Fritinancy

Why I'll Miss 'Jane' Magazine

So publisher Condé Nast has pulled the plug on Jane magazine after nearly 10 years of publication "despite a turnaround effort that had shown signs of progress" (italics mine). It turns out you can be too thin, if you're a magazine: Jane never had enough advertising revenue, whatever "enough" means these days. The August issue is the last one. And don't go looking for archived articles online: you'll be redirected to a letter "inviting" you to explore another Condé Nast pub, Glamour. In fact, Jane subscribers are now getting the un-Janelike Glamour in their mailboxes, which reportedly is making former Jane editors "livid."

I wasn't in the Jane demographic--single women in their 20s--but I counted the magazine among my not-very-guilty pleasures. In the increasingly homogeneous world of gal-mags, Jane stood apart. It was irreverent, tongue-in-cheek, indeed sassy--no surprise, since founding editor Jane Pratt had also edited Sassy (1988-1997), a much-missed teen magazine with a similarly distinctive voice.

What I'll miss about Jane is its writing, which was breezy with a kiss of snark and a blithe thumbing-of-nose to the literary conventions of women's publishing. A few examples (I wish I'd had the foresight to record more of them over the years):

• On the spine of the August issue: "Hey, camera guy, get out of my cube."
• Cover lines like "Flawless Hair and Makeup for Those Who Usually Don't Care."
• A guide to denim trends illustrated by a chart with axes labeled "rightnowishness" and "foreverishness."
• In every issue, a "sex position of the month" with a totally nutty name like "The Lost Contact Lens" or "The Challah Bread." (The magazine solicited real-life "test drivers" for the calisthenics.) Somebody, please, compile these columns into a book.
• A monthly Q&A titled "The Same Five Questions We Always Ask."
• The casual use of words like "schmancy," "swanky," and "zeitgeisty."
• A horoscope that counsels, "Turn a problem into a propportunity." A propportunity! Yesss!

And although Jane didn't invent it, I'm indebted to the magazine for introducing me to the term "Canadian tuxedo": jeans, denim shirt, and a jeans jacket.

So long, Jane, it's been good to know you.

P.S. Over at the Jezebel blog, they're conducting a poll asking what you'll read instead of Jane.

Naughty Kiwis

You'd have to have a much dirtier mind than I do to catch all the verbal and visual double entendres in this commercial.

It's for an adult TV channel in New Zealand, but I think the puns are recognizable throughout the English-speaking universe. But, as I say, I couldn't possibly know for sure.

Via Qwghlm (del.icio.us)

Huluballoo

NBC Universal and News Corp. announced a name Thursday for their web video joint venture: Hulu.

The name is the latest in a long line of copycat names--Google and Yahoo got there first--that are short, more or less meaningless, and distinguished by long-u vowel sounds (a k a Oo, baby, baby). See Squidoo, Doostang, Boompa, Qoosah, etc. etc. etc. (For even more Baby Talk 2.0 names, see this L.A. Times story.)

In a "Hulu hello" posted on Hulu.com, CEO Jason Kilar (formerly of Amazon) explained the name choice:

Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we're building. Our hope is that Hulu will embody our (admittedly ambitious) never-ending mission, which is to help you find and enjoy the world's premier content when, where and how you want it.

Translation: We were able to buy the domain.

Kilar may think "Hulu" is an empty-vessel name, but in fact it's the Hawaiian word for:

1. Feather, hair

2. Esteemed, choice; esteemed older relative, as of parents' or grandparents' generations

Hulu hipa is sheep fleece and huluhulu is body hair.

Hawaiian is spoken in Hawaii, which, last time I checked, was still in the United States.

Elsewhere, hulu means "butt" (of, say, a gun) in the Malay and Indonesian languages. It means "cease and desist" in Swahili. (I am not making this up.)

But my favorite bit of disambiguation comes from Broadcasting & Cable, which said:

The new Hulu is not to be confused with the Swedish technology company, Hulu, which creates WiMAX applications for, among other things, the kind of streaming video the other Hulu plans to do.

All right, then! If it's not to be confused, then we are not confused.

P.S. The Swedish Hulu, which was founded in 2004, is an acronym of Hyper Urban Level User. So they say. 

(Hat tip to MJF.)

Update: William Lozito at NameWire notes: "When written in Latin script (the alternative is Arabic), the Azeri word for "peach" is hülü." Azeri is the official language of Azerbaijan.   

Kinda Young, Kinda Now

According to the Springwise newsletter, Heineken is about to soft-launch Charli, a new 5% alcohol sparkling beverage for women. The product will be test-marketed in 17 bars in Amsterdam and Deventer before being introduced throughout the Netherlands next summer.

If Charli ever makes it to the U.S., perhaps Heineken could recycle this jingle from a famous 1976 commercial. Video quality is poor, but yes, that's Bobby Short on the piano. He was virtually unknown until then.

Charli has an apple-juice base, but otherwise sounds a lot like low-alcohol, pear-based Babycham, "the original girlie drink" (their words, not mine) that has been sold in the UK for decades. The website is charming; check out the "classic adverts" page, especially the very funny "I'd Love a Babycham."

The Springwise article also mentions two other new brews targeted at women: a "medicinal" beer, Karla, from Germany's Karlsberg; and Karmi, from the Polish division of Denmark's Carlsberg, not to be confused with Karlsberg. Karla and Karmi make sense as name extensions; Charli less so. And faced with a choice of Karla, Karmi, and Charli, a drinking gal could be forgiven for a moment of confusion, even if she were admonished not to be confused. But I don't suppose Heineken wanted to go with Heinie.

Aptronym Contest at Freakonomics Blog

Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics, the book, and Freakonomics, the blog, announces a contest to identify the best aptronym (a name ideally suited to its owner). The name to beat is Paige Worthy, an editor at Good magazine.

No deadline is mentioned, but entries are already rolling in. The winner gets a copy of the Freakonomics book or a Freakonomics yo-yo--your choice.

More on aptronyms here.

Eggcorns in Ecstacy

The Volokh Conspiracy is a legal blog (or blawg), but many of its posts are devoted to language. Last week blog co-author Eugene Volokh stirred things up when he published a post about "commonly misspelled phrases"--like "free reign" instead of "free rein" and "baited breath" instead of "bated breath." ("Bated" here is a truncation of "abated," meaning "shortened.")

Then he invited his readers to contribute their own examples, along with Google hits for correct and incorrect versions. And, oh lordy, they responded. And vented. And twisted their handkerchiefs in despair. The last time I checked, there were 195 comments. One commenter noted that these malapropisms aren't misspellings--"baited" and "reign" are spelled correctly--but rather eggcorns: substitutions of words based on the mis-hearing or misunderstanding of an idiom. ("Eggcorn" itself comes from a mis-hearing of "acorn.")

A few of the choicer submissions:

• "Exercise in fertility" for "exercise in futility" (probably an eggcorn)
• "Pre-Madonna" for "prima donna" (a true eggcorn, and well worth preserving IMO; it's also cited in Um...Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean, the new book by Michael Erard, which I've just started reading)
• "Wallah" for "voilà" (a misspelling, unless you mean this)
• "Penultimate" for "really, really super important" (a misunderstanding of what the pen- prefix means)

My favorite comment came from Stevethepatentguy (sorry, Volokh Conspiracy doesn't number its comments), who chided some of the more agitated commenters by punning, "Watch those ad homonym attacks."

While you're over at Volokh Conspiracy, check out this follow-up post and also this one, in which Volokh challenges the declaration that an ungainly neologism like mentee (the person a mentor, uh, ments) "is not a word." And then read what dictionary editor Erin McKean has to say over at Dictionary Evangelist.

(Hat tip to Mark Liberman, posting at Language Log.)

Iconoclasm

San Francisco Chronicle architecture critic John King would like to see a moratorium on the use of "icon" by architects and their "enablers":

The word should be banished from the world of design, and with it the notion that the worth of new buildings is measured by how much they stick out - vertically, stylistically, you name it.

King has been reading the proposals from the teams competing to build a new transbay transportation terminal and tower in San Francisco. All three of the front-runners use the i-word.

England's Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, working with a local architecture firm and two developers, calls its design "a strong and iconic portal," an "iconic gateway," and "an iconic expression of San Francisco's position as the center of gravity for new technologies, creativity, multi-cultural initiatives and knowledge leadership." (That last phrase merits enshrinement in the Towering Babble Hall of Fame.)

"Wow," King comments. "No wonder it's so hard to find a place to park."

The other two teams offer, respectively, "a memorable icon" and "a slender iconic shape acting as a beacon from all approaches."

Across the bay in Emeryville, two new residential developments are actually called Icon @ Park and Icon @ Doyle. For those not familiar with Emeryville, it's a slender sub-municipal strip of land that until the 1990s was known mostly for its legal card rooms. Today it's where you go around here to get your Trader Joe's and Banana Republic fix. There is nothing iconic about Emeryville except perhaps for the symbols on the computer screens at Pixar headquarters.

Image: an icon of Saint Stylianos of Paphlagonia.

A Hair Over the Line?

Hairapy isn't a brand or a product but rather the name of a multimedia campaign from Sunsilk, a division of the venerable beauty brand Helene Curtis. I blogged about the Hairapy name back in January, saying it reminded me uncomfortably of "harpy." Somehow, Sunsilk recovered from that devastating blow and soldiered on with its team of Hairapy Guys who pose as therapists ("The door is always open and we're always here to help").

Some of the Hairapy output is quite funny, intentionally or not. The "case history" commercials are both sexy and goofy, especially this one (although as AdRants has noted, the premise isn't original).

There's also a blog (not to be confused with this blog, also called Hairapy, which seems to be about buying hairstyles on Second Life), where you can apply your intellect to timely topics like "Who's smarter? Blondes or brunettes?" And there are forums where you can sympathize with readers like Morgan, who writes, "i just want my hair curly but one thing that bothers me is my hair at the root is all poofy and lil hairs stuck up and it just a mess.. and hard to make it look nice u kno?"

Oh, Morgan, we kno.

A couple of things puzzle me about Hairapy. One is the semi-bilingual marketing. Of the eight product formulas, two have Spanish names: "Anti-Caída" and "Anti-Esponja." Anti-caída means "anti-fall" or "anti-break," and as a Sunsilk "expert" explains in a forum, the Anti-Caída system "balances excellent conditioning protection to reduce hair breakage during hair grooming." Anti-esponja literally means "anti-sponge," but here has something to do with reducing hair volume (a problem some of us wish we shared).

Are Spanish-speaking women the primary market for these two product types (which, by the way, are sold only in "threesomes," a bit of naughtiness that foreshadows my main topic here)? If they are, why don't the forums have Spanish-language versions? Is there something about women who speak Spanish that makes them especially vulnerable to "falling" and "sponge"? Or are the names in Spanish because Spanish is the new French--in other words, the international language of beauty and elegance?

I really do want to know.

But here's my main reason for revisiting Hairapy. Some generous Sample Fairy recently visited the Dolphin Club, where I swim, and left behind a big bag of Sunsilk goodies. I scooped up a fistful of folded cards in different colors that represented various formulas. Each piece contained a "threesome" of samples--shampoo, conditioner, and "creme"--along with a couple of gift cards worth a dollar each.

Branding obsessive that I am, I couldn't just tear open the packages and lather away. In fact, I had a hard time getting past the copy on the front of each card, which invites the customer to choose her hair "issue":

My frizz is so wild not even a dominatrix could tame it (image: silhouetted high-heel boots and handheld whip)

My hair is poofier than a prize-winning poodle

My hair is kinkier than an S&M convention

My hair is drier than a martini

And the one that really got my attention:

My hair is limper than my boyfriend after a few drinks

Hilarious? Edgy? Vulgar? Cruel? You be the judge. And while you're being judgmental, you might also ask yourself how you'd feel if your thirteen-year-daughter, niece, or sister--who is likely in Sunsilk's target demographic--came home with these sample cards.

I looked online for examples of this promotion but couldn't find them. I did, however, find a version on Sunsilk's Canadian site, where a quiz asks users to describe their hair in one sentence:

Flat as a training bra and limp as a noodle

Bigger and poofier than a bridesmaid dress

So frizzy a dominatrix couldn't control it

Straightened with kinky tendencies

Dry as toast--with more splits than a pole-dancer

Pretty easy-going and well-adjusted, considering

Duller than the clearance rack at the Khaki Shack

Let's recap: Dominatrices. Pole-dancers. S&M. Dry martinis. Limp boyfriends.

To sell shampoo.

Am I the only one who has a problem with this? Is it a problem a Hairapist can solve?

 

Word of the Week: Bacn

Bacn: E-mail that isn't spam but isn't what you really want or need, either. A truncation of "bacon" (chosen probably for its culinary relationship to Spam), bacn was coined during PodCamp Pittsburgh, held August 18 and 19, 2007.

Virtually overnight, a blog, Bacn2, was launched. There was an official bacn press release, in which the new word is defined as "email you want -- just not right now":

Bacn has been said to be the “middle class of email.” It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.

You can already buy the bacn T-shirt (proceeds donated to charity). And within less than a week, the neologism made it into New York Times's "What's Online" column, written by Dan Mitchell (see final item).

Slogans for Senators

Consider yourself a better-than-average crafter of slogans? Want to help the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spread the word on auto bumpers across this fair land? Then submit your ideas for bumper stickers on the DSCC website. You could also vote for one of the four slogans the DSCC came up with all by its lonesome, but as Michael at POPwink points out, they're kinda lame:

Do visit POPwink to watch the amusing pitch video starring the Ragin' Cajun himself, James Carville.

The rules: Keep it to 40 characters. Send in your submission by midnight Monday, Aug. 27. And--this is my own suggestion, not an official rule--try to make it about the Democrats, OK? Can't help noticing that three of the four DSCC candidates are about the Worthy Opposition. We can do better. I think.

Update: We have a winner? Not. Check out POPwink and Thingnamer for critiques of the four finalists.