Fritinancy

The Fritinancy Giftapalooza!

Wordy, worldly gifts suitable for any wintertide occasion, including Hanukkah (this year: sunset Dec. 1 through sunset Dec. 8).

1. Postcard telegrams. “Designed to resemble cable-service telegrams—complete with class of service designations, an area to fill in the charge amount, and an official-looking office-of-origin stamp (your messages will appear to be sent from Portland, Oregon)—these letterpress-printed cards have an authentically vintage feel.”

Especially nice if you actually reside in Portland, Oregon. From Bas Bleu. Six cards plus envelopes, $16.95.

2. Library candles and scent diffusers. “Pairing favorite quotes with exquisite fragrances, we pay homage to the literary greats.” In Dickens, Whitman, Austen, Thoreau, and Poe. Shown below: the Dickens (a blend of tangerine, juniper, and clove); the quote reads, “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.”

 

From Paddywax (excellent name!). The 60-hour soy candle is $25; the library travel tin is $9.95.

 

3. QWERTY keyboard carryall bag.

I confess I got a little swoony with desire when I saw this whimsical-yet-practical bag at Kate Spade. It’s made of “Italian smooth shiny cowhide” with 14k gold-plated hardware—which I would forgo if it meant reducing the $495 price. On the other hand, if each of you readers chipped in 50 cents . . .

4. OK, by Allan Metcalf.

A whole book about “OK”? Oh, yes. Because as author Allan Metcalf says, “It’s OK the Great: the most successful and influential word ever invented in America.” His recently published book is a dandy gift that enables the reader to win bets (no, “OK” doesn’t derive from Choctaw), learn about American history (Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson figure into the narrative), and gain insights into literary classics (Louisa May Alcott used “okay” in the first edition of Little Women). And there’s brand history, too (I wrote about that angle last month in a post about OK Soda). Bonus gift: an interview with Allan Metcalf on the Oxford University press blog.

Word of the Week: Completist

Completist: Someone who wants to make something, such as a collection of books or records, complete. The OED puts it more strongly: “An obsessive (and often indiscriminate) collector.” And Encyclopedia Dramatica is even more judgmental:

A completist is a fanboy or fangirl that must prove their devotion to a band, television show, movie or comic book by collecting every piece of Chinese made crap sold at Wal-Mart that relates to said media. Symptoms include lining up at midnight to buy a new record, DVD, or toy, constantly searching eBay for imports of the same exact crap from Japan and camping in line for years just so they can get tickets to a show before you. There is a significant overlap between completists and fans of Pokémon and similar franchises, and this is expected given Pokémon's catch phrase “Gotta catch ’em all”.

Completism is sometimes called an “affliction” or a “pathology.”

Completist appeared in the first sentence in an article in last Friday’s New York Times holiday gift guide: “Completists with deep pockets can revel in the 2010 bounty of boxed sets.”

Merriam-Webster online gives 1951 as the date of the first known use of completist, but doesn’t provide a citation. The OED moves the date to 1955, citing an article in the New York Times Book Review: “Perhaps the one point of interest here, even for the Holmesian completist, is the effort in the introduction to identify Watson as Doyle’s secretary, Maj. Alfred Wood.”

“Appreciation Day”? “Gratitudemas”?

Lest we forget, name development has always been a demanding job.

 

Rhymes with Orange

Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow United Statesians! I’ll return to this space next week.

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P.S. In the spirit of Monday’s cherpumple post, here are “10 Awesome Turkey Recipes” from BuzzFeed. “Awe” is not precisely the emotion I experienced upon beholding TurDunkin’ (“turkey brined in Dunkin Donuts coolattas, stuffed with munchkins and served with coffee gravy and mashed hash browns”) or Turbaconduckenriblets (“made of riblets individually wrapped in bacon stuffed with stuffing into a deboned chicken, wrapped in bacon stuffed with stuffing into a deboned duck, wrapped in bacon stuffed with stuffing into a deboned turkey, wrapped in woven bacon strips”). Hat tip: Ben Zimmer.

P.P.S. For a more uplifting take on the traditional Thanksgiving main course, here is Dan Jurafsky of The Language of Food to explain why “a Mexican bird [is] named for a large Eurasian democracy of the eastern Mediterranean.” In other words, why do we call the bird turkey? Hat tip: Lynneguist.

Anatomy Lesson

In the bulk-foods aisle:

Perhaps I can interest you in some balls of the fish to go with those nuts of the corn.

Corn “nuts” are not, of course, nuts; they’re kernels. As for “nuts of the corn,” that’s just Too Much Explanation.

These particular corn nuts represent a semi-genericized trademark. The CornNuts mark, spelled as one camel-case word, was registered to Albert F. Holloway in 1951; Holloway had created the product back in 1936, named it Brown Jug Toasted Corn, and sold it to tavern owners who gave it away to customers in whom the salty snack induced a profitable thirst.*

Corn nuts aren’t particularly hard to make: First you soak whole corn kernels in water for three days to rehydrate them, then you deep-fry and salt them. The secret of Holloway’s CornNuts lay in the corn itself. He had started his business using sweet corn and then discovered Cuzco corn, a Peruvian variety with jumbo kernels. As big as an inch across, these kernels resembled actual nuts, inspiring Holloway to change his company’s name. Eventually, his scientists developed a Cuzco hybrid that could be grown in California. The supersized CornNuts were introduced in 1964; Planters—the nut-nut (as opposed to corn-nut) company—bought the company in the 1990s. After a 2000 merger, Planters and CornNuts became a subsidiary of Kraft Foods.

Read about the Legendary Giant Corn and the Lost Tribe of Stun Nroc, whose members are reportedly known “for their high tolerance for spandex and edgy approach to facial grooming.”

Listen to the infamous CornNuts “Bust a Nut” radio commercial from the 1990s. (“Go to your room and lock the door/’Cause when you try it once you’ll wanna try it some more.”)

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* Curiously, neither Holloway nor any of his corporate heirs seems to have troubled to register the two-word “Corn Nuts” spelling with the USPTO.

Word of the Week: Cherpumple

Cherpumple: A dessert comprising cherry, pumpkin, and apple pies, each baked inside a layer of cake. The word is a portmanteau of cherry, pumpkin, and apple.

 Photo: This Is Why You’re Fat (“Where dreams become heart attacks”).

Cherpumple was invented and named last Thanksgiving by Charles Phoenix, a 47-year-old Los Angeles resident whose website describes him as a “showman, author, humorist” and “ambassador of Americana.” A page devoted to cherpumple describes the creation as the “desert [sic] version of the Turducken”—if you need a definition of the latter, go here—and goes on to explain:

The inspiration for the Cherpumple came from the typical desert [sic] table selection you would find at one of my family’s holiday celebrations. Seems there’s always cherry, pumpkin, and apple pie and a cake that’s a family tradition. It has a layer of spice and a layer of yellow. Since I always want to have a piece of each of the pies and the cake I figured why not make that waaaaaaaay more convenient. So I baked them all together as one and the Cherpumple was born.

There’s a recipe (using frozen and boxed ingredients) and a video on the site, along with suggestions for making a flambé version. As Mr. Phoenix told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, the recipe “puts the kitsch in kitchen.” The entire enterprise can take up to three days, the WSJ reports, “because each component must cool before being baked into another.”

According to the WSJ, other bakers have viewed Mr. Phoenix’s achievement as a challenge. Their variations have included cherberryple (which replaces the pumpkin layer with blueberry pie) and pumpple cake (pumpkin and apple), “which has 1,800 calories in an $8 slice designed to serve four.”

In related culinary portmanteau news (from the archives): Turbaconducken.

What Men Want: Fours and Sevens

Last month, the British publishing company Bauer Media introduced a new weekly magazine for men, Gaz7etta, described online as “the perfect mix of news and style, with a healthy dose of business, politics and sport.” The magazine itself is not online; the 60-page pilot issue was distributed free in department stores and as a supplement within Bauer’s other magazines, including Gaz7etta’s counterpart for women, Grazia.

I’ll get to the odd spelling of Gaz7etta in a minute. But first, a few words about Gaz7etta’s intended readership.

How Tod’s Got Its Name

Diego Della Valle built the Italian luxury brand Tod’s “on the foundations of his family’s cobbler business,” writes Christina Passariello in the October/November WSJ Magazine. In the 1970s, Della Valle created a driving moccasin with a rubber-nubbed sole and named it “Gommino” (“rubber tip” in Italian). He thought the Gommino “would be a perfect fit” for the “new leisure lifestyle” he saw on the streets of New York.

But he needed a name. And it would have to be easy to pronounce around the world. Legend has it that Della Valle picked the name J.P. Tod’s from the Boston phone book, but he says the choice was more studied than that—he spent a month looking at combinations of letters. “It’s a round name, it’s a sound with a friendly character, it’s not rigid,” he says. “It’s like if you choose a note on the piano.” (In 1999, Della Valle dropped the first initials after the brand started to become known as J.P. in the U.S., his brother Andrea says.)

Della Valle introduced the Gommino to the United States in 1979. But, writes Passariello, “he broke fashion’s strict black and brown color code and made the moccasin available in every shade of the rainbow. Soon the Italian shoemaker was selling an Italian interpretation of American style back to the Americans—and doing it better than classic loafer brands like Bass and Cole Haan.”

Tod’s has since expanded into handbags and sunglasses; fans of the brand include Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and Michael Douglas.

Tod’s Script Grande bag, $1,125 at Saks

 

Men’s leather driving moccasin, $425 at Neiman Marcus.

Another tidbit from the WSJ article: Diego Della Valle’s private jet bears the initials “D.D.D.,” which stand for “Dignità, Dovere, Divertimento”—“Dignity, Duty, Fun.”

“That Name Is So Bad, It Feels Like a Scam from Nigeria”

Beginning at 3:31, Helen Hunt, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and other entertainers critique “American Jewish World Service” and its acronym, AJWS.

 

 

For a good cause, to be sure.

Hat tip: Bobbie Altman.

November Linkfest

The New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year, announced yesterday, is refudiate. Runners-up included vuvuzela, bankster, and nom nom. Read all about it. For the curious: my archived posts about NOAD’s words of the year for 2007, 2008, and 2009.

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If you, like me, see red when you find misspellings, errors of fact, and grammatical mistakes in published books, help is at hand. Typoze allows you to report typos online, thereby contributing to “improving the overall quality of published material.” I’ve done it; it’s easy and satisfying. My only question: Where do I report the typos in Typoze’s own web and blog content?

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After 94 years, beloved spokeslegume Mr. Peanut finally, um, speaks. And he sounds a lot like Robert Downey, Jr. (Ad Broad.)

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Rob Beschizza was struck by how the New York Times’s stories about the Iraq War Wikileaks material “could get through such gruesome descriptions — fingers chopped off, chemicals splashed on prisoners — without using the word ‘torture.’” So he created a torture euphemism generator. Why should Times reporters have all the fun? (Via Mark Peters.)

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If you’d lived in Chaucer’s time, you’d have known what sort of work a cautioner, a pannarius, and a tapley did. Find definitions for those and other trade names on this fascinating list. Despite the list’s title, the names are not “Old English”; they’re old, and they’re from the British Isles, but their etymologies are variously French, Latin, German, and Middle English. (Via Kevin Smokler, aka Weegee.)

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The New York Times blog Schott’s Vocab has been performing an invaluable service by reprinting archived entries from American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society. Here, from 1934, is one of my favorities: a glossary of shoe-salesman lingo. A brief excerpt: “The widths of the shoe, A, B, C, D, and E, are called Al, Benny, Charley, Dave, and Eddie. These names are used to conceal the size from the customer.”

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The Gobbledygook Grader reveals how much of your writing (or a colleague’s) is ridden with “gobbledygook, jargon, clichés and over-used, hype-filled words.” Just copy and paste a passage into the window to receive your grade—and tips for improving it.

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“Wants pawn term, dare worsted ladle gull . . .” Surely you know the rest of the “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut” tale, right? Hint: read it aloud, slowly. (Or listen to the recording.) From San Francisco’s wonderful, one-of-a-kind Exploratorium. (Hat tip: Mighty Red Pen and Trochee.)

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How do you pronounce Cthulhu? Linux? Mister Mxyzptlk? To the rescue, from Geekosystem, comes the ultimate geek pronunciation guide. Mister Mxyzptlk, by the way, is not to be confused with the hip New York store Mxyplyzyk, named for the same Superman character but spelled differently and pronounced “mix-ee-pliz-ik.” (Hat tip: Karen.)

Word of the Week: Bechdel Test

Bechdel Test: A method of evaluating the female presence in movies and television. To pass the Bechdel Test, a film or TV show must (a) have at least two women in it, who (b) talk to each other, about (c) something other than men. Also known as the Bechdel Rule, the Bechdel/Wallace Test, and the Mo Movie Measure.

The Bechdel Test is named for feminist cartoonist Alison Bechdel, creator of the comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For”  (1983-2008), who introduced the concept in a 1985 strip titled “The Rule.” Bechdel has said that she stole the idea from a friend, Liz Wallace; the character Mo, as in “Mo Movie Measure,” doesn’t appear in “The Rule”—in fact, she wasn’t introduced until 1987—but the name somehow stuck.

The Bechdel Test does not pretend to determine the cinematic merits of a film. Many excellent movies, from Stalag 17 to Das Boot, have no female characters; some mediocrities (Bring It On Again, 27 Dresses, et al.) pass the test with flying colors but probably aren’t worth a free download.

The TV Tropes Wiki*, an invaluable resource for everything television-related, has this to say about the Bechdel Test:

The test is often misunderstood. The requirements are just what they say they are - it doesn't make any difference if, for instance, the male characters the women talk about are their fathers, sons, platonic friends or mortal enemies rather than romantic partners. Conversely, if a work seems to pass, it doesn't matter if male characters are present when the female characters talk, nor does it matter if the women only talk about stereotypically girly topics like shoe shopping - or even relationships, as long as it's not relationships with men.

A video introduction to the Bechdel Test.

An annotated list of movies listed in chronological order from 1900 to 2011 and rated according to the Bechdel Test.

 

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Mean Girls still from FanPop.

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* I wrote more generally about TV Tropes in a 2007 post.