic featuring a posse of 12-year-olds who speak an idiosyncratic lingo filled with invented profanity. The play’s subtitle—“The Freakin Kick-A Adventures of Bradley Boatright”—gives you a taste; two minor characters are listed in the credits as A-Hole #1 and A-Hole #2. Tween tough-gal Loretta Beretta (great name!) snarls some of the best lines: “I’ll rip off your breadstick and shove it up your Olive Garden.” “Shut your St. Francis and move your Assisi.” “You’re lucky I don’t break your banana, remove it from your republic, and shove it up your gap.” In his review for Theater Dogs, Chad Jones wrote that it’s “pretend swearing taken to such an outrageous level that it’s actually beautiful in its own poetic way.” The play ends its Berkeley run on Sunday; if it shows up in your city, go see it.

Names in the Wild: Olvera Street

Olvera Street (Calle Olvera) is the oldest street in Los Angeles, dating back to the city’s founding in 1781. Situated opposite Union Station and named for Los Angeles County’s first judge, Agustín Olvera, the street has been a tourist-friendly “Mexican marketplace” since 1930. It’s artificial (the commercial strip was planned and executed by a wealthy Anglo, Christine Stirling) yet also authentic (several historic buildings still stand). In other words, it’s a living metaphor of Los Angeles.

On a recent trip to L.A. I visited Olvera Street for the first time in many years. I found much unchanged (a few establishments, like La Luz del Día restaurant, have been around since the 1950s), while other things have adapted to changing times.

There were lots of Día de los Muertos items for sale, including these same-sex wedding-cake toppers.

 

A “Who Would Jesus Deport?” T-shirt.

 

Painted-tile bathroom sign in Spanglish.

 

I’m not sure why it’s “Mr.” Churro and not “Señor,” but the name does fit the bilingual flavor of the rest of the sign. And of course I’m always happy to meet a Mr. business name in the wild.

 

This mug was one of many souvenirs bearing the “Latina – Proud, Educated and Powerful!” motto. It appeared to be a girls-only phenomenon.

 

If you haven’t found a parking sign with your child’s name, maybe you’ve been shopping in the wrong place.

 

Travel note: I recommend taking one of the Metro Line (rapid-transit) trains into Union Station and wandering around to admire the spectacular Spanish Colonial Revival architecture and décor. While you’re on Olvera Street, allow some time to view the long-hidden fresco by the great Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974). Originally unveiled in October 1932, the painting was whitewashed shortly afterward to obscure its “radical” subject matter. After more than 40 years of planning and preservation work, it reopened to public viewing earlier this month.

Word of the Week: Thanatourism

Thanatourism: Travel to destinations involving death and tragedy, including battlefields, disaster sites such as Hiroshima, and museums commemorating atrocities. From Greek thanatos (death) + tourism. Also called dark tourism, grief tourism, atrocity tourism, and morbid tourism.

Thanatourism was coined by A.V. Seaton, a British scholar specializing in the study of tourism. In a 1996 paper, “Guided by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism,” Seaton traced the activity of thanatourism back to the Middle Ages; it was revived during the Romantic period of the late 18th early 19th centuries. For the Romantics, Seaton wrote, Pompeii was the ultimate thanatoptic travel destination.

“Dark Tourism,” in the November 2010 issue of The Atlantic magazine, explored how Cambodia is turning “its bloody history into a sightseeing boom.” The article opens in Anlong Veng, site of a shrine to the murderous dictator Pol Pot:

The Cambodian government plans to develop this sun-baked, mine-riddled frontier town into a theme park devoted to the Khmer Rouge, the brutal regime that murdered perhaps 15 percent of Cambodia’s population when it ruled from 1975 to 1979. The planned park is of a piece with Cambodia’s larger effort to capitalize on the atrocities of its past—and to tap into a booming global industry in travel to macabre destinations, known as thanatourism.

“Dark tourism” was coined by John Lennon—not the late Beatle but a professor at Glasgow Caledonian University and author of Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster. The Atlantic article cites Lennon as asserting that

a global demand for “authentic” attractions has turned thanatourism into an increasingly profitable sector of the tourism business. More than a million people visit Auschwitz annually, while millions more take in the Tower of London. Today’s Lonely Planeteers flock toward the bridge over the Kwai River, synonymous with the brutality of the Japanese army during World War II, and the Wolf’s Lair, where Hitler survived an assassination attempt in 1944. Tour companies offer package trips to Baghdad, Sarajevo, and Chernobyl.

Thanatourism is on sound academic footing, at least in the UK. The Institute for Dark Tourism Research was founded in 2005 at the University of Central Lancashire as “a centre of excellence for dark tourism research aimed at a global audience of academics, students, industry practitioners, policy-makers, and the media.” The iDTR sponsors research, held a symposium, and manages online discussion forums on Facebook and JISCmail.

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Thanks to C.J. Hirschfield for introducing me to the iDTR.

 

Are We Having Funner-er Yet?

Something about this Hipmunk ad seemed familiar to me.

San Francisco Muni bus, May 20, 2012.

Then I remembered: Back in 2008 Google introduced its first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1. The ad for the phone was, as Ben Zimmer wrote for Language Log, “packed with jocular comparative adjectives: smarterer, connecteder, funnerer.” Ben went on:

This isn’t just an homage to Dumb and Dumberer, the even more dim-witted sequel to Dumb and Dumber. Rather, it’s being recognized by many in the techie community as a pointed jab at Apple honcho Steve Jobs, who recently enthused about “the funnest iPod ever.”

Jobs died last year, the iPod Touch website no longer includes a reference to “funnest” (it now says “It has fun written all over it”), and the G1 has evolved into the G2X. But “funner-er” lives on at Hipmunk, the San Francisco startup founded in 2010—a generation removed, in tech years, from that 2008 Android campaign.

You may be wondering about the Hipmunk name. Here’s a story about it from TechCrunch, reproduced verbatim with the usual caveat about TechCrunch’s slack writing and editing:

Like many startups in today’s Silicon Valley*, [co-founder Adam] Goldstein was struggling to find an apropo domain that was topical and more importantly, available. After dangerously flirting with (and even purchasing) domains like BouncePounce.com and Trot.me, Goldstein’s girlfriend** told him to identify a cute mammal that he could build a brand around. Hipmunk fit the bill.

You’ll notice something missing from this origin story: an explanation of how Chipmunk (I presume) became Hipmunk. I gather that Chipmunk.com wasn’t available and (“more importantly”) no one was willing to part with cash for (a) domain negotiations or (b) professional naming services. Or maybe the founders just wanted to emphasize their hipness. A follow-up question from the reporter would have been helpful.

I wrote about another super-superlative coinage—“Maker’s-er,” from Maker’s Mark—in a September 2011 post.

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* Hipmunk is in San Francisco, not Silicon Valley. Different area code, more fog, etc., etc.

** I’m sorry to keep sticking it to TechCrunch, but who was doing the dangerous flirting and purchasing—Goldstein or his girlfriend? Dangling modifiers: use at your own (and your readers’) peril.

Tagline of the Week

Escape Campervans knows exactly what its customers want.

 

“The freedom to sleep around.”

 

Cheeky. Un-corporate. Irresistible.

Because I zoomed in on the tagline, you can’t see the psychedelic paint job on this Minibago. Turns out it’s one of more than 40 artist-created designs in the fleet. I love the Roy Lichtenstein homage.

 

From the website:

Most people assume the Camper is your own and that you have painted it yourself. The feedback our clients gave us after their Campervan trip reinforced the initial crazy idea as being a pretty good one.

Escape Campervans was founded in 2003 in New Zealand, which explains the spelling of “flavour” and “enquiries” on the website. The company opened a Los Angeles facility in 2009; I don’t know when the San Francisco depot opened, but this was the first Escape van I’ve seen. Wouldn’t it be a kick to see a parking lot full of them?

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Spotted in front of the Dolphin Swimming and Boating Club, Aquatic Park, San Francisco, April 19, 2012.

"Get Your X On"

Last week the Brand New blog critiqued the new logo and ad campaign for the Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority, which has rebranded the lake’s south shore as “Tahoe South.” The review, which focuses on the typeface, is generally positive: “This is probably not the best destination branding job of the year, but definitely one of the best examples of commissioned lettering with a strong purpose.”

The review doesn’t mention the new tagline, “Get Your Vacation On.” Here’s the tag in an ad:

 

Rebranding by Duncan/Channon, San Francisco.

 

“Get Your Vacation On” is a new twist on a formula whose contemporary source is “Get your groove on” (“to get something going,” e.g., “to dance”) from the early to mid-1990s. In her textbook African-American English: A Linguistic Introduction, published in 2002, Lisa J. Green noted that “get one’s X on” was “extremely productive.” Among the examples she listed: get my chill on (“to rest”), get my eat on (“to eat”), and get my praise on (“to worship”).* Green doesn’t include a much earlier example, “get your habits on,” which was discussed in the American Dialect Society’s listserv in 2005. “Get Your Habits On” was the title of an 1899 song that inspired many sequels and imitations, including one sung by Bessie Smith in 1933 (sample lyric: “I like you when you got your habits on”).

The Washington, DC, go-go band Rare Essence recorded “Get Your Freak On” in 1995; the Missy Elliott song from 2001, “Get Ur Freak On,” is unrelated.

The 2003 remake of Freaky Friday used “Get Your Freak On” as a tagline.

“Get your freak on” can be sexual or non-. An example of the former: Last October, a TSA agent added a handwritten note—“GET YOUR FREAK ON GIRL”—on a luggage-inspection notice given to a female passenger whose bag contained what she later described as “a personal item.” The passenger was a blogger, so the note found its way to Gawker.

 

Some non-freaky twists on the formula:

• Get Your Preak On is the slogan for the Preakness InfieldFest, held in May in conjunction with the Preakness Stakes.
  
  
• Get Your Geek On is “a weekly show about all things geek.”
  
  
• Get Your Geek On is also the slogan of GeekTheLibrary.org (“Whatever you geek, the public library supports it all”). For more on this slogan—and on geek used as a verb—see Ben Zimmer’s Word Routes column from November 2010.
  
  
• Get Your Craft On is the name of a crafts blog.
  
  
• “Get Your Roll On” was a 2000 single by the hip-hop duo Big Tymers .
  
  
• In 2008, Apple used “Get Your Groove On” as a slogan for the iPod Shuffle. The earliest citation for “get your groove on” in the Online Slang Dictionary is dated 1999.
  
  
• “Get Your Drink On” shows up all over the Web. It’s the name of a regular column about bars and cocktails in SF Weekly, a Bay Area publication.
  
  
• In its August 17-24, 2005, issue, Boston’s Weekly Dig newspaper used only “Get Your X On” headlines. ADS-L contributor Steven Kleinedler noted several of them: “Get your wiseacre on,” “City Hall told to get its green on,” “South End gets its sashimi on,” and the very meta “Get Your Get Your ___ On.” Kleinedler said the editor’s letter explained it all; unfortunately, the issue is not online, so I can’t share it with you.

“Get your X on” may or may not be related to the simpler and less variable “get it on,” which arose in the 1950s as a musical command and later took on a sexual connotation. (Marvin Gaye released “Let’s Get It On” in 1976.) In “get it on” the emphasis is on the on; in “get your X on” the emphasis is usually on “X.”

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* Thanks to Stan Carey and Ben Zimmer for the link to African-American English.

AmEx Strikes Out

Another example of deletion in advertising, this one from the American Express home page:

 

 

Here the graphic device is supported by echoing word choice: “far away” becomes “on the way.”

I’m rather pleased to see the official (“pig’s tail”) deletion symbol, which is the one I learned as a newspaper editor.

Carmageddon

It’s not just a video game anymore.

This weekend, 11 miles of the I-405 freeway in Los Angeles will be closed for 53 hours for the demolition of the 51-year-old Mulholland Bridge. The freeway connects L.A.’s Westside and the San Fernando Valley; on an average weekend, it carries 500,000 cars.

Even the New York Times is calling it Carmageddon. (Predictably, the Times misspelled “Westside.” It’s one word in L.A.)

L.A.’s mayor didn’t sugarcoat his warning at a June 6 press conference:

“There’s gridlock on the 405 virtually any time of the day, but particularly during the rush hour, and if you think it's bad now, let me just make something absolutely clear: On July 16 and 17, it will be an absolute nightmare,” said Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Other city leaders are doing their best to sound upbeat. On Metro.net, L.A.’s public-transit hub, two Metro officials offered soothing reassurances that “the project is on schedule” and if Angelenos will just stay home over the weekend, “everything will go smoothly.”

Readers may be less than heartened to learn that one of those officials, Metro’s executive director of highway projects, is named Doug Failing. I did not make this up. 

This is the second coming for carmageddon: The word was reportedly coined (from car and Armageddon) by a KNX Newsradio anchor, Denise Fondo, for the August 2010 visit to L.A. by President Obama. As you may have heard, Los Angeles survived that event.

This year’s Carmageddon has its own Facebook page and an app, powered by Israeli startup Waze, that relies on crowdsourced traffic information. There’s a website and Twitter feed that encourage bars and restaurants in the Carmageddon Zone to offer discounts “to weary travelers.” Oh, and the L.A. Times has a special Carmageddon Twitter feed, too. (“Two words: surface streets.”) 

Another local paper, the LA Weekly, has been counting down to Carmageddon with almost unseemly glee. On June 30, the Weekly published a Carmageddon Q&A headlined “Will It Suck? Yes It Will.” A sample exchange:

Q: What if I have a medical emergency?
A: Plan ahead.
Q: But --
A: Plan ahead.

And it wouldn’t be an impending disaster without a Hitler-meme video, would it? This one is particularly well executed (you should pardon the expression), and extra-hilarious if you know L.A. well enough to catch all the Southland references.

 

(Hat tip: MJF)

For extra credit, see Snowmageddon and Wordgeddon. And for “disaster news and end-of-the-world scenarios,” see Armageddon Online.

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Ever wonder why Southern Californians put “the” in front of freeway numbers and Northern Californians don’t? Language Hat provided a semi-official explanation back in 2008.

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I-405 graphic from CarMageddonLA. Yes, you can buy a T-shirt.

Nada Bus

Well, then, what is it?

 

Nada Bus, Inc., is based in Commerce (Los Angeles County). I found neither an explanation of the name nor a trademark filing, although I did find trademarks for Carba-Nada (reduced-carb pasta); Nada Nuff (a women’s clothing line based in Toronto); Nada-Chair (“The cure for terminal sitting”); and N.A.D.A., the National Association of Automobile Dealers, which owns the nada.com domain.

Nada Bus seems to do a lot of business ferrying passengers to Nevada casinos not featured in any of the Ocean’s movies, or even The Hangover. Judging from the web copy and the testimonials, it appears to be run and patronized by non-native English speakers. (“Nada Bus provide you the best service in the world.” “We will happy to answer for your question.”)

The company’s slogan, I’m sorry to say, is “Serving you with PASSION to make your trip memorable.” PASSION + long-distance bus trip = memorable in the worst possible way.

Still, “Nada Bus” has a certain existential allure, no?

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Photo taken during a recent stay in downtown Los Angeles.