Fritinancy

Drove My Chevy to the Levee

Back in the 1950s, singer Dinah Shore burbled at TV viewers to "see the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet." For the last month, Chevrolet has been playing the patriotic card once more, but with a deeply disturbing twist. General Motors' 60-second TV spot for the Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck, titled "Anthem," features John Mellencamp singing "Our Country" against a montage that shifts from uplifting (Statue of Liberty, factory workers) to unsettling (civil rights boycotts, Vietnam battle) to shocking (Hurricane Katrina, 9/11 memorial). And what's Richard Nixon doing in there, like the Spirit of Walpurgisnacht Past? (Watch the ad, and read Slate.com writer Seth Stevenson's critique, here.) The original spot, according to car blogger Jalopnik, included footage of a nuclear mushroom cloud. (Jalopnik called the ad an "Amerigasm.")

Polarizing? Oh, just a tad.

Robert Farago blogs in The Truth About Cars:

When asked WTF they were thinking, the edgy ad guys responsible for the spot were even, um, edgier. According to Bill Ludwig, Chief Creative Officer for the Campbell-Ewald ad agency, "If you want to make a statement that rings true with the majority of people, you are going to piss off some people.” This, we can presume, was a large part of Ludwig’s goal. In case you missed it, “There are a lot of cynical people out there who don't react well to this, and a lot of people who will never get behind the wheel of a pickup. So let them get into their Volvo sedans and complain about this spot that they see as exploitive. This is not for them."

Yeah--downshift this, you latte-drinking, same-sex-marrying, French-speaking, Volvo-driving wusses!

The campaign could be seen as a desperate attempt by GM to stanch the bleeding. In fact, yesterday's New York Times reported that improved sales of the Silverado were in part responsible for GM's smallest loss in two years ("just" $155 million). Not exactly the same as a profit, but still.

Times media critic David Carr, also writing yesterday, says the ad is "landing with a thud in the advertising community, and not just because it achieved the impossible: making viewers nostalgic for Chevy’s last anthem, Bob Seger’s 'Like a Rock.'”

“I feel a little violated when I watch it,” Advertising Age ad critic Bob Garfield told Carr. “I don’t mind when they have a tent sale on President’s Day, but those guys have been dead for 200 years. I’m not sure I’m ready for a Rosa Parks sale-a-bration.” Veteran ad man Jerry Della Femina said, "You see all these moving images and at the end of it, all you get is a lousy Chevy truck.” 

Concludes Carr: "When it comes to selling bars, trucks or even politicians, you can wave the flag or you can drape one over a coffin. You can’t do both."

There's a spoof of the ad on YouTube, but it's hard to top the original, which approaches self-parody.

Perish: The Thought

Tune in to this Slate.com podcast to hear the results of the latest euphemisms contest, which asked for alternative ways to say "s/he's dead." Such a festive way to get into the Halloween spirit!

Some highlights:

• "Taking a dirt nap."
• "Going where the old people go after Florida."
• "Discharged to the eighth floor" (said by medical staff in a seven-story hospital)
• "Eating the grass by the root" (a translation of a French expression)

And the winner: "Gone to the other side of the mirror," a lovely and--dare I say it?--haunting image on which to fade away.

Scare Words

Remember when Halloween was really, truly scary? When a low moan or a slow c-r-r-r-e-a-k could make your stomach do a backflip, when witches wore warts instead of skimpy slit skirts, when the treats were modest and the tricks ominous? Nowadays the holiday is all about wee superheroes and princesses and "unleashing your inner hoochie" (to borrow the Manolo's piquant phrase). Bucking the trend, some businesses are trying to put the horror back in Halloween, according to this New York Times article. With a five-year buffer between us and 9/11, says J. Walker Smith, president of market research firm Yankelovich Partners, advertisers feel it's safe at last to be "more aggressive...about everything they're doing associated with the holiday." Thus: goth windows at Bergdorf Goodman and "the sounds and scares of Halloween" all day Tuesday on an entire channel of Sirius Satellite Radio ("Channel Your Fear").

Nice try, but no exploding cigar. The reason: we've lost our fear of fear itself. Just as Halloween has become more ho-hum and less haunting over the last decade or so, so has our vocabulary of fright.

Take, for example, creepy. When it entered the lexicon in 1831, this adjective referred to "the sensation of the flesh creeping in horror." Today, as Language Log linguist Mark Liberman observes, creepy has crept into the tame zone. Liberman has noticed that teenagers are using expressions like "That's so neat and creepy!"--a development he calls "semantic bleaching." One of his correspondents reports that creepy now means "so coincidental and unlikely that one suspects there are some divine or supernatural forces at work." A subsequent Language Log post charts the parallel domestication of other scare words, among them:

• Terrific. From the Latin terrificus ("causing terror or fear"). In 1667 terrific meant "dreadful" or "frightful." By 1809 it was beginning to take on its current meaning, "really excellent." (Source.)
• Awesome. From "awe," an Old English word that signified "dread mixed with veneration"--the feeling a mere mortal experienced in the presence of the gods, or God. Today it's, like, omigod.
• Uncanny. From Scots "canny," meaning "knowing." Uncanny originally meant "unknowable" or "associated with the supernatural." Nowadays any better-than-average skill is called "uncanny," as in "an uncanny sense of timing."

Continuing in this (jugular) vein, I investigated:

• Weird. From Old English "wyrd," meaning "fate" or "destiny," weird once meant "supernatural in origin," as in the Weird Sisters (aka witches) in Macbeth. Now it's creepy's twin: strange, odd, or even funny-ha-ha.
• Wonderful. It originally meant, yes, "full of wonder," back when "wonder" meant "a cause of astonishment or admiration." Wonderful meant "miraculous," not "super, fantastic, I'll have my people call your people."
• Formidable. From Latin formido--"terror"--formidable meant "causing fear, dread, or apprehension. Current meaning: "pretty darned impressive." (In French, formidable has many more shades of meaning, depending on inflection and subtle shift of emphasis. I remember spending a couple of hours in the language lab repeating "Formidable...formiDABle!...FORmidable" to approximate minute nuances of meaning translating to "swell," "dreadful," "over-the-top," and so on.)
• Tremendous. From Latin tremendus (literally, "to be trembled at"), tremendous in English used to mean "awful, dreadful." By 1812 it had come to mean "Immense" or "extraordinarily great." (Meanwhile, "awfully" was being paired with "good.").

So how do we say "I'm afraid" when all we hear is "I'm afraid...I'm going to have to ask you to work late"? When "phobia" is something everyone has, and is on meds for? When even "terror" is just another political-campaign buzzword?

Spooky, isn't it?

Photo: Von Kale.

Word of the Week: Bumf

Bumf: Official forms and paperwork. A British import dating back at least to World War II, it's a contraction of "bum fodder"--toilet paper.

Hat tip to John McIntyre at the Baltimore Sun's You Don't Say.

What I Want for Chanukah

One of these Scrabble-tile benches from Stephen Reed Industrial Design, a London firm.

I'd have guessed the benches were created for some trendy ad agency. But no: they're in the London office of Bloomberg Financial Services.

Actually, I want everything on the Stephen Reed "Projects" page. Don't miss the Soft Spot Table.

Via BoingBoing.

Hour-Back Story

At 2:00 a.m. Sunday morning, Daylight Saving Time ends in those parts of North America that observe it, and Standard Time begins. (In the European Union, the changeover happens at 1:00 a.m. GMT.) I've always greeted this autumnal transition as the perfect holiday: I get to spend an extra hour in bed, and by reveille the sun has already risen. (Afternoon darkness doesn't bother me nearly as much as morning gloom.) It grieves me that among the current White House occupant's lesser offenses is his signing of a bill that will extend Daylight Saving Time by about four weeks beginning in 2007. How about extending the minimum wage by a couple of bucks instead?

But I digress. I'm writing about the fall-back ritual (that would be "autumn-back" in the UK, which makes no sense at all) because Eric Bakovic at Language Log talks at some length about the proper nomenclature: is it Daylight Saving or Daylight Savings? Most of us choose the latter, but according to WebExhibits the "official spelling" is the singular form. Bakovic argues, with the help of some scholarly-looking diagrams, that "savings" is more appropriate:

The issue, I think, is this: the word saving, like other -ing participles, is not commonly used as a noun, but the word savings is. This is especially true in the context of money, and there's a well-known metaphorical link between money and time (see this page for some discussion; search for "time is money"). So, at least for "many people", the most accessible relevant noun is savings, not saving. The reasoning that Saving here is a "verbal adjective" is just hooey.

By the way, if you've ever wondered what happens at hour-back time in restaurants and bars where liquor can't be served after 2:00 a.m., WebExhibits has the answer on this page.

On Mission Stweet, No One Can Hear You Squeem

Product name of the week:

Snapped by CB "in front of a cheesy 'health' store" on San Francisco's Mission Street.

Designers Who Write

Here's a follow-up to last week's post about visual and verbal thinkers. Design Observer, a blog about design and culture created by three graphic designers (including Pentagram's renowned Michael Bierut), consistently publishes some of the most articulate prose on the Web. I just finished reading "My Cup Holder Runneth Over," an astute and hilarious essay by Jessica Helfand, a Design Observer co-founder and a partner in Connecticut design studio Winterhouse. In it, she knits together two seemingly unrelated contemporary phenomena: nail salons and cup holders. A snippet:

As a Mom-on-the-go who managed to rear two children past toddlerhood without beverage dispensers surgically attached to our bodies, I can tell you that nobody ever had to be rushed to the hospital due to dehydration. Strollers were just strollers back then, way back in the dark ages — and that was the late 1990s. We’re all of us still alive and well, thank you — even occasionally drinking tap water out of a glass. Clearly, I am not the target audience for this sort of thing, yet cup holders persist, manufactured for everything from folding chairs to golf caddies. They’re slyly integrated into the molded plastic dashboards fronting the treadmills at my gym, neatly carved into the foam in my neighbor’s swimming pool float, and if that isn’t laziness-inducing enough, there are cup holders that even come to you: with a 9-volt battery and a pool, you can ferry out drinks to your friends with a remote controlled drink caddy. (Serves four.)

Bubbling Over

In Celebrity Endorsement Land, it was huge: hip-hop megastar Jay-Z just saying non to Cristal champagne.

That was back in June. Now, in his James Bond-esque new video, "Show Me What You Got," Jay-Z flaunts the break-up, turning down an offer of Cristal in favor of a gilded bottle of Armand de Brignac "Ace of Spades" bubbly.

Why should we care? Because Jay-Z's earlier endorsement of Cristal (in his 1998 hit "Hard Knock Life," he intoned, "Let's sip the Cris' and get pissy-pissy," which in certain circles qualifies as a four-star review) had given the brand a huge popularity boost in the U.S. But Jay-Z abruptly lost his taste for the stuff when Frederic Rouzaud, chief executive of Cristal's parent company, Roederer, was quoted in the The Economist's "Intelligent Life" supplement making what Jay-Z considered racist and demeaning remarks, to wit:

Asked if an association between Cristal and the bling lifestyle could actually hurt the brand, [Rouzaud] replies: “That’s a good question, but what can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it. I’m sure Dom Pérignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business.”

Oooof. Jay-Z parried by calling for the hip-hop community to boycott Cristal. He also banned the brand from his 40/40 clubs.

Fast-forward to last week and Jay-Z's PDA for Armand de Brignac, a brand previously not sold in the U.S. Here's what caught my eye: the "Ace of Spades" sub-brand. Not very long ago, "spade" was about as insulting an epithet as you could hurl at a person of African descent--nearly the equal of what's now coyly referred to as "the n-word." (Word Origins dates the first recorded use of "spade" to 1928; it was still common parlance during my Vietnam War-era high school days at a mostly black high school.)

And where did "spade" come from? "Black as the ace of spades."

I suspect that 36-year-old Jay-Z, who is also CEO of Def Jam and Roc-A-Fella Records, is fully aware that the "ace of spaces" association is far more racist than M. Rouzaud's imperious snub. Maybe he finds the phrase satirical (so bad it's good). Maybe he's moved on from the whole racist-demeaning thing. Maybe he just likes the Armand de Brignac bottle's golden bling. Or maybe he's cut himself a cozy deal with his new favored quaff, as this hip-hop blog alleges.

Bottoms up.

 

Hat tip to Strategic Name Development.

Word of the Week: Pizzled

Pizzled: A combination of "puzzled" and "pissed off." Coined by psychiatrist Edward Hallowell in his book CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD (whew!) to describe how you feel "when you're eating with somebody and their phone rings and they answer it." Evidently he hadn't researched the traditional meaning of "pizzle," which has been around since 1523.