Fritinancy

January Linkfest

I’ve always wanted to name a perfume. Maybe I should just invent my own, as Sarah Marshall of The Hairpin did with her Unreleased Celebrity Fragrances: Acedia by Louis CK, Sherlocked by Benedict Cumberbatch, and a bunch of others, each with a pungent description.

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Continuing with the made-up names theme, here’s a crayon collection with grown-up color names:

 

I’m digging “Void of Existential Anguish Black.”

Via Arnold Zwicky, who adds a story about the Eagle Shirtmakers color-naming contest of 1961, which yielded submissions like Roe Cocoa, Unforeseeable Fuchsia, and Noblesso Beige.

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Also from Arnold Zwicky: How the dobro got its name. Dobro is a registered trademark of the Gibson Guitar Corporation, which means we all should be capitalizing it; it’s also an eponym, a portmanteau, and a word meaning “goodness” in most Slavic languages.

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“We gave you way too big an advance to call this book Freakonomics,” said the publisher of the book that gave rise to an entire freakin’ industry. Briefly considered as substitutes: Economics Gone Wild, Bend It Like Veblen, and Dude, Where’s My Rational Expectation?

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Earlier this month, the American Dialect Society voted phablet – the coinage that describes a smartphone-tablet hybrid – the word Least Likely to Succeed. (Phablet shared the dubious distinction with YOLO.) In a Word Routes column, Ben Zimmer traces the origins of phablet and ponders why nobody loves the word. (For the record, I’d revive an old word, tabloid, to replace phablet. Here’s my 2009 post about tabloid’s fascinating history.)

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Let’s squeeze in one more Word of the Year 2012 story. This one’s by linguist Arika Okrent, who rounds up eight countries’ words of the year, from entroikado (Portugal) to watture (France). J’aime beaucoup watture!

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“Focus more on connotations and less on definitions” – Lexicon Branding’s advice for choosing a name.

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“The next time someone tells you that they can’t accept a name with risk, consider asking them if pouring money into a brand that no one notices and no one cares about is more or less risky than investing in one that just might have a shot.” – Tate Linden, founder of the branding agency Stokefire, in a Q&A with the Wordnik blog.

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Whoever named the top 10 cannabis strains of 2012 was having way too much fun. (Via a tweet from Whatever It Is, I’m Against It.)

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What can the online dating site OKCupid teach us about naming? It’s all about standing out from the crowd, says Beth Gerber of Catchword Branding.

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Ever remember hearing that HAL, the computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, was meant to represent big bad IBM? (Just move the letters H-A-L forward one space in the alphabet.) A new video sets out to prove that the theory isn’t so farfetched after all.

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Ben Schmidt, who’s written about anachronisms (or prochronisms) in Mad Men and Downton Abbey, listens for anachronisms in Lincoln, the Stephen Spielberg movie written by Tony Kushner. Examples: “barrage” (of artillery) didn’t enter the lexicon until 1900, and “peace talks” wasn’t coined until the Vietnam War. Bonus for Lincoln-lingo nerds willing to pay for the privilege: Ben Zimmer’s Boston Globe interview with Kushner. There’s a related (free) article at Word Routes.

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How did Lockheed Martin’s famous Skunk Works get its name and mascot? The Zinzin blog follows the scent and tracks down the story.

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What’s your favorite legal word? The ABA Journal’s readers testify. (Via a tweet from Beauty Marks.)

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Two from Ad Freak: The ad agency pronunciation guide…

 

.. and a taxonomy of ad-agency names.

 

(Click to embiggen.)

Word and Name of the Year 2012: Final Votes

Voting earlier today at their annual meeting in Boston, the members of the American Dialect Society selected #hashtag – “a word or phrase preceded by a hash symbol (#), used on Twitter to mark a topic or make a commentary” – as the 2012 word of the year.

The vote was close and required a runoff:

I followed the #woty12 hashtag to get the details of the vote.

And the selection had a certain meta quality.

Dennis Baron, who writes the Web of Language blog, was pleased to have predicted the winner.

Nominations for word of the year were taken from the floor. In addition to hashtag and marriage equality, nominees included YOLO (an acronym for “you only live once”), Gangnam style, fiscal cliff, and 47 percent. (Ben Zimmer commented on most of these words in his “year in words” column, published last month in the Visual Thesaurus.)

Conference-goers in Boston also voted on words in several categories:

Most useful: -(po)calypse, -(ma)geddon: “hyperbolic combining forms for various catastrophes.” (For real-world examples, see my 2011 post on Carmageddon and Ben Zimmer’s 2010 column on snowmageddon and snowpocalypse. Yes, it sometimes takes ADS a couple of years to catch on.)

Most creative: gate lice, “airport passengers who crowd around a gate waiting to board.” (This one was new to me and is now my second-favorite airport-related WOTY after 2008’s recombobulation area.)

Most unnecessary and most outrageous: legitimate rape, the kind of rape Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin claimed couldn’t result in pregnancy. (A rare double-category winner.)

Most euphemistic: self-deportation, “policy of encouraging illegal immigrants to return voluntarily to their home countries.” (So little love for MOOC! I haz a sad.)

Most likely to succeed: marriage equality, legal recognition of same-sex marriage.

Least likely to succeed: a tie between phablet (see my June 2012 post about the Microsoft Surface and similar devices) and YOLO.

Election word of the year: binders (full of women), “term used by Romney in the second presidential debate to describe the resumes of female job candidates that he consulted as governor of Massachusetts.”

My own list of WOTY nominees is here.

In a separate vote Thursday evening, members of the American Name Society picked their names of the year for 2012. The overall winner was Sandy. (Disaster-related names tend to be popular with the ANS: previous winners have included Fukushima and Eyafjallajökull.) Category winners included Downton Abbey (fictional name), Gangnam (place name), and Malala (personal name).

The ANS also picked fiscal cliff as trade name of the year, which I’m at a loss to explain. The ANS defines “trade names” as “names of real commercial products as well as names of nonprofit or for-profit companies or organizations, including businesses, universities, and political parties,” and fiscal cliff fits into none of those categories. It isn’t capitalized. It isn’t a trademark. It isn’t even a name. In hashtag-ese: #smh.

For the record, my own pick for trade name of the year was FiveThirtyEight. You can read about my other NOTY choices here.

More on notable names and words of 2012 here. And here’s a list of all previous American Dialect Society words of the year. The 1990 WOTY was bushlips, by the way. Everyone remembers that one, right?

Year-End Roundup: The Names, Logos, Words, and Maps of 2012

Lots of late-breaking X-of-the-year news:

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Laura Wattenberg, astute observer of baby-naming trends, selected Blue Ivy as the Baby Name Wizard name of the year. The story of the name, she writes, is “all about the essence of intellectual property rules: invention, identity, exclusivity and control.”

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In a commentary for NPR’s “Fresh Air,” linguist Geoffrey Nunberg defended “Big Data,” his choice for the 2012 word of the year: “It’s responsible for a lot of our anxieties about intrusions on our privacy, whether from the government's anti-terrorist data sweeps or the ads that track us as we wander around the Web. It has even turned statistics into a sexy major.” Nunberg also talked about the political buzzwords of 2012 – right to work, entitlement, evil, and more – in a Bill Moyers Q&A.

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The Australian National Dictionary Centre’s word of the year is green-on-blue: “(used in a military context) an attack made on one’s own side by a force regarded as neutral.” It beat out qubit, fourth age, brotox, and fossil farming – none of which, I’m fairly confident, are on any US WotY lists.

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Collins Dictionary (UK) didn’t pick a single word of the year: it picked 12, from broga (yoga for men) to fiscal cliff.

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From the Wordnik blog: the best TV words of 2012, from anaphor to unwindulax, and the best language stories of 2012, from Rick Santorum’s “blah people” to the New York Times’s “offensive adjective inappropriate for family newspaper” – which wasn’t an adjective at all.

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In the New York Times, Grant Barrett’s annual roundup of the year’s notable words and expressions includes some by-now-familiar contenders – Eastwooding, 47 percent, Gangnam style – as well as some surprises, including doga (yoga with a dog), nomophobia (a Fritinancy word of the week in February), and pet shaming.

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Lynne Murphy of Separated by a Common Language picked the best American-to-British import (“wonk”) and the best UK-to-US counterpart (“bollocks”). Influencing her choice of “bollocks” was Newcastle Brown Ale’s “No Bollocks” ad campaign – used in the US but not in the UK.

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The Brand New blog identified the year’s best visual identities (logos) and the worst.

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The year in maps, from The Atlantic Cities, includes, at #5, the delightful Metrophors map of geographic X-is-the-Y-of-Z metaphors (“THE Ukraine is THE Ohio State University of European countries”). (Hat tip: Lance Knobel.)

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Coming next week: the American Dialect Society’s word-of-the-year vote. If you’re in Boston on Friday, January 5, get yourself over to the Marriott Copley Place to support your favorite words. Everyone’s welcome, and it’s a total hoot. I attended the January 2009 vote in San Francisco and wrote about it here.

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And in case you missed my earlier posts, here are my words of the year, brand names of the year, (other) names of the year, and (possibly) the name of the year.

December Linkfest

A new language quarterly, aptly called Babel, brings linguistics to a general audience without dumbing down the subject. Published at the University of Huddersfield (UK), the magazine covers “issues relating to many different human languages” – and some non-human ones, including, in the first issue, Venusian. I’m already looking forward to the second issue, which will include an article about “the secret linguistic history of brand names.”

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At Word Routes, Ben Zimmer recaps the year in words and picks his word of the year. (Surprise – it isn’t fiscal cliff.) I published my own list earlier this week.

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Do not ask science-fiction author John Scalzi to write for free. No, really – don’t even think about it.

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In the 1920s, when TV was still in its infancy, retailers used fake television broadcasts to trick customers into entering stores. Smithsonian magazine’s Paleofuture blog explains how it was done. 

Faked TV demonstration from 1926, via Smithsonian.

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From caucus to urbane: the words that spiked each week this year in look-ups at Merriam-Webster online.

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Catalog love: Your L.L. Bean Boyfriend. He’ll “build you a table and then have sex with you on it.” (Via Girls of a Certain Age.)

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From Jen Doll at The Atlantic Wire, the best (worst) typos, mistakes, and correrctions [sic] of 2012.

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Holly Buchanan of Marketing to Women Online picks the  commercials that did the best job of marketing women in 2012. She has strict criteria:

In order to pass The Buchanan Test a commercial must do three things. It must feature women who:

1. Are outside of the home
2. Are in a role other than that of "mother"
3. Are NOT doing yoga

(For comparison, see Bechdel Test.)

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“So it looks like the New Orleans Hornets are going to change their name to become the Pelicans.” A defense of the new team name by Barry Petchesky at Deadspin. (Naughty language advisory.)

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From my favorite info-viz site, Muckety (“Mapping the paths of power and influence”): The Trump Fund for the Gutting of Red Herrings and other think tanks we’d like to see in 2013.

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I grew up in Los Angeles and always wondered why the Ralphs supermarket chain didn’t have an apostrophe in its name. Now, thanks to Los Angeles magazine, I know: the business was founded (in 1873, at Fifth and Hill streets) by George Ralphs.

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“Twitter is a machine for continual self-reinvention”: Matt Haughey on why he loves Twitter and hates Facebook.

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Something to play with while you’re waiting in line to see The Hobbit, which opens in theaters today: the hobbit name generator and the Elvish name generator. (Via @Wordnik.)

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Like it or not, the “fiscal cliff” metaphor is here to stay. Linguist George Lakoff explains why.

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“I sculpt baby names from love, from hatred, from the reality of this hellhole of a world that you’re forcing an innocent life to endure.” Bob Powers, artisanal baby namer, at McSweeney’s. Yes, he jests. Mostly. (Via Karen Wise.)

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Over at The Atlantic, sociology professor Philip Cohen asks: Why don’t parents name their daughters Mary anymore? (Also via Karen Wise.)

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From Copyranter: The best men’s underwear commercial ever.

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According to Helen Sword, author of a column for the New York Times and creator of something called the Writer’sDiet test, a “zombie noun” is any noun (proliferation, formation, indication) that “cannibalizes” a verb. Now linguistics grad student Josef Fruehwald, blogging at Val Systems, delivers an incisive counterpoint. “Ain’t nothing like exploiting the collective dysmorphia of a nation to push your quarter-baked usage decrees,” says he.

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Via the brilliant Maria Popova at Brain Pickings: Alice in Wonderland as a subway map.

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And to all a good night.

Words of the Year 2012: Fritinancy Edition

Politics and economics made 2012 a target-rich environment for us word-of-the-year trackers. Republican presidential-primary candidate Rick Santorum alone gave us blah, guillotine, snob, and non-faith. (Santorum’s surname has achieved its own scandalous notoriety.) From the Mitt Romney campaign we picked up tithing, retroactively, wazzock, Romneyshambles, and binders. Vice President Joe Biden made malarkey memorable, President Obama spoke sharply of bayonets, and the Republican convention spawned Eastwooding, from actor Clint Eastwood’s surreal dialogue with an empty chair.

Meanwhile, we struggled to remember the fiscal definition of sequestration – not to be confused with jury sequestration – and marveled at all the people looking up socialism and capitalism in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. We shopped for tribal prints and smoking slippers and earnestly practiced chewdaism. We worried about the Rampture and distracted ourselves by GIF-ing compulsively. “YOLO,” we said, shrugging.

But enough runners-up. My list of 14 WOTY nominees follows the jump. I limited my list to U.S. usages, and I adhered to the American Dialect Society’s criteria for selection, which stipulate that nominees be:

• demonstrably new or newly popular in 2012
• widely and/or prominently used in 2012
• indicative or reflective of the popular discourse

In addition, a nominated word can’t be “a peeve or complaint about overuse or misuse.”

In alphabetical order, then:

Brand Names of the Year: 2012

My new column for the Visual Thesaurus is an end-of-the-year review of the notable brand names of 2012. My top-ten list includes food brands, consumer-technology brands, a numerical brand, one of those ubiquitous -ly brands, and a back-from-the-nearly-dead toy brand. Access to this column is unrestricted, so go forth and read freely!*

Tomorrow on the blog: my words of the year for 2012. I’ll report my (non-brand) names of the year sometime next week.

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* But wouldn’t a Visual Thesaurus subscription make a swell holiday gift for your favorite linguaphile?

November Linkfest

The leaves are falling, the turkey’s defrosting: It must be time for the first Word of the Year 2012 announcement! Oxford Dictionaries, the traditional early bird, picked one WOTY for the US, GIF (the verb), and one for the UK, omnishambles. For background on omnishambles—which made a brief appearance in the US this year as well—see my post on “wazzock.” And for background on how Oxford chose GIF, see this hilariously be-GIFed blog post. 

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Turducken: chicken stuffed inside duck stuffed inside turkey. Cherpumple: cherry, pumpkin, and apple pies stuffed inside cake. Now online dictionary Wordnik invites readers to invent a new Thanksgiving-related Franken-word (portmanteau). “It could be a (horrific) new food, a feeling, or a phenomenon. The only rules are that they combine two or more words, and that they have to do with turkey-day.” Tweet your nominations with the hashtag #turkeyword.

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This one goes out to all you graphic designers and creative directors: horrible client feedback turned into hilarious works of art. (Full gallery at SharpSuits.net.)

“I’ll know what I want when I see it.” – Clients everywhere

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Astronomy and space startup Uwingu – that’s oo-WING-oo, the Swahili word for “sky” – is building “a baby book of names” for newly discovered planets. For 99 cents per nomination, you can submit a name to the database; for another 99 cents, you can vote for your favorite name on the list. The money goes to a good cause, of course. According to the Bad Astronomy blog, “The folks in charge are professional astronomers and space scientists at the tops of their fields, people like Alan Stern and Pamela Gay.”

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Cast your vote for the name of the year at Baby Name Wizard. The NOTY “isn't necessarily the most popular baby name,” writes BNW’s Laura Wattenberg. “It’s a name that changed during the course of the year, and points to more changes around us. It’s a one-name time capsule that reminds us of how names are woven into our lives, connecting to and reflecting everything that goes on in our culture.” The 2011 winner was Siri.

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Do we need a new name for the fiscal cliff? The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein proposes “austerity crisis”; his readers have their own suggestions, including Policy Meltdown, Lemmings Moment, Fiscal Spliff, and Mole Hill. (What’s the fiscal cliff, you ask? Here you go.)

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Corporate tagline or university motto? Take the quiz (it’s tougher than you’d think).

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Minor hockey (not to be confused with minor-league hockey) is divided into narrow age ranges, and the names for those ranges vary wildly and whimsically around the world. In Canada the 9-10 age group is called “Atom”; in France the 10-11 group is called Poussins (“young chickens”). More minor hockey lore at (where else?) Wikipedia. Hat tip: Bruce Fulton.

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Remember Cuil, the search engine that was supposed to be a Google-killer? It died in 2011, possibly of pronunciation failure. “You might think that making a pronounceable name is a no brainer,” writes Andrew Hennigan on his blog about communications, “but there are actually several separate issues you need to think about, and Cuil got all three wrong.” (Hat tip: FussFactory.)

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Green-suiter, Yuk, 2% Club and other West Point slang: a lexicon.

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What does the “signature” mean in “signature burrito”? Lexicographer Orin Hargraves, writing for the Macmillan Dictionary blog, says “signature” has been “so diluted by modern usage as to become meaningless.”

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Speaking of meaningless, William Germano has had it with passion. He writes in Lingua Franca: “In its new, overexposed phase, passion has come to mean something else. I’d hazard the definition ‘an outsized, all-consuming enthusiasm that leads to achievement.’ That seems to be where passion is drifting in our outcome-driven society: It’s become a word signifying the precondition of success.” I’ve written about passion overload a number of times myself, starting with a 2006 post, “Our Passion Is Your Problem.”

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The Romney campaign named its (badly botched) get-out-the-vote program Project ORCA, but why? Language Log’s Mark Liberman goes fishing: “It would be a little weird, in my opinion, to name a GOTV program after a boat used to hunt a fictional monster shark. Clearly the shark would be Obama, or perhaps Obama’s appeal — but in that metaphor, where are the Romney voters?”

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After Hurricane Sandy struck, New York City gained a new neighborhood: SoPo, for “South of Power.” As The Atlantic Wire’s Jen Doll tells it, “New York City has a history with this sort of name.” (Hat tip: @nextmoon.)

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From the public-radio show A Way With Words, hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette, here’s an excellent list of reference resources for writers and word lovers. A good place to start your holiday shopping!

Junk and Pride

A couple of language notes from San Francisco Pride, the annual celebration that culminated yesterday with the Pride Parade from Market and Beale streets to Civic Center.

I spotted “Touch Our Junk!” on the marquee of the Nob Hill Theatre (not on the parade route). The façade was festooned with rainbow bunting.

 

Nob Hill Theatre, 729 Bush Street, San Francisco. (Shot through my windshield.)

“Junk” as a slang synonym for “male genitals” became a “cri de crotch” (as the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus put it) in late 2010, after a software engineer named John Tyner refused the full-body security scan at San Diego International Airport. “If you touch my junk, I’m gonna have you arrested,” Tyner told the screener. The trope quickly evolved into “Don’t touch my junk!” The Nob Hill Theatre marquee playfully inverted (ahem) the quote, turning a threat into an invitation.

As Ben Zimmer wrote in a December 2010 “On Language” column in theNew York Times, “junk” had been introduced into the lexicon of genital euphemisms in 1983, in a gay-themed short story by Ethan Mordden called “The Hustler”:

Since it’s doubtful that the young popularizers of junk were familiar with Mordden’s fictional forerunners, something about the sound and sense of the word must have made it ripe for reinvention. Tom Dalzell, whose latest book is “Damn the Man!: Slang of the Oppressed in America,” sees junk catching on euphemistically: “To diminish the shock, we call the genitals childish names or use vague and sometimes coy euphemisms —down there, unit or thing.” The Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky concurs, adding stuff as another euphemistic model forjunk. Unlike these other terms, however, junk is a harsh monosyllable evocative of four-letter taboos.

The other language innovation I observed was Bay Area OccuPride, whose name is a nifty blend of occupy (the American Dialect Society’s 2011 Word of the Year) and pride, the one-word tag for “celebration of gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender identity and achievements.”

 

OccuPride’s adaptation of the gay rainbow flag.

OccuPride was formed to protest the commercialization and corporatization of the Pride observances.

As for “gay pride,” the phrase first appeared in print in the Washington Post’s June 29, 1970, coverage of a march that “was the climax of what its organizers called ‘Gay Pride Week’.” (Note the use of quotation marks around Gay Pride Week.) “Pride” was chosen because it’s the antithesis of “shame”; earlier slogans had included “gay is good” and “gay liberation.” The success of “pride” is often credited to Brenda Howard, an activist in New York City who helped organize the first-anniversary commemoration, in 1970, of the Stonewall riots.

“Pride” is also, of course, the collective noun for a group of lions. This association has been made explicit in some usages of “gay pride.”

Gay pride of lions bracelet. Flickr photo by itsalovelycake.

 

According to the OED, “pride” is also an obsolete term for sexual desire (“esp. in a female animal; heat”). It’s also one of the seven deadly sins. Columnist and author Dan Savage wrote in a June 1999 issue of The Stranger:

Webster’s defines pride as “inordinate self-esteem,” or “a reasonable and justifiable self-respect." Whether inordinate or justifiable, pride was an effective antidote: as more gays and lesbians committed the sin of pride, fewer were victimized by shame.

 

Word and Name of the Year 2011: Final Report

At its annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, last Friday, the American Dialect Society selected occupy (“verb, noun, and combining form referring to the Occupy protest movement”) as its word of the year for 2011.

Post-vote tweet.  

Ben Zimmer, chair of the ADS’s New Words Committee and executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, said about “occupy”: “It’s a very old word, but over the course of just a few months it took on another life and moved in new and unexpected directions, thanks to a national and global movement. The movement itself was powered by the word.”

“Occupy” prevailed over runners-up FOMO (fear of missing out), the 99%, humblebrag, and job creator. “Humblebrag”—an expression of false humility—won in the “Most Useful” category. “Job creator”—a member of the top 1 percent of money-makers—was selected euphemism of the year. I’m especially pleased to report that “assholocracy” was the overwhelming choice for most outrageous word of the year.

For more details about the vote, read the press release.

In a companion vote, the American Name Society selected Arab Spring as its name of the year for 2011. The society’s trade name of the year was Siri; place name of the year was Fukushima; Qaddafi (and alternate spellings) was personal name of the year; and Lisbeth Salander—the heroine of the Stieg Larsson trilogy and the films based on it—was chosen as fictional name of the year. Here's the press release (PDF). 

Read linguist Geoffrey Pullum’s eyewitness report on the ADS vote. On occupy: “Rather disappointing, I thought: the Mitt Romney of the field of candidates. Just an ordinary and rather moderate verb, not a neologism. But its profile rose so much during the tent-city protests of 2011 that it seemed a true representative of the Zeitgeist. It was unstoppable.”

UPDATE: Ben Zimmer’s account of last Friday’s ADS vote is now on the Visual Thesaurus. Includes video!

Read my posts about past names and words of the year: 2010, 2009, 2008.

This, That

A few miscellaneous items for the first full day of (Northern Hemisphere) winter. Tomorrow: Festivus! I’ll present my annual Airing of Grievances.

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The Japanese word of the year, announced by the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation on December 12, is kizuna. The word, which means “bonds between people,” was frequently used to express the solidarity and support shown by Japanese people in response to the disastrous earthquake and tsunami in March.

 

(Hat tip: Rochelle Kopp of Japan Intercultural Consulting.)

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Every year since 2006, expatriate American linguist Lynne Murphy, who blogs at Separated by a Common Language, has selected two words of the year: the most useful import from American English into British English and the most useful import from British into American. This year, the most useful UK-to-US word is kettling, which happens to be a word I nominated! (You may recall that it was a Fritinancy word of the week in October.) The most useful US-to-UK word is FTW, an abbreviation of “for the win.” And yes, initialisms are words. Be sure to read Lynne’s thoughtful and well-informed defen{s/c}es  of her selections.

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Speaking of FTW, I’m flattered and delighted that my blog has been nominated for a Macmillan Dictionary “Love English” award in the blog category. I’m in excellent (read: daunting) competition: Separated by a Common Language, Language Hat, Johnson, Sentence First, Throw Grammar from the Train, Language Log—and several language blogs I’d been unaware of, which is always the most interesting thing, in my opinion, about contests like this one. If you’d like to cast a vote for Fritinancy, I’d be most grateful. There’s also a Best Website category; check out all the links, then vote for Visual Thesaurus.

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A little comic relief: You may recognize Christopher McDonald, David Koechner, Maria Bamford (the crazy Target Christmas lady), and Andre Royo (Bubbles from The Wire) in Funny or Die’s spot-on spoof of campaign commercials. Yes, let’s restore the dignity and the tradition of our Founding Santas!

Via AdFreak.