Fritinancy

Word of the week: Vote-a-rama

After seven years of Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act – probably the signature legislative accomplishment of President Obama’s first term – and two failed attempts this year by the Republican-majority to repeal and replace the law, U.S. senators prepared to spend most of July 27 in a marathon of voting on amendments to a new “skinny repeal” of the ACA. The showdown they were bracing for has a name that sounds like a joke but in fact is 100 percent official: vote-a-rama.

It even had its own logo.

Via the official website of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Budget.

 

In the end, the proceedings didn’t quite add up to a vote-a-rama, which is defined as 15 or more votes on a single bill in a single day. The “skinny repeal” – officially the American Health Care Act of 2017 – was defeated, 48-52, when three Republican senators joined their Democratic colleagues in voting nay.

July linkfest

Linguist Arnold Zwicky examines the “ostentatious euphemism” beat the snack out of, as seen in a recent Jack Link’s ad. I’ve written about ostentatious euphemisms myself – “Ship my pants,” “Look at the booking view,” “Do you give a cup?” – and am glad to know what to call them. 

 

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A linguist walks in a Mexican restaurant in southern Arizona – several of them, in fact – and takes note of the various kinds of Spanishes on the menu, from mock to minimal to weirdly translated.

 

Eater magazine published a five-part series on bad restaurant names, from bad puns to “distressingly sexual” to “crimes against language” to “just really bad.” Start with Part 1 and follow the links at the end to read about the others.

Word of the week: Popinjay

The perfectly calibrated insult is a rara avis nowadays – ass- and douche- compounds don’t really count – so when someone resurrects an elegant 16th-century epithet, attention must be paid.

So: Scaramucci will be fine working with Reince. Even if Reince continues to loathe the popinjay.

— Felix Salmon (@felixsalmon) July 22, 2017

The reference is, of course, to the former hedge-fund manager (and former supporter of liberal causes like gun control) Anthony Scaramucci, who last week was appointed White House communications director despite, or because of, having no experience with media or communications other than having granted interviews to reporters. He’s known familiarly, if not always approvingly, as “the Mooch.” “Reince” is White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, formerly the chair of the Republican National Committee.

Anthony Scaramucci, July 21, 2017: “I love the president and I’m very, very loyal to the president.” In 2015 he called Trump a “hack” and a “bully.” Via Business Insider.

 

Popinjay is a wonderful old word and a memorable descriptor for the slick, effusive Scaramucci. For the last 500 years or so it’s meant “a vain, conceited, shallow, talkative person,” although its original definition was neutral and zoological.

Perchance to dream: The names of mattress companies

Until the 1990s, if you lived in the U.S. and needed a new mattress you probably began and ended your search with the letter S. Simmons (founded in 1870), Sealy (1881), and Serta (1931) were the CBS, NBC, and ABC of the mattress world: anything else was on the far end of the dial and virtually unsupported by advertising.*

The Big Three had sturdy, uncomplicated names. Simmons was named for company founder Zalmon Simmons. Sealy took its name from its place of origin: Sealy, Texas. Serta, which began life as the nearly generic Sleeper, Inc., is harder to analyze: I’ve found no etymology for the name, although it may have been an attempt to convey “certain.” (Compare Certs, a brand of breath mints** that debuted in 1956.) Serta and Simmons merged in 2012 to form Serta Simmons Holdings.

Everything began to change in 1992, when Tempur-Pedic – originally a Swedish company called Fagerdala Foams – introduced its “memory foam” (technically viscoelastic; the visco comes from viscosity) mattresses to the U.S. Tempur-Pedic doesn’t tell a story about its name, so I’ll have to guess that it’s an altered-spelling blend of temperature, pure, and orthopedic. (The mattress material is said to respond to body temperature.) As a name, it’s an improvement, to Anglophone ears, on “Fagerdala,” which may have been an anagram of the founders’ names. Tempur-Pedic was acquired by Sealy in 2012 and is now called TempurSealy.

After Tempur-Pedic, the deluge. Foam mattresses were cheaper than traditional innerspring mattresses, and they didn’t require separate box springs. As foam technology improved, more and more companies got in on the sleepy-time action. The advent of the Internet and direct-to-consumer sales encouraged even more competition. The final disruptive turning point was the development of technology that could compress a foam mattress down to a single inch of thickness so it could be packed in a box. Today, U.S. mattress sales total more than $14 billion (the figure is from 2014), and there are dozens of mattress manufacturers – see the Sleepopolis website for reviews and comparisons – whose names reflect a wide range of naming styles. Here’s my rundown of some of the most interesting names. So as not to drive myself nuts, I’m limiting the list to nationally or internationally available brands, which means I’ve left out a bunch of Bay Area names like Ergo, Essentia, and Earthsake. Founding dates are from Crunchbase, Wikipedia, and news reports.

Word of the week: Overstand

I first encountered overstand only recently, while I was catching up on the most recent season of “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” on Netflix. When I heard the word twice in that episode, I wondered whether it was a Kimmyism like “What the fudge?” or “Troll the respawn.” But no: overstand turns out to be a different sort of invention altogether. In fact, it’s a couple different inventions.

 

Tituss Burgess as Titus Andromedon in “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” Season 3, Episode 6.

So many words, so little impact

When is a billboard not a billboard? When it’s a freakin’ 227-word manifesto – 239 if you include the headline.

 

“This is our only billboard. We need it to say a lot.” No you don’t.

 

Yes, I counted the words in this screwy outdoor ad from Public Mobile, a Canadian wireless-telecom company. (I lifted the photo from Tim Nudd’s post on Adweek, which called the ad “clever.” I disagree.)

Word of the week: Magnitsky Act

If we’ve learned anything in the last nine months, it’s that there’s no such thing as a slow news day anymore. Take yesterday, a midsummer Sunday. At about 4:30 Eastern Daylight Time, the New York Times published a front-page story that astonished even those of us who thought we’d become inured to astonishment.

According to the Times, the American president’s first-born son and namesake “was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer” at Trump Tower in June 2016. The Times cites five sources, and Don Jr. himself confirmed the account – a mere 24 hours after claiming that the subject of the meeting had been “primarily about adoptions” of Russian children by American families. He changed his story after being confronted with the Times’s information, confirming in a written statement that he’d attended the meeting in hopes of obtaining some dirt on his father’s opponent in the presidential race. But, according to the statement, “it quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.” Bait and switch!

 

Someone be a dear & tell stupid @DonaldJTrumpJr that "I went there to commit a crime but the mean lady didn't let me!" isn't a great defense

— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) July 10, 2017

 

How does the word of the week fit into this tangled web? Recall the “adoptions” story.