Fritinancy

Abso-Booking-Lutely

I caught this new spot from Booking.com during a “Portlandia” commercial break:

The ad is cleverly plotted and well acted (the expression on the face of the teenage girl as she schleps down the hotel corridor is pure bershon), and the multiple payoffs at the end are satisfying. What stands out, though, is the repeated appropriation of the company name as an almost-expletive:

It doesn’t get any booking better than this!
Look at the booking view!
This is exactly what you booking needed!
Bask in the booking glory!

As a general principle, associating your brand name with an obscenity is a bad idea. But as AdFreak says in its review of the commercial, “the fact that it's vaguely explicit makes it just self-deprecating enough to not be too abrasive.”

Here’s another thing about booking: it’s a Britishism that’s infiltrated American English only in the last 20 years or so. (Americans have traditionally preferred to reserve restaurant tables and make reservations for theater seats and vacation travel.) When Ben Yagoda wrote about book (tickets, table, room) in an October 2011 post on his Not One Off Britishisms (NOOBs) blog, he noted that the usage started surging in the US around 1993, “the sweet spot for NOOBs.”

Booking.com is owned by Priceline, an American company, but it’s based in Amsterdam; the ad agency that produced the spot is the Amsterdam office of Portland-based Wieden + Kennedy. That European perspective may have influenced the choice of the company name and the push to fully Americanize booking.

Speaking of euphemistic expletives and brand-name dropping, a play I saw last night at Berkeley Rep is gloriously full of both. Troublemaker, by Dan LeFranc, is a live-action adventure comic featuring a posse of 12-year-olds who speak an idiosyncratic lingo filled with invented profanity. The play’s subtitle—“The Freakin Kick-A Adventures of Bradley Boatright”—gives you a taste; two minor characters are listed in the credits as A-Hole #1 and A-Hole #2. Tween tough-gal Loretta Beretta (great name!) snarls some of the best lines: “I’ll rip off your breadstick and shove it up your Olive Garden.” “Shut your St. Francis and move your Assisi.” “You’re lucky I don’t break your banana, remove it from your republic, and shove it up your gap.” In his review for Theater Dogs, Chad Jones wrote that it’s “pretend swearing taken to such an outrageous level that it’s actually beautiful in its own poetic way.” The play ends its Berkeley run on Sunday; if it shows up in your city, go see it.

 

Somethin’s Missin’

Picking up on yesterday’s theme of apostrophe’d brand names, here are more examples of squiggles in places you wouldn’t expect to find them.

Exhibit A: Amaz’n Asian Sesame Chik’n.

 

I learned about this frozen product at The Impulsive Buy, which tested it and found it “not amaz’n, but appetiz’n.” The “chik’n” spelling here communicates “just kiddin’ – it’s veggie chicken!” That isn’t a hard-and-fast spelling rule, though. As I wrote in a 2011 post about the names of “further processed foods”: “Chik’n (or chick’n) can be chicken-derived or just chicken-ish. It can come from any of a dozen or so unrelated companies. The only thing the odd spellings guarantee is a certain degree of unnatural-ness.”

As for “amaz’n,” I surmise that it’s there 1) to chime with “Asian” and 2) to mirror the look of “chik’n.”

For what it’s worth, “amazing” topped the list of Lake Superior State University’s 2012 List of Banished Words, and there’s a thread on Yelp’s Portland (Oregon) site titled “I Hate the Word ‘AMAZING’.”

 

Exhibit B: Chop’t.

I’d never heard of Chop’t—the fast-salad chain, not to be confused with “Chopped,” the Food Network program—until I read Matthew Yglesias’s withering comments about it on Slate. (My excuse: there are no Chop’t restaurants outside New York and Washington, DC.) Yglesias is annoyed by Chop’t’s wanton use of “Cobb” to describe any old seasonal salad (see also “Stop the Cobb-sanity”), and I can’t say I disagree. Salad historians tell us that the Cobb salad was invented at the Brown Derby in Hollywood and named for the restaurant’s owner, Robert Cobb; the requisite components are chopped greens, tomato, bacon, boiled or roasted breast of chicken (not chik’n!), hard-boiled egg, chives, Roquefort cheese, and red-wine vinaigrette. Yes, hominy, pepper jack cheese, and pita chips are tasty, but they do not belong in a Cobb salad. (See “Flagstaff Food Truck Cobb” on the current seasonal menu.)

But I digress: my own interest is in “Chop’t,” in which the apostrophe replaces a couple of letters and the T substitutes for D, possibly to approximate the word’s actual pronunciation but more likely because CHOPTSALAD.COM was available for purchase.

The spelling conveys a vague if inaccurate sense of old-timey Britishness. But mostly the apostrophe-t just calls attention to itself, the way gratuitous umlauts in brand names do. (The British do prefer -t suffixes for some past-tense verbs such as leapt, spilt, and learnt. I even came across an argument that dreamt and dreamed have different meanings; this may be true in Commonwealth countries, but not in the US.) 

For an even odder example of -ed changing to apostrophe-t, see my 2008 post about “home bake’t delicious muffin.” And for more about “the most misunderstood and misused piece of punctuation in the language,” see The Dreaded Apostrophe.

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UPDATE: Commenter Clachnit reminded me of the Kia cee'd, which I wrote about in (can it be?) 2006.

Get It Off Your Chest

Moist jeans may be the Next New Thing; moist bras, not so much. Fortunately, there’s an app—a nappy?—for that: the Wick’em moisture-managing bra liner.

 

For consistency, shouldn’t it be “to keep ’em dry”?

 

 

As a brand name, “Wick’em” is assertively descriptive if a bit too reminiscent of Hang ’em High. (I’d like it better if the brand were spelled Wickham and the styles were called Lady Wickham, the Dowager Countess of Wickham, and Mistress Wickly.*) There’s no way to make “wick” sound elegant, and the apostrophe takes it even further downmarket.

The folksiness of that eye dialect is at odds with the boardroom-stiff brand voice of Wick’em’s parent company, Coconut Grove Intimates (whose other products include adhesive bras and which is headquartered, incongruously, in Ontario, Canada, far from any coconut groves I’m aware of). There’s that “moisture management” descriptor, for starters. And on Wick’em’s About Us page I learned that Coconut Grove Intimates is “an industry leader in the development of solution-oriented bras and bra accessories.” Maybe Hank Hill should be the corporate spokesman.

 

 

Hat tip to Corporette for the Wick’em link.

 

P.S. If you’re goin’ to go droppin’ letters, at least get it straight. It’s “Wear ’n’ Care”—one apostrophe for each of the missing letters in “and”—not “Wear N’ Care.”

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* And I’d really like to rename the product Bosom Buddy, but it’s taken.

Word of the Week: Tannoy

Tannoy: (UK) A loudspeaker or public-address system. From Tannoy, the trademark of a speaker manufacturer founded in London in 1926 and based in Scotland since the 1970s; genericized since the 1940s. Also used as a generic verb, “to call someone over a public-address system.”

Tannoy is a blend of tantalum alloy, the material used in an electrolytic rectifier developed by the company. The chemical element tantalum (symbol Ta) was discovered in 1802 and named for Tantalus, the character from Greek mythology who was forced to stand for eternity beneath a tree whose fruit was just out of his grasp. As you may have guessed, “Tantalus” is also the source of the English verb tantalize.

I knew about Tantalus and tantalize but had never encountered tannoy until I read a story by the actor John Lithgow published in the New York Times earlier this month. Lithgow is the only American in the cast of a current National Theatre production, The Magistrate; his essay is about the differences between US and UK theater customs. Here’s the lede:

The language of theater here is slightly different from ours in New York. The crackly speaker in a London dressing room is called the “tannoy.” The opening night of a London show is called its “Press Night.” When a stage manager announces the start of a performance, London actors don’t hear the word “places.” They hear “beginners.”

If you aren’t in London, you may be able to see Lithgow in The Magistrate in your own city through the magic of National Theatre Live, which broadcasts productions live (or almost live) to cinemas around the world. I caught The Magistrate in Berkeley last week and enjoyed it: it’s a late-Victorian farce, so expect plenty of groan-worthy plot contrivances along with well-earned laughs. The staging and acting—Lithgow’s included—are first rate. Check the site for broadcast dates.

Discover Your X

Henry Alpert of Action Copy emailed to alert me about a mini-trend in commercial calls to action: Discover your X, in which X is some non-noun pressed into nounish service.

Henry’s first example:

“Discover your Interesting.”

Zite is an app that “delivers your personal slice of the Zeitgeist.” (Yes, Zite comes from Zeitgeist.) It’s hard to tell whether interesting is capitalized because it’s meant to be a proper noun or because the proofreading was haphazard.

Henry’s second example:

“Discover your Why.”

 

 

The slogan appears on an online-education site whose name may be Start with Why (the URL), Inspire Action (the home-page headline), Why University (one of the things being sold) or Simon Sinek (the name of the developer). Honestly, the site makes it really challenging to find your What.

Elsewhere on the site we see “Learn your Why.”

And also “Share the Why,” “Clarify your Why,” and “Articulate your Hows.”

Unlike interesting, why is legitimately a noun from time to time (“the hows and whys of logo design”), as well as an adverb, a conjunction, and an interjection.

A third example of the trend appeared in my in-box earlier this week: “Find your inner fabulous!”

 

HerRoom turns underwear into a verb (I think) and fabulous into a noun.

Besides the discover/find trope and the anthimeria—the use of a word outside its customary part of speech—the theme here is personalization: it’s your why, your interesting, your inner fabulous. This is a trend of its own, one I first wrote about in 2009 (“But Enough About Me”). In 2010 I devoted a Visual Thesaurus column to the subject (“The You Decade”). Back in 2007, the late Christopher Hitchens wrote much more elegantly about it for Slate; his essay is also titled “The You Decade.” Hitchens wrote:

Perhaps global-scale problems and mass-society populism somehow necessitate this unctuous appeal to the utter specialness of the supposed individual. What you can do to stop planetary warming. How the maximum leader is on your  side. The ways in which the corporation has your  needs in mind as it makes its dispositions. The candidate who wants to hear your  views.

Almost six years later, the political is, if anything, even more personal. You may not have much influence on climate change or gun violence, but hey—you can own “interesting.” If you can find it, that is.

Moist Slacks

Do the two words in the title of this post make your skin crawl? Your gorge rise? Then, Gentle Reader, I suggest you watch some cat videos, because today we are in fact going to talk about moist slacks, two of the most loathed words in the English language, according to various unscientific polls.

Please understand that I’m simply reporting the news from U.S. jeansmaker Wrangler, which recently announced the launch of Denim Spa, a line of slacks – OK, denim slacks, aka jeans – infused with moisturizing ingredients “to protect your legs from the dehydrating effects of denim.” Denim dehydrates? News to me.

(Tangentially, I’m sad they didn’t call it “Denim Oasis.” I was all set with jokes about palms and dates and the toes of camels.)

Wrangler, which has been around since 1947, has traditionally catered to rodeo cowboys, but we’re not talking Brokeback Mountain and chapped chappies here. Denim Spa is a women-only brand, and it will be sold (at first, anyway) only in the U.K. The line’s official spokesmodel is Lizzie Jagger*, daughter of Mick. “They’re definitely cooler than regular jeans,” coos Ms. Jagger in a promotional video.

Wrangler Denim Spa “Molly” skinny jeans with olive extract. Available January 28 from online retailer Asos for $149.51.

 

The moisture lasts for 15 days, after which the wearer can replenish it with a “reload spray.” One of the formulas, Smooth Legs, is supposed to fight cellulite, which is a marketing word that means “bumpy fat.”

(Sodden afterthought: What if fashion brand Superdry started selling moisturizing jeans? Would they be labeled Supermoist?)

Setting aside the desirability of jeans that require regular lube jobs, let’s tackle the big question: What is it that people detest about moist and slacks and other “least favorite words” like vomit, panties, goiter, and ointment? In “Words We Love to Hate,” published on the Visual Thesaurus, Ben Zimmer speculated:

It’s difficult to find any unifying thread for these words that get people’s goat. But much like the enjoyable words on the “favorites” list like serendipity and mellifluous, there's a certain sound/sense combination that sparks these word aversions. Why does moist merit a Facebook group of haters, while hoist and joist go unnnoticed? It’s more than just the sound of the word: the disliked words tend to have some basic level of ickiness.

Maybe it’s the vowel sound, Zimmer suggests:

Ointment and goiter share the “oi” sound with moist: there must be something about that diphthong that gets under people's skin.

Oy!

Still, context counts. For some reason, we may give a pass to moist if it modifies cake, as in the Duncan Hines tagline:

“So moist. So delicious. And so much more.”

And skin-care companies haven’t perceived a need to replace “moisturizer” with a less icky word, as many pages of Google hits attest.

Likewise, the guys at the construction site near my house seemed unperturbed by the Moistop signs stapled all over the building frame.

 

I read first the name as “moist top,” then enjoyed thinking of it as “Moi? Stop?” I finally parsed it the way I suppose it’s intended: as a blend of moist and stop.

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* Or Lizzy, as her signature spells it.

(Hat tip to Diane Fischler for the Denim Spa story.)

Inauguration Recap: Rhetoric and Poetics

Commentary on the language of Inauguration Day:

At The Atlantic, James Fallows identifies “the two most powerful allusions” in President Obama’s speech: “lash and sword” and “Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall.” I’d add that the lucky alliteration in the second allusion gives it additional force.

Ben Zimmer, of the Visual Thesaurus, looks at the repeated rhetorical flourish of “We, the People.” He also addresses the nitpickers who cried foul over Obama’s placement of “only” in one phrase and his use of singular “they” in another. (Both usages, by the way, are acceptable.)

For a snarky take on the speech, see the Whatever It Is, I’m Against It blog. The title of the post: “We Are Made for This Moment (Although If You Check the Label, It Says ‘Made in China’).”

UPDATE: Jay Heinrichs analyzes the rhetorical tropes of the speech: antithesis, metaphor, and anaphora (with a little syncrisis—“a kind of antithesis that piles on the contrasts in multiple clauses”—for good measure). 

The inaugural poem, “One Today,” was written and delivered by Richard Blanco, who was born in Spain to a Cuban-exile family and grew up in Miami; he was only the fifth poet to read at a presidential inauguration, and the first immigrant, first Latino, first openly gay person, and youngest person (at 44) to hold that honor. Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly provides the full text of the poem and an analysis (“a humble, modest poem, one presented to a national audience as a gift of comradeship”). Andrew Sullivan heard “strong echoes of Whitman, America's national poet.”

I had one tiny cavil: A professional writer, especially one whose first language is Spanish, ought to know that it’s Sierra—singular—and not Sierras.

My posts about the January 2009 presidential inauguration are here and here.

Word of the Week: Snollygoster

Snollygoster: A shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician. American dialect and slang. First print appearance in 1846, in the Frankfort (Kentucky) Commonwealth: “Now here I am a rale propelling, double revolving locomotive Snolly Goster, ready to attack anything.” (Source: Hatchet Jobs and Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang. “Rale” is dialect for “real.”)

Snollygoster was popularized “almost singlehandedly” by a Georgia Democrat, H. J. W. Ham, writes Rosemarie Ostler in her 2011 book Slinging Mud: Rude Nicknames, Scurillous Slogans, and Insulting Slang from Two Centuries of American Politics.

[Ham] traveled around the country during the 1890s with a stump speech titled “The Snollygoster in Politics.” Ham claimed to have first heard the word during an 1848 political debate. He defined a snollygoster as a “place-hunting demagogue” or a “political hypocrite.” The Columbus Dispatch for October 28, 1895, captures the spirit of the word with this more elaborate definition: “A snollygoster is a fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnancy.”

The origin of snollygoster is unknown. It may come from German schnelle geister (“quick spirit”), writes Ostler, “but extravagant nonsense words such as lollapalooza and splendiferous were popular during the nineteenth century. Snollygoster may be part of this trend.” Snallygaster, which first appeared in 1940 as the name of a mythical dragonlike monster found only in Maryland, is probably unrelated to the political epithet unless both come from schnelle geister. In the 1960s the beverage brand Mountain Dew invented a drink called the snallygaster, made of vanilla ice cream and Mountain Dew.

Snollygoster faded into obscurity around World War I, then resurfaced during President Harry S. Truman’s 1952 reelection campaign. In a memoir, Ken Hechler. a White House assistant during Truman’s presidency, tells about a speech Truman gave at the Parkersburg, West Virginia, railroad station. The president asked Hechler for a Bible, then quickly found a passage about the “hypocrites” who “love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.” Hechler goes on:

Then he added that some Republican campaign orators like John Foster Dulles were posing as self-righteous defenders of the captive peoples of Eastern Europe. He read the Bible passage to his Parkersburg audience, adding that his grandfather used to tell him that when you heard someone praying loudly in public, “you had better go home and lock your smokehouse.” Then Truman sent reporters scurrying to their dictionaries when he denounced Republican “snollygosters.” He turned to the puzzled press corps, chewing their pencils at trainside, and quipped, “Better look that word up, it’s a good one.”

For more on presidential neologisms—including neologize, whose invention is attributed to Thomas Jefferson—see Paul Dickson’s recently published Words from the White House. Dickson was interviewed on NPR’s Weekend Edition yesterday; you can listen to the interview or read a summary here. 

There Isn't Any Name That I Can't Rhyme

Let’s play the name game!

Boku! “BOKU enables people across the globe to pay for the things they love using the one device they’re never without.” Phonetic spelling of French beaucoup (much, a lot). Based in San Francisco, with offices in London, Berlin, and Singapore.

Loku!  “At Loku, we have built the first-of-it’s-kind [sic] local analytics technology that gathers and synthesizes local information from the web & social media.” Possibly from “location” plus “you.” Based in Berkeley.

Zoku!  “Zoku is dedicated to providing unique products for the home. We are a collective of creative individuals who create things that will make our lives better through intelligent design and engineering.” No name story provided, but zoku means “tribe,” “clan,” or “family” in Japanese. Based in Hoboken.

Roku!  “Roku launched the first product designed to deliver movies from Netflix instantly on TV, using the power of the Internet.” Based in San Francisco. Roku is the Japanese word for “six”; more about Roku here.

All together now …

 

On the Visual Thesaurus: How to Name Anything

What exactly do name developers do, and how do they tackle a naming assignment? In my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, I look at the naming process and share some tips for naming products and companies.

Full access is restricted to subscribers (so subscribe!). Here’s an excerpt:

Like a writing project, a naming project begins with research. What is being named — a company, a product, a feature, a program? Why was the company founded or the product invented? What does the name need to communicate — playfulness, security, speed, luxury, practicality? What's the competitive namescape — that is, what do rivals and partners call themselves? Who is the customer or audience — hospital managers, software developers, single parents, international travelers? Where will the name appear — website, magazine ads, T-shirts, trade-show booths, packaging? Will you require an Internet domain? Trademark protection?

Then define the personality of the company or brand. Big and serious, like a global cybersecurity company? Cute and friendly, like a children's clothing boutique? If the business is new, ask about the founders. Are they professors, gourmands, rock-climbers? What makes them tick and what turns them off? Do they share an interesting connection? I once was hired to name a startup whose founders were five brothers; “five,” “brother,” and “family” gave me lots of ideas for an initial round of creative work.

Read the rest of “How to Name Anything.”