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“What linguists sometimes call ‘genericisation’ of brand names has a grimmer name among marketing types: “genericide”. The Economist’s Johnson on google, photoshop, xerox, and other examples of brand genericization.
A trademark-defense ad from Xerox, 2011. Yes, “zipper” used to be a trademark-protected brand name. Source.
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Related: The lawyers at Velcro® want you to know – in full-throated song – that the competitors’ product is properly called hook and loop tape. (Thanks, David!)
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In my newest column for the Visual Thesaurus, I take a look at backronyms, defined in an Oxford Dictionaries blog post as “an acronym deliberately created to suit a particular word or words, either to create a memorable name, or as a fanciful explanation of a word’s origin.” Backronyms are rife in the names of legislation: witness the recent HONEST, COVFEFE, and MAR-A-LAGO acts. It’s a tradition that goes back to the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, whose rah-rah title expands into “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.”
Backronym was coined (as bacronym) in 1983; examples were rare before then.
Full access to the column is available only to subscribers for three months. Here’s an excerpt:
Continue reading "On the Visual Thesaurus: Back to backronyms" »
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Will Sommer writes in his blog, Right Richter*:
After Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer announced a potential DACA deal, pro-Trump forums and Twitter lit up with mentions of “blackpilling”— the concept that the political process is useless, and that either completely dropping out of society or responding with mass violence is the answer. The idea that Trump would betray them, they said, was the ultimate blackpill.”
(Emphasis added.)
Blackpill (noun), blackpilling (gerund), and to blackpill (transitive verb) are relatively new, but since 2016 they’ve been pervasive among the so-called alt-right, whose adherents include neo-Nazis, white separatists, and the manosphere. The terms were inspired by The Matrix (1999), written by siblings Lilly and Lana Wachowski, in which the protagonist, Neo, is offered a choice of a virtual red pill or a virtual blue bill. “You take the blue pill, the story ends,” the character Morpheus tells Neo. “You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
“Red pill” – a metaphor for “reality, however harsh” – was adopted by the men’s rights movement, many of whose adherents frequent a sub-Reddit called The Red Pill. The Red Pill was also the title of a 2016 documentary about the men’s rights movement directed by Cassie Jaye.
What “redpilling” is to the manosphere, “blackpilling” is to a segment of the alt-right: the neoreaction movement, self-styled as NRx.
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If you’re inclined to spend $100,000 or more for a fully loaded urban tank, Range Rover has just the thing for you: its new Velar SUV.
Picky people will point out that it’s Tata Motors’ Jaguar Land Rover Range Rover Velar. (Jaguar Land Rover has been a wholly owned subsidy of Mumbai-based Tata Motors since 2008. Tata Motors is a subsidiary of the Tata Group, founded by the marvelously named Ratan Tata.) But that’s a mouthful, and what I’m really interested in – as are you, I’m guessing – is the new name: Velar.
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This week, the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency (SFMTA) will consider approving a new permit program for private transit vehicles, or PTVs. These vehicles – currently, Chariot is the only one operating in the city – use shuttle vans and a smartphone app; they are “open to the public, charge individual fares and operate on fixed routes,” according to the SFMTA website.
Bureaucrats may call them PTVs, but these vehicles are better known by an old slang term: jitney. And I was surprised to learn that both the word jitney and jitney transportation have deep roots, and routes, in California.
A “super jitney bus” in San Francisco, 1970s. Photo via SFMTA.com.
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In Advertising Land, parts of speech move freely across borders. Nouns become verbs (“Prepare to Pumpkin,” “Let’s Movie”); adjectives become nouns (“Welcome to Possible,” “The Power of True”). This functional shift, or anthimeria, happens in regular English, too – share and contact were nouns long before they were verbs – but it’s downright rampant in ad copy, as these recent sightings demonstrate.
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I’ve followed Tinu Abayomi-Paul on Twitter for years, but I only recently noticed that her profile included the hashtag #spoonie, a term unfamiliar to me.
So I did a little research.
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Last weekend Peter Daou, a political blogger and former adviser to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, launched Verrit, a website that purports to be “for the 65.8 million.” The number refers to the popular-vote plurality won by Clinton in 2016 (which, of course, was insufficient to win the Electoral College, ergo President Trump). And numbers play a big role in the Verrit brand, which so far consists of quotes and statistics presented on the web equivalent of index cards, each one topped by a headline and bottomed, as it were, with a “Verrit.com authentication code.” Each “card” is called a Verrit, as is the collective endeavor.
Many of the headlines are blandly descriptive. Others, like the one on this Verrit, have a creepily propagandistic tone: “Maligning Hillary Clinton From the Left Is a Conscious Embrace of the Far Right.”
Clinton has publicly approved of the enterprise.
I'm excited to sign up for @Verrit, a media platform for the 65.8 million! Will you join me and sign up too? https://t.co/bOLSMyk6bG
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 3, 2017
But other people within and outside the media were skeptical, or even snarky. “Peter Daou continues to embarrass Hillary Clinton,” wrote Sarah Jones in the New Republic. At New York, Brian Feldman called Verrit “the product of an unraveled mind that would prefer to relitigate the 2016 Democratic primary and general election until our sun burns out.” “A sad nostalgia act, ahead of its time” was the summary judgment of Politico’s Jack Shafer. Note, please, that none of these publications could be called right-of-center.
Enough background. Where, you are probably wondering, does the “Verrit” name come from, and what does it mean?
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In early 2016, when Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign was looking for a way to connect with supporters and recruit volunteers, it turned to Hustle, a mass texting platform that had been created barely 18 months earlier. Sanders eventually lost the Democratic nomination, but San Francisco-based Hustle hustles on, shifting its efforts toward the anti-Trump resistance. Hustle’s goals may be more overtly political than those of other technology startups, but the company’s name perfectly encapsulates an entire industry’s ethos: move fast, be aggressive, shake things up.
Hustle is far from a new word or concept; it’s been in the English lexicon for nearly 350 years. It comes from Dutch husselen, which means “to shake,” but it quickly developed additional senses in English, including “to crowd or push roughly,” “to obtain by fraud or deception,” “to steal,” “to beg,” and – by the 1920s – “to swindle.” (The noun form followed the same semantic route.) As early as 1825, a “hustler” was a thief; a century later, it could refer to a prostitute. Writing in the 1890s about his travels through “Our Great West,” Julian Ralph observed that “The key-note and countersign of life in these cities [of the U.S. West] is the word ‘hustle.’ We have caught it in the East. but we use it humorously, just as we once used the Southern word ‘skedaddle,’ but out West the word hustle is not only a serious term, it is the most serious in the language.”
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