Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Mancession

Mancession: A recession that hurts men more than women. Also spelled man-cession. Not to be confused with man session.

From "With Dad Laid Off, Finding Ways to Hold On," New York Times, Aug. 23, 2009:

Losing his job has wounded Mr. Winkler’s self-esteem and strained his 14-year marriage. In the lexicon of the modern recession, he has found himself at the center of the “man-cession,” the downturn that has hit men much harder than women. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the gap in the male-to-female jobless rate is at a record high: 2.4 percent — 10 percent for men and 7.6 percent for women.

Those statistics were published in December 2008, which is when man-cession first appeared in the press. (The trend was noted as early as May 2008.) The popularity of the term has been attributed to Mark J. Perry, a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan who writes a blog called Carpe Diem. On Dec. 5, 2008, Perry called the trend "The Male Recession"; by Dec. 9 he was using "Man-Cession" in a headline; he's used it consistently ever since. However, the term may actually have been coined by Canadian Economics Press*. Perry quoted this paragraph from CEP in his Dec. 9 post:

It's not a recession, it's a man-cession. And the lipstick economy may have only just begun.The U.S. recession has been a catastrophe for men, but merely a downturn for women. According to Friday's payrolls report, eight out of every 10 pink slips in the past year have gone to men.

Mancession sightings multiplied in the spring and summer of 2009, as the employment numbers showed no signs of improvement. "Is this a Man-Cession?" asked California Budget Bites in April. "It's Not Just a Recession. It's a Mancession!" read a headline in The Atlantic in early July; the article quoted Mark Perry extensively and reproduced his charts. The article concluded: "The Great Mancession, as silly as it sounds, could be deeper, and more long lasting, than the Great Recession." On Aug. 10, Gawker called mancession "our favorite new word."

I've been reporting on man- as a combining form in brands and colloquialisms for a couple of years. Go here to read my posts on Man Glaze, ManQuarium, Mansinthe, MANdles, and more.

Chart: Carpe Diem.

___

* No link, because CEP appears to have imploded. Montreal-based media observer Ann Brocklehurst covered the story.

Two Things I Learned This Week

1. The term "socialized medicine" was invented in 1947 by the American Medical Association's public-relations agency.

From the transcript of a "Fresh Air" interview with T.R. Reid, author of the new book The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care:

Harry Truman wanted to provide universal health care in 1947.  The American Medical Association -- the doctors -- hired a PR firm that invented the term "socialized medicine."  Nobody knew what it meant.  But I think the idea was that if you wanted to provide health care to your sick neighbor, you were a commie!  During the Cold War that was a powerful argument!  The amazing thing is that it's still a powerful argument.

2. I've been using "self-deprecating" to mean "disparaging of oneself and one's abilities" for ... well, forever.

But Garner's Modern American Usage, Third Edition, has set me straight. Deprecate, says Garner, means "to disapprove earnestly." The correct word is self-depreciating. Garner writes:

Depreciate, transitively, means "to belittle, disparage"; and intransitively, "to fall in value" (used in reference to assets or investments). The phrase self-deprecating is, literally speaking, a virtual impossibility, except perhaps for those suffering from extreme neuroses. ... Unfortunately, the form self-deprecating—despite its mistaken origins—is now 50 times as common in print as self-depreciating. Speakers of AmE routinely use self-deprecating. However grudgingly, we must accord to it the status of Standard English.

Poll: How Do You Pronounce "Virgance"?

I got an interesting range of comments on my post about Virgance, published earlier today. So just for fun, and because I've never conducted a poll here, I'm inviting you to choose the pronunciation.

If you like, you can also leave a comment below to explain your choice. (Results appear in a new browser window; you'll need to scroll past the ads to see them. If I ever do this again, I promise to find a more user-friendly poll.)

Names in the News: Virgance

Many companies "are turning to short-term 'test periods' as economic instability and high unemployment continue to shape hiring standards," according to a story published in the San Francisco Chronicle last Sunday. One such firm, Virgance, is as interesting for its name as for its hiring practices.

But first, the "in the news" part. Virgance is based in San Francisco; on its website,  it says it's "a company that seeks to promote world-changing activism campaigns using market-based methods that are effective, transparent, profitable, and scalable." According to the Chron story, Virgance requires all new hires to work as hourly contractors for a month before they're hired. Virgance's CEO defends that practice:

"I've had people who are horrible at interviewing but are awesome employees, and people who are great at interviews and horrible employees," said Steve Newcomb, who founded the 15-person company. "So for me this has zero to do with the current economy and 100 percent to do with building a top-notch team."

Virgance's one-month contract program is called "Try before you buy" and requires company staff to vote on the cultural fit and skill set of the employee on trial. The program has existed since the company's founding in 2000. "When you do get an offer at Virgance, it's incredibly empowering because you know that you were unanimously voted in," said Newcomb, 39.

Now: about the name. If you're seeing "Virgance" for the first time, how do you think it's pronounced? And what do you think it means?

The answer: If you assume the second syllable of "Virgance" is pronounced like the last syllable of "elegance," your logic is flawless. And you're wrong.

 

How The Moth Got Its Name

If you live in New York City and enjoy live theater and storytelling, you may have heard of The Moth or attended one of its mainstage shows at The Players Club on Gramercy Park. If you live elsewhere, perhaps you've heard a snippet of a Moth show during a radio broadcast, or caught an infrequent road tour, or bought a "best-of" CD.

And you may have wondered, as I did, how The Moth got its name.

Here's the answer, from TheMoth.org's About Us page:

The Moth, a not-for-profit storytelling organization, was founded in New York in 1997 by poet and novelist George Dawes Green, who wanted to recreate in New York the feeling of sultry summer evenings on his native St. Simon's Island, Georgia, where he and a small circle of friends would gather to spin spellbinding tales on his friend Wanda's porch. ... The screen around Wanda's porch had a hole where moths would flutter in and get trapped in the light. Similarly, George and his friends found that the characters in their best stories would often find themselves drawn to some bright light—of adventure, ambition, knowledge—but then find themselves burned or trapped, leaving them with some essential conflict to face before the story could reach its conclusion. So George and his original group of storytellers called themselves "The Moths". George took the name with him to New York, where he hoped that New Yorkers, too, would find themselves drawn to storytelling as moths to a flame. They did. With no advertising, through sheer word of mouth, every show to date has sold out in 48 hours or less.

Listen to a Studio 360 interview with novelist George Dawes Green, the founder of The Moth. His account of the name's origin begins at about 8:09.

"The Moth" is an example of a name that has succeeded despite an original significance that was private and relatively obscure. (The shortness of the name and the vividness of the moth image certainly help.) The Moth has nurtured the brand through extensions: a MothUP is a "living room satellite Moth"; the annual fundraising event is the Moth Ball. The logo incorporates a moth silhouette and shadowed lettering that reveals itself to be a tagline ("Stories Told") rather than a mirror image.

Feeling Passionate about Excellence

GoodCopyBadCopy, the blog of London agency DAC Creative, has been publishing "Scenes from Corporate Life," a series of original cartoons poking fun at corporate jargon. This one has a familiar ring:

 

Ah yes, our old friend corporate passion! 

More Fritinancy posts about corporate passion here. More Scenes from Corporate Life here. This post, about how a self-described "artistically incompetent" person developed the cartoons, provides interesting background.

And more corporate cartoons at Business Guys on Business Trips, a mordant Monday-morning skewering of creative-department folly.

P.S. Speaking of cartoons, I miss The Red Phone, Mxrk's sardonic political series.

Word of the Week: Diavlog

Diavlog: A video blog, or vlog, in which two people discuss a topic. A portmanteau of dialog, video, and blog. (Blog is itself a truncated portmanteau of web and log.)

Diavlog was coined popularized by Bloggingheads.tv, which was founded by journalists Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus in November 2005. Linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer took note of the coinage in a March 1, 2006, post to the American Dialect Society listserv that included a citation from the Bloggingheads website (note: the Bloggingheads link no longer appears to be active):

After announcing near the outset of this video that in it Mickey and I were experimenting with a format "we call the diavlog" I got around to actually googling "diavlog" and got two hits. One was actually for "dia-vlog" (hyphenated)--a kind of interactive video-editing game that has something in common with our `diavlog' but is a very different kind of thing. (Seems cool, btw.) The other hit led to a discussion in which someone threw out "diavlog" as one of several possible names for some new conversational video genre that was only vaguely described and that, so far as I could tell, hasn't been realized--and that, in any event, seems not to have taken up "diavlog" as its name. I guess we could spell it "diavlogue" and be completely original.

Zimmer added:

The phonotactics of [-vl-] are a bit tricky in English, as I think Mickey Kaus unwittingly illustrated via this metathetical typo in a recent column:

-----

http://www.slate.com/id/2136998

In the "diavolg" about Coulter I declare that Bob's recent NYT op-ed
(the one Coulter was discussing) makes "one very good point" but "went
astray in a couple of places."
-----

Ben Zimmer and his brother, science writer Carl Zimmer, participated in a Bloggingheads diavlog last weekend. The topic was words; the brothers Zimmer took on "the ever-changing number of Eskimo words for snow," the myth of Walter Cronkite's influence on the Swedish language, "the endlessly adaptable FAIL!" and other topics.

Aside: Does anyone besides me perceive something a little diabolical about the look of diavlog?

The Game of the Name

I'm not in the target market for this game—I don't have kids—but I want it anyway, because it would be an excellent addition to my name-development toolkit:

 

From the description:

Imagine if a bakery merged with barber shop. What would you call the new business? Bread Heads?... Cookie Cutters?... How about Shave 'n Cream? Think up these and other creative answers in this hilarious party game where naming is the name of the game. Randomly select two different business cards and then try to come up with a clever name for their unlikely merger. If your name wins the most votes, you're the boss!

Hey, naming is always the name of my game! And I love being the boss! Especially when I control all the votes.

(Thanks to Karen at Verbatim.)

Local Labels

How do you identify yourself geographically? Sometimes it's easy: If you live in New York, you're a New Yorker; if you're from Canada, you're a Canadian. But it isn't always obvious, as Mike Pope points out in a recent blog post. Mike lives in Seattle, which is in King County. He's a Seattleite, he says ("We're not Seattlers ... we just aren't"), and a Washingtonian, but what about the county identification? Kinger? Kingite? Kingean? (I suggested "Kingon," with a nod to Star Trek.)

Coincidentally, I'd just been reading about resident names—the technical term is demonym or gentilic—in Garner's Modern American Usage, Third Edition, newly published by Oxford University Press, which generously sent me a review copy. (I'll have more to say about this marvelous book in a future post.) Editor Bryan Garner uses the term "denizen label" and devotes three and a half pages to the subject. He refers readers to the historian George R. Stewart (1895-1980)¹, who devised seven rules for naming denizens; H.L. Mencken called them "Stewart's Laws for Municipal Onomastics" and they were cited, Garner writes, "in the best up-to-date work on the subject, Paul Dickson's Labels for Locals (1997)." The rules are:

1. If the place name ends in -a or -ia, add -n (Californian).
2. If the name ends in -i or sounded -e, add -an (Hawaiian).
3. If the name ends in -on, add -ian (Oregonian).
4. If the name ends in -y, change the -y to an -i and add -an (Albany --> Albanian).
5. If the name ends in -o, add -an (Chicagoan).
6. If the name ends in a consonant or a silent -e, add either -ite or -er, depending on euphony (agreeableness of sound) (Mainer, New Hampshireite).
7. If the name ends in -polis, change that to -politan (Minneapolitan).

Naturally, there are exceptions: Utah, for example, ends in a consonant, but state residents are called Utahns.

And then it gets really interesting.

• A resident of Las Cruces, New Mexico, is a Crucen.
• A resident of Phoenix, Arizona, is a Phoenician.
• A resident of Independence, Missouri, is an Independent.
• A resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a Cantabridgian, just like his or her counterpart in England.
• Residents of Los Angeles and Taos (New Mexico) are, respectively, Angelenos and Taosenos, following the Spanish formation rule. (Do not use a tilde over the -n, and do not say "Los Angelean"!)

United Kingdom demonyms often follow a distinct set of rules, sometimes based on Latin origins, sometimes not:

• A resident of Norfolk is a North Anglian.
• A resident of Manchester is a Mancunian.
• A resident of Newcastle, England, is a Geordie². But a resident of Newscastle, Australia, is a Novocastrian.
• A resident of Hampshire is a Hantsian.
• A resident of Shropshire is a Salopian.
• A resident of Dundee, Scotland, is a Dundonian.

Elsewhere, a resident of Buenos Aires is a Porteño/a (which originally denoted any person living in any port city); a resident of Lima, Peru, is a Limeño/a; and a resident of Madrid is a Madrileno/a (no tilde over the n). A resident of Cairo (Egypt, not Illinois) is a Cairene. And a resident of Rio de Janeiro is, of course, a Carioca (from an indigenous term meaning "white man's house"; there is no gender inflection).

Oh, and the preferred spelling for a Seattle resident is "Seattlite," not "Seattleite." Oops: my mistake. I misread the entry in Garner. "Seattleite" is preferred.

For more information about double forms (Greek or Grecian? Norse or Norwegian?) see the StateMaster Encyclopedia of Demonyms.

__

¹ This is the same George R. Stewart who wrote the justly famous account of the Donner Party, Ordeal by Hunger. I had nightmares for months after I read that book.

² Read about the derivation of "Geordie" here.

Bothered and Bewildered

Behold the bureaucratically named yet seductively styled Givenchy 593933, a lace-and-leather contrivance with the power to transform shy damsels into stuff-struttin' vixens.

First, however, they must avoid gagging on the Zappos copy:

Bewildering wild beauty! Grasp the reigns of gorgeousness and masterfully maneuver through the macabre with the romantic secrets of this beautifully bewitching sandal by Givenchy™!

Even at the marked-down price of $546.75, I expected better from the formidable House of Givenchy. My complaints: