Fritinancy

The Changing Names of California's Freeways

Historian Kevin Starr writes:

Freeways were initially given poetic-evocative names, drawn from historic, literary, or geographical sources: the Cahuenga, the Bayshore, the Redwood, the Ramona, the Cabrillo, the James Lick, the Nimitz. In the second phase of development, freeways tended to take on the names of their destinations—the Hollywood, the Long Beach, the Santa Ana, the San Bernardino—as in August 1954 when the Arroyo Seco Parkway became the Pasadena Freeway. In the third phase of development, freeways were to become known primarily by their numbers—the 10, the 5, the 880, the 101—for they were now part of an integrated state grid, scheduled for integration into an interstate system.

-- Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963. Golden Dreams is one of eight volumes in Starr’s Americans and the California Dream series; Kevin Starr is a professor of history at the University of Southern California and the former state librarian of California (1994-2004).

In the Bay Area, many residents (and traffic reporters) still refer to the Bayshore and the Nimitz (and to the Warren Freeway, State Route 13). No one in Northern California, however, would call the Nimitz Freeway “the 880”: up here, we prefer our freeway numbers anarthrous. For more on that subject, see the second half of my 2011 post “Thinking, Doing, Engineering, Amazing.”

The Porsche Chiasmus

No, not a new model: a rhetorical device.

I spotted it on a Bay Bridge billboard, then tracked it down to the June 2013 issue of Entrepreneur magazine.

 

“The new Cayman: Bends the rules. Rules the bends.”

 

A nice example of chiasmus – the “crossover trope” – from Porsche.

Lysol and Healthing

I’d missed the new marketing campaign for household brand Lysol until a column by New York Times advertising writer Stuart Elliott brought it my attention. Earlier this week, Elliott wrote in one of his regular “20 Questions” columns:

Will a new campaign for the Lysol line of products sold by Reckitt Benckiser, which is centered on the word “healthing,” prove to be the biggest bugaboo for English teachers and grammarians since R. J. Reynolds infuriated them with the jingle “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should”?

 

“Cleaning is hoping you’re killing germs. Healthing is knowing it.”

 

My answer: Nah. In the nearly six decades since that Winston jingle provoked an epidemic of pearl-clutching we’ve become blasé about (or unaware of) advertisers’ “bad” grammar (see “Lay Flat Collar,” “To Each Their Own,” et al.) and parts-of-speech-play (see “Tonight We Tanqueray,” “Let’s Merry,” “I Zappos to Get Noticed,” “Plus Your Life,” “Step into Awesome,” et al.). I suspect that some people even look forward to the next flight of language fancy from advertisers. I certainly do.

Still “healthing” bears comment – as does the Lysol brand itself.

On the Visual Thesaurus: Branding by Definition

Are you more or less likely to trust a brand that invokes dictionary definitions, syllabification, and pronunciation guides in its advertising? My new column for the Visual Thesaurus, “Branding by Definition,” looks at the messages such marketing sends. Access is restricted to subscribers; here’s an excerpt:

Take Babson University, which takes pains to syl•lab•i•fy a word that doesn’t really need the dots: entrepreneurship.

In 2011, the nearly century-old Boston-area college opened its first West Coast graduate business school in San Francisco, where it began festooning utility poles with ads that both invoke and challenge dictionaries. “The world needs a new definition of entrepreneurship,” the Babson web copy announces – and you can write that definition yourself, right there on the web site. (Most of the submissions lead one to conclude that professional lexicographers are secure in their jobs. “Grabbing a life passion by the horns and sculpting it into a real business that adds value to others’ lives,” reads one “redefinition.”)

Read the rest of the column, which has many more examples, quotes from dictionary mavens, and theories about causes and effects.

Word of the Week: Tick-Tock

Tick-tock: Journalism jargon for a story that recounts events in chronological order, as if accompanied by the soundtrack of a ticking clock.

From my Twitter feed:

An Oklahoma way of life: A tick-tock by @jswatz and me on racing time with a tornado. nyti.ms/11etBTl

— Dan Barry (@DanBarryNYT) May 24, 2013

Word Spy’s Paul McFedries credits the late William Safire with the first mention in print of this usage of “tick-tock.” Safire included it in his book The New Language of Politics: an Anecdotal Dictionary of Catchwords, Slogans, and Political Usage. McFedries gives the book’s publication date as 1972, but Wikipedia and Safire’s New York Times obituary—he died in 2009—give it as 1968.

Here’s Safire’s definition of “tick-tock”:

TICK-TOCK journalists argot for story listing chronology leading up to a major announcement or event. ... A tick-tock (the metaphor, obviously, of a clock moving toward a fateful hour) is often written with boldface dates indicating significant meetings or preliminary events, and is more reportorial than a “think piece” or "thumbsucker”…

See the Word Spy entry for a list of other journalism jargon, including muffin choker, charticle (a Fritinancy word of the week in 2009), and Danny Boy.

In the Wild: House Whip

Sometimes I’ll spot a name in the wild and it’ll make me smile all day.

Trader Joe’s House Whip is one of those names.

 

“Whippee!” “Whip-itty-doo-dah!”

 

Makes me feel like dancing.

 

Operation Fortitude

During the lead-up to D-Day—June 6, 1944—the Allied nations undertook an elaborate deception strategy designed to mislead the Germans about the real date and location of the Normandy invasion. The overall plan was called Operation Bodyguard; one of its more bizarre elements—the creation of a decoy army, complete with inflatable tanks and fake artillery—had the code name Operation Fortitude.

Why Fortitude? As Ben Macintyre writes in Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, his 2012 history of the plan:

The choice of code name for this particular operation—the crux of Bodyguard—was much debated. [British Prime Minister Winston] Churchill had given instructions that no code name should be selected that might seem flippant in retrospect or give a hint of the individual or action involved. But he also disliked code names that meant nothing at all, which is why the original choice, “Mespot,” was rejected. Also vetoed were “Bulldog,” “Swordhilt,” “Axehead,” “Tempest,” and, obscurely, “Lignite.” Finally, a name was selected that seemed to evoke the resolution required to pull it off: Operation Fortitude.

The story of Operation Fortitude is told in a new documentary by Rick Beyer, “The Ghost Army,” that had its premiere Tuesday night on PBS. (Repeat broadcasts are scheduled throughout the week.)

It wasn’t only the operations that were deliberately named. The code names of the double agents who worked for MI5, the British intelligence agency, were also chosen with care and a hefty dash of dry humor. Dusko Popov, for example, a risk-loving Serbian playboy, was dubbed “Agent Tricycle.”

Macintyre explains:

This may have been, in part, a reference to Popov’s insatiable appetites and his reputed but probably apocryphal taste for three-in-a-bed sex. It also recognized that the Tricycle network now consisted of one big wheel—Popov—supported by two smaller ones, Agents Balloon and Gelatine.

The Americans took a different approach to code names. When Popov came to Washington in 1941 on an assignment from MI5, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who regarded foreign spies as “just another species of criminal,” was not amused. “The FBI did not go in for jocular code names,” Macintyre tells us. “Popov was ‘Confidential Informant ND 63,’ an austere title that aptly reflects the bureau’s chilly attitude.”

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Eat at [Verb]

These Bay Area restaurants don’t just take orders: If their names are any indication, they give them, too.

Melt! (San Francisco)

The exclamation point is part of the name, and melting is the raison d’être, of this fondue café in San Francisco’s North Beach.

 

Build (Berkeley)

One Yelper called it “the Subway of pizzas. You enter a line and the employees make the pizza as you like.” The slogan is “Find Your Inner Pizza,” which does not sound appetizing at all.

 

Toss (Berkeley, just a few doors away from Build)

I love the wordmark, but every time I see the name I want to finish the sentence: “… your cookies.” Maybe this is where all those inner pizzas end up.

 

Gather (Berkeley)

Hip, centrally located – in the greenest building in Berkeley –and designed to please demanding foodies of every persuasion, from gluten-free vegans to whole-animal carnivores. (Are you surprised to learn the idea for restaurant came out of a “vision” during “a retreat in the California desert”? Neither am I.) The name suggests hunter-gatherers as well as gathering around the table.

 

Assemble (Richmond)

Yes, it’s another way to say “gather,” but in this case there’s a historical resonance to the name that makes it a perfect fit for the location, in a former Ford Motor Company assembly plant on the bay in Richmond.

Word of the Week: Shmeat

Shmeat: Meat grown in a laboratory from animal cells; the objectives include reducing animal cruelty and increasing the global supply of affordable protein. “Shmeat” is a portmanteau of “sheet” and “meat.”

An undated article on a website called Shmeat.com (apparently operated by SavingAdvice.com) explains the process:

Cells are harvested from a live animal, such as a chicken, pig or cow. The cells are then placed in a special solution of nutrients which mimics the qualities of blood. This nutrient solution will help the cells to multiply where they can then be secured to a spongy sheet which has been soaked with nutrient solution. The sheet is then stretched to increase cell size and protein content. It’s from the combination of this “sheet meat” that shmeat derives its name.

Shmeat was the subject of “Building a $325,000 Burger,” a May 14, 2013, story in the New York Times. Reporting from the Netherlands, where researcher Mark Post has created a proof-of-concept shmeat patty, science writer Henry Fountain noted that the burger “was created at phenomenal cost — 250,000 euros, or about $325,000, provided by a donor who so far has remained anonymous.” Fountain went on:

“This is still an early-stage technology,” said Neil Stephens, a social scientist at Cardiff University in Wales who has long studied the development of what is also sometimes referred to as “shmeat.” “There’s still a huge number of things they need to learn.”

The origins of “shmeat” are uncertain. The earliest citation I could find is in a December 5, 2008, column by Lou Bendrick (“Meet Shmeat”) in the online environmental magazine Grist:

Test-tube meat is also known as in vitro meat, cultured meat, victimless meat, vat-grown meat, hydroponic meat, and, finally, shmeat. (Note to self: Be sure to apply for inevitable X Prize to rename this stuff.)

For now, let’s call it shmeat.

Shmeat is grown from a cell culture (hence the in vitro or cultured prefixes), not from a live animal. These harvested cells are taken from an animal, such as a pig, and placed in a “nutrient-rich medium” that mimics blood. Once the cells multiply they are attached to a spongy scaffold or sheet (sheet + meat = shmeat) that has been soaked with nutrients and stretched to increase cell size and protein content.

“Also known as” suggests that “shmeat” had already entered the vocabulary, but I couldn’t find an earlier citation.

As Bendrick jokingly points out, and as the title of his column underscores, “shmeat” is not a felicitous name for a serious product. (Shortly after the Grist column appeared, a commenter on the Offalgood website said “shmeat” was “a horrible name, it sounds like what you get when you cross shit and meat.”)

Words beginning with shm- indicate mockery or derision in Yiddish (see shmo, shmendrick, shmegegge, shmuck, etc.), and the pattern has been adopted in dismissive English reduplications like fancy-shmancy. (See my recent post, “Name, Shmame,” and related links.)

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Obligatory Urban Dictionary addendum: “Shmeat: Small penis or dick, also reffering [sic] to any person or anything. It can be used for anything anyone and anything can be a shmeat.” Posted November 27, 2006, a full two years before the Grist column.