Fritinancy

August Linkfest

A late-summer harvest of idioms, acronyms, neologisms, and hench-words:

"At the drop of a heartbeat." "A bull in a candy shop." "Green behind the ears." They're all odd amalgamations of familiar idioms collected at Conflation, whose editors write:

The purpose of this website is not to provide an inert list of expressions that can be chuckled at and then put aside. We have compiled this collection with the genuine hope that readers will deliberately use conflations in their day-to-day lives. These expressions should be studied and memorized to the point where the reader is comfortable using them in proper context without hesitation or awkwardness. It should be pointed out that conflations are not to be slipped into conversation with the intention of fooling the uninitiated. Conflation is not an inside joke. Any pleasure gained from successful conversational usage should be derived from the knowledge that you are activating the evolution of language toward a vernacular of resistance.

Could be a fun party game, too. (Via ThatWhichMatter, which does not appear to have a website but is well worth following on Twitter if you're interested in language. UPDATE: And which just launched a Tumblr log.)

A different species of neologism is the specialty of Mark Peters, curator of Wordlustitude. Guest-posting at the Oxford University Press blog, Peters writes about the "underrated prefix" hench-, which turns up most famously, but hardly exclusively, in henchman. (The title of the post is "Send in the Hench-poodles!") To wit:

I’ve found uses of henchblob, henchboob, hench-chicken, hench-Cylon, henchdemon, henchgoat, henchidiot, hench-lady-men-partners, hench-monster, henchscum, hench-wench, plus spokeshenchman, sub-sub-henchman, under-henchlings and many others.

Who doesn't love a "hench-wench"? By the way, hench comes from Old English hengest, meaning horse or stallion: a henchman was originally a groom.

Ben Schott, author of the Schott's Miscellanies and occasional contributor to the New York Times op-ed page, writes a Times blog, Schott's Vocab, where he documents new words and phrases. Once a week he hosts a contest in which readers submit their own inventions. Read the results of the most recent competition, to devise "weasel words, euphemisms, dysphemisms and circumlocutions for items in the news."

I recently discovered Beg to Differ, the bright blog produced by Brandvelope Consulting in Ottawa, and couldn't resist subscribing. Two posts sealed the deal: "The 25 Worst Acronyms in the World" (RUMPS? WinCE? MANPADS?) and "25 Meaningless Tag Lines" (Exxon: "We're Exxon.").

Another new discovery, this one via Editrix: Funny Typos, Misspellings, Bad Grammar & Engrish, which delivers the goods, or the bads. Examples: a DeLonghi coffeemaker with a "permanent god filter" and a hand-lettered sign for a "Hugh Sale." Hugh Sale, meet Hugh Reductions.

Speaking of errors, NPR's Page Not Found page transforms a wrong turn into a jolly adventure.  "It's a shame that your page is lost, but at least it's in good company," the page consoles. "Stick around to browse through NPR stories about lost people, places and things that still haven't turned up." Links go to stories about Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa, "Your Luggage," and other missing people and things.

The Estonian language uses lots of umlauts and is related to Finnish and not much else. That was all I knew about Estonian until I found this well-written (in English), gorgeously illustrated Brief Guide to Estonian, which made me want to learn more. Did you know that Estonian has 14 grammatical cases, no grammatical gender, and no articles (definite or indefinite)? Or that there's an Estonian Sign Language, used by about 2,000 people? Just knowing that sort of thing makes me happy.

Word of the Week: Handfasting

Handfasting: A ritual in which the hands of both marriage partners are tied together to symbolize their connection to each other. From Middle English hondfesten, "to betroth." Originally Old Norse handfesta, "to strike a bargain; to pledge." From hond = hand and festa = to fasten, fix, or affirm. Modern English retains this sense of fast in words such as fasten and steadfast.

I witnessed handfasting for the first time at a wedding I attended over the weekend. The program described the ritual this way:

Handfasting is a traditional Celtic wedding ceremony. The term comes from the verb to handfast, which was used in Middle to Early Modern English to make a contract of marriage. The symbolic binding of the hands at the end of the service inspired the terms "bonds of holy matrimony" and "tie the knot." This custom has also been known the world over, through many different periods of history. During the Middle Ages, to be seen in public holding hands was a sign that a couple was exclusive to one another. The handfasting tradition also comes from this time when rings were for the very rich, yet love knew no bounds and a simple cord represented your commitment and love.

A lovely story, to be sure, but because most pre-modern marriages were arranged, the binding would have represented obligation rather than love.

One of the other highlights of the ceremony was the recitation of a delightful epithalamion* (wedding poem) written by spoken-word artist Taylor Mali. The poem, titled "Falling in love is like owning a dog," begins with this stanza:

First of all, it's a big responsibility,
especially in a city like New York.
So think long and hard before deciding on love.
On the other hand, love gives you a sense of security:
when you're walking down the street late at night
and you have a leash on love
ain't no one going to mess with you.
Because crooks and muggers think love is unpredictable.
Who knows what love could do in its own defense?

You can read the entire poem on Taylor Mali's website.

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* The word is sometimes spelled epithalamium.

You Say Ne-vah-da, We Say Nevaaada

Now playing in San Francisco's Montgomery BART station: wall-to-wall Nevada tourism:

 

 

Members of the Blue Man Group kayaking on what appears to be Lake Tahoe.

The images (there are several others) are cleverly conceived and staged. But you know what made me smile? The diacritical mark over the first a in Nevada, signifying a short vowel sound.

Yep, here in the West we rhyme the second syllable of Nevada with dad, not wad. We hear you Easterners trying to be "correct," saying "Ne-vah-da," and we roll our eyes.

(And yes, I know it's "Ne-vah-da" in Spanish. So?)

Plus: You've just gotta love an ad that assumes that average American transit passengers know (a) what a diacritical mark is and (b) what it means.

The campaign was originally created by The Glenn Group (Reno) and adapted for BART by Travel Nevada.

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P.S. See my other posts on BART station domination: Perrier and Pepsi.

NEA's New Slogan

The National Endowment for the Arts has a new director, New York theater producer Rocco Landesman, who received Senate confirmation last week. Landesman has already indicated that his tenure will be different in at least one way from that of his predecessor, poet Dana Gioia. From an interview with Landesman published last Saturday in the New York Times:

The new chairman said he already has a new slogan for his agency: “Art Works.” It’s “something muscular that says, ‘We matter.’ ” The words are meant to highlight both art’s role as an economic driver and the fact that people who work in the arts are themselves a critical part of the economy. ...

“Someone who works in the arts is every bit as gainfully employed as someone who works in an auto plant or a steel mill,” Mr. Landesman said. “We’re going to make the point till people are tired of hearing it.”

As for the former agency slogan, “A Great Nation Deserves Great Art,” he said, “We might as well just apologize right off the bat.”

The old slogan had long been unpopular with some prominent critics. Here's what the Los Angeles Times arts blog, Culture Monster, said about it in May:

Wince. That imperial bit of provincial pomposity has things exactly backward.

Culture Monster proposed, instead: "Great Art Makes a Great Nation."

"Ms. Cosmopolite," the blog written by the executive director of L.A.'s Craft and Folk Art Museum (CAFAM), had this to say in March, in a post titled "If I Ran the NEA":

First, I would do away with the current NEA slogan, “Because a great nation deserves great art.” This line gives me the hives from start to finish and raises many questions. Does a great nation come before great art or the other way around? Based on what criteria does one define greatness? I also don’t get the deserve part. Is there a nation on the planet that doesn’t merit culture? In my mind, the creation of art does not occur in a parallel universe, but is a naturally occurring byproduct of society. Instead of this rather empty line, I would borrow the slogan of a colleague of mine from the Festival of Philippine Arts & Culture that captures my sentiment perfectly: Art=Culture=Community

To my own ear, "Art Works" is the best solution of all. It's succinct, it's positive, it puts "art" in the first position, and it includes an active verb. It plays on artworks, the noun, and has a roll-up-your-sleeves, WPA* flavor that suits the current era of cutbacks and belt tightening.

I'm looking forward to seeing whether Landesman's innovations go beyond slogans. He certainly represents a stylistic change from the mild, conciliatory Gioia, a published poet. In the Times story, a colleague described Landesman as "mercurial," "unpredictable," and "an extraordinarily hardheaded businessman."

He's also a guy who doesn't shrink from making controversial statements on the record:

In American politics generally, [Landesman] added: “The arts are a little bit of a target. The subtext is that it is elitist, left wing, maybe even a little gay.” 

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

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* Works Progress Administration, 1935-1943.

"The Pink Elephant in the Living Room"

From an interview with the actress Jennifer Aniston in the September issue of Elle:

On being labeled a “lonely girl”:"I'm not going to ignore the pink elephant in the living room. It's fine. I can take it. If I'm the emblem for 'this is what it looks like to be the lonely girl getting on with her life,' so be it."

Ms. Aniston colorized the idiom, which is usually stated as "the [color-unspecified] elephant in the room." Its meaning: "an important and obvious topic, which everyone present is aware of, but which isn't discussed, as such discussion is considered to be uncomfortable." (Source: The Phrase Finder.) The room is usually unspecified, too—when used in a business context, the room may be a conference room. The "living room" association was first made in the title of a 1984 book, An Elephant in the Living Room: A Leader's Guide for Helping Children of Alcoholics.

Speaking of alcoholics, "seeing pink elephants" is a euphemism, reportedly coined by none other than Jack London*, for "hallucinating while in a drunken stupor." When the title character in Disney's Dumbo accidentally drinks a bucket of booze, he dreams about "pink elephants on parade."

In the absence of any inside info about her experience with liquid intoxicants, I will venture to guess that Aniston simply conflated the two idioms.

For more celebrity malapropisms, see Celebrity Usage and Celebrity Grammar. Yes, I know that the most recent posts are dated June 2006 and that all three sites are supposed to redirect to Celebrity English, but Celebrity English n'existe pas. And the archives, with their combination of inane celebrity blather and deadpan academic critique, are still fun to read.

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* That post, written by a "Cocktail Shaker & Barware collector, amature [sic] mixologist, cocktail enthusist [sic], and all around lover of good food and drink" in the blog Shaken & Stirred, is a trove of pink elephantiana.

On Beetle-ness and Daffodility

From an article by Carol Kaesuk Yoon in today's New York Times:

Today few people are proficient in the ordering and naming of life. There are the dwindling professional taxonomists, and fast-declining peoples like the Tzeltal Maya of Mexico, among whom a 2-year-old can name more than 30 different plants and whose 4-year-olds can recognize nearly 100. Things were different once. In Linnaeus’s day, it was a matter of aristocratic pride to have a wonderful and wonderfully curated collection of wild organisms, both dead and alive. Darwin (who gained fame first as the world’s foremost barnacle taxonomist) might have expected any dinner-party conversation to turn taxonomic, after an afternoon of beetle-hunting or wildflower study. Most of us claim and enjoy no such expertise.

Happily, changing all this turns out to be easy. Just find an organism, any organism, small, large, gaudy, subtle — anywhere, and they are everywhere — and get a sense of it, its shape, color, size, feel, smell, sound. ... [M]editate, luxuriate in its beetle-ness, its daffodility. Then find a name for it. Learn science’s name, one of countless folk names, or make up your own. To do so is to change everything, including yourself.

(Excerpted from Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science.)

The comments on the article are worth reading, too. Here's one that made me think:

You write "Today few people are proficient in the ordering and naming of life." Yet, I know more than a few kids who can name and characterize scores of dinosaurs. I would be curious as to why this generation is so fascinated with the 65 million year old stuff, instead of what is around them today.

And here's some interesting biographical background on science writer Carol Kaesuk Yoon.

Snacklish, Monte Carlo-ese, and Other Brand Lexicons

My latest Candlepower column for Visual Thesaurus ("We Speak Brandish. Do You?") looks at fanciful brand vocabularies with invented words or whimsical spelling. My inspiration was a new ad campaign for the Monte Carlo resort and casino in Las Vegas, in which French words (and even a couple of English words) are respelled phonetically: TRAY SHEEK, BONE APP A TEAT, DUH BOTCH OR EE.

Brands have been taking liberties with language for decades (quoting myself here):

But it's really in the last decade or so that creative directors have made neologisms and language play a competitive sport. One of the first brands to experiment with phonetics was the California winery Clos du Bois, which in 1996 launched an outdoor ad campaign that helped monolingual Americans with a pronunciation guide to the winery's name: CLO DEW BWAH. ("See voo play" was the follow-up.)

In 2003, the American film director David Lynch, known for his hip, surrealist vision, created "Do You Speak Micra?" a European TV campaign for Nissan's tiny Micra model. A pair of giant blue lips uttered words from the Micra language, all of them awkward portmanteaus: spafe (spontaneous and safe), modtro (modern and retro), simpology (simple and technology).

Read the full column*, which also covers the Sprite "lymon," the Snacklish lingo invented by Snickers, and the fictional disease that proved very, very profitable for one household name. Don't miss the reader comments.

Image via Adland.

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* You'll need a Visual Thesaurus subscription to see the full content. Go for it!

Word of the Week: Name-Checking

Name-Checking: Mentioning someone less famous than oneself. The inverse of name-dropping ("mentioning someone more famous than oneself to enhance one's status"). Also spelled namechecking or name checking.

Kurt Anderson drops name-check into "Pop Culture in the Age of Obama," an essay in the New York Times Book Review, Aug. 9, 2009:

And then there’s Obama the tasteful pop-culture-consuming American, redefining presidential regular-guyness. On his iPod, Obama says, are “probably 30 Dylan songs,” “African dance music,” “Javanese flute music,” Yo-Yo Ma, Howl­in’ Wolf, John Coltrane, Jay-Z, Frank Sinatra and Sheryl Crow. ...  He doesn’t just name-check, but convincingly declaims — he prefers Spider-Man and Batman to Superman because “they have some inner turmoil.”

The Urban Dictionary entry for name-check ("Usually used to describe when some poser is listing bands to try to look cool or when some pretentious guy does the same to show how elite he is") was posted in March 2006. But the term's history is much older than that. Jan Freeman, who blogs at The Word, wrote in October 2006 that name-check originated in Cold War bureaucratese:

As The New York Times described it in 1953, an FBI ``name-check" involved looking for the names of federal job applicants and suspected traitors on lists the bureau compiled by reading ``every issue of The Daily Worker, and other publications regarded as being communistic," and adding the name of anyone mentioned as a speaker or supporter to the government files.

The verb to check is highly flexible; its more than 20 definitions include "to restrain," "to consign" (as in "to check one's bags"), and "to correspond." The check in the 1950s name-check meant "verify" or "investigate." But in the 1970s, the check in name-check mutated to mean something more like "put a check mark next to." The advertising world, Freeman writes, borrowed name-check "to mean an acknowledgment of support or sponsorship." (And not only in the United States: Freeman provides a 1985 citation from the BBC.) By 1987, it was common enough in the music world for the Los Angeles Times to use it without explanation in a review of a James Brown concert: the singer "only managed to name-check himself three times within a 90-minute set."

Freeman summarized:

What niche is name-check filling? For one, it's a nicer sort of name-dropping; unlike the social climber, a name-checker is usually as famous as the checkee, if not more so. It's a muted version of the shout-out, born circa 1990; a passing mention, a tiny tribute, a pufflet. It's a tip of the hat for a generation that, if it weren't for Turner Classic Movies, might not know what a hat tip is.

(See also a recent blog post by linguist Arnold Zwicky,which includes a number of citations from sports and music.)

In my own line of work, name-checking means something else again: "checking a corporate or product name for domain or trademark availability." For the more familiar use of name-checking, see "Top Seven Songs Namechecking Jesus," in the Three Monkeys Online blog: "The devil may have the best tunes, but in at least several top-class songs Jesus gets a mention."

Mastering the Art of Book Titling

Julie & Julia, the movie based on the memoirs of Julia Child and Julie Powell, opened today. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott opened his admiring review with a description not of a cooking scene but of the discussion over the title of Child's landmark cookbook:

It’s not an especially suspenseful moment — pretty much anyone who has cooked an omelet knows what the book is called — but it gives [director Nora] Ephron and the audience a chance to savor the precise nature of Julia Child’s achievement.

The book is “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” — not “How To” or “Made Easy” or “For Dummies,” but “Mastering the Art.” In other words, cooking that omelet is part of a demanding, exalted discipline not to be entered into frivolously or casually. But at the same time: You can do it. It is a matter of technique, of skill, of practice.

The title of Julie Powell's book, based on Powell's attempts to cook every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, strikes a very different note: Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. It's a memoir, not a cookbook, and it's based on Powell's blog, which explains the first-name-basis, just-a-couple-of-gals main title. The numeral-heavy subtitle reflects a contemporary trend: compare Ammon Shea's Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages.

Need help with the title of your own literary classic? I've worked with authors and led workshops on trends and techniques in book titling. Here's something I wrote about one of those techniques; contact me if you want a consultation.

How MySpace Got Its Name

It was recycled.

Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Angwin tells the story in her recently published book, Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America. In 1999, Chris DeWolfe, then 34, was hired as head of marketing by a Los Angeles start-up, XDrive, that "aimed to provide free Internet storage space for consumers to store their backup computer files." DeWolfe soon was overseeing 87 people ("the largest marketing division I've ever had in my life," a turnaround specialist later observed) who instead of doing marketing wrote newsletters that were e-mailed to more than 6.5 million subscribers. But by 2001, XDrive had filed for bankruptcy and DeWolfe was out of a job. He spotted an opportunity:

One of his first e-mail consulting clients was a website called MySpace.com, an XDrive competitor that offered free online storage. MySpace had 7.5 million users and offered slightly more storage space—300 Mb (megabits)—than XDrive, which offered 100 Mb.

The MySpace contract didn't last long. On Sunday evening, June 3, at about eight o'clock, the MySpace website went dark. The company had run out of money, and an attempt to save itself through a merger had failed. During the liquidation process, DeWolfe bought the domain name Myspace.com from his former client for $5,000. He wasn't sure what he would do with it.

It took another two years for DeWolfe and a group of colleagues to find a use for MySpace.com: In August 2003, it became the name of a new social-networking site modeled after Friendster. The business was sold to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in 2005 for almost $1 billion. Until April 2008, when it was overtaken by Facebook, MySpace was the most popular social networking site in the United States. 

Three lessons here:

1. Names can be fungible commodities. In its first incarnation, the "space" in MySpace referred to storage; in its better-known reincarnation, the "space" is what Angwin describes as "a dazzling virtual locker room" that every member can "decorate any way that he or she likes, often with blinking wallpaper, blaring music, streaming videos, and oversized photographs."

2. Recycling isn't only for bottles and cans.

3. Spending money on a domain name can be a very smart move.

As for Angwin's book, it's an enlightening, well-researched investigation of what the author calls "the world's first Hollywood Internet company, a company that is a breed apart from its Silicon Valley brethren." Recommended.

P.S. Read my post about another repurposed company name, doubleTwist.