Fritinancy

Neologistics

Dictionary Evangelist is one of the blogs written by the multitalented Erin McKean, editor-in-chief of U.S. dictionaries for Oxford University Press. (McKean is also the editor of Verbatim: The Language Quarterly and of the blog A Dress a Day, in which she indulges a non-lexicographical enthusiasm. And she's the source of McKean's Law: “Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error.”)

I discovered Dictionary Evangelist only recently, thanks to a link from Jason Kottke, who pointed me to this list of neologisms coined at last week's GEL 2007 conference (an event that had completely escaped my attention--why am I not receiving these memos??). McKean led 60 participants through a three-hour "word-lovers' boot camp" with admirable results, including:

Crappyjack: any kind of empty, snacky junk food (voted "favorite new word" by participants)

Heeb-hop: Jewish hip-hop.

Mispronoonce: a jocular way of saying "mispronounce," to be used in the first person after a particularly embarrassing mispronunciation: Oh, gosh, I mispronoonced that, didn't I?'

Somnophagy: sleep-eating.

Spensitize: To make aware of financial consequences.

Not bad for amateurs!

By the way, I love the adverb McKean coined to describe the way in which words are created through mashup: "Frankensteinianly."

If you'd like to try word-cobbling yourself, check out the Word Fugitives contest in the May issue of The Atlantic. This month's challenges:

1. A word for "that guy (or girl) who, once he starts dating someone new, abandons all his friends."

2. "A word for that happy feeling of kinship one feels for the driver of a car of the same make and model as one’s own."

Fill out a submission form here or send an e-mail to [email protected]. Deadline is May 31.

And in other calendar-related news, I'm taking the next few days off and will be posting ... well, probably not at all. Meanwhile, there are 355 posts in the archives here. Have fun!

But Are You Sure?

Definitely.

Via The Viral Garden.

It's a Man's, Man's, Man's, Man's Word

Add man-novation to the growing lexicon of man-words. I spotted the coinage on page 32 of the May issue of Wired, in an article about "the dumbest, dude-liest schemes" ever filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office--you know, your pogo-copters, your helmet-mounted pistols, your fulcrum-activated penis exercisers. They could fill a book, and as it turns out, they do. (Manly innovation does not, however, appear to extend to book titles.)

Well, if there's one thing Wired ought to know, it's man-stuff. I counted only only five female names among the magazine's 32 contributing editors and one lone woman--Xeni Jardin--out of 18 correspondents listed on the masthead. I guess most women don't care about the "innovators, instigators, and investors who are changing the world." Heck, no! We just want our mani-pedis!

Hmmm ... mani. Now I remember why I came in this room. I've been tracking man-words ever since the topic came up, about a month ago, on the American Dialect Society's listserv. A correspondent wrote that he was "working on a possible article about the man-word trend" and asked for additions to his list, which included (I'm editing for brevity):

  man bag
  man cave
  man juice
  man laws
  man purse
  man-boobs
  mancation
  man-crush
  mandal
  man-date
  man-dress
  manfriend
  man-hug
  mankini
  man-loaf
  manmaries
  manorexia
  manscaping
  man-seed
  man-spat
  manties
  mantique
  manzillian (yes, a male Brazilian)
  murse

Well, that opened the floodgates. Over the next week my inbox bulged with testosteroneologisms like these from Michael Covarrubias:

man date: a planned outing - or perhaps an edict of "man law"
manzierre: we mustn't forget this and the "bro"
man-gina: unfortunately not referring to male chest-pain
manscara: popular with glams, goths and metros

And from other contributors:

man-skank, man-slut, man-whore

And:

man-handles, to mean a man's love handles

And the whole roster of man-smut (man muscle, man gristle, man butter, man chowder, man sugar--hey, hold the man-mayo!).

You can follow the whole thread here.

So the next time you hear someone saying, as pop linguists are wont to do, that men use fewer words than women, you have my permission to produce this list and loudly proclaim "Ha!"

Or to challenge him to a mano a mano.

"Shall I Nail Thee to a Summer's Day?"

If you missed the uproarious Meta-Free-Phor-All on The Colbert Show last week--Stephen Colbert vs. Sean Penn, moderated by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky--here's the clip.

Via Kottke.org.

False Friends

Students of Spanish learn about falsos amigos--words that appear to be English equivalents but in fact are "false friends." Embarazada, for example, doesn't mean "embarrassed"; it means "pregnant."

English has its own false friends. Here are some word pairs that frequently get confused or are incorrectly assumed to be synonomous.

• Fortuitous/Fortunate. Fortuitous means "accidental." Fortunate means "lucky." The two words have a common Latin root, fors, which means "chance," which explains the confusion. When in doubt, use a simpler synonym.
• Invoke/Evoke. Invoke means "to call upon; to appeal for help." Only human beings can invoke something; a landscape can't "invoke" memories of a happy childhood. For inanimate objects and processes we must invoke evoke, which means "call something up in someone's mind."
• Loose/Lose. Yes, I know that lose should rhyme with those and close, but it doesn't. (This is English, remember? Abandon logic, ye who enter here.) And loose should, or could, rhyme with choose. But lose--the opposite of find--rhymes with bruise (and, yes, choose) and loose--the opposite of tight--rhymes with caboose. The participle of lose is losing, as in "I'm losing my marbles over this usage lesson!" Use a mnemonic if you must: lose has lost the extra "o" in loose.
• Select/Selected. "Save 50% on select T-shirts!" I doubt it. Select--the adjective, not the verb--means refined, discriminating, or of special quality. What copywriters usually mean here is selected--chosen from among the larger group.
• Advance/Advanced. "Advanced tickets $35." As opposed to beginning or intermediate tickets? The correct word here is advance, "made or given ahead of time."

One more thing: I'm picky about artful when it's used to mean artistic--I'd rather reserve artful to mean crafty or deceitful, as in the Artful Dodger--but most usage guides accept the broader definition, so I grumpily yield. But you won't find me writing "an artfully designed room" unless said room has a trapdoor.

What I've Been Up To

I've been working on a long-overdue update of my web site. In the meantime, for those of you who care, here are some of the projects I've recently completed:

• All new content for the Children's Fairyland web site. Fairyland is that rare thing: a relevant anachronism. It opened in 1950 on the shores of Oakland's Lake Merritt as a storybook theme park for young children, and for 57 years has successfully resisted the lure of thrill rides, arcade games, and corporate sponsorship. (Walt Disney visited the park the year it opened and copied many of its features when he created Disneyland.) At Fairyland, admission is only $6 and everything is kid-scale and kid-friendly. It has no roller coasters, but it does have a little library hut and the oldest continuously operating puppet theater in the United States. It has a children's theater program, a pair of rabbits, a llama, and an elderly pony. And it has lots of stuff that adults find corny and little kids absolutely adore--like Magic Keys that operate talking Storybook Boxes and a big elf statue that blows bubbles. Little kids love those bubbles. Fairyland is a wonderful place to visit, but its web site wasn't. It was awkwardly written and confusing to navigate, and it didn't convey the spirit of the place. So I set about creating a new voice, stories, and site architecture. I interviewed more than a dozen people involved with Fairyland, from 79-year-old puppetmaster Lewis Mahlmann, who's worked with the park for 40 years, to 9-year-old Anthony Sung, who played a flying monkey in Fairyland's 2005 production of "The Wizard of Oz." And I spent lots and lots of time with C.J. Hirschfield, Fairyland's dedicated and inspirational executive director. Then I persuaded my friend Susan Bercu, a gifted designer and illustrator, to create templates for the site design. Susan used to teach preschool; she really got the spirit of Fairyland. But I'm biased. See for yourself.
• A new name for a Silicon Valley restart-up (formerly Connex Technology): BrightScale. The company makes the chip arrays that make high-definition TV look good across a range of international standards. The new name plays on the optical term gray scale, a black-to-white spectrum. This was my third naming project with CEO Dave Corbin--he gets around--and as usual, he was a dream client: clear, attentive, and decisive. The BrightScale.com URL was taken but not developed; I helped negotiate a smooth domain transfer. My deep gratitude to genius graphic designer Mark Landkamer, who brought the identity and web site to life.
• Name development for TRIA, the first clinically proven laser hair-removal device for home use. Trademarked as both a medical device and a beauty product, the name had to suggest skin beauty, femininity, strength, freedom, modernity, elegance, and light. The coined word TRIA (pronounced TREE-ah) combines a crisp, efficient-sounding consonant blend with an open, feminine suffix; the word suggests "trim" and "ray" and also hints at the three-point contact area of the device. I also consulted on the tagline, "The Enlightened Solution," and on the URL, TriaBeauty.com.
• Web content for Central Station, a multifaceted new real estate development on the site of a historic West Oakland railroad terminal. My client was Holliday Development, which has worked for years with community and government groups to move the development forward. I wrote all content, including descriptions of projects being developed by companies other than Holliday. Very nice site design by LStudio.
• Name development for New Routes to Community Health, a nonprofit venture that creates multimedia programs to encourage new U.S. immigrants to improve their health status. Among other constraints, the new name couldn't use the words "immigrant," "assimilation," or "new American." I worked with a client team spread across three time zones and presented the names via conference call. The chosen name connects strongly to the team's previous successful project, Sound Partners for Community Health, while also suggesting the immigrant journey and--through homophonic association--the "new roots" immigrants are putting down in their adopted homeland.

More news after it happens.

"We Are at the Mercy of Our Name Givers"

From the New York Times, April 22:

Kelsie B. Harder, Name Expert, Dies at 84

Kelsie B. Harder, whose ruminations about why his parents gave him what sounded like a girl’s name provoked such enthrallment with proper nouns that he became a leading onomastician — a student of names and their origins — died on April 12 at his home in Potsdam, N.Y. He was 84.

Mr. Harder was a toponomist--a scholar of place names--whose interest in the subject began, as the Times's Douglas Martin notes, "with baby steps, literally":

Dr. Harder learned that his parents had wanted to give him an unusual name and liked the sound of Elsie, his sister’s. They stuck a “K” in front of Elsie. Dr. Harder, like “A Boy Named Sue” in the song, spent a lifetime explaining that he was not a girl named Kelsie.

“We are at the mercy of our name givers,” he said in a 1987 interview with The Post-Standard of Syracuse. “These things influence us for the rest of our lives, and we have nothing to do with it.”

Read the rest of the obit.

Word of the Week: Friedman Unit

Friedman Unit: A neologism coined last year by Atrios (the nom de blog of Duncan Bowen Black). A Friedman Unit, or FU, equals six months. It's named for New York Times columnist Tom Friedman (no relation to your correspondent), who since 2003 has repeatedly written that U.S. victory or defeat in Iraq will be determined "in the next six months."

Huffington Post contributor Robert Naiman reported on April 18 that the last "Friedman" in Iraq was the worst so far for the United States:

From October 2006 through last month, 532 American soldiers were killed, the most during any six-month period of the war. March also marked the first time that the U.S. military suffered four straight months of 80 or more fatalities. April, with 58 service members killed through Monday, is on pace to be one of the deadliest months of the conflict for American forces.

I think I can safely speak for most Friedmans when I say that we'd have preferred a different route into the Eponym Hall of Fame.

About the photo: Yes, there really is a Friedman Memorial Airport in--of all places--Hailey, Idaho, the gateway to Sun Valley. The airport honors a 19th-century Blaine County merchant and his family--again, no relation. (I'm not related to Milton or Kinky, either.)

RFP? OMDB!

Having recently endured four rounds of hectic proposal writing, followed by--surprise!--no response whatsoever from the proposal-requesters, I laughed through my tears at Peter Madden's anti-RFP* manifesto in Advertising Age. He counter-proposes a form letter that begins:

Dear COMPANY NAME:

Thank you for inviting AGENCY NAME to participate in your company's review of proposals to handle your business.

But we'll have to give you a big, fat NO FREAKING THANKS. Below are six reasons. I'd give an even 10 but I have to get back to productive work.

1. We're not fans of giving away our creative concepts and strategies for free. Our clients (none of whom we landed through an RFP process) pay us well to do things like that.
2. The first "get together" with COMPANY NAME will most likely be like an awkward first date -- except without the wine and potential hook up. Just tired of the thousand-yard gaze while we're trying to get you excited about what we could do for your company. Well, maybe we will elect to participate if we can bring a nice Chilean red and you bring a sense of humor, or at least some emotion. ...

Oh yeah, that thousand-yard gaze. Or worse: during one of our virtual agency's recent "get-togethers" with an executive team, the CEO actually nodded off. I kid you not.

Read the rest. And be sure to check out the comments at the bottom, including one from my old pal Rick Binger at Binger Catalog Marketing (hi, Rick!). Rick writes: "I totally agree. If you needed surgery, would you ask your surgeon to do a small surgery on some other part of your body first, before you decide whether to go with him/her for the 'real' surgery? Would you ask your car mechanic to fix a problem on your car for free before deciding whether to use him/her for the 'real' repair?"

Thanks to Mark Sloneker for forwarding the link.

* RFP = request for proposal. For a definition of OMDB and other instant-messaging lingo, visit Buzzwhack.

WPF/E by Any Other Name

Surely by now you've heard of Silverlight, Microsoft's new "cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web." That's a direct quote from the official site; Steve at How to Split an Atom provides an MS-to-English translation: "Flash re-branded and re-factored by the Big M."

If you're hard core, you know that Silverlight's code name was the euphonious and memorable WPF/E.

Now Windows Vista tech insider Tim Sneath graciously discloses how Microsoft developed the Silverlight name:

It was a tough choice; we know that WPF/E was much loved by the community and that acronyms can be both inspiring and evocative, but we really wanted to try something radical and different.

We had some really great alternative choices that we considered before settling on Silverlight, and I thought now would be a perfect time to share them. I hope that after you see the other brand names we considered, you'll be happy with our final choice. So here goes... drum roll, please; here are the top 10 names we rejected before settling on Silverlight:

10. GrayLuminosity (close, but there was just something not quite right about it)

9.   AJAX - Asynchronous JavaScript And XAML (turns out that acronym was already taken)

...and finally:

1. Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation Live Rich Client ActiveX Player R2 Ultimate Edition Service Pack 1 CTP (or WPFLRCAPR2UESP1CTP for short)

The rest of the list is just as funny.

Hat tip to the indefatigable Mike Pope!