Fritinancy

The Doctors Are In

For more than five years I’ve kept a tally of mister brand names—Mr. Tea, Mr. Bra, Mr. Noodle, Mr. Handyman, et al. Lately, I’ve discovered that “mister” is démodé: all the cool generic brands have gone to grad school and earned doctorates.

For example:

*

Dr. Fone calls itself “the world’s #1 iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch data recovery software to recover lost contacts, text messages, pictures, notes, and much more.” This doctor has a devious side. In “The Adultery Arms Race,” published in the November Atlantic, Michelle Cottle writes that Dr. Fone allows suspicious spouses to moonlight as private eyes:

Jay spent a few days researching surveillance tools before buying a program called Dr. Fone, which enabled him to remotely recover text messages from Ann’s phone. Late one night, he downloaded her texts onto his work laptop. He spent the next day reading through them at the office. Turns out, his wife had become involved with a co-worker.

*

Dr. Smog N Lube in Burbank, California, sounds like a shop that sells just two things, but in fact it “offers comprehensive auto services.”

 

Tip: “Doctor” names work best (if they work at all) with a single descriptor, not two. “N” as an abbreviation for “and” is ill advised at all times. And the “Dr.” abbreviation is used only in a title—not in a sentence like “Go to the doctor.”

(Hat tip: brother Michael.)

*

Dr. Sponge (“sustainable cleaning for your skin”) sells “a revolutionary skin cleansing tool that serves as an all-in-one solution for various skincare concerns.” The sponges come in several colors and formulas.

Dr. Sponge Lycopene Body Cleansing Konjac Sponge, $11.50. Konjac, “an exotic plant native to Eastern Asia,” is further defined as “glucommnnan,” which is a misspelling. Hardly spongeworthy!

*

Dr. Lipp is the “original nipple balm for lips.” Yes, you read that correctly.

Why they didn’t go with “Dr. Nipp” is a mystery.

The company is based in London; the product is sold at Sephora, Bloomingdale’s, and other retailers for $15 a tube.

*

Dr. Dewy is another lip doctor. This one’s in Southern California.

 

“The dewy lip specialist.” Image via Beauty Gypsy.

 

“Dr. Dewy” is the nom de balm of Dr. Edward Akkaway, who is “inspired by nature’s unlimited bounty of remedies that help heal the body and mind, as well as enrich the soul.”

*

I wrote about Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School for the Visual Thesaurus in 2011. (No longer paywalled.) The name is a double entendre, I wrote; it refers both to the activity of sketching or drawing and to something more sinister:

Google “sketchy neighborhood” and you get more than 67,000 results. “Sketchy area” yields more than 70,000. Both references are to what Urban Dictionary’s contributors agree is a synonym for “unsafe,” “creepy,” “not kosher,” or “someone or something that gives off a bad feeling.”

 

*

Want to be a doctor yourself? No problem! Just ask Dr. Science, the world’s foremost authoritarian. He’ll sell you a credential.

 

Just $3.75!

 

Word of the Week: Furcifer

Furcifer: A yoke-bearer; a fork-user; a rascal or scoundrel. From Latin furca, a fork.

Furcifer is archaic enough to be ignored by the online OED, which gives definitions only for some of its relatives (furcate: to divide into branches; furciferous: descriptive of certain butterflies that bear a forked process). Furcifer’s heyday was the early 17th century, when English travelers to the Continent noticed that the Italians used a curious pronged implement at table. One of those travelers, Thomas Coryat (or Coryate), visited Italy around 1608, when forks were virtually nonexistent in England. He wrote about this odd custom at some length in a book published in 1611.*

Bee Wilson tells Coryate’s story in Consider the Fork (2012), her informative and amusing “history of how we cook and eat”:

The typical Italian, noted Coryate, “cannot endure to have his dish touched with the fingers, seeing all men’s fingers are not clean alike.” Although it seemed strange to him at first, Coryate acquired the habit himself and continued to use a fork for meat on his return to England. His friends—who included the playwright Ben Jonson and the poet John Dunne—in their “merry humour” teased him for this curious Italian habit, calling him “furcifer” (which meant “fork-holder,” but also “rascal”). Queen Elizabeth I owned forks for sweetmeats but chose to use her fingers instead, finding the spearing motion to be crude.

In the 1970s, real men were said not to eat quiche. In the 1610s, they didn’t use forks. “We need no forks to make hay with our mouths, to throw our meat into them” noted the poet Nicholas Breton in 1618.

Breton was on the wrong side of English history. “By 1700,” Wilson writes, “ a hundred years after Coryate’s trip to Italy, forks were accepted throughout Europe. Even Puritans used them. … Not wanting to dirty your fingers with food, or to dirty food with your fingers, had become the polite thing to do.”

In an untitled article about the history of forks published in The House Furnishing Reviewin 1897, the anonymous author provides additional background on furcifer:

Furcifer literally meant, in Latin, a slave who for punishment of some fault was made to carry a fork or gallows upon his neck through the city with his hands tied. Hence it came to signify generally a rogue or villain.

__

* The book’s full and splendid title is Coryat’s Crudities, Hastily Gobbled Up in Five Months’ Travels in France, Savoy, Italy, Rhaetia (commonly called the Grison’s Country), Helvetia (alias Switzerland), Some Parts of High Germany and the Netherlands.

“Excited for You to Take”

Last week the mail brought a sample of Dove Deep Moisture Nourishing Body Wash with NutriumMoisture [sic]. Yes, I puzzled briefly over “Nutrium” (the singular form of nutria?) and the “moisture” redundancy,* but that’s not what I want to talk about today.

Here’s the package insert.

“We’re excited for you to take the One Shower Challenge!”

 

“Excited for you to take” is one of the newish “excited for __” constructions that I’ve been noticing in speech and writing. The Dove copy was my first encounter with the phrase in a commercial context, but it turns out to be more common than I’d thought. (See below.) Indeed, it represents a convergence of two hot lingua-trends: preposition creep—a term I’m borrowing from English professor and language writer Ben Yagoda—and, more generally, excitement overload.

Harmless

Whole Foods launched its first national ad campaign this week, using a new themeline: “Values Matter.” The ads, created by New York agency Partners & Spade, are upbeat and mostly unobjectionable. “Eat Like an Idealist,” says one. “Healthy Food Does Good,” says another.

Then there’s this one: 

 

“Grow Up Strong and Harmless.” But not armless, obviously.

 

I … don’t get this. I mean, “Grow Up Strong”—sure, fine, OK. But how does one “Grow Up Harmless”? What could that possibly mean?

“Harmless” has several dictionary definitions: inoffensive (“He seems harmless enough”) and benign (“harmless bacteria”) are the most familiar. There’s also a legal definition, the one we see in the boilerplate language “to hold harmless”: “free from loss or legal liability.”

But the WF ad doesn’t appear to use “harmless” in any of those senses. Instead—as far as I can tell—it’s meant to be a synonym for “kind” or “ethical.” Or possibly “Without Causing Harm to Anything on the Planet.” That’s quite a semantic leap, and, frankly, senseless.

Then again, I may just be too square for the rarefied sensibilities of Partners & Spade, which has built its reputation on too-cool-for-school chic. The agency’s inverted name is one tipoff; its strenuously self-effacing tagline—“A Well-Intentioned Endeavor”—is another. The P&S client list is a hipster honor roll: Warby Parker, Shinola, Harry’s shaving products. The Spade on the nameplate is Andy Spade, husband of Kate and co-founder of the fashion label Kate Spade and the grownup jammies label Sleepy Jones. I’d tweet a query about “harmless,” to P&S, but the account’s been moribund for more than a year. Too cool for Twitter, even!

The “harmless” Whole Foods ad triggered my recollection of another grocery-store “harmless.”

 

Harmless Harvest 100% Raw & Organic Coconut Water.

 

The first time I encountered this name I thought it sounded weirdly apologetic: damning with the faintest of praise. But at least it has alliteration on its side; Whole Foods’ “harmless” just sounds confused.

I did find one use of “harmless” that’s not merely well intentioned but also well targeted: Harmless.org, a UK organization that helps “people who self harm, their friends and families and professionals.” At last—someone who knows how to keep “harmless” out of harm’s way.

Word of the Week: Quarantine

Quarantine: A period of enforced isolation or restriction of movement to prevent the spread of infectious disease. From Italian quarantina, a 40-day period.

“Quarantine” has spiked recently because of news coverage of the Ebola virus, which originated in West Africa—the virus was named for for what researchers believed to be the Ebola River in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo—and has spread to other areas, including the United States.

 

NYTimes.com, October 19, 2014.

 

From the Times story:

So it has been in Quarantine Nation. As the Ebola scare spreads from Texas to Ohio and beyond, the number of people who have locked themselves away — some under government orders, others voluntarily — has grown well beyond those who lived with and cared for Mr. Duncan before his death on Oct. 8. The discovery last week that two nurses at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital here had caught the virus while treating Mr. Duncan extended concentric circles of fear to new sets of hospital workers and other contacts.

 

The medical-isolation sense of “quarantine” is only one of the word’s historical meanings. John Kelly, who blogs about etymology at Mashed Radish, wrote earlier this month about “quarantine”:

The third sense of quarantine, from which we get today’s sense of medical isolation, was “first imposed in 1377 at Ragusa (now Dubrovnik), on ships from Egypt and the East,” Shipley comments in his Discursive Dictionary. Other sources cite quarantine as first appearing in Venice. This quarantine indeed passes, though, from the Italian quarantina giorni, “period of forty days,” with quarantina from quaranta, “forty,” also showing significant reduction of quadraginta’s consonants.

Before it became associated with disease, “quarantine” referred to the Biblical desert where Jesus is said to have fasted for 40 days and to the 40-day Lenten period, whose length was inspired by the Bible narrative. (For more on the mystical meanings of 40, read the rest of John Kelly’s post.)

“Quarantine” also has an obsolete legal sense, summarized by the OED as “[a] period of forty days during which a widow who is entitled to a dower is supposed to be assigned her dower and has the right to remain in her deceased husband's chief dwelling.”

And “quarantine” is used in computing: “The isolation of a computer, a piece of software, a part of a network, etc., in order to keep malignant software or unwanted data separate from the rest of a system” (OED again).

For reasons I can’t explain, the people who loudly lament the use of “decimate” to mean anything other than the Roman military sense of “to kill one in ten” are silent on the seemingly paradoxical matter of a 21-day quarantine.

Despite considerable media-generated Ebola hysteria, the current spike in “quarantine” usage is dwarfed by a giant peak in 2008. I suspect that this cultural event prompted the earlier surge:

 

Quarantine (2008). Image via Cranky Critic.

UPDATE: Ben Zimmer wrote about “quarantine” for the Wall Street Journal, noting that the term was used “in the run-up to World War II when Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to punish the Axis powers, and then again by John F. Kennedy during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.”

On the Visual Thesaurus: Ish

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at ish, a flexible little suffix with multiple meanings that’s increasingly seen in titles (ABC-TV’s “Black-ish”), brand names (the Berkeley bookstore Bookish, the Oakland T-shirt company Oaklandish, the vintage-furniture etailer Chairish), and brand descriptors (anonymish). In some places, ish has even attained independent status (Ish Watch; Ish, a children’s book).

Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers (only $19.95 a year!). Here’s a shortish excerpt:

Bookish: This word has meant “literary” or “enthusiastic about reading” since the mid-16^th century. When attached to a noun, ish gives the sense of belonging to that thing or person, or having its nature or character. Many noun + ish blends express disparagement: consider childish, sluggish, shrewish, foolish, selfish, and many others. Other times, as with bookish (or feverish or freakish), the sense is neutral. In addition to the Berkeley bookstore, there’s an ebook reader called Booki.sh, which uses the Saint Helena country-code domain extension .sh.

Read the rest of the column.

Related: Raffish.

Blog bonus #1:

Here’s the normal Bookish logo.

 

And here’s the Halloween version.

Via a tweet from San Francisco Chronicle book editor John McMurtrie.

 

Blog bonus #2:

I figured someone would ask about Ish Kabibble, so even though he’s unrelated to the topic at hand I did some research.

Ish Kabibble was the stage name of Merwyn Bogue (1907-1994 or 1908-1993, depending on the source), a cornet player in Kay Kyser’s big band. The origin of the pseudonym is debated. Here’s an excerpt from the World Wide Words entry:

This dismissive slang expression came into existence in the USA quite suddenly around 1913 with the ostensible meaning “I should worry!”, which means, of course, “Don’t worry!” or “Who cares?”. It had quite a vogue for a decade or two and was the name of a character played by Merwyn Bogue on a 1930s radio show called Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge (they don’t make titles like that any more).

Those of us who sift the detritus of language for fun and profit are intrigued by it. It looks and sounds Yiddish and the phrases nish gefidlt, nicht gefiedelt, and ich gebliebte have all been suggested as sources. The idea of a Jewish connection was reinforced in 1914 when Harry Hershfield began his cartoon strip Abie the Agent in Hearst newspapers, which featured the car salesman Abraham (“Abie”) Kabibble.

Many people at the time certainly thought it was Yiddish, and it’s notable that some Anglicised it to “I should bibble” or “we should bibble”. But it was equally firmly said by contemporaries that no Yiddish connection existed at all.

 

October Linkfest

When McDonald’s met Play-Doh, and other examples of peculiar co-branding. (Marketplace)

*

Forward thinking, incremental thinking, and three other proven alternatives to brainstorming. (Strategy+Business)

*

Worst. Infographics. Ever. (WTF Visualizations, via The Guardian, via Paul Wiggins)

 

Bad math, bad spelling, and … chickens? Many more like this at WTF Visualizations.

*

“Years ago, I asked one of my mentors what he thought was the hardest part of designing a typeface. I was expecting ‘the cap S’ or ‘the italic lowercase’ or something like that. But he answered without hesitation: the name. Finding the name is the hardest part.” (Tobias Frere-Jones on the names of typefaces, via Michael Bierut)

*

M life (“Own Vegas”) is MGM Resorts’ customer rewards program. M’life Wellness is a fledgling medical marijuana dispensary in Las Vegas. Does MGM have a trademark case? (Las Vegas Review Journal, via Proof of Use)

*

“Can I stipulate the awesomeness of a lawsuit based on parts of speech?” Ben Yagoda on the trademark dispute between management consultant Dov Seidman and yogurt maker Chobani over the slogan “How Matters.” (Lingua Franca)

*

In a tribute to Hayao Miyazaki, director of My Neighbor Totoro and many other brilliant animated films, a new species of velvet worm has been named Eoperipatus totoro. (Via Tom Moultrie)

             

Eoperipatus totoro.                                        Catbus in My Neighbor Totoro.

 

*

“Foodster,” “chefstaurateur,” “drool-worthy”: the food site Eater would very much like to ban their use forever. Not sure what “kerfuffle” is doing on that list—it’s a perfectly cromulent word! (Eater, via Lisa Newman-Wise)

*

“Crone”? “UAV”? “RPA”? A lot of people in the drone industry hate the word “drone,” but they can’t agree on a replacement. (Wall Street Journal)

*

Acronym of the month: PNIS (Proceedings of the National Institute of Science, a not exactly factual entity). PNIS calls itself “the journal that publishes just about anything (real or fake)”; categories include HARD (Honest And Reliable Data) and SOFD (Satirical Or Fake Data). “An analysis of the cost of raising a child like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes” is, you will be gratified to know, an example of HARD research. (Via Christopher Phipps)

 

Word of the Week: Raffish

Raffish: Disreputable, vulgar, sleazy; also (and more commonly now) mischievous, offbeat, showing an attractive disregard for conventional behavior.

I’ve been doing some research into brand names that end in -ish, so a recent tweet from word guy James Harbeck caught my attention:

 

 

The adjectival suffix -ish signifies “having the qualities of [the noun it’s attached to].” So if raffish is “having the qualities of raff,” what is “raff”?

It turns out that raff goes back to Middle English. Back in the late 14th century, according to the OED, it meant “a class or group of people (perh. with negative connotations.” By the mid-1400s it also meant “worthless material” or rubbish, a meaning that persisted through the early 20th century. We still use riff-raff to mean “disreputable people”; that usage has cognates in many European languages—French rif et raf, Italian de riffa e de raffa, Danish ripsraps—where it means something closer to “every single one.” Oxford Dictionaries Online claims that raffish was shortened from riffraff + ish, but other dictionaries don’t concur.

The Online Etymology Dictionary credits Jane Austen with the first published usage of the “disreputable” sense of raffish, in 1801, but gives no citation; the OED doesn’t mention Austen and antedates the usage to 1795, in a book called Elisa Powell. (“They returned to the parlour, laughing, and saying one to the other, ‘Did you ever see any thing so raffish! He will certainly become a mere student.’”) The “attractive disregard” sense goes back only to 1906, and didn’t really pick up steam until the middle of the 20th century, according to Ngrams for American and British English. Maybe the dashing flyboys of the RAF (Royal Air Force) nudged the word into positive territory, or perhaps it was influenced by rakish (now “jaunty, dashing,” but originally “disreputable”—as in like a rakehell).

Tennessee Williams used raffish to vivid effect in his stage directions for the opening of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947):

The exterior of a two-story corner building on a street in New Orleans which is named Elysian Fields and runs between the L & N tracks and the river. The section is poor but, unlike corresponding sections in other American cities, it has a raffish charm.

To learn how the -ish suffix became an independent word (“Hungry?” “Yeah, ish”), read Gretchen McCulloch’s essay for Lexicon Valley.

Here a Meow, There a Meow, Everywhere a Meow Meow

I’m serious. Everywhere.

*

First sighting: in a story from early September about a BBC radio announcer (oops, presenter) who admitted snorting a drug called mephedrone—street name “meow meow.” Precisely how meow meow got that sobriquet is subject to some debate, but it may derive from the drug’s chemical name, 4-methylmethcathinone, or MM-CAT for short. According to a 2011 Mindhacks post, journalists (and one anonymous Wikipedia editor) were responsible for popularizing the feline nickname.

 

*

Then I attended a performance at Berkeley Repertory Theatre by the post-post-modern cabaret artist known as Meow Meow.

 

Melissa Madden Gray in character as Meow Meow. “This is a performer who has always seemed more of a bird than a cat.” - Crikey

 

The show is directed by Emma Rice of Kneehigh, a terrifically inventive British theater group. Through October 19.

 

*

Meow Meow Tweet is an apothecary. In Brooklyn. It has stockists!

 

No explanation for the name. Naturally, they tweet.

*

 

Miaow Miaow cuttlefish flavoured [sic] crackers are made in Malaysia. I discovered them at my favorite food emporium, the Berkeley Bowl Marketplace.*

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Berkeley Bowl is a wonderland of Asian snacks.

 

A blog called Revolting Foods of America published a catty review of these squiddy crisps last year. I’m inclined to be more generous, although the crackers (not really crackers in the US sense; more like small tentacle-shaped chips) are too sweet for my taste. You should, however, check out the review to gaze in wonder at a full-size photo of the package art, which is worthy of Jules Verne.

 

*

 

Just one Meow, but three M’s.

 

Mmmeow party picks (“cool cats with good taste”) from Fred and Friends. I’m not sure why they belong in the San Jose Museum of Art gift shop, but that’s where I found them.

 

*

It’s Meow Time!

  

 

The Meow Mix jingle was introduced with the Meow Mix brand in 1974. “Tastes so good, cats ask for it by name” was the brand’s most memorable slogan. It never should have changed.

__

* The BBM’s original store, across the street, was in a repurposed (unpinned? deballed?) bowling alley.

Half-Fast, Whole F-Word

If you needed proof that “ass” and its variants (kick-ass, bad-ass, Big Ass) have become unexceptional in mainstream US advertising, here’s a new Verizon ad that tells customers they can “stop living with half-fast Internet.”

Geddit? “Half-assed,” haha.

Update, December 2014: the video I originally embedded is no longer available, but the campaign continues.

“Don't have a half-fast holiday.”

Via Language Log.The comments are worth reading.

For additional examples of commercial near-profanity, see Booking.com’s “Abso-Booking-Lutely,” Sheets Energy Strips “I Take a Sheet in the Pool,”  Peet’s Coffee and Tea’s “Do You Give a Cup?” and Kmart’s “Ship My Pants.”

*

Meanwhile, a new cookbook from Rodale—yes, that Rodale, 84 years old and famous for healthy-living publications like Women’s Health and Prevention—says F-U to innuendo and drives straight into foul territory.

Thug Kitchen: The Official Cookbook. Tagline: “Eat like you give a fuck.” Via AdFreak.

 

It’s a real cookbook, and there’s a real trailer for it. As the header warns, the language is “explicit”—and also very funny. The ad team has clearly paid attention to pharmaceutical advertising.

  

“Consult your doctor or use common fucking sense.”

 

The Thug Kitchen website minces nectarines but not words.

Hey, you missed a fucking apostrophe there!

 

I can’t wait to read the review by Cursing Mommy.