Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Kipe

Kipe (also kype): To pilfer or steal; to swipe. North American slang (20th century).

Kipe is a word I associate with my childhood—it was a word used only by kids—but have heard only rarely since. Indeed, I’d have laid odds that the word was as dead as gadzooks or prithee. Then, just last week, I stumbled upon “The Revolution Will Probably Wear Mom Jeans,” by Eugenia A. Williamson, which was published this year in Issue No. 27 of The Baffler. The story is about the fashion trend called normcore, a subject in which I have more than a passing interest: I made normcore a word of the week in March 2014, and I am proud that that post is the first citation in the Wikipedia entry on normcore.

About halfway into the Baffler piece I saw this:

“…a retail label whose name kipes the year of the Bill of Rights’ signing…”

 

Whoa! Kipes right out there in the open, with no parenthetical definition or footnote, in a semi-scholarly essay! In 2015! I was transported back to John Burroughs Junior High School in Los Angeles, which is where I learned to say kipe from friends who’d probably learned it from their larcenous older siblings. That was a long time ago. In fact, I can’t remember hearing any form of to kipe since, oh, 1975. And I don’t recall ever seeing it on page or screen until I read the Baffler story—whose author, it seems relevant to add, appears to be a youngish person.

Driven by equal parts nostalgia and etymological curiosity, I decided to investigate.

Signs of Weirdness

One side of a sandwich board in front of the John Fluevog store on Grant Avenue, San Francisco:

 

“Know You’re Weird!”

 

The other side:

 

“No, You’re Weird!”

 

The resemblance to the “Keep Calm and Carry On” oeuvre is probably not coincidental, but the weirdness and wordplay are pure Fluevog. The Canadian shoe company is weird and proud of it, starting with its name—John Fluevog is the founder and chief designer—and carrying on, as it were, through the merchandise.

Take, for example, this current boot, the Angelina.

 

 

Or a chunky, four-color Mary Jane called the Sam.

The Escarpin has a ball-and-claw heel inspired by the cabriole legs of Louis XV furniture.

 

 

The men’s styles are equally striking.

The Alexander. (A metallic cap-toe oxford? Brilliant.)

 

Sometimes the weirdness overlaps with pure design genius.

The Neptune, perfect for a gala at the natural history museum or a stroll through the Everglades.

 

Lots of companies pay lip service to customer service and community, but Fluevog is the rare business that follows through. Its community (or “Flummunity”) includes a marketplace (“Fluemarket”) for secondhand Fluevog shoes and an invitation to submit a shoe design. Quite a few submissions have made the cut. (It’s “open source,” so no one gets paid, but the citizen-designer gets a free pair and the honor of having the design named after her or him.)

I’m a Vogger myself: I own two pairs of Fluevog sandals (these and these), whose styling skews toward the less-weird end of the Fluevog spectrum but is still distinctive enough to elicit admiring comments. (I think they’re admiring.) The shoes are beautifully made and very, very comfortable.

I wrote about the Fluevog.com FAQ page in 2007. A few of my favorite Fluevog Q’s:

“Who played vibes with Benny Goodman’s big band between 1936 and 1940?”

“Why are Fluevogs so expensive?”

“Are John Fluevog Angels really Satan resistant?”

 

Stricken

I’ve been collecting examples of strikethrough in print advertising for several years now.. The latest examples to have caught my eye are ads for the PBS production of “Wolf Hall,” based on the Hilary Mantel novels about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, and Anne Boleyn. (This is not the production that’s currently on the stage of the Winter Garden in New York; that’s the Royal Shakespeare Company’s version, starring Ben Miles as Cromwell. Yes, it’s a happy season for Tudorphiles and fans of Hilary Mantel’s excellent prose.)

These half-page ads appear sequentially on pages 11, 13, and 15 of the April issue of The Atlantic.

Word of the Week: Libel Tourism

Libel tourism: “The act of suing a writer for alleged defamation in a foreign jurisdiction where there are weak libel laws.” (Source: Dictionary.com).

Often, that jurisdiction is Great Britain, as NPR reporter Ari Shapiro noted in a March 21 report, “On Libel and the Law, the U.S. and U.K. Go Separate Ways.”

The hook for Shapiro’s story is Going Clear, Alex Gibney’s new documentary about the Church of Scientology, which will have its premiere March 29 on HBO. (Shapiro said the film aired “last week.” Maybe for critics, but the rest of us will have to wait.) The film is based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright; the book was published in the U.S. in 2013 (and was short-listed for a National Book Award), but has not yet been released in the U.K. There have also been “serious challenges” to the release of the film, Shapiro reports, “because Britain does not have the same free speech protections as the United States.”

The libel tourism coinage is credited to the British media lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, who cited “the menace of libel tourism” in a 2010 opinion piece for The Guardian. The term had already been in circulation for at least a few years by then. It appeared in a January 2008 article by Doreen Carvajal in The New York Times about a Scandinavian case: 

You’re an investment bank in Iceland with a complaint about a tabloid newspaper in Denmark that published critical articles in Danish. Whom do you call?

A pricey London libel lawyer.

That is called libel tourism by lawyers in the media trade. And Britain remains a comfortable destination for the rich in search of friendly courts, which have already weighed complaints from people who consider themselves unfairly tarred with labels like tax dodger, terrorist financier or murky Qaeda operative.

Russian oligarchs and Saudi billionaires have also found refuge in British libel law, Carvajal writes. Her succinct explanation:

Britain is a legal refuge because of defamation standards rooted in common law. They essentially assume that any offending speech is false and the writer or author must prove that it is in fact true to prevail against the charge.

In the United States, with its First Amendment protection for free speech, the situation tilts in the opposite direction: To succeed, libel plaintiffs must prove that the speech is false and published with a reckless disregard for the truth.

The expanded Dictionary.com entry brings us up to date:

After several high-profile libel suits filed in the U.K. against U.S. authors resulted in judgments against the authors—lawsuits that, in the opinion of many jurists, probably would not have held up in a U.S. court of law—Congress in 2010 passed the SPEECH (Securing the Protection of our Enduring and Established Constitutional Heritage) Act. The title of the act speaks volumes: foreign libel judgments are no longer enforceable in the U.S. unless they meet the same high legal standards in libel matters as required by U.S. law, including that they do not violate the First Amendment right of free speech of an American author.Thus the tourist must return home.

SPEECH is a masterly example of the bureaucratic backronym.

Besides libel tourism, there are a few other examples of the “X tourism” formula.

Birth tourism, also known as maternity tourism, is travel to another country for the purpose of giving birth. Reasons for the practice, according to a Wikipedia entry, “include access to the destination country's healthcare system, circumvention of communist China's one-child policy and (in countries that recognize jus soli) birthright citizenship for the child.” According to a CBS News story published February 9, 2015, the number of Chinese women giving birth in the United States “more than doubled to about 10,000 in 2012.”

Medical tourism is travel to another country for health care, often for economic reasons. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has estimated that 750,000 U.S. residents travel abroad for medical care each year; a CNBC report put the 2013 figure at 900,000, and noted that the worldwide market is $20 billion to $40 billion. Websites such as MedicalTourism.com (“Your Passport to a World of Options”) and PatientsBeyondBorders.com (“The Most Trusted Resource in Medical Travel”) provide information and patient accounts; companies like Planet Hospital (“A New Way to Care”) handle the logistics.

A subset of medical tourism is surgery tourism, and a sub-subset is plastic surgery tourism, which New Yorker contributor Patricia Marx touches on in her “Letter from Seoul,” published in the March 23 issue. Her subtitle: “Why is South Korea the world’s plastic-surgery capital?” Her answer:

“Surgery tourists” from abroad make up about a third of the business in South Korea, and, of those, most come from China. One reason is that, throughout Asia, the “Korean wave” of pop culture (called hallyu) shapes not only what music you should listen to but what you should look like while listening to it. Cosmetic transformations can be so radical that some of the hospitals offer certificates of identity to foreign patients, who might need help convincing immigration officers that they’re not in the Witness Protection Program.

Some of the clinic names Marx spotted on her visit: Small Face, Magic Nose, Dr. 4 Nose, Her She, Before and After, Reborn, Top Class, Wannabe, 4 Ever, Cinderella, Center for Human Appearance, and April 31 Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. Marx’s translator explained “Small Face” to her: “Koreans, and Asians in general, are self-conscious about having big heads,” he said. “This is why in group photos a girl will try to stand far in the back to make her face relatively smaller.” Also popular in South Korea: the “Bagel Girl” look—bagel being a portmanteau of “baby-faced” and “glamorous.”

On the Visual Thesaurus: Naming Sub-Brands

Apple’s newest device will be offered in three models: Watch Sport, Watch, and Watch Edition. The significance of those names—and the strategies behind other sub-branding programs—is the subject of my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, “The Cues and Clues of Sub-Brands, from Cabin Class to Apple Watch.”

Access is restricted to subscribers. Here’s an excerpt:

Marking class distinction was the goal of one of the earliest sub-branding efforts. In the 19th century, writes John Maxtone-Graham in Liners to the Sun, trans-Atlantic steamships "separated and identified" passengers according to type of accommodation. Those who could afford individual cabins were booked in Cabin class; those who couldn't were berthed below, in dormitories often situated near the steering equipment — hence "Steerage."

When larger liners came along toward the end of the century, their owners saw a business opportunity in additional levels of choice. "Henceforth," writes Maxtone-Graham, "Cabin passengers were economically subdivided. First Cabin, or First Class, encompassed the most lavish and expensive staterooms on board. Second Cabin — hence Second Class — occupied small quarters at the after end of the main bunkhouse and below."

Read the rest of the column to learn how software manufacturers, automakers, and fashion and beauty brands handle sub-branding.

March Linkfest

Here’s a spirited celebration of St. Patrick’s Day: “Mudebroth, an Ejaculation of St. Patrick.” It’s on Strong Language, so expect naughty words.

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“Clickspittle: an unquestioningly loyal follower who obediently shares every trivial thought of their idol on social media.” Post-modern portmanteaus from The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present, excerpted in The Independent.  (Via @Catchword)

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“Most important, it stood for Internet. But it also stood for other valuable i things, like individual, imagination, i as in me, etc. It also did a pretty good job of laying a solid foundation for future product naming.” A knowledgeable Quora answer to the question “What is the history of the i prefix in Apple product names?”(Via @AlanBrew)

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When you’re creating a name, trademark protection is more important than domain name—but the wrong domain name can get you into trademark trouble, writes Brent Lorentz on Duets Blog.

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Eight great fake company names. (Via @HenryAlpert)

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“Around the time of the birth of OK, there was a fad for komical Ks instead of Cs on the pages of newspapers … including from 1839: ‘The gentleman to the left of the speaker, in klaret kolored koat with krimson kollar, is Mr. Klay, member of Kongress from Kentucky’.” Allan Metcalf, author of OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word, marks the 176th anniversary of “OK” with a post about the word’s “konspicuous, kurious, komical” … uh, kwalities. (Read my 2010 post about “OK.”)

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What do we lose when dictionaries delete words like bluebell, catkin, lark, and mistletoe to make room for blog, broadband, MP3 player, and chatroom? British nature writer Robert Macfarlane—most recently the author of Landmarks—writes in The Guardian about “the importance of preserving and plenishing a diverse language for landscape.” His essay includes some beautiful, obscure words like ammil, “a Devon term for the thin film of ice that lacquers all leaves, twigs, and grass blades when a freeze follows a partial thaw, and that in sunlight can cause a whole landscape to glitter.” Plenishing is pretty wonderful, too. (Via @StanCarey)

 

 

Word of the Week: Grolar Bear

Grolar bear: A hybrid animal that’s part grizzly bear (Ursus arctus) and part polar bear (Ursus maritimus). The word is a blend of grizzly and polar.

Eva Holland wrote about grolar bears last week in the online magazine Pacific Standard:

I thought it was a joke when I first heard about it two or three years ago: a bear that was part-grizzly, part-polar bear, roaming the land where tundra meets sea ice? People called it the grolar bear, I was told, or sometimes the pizzly bear.

Pizzly bear? I thought at the time. Come on.

But the hybrid is very real. (Although, clearly, “grolar bear” is the superior choice of name.) And if some scientists’ predictions are correct, it could be just one of a whole host of potential hybrid mammal species to emerge from the Arctic as it continues to warm.

Polar and grizzly bears have long been bred in captivity, but the first wild hybrid wasn’t seen until 2006, when hunter shot “an odd looking bear—white with brown patches” in the Canadian Arctic. Since then, at least three other sightings (two unconfirmed) have been reported. Unlike some interspecies hybrids, these animals are fertile.

Brendan Kelly, the chief scientist and director of conservation research at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, spent 35 years in Alaska studying Alaskan marine mammals; in an interview with Holland, he theorized that the rapid disappearance of Arctic sea ice is leading to a dramatic rise in hybridization. There’s evidence, he said, that beluga whales and narwhals are mating in the eastern Arctic. The hybridization “is cause for concern,” writes Holland:

With every mating season that rolls around, each remaining polar bear will be statistically more likely to encounter and mate with a grizzly rather than a fellow polar bear. That will produce more hybrids, which will also be more likely to mate with a grizzly bear or a fellow hybrid. And so on.

“It can be the final nail in the coffin,” Kelly says.

In addition to grolar bear and pizzly bear, the Arctic hybrid has also been dubbed nanulak, a blend of the Inuit names for polar bear (nanuk) and grizzly bear (aklak).

NO NAME vs. NO NAME

“A name doesn’t define who or what you are,” declares No Name, a National Beverage Alliance brand of alcoholic drinks. 

 

 

The copy goes on, redundantly: “Sometimes a name doesn’t matter. A name doesn’t matter.”

You can repeat it as much as you want, but No Name Steaks will still have a beef with that claim.

 

 

NO NAME vs. NO NAME, pending before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Maybe they’ll shoot it out at Sausalito’s famous No Name Bar.

Fifty-six years now: The bar opened in 1959.

 

(Hat tip: Erik Pelton.)

 

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Related: Untitled, a restaurant at New York’s Whitney Museum; Untitled Startup, Inc., which eventually chose a less baffling name; The Nameless Café in Oakland, California (which has no listings as well as no name); and The Nameless, a nonprofit organization, also in Oakland, that is defunct as well as nameless.

While the Getting’s Good

In New York City, you can summon a limo with an app called Gett.

TechCrunch calls Gett “Uber without surge pricing.”“Gett rides are $10 in central Manhattan, anywhere between Houston and Central Park South, no matter what day of the week.”

 

You can tell your Gett driver to take you to Lincoln Plaza to see a screening of Gett.

Gett—it's the Hebrew word for a religious divorce—is an Israeli courtroom drama that opened in the U.S. in February. New York Times critic Manohla Dargis called it “gripping cinema from start to finish.”

 

Curiously, the ride-hailing app Gett was developed in Israel, where Hebrew is, of course, one of the official languages. In most of the 32 cities in which it operates, the company is known as GetTaxi.

 

Confused? You could just stay home and watch getTV.

 

“A new television network that brings the classic films you love to your living room.” (Read my Visual Thesaurus column on “classic.”)

 

getTV is owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment. It launched in February 2014.

  

Got it?

Danny Kaye and Basil Rathbone in The Court Jester (1955)

Word of the Week: Pallesthesia

Pallesthesia: The sensation of mechanical vibration on or near the body. From Greek pallein, to quiver, and aisthesis, feeling.

Pallesthesia shows up mostly in medical reference books and journals—in, for example, a 1953 article in Nature on “depression of vibratory sense levels in lupus erythematosus.” But John McPhee, the eminent author of books about basketball, geology, freight transportation, and many other topics, is also fond of it. He drops it into “Frame of Reference,” his essay in the March 9 issue of The New Yorker about when to explain a reference and when to skip it. Here’s his satirical example of “when to skip it”:

And NPR is reviewing the life of the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee: “He became close to a Georgetown neighbor—a young senator named John F. Kennedy.” Doesn’t that give you a shiver in the bones? Pure pallesthesia. Ta-da!

This isn’t McPhee’s first pallesthetic indulgence. He slipped it into a description of a volcanic eruption in his 1989 book The Control of Nature, excerpted over several issues of The New Yorker:

The eruption came without warning—that is, without sufficient portent to yield an interpretation resulting in alarm. Gudmundur Karlsson, visiting friends the previous evening, thought he felt vibrations. He asked his friends if they were having trouble with their central heating. They looked at him oddly and said they felt nothing. In the hour after midnight, Magnus Magnusson thought he counted fifteen earthquakes. They were like touches of pallesthesia, nothing more: little shivers in the bones.

When is it kosher to use an obscure word like pallesthesia or an obscure reference—Tom Ripley? Wilford Brimley?—in writing intended for a general audience? How much of a frame of reference should the writer provide before sounding condescending or simpleminded? McPhee illuminates:

Frames of reference are like the constellation of lights, some of them blinking, on an airliner descending toward an airport at night. You see the lights. They imply a structure you can’t see. Inside that frame of reference—those descending lights—is a big airplane with its flaps down expecting a runway.

You will never land smoothly on borrowed vividness. If you say someone looks like Tom Cruise—and you let it go at that—you are asking Tom Cruise to do your writing for you. Your description will fail when your reader doesn’t know who Tom Cruise is.

On the other hand, McPhee writes, “Writing has to be fun at least once in a pale blue moon.” Thus: pallesthesia (twice in a lifetime). And, from another McPhee essay: “grand odobene mustache.” Yes, McPhee could have written “walrus mustache.” But where’s the fun—and the race to the dictionary—in that?