Fritinancy

Lyrics: Ten, Title: Three

I thoroughly enjoyed Every Little Step, a new documentary now in theaters that compares the casting of the original A Chorus Line (1975) with that of the 2006 Broadway revival. The movie will thrill anyone who loves Broadway musicals and the extraordinary dedication required to create them. (I'm in that group.) And it may find a secondary audience among people who follow audition shows like American Idol but suspect there's more to life (and art) than that.

If you've seen A Chorus Line on Broadway or on the road*, you know the original production was a labor of love, crafted from the true and often heartbreaking stories of the performers who volunteered to be taped. (The archival tapes, and some grainy movie footage, are used to great effect in the film.) It broke the mold of American musicals and brought a bracing verisimilitude to a theatrical form often disdained for its artificiality. And it won nine Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

What you may not know—what I hadn't known—is how the show kept evolving even after opening night. One story in particular captured my attention because it demonstrates the power of a name.

One of the chorus members, Val, sings a comic tribute to plastic surgery. The number was originally called "Tits and Ass," and in the show's first performances it flopped. Nobody laughed. Composer Marvin Hamlisch recalls for the camera that he and Michael Bennett, the show's director/choreographer, couldn't figure out why. The lyrics were funny, dammit!

Then, Hamlisch says, they had an insight. They decided to see the song before they heard it, the way the audience first did: by reading the program before the curtain went up. When they saw the title in the list of songs, they got it: "Tits and Ass" gave away the punchline. There was no element of surprise or delight.

To find a new title, they went back to the spoken vamp to the song:

...But after a while I caught on...I mean, I saw what they were
hiring! I also swiped my dance card once after an audition, and on a scale
of ten, they gave me for dance: TEN, for looks : THREE! Well!

Overnight, "Tits and Ass" became "Dance: Ten, Looks: Three." And the first time A Chorus Line was performed with a reprinted program the song stopped the show. As it has done ever since.

The moral of the story: Believe in your work, but respect your audience's (customers') feedback. Make your title (or your company name) intriguing, but don't give away the store. And have the humility to accept when it's time to change.

Watch Jessica Lee Goldyn, as Val, sing "Dance: Ten, Looks: Three" from the 2006 production of "A Chorus Line."

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* The 1985 movie, starring Michael Douglas and directed by (huh?) Richard Attenborough, is pretty universally agreed to be a travesty. There are many things that—to borrow another song title from the show—I'll do for love, but seeing this movie hasn't yet been among them.

Dear Client: That Name Sucks

Should you tell your client that the name he's chosen for his new company is so bad he shouldn't use it? How should you approach the subject?

These aren't hypothetical questions. I've faced this dilemma more than once in my own career, and it recently came up in a LinkedIn discussion group I belong to, where it generated an unprecedented amount of feedback. The person who posted the topic requested confidentiality, so I won't disclose any of the details except to say that I, like the majority of commenters, agreed that it was a very bad name indeed. (You will probably not be surprised when I tell you it was one of those Bad Portmanteaus, not unlike the ones I critiqued during Bad Brand Names Week. And you may not be surprised to learn that the name was the "brainchild" of the client's next of kin.)

So: names are withheld to protect the guilty. But I think it's fair and worthwhile to paraphrase the group members' most helpful advice.

"The Enthusiast"

I wrote briefly last month about The Enthusiast, the debut novel by my old friend and colleague Charlie Haas. Today is the book's official publication date, and if you haven't yet ordered a copy, go forth and do so. And be sure to read it in a place where no one will be disturbed by frequent outbursts of uncontrolled laughter.

The title refers to, yet doesn't quite describe, the first-person narrator, Henry Bay, an editorial nomad who works his away around the country doing stints at "enthusiast" magazines with imaginary (yet totally credible) titles that made me snicker: titles like Spelunk; Monster Truck Tunin'; Cozy: A Magazine of Tea; Row! ("The Coxswain That Comes in Your Mailbox"); and Short Sheet (a monthly for shortwave radio enthusiasts). A subplot involves Henry's brother Barney, a laboratory scientist, and Barney's nemesis, a Unabomber-like loony called Freebird. The subplot is a little dark and a little zany; it's a combination Haas handles with cool control, steering the narrative toward an ending that's surprisingly sweet, even redemptive.

Haas has been a magazine writer and a screenwriter; his writing is jazz-inflected and pop-savvy. He can toss off a mock-Chandler simile ("I hadn't eaten breakfast and my stomach made a noise like the word diurnal"); he can mimic motivational speakers, "full of breath and portent"; and he does the best punk-kid-turned-pro-skateboarder riff I've ever read. He can do lyrical con brio, as when he describes young Henry's first brush with the enthusiast life, in a kite buggy:

[F]or a second I thought the wind would pull my arms off before the buggy moved out. The low-centered gravity and tight steering were like a race car's, my outstretched legs were inches off the ground, and the shock of speed was doubled by the quiet, with only a faint hum of wind in the kite lines. I sped wide-eyed past Dad's old office, finally exercising my California birthright to go fast on something crazy.

And he totally gets marketing. In fact, much of The Enthusiast is a sly parody of the enthusiasms that lead us down dangerous ravines: the enthusiasm for gonzo consumerism, the obsession with  self-branding.

At one point, Haas reels off a list of (real) car names that includes Protégé, Aspire, and Justy. The list culminates with the almost-plausible "Flurry," which Haas's narrator calls "one of the most entry-level cars ever made by a Big Three manufacturer."

He goes on:

The TV commercials for the Flurry had shown college-age kids, braless and Fugee-haired, silently laughing it up as they drove down a mercury vapor-lit expressway with Scottish techno on the soundtrack. In real life Flurry was a perfect name for the car because it weighed nothing and a gust of wind could move it over a lane and a half. There were two recalls after I bought it, once for its gossamer steering linkage and once for its Molotov gas tank. Mine was stolen twice, but viciously turned up a few blocks away both times. My model was the Hatchback GS, but if they'd called it the Associate Editor I wouldn't have argued.

The Flurry conveys Henry to the Missouri outback, where he's supposed to be engaging in some investigative journalism for Spelunk, the caving magazine. But the cave turns out to be home to a gun-toting semi-maniac (not Freebird), who eventually puts down the gun and reveals why he's a voluntary troglodyte:

"Yeah, well, that's what led me here. Market research. Working at a company in St. Louis. We broke the population into groups and found out everything about them. What they bought, what they wore, what they watched, what they drank, how they talked. We started out with all the old classifications, like Sustainers and Achievers and I Am Me's, and then we broke them way down. We had eighty subgroups. Nobody's Homies. Dior Christians. Home Despots. Shaft in Golf Pants. The energy just to think up the names would power a small city. But the data were beautiful. The ad agencies? Political parties? Wanted to marry us."

Nobody's Homies? Dior Christians? Brilliant.

Be sure to read the end matter, which includes an author interview unlike any other you've read ("Q: Is the Tom Patrick character based on a real person? A: Yes, but the real person based himself on a character in a nineteenth-century novel that's in the public domain now, so I think we're okay"), an essay titled "Does This Novel Make Me Look Fat?", a "musical concordance" to complement each of the book's chapters, and the funniest set of reading-group questions you're likely to encounter. And visit the Charlie Haas page on the Harper Collins website, where you'll learn about the author's favorite books, least favorite foods, and scheduled bookstore readings. I'll be at the June 8 reading at the Barnes & Noble in Jack London Square. Enthusiastically.

Word of the Week: Retronovation

Retronovation: "The conscious process of mining the past to produce methods, ideas, or products which seem novel to the modern mind. Some recent examples include Pepsi Throwback’s use of real sugar, Pepsi Natural’s glass bottle, and General Mills’ introduction of old packaging for some of their cereals." (Source: Kottke.) A portmanteau of retrospective and innovation.

Retronovation was coined in early March 2009 by Tim (no last name given), who represents half of the Snarkmarket blog. (Tim clearly relishes neologism; his blog's archives are "snarkives," posts about food are "gastrosnark," and each post's permanent URL is a "permasnark.") After Kottke picked it up, Tim commented in a follow-up post about the word's genesis:

But while we’re on the subject, let me say a little about the word itself. I write a lot of things super-fast. But I toiled over this word. “Retrovation”? I asked. “Retrinnovation”? It was Mayostard/Mustardayonnaise all over again. “Retronovation” is the clear winner, not only because it sounds better, but because it’s etymologically correct: retro + nova => “backwards new.” (Or, “return to begin.”) Also, hats off to Jason for omitting the hyphen (i.e. “retro-novation”). Fie on the hyphen! The hyphen is only there to draw attention. In fact, I’ve retronovatively changed the word in my original post to scrap the hyphen I put there. Vive retronovation! Old is the new now!
 

Tim, whose Blogger profile identifies him as a PhD student in Philadelphia, also maintains a second blog about culture and politics, Short Schrift. (Maybe his last name is Schrift?) Both blogs are intelligent, amusing, and well worth your time.

Skirpantings

What, to paraphrase Dr. Freud, does a woman want to wear? Skirt? Pants? Well, how about both!
 

Tube spant by Y-3

You'd pose awkwardly, too, if you were wearing this portmanteau garment. According to The Cut, New York magazine's fashion blog, a word had to be invented to describe it: It's a spant, as in skirt plus pant. From the description on the Oak Boutique site: "double layer perforated wool jersey gauze asymmetrical culotte with one extra oversized and draped pant and one smaller. internally attached legging with a drawstring closure." If this sounds like the answer to your wardrobe prayers and you wear a size extra-small (the only size remaining!), you can buy it at the marked-down price of $276 and do your part to revive American retail, which from the looks of it is digging its own grave.

(Since it's really a skirt-pant-legging that leaves one lower limb exposed, shouldn't it be called a skipaleg?)

Elsewhere in CoutureLand, this season's skirt-pant hybrid has been called a skant. Scroll down to the Skirts section in this post to see examples of what the blogger compared to "a short dhoti." It's not, however, as short as a skort (skirt plus shorts), an item that's been around since at least the 1950s.

Earlier this year, the house of Yves Saint Laurent offered its own interpretation of the trend, which it called simply "skirt pant." In English, anyway. I don't know what it's called in French—pantajupe? I call it "the $850 diaper." Voilà:

Photo from Saks Fifth Avenue.

On the plus side: excellent air circulation!

Skirt-pant mashups aren't the only combo garments awaiting deep discounts. "When Trends Collide" is how The Cut headlined a short article about jeggings (jeans that fit as tightly as leggings). They're known in the UK as treggings (trousers + leggings) and are being sold by über-hot retailer Topshop for £28 to £40 (about $43 to $62).

Attention, gentlemen: Snicker all you like, but don't think you're exempt. Today's New York Times Thursday Styles features a story about designer shorts for men with price tags of $465 and up. Among the options is Thom Browne's seersucker man-skort, "which, at $1,495, could make you rethink the derivation of the name of said fabric." (Did you think we'd seen the last of the man-words? Ha, and ha encore!)

Thom Browne, for those who don't study Details and GQ, is the designer who popularized "poindexter chic," i.e., high-water pants that expose sockless feet shod in clunky brogues. Ever on the bleeding edge, Browne is currently proposing a skirt suit for men. It's yours for the marked-down price of $1,288. I double-dare you.

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For a consideration of portmanteau beach fashion, see my 2008 post on the skirtini and its -kini kin: tankini, monokini, and more.

I Scream

This makes me a little crazy:

The spelling, I mean:

Lil' Drums.

That is just wrong.

If you're doing a folksy rendering of "little," the spelling is Li'l: L-I-apostrophe-L. As in Li'l Abner, Li'l Friends, and Li'l Folks, the first comic strip by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz.

There's a historical reason for this spelling, although it isn't addressed by the rules you learned in school. Unlike the apostrophe in contractions such as don't, wouldn't, or he's; or the possessive apostrophe in Abner's (singular) and folks' (plural); or the apostrophe-of-omission in fo'c'sle (forecastle) or bo's'n (for boatswain), the apostrophe in li'l doesn't represent a missing letter—even though three letters are indeed missing.¹ Its function is to create something called eye dialect: nonstandard spelling that approximates a pronunciation that's not much different from the standard, but gives the reader the impression of "dialect, foreign, or uneducated speech" (per Wikipedia). The apostrophe represents "flapping," that thing we do with the t sound in little so that it almost disappears.

This special apostrophe has a wonderful name all its own: the apologetic apostrophe. It shows up in Scots words such as ta'en (taken) to suggest that a letter is missing. It isn't: the word was originally spelled tane. Unapologetically Anglocentric Brits, however, inserted the apostrophe to "prove" that Scots was a degraded form of "pure English."

So where did my Oakland neighbor Dreyer's², which owns the Drumsticks brand, get the apostrophe-at-the-end "Lil'"?

I blame rap music.

Consider Lil' Kim, Lil' 1/2 Dead, Lil' Fizz, Lil' Jon, and Lil' Malik (now known as Mr. Malik). Wikipedia has compiled a much longer list of Lil' rappers. 

This is apostrophe abuse, plain and simple.³ What's the function of that terminal apostrophe? Does it represent a missing letter? Is Kim's real name Lily? Or Lilt? Is Mr. 1/2 Dead honoring the French city of Lille?

Or is it mere ornamentation—the orthographic equivalent of a hood ornament?

I doubt very much that it's apologetic. I mean, have you seen Lil' Kim?

Don't even get me started on Lil Wayne, né Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr. Perhaps in homage to the Mae West vehicle Diamond Lil, he dispenses with the apostrophe altogether.

Eccentric or nonstandard spellings may be part of the rap brand. But Dreyer's has no excuse for its errant apostrophe. I beg you, Dreyer's, think of the children! You know: the li'l ones.

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¹ Yes, the possessive apostrophe represents a missing letter. Long ago, English had a genitive case equivalent to the one in German; "of/belonging to the man" was spelled mannes. As pronunciation changed, the -es contracted into 's.

² Sold as Edy's on the East Coast. 

³ For a different strain of apostrophe abuse, see "There's an Apostrophe in There Somewhere," in Arnold Zwicky's blog.

 

May Linkfest

Ready for an antidote to Bad Brand Names Week? This month's Linkfest stays on the sunny side of the street.

Wolfram Alpha may be the new kid on the search-engine block, but don't count Google out just yet. A nifty new search option, Wonder Wheel, presents results as a constellation (or mind map); each term in the constellation is clickable, yielding a new constellation. Check out the Wonder Wheel for "wisdom." (Via Joho the Blog.)

Bay Area journalist and blogger Tracey Taylor (of Home Girl and On the Block) forwarded two articles about names, brands, and trademarks. The first is Phil Patton's eulogy for animal-themed car names (Mustang and Impala are the last remnants of the herd). It's full of lore: Did you know that the Ford Taurus was named for the astrological sign of a Ford executive's wife? Or that before World War II, the Jaguar was known as the Swallow Sidecar?

The second article, "Naming a Company: Many Difficulties in Selecting a Name That Can Be Used in the Various States" (PDF), is nearly century-old proof that name development has long been a challenge. Published in 1912, it takes fastidious pains to explain to readers what must have once been a novel predicament. "When the number of States is considered," the reporter cautions, "it is at once apparent that much searching of records is necessary before a name can be adopted. It would have been unfortunate, for instance, if the organizers of the Tobacco Products Corporation had incorporated under that name without preliminary investigation, and had found that there were corporations of the same name in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Massachusetts..." Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

I was delighted to discover (via Twitter) the Unshelved blog, which features the only daily comic strip set in a public library. That's good news right there; even better, the May 17 strip is about my pal Charlie Haas's wonderful new novel, The Enthusiast.

Tributes to and indictments of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style have abounded in this, the book's 50th-anniversary year. Geoffrey Nunberg wrote two of the best pieces: a defense of the passive voice (originally read on NPR's "Fresh Air") and, in Language Log, a virtuoso verse (in perfectly scanning heroic couplets!) that summons the shade of Alexander Pope.

I'm glad to see someone else shares my fascination with brand names beginning with "Mister." Here's Nama Sutra with a new-to-me crop that includes Mister Tapioca, Mr. Zipper, and the gender-bending Mister Lady.

Copyeditor extraordinaire John McIntyre recommends 10 blogs to improve your mastery of language and editing, including a few that were new to me. And Mighty Red Pen suggests 10 blogs word nerds will love, including (ahem) the one you're reading now.

Finally, just for the heck of it: How many folksingers does it take to change a light bulb? (Hat tip: Walter Olson.)

Word of the Week: Tabloid

Tabloid: A reduced-format newspaper, generally half the size of a traditional broadsheet paper, that opens like a magazine for easier reading on buses and subway trains. Introduced in the late 19th century in England and the United States, tabloid newspapers quickly became known for their sensational content. Tabloid is often shortened to tab.

So far, so familiar, at least for this lapsed journalist. What I hadn't known was that tabloid derives from an old trademark for a pharmaceutical brand. Ralph Keyes enlightened me in his recently published book with the excellent title I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech:

At first readers didn't know what to call this compact type of newspaper. By analogy it resembled a kind of compressed medical pill introduced in 1884 by Burroughs, Wellcome. That pharmaceutical company called its new product line Tabloid. It didn't take long for this term to be applied to any compressed item, including the vertical-fold newspaper format pioneered by London's Daily Mail and New York's Daily News. Because tabloid newspapers tended to emphasize sensational news coverage, their name itself came to signify that style of reporting.

A January 2009 article in the British medical journal The Lancet (free registration required) goes into greater detail:

Coined by Sir Henry Wellcome (1853—1936), [Tabloid] became the registered trademark of Burroughs Wellcome & Co, the company Wellcome had co-founded with fellow American Silas Mainville Burroughs in London in 1880.

Wellcome strived [sic] to come up with an original, catchy word to describe Burroughs Wellcome's new compressed medicines: “I wanted to coin some word that would be euphonious that is something that would be pleasing to the ear, that would be easy to remember”, he would later write. Inspiration struck early one morning in 1884: after passing through his mind combinations of letters and syllables, Wellcome hit upon tabloid—a combination of two words: tablet and ovoid (although some sources claim alkaloid). Wellcome quickly registered his invented word as a trademark to describe his company's products.

(The -oid suffix comes from Latin oides, adapted from Greek oeides, "having the likeness of." It's a remarkably productive morpheme whose children include trapezoid, asteroid, thryoid, humanoid, adenoid, android, steroid, and factoid. The last word was reputedly coined by Norman Mailer in his 1973 book about Marilyn Monroe.)

Wellcome's Tabloid product range extended beyond medicine. Johnson Year Book, a photography website, depicts packages of Tabloid brand photographic chemicals. The site picks up the Tabloid trademark story:

A problem arose in the early 20th Century when the term 'tabloid' was first used to describe a shortened form of journalism "with an emphasis on short stories simply told, on sport and human interest topics, and with the innovation of a women's page". In 1903, Burroughs Wellcome sued Thompson and Capper, a Manchester [U.K.] firm, for using the trademarked word 'tabloid' without permission. In their defence, Thompson and Capper pointed out that 'tabloid' was by then widely used and argued Burroughs Wellcome had lost all rights to the term and that they were attempting to prevent the proper development of the English language.

Burroughs Wellcome won the case; but the judge agreed the word had acquired a secondary meaning though stated that this didn't interfere with the firm's trademark rights.

It wasn't the first time Burroughs Wellcome had fought trademark infringement. According to The Lancet, in the 1880s and 1890s the company "wrote to such newspaper barons as Joseph Pulitzer and Alfred Harmsworth to warn against using the word."

The controversy died a natural death when Burroughs Wellcome phased out its Tabloid products in the 1960s. In 1995, the company merged with Glaxo Inc. (which had been founded in New Zealand in 1904) to become GlaxoWellcome. In 2000, GlaxoWellcome merged with American drug company SmithKline Beecham (formed from the merger of two other companies) to become GlaxoSmithKline. The Burroughs Wellcome name survives in the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, an independent foundation that supports medical and scientific research.
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Image from How Stuff Works.

Bonus Bad Name: Shiva

Tremble in awe before the Shiva sandal from German shoemaker Think! (exclamation point theirs):

It's awfully festive for the seven-day Jewish period of mourning.

And it doesn't look like anything the Hindu god Shiva (the Destroyer of the World) would be caught reincarnated in.

Shoe-style names often exist in a parallel universe governed by designers' egos and littered with zany mis-translations. Readers of this blog may remember the Stupa (which bore the name of a Buddhist tomb), the Weirda (a decidedly un-weird, indeed pedestrian slip-on), and the Nervous (a driving shoe!).

So, sure, there's plenty of precedent. But I still think Think! should have thought twice before choosing this name. The shoe may fit, but the name doesn't.

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P.S. None of this commentary is meant to disparage the quality of Think! shoes, which in my experience is superb. I do, however, have another complaint about the company's nomenclature. Think! assigns a word name to each last (the shape on which the shoe is built) and a frustrating five-digit string of numbers to differentiate style variations. This particular Shiva sandal, for example, is actually the Shiva 82523. Then there's the Julia 82337, the Julia 82340, the Julia 82330, and so on. This naming convention may be useful within the company (I'm guessing the first number is a seasonal code), but it's mystifying, memory-defying, and pointless for customers.

Bad Brand Names: ♬.ws

Remember when Prince changed his name to ,  The Unpronounceable Love Symbol?

Now we have ♫.ws, also known as The Unmentionable Musical Symbol.

According to this story in Wired online—where the musical symbol got scrambled into a question mark, and the link goes nowhere—♫.ws is a music search engine for Twitter users. It was developed by Sawhorse Media, which also created Musebin, "a site for Twitter-style music reviews," according to Wired. 

Sawhorse Media has a nice handmade ring to it. Musebin isn't bad. But two eighth notes? At least tell us which key they're in.

It's hard to build word of mouth when you don't have a word.

Hat tip: Anthony Shore.

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And .ws? It's the country domain of Samoa, formerly known as Western Samoa.