Fritinancy

“The Right to Choose”

In the nearly four decades since the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade decriminalized abortion in the United States, “right to life” and “right to choose” have become shorthand for the opposing sides of the abortion debate. In her new book, Before Roe v. Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling, Linda Greenhouse reveals some of the little-known events that preceded the decision, including the discussions that led to those slogans. Here’s an excerpt from Greenhouse’s interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air” earlier this week in which she explains how “right to choose” became associated with the decriminalization movement:

Jimmye Kimmey was a young woman who was executive director of an organization called the Association for the Study of Abortion (ASA), which was one of the early reform groups and was migrating in the early 1970s from a position of reforming the existing abortion laws to the outright repeal of existing abortion laws, and she wrote a memorandum framing the issue of how the pro-repeal position should be described: “Right to life is short, catchy, composed of monosyllabic words — an important consideration in English. We need something comparable. Right to choose would seem to do the job. And ... choice has to do with action, and it's action that we're concerned with.”

Listen to the complete interview with Linda Greenhouse.

Choose and choice are also popular words in advertising. Read my post about what choosiness means in the marketplace.

On Visual Thesaurus: More Ranting About “Lay Flat”

In my latest Visual Thesaurus column, published today, I continue flaying “lay”—as in “Lay Flat Collar T-Shirts” from Hanes. You may recall that I launched this rant last week here on Fritinancy; in today’s column, I provide some historical examples of grammar-flouting ads. The full column is available to subscribers only (so subscribe already!); here’s an excerpt:

For examples of real outrage over grammar-defying slogans ... we need to go back to the Mad Men era. In 1954, the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company introduced the Winston brand with the slogan "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should," setting off a cultural skirmish, if not an actual war. Like, not as? Horrors! The poet Ogden Nash published a verse in The New Yorker that included the line "Like goes Madison Avenue, like goes the nation." Walter Cronkite, then the anchor of The Morning Show on CBS, took a principled stand, refusing to read such illiteracy on the air. An announcer filled in for him. (This was in the days when broadcast journalists routinely read ads as well as news, so Cronkite's principles were not exactly unsullied.)

Naturally, the uproar only increased public awareness of the new brand. Within months, according to Malcolm Gladwell's account in The Tipping Point, Winston vaulted to second place in the American market; by 1966—still using the "like a cigarette should" slogan—it had become the country's bestselling brand. Before retiring the slogan in 1972, Winston ran ads whose copy defiantly asked, "What do you want, good grammar or good taste?" The final nail in the coffin, so to speak, had come in 1961, when Merriam-Webster accepted "like" as a conjunction in its Third International Dictionary—and used the Winston slogan as an example. (For this and other sins, the New York Times called the dictionary "bolshevik.")

Read the full column here.

Word of the Week: Chesty

Chesty: Boastful, proud, self-assertive; having one’s chest thrust out as a sign of self-importance. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies this usage U.S. slang; the Random House Dictionary of American Slang cites 1899 as the year the word first appeared in print, in George Ade’s Fables in Slang and A.H. Lewis’s Sandburrs.

I confess that this definition of chesty was unknown to me until quite recently. (Is it a regionalism, perhaps? Neither of my lexicographical sources says so.) Previously, I’d associated chesty with this lady and others of her ilk:

Welcome to the Wayback

Can’t afford a summer vacation? Why not take a cruise back in time, to when technology was more thrilling and much, much more complex.

Hot Under the Collar

I’m writing a longer piece about Hanes Lay Flat Collar T-Shirts for the Visual Thesaurus, but I have too much surplus crankiness not to preview my thesis here.

Let’s start with an email promotion starring Michael Jordan that appeared last week in inboxes around the country, including that of my brother Michael, who forwarded it to me:

 

 

“Lay Flat Collar Tees”? I am shuddering as I type those words. Why? Because:

1. A hen lays eggs. A collar lies flat. Unless we’re using the past tense: “Yesterday, my collar lay flat. Today, alas, it lies crumpled in the corner.”

2. Compound adjectives take hyphens. If you must (really? must you?), it’s “Lay-Flat Collar.” (In some places on the Hanes website, it even appears as “Layflat Collar.” That noise you hear? It’s my convulsive whimpering.)

3. It’s a T-shirt, and T-shirts by definition don’t have collars! They have necklines. Here, take a look: “T-shirt: A short-sleeved, collarless undershirt” (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition; emphasis added). 

In years gone by, I would not be bleating my complaints in lonely isolation; egregious errors such as these would have brought out a horde of outraged self-appointed grammar enforcers. But standards have sunk so low—yes, I said “have sunk,” not “have sank,” because that’s how I roll—that I’ve been hard pressed to find even a peep of protest. Oh, all right, one peep: in a Hanes commercial that mocks a kindly gentleman who dares to suggest that “lie” is preferable to “lay” in this context.

Here’s the best/worst part:

See the first sentence? “A collar that lies flat.” Yes, apparently some heroic copywriter at Hanes couldn’t bear the shame and found a way to insert the correct language into the guarantee. Give that person a raise!

I mean, really. Even a dog can learn the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs.

Cartoon by Harry Bliss.

Elderhostel’s Long and Winding Road

It’s tough enough to rename a 35-year-old organization once. To rename it twice in less than a year? Pass the smelling salts.

Yet that’s the painful fate that befell Elderhostel, the Boston-based travel organization for adults. Founded in 1975 and inspired by European youth hostels, Elderhostel originally offered its educational travel programs—often based on college campuses whose dorms were empty during vacations—to anyone over 60. In the 1990s, the minimum age dropped to 55. Then, in October 2009, Elderhostel made a radical announcement: Henceforth, its programs would be open to anyone over the age of 21. And those programs would be called “Exploritas,” a blend of “explore” and “veritas,” Latin for “truth.”

But save your breath on the virtues or deficits of Exploritas, because as of June 15, 2010, it’s kaput.

 

Vendr, Meet Vendder

Here’s Vendr, an application that allows you to turn any website into an online store.

And here's Vendder, which . . . um . . . allows you to turn any website into an online store.

Yes, their names are pronounced identically. No, they are not related. (Vendder is based in Portugal; Vendr doesn’t disclose its earthly whereabouts.)

How did this happen? I’ll hazard a guess: In each case, the name-development process went no further than (1) the not-so-brilliant insight that “vendor” was a key concept and (2) the securing of an available domain.

I asked trademark lawyer Jessica Stone Levy, who writes the Beauty Marks blog, for her professional opinion of this mess. Her response:

It’s an excellent example of (1) why a professional search can be really helpful (e.g., I would never think of doubling the “D” in an online search); and (2) why it helps to have a trademark lawyer tell you “hey, that’s descriptive.” 

For the uninitiated: In trademark law, “descriptive” is a Bad Thing, almost as bad as “generic.” Good names are suggestive, fanciful, or arbitrary.

So, Vendr and Vendder: How's that word-of-mouth thing working for you?

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P.S. There’s also a site called Vendr.tv, but it doesn’t turn websites into online stores—it covers the world of street-food vendors.

Word of the Week: Fracking

Fracking: Shorthand for hydraulic fracturing, a method of obtaining natural gas by injecting millions of gallons of water and chemicals deep underground, creating small cracks in hard rock that allow gas to escape. The practice is controversial because some private landowners claim it has ruined their water wells—and worse.

From a May 27, 2009, story on NPR’s “Morning Edition”: 

Steve Harris . . . lives on 14 acres south of Dallas. Shortly after a driller fracked a nearby well, he and his neighbors noticed a change in water pressure.

“When you’d flush the toilet — in the back where the bowl is — water would shoot out the top of the bowl,” says Harris.

When he took a shower, there was a foul odor, and the water left rashes on his grandson’s skin. His horses stopped drinking from their trough, and there was an oily film on top of the water.

Filmmaker Josh Fox traveled around the country to see how fracking has affected communities and homeowners. His documentary Gasland, which won a special jury prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, premieres on HBO tonight.

Terry Gross interviewed Fox on “Fresh Air” recently. From the interview:

[S]ome homeowners he spoke to noticed that their water had been discolored or was starting to bubble. And in some communities, people were able to light the water coming out of their faucets on fire — because chemicals from the natural gas drilling process had seeped into the water.

“I did it myself,” he says. “That’s one of the most dramatic and spectacular things in the film. It just turns your whole world upside down when you can turn the faucet on and stick a cigarette lighter under it and you get this explosion of flame.”

Listen to the “Fresh Air” interview with Josh Fox.

Watch a trailer for Gasland.

Frack has another meaning for fans of Battlestar Galactica: It’s an expletive used in place of “fuck.”

At IKEA stores, a Fräck is a shaving mirror (“fräck” means “bold” or “audacious” in Swedish; more about IKEA’s nomenclature here).

Unrelated but interesting: fracket (from “frat” + “jacket”), a jacket worn by a young woman to a frat party in the expectation of it being ruined.

Oh Say, Kin You See?

In the beginning, back in 2007, there was Amazon’s Kindle. A mildly controversial name—burning books? really?—but not on account of its first syllable.

Turns out, though, that more kindred were on the horizon.

In May of this year, Microsoft introduced its new mobile phone, the Kin. (Or as the official communications put it, the KIN.*)

And just this week, also from Microsoft, comes Kinect, an Xbox 360 peripheral which Gizmodo calls “a webcam on steroids that plugs into the console's USB port that looks like it belongs with a PS3.” The name (Gizmodo again) is meant to suggest “connect” and “kinetic.” It’s “horribly confusing,” writes Gizmodo’s Mark Wilson, “to those of us who played Nike’s Kinetic.”

Can you say “kinsiderable kinsumer kinfusion”?

Words and names starting with K have a certain allure, going back to Kodak and Special K and continuing through 21st-century baby-naming trends. (See my 2007 post, “If Any Letter Defines Modern American Name Style, ‘K’ Is It.”) And kin has its own inherent power: It’s a very old word (cyn in Old English) that originally meant family, race, kind, or nature. It’s unrelated except orthographically to kinetic, which comes from Greek kinein, “to move.”

But Microsoft’s Kin isn’t connected (sorry) to Kinect, and neither Microsoft product has any kinship (sorry again) with the Kindle.

A more paranoid observer than I might suspect a kinspiracy. As my grandmothers would have said, kinehora.

UPDATE, July 1: The Microsoft Kin is dead.

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* What exactly is up with all these faux acronyms? (Mockronyms?) Yesterday I told you about the CODA. Today it’s the KIN. Will everyone PLEASE STOP SHOUTING?

Thanks to Mike Pope for the link to Gizmodo's article about Kinect.

Names in the News: Coda

If you live in California, by the end of 2010 you may be able to buy the Coda sedan, the new all-electric car from Coda Automotive. The company is based in Santa Monica; the chassis, a modified Mitsubishi, is from China, as is its lithium-ion battery, although Coda is hoping to build a new battery plant in Ohio (with a little help from the U.S. government).

I recognized “coda” from musical terminology: it’s the closing passage of a movement or composition. (The source is the Italian word for “tail.”) But I couldn’t get from there to “forward-thinking,” “innovation,” and “transforming the traditional car sales and service model.” Nor did I understand the all-caps spelling in the logo and throughout the website. Is CODA an acronym? For what?

I found an answer, sort of, on the AutoBlogGreen site, which posted a video from Coda (or CODA). There, the definition of “coda” is given as “a musical phrase that brings a piece to an end so a new one can begin.” And, the voiceover continues, “that is just what this car can do: usher in the electric car era.”

I’m still not convinced. When I see “coda,” I hear “The End.” Period. Unless I’m faking a New Jersey accent, in which case I’m really confused. Da Coda or Dakota?

And I’m still baffled by the acronym-like spelling, which only the company uses. Everyone in the media seems to be ignoring it.

In other respects, Coda fits squarely into what’s becoming a predictable naming convention for electric vehicles. So far we’ve seen the Chevy Volt, the Nissan Leaf, and—from Canada—the ZENN, which stands for Zero Emission No Noise. They’re all four-letter, one-syllable names*. Perhaps their brevity is meant to represent the short driving range of the cars.

I give other elements of the Coda verbal brand a B-. The Coda website is, for the most part a clear and effective blend of technical explanation and social conscience along with some clever wordplay such as “End Dependence Day” and “100% Fuel Deficient.” (But “Flip gas prices the bird” strikes my ear as both awkward and immature.) I saw some lazy writing, too, such as an overdependence on “actually,” which comes across as defensive. (“Actually, the CODA's 90-120-mile range will satisfy 94% of typical daily driving routines”; “Actually, about 35% of the components used in the CODA are manufactured in the U.S.”) The blog appears to have been delegated to a junior copywriter or intern (a sadly typical state of affairs for corporate blogs); its tone is simultaneously rambling and breathless: “Join CODA this Saturday in standing up for and supporting what we like to call ‘End Dependence Day,’ a day when we are no longer dependent on foreign oil and are free from all of the environmental degradation that it causes.”

In comments, perhaps you could suggest a suitable acronym for CODA.

To the ER, stat! We have a Coda Blue!

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* Commenter Q Pheever correctly points out that Coda is a two-syllable name.