Fritinancy

Nicely Named: Weightless Books

I learned about Weightless Books through Brian White, who publishes the new fiction magazine Fireside. (You may recall that I wrote about Fireside when Brian was seeking Kickstarter backing for Issue #1. He’s now raising money for Issue #2 and beyond.) If you didn’t get in on the original Kickstarter frenzy and still want to read Fireside #1, you can order it from Weightless, which sells DRM-free, non-encrypted publications in PDF, epub, mobi, and .lit formats. That means you can read them on any device. Lots of small, independent publishers are in the Weightless e-stacks, and you’re in particular luck if you favor the romance, fantasy, and science-fiction genres, which are well represented. Weightless also carries Fairy Tale Review, a very worthy little journal to which I once subscribed the old-fashioned way.

Weightless Books appears to be based in Massachusetts. (No mailing address is given; for “location,” their Twitter profile gives “The Aether.”) It was launched in 2010 by two self-described enthusiasts, Gavin J. Grant and Michael J. DeLuca. Both men are published fiction writers as well.

I love Weightless’s business model and its support for small presses, and I really like the Weightless name, which of course suggests the bits-and-bytes nature of the product. I also like that it’s a homophone of waitless—a more interesting way of saying “instant download.” I smiled to see the administrivia (About, FAQ, Contact) under a wry heading, “Slightly Weighty.”

My only quibble concerns Weightless’s tagline, (e)Books That Don’t Weigh You Down. That parenthesis at the beginning looks clumsy, and I’d prefer that the tag didn’t repeat “weigh” and “books” from the name. The negative phrasing isn’t ideal, either. I’d have encouraged Gavin and Michael to explore other words—say, “light,” “reader” (referring to both the person and the device),” and “speed.” Good Reads at Light Speed—something like that.

Yes, that’s how much I admire Weightless Books: I’m giving away an idea. It may never happen again!

Speaking Truth About Power

I was surprised, as many regular New Yorker readers were, to see a long essay by Joan Acocella, “The Language Wars,” in the magazine’s May 14 issue. Acocella is the New Yorker’s long-time dance critic; I hadn’t known she was also a language maven. Yet there she was, using a new book by Henry Hitchings, The Language Wars: A History of Proper English, as an excuse to disparage language descriptivists—that is to say, pretty much all contemporary linguists and lexicographers—as flame-throwing anarchists who are also, paradoxically, elitists. (Or as the New Yorker prefers it, élitists.) One of the descriptivists she singled out, Steven Pinker, wrote a stinging response that has been published in the current issue.*

But apparently that wasn’t enough merde-stirring for the New Yorker. Yesterday, the magazine’s Page-Turner blog published a post by Ryan Bloom with the finger-wagging title “Inescapably, You’re Judged by Your Language.” After a pass at talking about appropriate register and dialect (“Know thy audience, know thy friends”), Bloom cuts to the chase. “Why should we bother to learn prescriptive English—the grade-school rules—if it isn’t our natural dialect?” he asks, rhetorically. Because:

Repugnant as it may be, the simple answer is that we need to learn prescriptive English because that’s the way the people in power communicate. As far as daily survival is concerned, it doesn’t matter whether the origins of this linguistic power structure are racist, classist, or élitist, or whether they’re based on the whims of dead white males. This is how the system works right now, today, and in order to best get the attention of those in power, to begin to effect change, we must be able to use their dialect. We must know their rules.

I’m neither a linguist nor a lexicographer, so I’m not qualified to talk about descriptivism and prescriptivism with any authority.** But I am qualified to tell Ryan Bloom that if he thinks “prescriptive English” is “the way the people in power communicate,” he and I are living on different planets. Maybe “prescriptive English” is how the powerful people at the New Yorker speak and write. But as far as I can tell from my sorties into other corridors of power, it sure ain’t how “the system works right now.”

You want to know how “people in power”—company presidents, board chairmen, politicians, and other members of the .01 percent—communicate? I’ll tell you. They say and write things like “between you and I” and “please circle back to Fred and myself.” They write “alot” and “alright.” They “hearken back.” They use comma splices. They confuse your and you’re, rein and reign. They’ve never met a Business Concept that didn’t merit Promotion through Capitalization. They smiled benignly upon the 43rd president of the United States—a former person of power—when he publicly said misunderestimate and Grecians. They didn’t see what the fuss was all about.

Need more evidence? Listen to Ursula M. Burns, the CEO and chairman of Xerox, in a recent interview with NPR:

What I found there was an organization that accepted me for whom I was.

Xerox ranks #127 in the Fortune 500. Ms. Burns has a master’s degree in engineering from Columbia. I’d say she is one of those “people in power” Ryan Bloom is talking about. And yet she used whom incorrectly (and quite emphatically) in the interview. I don’t know why. Maybe she once learned a “rule” about whom following prepositions (as it does in “for whom the bell tolls”). Maybe, like many people in and out of power, she thinks whom just sounds ritzier than plain old who. She’s doing it wrong, but who’s going to tell her?

I say all this not to shame, blame, or point with alarm. (OK, just a little.) I’m just saying that Ryan Bloom has been misinformed. To all appearances, knowledge of proper “prescriptivist” grammar is not a prerequisite for survival at Xerox. Or, like it or not, at most other companies. Other things matter more: enthusiasm, connections, the right degree from the right university, the willingness to work nights and weekends. “Correct” language? That’s for pedants and peevers, not for American go-getters and success-seekers.

I do maintain that there are good reasons—clarity and consistency foremost among them—for mastering some rules of language usage. But the notion that we plebes need to speak and write “correctly” so as to impress the higher-ups is simply nonsensical. The rich and powerful may have more money and political clout, but when it comes to “correct” speech and writing they’re as clueless and error-prone as everyone else.

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*Someone else wrote a completely bonkers letter that bemoaned usage “horrors” such as “Did you finish your homework yet?” and claimed that “a locution like ‘exact same’” is “indicative of the depth to which American English has sunk.” I kid you not. (One Language Log commenter suggested that the letter was an example of Poe’s Law, which states that without signals like emoticons, it’s difficult to tell whether extremism on the Internet is sincere or satirical.)

**The linguists at Language Log have done their usual excellent job analyzing the current brouhaha: see Mark Liberman (here and here) on the Acocella story and Ben Zimmer on Bloom’s blog post. See also Jessica Love’s essay on “what the New Yorker got wrong” in The American Scholar. (Update: Read Steven Pinker’s response to Acocella, “False Fronts in the Language Wars: Why New Yorker Writers and Others Keep Pushing Bogus Controversies,”  published May 31 in Slate.)

Cigar Men

Cigar-store Indians—those once-ubiquitous carved statues that advertised tobacco shops—began disappearing from U.S. sidewalks more than 50 years ago. But on my ramblings around San Francisco I’ve taken note of their 21st-century folk-art equivalent: cigar men. Not men with cigars: cigar-shaped men. They’re slightly surreal and completely wonderful.

Here’s a studious-looking specimen in front of International House of Wine (no website), in the theater district at 395 Geary Street:

 

 

There’s a Turkish-stereotype (or Shriner-stereotype) cigar man in front of Dean’s Fine Cigars at 715 Market Street.

 

 

And on the other side of the door there’s an endangered cigar-store Indian gazing skyward.

 

I think he’s saying, “Oy vey—it’s come to this?” On behalf of all European-American usurpers, I apologize.

I couldn’t help noticing that the skinny yet muscular arms of the fez-wearing cigar bear a strong resemblance to those of International House of Wine’s cigar man. The same artist, perhaps?

There’s a clue on the base of the Dean’s sign:

It turns out that Back to the Drawing Board has done a lot of inventive advertising art in San Francisco and Grass Valley. Until I checked out his (her? their?) website, I hadn’t realized that the non-cigar sidewalk sign in front of Creative Marketing Concepts, at 572 Market Street, came from Back to the Drawing Board.

 

Sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar. It’s a fountain pen!

The cigar men seem to have replaced a more realistic genre of street advertising, as seen in this photo I took in 2009 on Third Street near SFMOMA.

 

 

Here’s his weird yet worthy replacement, in front of Zain’s Liquor:

Well, helloooo, Mr. Disco Collar with the soulful eyes!

Are these artifacts unique to San Francisco, or do other cities have them, too?

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For other examples of folk-art advertising signs, see my post about muffler men.

Word of the Week: Rampture

Rampture: The traffic congestion that’s expected to ensue after the closing of Wilshire Boulevard on- and offramps to (the) northbound I-405 on Los Angeles’s Westside. Rampture is a humorous blend of ramp and rapture; in certain Christian belief systems (the) rapture represents the “carrying away” of believers after Jesus’ return to Earth.

Some background: Over the coming year, all eight Wilshire ramps will be replaced as part of the $1 billion I-405 Sepulveda Pass Improvement Project. Last year, work on the project required the temporary shutdown of 11 miles of freeway, an event that gave rise to another religiously themed coinage, Carmageddon. (The work went smoothly, and the predicted apocalypse failed to materialize.)

This year’s ramp closings are a much bigger deal, according to most sources. Here’s the lede from a May 11 post, “The Rampture on the 405 is Real and It Starts June 22,” on Curbed LA:

The Westside and Valley are just about to prove how far they'll go for a carpool lane on the northbound 405. LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky's blog announced today that the Rampture ramp closures will commence June 22, and they will continue to inflict pain on the Wilshire Boulevard access to the 405 over the next year.

Yaroslavsky does not use “Rampture” in his discussions of the closures. (His being Jewish may or may not be a reason.) He prefers the more secular, rock-’n’-roll-tinged “Ramp Jam.”

UCLA Today, a generally even-toned publication that covers faculty and staff news, did use “Rampture” in the headline of a May 18 story about the ramp demolition, which is taking place in the university’s neighborhood. The article quoted Bruce Taylor, a UCLA professor in urban planning and director of the Institute for Transportation Studies:

“It would be easier if we could just shut everything down,” Taylor said. “Instead, we have to do this while we’re still moving 300,000 vehicles through there a day. ... There are going to be incredible delays.”

Dave Karwaski, UCLA’s senior associate director of transportation, told UCLA Today: “It’s a good time to take a vacation.”

You can follow the progress of the Sepulveda Pass work via Los Angeles County’s dedicated Twitter feed, @I_405.

A New Look for Wordworking

Big changes over at my business website, Wordworking: new design, new content, easier navigation. I’ve added a section on what to expect during the naming process, and I’ve created a handy guide to some of my most popular blog posts.

Big thanks go to ace designer Mark Landkamer of Landkamer Partners; super-smart, super-fast programmer Jay Cornell; and nonpareil copyeditor Elissa Rabellino. Hire them for your own projects!

And as long as I’m promoting myself, I hope you’ll vote for  Fritinancy in the Top Language Professional Blog 2012 contest! Voting ends at midnight, German time, on Monday, May 28.

Let's Have Another-er

My post earlier this week about Hipmunk’s “funner-er” ad prompted a couple of readers to contribute other examples of super-comparative coinages in advertising.

From HildebrandBurke, a new Twitter friend, I learned about KFC Australia’s recent “Goodest Get Together” promotion, an extension of the international “So Good” slogan. The agency, Ogilvy, went a little nuts inventing new words for this explanatory video:

 

 

“You simply take a good thing, emgooden it, and voilà—you’ve made it gooderer, as in ‘That’s the gooderest thing I’ve ever tasted!’”

Yeah, it’s pretty silly*, but even sillier (sillierest?) is the utter absence of brand referents. No food, no restaurants, no happy customers—what’s the deal? And why should I care?

Here in the U.S., reader Jenne reported seeing a store promotion that used the slogan “Make it creamier-er-er.” “Sadly,” Jenne wrote, “this explosion of ‘er’ did not make me remember what the product was.”

It was Kraft Natural Shredded Cheese.  

 

Now, I understand that advertisers are constantly looking for new ways to say “superlative.” And I certainly don’t have a problem with wordplay and word invention. But I’m tired of the copycatting. When Android used “funner-er” back in 2008, it got attention. Then, in 2010, a bunch of companies hopped on the bandwagon: BlackBerry used “closer-er,” Captain Morgan used “delicious-er,” and Old Spice coined “fresherer” and “freshershist” [sic!]. Last year Maker’s Mark tried to sell us on “Maker’s-er” and United Airlines flew “worldwider.” Now Hipmunk is recycling “funner-er.”

It’s getting, shall we say, tedious-er.

Sticking an -er or an -est on an adjective doesn’t tell me you’re creative. It’s no longer a way to stand out from the competition. All it says is that you’re too lazy to do some truly original thinking about what your brand means.

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* I give partial credit to “emgooden,” but it’s not as good as  “embiggen,” whose coinage is usually attributed to “Simpsons” writer Dan Greaney, who used it in a 1996 episode. In fact, the first citation for “embiggen” appeared in 1884.

More Campaign Lingo 2012

Part 2 of my lexicon of presidential-campaign buzzwords—guillotine to super PAC—was published today on the Visual Thesaurus. You’ll have to subscribe to read it (and Part 1), and of course I hope you will. Meanwhile, here’s an outtake from the column, cut to keep the list to an even dozen:

Meh. The monosyllabic expression of disappointment has been used for the Republican contest in general and especially for candidate Romney, who has failed to generate much enthusiasm among voters. Punning on the candidate’s name, reporters and humorists started referring to “Meh Romney.” (There’s even a Tumblr blog where you can download a Meh Romney poster.) Meh was popularized by a 1995 episode of “The Simpsons” (“Lisa’s Wedding”), but Visual Thesaurus executive producer Ben Zimmer has traced it further back to a Yiddish source.

Read the rest of Campaign Lingo 2012: Part 2.

Say Hi, Boo!

Britain’s Yell Group, which publishes Yellow Pages directories but prefers to call itself “a leading provider of digital services within the emerging local eMarketplace for consumers and SMEs”—aren’t you glad you asked?—will henceforth be known as Hibu.

 

 

The name was developed by global branding giant Landor after a five-month exploration. What does it mean? Nothing.

Here’s how the Telegraph reported the news:

Mike Pocock, chief executive, said the company needed to find a new name because it was “viewed as a dinosaur”, but admitted that hibu was “just a word” with no real meaning.

“Don’t read anything into it...It doesn’t have any pure meaning behind it,” he said. “It needed to be short, easy to pronounce and to sound edgy and innovative. It doesn’t mean a lot by itself, but if you turn the clock back, neither did Apple [sic] and Google or Yahoo!”

Or, say, Hulu.

As Yell Group, the company had a clever if vestigial linguistic connection to “Yellow.” It also had a lot of debt. It undertook the rebranding, Pocock told the Evening Standard, because “Yell had low awareness online, especially among those aged under 35.”

Hibu—the company prefers to spell it with all lower-case letters, but they aren’t the boss of me—is pronounced “high-boo.” Despite the don’t-read-anything-into-it directive, the marketing department has labored mightily to do exactly the opposite. This is from the Our New Brand page of the corporate website:

What’s the thinking behind the brand identity?
In addition to being consumer oriented and a symbol in its own right, we wanted our identity to tell a story. We have developed a new positioning for the organisation – ‘connecting communities’. Communities are built on the connections people make and people are connected at the heart of the hibu logo. The identity utilises typography with soft shouldered edges like the human body and coloured dots represent the people behind the identity, diversity, connections and conversation. By using bold lower case typography with soft edges we project a human and approachable company.

Aha—dots are people! And here I was reading it as yet another happy smiley umlaut.

UPDATE: Twitter friend Ian Preston notes that in French, hibou (ee-boo) means “owl.”

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Thanks to Benjamin Lukoff of the American Name Society email list for the tip.

Are We Having Funner-er Yet?

Something about this Hipmunk ad seemed familiar to me.

San Francisco Muni bus, May 20, 2012.

Then I remembered: Back in 2008 Google introduced its first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1. The ad for the phone was, as Ben Zimmer wrote for Language Log, “packed with jocular comparative adjectives: smarterer, connecteder, funnerer.” Ben went on:

This isn’t just an homage to Dumb and Dumberer, the even more dim-witted sequel to Dumb and Dumber. Rather, it’s being recognized by many in the techie community as a pointed jab at Apple honcho Steve Jobs, who recently enthused about “the funnest iPod ever.”

Jobs died last year, the iPod Touch website no longer includes a reference to “funnest” (it now says “It has fun written all over it”), and the G1 has evolved into the G2X. But “funner-er” lives on at Hipmunk, the San Francisco startup founded in 2010—a generation removed, in tech years, from that 2008 Android campaign.

You may be wondering about the Hipmunk name. Here’s a story about it from TechCrunch, reproduced verbatim with the usual caveat about TechCrunch’s slack writing and editing:

Like many startups in today’s Silicon Valley*, [co-founder Adam] Goldstein was struggling to find an apropo domain that was topical and more importantly, available. After dangerously flirting with (and even purchasing) domains like BouncePounce.com and Trot.me, Goldstein’s girlfriend** told him to identify a cute mammal that he could build a brand around. Hipmunk fit the bill.

You’ll notice something missing from this origin story: an explanation of how Chipmunk (I presume) became Hipmunk. I gather that Chipmunk.com wasn’t available and (“more importantly”) no one was willing to part with cash for (a) domain negotiations or (b) professional naming services. Or maybe the founders just wanted to emphasize their hipness. A follow-up question from the reporter would have been helpful.

I wrote about another super-comparative coinage—“Maker’s-er,” from Maker’s Mark—in a September 2011 post.

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* Hipmunk is in San Francisco, not Silicon Valley. Different area code, more fog, etc., etc.

** I’m sorry to keep sticking it to TechCrunch, but who was doing the dangerous flirting and purchasing—Goldstein or his girlfriend? Dangling modifiers: use at your own (and your readers’) peril.

Word of the Week: Ganja-preneur

Ganja-preneur: “An American capitalist profiting from the recent pseudo-legalization of marijuana in the U.S. by opening up a dispensary that sells the plant in smokeable form to registered medical marijuana patients.” (Urban Dictionary, Jan. 15, 2010.) Also spelled ganjapreneur.

 

San Francisco Chronicle, May 19, 2012. Headline was changed in the online version.

 

Ganja, a synonym for marijuana, is the English spelling of gānjhā, the Hindi word for “hemp,” which comes from Sanskrit gañjaḥ (“hemp”). According to the OED, ganja first appeared in print in 1800, in a letter from the Duke of Wellington. In recent years it has become a prefix in many slang terms, including ganjacologist, ganjanomics, ganjarrhea, and ganj o’clock. (Thank you, Urban Dictionary!) 

Ganjapreneur T-shirt from Etsy.

 

For many other -preneur blends, including ecopreneur, funpreneur, mommypreneur, and warrior-preneur, see my 2009 post “Enterprising Language.”