Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Chapulling

Chapulling: A term used by Turkey’s anti-government activists to describe their peaceful demonstrations. A transliteration of Turkish çapulcu (“looters,” “marauders,” “bums”) combined with an English verb ending; pronounced with the second syllable stressed. According to Google Fight, the English transliteration is much more common on the Internet than the Turkish original.

Reporting from Istanbul on June 10, the Guardian’s Luke Harding wrote:

When demonstrators first took to the streets to protest against the Turkish prime minister he branded them çapulcu…

But Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s attempt to demean his opponents has backfired. Protesters in Istanbul and other cities have embraced the word as their own, labelling themselves proud çapulcu and even coining an English verb, capuling.

Pronounced chapulling, with the emphasis on the second syllable, it has become synonymous with the alternative, youth-driven anti-Erdoğan movement. Students sleeping under the plane trees in Gezi Park, Istanbul, have dubbed their makeshift camp Capulistan, with many mounting cardboard signs next to their dwellings that read “Capul residence”. Meanwhile, the city’s must-have fashion accessory is a white T-shirt with the slogan: “Every day I'm capuling”.

The slogan apparently plays on the line “Every day I’m shuffling” from the LMFAO song “Party Rock Anthem” (pointed out by Ben Zimmer in a comment on Language Log; see embedded video). “Party Rock Anthem” was in turn influenced by the 2006 Rick Ross song “Everyday I’m Hustling” (noted by Connor Adams Sheets in his International Business Times story about chapulling).

The reclaiming (or reappropriation) of a disparaging term, in this case çapulcu, has a long history: see, for example, queer and slut.  

 At least one additional neologism has gained currency as a result of the Turkish protests, which began in late May: Resistanbul. The blend of “resist” and “Istanbul” has gained acceptance outside Turkey; the photo below (via the Guardian) was taken in Milan.

 

“Resistanbul” is older than the current demonstrations, however: a Resistanbul blog (“Direnistanbul” in Turkish) was launched in 2009 to protest the meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the Turkish capital.

See also my 2012 post on hooliganism.

Word of the Week: Prankvertising

Prankvertising:  An extreme form of guerrilla marketing that involves unsuspecting people “who have no idea that they’re playing a part in the creation of a video or TV spot that will (hopefully) go viral.” – The Pita Group, a branding agency in Connecticut.

AdWeek began using prankvertising in an April 1, 2013, post by David Gianatasio that was not an April Fool’s gag. “Are outrageous marketing stunts worth the risk?” the headline asked. Here’s the lead paragraph:

You’re waiting for the elevator in an office building, minding your own business, perhaps lost in thought. The door slides open and, wham! You’re confronted by a scene of intense violence as two men grapple on the floor of the cramped car, fists flying. One combatant slips a cord around the other’s neck and pulls it tight, choking the life out of his adversary.

The agency: Thinkmodo. The product: Dead Man Down, a movie.

Other recent examples of prankvertising have included wee-hours distress calls to unsuspecting people on behalf of Carlsberg beer; and a shocking public-restroom event in the service of a British drunk-driving campaign. An Indian agency, Creativeland Asia, took a somewhat more playful (but still alarming) approach in a 2010 spot involving giant mangos.

Gianatasio writes in his April 1 post:

Such marketing stunts are nothing new, but lately, brands seem to be taking the tactic to a new, extreme level, engineering increasingly sophisticated, hair-raising scenarios to break through the clutter, confusion and complexity of modern media to titillate consumers and generate free media coverage. These stunts involve, to varying degrees, average people who often have no idea at the outset that they're taking part in the making of a commercial or a video designed to go viral. Such efforts blur the lines between artifice and reality, fusing fact and fantasy in ways that can be invasive, sadistic and potentially risky.

There’s a precedent for the trend, he adds:

Contemporary prankvertising echoes Allen Funt’s Candid Camera, notes Michael Solomon, industry consultant and professor of marketing at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. The show pre-dated the reality TV craze by almost 50 years, incorporating unsuspecting subjects into oddball scenarios in public places.

The difference today, Solomon says, is that marketers are staging “pranks on steroids,” upping the ante in almost every imaginable way and probing darker territory—with the sponsor’s name attached. Scenarios that trade on fear, death and danger test the limits of personal privacy and social acceptability.

The first person to use prankvertising in print (or pixels) may have been Zoli Erdos, a Bay Area startup advisor, editor, and blogger. In an August 3, 2006, blog post headlined “Prankvertising,” Erdos wrote that pranks “seem to become [sic] the new trend in advertising.” He cited two relatively mild spoofs, one for Agency.com (later renamed Designory) and one for Alltel.

Word of the Week: Creepers

Creepers: Shoes with thick soft soles, usually made of crepe rubber.

“Smiley Face Unicorn Glitter Mega Platform Wedge Hand Made Collaged Art Creepers” on Etsy. The platform is 4 inches high at the heel.

 

The Smithsonian blog Threaded traces the history of “creepers” to a 1953 name-of-the-dance hit song, “The Creep,” recorded by British big-band leader Ken Mackintosh. “A slow shuffle movement, it was embraced by a subculture called the Teddy Boys, who became known as creepers”:

In addition to distinguishing themselves by their musical preferences, Teddy Boys made themselves known through their dandy-like sartorial choices that referenced the early 20th century. A popular look included drainpipe pants with exposed socks, tailored drapey jackets, button-down shirts, brogues, Oxfords or crepe-soled shoes. Those ridged, thick-crepe-soled shoes with suede or leather uppers became known as “creepers”  because of their association with the Creep dance (and maybe because if you misspelled crepe, you got creep?).

Maybe, but crepe (or crêpe) and creep are unrelated etymologically. Crepe comes via French from a Latin root meaning “curled.” (Yes, it’s the same word whether you’re talking about a thin pancake, crinkly paper, or rubber with a corrugated surface. Because of the crumpled look of its petals, crape myrtle is related, too.) Creep comes from Old English créopan, which meant pretty much what it does today: “To move with the body prone and close to the ground, as a short-legged reptile, an insect, a quadruped moving stealthily, a human being on hands and feet, or in a crouching posture.” (OED)

Creepers became known as brothel creepers when British soldiers returned home from fighting World War II. From Smithsonian.com: “Still wearing their crepe-soled, military-issued boots, they hit the London nightclubs.”

Creepers’ popularity declined in the 1960s but re-emerged during the punk scene of the 1970s. They’re back again in exaggerated styles similar to the flatforms of several seasons ago.

Retailer Urban Outfitters currently sells 37 styles of creepers on its website – all for women, interestingly. One brand, T.U.K., based in Poway, California, accounts for about 40 percent of them.

T.U.K. Oil Slick Mondo Creeper. The company was founded by a Brit who originally named it Tredair United Kingdom.

 

Footwear footnote: Sneakers or sneaks to mean “soft-soled footwear” is very similar in connotation to creepers but much older. According to the OED, sneaks was used in this sense at least as early as 1862 (“The night~officer is generally accustomed to wear a species of India~rubber shoes or goloshes on her feet. These are termed ‘sneaks’ by the women [of Brixton Prison]”. Sneakers is classified as “orig. and chiefly U.S.”; the earliest citation is from an 1895 edition of Funk’s Standard Dictionary of the English Language. In 1900 the American humorist George Ade wrote in More Fables: “His Job on this Earth was to put on a pair of Pneumatic Sneakers every Morning and go out and investigate Other People's Affairs.”

Word of the Week: Tick-Tock

Tick-tock: Journalism jargon for a story that recounts events in chronological order, as if accompanied by the soundtrack of a ticking clock.

From my Twitter feed:

An Oklahoma way of life: A tick-tock by @jswatz and me on racing time with a tornado. nyti.ms/11etBTl

— Dan Barry (@DanBarryNYT) May 24, 2013

Word Spy’s Paul McFedries credits the late William Safire with the first mention in print of this usage of “tick-tock.” Safire included it in his book The New Language of Politics: an Anecdotal Dictionary of Catchwords, Slogans, and Political Usage. McFedries gives the book’s publication date as 1972, but Wikipedia and Safire’s New York Times obituary—he died in 2009—give it as 1968.

Here’s Safire’s definition of “tick-tock”:

TICK-TOCK journalists argot for story listing chronology leading up to a major announcement or event. ... A tick-tock (the metaphor, obviously, of a clock moving toward a fateful hour) is often written with boldface dates indicating significant meetings or preliminary events, and is more reportorial than a “think piece” or "thumbsucker”…

See the Word Spy entry for a list of other journalism jargon, including muffin choker, charticle (a Fritinancy word of the week in 2009), and Danny Boy.

Word of the Week: Shmeat

Shmeat: Meat grown in a laboratory from animal cells; the objectives include reducing animal cruelty and increasing the global supply of affordable protein. “Shmeat” is a portmanteau of “sheet” and “meat.”

An undated article on a website called Shmeat.com (apparently operated by SavingAdvice.com) explains the process:

Cells are harvested from a live animal, such as a chicken, pig or cow. The cells are then placed in a special solution of nutrients which mimics the qualities of blood. This nutrient solution will help the cells to multiply where they can then be secured to a spongy sheet which has been soaked with nutrient solution. The sheet is then stretched to increase cell size and protein content. It’s from the combination of this “sheet meat” that shmeat derives its name.

Shmeat was the subject of “Building a $325,000 Burger,”a May 14, 2013, story in the New York Times. Reporting from the Netherlands, where researcher Mark Post has created a proof-of-concept shmeat patty, science writer Henry Fountain noted that the burger “was created at phenomenal cost — 250,000 euros, or about $325,000, provided by a donor who so far has remained anonymous.” Fountain went on:

“This is still an early-stage technology,” said Neil Stephens, a social scientist at Cardiff University in Wales who has long studied the development of what is also sometimes referred to as “shmeat.” “There’s still a huge number of things they need to learn.”

The origins of “shmeat” are uncertain. The earliest citation I could find is in a December 5, 2008, column by Lou Bendrick (“Meet Shmeat”) in the online environmental magazine Grist:

Test-tube meat is also known as in vitro meat, cultured meat, victimless meat, vat-grown meat, hydroponic meat, and, finally, shmeat. (Note to self: Be sure to apply for inevitable X Prize to rename this stuff.)

For now, let’s call it shmeat.

Shmeat is grown from a cell culture (hence the in vitro or cultured prefixes), not from a live animal. These harvested cells are taken from an animal, such as a pig, and placed in a “nutrient-rich medium” that mimics blood. Once the cells multiply they are attached to a spongy scaffold or sheet (sheet + meat = shmeat) that has been soaked with nutrients and stretched to increase cell size and protein content.

“Also known as” suggests that “shmeat” had already entered the vocabulary, but I couldn’t find an earlier citation.

As Bendrick jokingly points out, and as the title of his column underscores, “shmeat” is not a felicitous name for a serious product. (Shortly after the Grist column appeared, a commenter on the Offalgood website said “shmeat” was “a horrible name, it sounds like what you get when you cross shit and meat.”)

Words beginning with shm- indicate mockery or derision in Yiddish (see shmo, shmendrick, shmegegge, shmuck, etc.), and the pattern has been adopted in dismissive English reduplications like fancy-shmancy. (See my recent post, “Name, Shmame,” and related links.)

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Obligatory Urban Dictionary addendum: “Shmeat: Small penis or dick, also reffering [sic] to any person or anything. It can be used for anything anyone and anything can be a shmeat.” Posted November 27, 2006, a full two years before the Grist column.

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.

Word of the Week: Cheekini

Cheekini: A style of women’s underwear with moderate coverage in front and on the sides and a raised cut in the rear that covers some but not all of the buttock cheeks.

Victoria’s Secret Bridal Cheekini Panty.

The style sometimes appears, with minor variations, under different names: boykini panties, boyleg briefs, hipster panties, booty shorts. All are marketed as comfortable, panty-line-less alternatives to thong underwear (disparaged by detractors as “butt floss”).

I first discovered cheekini on the Victoria’s Secret website, but the term is neither original nor exclusive to that retailer. JC Penney sells cheekini panties under its Flirtitude label; it also sells visually similar boykini panties and hipster panties. I also found cheekini panties by Steve Madden, Betsey Johnson, and Felina.

The earliest citation I found for cheekini is a July 2006 blog post, “Cheekini Is the New Thong!”,  that credited DKNY with coining the term. However, a search for DKNY cheekini underwear came up empty-handed, or -cheeked, and all the images on that 2006 post have vanished.

I found the most extensive definition for cheekini in an unexpected place: a blog called He Wears Panties (“a friendly place to discuss lingerie and women’s clothing with men who wear it”):

Cheekini panties are clearly a play on the ‘bikini’. The general idea of the cheekini is that the rear of the panty is cut quite high across the buttock, leaving a fair amount of cheek showing whilst also reducing panty lines in the process. These are a viable alternative to thong lovers who are growing tired of feeling as if they have a never ending wedgie.

Cheekini is yet another variation on the linguistically productive bikini, which was adopted in 1946 as the name of a new French swimsuit as “explosive” as the nuclear-bomb tests that had recently taken place on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

Read my previous posts about -kini and -ini:

• “Put on a Suit and You’ll Look Cute” (bikini history; plus skirtini, tankini, monokini, microkini, burqini).
• “New -kini on the Block” (trikini)
• “Logic-ini” (-ini in the comics)
• “-Kini Season” (nun-kini, Babi-kini, spring-kini)
• “Bikini and Beyond” (the whole -kini catalog, for the Visual Thesaurus)

Word of the Week: Slow TV

Slow TV: Television dramas whose gradual, deliberate pacing and literary structure – “unrushed, atmospheric narratives,” as Salon’s Matt Zoller Seitz described them – demand patience and engagement on the part of the viewer. Current or recent examples include the Danish series “The Killing”; the BBC’s “The Hour”; and the American shows “Mad Men,” “Game of Thrones,” and “The Wire.”

Critic-turned-opinion-writer Frank Bruni, of the New York Times, observed in early April:

Slow TV pushes back at the instant gratification and empty calories of too many elimination contests, too many reality shows, too many efficient, literal-minded forensic dramas that perhaps keep certain plot threads dangling but tie up the episode’s main mystery by the hour’s end.

The descriptor “Slow TV” began appearing in the U.S. press around 2010. In a June 2010 review of “Memphis Beat,” Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley placed Slow TV in context:

Slow Food, a movement that began in Italy in the 1980s as a protest against agribusiness and fast food, promotes organic farming and regional cooking. That cult of less-is-more parochialism spread to other fields, including tourism (Slow Travel) and investment (Slow Money).

Now there is Slow Television.

In November 2010, the Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Goodman included “Rubicon” and “In Treatment” in the category:

These shows are the ultimate examples of what can best be described as Slow TV. It’s not quite a fad or a revolution — and given the dismal ratings, no one involved should feel comfortable about their futures — but you can’t give HBO and AMC enough credit for making shows like this in the first place.

Earlier citations for “slow television” come from Scandinavia, where the term referred to marathon, non-narrative coverage of an ordinary event. In 2009, for example, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) aired the complete seven-hour train trip from Bergen to Oslo – and then topped that feat with live coverage of a 134-hour voyage by ship from Bergen to Kirkenes. Both programs were popular successes. In February 2013 NRK aired a 12-hour broadcast about firewood, described as “slow but noble television.”

But the earliest citations I found are from Australia. David Dale, writing in February 2005 for the Sydney Morning Herald, presaged the current meaning of “slow TV” in a column about the slow-paced “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” and “Desperate Housewives”:

It was reminiscent of the marketing campaign for the new Orient Express train in the 1980s: “In a world where everything is fast and cheap, we are very slow and very expensive.” Then in the ’90s came the slow food movement, which argues that human beings are healthier and happier if they take time to appreciate what they are eating. Perhaps we are about to see a “slow television” movement.

(SlowTV is also the name of an Australian Internet channel that delivers “interviews, debates, conversations and public lectures about Australia’s key political, social and cultural issues.”)

In a November 2011 article for the BBC News Magazine, reporter Jon Kelly looked into the rise of slow TV. The growing popularity of the boxed set, which allows viewers to watch long-running programs on their own schedule, accounts for part of it. In addition:

[T]he pace of slow TV invites viewers to actively engage with the programme, rather than their normal treatment as passive, argues Dr Amy Holdsworth, lecturer in film and television studies at the University of Glasgow and an expert in small-screen history.

“Part of the appeal is working things out for yourself,” Dr Holdsworth adds. “They allow the space for viewers to invest in them and make connections for themselves.

“These days there is definitely more of an appreciation of what you can do with TV as a form - you can have so much more character depth in 80 hours than you can in a two-hour film.”

Word of the Week: Zajonc Effect

Zajonc effect: The tendency of people, after repeated exposure to an unfamiliar thing, to reverse their initial feelings of dislike or distaste and like the thing more over time. Also called the Mere Exposure effect or the Mere Zajonc effect.

The Zajonc effect is named for Robert Boleslaw Zajonc (1923-2008), a Polish-born American social psychologist who taught at the University of Michigan and Stanford University. (His last name rhymes with “science.”) His obituary in the New York Times singled out his work with “mere exposure”:

In a seminal experiment, published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1968, he showed subjects a series of random shapes in rapid succession. The shapes appeared and disappeared so quickly that it was impossible to discern that some of them were actually repeated. Nevertheless, when subjects were later asked which shapes they found most pleasing, they reliably chose the ones to which they had been exposed the most often, though they had no conscious awareness of the fact.

Familiarity, in other words, breeds a kind of affection, Professor Zajonc found. Even before he defined and named it, the effect was dear to the hearts of advertisers and other shapers of culture.

The Zajonc effect has implications for branding and naming. Bruce Tait of the Minneapolis brand consultancy Tait Subler wrote about the connection in a 2012 blog post:

Let’s say you have five potential brand positioning strategies. In an effort to make the best decision, you quantitatively test the alternative strategies. People being people, they respond most negatively to the most unfamiliar — and differentiating — concept. They respond best to the strategy they’ve seen before. The one your competitor is using already. That’s the strategy you run with because it “won” in research… and another undifferentiated brand strategy is born.

Look around at famous marketing failures and they are often the ideas that tested the best. Some of the greatest successes tested terribly because they were different. It is a frustrating  fact of marketing that the key ingredient to long-term brand success is differentiation but people are wired to respond negatively to a truly differentiating idea upon initial exposure.

(Hat tip: Anthony Shore.)

See also  “Forget About Love,” my 2010 post comparing a successful corporate name to an arranged marriage.

Other eponymous effects discussed here in previous posts: Dunning-Kruger, Streisand, Bradley, Coolidge, Martha Mitchell, Droste, Forer, Fujiwhara, McGurk, Meisner.

Word of the Week: Swatting

Swatting: Calling 9-1-1 and faking an emergency that draws a response from law enforcement. The gerund, which is relatively new, is derived from the acronym SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics), which was first used by big-city police departments in the mid-1960s.

Last week six Los Angeles-area celebrities were the targets of swatting, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. On April 8, L.A. police responded to a swatting call at the home of comedian Russell Brand, who was away from home at the time. Two days later, the Beverly Hills Police Department responded to a similar call at Ryan Seacrest’s home. Justin Timberlake, Rihanna, Selena Gomez, and Sean Combs have also been targeted. According to the New York Times:

What once was merely a police annoyance in Southern California — thrill-seeking pranksters filing a false report of a breaking horrific crime at celebrity’s home, designed to provoke the dispatch of SWAT teams — has turned in recent weeks into a full-blown “swatting” epidemic, drawing expressions of concerns from police officials and victims alike, and the promise of a crackdown by lawmakers in Sacramento and at Los Angeles City Hall.

The earliest references I found for “swatting” are from 2007 and do not involve famous names. In March of that year, SWAT teams in Orange County, California, showed up with assault rifles, dogs, and a helicopter at what a caller had described as the scene of a murderous rampage. A 19-year-old Washington State man was arrested seven months later on felony charges of endangering the homeowners’ lives. According to police, the man had hacked into the county’s 9-1-1 system from his home hundreds of miles away and placed a call that appeared to come from the scene of the crime.

Similar crimes were reported in Texas around the same time.

In February 2008 the FBI posted a warning on its website:

Needless to say, these calls are dangerous to first responders and to the victims. The callers often tell tales of hostages about to be executed or bombs about to go off. The community is placed in danger as responders rush to the scene, taking them away from real emergencies. And the officers are placed in danger as unsuspecting residents may try to defend themselves.

In Los Angeles last Thursday, the L.A.P.D. announced “that it would take the unusual step of no longer issuing press releases or immediately confirming instances of celebrity ‘swatting,’ saying intense media coverage seems to be fueling more incidents.”