Fritinancy

Pan-American Pepsi

For a perennial runner-up brand, Pepsi-Cola's been having an unusually high-profile year. First came a controversial logo redesign and the leaking of an even more controversial creative brief that revealed Arnell Group's bizarre strategy behind the redesign.

Now, from opposite ends of the Western Hemisphere, come two very different yet equally remarkable stories about Pepsi branding.

In Argentina, it seems, as in much of Latin America, "Pepsi" is pronounced "Pecsi."*  Rather than fight, Pepsi opted to switch. Its new marketing campaign in Argentina actually respells the venerable (since 1898) brand name:

 

Translation: "Drink Pecsi, save [money]. Drink Pepsi, too."
The verbs are in the archaic second-person plural familiar tense (vos)
used almost exclusively in Argentina.

As part of the campaign, Pepsi (or Pecsi) compiled an online "Pecsipedia" of slang terms used mostly by residents of Buenos Aires, known locally as Porteños. According to the introduction, "It doesn't matter how we say it, let's speak the same language."

Not Quite Bronze

...but still a great honor. Fritinancy has been voted...

...in Lexiophiles' annual competition. Thanks to everyone who spread the word and voted!

I'm especially honored to be in such distinguished company. The justifiably top-ranked blog is Separated by a Common Language, written by an American linguist in the UK. Right above Fritinancy, in the number-three spot, is my esteemed colleague The Name Inspector; he and I are the only name developers to have made the top-ten list.

The Top 100 list, which aggregates blogs from all four judging categories (Language Learning, Language Teaching, Language Technology, and Language Professionals), is here. You'll find Fritinancy in thirty-fourth place.

Special congratulations to the other language mavens whose blogs I follow: Grammar Girl (#10 on the aggregated list), Language Hat (#17), Wishydig (#27), and The Engine Room (#45).

Odd English

Sightings of note from around the Interwebs.

From Twitter:

"Wild Mountain Gourmet produces the highest quality mustard and sauces that will enhance the flavor and goodness of every table it touches." Um, I don't eat table. (Also: it?)

Chez Papa Restaurant: "Where the food meets sexiness." I'm trying to picture this steamy encounter, and failing.

From my spam folder, where the sexiness meets the poetry:

"Now you can take your pants off with pride."

"Accept some courage for your needs."

"BE THE MASTER OF THE NIGHT."

From my inbox, an email from Discover Card I didn't finish reading:

"Dear Sample A Sample."

From Brandweek, where homophones rain rein reign:

"The campaign embraces all the luxury queues that consumers are used to..." Have you hugged a line today?

From Sarah Palin's final speech as governor of Alaska:

"And it is our men and women in uniform securing it, and we are facing tough challenges in America with some seeming to just be Hell bent maybe on tearing down our nation, perpetuating some pessimism, and suggesting American apologetics, suggesting perhaps that our best days were yesterdays." American apologetics? As Maureen Dowd writes in the New York Times today, it "sounds like a cross between apologists and Dianetics." But American! So it's all good, right?

The Hub: My Guest Post at InBerkeley.com

I'm a border-crossing guest contributor today at InBerkeley.com, the local-journalism blog started by Lance Knobel and Dave Winer. I don't live in Berkeley, but I did attend last night's "Money, Mobs, and Media" panel discussion at the new David Brower Center near the UC campus*, and I somehow sorta found myself volunteering to file a report.

The event was sponsored by The Hub Bay Area, the first U.S. location of an international network of collaborative workspaces for social innovators. The actual office won't open for a couple of weeks, but the renderings look appealing and the Brower Center is a beautiful and inspirational addition to downtown Berkeley.

A handful of observations I didn't include in my InBerkeley story but thought you'd enjoy:

• One of the group workspaces at The Hub is called The Hubble, which appears to be a portmanteau of hub and huddle. (It does not appear to be connected to the Hubble Telescope, which was named for astronomer Edwin P. Hubble.) Love the name. It has room for eight people and is surrounded by frosted glass walls that form a writeable surface. Love the concept.
• The home page of the Bay Area Hub website includes this phrase: "During the day, The Hub is a dynamic, collision-rich workspace..." Collision-rich? Ow! I hope they have really good liability insurance.
• Last night's panel featured the founders of three prominent social-innovation organizations: Kiva, Virgance, and Change.org. Not only do the three companies represent different approaches to social change, but their names represent three distinct name styles. I'm working on a post comparing the three names.
• Filing my report on InBerkeley.com required my learning the rudiments of WordPress. I'm told it's a vastly superior blogging platform to TypePad (which hosts my own blog), but naturally I felt like a complete oaf. Learning stuff is hard!
• If you find yourself in downtown Berkeley, do check out the Brower Center, which was designed by prominent Bay Area architect Daniel Solomon to the most rigorous "green" standards. (Example: recycled rainwater in the toilets.) Through Jan. 31, 2010, there's a stunning exhibit in the  main-floor Hazel Wolf Gallery of the large-format black-and-white photographs of Sebastião Salgado, which span 30 years and several continents. Born in Brazil, Salgado began his career as an economist and taught himself photography in order to document the lives of the world's poor, displaced, and oppressed people. Despite what may seem to be depressing subject matter, the photographs are breathtakingly beautiful. Definitely worth a visit.

___

* I included the Brower Center's address in the InBerkeley post but neglected to do so here: 2150 Allston Way. Thanks, Jon Carroll, for the reminder.

Word of the Week: Truel

Truel: A duel involving three combatants instead of the standard two.

Used mostly in game theory, truel was coined by mathematician Martin Shubik in a 1954 article, ""Does the Fittest Necessarily Survive?" It's a portmanteau of trio (or perhaps "three-way") and duel that assumes that duel has a root meaning "two," as in "duo." However, "duel" in fact is a shortening of an Old Latin word for "war," duellum, and truel ambiguously suggests a root of true.

Contests involving an unspecified number of participants are called N-uels in game theory (PDF).

From a film-studies quiz in the Education Life section of yesterday's New York Times:

The duel provides the most classic ending for westerns. This film ups the strategic tension by introducing the truel, a three-man gunfight.

1. "High Noon"
2. "Vera Cruz"
3. "High Plains Drifter"
4. "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"

(Answer after the jump.)

Truel is also a surname. A computer programmer named Bob Truel co-founded the Open Directory Project, Topix LLC, and Blekko.

Button, Button

Your assignment: describe this tailored shirt for women.

Source: Corporette blog.*

Me, I'd call it a tailored shirt with buttoning cuffs, or perhaps a button-front shirt. But at some point in recent history, women's-fashion copywriters started calling it a button-down shirt. See here, here, and here, for starters.

I beg to differ.

My very first job, as a teenager, was in retail sales. Later, I wrote fashion copy for years. I learned all the lingo, from raglan to dolman to balmacaan to peplum. And I learned that a button-down shirt was this:

Source: Brooks Brothers.

See the difference? I mean, apart from the tie. It's the collar that defines this style: its points button down to the shirt body. Hence, button-down shirt.

The women's shirt in the first photo? No buttons on the collar. Not a button-down shirt.

John Brooks, grandson of the founder of Brooks Brothers, introduced this style in 1896, calling it the "button-down polo collar shirt." According to the Brooks Brothers website, "His design inspiration came after attending an English polo match where he observed the players' shirts secured with buttons to keep them from flapping in the wind."

The button-down shirt—that is, the shirt with a button-down collar—really became popular in the 1950s, when it epitomized square, conformist style. Comedian Bob Newhart appropriated the term in a 1960 recording:

Just $8.99 on Amazon!

Today, a men's button-down (or buttondown) shirt is still a shirt with a buttoned collar, as distinguished from a spread collar, snap tab, forward point, etc. And some women's retailers maintain the distinction, too: for a few sticklers, "button-down" refers to a specific collar style. But even as true button-down shirts have fallen out of favor in women's wear, perhaps because their look is too fussy, the term has survived, now describing (inaccurately, IMO) any shirt that buttons up the front. Well, I ask you: what else would a shirt do? If it didn't button up the front, it wouldn't be a shirt; it would be a tunic or pullover.

Has anyone else noticed this peculiar (to me) semantic creep?

___

* "A fashion and lifestyle blog for women lawyers, bankers, MBAs, consultants, and otherwise overachieving chicks who work in conservative offices and need to look professional, but want to be fashionable."

Nature Boy

I picked up a bag of this after donating blood last week:

 

Made by the Mr. Nature company, Los Angeles.

...and immediately got nostalgic for last year's post about "Mister" brand names. (And for Nama Sutra's later homage.)

And then I remembered something I hadn't thought about in years:

Mr. Natural, by R. Crumb.

And then I thought, wait. When did Mom get married?

"Mother Nature Is a M.I.L.F.," from Zazzle

There's a women's version, too.

Spitting Image

This term was so unfamiliar to me that I thought at first the photo was taken outside North America:

"Ticket Spitter"? It sounds (a) unhygienic and (b) angry. But it's absolutely born in the U.S.A. In fact, it's been a registered trademark of Federal APD of Novi, Michigan, since 2002. A vendor, DGO Access, says the Ticket Spitter® (full name: Smart System Transport Ticket Spitter®) "utilizes contemporary technology to provide you with a completely flexible system for machine readable parking operations. The unit utilizes a modular SST Ticket Transport Mechanism that features robust components, magnetic read/write heads, thermal printer, and a Ticket Burster/Feeder mechanism that snaps apart tickets."

(Peeved digression: Can we stop with the utilizes already? Especially twice in one paragraph? Uses or employs does the job just fine.)

Because I know you'll ask, the "Ticket Burster" "eliminates the need for a cutter assembly by bursting the perforated  tickets apart as they ascend into the transport mechanism."

Hat tip to friend Peter F., who snapped the photo of this "linguistic loogie" (his term) at the Crowne Plaza Hotel parking lot near L.A. International Airport, and queried: "Did you come up with this appetizing name?" Sadly, Peter, someone else salivated over the assignment.

Zippy Extra Snappy Limited!

Graphic designers know "greeking" as a sequence of Latin words used to fill a space until actual copy is written. But they're no longer limited to the old standby, "Lorem ipsum dolor" et cetera. The Greeking Machine offers a choice of gobbledygook, including up to 50 paragraphs in the dialect known as Marketing:

You racy ordinary original now care agree. Spring if brings tasty, intense tangy. Also spectacular feel free choosy bigger tummy choose so free low-cost, vast really satisfied bigger. Shopping quality tummy high-tech generous rosy will go more challenge industry touch win choose. Limited catch sale lost lather grown absorbent remarkable, super desire ever tough tasty. Parents grand shine secure care goodbye. Zippy extra snappy limited our way value appetizing plush quite vast quenches, prevents.

Velvety parents happy, know one soaking unique it's incredible, desire. Than care also action yet sweet zippy drink amazing choice. Miracle secret just recommended, that 100% whiter available one, advertising permanent successful sporty. Care spectacular reduced surrender agree world's spacious takes valuable don't crunchy limited chocolatey win. That as talking feel wherever talking lower sporty. Fresh improved soothing out humongous surrender brighter spring aromatic, smooth racy magically quenches spectacular. Messy special comfort, tempt luxury look mountain action powerful compare fun luscious cool. Hurry spend wherever, great mouthwatering brand convenient, ever.

Also available in Hillbilly, Pseudo German ("Handercloppen stein glockenspiel und gestalt spritz"), Metropolitan ("Pedigree townhome polo stockmarket"), Technobabble, The Matrix, and, of course, Classical Latin.

They Left Their Words in San Francisco

I'm crazy about this map:

It's the cover of the book-review section in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle; it was created by Ian Huebert, "loosely inspired by one of St. Petersburg, Russia, by Vera Evstafieva and Andrew Biliter."

Not only are the colors and calligraphy delightful and the quotations well chosen, but you can identify many of the locations from their corresponding quotes: The Golden Gate Park quotation fills a GGP-shaped space; Robert Hass's Tenderloin quotation occupies the Tenderloin portion of the map.

I got a laugh out of this sniffy observation, right about where the bridge's south tower would be: "The new Golden Gate Bridge, that ugly reminder that beauty was going down before utilitarianism." No one reads the author, Gertrude Atherton, these days (although her husband's family estate became the town of Atherton, near Palo Alto); the Golden Gate Bridge, however, seems to have passed the test of history. But Atherton's comment belongs on the map because it's echt San Francisco: The city may appear liberal to outsiders, but in matters architectural it's downright Tory. Every single addition to the skyline, from the Transamerica Pyramid to the recent DeYoung Museum redesign (which I adore), has been met with gnashing of teeth and predictions of doom by the self-appointed guardians of the architectural status quo.

As for the map itself, I was sure the Chronicle would be selling a high-quality poster-size print of it. But no! The accompanying article says only this: "We encourage you to get out some tape or tacks and pretty up that bare wall or window with this map." Seriously? Hang a sheet of newsprint on a wall with tape or tacks? That's just cheesy. And it's dumb of the Chron—which is hemorrhaging money—to pass up a revenue opportunity like this one.

I left a comment to that effect online, and encourage you to do so, too (although site registration is a nuisance). Meanwhile, I checked out the website of artist Ian Huebert. He's not selling posters, either, but maybe (if he's retained copyright) he could be persuaded to. And lookee here! Not only does he live in Oakland, he's practically a neighbor of mine. Yoo-hoo, Mr. Huebert! I'd even stroll  over and pick up a print from you.

UPDATE: Just got an email from the Chronicle's book editor, John McMurtrie: "We hope to offer a high-quality print of the map soon. I recently tried to put something together with the business folks here—while doing a few other things in this one-man department!—and I'll pursue it again soon. When a poster is available, I'll make a note of it in the Books section."

___

Typography trivia: Huebert's rendering of the map title reminded me of the logo of Francis Ford Coppola's City Magazine, which flourished briefly in the late 1970s. 

Love the diamond-shaped dot over the i.

By the way, the proper shorthand for San Francisco is "The City." Locals never, ever say "San Fran." Or, perish the thought, "Frisco."