Fritinancy

December Linkfest

A new language quarterly, aptly called Babel, brings linguistics to a general audience without dumbing down the subject. Published at the University of Huddersfield (UK), the magazine covers “issues relating to many different human languages” – and some non-human ones, including, in the first issue, Venusian. I’m already looking forward to the second issue, which will include an article about “the secret linguistic history of brand names.”

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At Word Routes, Ben Zimmer recaps the year in words and picks his word of the year. (Surprise – it isn’t fiscal cliff.) I published my own list earlier this week.

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Do not ask science-fiction author John Scalzi to write for free. No, really – don’t even think about it.

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In the 1920s, when TV was still in its infancy, retailers used fake television broadcasts to trick customers into entering stores. Smithsonian magazine’s Paleofuture blog explains how it was done. 

Faked TV demonstration from 1926, via Smithsonian.

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From caucus to urbane: the words that spiked each week this year in look-ups at Merriam-Webster online.

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Catalog love: Your L.L. Bean Boyfriend. He’ll “build you a table and then have sex with you on it.” (Via Girls of a Certain Age.)

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From Jen Doll at The Atlantic Wire, the best (worst) typos, mistakes, and correrctions [sic] of 2012.

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Holly Buchanan of Marketing to Women Online picks the  commercials that did the best job of marketing women in 2012. She has strict criteria:

In order to pass The Buchanan Test a commercial must do three things. It must feature women who:

1. Are outside of the home
2. Are in a role other than that of "mother"
3. Are NOT doing yoga

(For comparison, see Bechdel Test.)

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“So it looks like the New Orleans Hornets are going to change their name to become the Pelicans.” A defense of the new team name by Barry Petchesky at Deadspin. (Naughty language advisory.)

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From my favorite info-viz site, Muckety (“Mapping the paths of power and influence”): The Trump Fund for the Gutting of Red Herrings and other think tanks we’d like to see in 2013.

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I grew up in Los Angeles and always wondered why the Ralphs supermarket chain didn’t have an apostrophe in its name. Now, thanks to Los Angeles magazine, I know: the business was founded (in 1873, at Fifth and Hill streets) by George Ralphs.

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“Twitter is a machine for continual self-reinvention”: Matt Haughey on why he loves Twitter and hates Facebook.

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Something to play with while you’re waiting in line to see The Hobbit, which opens in theaters today: the hobbit name generator and the Elvish name generator. (Via @Wordnik.)

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Like it or not, the “fiscal cliff” metaphor is here to stay. Linguist George Lakoff explains why.

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“I sculpt baby names from love, from hatred, from the reality of this hellhole of a world that you’re forcing an innocent life to endure.” Bob Powers, artisanal baby namer, at McSweeney’s. Yes, he jests. Mostly. (Via Karen Wise.)

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Over at The Atlantic, sociology professor Philip Cohen asks: Why don’t parents name their daughters Mary anymore? (Also via Karen Wise.)

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From Copyranter: The best men’s underwear commercial ever.

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According to Helen Sword, author of a column for the New York Times and creator of something called the Writer’sDiet test, a “zombie noun” is any noun (proliferation, formation, indication) that “cannibalizes” a verb. Now linguistics grad student Josef Fruehwald, blogging at Val Systems, delivers an incisive counterpoint. “Ain’t nothing like exploiting the collective dysmorphia of a nation to push your quarter-baked usage decrees,” says he.

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Via the brilliant Maria Popova at Brain Pickings: Alice in Wonderland as a subway map.

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And to all a good night.

The New UC Logo: Let There Be Haters

Because I have no training or experience as a graphic designer, I prefer not to write about visual identities, aka logos, unless there’s a language angle I can cover. That’s why I’ve avoided any comment on the new University of California logo, even though (a) I’m an alumna myself (Berkeley campus) and (b) it is, as you can readily see, a pretty dramatic development.

Old and new logos via Berkeleyside.

But in the weeks since I first learned about the logo redesign, the story has become too huge to ignore. (Even James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic, has weighed in.) And when I realized there was a tiny language angle after all, I decided to add my two cents.

First, some clarification from the university about how the new logo was developed and how it’s being implemented:

The University of California seal isn’t going anywhere. It will continue to grace diplomas and other official UC documents, just as it has for most of the university's long and storied history.

Jason Simon, marketing communications director at UC’s Office of the President, issued that reassurance as debate continued over a small monogram that appears on many of the university's systemwide Web pages, as well as its marketing and communication materials.

“The seal signifies the prestige and tradition of the university itself, and is a treasured part of the UC identity,” Simon said. “There has never been any plan to replace it with the monogram.”

Reassuring, right? Not so fast.

Words of the Year 2012: Fritinancy Edition

Politics and economics made 2012 a target-rich environment for us word-of-the-year trackers. Republican presidential-primary candidate Rick Santorum alone gave us blah, guillotine, snob, and non-faith. (Santorum’s surname has achieved its own scandalous notoriety.) From the Mitt Romney campaign we picked up tithing, retroactively, wazzock, Romneyshambles, and binders. Vice President Joe Biden made malarkey memorable, President Obama spoke sharply of bayonets, and the Republican convention spawned Eastwooding, from actor Clint Eastwood’s surreal dialogue with an empty chair.

Meanwhile, we struggled to remember the fiscal definition of sequestration – not to be confused with jury sequestration – and marveled at all the people looking up socialism and capitalism in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. We shopped for tribal prints and smoking slippers and earnestly practiced chewdaism. We worried about the Rampture and distracted ourselves by GIF-ing compulsively. “YOLO,” we said, shrugging.

But enough runners-up. My list of 14 WOTY nominees follows the jump. I limited my list to U.S. usages, and I adhered to the American Dialect Society’s criteria for selection, which stipulate that nominees be:

• demonstrably new or newly popular in 2012
• widely and/or prominently used in 2012
• indicative or reflective of the popular discourse

In addition, a nominated word can’t be “a peeve or complaint about overuse or misuse.”

In alphabetical order, then:

 

Brand Names of the Year: 2012

My new column for the Visual Thesaurus is an end-of-the-year review of the notable brand names of 2012. My top-ten list includes food brands, consumer-technology brands, a numerical brand, one of those ubiquitous -ly brands, and a back-from-the-nearly-dead toy brand. Access to this column is unrestricted, so go forth and read freely!*

Tomorrow on the blog: my words of the year for 2012. I’ll report my (non-brand) names of the year sometime next week.

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* But wouldn’t a Visual Thesaurus subscription make a swell holiday gift for your favorite linguaphile?

Word of the Week: Swank

Swank: Elegance (noun); fashionable; pretentious (adjective).

Swank has always been classified as slang. It was first documented in 1809 as a verb meaning “to behave ostentatiously, to swagger or strut”; by the middle of the 19th century it was being used as a noun meaning “ostentatious behavior.” The adjective sense – “stylish, classy, posh” – dates from 1913, but swanky in that sense dates from 1842. In the 16th century, a swanky (noun) was “an attractive young fellow.”

The OED says swank “apparently” comes from Middle Low German and Middle Low Dutch words meaning “flexible, supple, slender.” If so, it’s related to some wonderful-sounding words: swancor, swankel, svangr (Old Norse, “thin, lean”), swange (“the flank or groin”), swink (Old English “labor, toil”), and modern German schwang (“to oscillate” and also “to be in vogue”). It may also be related to Middle High German swanken, “to swing,” which would confirm its kinship with swag and swagger.

The US trademark database lists 44 live trademarks for “Swank,” including Swank Daddys (a musician), Hollywood Swank (furniture), and Baby Swank (bibs and accessories). But when I hear “swank,” this is what first comes to mind:

“A fabulous assortment of unusual cuff links…” 1955 Swank ad in the Saturday Evening Post. See it larger here.

Swank, Inc., was founded in 1897 as the Attleboro Manufacturing Company in Attleboro, Massachusetts. The company made jewelry for women only until 1908, when it added a division, Baer & Wilde, to manufacture men’s jewelry. The new division struggled until 1918, when its “Kum-a-Part” cuff button became a huge success. (Yes, Kum-a-Part. For more early-20th-century brand names with “K” spellings, see my August 2011 Visual Thesaurus column.) The company also made dog tags for World War I doughboys.

“Swank” first appeared in a 1927 ad for a men’s collar holder, “but it was almost another decade before it became the corporate name,” according to a detailed company history on FundingUniverse. In the 1960s and 1970s, Swank, Inc., as it was known by then, acquired several other companies, including Countess Mara and Prince Gardner.

 

Swank cufflink ad via Found in Mom’s Basement.

In May 2012, Swank was acquired by Randa Accessories, which owns 75 global brands and has offices in nine countries. The Swank label lives on, along with the gorgeous Art Deco wordmark, although the designs have lost a lot of their former exuberance.

Swank is also the name of a “cocktail and coffee club” in San Francisco’s swanky Pacific Heights.

And Swank is also, of course, a surname.

Read more about swanky at The Word Detective.

Something Special for the Ladies

Women, do you feel locked out of the consumer playground? When you go shopping, do you say to yourself, “Golly, I sure wish they made a car/Chardonnay/chocolate bar/pen just for women?”

Nope, didn’t think so. But that hasn’t stopped manufacturers from trying.

One recent example: the Honda Fit She’s [sic]. How do we know this car is for women? Well, there’s a heart instead of an apostrophe in “She’s.” It’s available in pink or “eyeliner brown.” And it comes with a PlasmaCluster A/C system “that pumps out specially treated air that improves your skin.”

 

Via BoingBoing.

So far, the She’s is – I can’t believe I just typed “She’s is” –available only in Japan. But you can buy lady-wine right now, right here in the U.S.

 

Be. wines at my local supermarket, Piedmont Grocery.

Be. wines were introduced earlier this year by Beringer, the oldest continuously operating winery in the Napa Valley (established 1875).

 

“Get in the mood.” Be. point-of-purchase poster at Piedmont Grocery.

The brand is targeted at “eighties babies*,” according to Beverage Underground, an industry blog. A Beringer spokesman, Stephen Brauer, explains:

“Be. is about inspiring Millennial women to open up to the exciting world of wine without taking it too seriously. … This launch of this brand is particularly important to us because the women behind its inception are among the most curious and influential in the industry right now. We want to make sure they feel inspired to explore and are rewarded with a small but exciting indulgence.”

The name is a truncation of Beringer; I’m guessing that’s why it’s punctuated with a period. It also also works as an imperative, and it’s easily extended into other brand language: Pinot Grigio is called Be.Bright; Chardonnay is Be.Fresh. The store locator, I regret to inform, is labeled “Find your Be. Spot.”

I’ll give them this: Be. is a whole lot classier than most of the other names in the women’s-wine category – names like Happy Bitch, MommyJuice, and Mommy’s Time Out. (For more in-depth coverage, see Jessica Stone Levy’s posts on “drinking with my ladybrain.”)

Need a snack with your vino, girlfriend? Cadbury (now part of Mondelēz International!) has just the thing: Crispello chocolate, “three curved crispy wafer shells, each one filled with a smooth creamy center, dipped in Cadbury milk chocolate,” according to a press release. It’s “a lighter way to eat chocolate,” says Cadbury, which is why it’s OK for XX types.

Because, as we know, women need a lot of coaxing to get over our well-documented hormone-linked aversion to chocolate. 

Just one little question, Cadbury: If it’s for gals, shouldn’t it be Crispella?

For more on “needlessly gender-specific products,” see this Businessweek slide show, which includes the now-notorious Bic for Her pen.

And for something a little more high-toned, read “Hey, Lady!” a conversation between Ben Yagoda and Maria Yagoda.

Let's let the Flight of the Conchords have the last word on the L-word.

 

 

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* Blonde ones, from the looks of it.

Naming the Bookstore

Writer Ann Patchett lives in Nashville, which between December 2010 and May 2011 lost both of its bookstores. You read that right: Two years ago Nashville, Tennessee, a city with a population of almost 600,000, had only two bookstores. And then it had none.

Patchett – the author of eight books, including the novels Bel Canto and State of Wonder – thought someone should do something about it. Someone else, of course: “I wanted to go into retail about as much as I wanted to go into the Army.” Then she met Karen Hayes, a sales rep for Random House.

Patchett describes that meeting in “The Bookstore Strikes Back,” in the December issue of The Atlantic:

Karen pulled a business proposal out of her bag and handed it to me.

“It’s called Parnassus Books,” she said.

I looked at the word, which struck me as hard to spell and harder to remember. I shook my head. “I don’t like it,” I said. How many people would know what it meant? (In Greek mythology, Mount Parnassus is the home of literature, learning, music, and, I think, a few other valuable things.) I had wanted a store called Independent People, after the great Halldór Laxness novel about Iceland and sheep, or perhaps Red Bird Books, as I believed that simple titles, especially those containing colors, are memorable.

“I’ve always wanted a bookstore called Parnassus,” Karen said.

I looked at this woman I didn’t know, my potential business partner. I wanted a bookstore in Nashville, but why should I be the one to name it? “You’re the one who’s going to work there,” I told her.

Patchett and Hayes did become business partners, and Parnassus Books opened on November 16, 2011. The following Saturday – the official grand opening – “an estimated 3,000 Nashvillians came through the store,” Patchett writes. Local and national news outlets clamored for interviews. A year later, customers “are lined up outside most mornings when we open our doors.”

Patchett concludes that Karen Hayes was right: “Parnassus, I could finally see, was perfectly named, as she had known all along it would be.”

Read “The Bookstore Strikes Back.” It will give you hope.

Kinfolk

Two new names—Kinnek and Kngine—are bringing back old memories.

The names are more similar than they appear. That’s because – surprise! – Kngine is meant to be pronounced “kin-gin.” Yes, “kin-gin,” despite the fact that (1) Kngine is meant to be a compression of “knowledge engine” and (2) in English, K before N is always, always, always silent.*

But language appears not to be the strong suit of the Kngine team—which is odd, since Kngine is billed as a natural-language app.

 

This line appears in large type and unpunctuated:

With its simple interface and brilliant engine your life will be smarter

My life has a rather complicated interface, actually. But I digress.

So what we have are two more names that begin with kin, just like—here comes the nostalgia—Kindle (Amazon’s e-book reader), KIN (Microsoft’s ill-starred mobile phone), and Kinect (Microsoft’s Xbox 360 peripheral).

Some of you may also remember Kinetic, a fitness game made by Nike for the Sony EyeToy.

New York-based Kinnek calls itself “a better way to manage your business purchases”; Silicon Valley-based Kngine says it’s “changing the way people create, acquire and consume Knowledge [capital K sic].”

The companies may be brilliantly innovative—it’s too early to tell—but they haven’t signaled it with their names, which are derivative (Kinnek) and forced (Kngine).

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* In Yiddish you’d pronounce the K. Compare knaidlach (matzoh balls), pronounced with a kuh and a nay.

The grift that keeps on grifting

From a November 29 post by Andrew Sullivan in The Daily Beast:

I am now on a new drug called Egrifta which targets HIV-related lipodystrophy, i.e. strange fat accumulation around your internal organs, by triggering an increase in your own body's production of growth hormone.

 

Egrifta (“eh-GRIF-tuh”) injectable prescription medicine from Theratechnologies. Generic name: tesamorelin.

 

Interesting name, Egrifta. What’s the story behind it? I have no idea. But let’s consider:

Grifter: “Confidence trickster,” 1906, carnival and circus slang, probably an alteration of grafter (see graft (n.2); also cf. grift). Gradually extended to “any non-violent criminal.” (Online Etymology Dictionary)

 

 

The Grifters (1990)

 

Grift: (slang) 1. Money made dishonestly, as in a swindle. 2.A swindle or confidence game. (American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition)

 

 

Griftopia, by Matt Taibbi (Random House, 2010)

 

With all that rich source material, you’d think the marketing copy could have written itself. But the cupboard is bare—no tagline, no ads. So let’s, as a public service, fix that.

Maybe a sly double-entendre:

• What’ve you got to lose?

Or a cruder double-entendre:

• Skimming the fat since 2011.

Or we could really get into the carnival spirit:

• See the bottle? Under the middle shell. Watch the middle shell. Keep watching the middle shell. Don’t take your eyes off the middle shell. Where’s the bottle now?

On the other hand, maybe we should take a closer look at that “e” prefix:

• I write to you from exile, the daughter of a deposed Nigerian prince…

Eh, griftas—over to you!

UPDATE via email from Dan Freiberg: “You take it. It takes you.”

Word of the Week: Kabuki Dance

Kabuki dance: Political posturing; a performance that’s all style, no substance. Sometimes seen as Kabuki theater. “Kabuki” may be capitalized or lower case.

This sense of kabuki dance is found primarily in the U.S. It’s come up in coverage of the Congressional budget impasse (aka the fiscal cliff); the image of “dancing on a cliff” seems to be irresistible to reporters and pundits:

There will be a Kabuki dance when everyone comes to the White House next week for a meeting on the fiscal cliff. – Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post, November 9, 2012

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“Bloomberg’s Al Hunt discusses the dangerous fiscal-cliff kabuki dance.” (Video, November 14, 2012)

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“We go through this little kabuki dance every time the debt ceiling comes around,” [Bill] Frezza said. – Newsmax, November 30, 2012

 

The Japanese popular-theater form Kabuki literally means “art of song and dance”; the word Kabuki was adopted into English in the late 19th century during a flurry of Western interest in Japanese culture. (See, for example, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado.) It became more widespread in English-speaking countries after World War II, when Japanese theater companies toured the West.

To a culturally aware Japanese audience, traditional Kabuki is anything but empty posturing: every gesture is, on the contrary, packed with significance. “The quintessential Kabuki moment (known as a kata) is colorful and ruthlessly concise, packing meaning into a single gesture,” wrote Jon Lackman in an April 2010 article for Slate, “It’s Time to Retire Kabuki”:

It is synecdoche, synopsis, and metaphor rolled together—as when, in one Kabuki play, a gardener expecting a visit from the emperor cuts down all his chrysanthemums except one, the perfect one. And in contrast with our own shortsighted politics, Kabuki concerns not the present so much as a “dreamlike time shrouded in mist but ever present in the subconscious,” to quote critic Shuichi Kato.

But in American political jargon, the opposite holds true: Kabuki is always derogatory and condescending, connoting a lot of huffing and puffing without results. Lackman traces this meaning back to a 1961 article in the Los Angeles Times about a State Department plan to revise its security measures. “[By] finally dismissing Chester Bowles as undersecretary of state at the moment he did, the President unhitched the plan’s kingpin in this shoddy piece of left-wing kabuki,” wrote Henry J. Taylor.

(Lackman doesn’t mention it, but Taylor had served as US ambassador to Switzerland in the Eisenhower administration; in 1961 he was beginning a 20-year stint as columnist for the United Feature Syndicate.)

“Six months later, Taylor struck again,” Lackman writes. The quote: “Agriculture Secretary Freeman announced he has discussed Billie Sol Estes’ political corruption kabuki with Robert F. Kennedy and ‘had mentioned it informally to the president’.”

(Did you know that Billie Sol Estes is still alive and a free man?)

Lackman notes that kabuki usage increases “whenever Japan is in the news for disingenuous behavior” and “whenever fakery seems particularly rife in American politics.” He cites a July 2009 Wall Street Journal article headlined “The Supreme Court Kabuki Dance.”

Why do reporters and pundits relish kabuki? Lackman suggests it’s because “they and everyone else have only a hazy idea of the word’s true meaning.” Moreover:

1) It sounds funny.
2) It sounds childish.
3) It sounds foreign.
4) It sounds incomprehensible. …
5) It sounds Japanese.

And for a 400-year-old word, it also sounds trendy. As baby-name maven Laura Wattenberg has observed: “If any letter defines modern American name style, K is it."

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Hat tip: MJF