Fritinancy

How "Daisy" changed political advertising

Election Day, November 3: A polarizing Republican candidate who has spent much of his adult life heading a family business faces a Democrat who has spent most of his adult life as an elected official. The Republican has been branded as an extremist, a narcissist, and possibly a fascist—none of which deters his fanatical supporters. The Democrat is overshadowed by a glamorous predecessor and tarred by a specious eleventh-hour scandal. In the background—or foreground, depending on your perspective—are widespread racial and youth uprisings that some people suspect are ignited by “Communists” and “anarchists.”

2020? No, I’m describing 1964, when the November election date was the same as this year’s. It was a year of violence in Harlem and Jersey City; of the murders of three civil-rights workers in Mississippi; of heated free-speech protests in Berkeley. It was the year Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson, running for his first full term less than a year after the JFK assassination, faced Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a far-right Republican who had beaten all of the Establishment contenders—Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Cabot Lodge, William Scranton—to win his party’s nomination.

I’ve thought a lot about the parallels between then and now while I read historian Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. The book was published in 2001, long before our current troubles, but it’s a timely and vivid reminder of how history rhymes.*

 

One 1964 event stands apart for its strangeness and impact: the Johnson campaign’s rule-breaking late-campaign TV spot. It’s known today by a one-word title, “Daisy,” and it permanently changed the way political campaigns were waged.

Still shot from “Daisy” ad, 1964

Word of the week: Chump

At an October 24 drive-in rally in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was heckled by small group of Trump supporters, who honked horns, waved flags, and shouted “Four more years!” Addressing his own supporters, Biden said: “By the way, we don’t do things like those chumps out there with the microphone are doing, the Trump guys.”

It didn’t take long for the derogatory term chump to circulate widely. Although some Biden supporters picked it up as an insult, the other side chose to reclaim it. Within minutes after Biden’s appearance, #TrumpChump had popped up on Twitter, appended to tweets like “I’m a proud TrumpChump!” and “Congrats everyone we’ve been promoted from a #Deplorable to a #TrumpChump.”

And at 6:57 a.m. PDT on Monday, October 26, an email from a pro-Trump PAC appeared in my inbox. Subject line: “Chumps for Trump!”

October linkfest

Cleo Levin wrote for Slate about “ridiculously surreal” made-for-Amazon brand names: “Here were a series of names that were not only unknown to me, but also quite perplexing: Artfish, Wishpig, Sweatyrocks, Demonlick, and Pukemark.” 

*

Ben Zimmer wrote for Beyond Wordplay about Washington’s new Planet Word Museum, which opened via virtual ribbon-cutting—with President Obama as a surprise guest—on October 22.

*

On the Visual Thesaurus: Poll stars

In my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, I take a look at a certain four-letter word that’s dominating the news lately. No, not that one. Not that one, either. I’m talking about poll.

Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers. Here’s a sample:

Time magazine, known in its early years for its inventive language, is responsible for an enduring poll coinage first seen in print in 1939: pollster, a person who conducts opinion polls—another term first recorded in 1939, although the practice of opinion polling in the US goes back to 1824. The -ster suffix “is slightly jazzy (jokester, trickster, hipster),” [William] Safire wrote in his Political Dictionary, “and not at all scientific; many people in the survey business resisted it at first but now put up with it.” What Safire didn’t note: many modern -ster compounds have unsavory overtones: mobster, gangster, tipster, bankster. (Not to mention the much older monster, which goes back to Chaucer’s era.)

In the 70-plus years since pollster was coined, polling has become more widespread and more scientific. Exit polls (first usage: 1976) catch voters as they leave a polling place to take the pulse of an election. Flash polls, which “quickly reach a target audience with a time-sensitive goal”—often just a matter of hours—were made possible by online survey methods and statistical-inference techniques. There are polls of polls that compile the results of multiple polls from different sources; poll trackers, which obsessively analyze those results; and websites such as FiveThirtyEight devoted to poll aggregation and election forecasting. 

 

Read the rest of “Poll Stars.”

Blog bonus! Grammar Table—an actual traveling table staffed by Ellen Jovin—runs frequent Twitter polls on English-usage topics. Here’s a recent one.

You and a birder friend are about to jump out of an airplane, and your friend is nervous. To relax your friend, you say, "Imagine you __________ (are, were) able to fly like a bar-tailed godwit."

— Grammar Table (@grammartable) October 17, 2020

Jush and zhuzh and tszuj

A TikTok video by QueenBV59, about her preparations for casting a ballot during early voting, was shared all over Twitter on Thursday. I’ve watched it half a dozen times myself.

SHE READY pic.twitter.com/zLWQbSMljH

— Meena Harris (@meenaharris) October 15, 2020

One repeated word—jush—was new to me and, apparently, to some other viewers as well.

OK, folks, I’m gonna go over here and get my jush

Y’all need to get y’all jush and get y’all vote on

I’m gonna get my damn jush

Jush—rhymes with push—turns out to be a rare slang term that can be traced to a single person. But it isn’t quite as simple as that.

The good plaice

Lynne Murphy, a UK-based American linguist, blogged recently about “British words (most) Americans don’t know”—such as pelmet, quango, and bolshy. Many of the words were unfamiliar to me, an American who tries to keep with such things but doesn’t always succeed. (See, for example, my post about tannoy.) But one of them, plaice, not only registered but brought back some amusing memories from my freelance-journalism past.

Via Fish and Kids (Marine Stewardship Council, London)

Lynne writes that plaice “is a kind of flatfish that's common at British fish-and-chip shops. The OED says ‘European flatfish of shallow seas, Pleuronectes platessa (family Pleuronectidae)’, but some other fish (esp. outside the UK) are sometimes called plaice. The name came from French long ago. It shows up in *many* punny shop names”—Our Plaice, The Happy Plaice, Park Plaice, and so on.

My own introduction to plaice came from a different punny restaurant name—possibly the original one. In 1985, a magazine I wrote for, Tables, sent me to London to interview Bob Payton, an American ad-guy-turned restaurateur who was making waves over there with his Chicago-style pizza places, a Chicago Rib Shack, and a seafood restaurant called, yes, Payton Plaice. It was a double pun.

Peyton Place was a bestselling 1956 novel, a 1957 movie starring Lana Turner, a 1961 sequel, and a TV soap opera that aired from 1964 to 1969 and introduced 19-year-old Mia Farrow to viewing audiences (and set off a trend for “Allison”—the name of her character—as a girl’s name). “Peyton Place” became a synonym, or metonym, for “small town with a lot of hanky-panky.”