For a 107-year-old company beset by falling revenue, retail chain J.C. Penney is pursuing an admirably aggressive and forward-thinking strategy. It has more than 1,000 stores, its website is the largest in the United States, and in July it opened its first-ever Manhattan store, to cheersand sneers. Its Sephora stores-within-stores, introduced in 2006, bring a sophisticated range of cosmetics to mid-market shoppers.
But I have to wonder where the strategy was when Penney named one of its private-label brands a.n.a.
According to the website and the ads, a.n.a. stands for "a new approach." But "ana" has another meaning known to many girls and women (including, I'd venture to say, a lot of women in fashion and retail): It's slang for the eating disorder anorexia nervosa. On the sickest end of the anorexia spectrum is the self-described pro-ana movement, often personified as a girl/woman named Ana. (The counterpart among bulimics is "pro-mia," personified as Mia.)
The coincidence, if that's what it is, was picked up by Consumerist, which quoted a reader: "This seems to be an interesting choice name for a new clothing campaign, especially since the term is still widely unknown except for those directly involved with anorexia & other eating disorders."
Then there's the commenter who wrote:
The 12-year-old who lives inside my brain understands and chortles at the accidental anorexia connection, but is tantalized more by the opportunity to scrawl a letter "L" in Sharpie beside all of the incidences of "a.n.a." that will appear on the store signage. I'm not proud.
"A Passion for Excellence." "A Passion for Innovation." "A Passion for Performance." "A Passion for"—I kid you not—"the Business of Accounting."
There's a passion surplus out there in corporate America, and it's not a healthy sign. I write about the overused P-word in a new guest post at Duets Blog. Just for fun, I've included a 15-question passion-slogan quiz. If you get more than two correct answers, I'd love to hear about it.
If there is one word I’m rapidly growing tired of, it’s passion. Not the sex and love type, but the workplace kind. Lately, it seems, I keep hearing career counselors advising the unemployed to identify and develop their passion. Then they need to turn that passion into paid work and presto! They’re now in a career they love.
I know I’m being somewhat flippant, but I do wonder if passion is being oversold. Are we falling into a trap of believing that our work, and indeed, our lives, should always be fascinating and all-consuming? Are we somehow lacking if we’re bored at times or buried under routine tasks or failing to challenge ourselves at every turn?
I can see it now: "A Moderate Enthusiasm for Scrap Metal."
(If you're new around here, you may want to read my original passion post, "Our Passion Is Your Problem," which I wrote back in 2006.)
The American language lost two influential figures this month, one widely known among the reading public and the other known mostly to students of corporate America.
The passing on September 26 of William Safire, the Nixon speechwriter turned New York Times columnist, was promptly and thoroughly reported, as the deaths of media figures generally are. The Times obituary, by veteran reporter Robert McFadden (no mean wordslinger himself), included this vivid snapshot:
He was hardly the image of a button-down Times man: The shoes needed a
shine, the gray hair a trim. Back in the days of suits, his jacket was
rumpled, the shirt collar open, the tie askew. He was tall but bent — a
man walking into the wind. He slouched and banged a keyboard, talked as
fast as any newyawka and looked a bit gloomy, like a man with a
toothache coming on.
Safire was not, as McFadden reports, "a talented linguist"; he wasn't a linguist at all, but rather an enthusiastic amateur with a zest for word play and a lively interest in language. Of Safire's long-running On Language column, McFadden wrote:
There were columns on blogosphere blargon, tarnation-heck euphemisms, dastardly subjunctives and even Barack and Michelle Obama’s
fist bumps. And there were Safire “rules for writers”: Remember to
never split an infinitive. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing
metaphors. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. Avoid clichés
like the plague. And don’t overuse exclamation marks!!
Although genuine linguists loved to criticize Safire (see Mr. Verb, Wishydig, and Language Hat), I think most would agree with their colleague Benjamin Zimmer that Safire "will be remembered fondly for his openness, humanity, and thoughtfulness."
I was a regular Safire reader, but I'd never heard of Edward Gelsthorpe, who died September 12, until I read his obituary. But I certainly know his work for companies like Bristol-Meyers, Ocean Spray, and Hunt-Wesson. You probably do, too. Here's one example from the Times obituary:
Mr. Gelsthorpe, a salesman turned marketer, was known for his ability
to sniff out consumer desires and get new products into stores quickly.
At Bristol-Meyers, for example, when an amateur inventor walked into
the company’s Manhattan headquarters proposing that deodorant be
applied like ink from a ballpoint pen, he bought her idea on the spot;
Ban, introduced in 1955, became one of the company’s most successful
toiletry products.
The Times obit doesn't mention it, but Gelsthorpe was also a pioneer of what's now called corporate social responsibility. In the early 1970s, while he was president of Hunt-Wesson, he launched a number of programs that were well ahead of their time, including a partnership with Ralphs Grocery Company in Southern California that helped poorer customers get the most food value from their limited budgets. He was also an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War.
For language mavens and branding folks, however, Gelsthorpe's biggest contributions were Cran-Apple* (a juice blend invented to sell cranberries year round instead of only at Thanksgiving) and Manwich (Sloppy Joe sauce in a can).
The introduction of Ocean Spray's Cran-Apple in 1964 represented the first time cran- detached itself semantically from cranberry, paving the way for Cran-Grape, Cran-Raspberry, Cran-Pomegranate, and Crantini. Linguists eventually took notice of this phenomenon and dubbed it "cranberry morpheme," which got shortened to "cran-morph." In 2006, Benjamin Zimmer wrote about cran-morphs in Language Log:
The segment cran-
in cranberry is opaque,
though it looks like it's a modifier for the transparent morpheme -berry. Indeed, cranberrywas only ever fully
transparent in the Low German dialects from which the term was
borrowed, where it was kraanbereor 'crane-berry.' Since English underwent the Great Vowel Shift, the
semantic connection between the cognate forms cran- and crane has been lost. But the
opacity of cran- has allowed for
a reanalysis of the morpheme to "stand for" cranberry in new compounds like cran-grape and cran-raspberry. Such cran-morphing
has yielded many productive suffixes in the 20th century: -burger, -(o)holic, -(o)rama, -(a)thon, -(o)mat, -(o)nomics, -gate, etc. (In the case of -burger, the new morpheme quickly
became lexicalized as the standalone burger.)
As for Manwich, introduced in 1969 by Hunt-Wesson, it's both a cran-morph—-wich standing in for sandwich—and possibly the ur-man-word. Without Manwich, would we have mandles, manbags, mancession, Man Glaze, or manscaping? I suspect not.
The classic Manwich slogan, by the way, remains “A sandwich is a sandwich, but a Manwich is a meal.” I love this Manwich commercial:
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* I was amused to notice that the Times's auto-link for the "Apple" in Cran-Apple goes to "more information about Apple Inc."
Gubbins: Fragments (originally of fish); odds and ends; gadgets.
Gubbins is an old word—it made its print debut in 1553—but it's brand new to me. I discovered it over the weekend in the fine blog of John McGarvey, a copywriter in Reading, England. And how could I fail to take note when he used it in this context:
I really rate Fritinancy, Nancy Friedman's blog about naming, writing and other related gubbins.
Gubbins, a plural noun that takes either a singular or plural verb, is rarely seen in the United States. It isn't included in the American Heritage Dictionary (4th edition); my other American dictionary, the unabridged Webster's Third, gives its use as "British" or "British dialect." The only American citation for gubbins in the online Oxford English Dictionary is this one:
1944Amer. Speech XIX. 280 A gubbins is used to describe almost any part of the equipment of a plane, with about the same meaning as gadget.
I can't help wondering whether that usage was a World War II borrowing from the Royal Air Force.
Gubbins is a variant of an obsolete word, gobbon ("a portion, slice, gobbet"), which came into English from Old French gobon, which is related to gob (a mouthful, lump, or clot). It's one of many fanciful terms in English for "unspecified thing."1 From the WordNet entry for gubbins:
The OED gives two additional definitions for gubbins: "a contemptuous name formerly given to the inhabitants of a district near Brent Tor on the edge of Dartmoor, who are said to have been absolute savages" and "a fool, a duffer."
I'm pretty sure John McGarvey's meaning was the first, "thingamabob" one. Thanks for the mention and the link, John, and thanks for introducing me to gubbins!
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1 The term in linguistics for placeholder words like these is kadigan.
2. Does global warming need a porn name? A New Scientist blog wonders whether a sexier appellation would "provoke a ... passionate response from the apathetic masses." Apparently "global burning" is popular with Christian groups. (Via Jon Carroll.)
3. Speaking of smut, Isabella Rossellini has produced Green Porno, a series of short films about animals' reproductive habits. Watch here, on the Sundance Channel site. Then get yourself a new name from the Green Porno name generator. I'm Linda Larvae!
4. I'm probably the last person in the Bay Area to learn that there's a pitcher for the San Francisco Giants named Merkin Valdez. I realize he was born in the Dominican Republic, but still: couldn't someone have told his parents what "merkin" means? (Hint: It doesn't mean this.)
Even though I'm not officially in the punctuation-advice game—I refer seekers to Grammar Girl—I can't resist joining in today's celebration of National Punctuation Day. Here's a quartet of items about one of my favorite puncutation marks, the semicolon, that have the added advantage of also being about brands, design, and marketing communications.
1. Encore Careers, which helps baby boomers make the switch from midlife work to "encore careers," uses a semicolon to elegant effect in its logo:
The website's home page reinforces the concept with a headline:
Here's how the organization's newsletter explains it ("What's Up with That Semicolon?"):
Between Then and Now is a semicolon, the pause that represents the
transition, the time to rest, reflect and retool for a new stage of
life and work. The new Encore.org is focused on that transition.
2. Encore isn't the first brand to use the semicolon creatively. Wit, the play by Margaret Edson that won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1999, was published in book form with this cover:
On the cover of the published book of the play, the use of a semicolon in place of the letter i gives W;t
as one representation of the play's title. In the context of the play,
the semicolon refers to the recurring theme of the use of a semicolon
versus a comma in one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets.
3. In "Learning to Love the Semicolon," Visual Thesaurus Executive Producer Ben Zimmer documents
some recent "rumblings of appreciation for the semicolon," from New
York to Paris. I love the New York subway sign that correctly employs the semicolon in its admonition to newspaper
discarders: "Please put it in a trash can; that's good news for
everyone."
I also have some sad semicolon news to report. According to a Hubspot study published earlier this week and reported in Fast Company, there are "nine scientifically proven ways to get retweeted [have your message forwarded to a new set of followers] on Twitter." Using a semicolon is not one of them; indeed, Fast Company summarizes this finding as "Semicolon = Satan." Hubspot's viral marketing scientist,* Dan Zarrella, goes so far as to call semicolons "the only unretweetable punctuation mark."
Of course, there's more to life—and communication—than Twitter. (Hat tip: Steve Silberman. Via, um, Twitter.)
A disclosure: I've never read Dan Brown's best-selling novels—Angels and Demons, The Da Vinci Code. Nor have I seen the movie adaptations. But that hasn't stopped me from enjoying the creative snarkfest that greeted the release last week of Brown's latest potboiler, The Lost Symbol. For example:
2. Create your own Dan Brown sequel with Slate's interactive generator: "Plug in a city and a sect, and our computer will do the rest." The sect menu includes Scientologists, Shriners, Skull and Bones, and the Sierra Club (among many others).
3. Sam Anderson of New York Magazine has set up the Vulture Reading Room as a discussion forum for The Lost Symbol, but don't go there looking for earnest analysis or giddy fan mail. Anderson has posted a "cringingly funny" parody (says Language Log) that begins: "New York Magazine book critic Sam Anderson closed his heavily marked-up copy of The Lost Symbol with a sudden sense of dread." And it just gets better. Keep coming back for updates; there's already an excellent contribution from linguist Geoffrey Pullum—excuse me, renowned linguist Geoffrey Pullum—and more persons of renown are standing in the on-deck circle.
4. The Telegraph (UK) selects 20 of the worst Dan Brown sentences from all five of his published novels. Commenters suggest many, many more. Most would qualify for consideration in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. One of my favorites, from The Da Vinci Code, Chapter 5: "Only those with a keen eye would
notice his 14-karat gold bishop's ring with purple amethyst, large diamonds,
and hand-tooled mitre-crozier appliqué."The Telegraph: "A keen eye indeed."
5. Then there's this sentence from The Lost Symbol: "The thirty-four-year-old initiate gazed down at the human skull cradled in his palms." Steven Poole, who writes the excellent Unspeak blog, uses those 16 words to illuminate the murky secrets at the throbbing heart of Brownian prose:
The author then types on with some description of a big room, but it
is no shame for us to admit that his best work is already accomplished:
the concept of an initiate holding a human skull (hollow like a bowl)
filled with bloodred wine and cradled in his palms is a kind of chorus that insists on being heard again, and it is not long before the reader is thus pleasured:
The initiate had been told every room in this building
held a secret, and yet he knew no room held deeper secrets than the
gigantic chamber in which he was currently kneeling with a skull
cradled in his palms.
Down at the bottom of his post about "devices with capabilities duplicated to some degree by the iPhone," Jason Kottke appends this footnote:
You've got to wonder when Apple is going to change the name of the
iPhone. The phone part of the device increasingly seems like an
afterthought, not the main attraction. The main benefit of the device
is that it does everything. How do you choose a name for the device
that has everything? Hell if I know. But as far as the timing goes, I'd
guess that the name change will happen with next year's introduction of
the new model. The current progression of names -- iPhone, iPhone 3G,
iPhone 3GS -- has nowhere else to go (iPhone 3GS Plus isn't Apple's
style).
I've thought from the outset that Apple missed an opportunity with the iPhone name, which sounds like a brand extension of the iPod rather than a breakthrough. But that's often what you end up with when you do all your name development in house.
Jury-rig: To assemble for temporary service; to improvise.
Jury-rig was originally a nautical term meaning "to improvise the rigging on a ship." A related term, jury-mast, refers to a temporary mast that replaces one that has been broken or blown away; its first recorded appearance in print was in Captain John Smith's A Description of New England (1616). In both cases, the jury has nothing to do with a jury of one's peers or with the legal system generally; although its origin is uncertain, it most likely comes from a different Latin root, adjutare ("to aid"), via Old French ajurie.
Jury-rig is sometimes seen, erroneously, as jerry-rig, by association with jerry-built, a much more recent word. (The Oxford English Dictionary says it first appeared in print in 1869.) Jerry-built means "built of substandard or insufficient materials"—that is, shoddy.1 The jerry- in jerry-built is believed to come from the male nickname Jerry, possibly by association with some long-forgotten Jerry the Bad Builder.
During World War I Jerry acquired a new meaning: it was one of many nicknames for a German soldier (and it was sometimes spelled Gerry). The containers German soldiers used for carrying water or gasoline came to be called jerry cans by their British adversaries.
Jerry has a long list of additional meanings, including a machine for shearing cloth, a noise made by printers, an abbreviation for jerry-shop (from Tom-and-Jerry shop, "a low ale-house," according to the OED), and (chiefly in Australia and New Zealand), "to understand or realize."
P.S. I am now using the online OED here in my home office—free!—thanks to my new San Francisco Public Library card. Any California resident can sign up for a card at any SFPL branch and get instant access to the OED and dozens of other databases. I can't think of a better use of my tax dollars.
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1 Shoddy, like the jerry in jerry can, has a wartime provenance, at least in its current sense. It was originally a noun meaning "wool adulterated with cheap fibers"; it became an adjective during the U.S. Civil War, when war profiteers were labeled "shoddy millionaires."
Seven links in honor of September (from septimus, meaning "seventh"):
1. If you're a fan of global football (soccer), you may know the teams NAC Breda, Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata, and Sampdoria. But do you know what those names mean? Even if you don't follow soccer, this article from the Guardian (UK) is fascinating. (Hat tip: Lance Knobel.)
2. If Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations were published today, it would be titled Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them—am I right? Check out other contemporary retitlings at Your Monkey Called, and be sure to read the comments. The post got picked up by Kottke.org, where commenters submitted a slew of new suggestions. (Then: Infinite Jest. Now: Epic LOLZ.)
3. Syntactic ambiguity ("The man saw the boy with the binoculars"), independence of syntax ("Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"), lexical ambiguity ("Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo) and other linguistic example sentences, in English and 18 other languages. (Via @thatwhichmatter.)
4. News Dots, from Slate, is a brilliant interactive map of how every story in the news is related to every other story. Updated daily. (Via @poniewozik.)
7. Finally, tomorrow represents a rare confluence: Rosh Hashanah and Talk Like a Pirate Day. I couldn't find a glossary of Yiddish or Hebrew pirate-talk, so here are the next-best things:
