Fritinancy

Bad Names: The Last Roundup

The last roundup for 2011, that is. 

~*~

Webctor may be the only purportedly English word I’ve ever encountered that contains the consonant sequence B-C-T. That’s because that particular sequence is unpronounceable. Which makes word-of-mouth advertising, or even answering the telephone, rather challenging.

In creating this breathtakingly bad name, someone—or someone’s automated name generator—evidently went no further than “web + doctor.” A similarly shaky command of English is evidenced in the writing. (“WebCTOR.com delivers valuable medical content the needy every day.”) And, in fact, WebCTOR was launched in Poland sometime in 2011.

Any resemblance of the WebCTOR name and logo to an older and better-known medical website is probably entirely intentional.

 

 

Via Amy Reynaldo, who tipped me off to A Little Pregnant’s tweets about WebCTOR (sample).

~*~

You own a flower shop/restaurant/gift “shoppe” in “a sprawling turn-of-the-century home” in Pittsburgh, PA. Naturally, you name your business after a macabre, bestselling 1979 novel (and 1987 movie) about abandoned children and adolescent incest. Welcome to Flowers in the Attic!

 

“The horror begins…”

Hat tip: Coneslayer.

~*~

Rochelle Kopp, who tweets as JapanIntercult, sent me this ad (originally tweeted by Hiroko Tabuchi) for a new brand of milk tea from Kirin, the huge Japanese beverage company.

Let’s pause to admire that gorgeous “g” in the logo. And then let’s collectively drop our jaws at the name. Pungency may sound dandy in Japanese (I honestly have no idea), but its associations in English are less than appetizing. Pungent is a synonym for “biting,” “penetrating,” or “caustic”; its Latin root means “to sting.” Burning rubber is pungent. Milk tea should not be pungent. Indeed, the blogger at Transmissions from Tokyo found the opposite to be the case:

Ironically, the drink is more or less the same as Royal Milk Tea. It's not strong tasting or strong smelling at all. Not in the least! You'd think that someone there at the company would have thought to argue against naming a beverage Pungency for the same reasons I'm mentioning now. Guess not.

~*~

The language barrier is no excuse for Flubit, unless it’s that old separated-by-a-common-language barrier.

FlubIt is a London-based startup that finds discounts “on everything you buy.” The company’s founder apparently thinks “flub” is an invented word, when in fact—sorry to be the bearer of bad news—it’s a synonym for “botch” or “bungle.” Yes, the OED says it’s a US colloquialism, but it’s been around since 1924, for crying out loud. Surely it’s crossed the pond a few times.

But it seems never to have reached the ears of founder Bertie Stephens, who boasted to The Next Web about what a brilliant name he’d picked:

“[T]he name flubit preceded the actual business idea by a couple of years or so,” Stephens said, “and it just stuck with me until I eventually had the right product for it. So rather than putting a name to a product, we put a product to the name. … It was short, people would remember it, and it was a verb which, in my eyes, is hugely important. This meant I could run with the tagline ‘before you buy it, Flubit.’”

And then he said, still on the record:

“Also, it doesn’t have a pre-conceived meaning”, added Stephens. “So we can make it mean what we like – some find it silly, others cool.”

No preconceived meaning for someone who hasn’t consulted a dictionary, that is to say. FlubIt can go stand in the corner with Flubby, the badly named (but beautiful) shoe from Aquatalia. And, Mr. Stephens, the next time your entrepreneurial brain tells you to choose a name because it’s short and “a verb,” please seek professional advice.

Hat tip: Leslie Forman.

~*~

Read all of my Bad Names posts, if you have the stomach for them. Here’s to better names in 2012!

The Curse of Strong Drink

Effen vodka…

 

Effen flavors.

 

…meet FECKiN whiskey.

 

At the Dolphin Swimming and Boating Club, San Francisco.

 

“Effen,” according to a page on the brand’s original website (since deleted), means “smooth” in Dutch. “Feckin,” according to Urban Dictionary, is “a variation of the naughty word, Irishalized.”

Unquestionably a couple of suggestive marks.

Read my 2007 post about Effen. And read about Effen’s 2010 ad campaign, which used heavy-handed double entendres like “Nothing warms me up like Effen by the fire.”

Help Launch a New Fiction Magazine

UPDATE, January 6: Mission accomplished! Thanks to all who contributed.

*

It’s probably never been easy to be a writer of short fiction, but it’s probably never been harder than right now to make a living at it. Brian White wants to fix that. And he needs a little help.

Brian is a copyeditor at the Boston Globe whom I follow on Twitter and on his blog, Talk Wordy to Me. His new project, Fireside, will be a quarterly magazine that publishes fiction of all genres and—here’s the important part—pays its writers a fair rate. (The going rate for fiction, Brian reports, is an appalling 5 cents a word. Fireside will pay 12.5 cents a word, or $500 for a 4,000-word story.)

To launch Fireside—a very appealing name, by the way—Brian has put it up on Kickstarter, which gets the public involved in the funding of creative projects. It’s an all-or-nothing deal: the project must be fully funded or no pledges are redeemed. Brian has set a goal of $6,500, and as of this morning he’d raised about $2,700 toward that amount, mostly in pledges of $25 or less. The deadline is January 6; if the full $6,500 isn’t raised by then, no money will change hands and Fireside may join the ranks of worthy ideas that never got off the ground.

I’d hate to see that happen. And it doesn’t have to, because I have a plan.

On an average day, about 750 regular readers (as opposed to random searchers) visit my blog. Those regular readers most likely come here because they—you—are interested in words and writing and the creative process. That means you’re in the target audience for Fireside. You may even be a fiction writer who’d like to be published in Fireside.

So here’s my idea: If each of you pledges $4 or more each, Brian will meet his goal and Fireside #1 will be on its way to reality. Pledge a little more, and there’s hope for an Issue #2.

As they say on public radio, you can make a pledge right now. Or, if you need a little more persuading, you can keep reading.

You regular readers know that I don’t do this sort of thing very often. I don’t think I’ve ever asked readers to send money anywhere. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I care a lot about this project of Brian’s.

Once upon a time, not all that long ago, almost every popular magazine published at least one short story, and often more than one, in every issue, all year round. And by popular magazines I mean mass-circulation and general interest, not “literary.” F. Scott Fitzgerald published his short stories in The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire; Willa Cather and Kurt Vonnegut wrote fiction for Collier’s Weekly. Tom Wolfe published The Bonfire of the Vanities in 27 installments in Rolling Stone. I grew up reading short stories by less-famous (but compulsively readable) authors in my mother’s copies of Good Housekeeping and Ladies’ Home Journal; later on, I read the young-adult fiction—some of it written by actual young adults—in Seventeen.

Now? Good Housekeeping and Redbook still publish fiction, I’m happy to report, but not Ladies’ Home Journal or O or Real Simple or Wired or Esquire or Vanity Fair. The New Yorker and The Atlantic publish a single short story per issue (except for special all-fiction issues); they’re almost exclusively “literary” stories, which in my experience means they’re often plotless and unfathomable. 

In every medium we’re inundated with information, opinion, and memoir. Fiction, which used to be part of every literate person’s everyday experience, is a threatened species.

Fireside aims to be a modest corrective to this discouraging trend. I’m eager to see what Brian, an excellent editor, can do with it. I’ve already made my pledge. How about you?

Word of the Week: Office Plankton

Office plankton: Low-level office clerks; drones. English translation of a Russian slang term.

Young, formerly apolitical Russian office workers have been galvanized by protests against the Putin government, the New York Times reported on December 24:

On Friday afternoon, Denis Terekhov gathered together his employees for an impromptu staff meeting.

They were workaholics in their 20s — “office plankton,” as they are sometimes called here — punchy from an apocalypse-themed office party, some headed for winter vacations in Egypt and Turkey. But Mr. Terekhov had another order of business. Watch yourself, he told them, if you choose to attend Saturday’s antigovernment protest.…

A mystery has been unfolding here over the past month, and office plankton are in the middle of it. A critical mass of young Russians decided this month that they had the power to alter the course of political events. They organized outside the channels of mainstream politics and took the country’s leadership by surprise, as other crowds have done this year in Israel, India, Spain and the United States.

Plankton are, of course, small or microscopic organisms that drift with the ocean currents—the bottom of the pelagic food chain. The plankton name was bestowed on these organisms in 1887 by a German physiologist, Viktor Hensen, who took it from a Greek word (planktos) that means “wandering, drifting.” (Planet, which means “wanderer,” is related etymologically.) Plankton is the plural form; the singular is plankter. Neither word is related to the 2011 Internet fad planking.

Office Plankton is the title of a series of short animated features originally posted on a Russian website, Toonguru, and uploaded to YouTube. The first episodes appear to have been posted in late 2008. The cartoons feature a chaotic office, a clueless boss, and large helpings of sexism and scatology.

 

The Airing of Grievances

Today is Festivus, the holiday “for the rest of us” made famous by Seinfeld and celebrated since 1997. Of the principal Festivus traditions—which include a bare aluminum pole and Feats of Strength—my favorite, naturally, is the Airing of Grievances. Here, for the third consecutive year, are my grievances, culled from a vast universe of commercial language violations. (Past Grievances: 2009, 2010.)

This, That

A few miscellaneous items for the first full day of (Northern Hemisphere) winter. Tomorrow: Festivus! I’ll present my annual Airing of Grievances.

~ * ~

The Japanese word of the year, announced by the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation on December 12, is kizuna. The word, which means “bonds between people,” was frequently used to express the solidarity and support shown by Japanese people in response to the disastrous earthquake and tsunami in March.

 

(Hat tip: Rochelle Kopp of Japan Intercultural Consulting.)

~ * ~

Every year since 2006, expatriate American linguist Lynne Murphy, who blogs at Separated by a Common Language, has selected two words of the year: the most useful import from American English into British English and the most useful import from British into American. This year, the most useful UK-to-US word is kettling, which happens to be a word I nominated! (You may recall that it was a Fritinancy word of the week in October.) The most useful US-to-UK word is FTW, an abbreviation of “for the win.” And yes, initialisms are words. Be sure to read Lynne’s thoughtful and well-informed defen{s/c}es  of her selections.

~ * ~

Speaking of FTW, I’m flattered and delighted that my blog has been nominated for a Macmillan Dictionary “Love English” award in the blog category. I’m in excellent (read: daunting) competition: Separated by a Common Language, Language Hat, Johnson, Sentence First, Throw Grammar from the Train, Language Log—and several language blogs I’d been unaware of, which is always the most interesting thing, in my opinion, about contests like this one. If you’d like to cast a vote for Fritinancy, I’d be most grateful. There’s also a Best Website category; check out all the links, then vote for Visual Thesaurus.

~*~

A little comic relief: You may recognize Christopher McDonald, David Koechner, Maria Bamford (the crazy Target Christmas lady), and Andre Royo (Bubbles from The Wire) in Funny or Die’s spot-on spoof of campaign commercials. Yes, let’s restore the dignity and the tradition of our Founding Santas!

Via AdFreak.

The Right Words

Who knew that lexicographers had so much fun? Certainly not I. If only someone had told me, I’d have made a sharp detour away from journalism, my chosen (and doomed) profession, and headed straight for the great big tomes in the Reference section, which I actually enjoyed reading a lot more than city council reports and budget-negotiation recaps. With luck, I’d have ended up in a job like Kory Stamper’s: associate editor at Merriam-Webster.

Happily, there is now consolation in the form of Kory’s smart and funny new blog, which she describes as “a journeyman lexicographer’s look at the language as it grows and changes.”

The blog is called Harmless Drudgery—the title comes from Samuel Johnson, whose 1755 dictionary defined a lexicographer as “a harmless drudge.” Here’s a bit of the first post, in which Stamper tells how she became a lexicographer:

You see, I love words. I love all of them, even the nasty bastardized ones—yes, I even have a love/hate thing for “irregardless.” Their histories, who they’ve been with, where they came from, where they are going. Reading is not just an escape or a hobby; it is a compulsion. I am that person you see on the subway who, upon finishing her newspaper or magazine, begins carefully reading all the ads and graffiti on the train and then moves on to the receipts in her pockets.  If I run out of reading material, I start fidgeting like a coke fiend needing a line or ten. Do not come between me and my words.

Pre-Harmless Drudgery, Kory Stamper’s claim to fame(217,044 views!) was her two-minute video about the correct plural of “octopus.”

 

See more “Ask the Editor” videos on the Merriam-Webster YouTube channel. You may also follow Kory Stamper on Twitter.

The Wrong Names

New York Times film critic A.O. Scott is annoyed by one of the names in the new release Carnage, directed by Roman Polanski and based on Yasmina Reza’s four-character comedy of bad manners, The God of Carnage. The film is set in a “comfortable high-rise apartment” in Brooklyn:

I know these people. Why be coy? I am these people. And while these people might well be the parents of a Zachary and an Ethan, the sister of a Zachary would much more plausibly be a Sophie or an Emma than a Courtney. (Courtney? What is this, Beverly Hills? Reality television? Come on!)

My reaction precisely. How can you presume to comment on cultural mores while demonstrating such a tin ear for naming trends?

It’s not as though the filmmakers didn’t have a say in this matter. Reza wrote the play in French, and the characters’ names were Anglicized when it was performed in the US. (I saw it in Los Angeles earlier this year.) For some reason Polanski changed the women’s names again: Veronica (originally Véronique) became Penelope, and Annette (in both French and English-language versions) became Nancy. Huh? Penelope is a very popular baby name right now, but it’s anachronistic for a character in her mid-30s. And Nancy, I regret to say, would be more appropriate, name-trend-wise, for that character’s mother.

I had similar thoughts when I read a review of Daniel Handler’s new young-adult novel, Why We Broke Up. (Handler has also published under the nom de plume Lemony Snicket.) The first-person narrator is a high school junior named Min, a name that sounds right on trend for a girl born in 1993 or 1994. But the other teenage characters are named Ed, Al, and Joan. Really? There may be a few baby Joanies in the US right now, the offspring of besotted Mad Men viewers, but trust me: in the 16- to 18-year-old demographic there are approximately zero Joans. In fact, “Joan” disappeared from baby-name lists toward the end of the 1980s; it hadn’t been really popular since the 1930s. (Don’t take my word for it: check out the Baby Name Voyager.)

Likewise, a hip high school kid in 2011 would more likely be called Alec or Alejandro than “Al”—Al would be his grandfather or great-grandfather—and a boy born in 1993 would more likely be called Eduardo or even Edison than “Ed.” (Edison, which was very popular in the 1910s, has enjoyed a couple of recent dramatic spikes.)

With so much good research about naming trends at our fingertips—once again, I refer you to Baby Name Wizard—why would a playwright, screenwriter, or novelist make such tone-deaf choices?

__

Read my January 2007 post about well-chosen character names.

Word of the Week: Anticipointment

(From the blog archives; originally posted on Dec. 25, 2006.)

Anticipointment: High expectations followed by a letdown. A portmanteau of “anticipation” and “disappointment.”

According to legend, the word was coined in the 1960s by a Los Angeles ad agency that used it as the punchline of a holiday card whose outside read, in paraphrase: “At this time of year, just one word sums up the feeling in all of our hearts.” Now used for any instance of media or technology hype.

(I read the ad-agency story years ago and have been unable to corroborate it. Anyone?)

UPDATE, Dec. 19, 2011: Anticipointment is my favorite invented word of all time, so you can imagine my pleasure at discovering that my 2006 definition has been enshrined in PseudoDictionary. Thank you, Mark Allen, for submitting it! I’m flattered.

In other updating news:

The earliest citation for anticipointment documented by Word Spy is dated June 6, 1988:

When launching a new news anchor, experts offer one golden rule — a don’t. “You should never promise,” says Bob Casazza, vice president for marketing at Washington's WJLA-TV. “Let the audience pass judgment for itself.

“If you try too hard to force a perception through the use of promotion, there may be a backlash.”

Consultant Frank Magid, of Marion, Iowa-based Frank N. Magid Associates, says his company has its own term for it: “Our vice president for research calls it ‘anticipointment.’ Stations have overpromised in introductions to the point that the expectation is never lived up to.”
—Eric Mankin, “A few rules on how to launch a news anchor,” Electronic Media

Radio host Mike Malloy also claims to have invented the word “years ago.” Malloy wrote in May of this year:

Ol’ Harold Camping, the 89-year-old fundamentalist Christian and founder of Family Radio who predicted the apocalypse, said he was “flabbergasted” that he was, indeed, still in this mortal coil.  Many of his followers experienced severe “anticipointment,” especially the ones who burned through their life savings in anticipation of armageddon.

I still think there’s an ad-agency origin story in there somewhere. Help me, Intertubes!

A Seasonal Greeting

“Saturnalia was an ancient Roman festival in honor of the deity Saturn originally held December 17 and later expanded with unofficial festivities through December 23.” – Wikipedia

Thanks to @kbmcgowan for the concept.