Fritinancy

The Coffee Question

Cast your eyes upward in the older part of any American city and you're likely to glimpse a relic of advertising history.  Take, for example, a sign I saw earlier this week on the side of a gingerbready Victorian in Old Oakland, near 8th and Washington:

The paint may look fresh (probably thanks to a local preservation effort), but the sign is a relic of a curious ad campaign that made its debut exactly a century ago—a campaign I learned about in an interesting article by Susan Saperstein, "San Francisco Coffee Roasters." 

MJB Coffee was founded in San Francisco in 1899 by Max Brandenstein, whose father had immigrated from Germany during the Gold Rush. Max originally named the company after himself; he changed it when his brothers Mannie, Eddie, and Charlie joined the company. Saperstein writes that the brothers' first coffee brand, called Climax, "was advertised with a woman reclining in bed, smiling and sipping a cup of coffee."

Their next campaign was also suggestive, but in a different way:

Mannie launched a marketing campaign in 1910 with the slogan “MJB Coffee Why?” It began with promotional fans given to people attending a boxing match in Reno, Nevada; later signs were painted all over San Francisco. Mannie’s daughter later revealed the meaning of “Why?”–Mannie said it had no meaning, he just wanted people asking about MJB.

MJB 's "ultramodern coffee parlor" at the 1915 Pan-Pacific International Expo in San Francisco made creative use of the "WHY?" slogan:

(Photo from the San Francisco Chronicle.)

Mannie, Charlie, and Eddie changed their surname to Bransten to avoid anti-German bias during World War I. "This angered Max," Saperstein writes, "but they all reunited after the war."

Swiss conglomerate Nestlé bought MJB in 1985 and sold it 14 years later to Sara Lee. In 2005, Massimo Zanetti Beverage, based in Bologna, Italy, and Portsmouth, Virginia, bought MJB from Sara Lee along with three other coffee brands: Hills Brothers (another old San Francisco company), Chase & Sanborn, and Chock Full O' Nuts.

One of Max Brandenstein's descendants, Rena Bransten, owns the Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco, which represents highly regarded artists such as Ruth Asawa and Ron Nagle.

To see the effects of a hundred years of sun, rain, and fog on a painted ad, see this MJB sign of similar vintage across the bay.

Additional history from this Facebook post. Special thanks to Bay Area journalist and historian Frances Dinkelspiel for helping me make the Rena Bransten connection.

Apple Introduces iPad

And for those heavy info-flow days, the iMaxiPad.

MadTV saw it coming. (Thanks, Diane Fischler!)

Humpday Links

I'm on jury duty this week and up against multiple deadlines, so posting will be less frequent than usual. In my temporary absence, I suggest that you peruse these fine posts by friends, colleagues, and strangers for whom I have the utmost respect:

Just in time for the Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, SherryGrammarian instructs us about loonies, toonies, two-fours, and other features of the Canadian language.

What happens when you blend two overlapping two-word idioms—say, sweet tooth and tooth fairy? You get a sweet tooth fairy, of course. UK actor/marketing guy Graham Hidderley/Burgess (he prefers the slash to the more mundane hyphen) has compiled a slew of the coinages at his blog, The Illustrated Sweet Tooth Fairy. A few of my favorites: pistol whipped cream, unrequited love handles, and—speaking of international sporting events—Olympic torch song. (Via Erin McKean's The Word column in the Boston Globe.)

John McIntyre has a word for the defenders of the no-split-infinitives faux rule, and the word is mumpsimus. It's a word I'm fond of myself.

Here's some sweet news: According to Information Week, Google is naming its Android versions after desserts. In alphabetical order. So far, there's Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, and Froyo (frozen yogurt). No, I don't know what happened to A and B, but I'm definitely looking forward to Zabaglione.  Hey, it's better than Nexus One. (Via On the Button.)

Word of the Week: Flap and Zap

Flap and zap: Slang term for corrective eye surgery that uses a laser to reshape the cornea. In laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis (LASIK), a thin flap of surface tissue is lifted out of the way to allow the cornea to be reshaped ("zapped") with a laser. 

I discovered flap and zap in the quarterly journal American Speech, where it's listed in "Among the New Words," a regular feature contributed by the lexicographer Grant Barrett. (You can also find Grant at Wordnik, Double-Tongued Dictionary, and the radio program A Way With Words. For the Winter 2009 issue Barrett compiled 17 pages of rhyming compounds of the form noun-and-noun or verb-and-verb. He explained:

When trying to make some sense of the large quantity of new words it is possible to record here, it becomes necessary to slice and dice the database, rank and yank its citations, and then see what trends occur.*

The earliest published citation Barrett records for flap and zap is from a July 18, 1994, article in the Charlotte Observer; the LASIK procedure had been introduced about two years earlier, but according to the Observer reporter, flap and zap was already used "commonly" to describe it.

Robert H. Rubman, MD, an eye surgeon in New York City, maintains a website with the domain name FlapAndZap.com.

Other rhyming compounds covered by Barrett in American Speech include cherries and blueberries, chew and screw, chuck and duck, cuff and stuff, and drag and brag.

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* Read Double-Tongued Dictionary citations for sliced and diced and rank and yank. "Slice and dice" is also a move in World of Warcraft (WOW).

Image from Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou (1929), considered to be the first Surrealist film.

Patience Is a Virtue

But not here.

I'm somewhat relieved to see that it's punctuated correctly in the body copy.

(Hat tip: Namer X.)

How Many Errors...

...can you spot in the home-page copy for MovieHD.net?

Welcome to MovieHD.net Here you can watch movies online for free We update our site everyday with new movies, Keep visiting us often, Bookmark us and tell all your friends and family! Enjoy!

Thanks allot, your MovieHD.net administrator...

I count 9 errors in 38 words: a 23.6 percent error rate.

Not So Tasty

Thanks to a generous client who gave me a show pass, I got to spend an hour snacking my way through the fancy-food show in San Francisco yesterday. I'm sorry to report that I didn't see any fabulous names worth sharing, but I did spot this:

Here's a tip: Hire a proofreader before you call the printer. Or just look at a damn map.

Other Countries, Other Oscars

With last Sunday's Golden Globes ceremony, the Hollywood entertainment-award season got off to its official start. Nominations for the 82nd annual Academy Awards—the Oscars—will be announced Feb. 2; the awards ceremony will take place Sunday, March 7. In the meantime, many of the movie craft guilds have already announced their Oscar nominations, and critics have been publishing their best-of-2009 lists.

Well, hooray for Hollywood. What about the rest of the world?

Here's a little quiz to see how much you know about major film awards in countries other than the United States. In each case, the awards are considered "the Oscars of __." (I've omitted the obvious ones like BAFTA.) Match the award with the country. Answers after the jump. Extra credit if you can identify the source of the award's name.

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1. Ariel                                                            a. Germany

2. Blue Ribbon                                             b. Taiwan

3. Bogey                                                          c.  Spain

4. César                                                           d. Romania

5. David                                                           e. Canada

6. FAMAS                                                        f. Pakistan

7. Filmfare                                                      g. Mexico

8. Genie                                                           h. South Korea

9. Golden Horse                                           i.  Israel

10. Gopo                                                          j. India

11. Goya                                                           k. Italy

12. Grand Bell                                                l. Denmark

13. LuxStyle                                                   m. Philippines

14. Nika                                                           n. France

15. Ophir                                                          o. Japan

16. Robert                                                        p. Russia

                                            

For Best Performance by a TV Commercial...

The Super Bowl gets most of the advertising buzz, but last night's Golden Globes featured three ads so good they're worth multiple viewings.

Target, which has created witty, visually inventive commercials for years, outdid itself in a brilliant collaboration with the "dance-illusion" company MOMIX. As art, it's nothing short of stunning, although it's hard to say how effective it will be: no merchandise is depicted. Here's the 60-second version of the spot, with creative backstory and production credits (except for music—can anyone out there identify it?).* If only 5 percent of the ad's creativity carried over into the Target retail environment...

H&R Block, the tax-preparation company, is using "Tax Questions" as its theme this year. The campaign plays out in predictably earnest fashion on the website, but the commercial I saw is a different story: dynamically shot, realistic yet intriguing, funny without being forced. "Is a haircut a business expense?" asks a young man seated in a barber chair who's having his enormous, unruly mop shaved close to his skull. "My son earned four figures last year—does he need to file a return?" another voice asks, over a shot of a kid pushing a lawnmower. The ad is clever, persuasive, and a welcome change from last year's "Grim Reaper" spot. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the new ad online; I'll post a link as soon as it's available.

It's hard enough to turn taxes into entertainment. For a real challenge, consider the U.S. Census. (Yep, it's that time again.) Big props to whoever thought of letting mockumentary director Christopher Guest (Best in Show, A Mighty Wind) inject his deadpan humor into this potentially dreary subject. Guest rounded up a bunch of his regulars, including Ed Begley, Jr., Jennifer Coolidge, and Bob Balaban, for the hilariously spoofy campaign, "A Snapshot of America." (Playing himself in the ad: Gary Resch, group creative director at DraftFCB, the campaign's agency.) There will be five spots in all. Read the AdAge report, which includes video of the first spot; there's also an extended version. The Census Bureau has done a nice job with its website, too.

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* Music composed by Michael Picton of Expansion Team. Thanks to the reader who let me know; it's right there on the page, but I hadn't seen it!

Word of the Week: Buckraker

Buckraker: Someone who uses fame or personal connections to earn a significant amount of money outside his or her regular job. A blend of buck (slang for dollar) and muckraker (popularized in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt).

From "The Great Tea Party Rip-Off,"  Frank Rich's column in the Jan. 17 Week in Review section of the New York Times:

[Republican Party Chairman Michael] Steele is representative of a fascinating but little noted development on the right: the rise of buckrakers who are exploiting the party’s anarchic confusion and divisions to cash in for their own private gain. In this cause, Steele is emulating no one if not Sarah Palin, whose hunger for celebrity and money outstrips even his own.

Word Wizard contributor Ken Greenwald traces the first appearance of buckraker to a January 27, 1986, article by Jacob Weisberg in The New Republic; the full article isn't online, but Greenwald quotes the headline and the relevant passage:

“The buckrakers: Washington journalism enters a new era,’. . . mark February 1985 as the start of the next era. That was when Patrick J. Buchanan went to work at the White House and his financial disclosure statement revealed, to widespread astonishment and envy, that he had made $400,000 as a journalist in 1984. This included $60,000 for his syndicated column, $25,000 for his weekly appearance on ‘The McLaughlin Group,’ $94,000 for Cable News Network's ‘Crossfire,’ $ 81,000 for a radio show, and more than $135,000 for 37 speeches. Welcome to the era of the buckraker.”

Greenwald speculates that Weisberg coined buckraker for the article.

Greenwald comments:

Note: Muckraking involves searching for and exposing misconduct, corruption, scandal, etc. in public life. But it’s the two-piece form of the word muckraking that is important here, not its meaning. So that BUCKRAKING refers to ‘raking in the bucks’ whereas ‘muckraking’ refers to ‘raking in the muck’ (originally in the literal sense and later figuratively).

See Word Wizard and Word Spy for additional citations.