Fritinancy

Stan Freberg, 1926-2015

Stan Freberg, a man of myriad talents who was often called “the father of funny advertising,” died Tuesday in Santa Monica. He was 88.

Freberg was born in Pasadena and grew up in Los Angeles; he turned down scholarships to Stanford University and the University of Redlands in order to pursue a career in radio. He became a successful comedian and a voice actor in cartoons—his was the voice of the beaver in Disney’s Lady and the Tramp—but it’s as rule-breaking advertising copywriter that I choose to remember him.

According to the New York Times obituary, Freberg went into advertising “because he considered most commercials moronic.” In 1957, after the CBS Radio Network canceled “The Stan Freberg Show” after just 15 weeks, Freberg formed his own ad-production company, which he called Freberg Ltd. (but not very). His motto, according to the Los Angeles Times obituary, was Ars gratia pecuniae: “Art for money’s sake.” He “set the standard for humor in advertising,” according to a tribute in Advertising Age: his work included campaigns for Chun King, Jeno’s Pizza, Sunsweet prunes (one of his prune ads starred Ray Bradbury, the science-fiction writer), Contadina tomato paste (“Who puts eight great tomatoes in that little bitty can? You know who. You know who. You know who”), and Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Freberg’s copy wasn’t just funny; it was subversive. He “used humor to declare war on postwar advertising,” writes the New York Times’s Douglas Martin: “Mr. Freberg even committed, eagerly, the ad industry’s greatest heresy: lampooning the deficiencies of a paying client’s own products.”

When he couldn’t get a paying client to underwrite his heresies, he went indie. His 1958 comedy single, “Green Chri$tma$” hardly seems dated today, nearly half a century later:

Deck the halls with advertising!
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la!
’Tis the time for merchandising!
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la!
Profit never needs a reason!
Fa-la-la, la-la-la, la-la-la!
Get the money, it’s the season!
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la!

Listen to the whole “Green Chri$tma$” recording. 

A few more Freberg links:

“Who Listens to Radio?” (1965)

“Elderly Man River” (1957)

“Take an Indian to Lunch” (1961)

“St. George and the Dragonet” (1953 parody of “Dragnet”)

A tribute from NPR that includes a sketch Freberg did with Harry Shearer (This Is Spinal Tap, “Le Show”).

 

Judy Protas, 1922-2014

Judy Protas may have been famous only within the insular world of New York advertising. But some of the ads she wrote, including the 20th-century classic “You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy’s Real Jewish Rye,” have been been famous across the country for more than half a century.

Ms. Protas, a retired executive at New York agency Doyle Dane Bernbach, died January 7 at 91. Margalit Fox wrote the obituary for the New York Times, which I commend to you.

Here’s Fox on the Levy’s campaign:

Though its evocative tagline is often credited to William Bernbach, a founder of DDB, or to Phyllis Robinson, the agency’s chief copywriter, period newspaper accounts and contemporary archival sources make clear that the actual writing fell to Ms. Protas, who, working quietly and out of the limelight, set down those dozen durable words.

We didn’t have Levy’s in California, so this may have been the first Judy Protas ad I ever saw:

The walls of the mezzanine of the Ohrbach’s store on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles were decorated with ads like this one, which was far from current by the time I laid eyes on it. (The store, part of a New York-based chain, closed in 1987.) I remember my bemusement—a talking cat? in a fancy hat? with a cigarette holder?—and my delightthat this discount retailer valued advertisements highly enough to treat them as art. (Yes, I was an ad nerd even as a child.)

“Ohrbach’s … wanted to disabuse consumers of the notion that discount equaled déclassé,” writes Fox:

Beneath the headline — “I Found Out About Joan” — Ms. Protas’s copy went on, cattily, to describe the impecunious Joan’s pretensions to wealth before conceding, “She does dress divinely,” and concluding, “I just happened to be going her way and I saw Joan come out of Ohrbach’s!”

Protas also wrote the lyrics to the Cracker Jack jingle, “which in full (‘lip-smackin’, whip-crackin’, paddy-whackin’, knickin’-knackin’, silver-rackin’, scoundrel-whackin’, cracker-jackin’ Cracker Jack’) has the trochaic rush of a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song,” writes the inimitable Fox.

The career of Judy Protas serves as a reminder that not all Mad Men from advertising’s golden age were men. For further proof, see my post about Lois Wyse, who coined the Smucker’s slogan; and my Visual Thesaurus column about “you deserve it” slogans, which includes the story of how Ilon Specht came up with the long-lasting L’Oreal slogan “Because I’m Worth It.”

Read more about the Levy’s Rye Bread ad campaign at Barry Popik’s Big Apple blog.

Cal Worthington, 1920-2013

If you lived in California between the 1950s and the 1980s, there was no escaping the TV commercials of Cal Worthington, the Oklahoma-born grade-school dropout who turned a single Hudson dealership in Huntington Park (Los Angeles County) into an automotive empire. At one point, in the 1960s, Worthington was the top-selling Dodge dealer in the United States. But it was those TV ads—90 seconds long, cheesy even for their era, but impossible to forget—that made Cal Worthington a household name. Each ad featured a jingle set to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It”; the verse varied, but the relentless refrain never changed:

If you need a better car, go see Cal
For the best deal by far, go see Cal
If you want your payments low
If you want to save some dough
Go see Cal
Go see Cal
Go see Cal

 

 

 

“It ain’t Shakespeare,” the Los Angeles Times’s David Lazarus wrote yesterday in an appreciation. “But then again, Shakespeare wasn't hell-bent on moving inventory off the lot.”

Worthington died Sunday at his ranch in Orland (Glenn County), California. He was 92.

Cal Worthington “deserves to be included among the greats of TV pitchmen,” Lazarus wrote:

I’d put him right up there with Ron Popeil of Veg-O-Matic fame (“It slices! It dices!”) and Billy Mays (“That's the power of OxiClean!”).

I’d even put Worthington alongside the great Ed Valenti, the genius behind Ginsu knives and the phrases “But wait! There's more!” and “Now how much would you pay?”

Not only did Cal Worthington have the perfect pitch, he was inadvertently blessed with the perfect pitchman’s name. “Cal” suggested California—although he had dealerships in Nevada, Arizona, Texas, and Alaska, California was always Worthington’s home base. His surname suggested “get your money’s worth.” And the name of his “dog” Spot—sometimes a hippo, a lion, or gorilla, but never a dog—seems in retrospect to be a meta-reference to TV ad spots. (Worthington eventually created his own ad agency, Spot Advertising.)

Yes, Cal Worthington was his real name, shortened from Calvin Coolidge Worthington. He honored his namesake, that government-hating public servant, by being a model entrepreneur, a poster boy for bootstrapped individualism. But, as William Grimes notes in his New York Times obituary, Worthington in fact got his first real start in the working world through a government program: FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps.

True, he didn’t have the best relationship with regulators: he was sued twice by the state of California for deceptive advertising. (Both cases were settled without an admission of guilt.) But deception was, after all, his game: he always appeared to love the flim-flammery of advertising more than the actual selling of product. “I never much liked the car business,” he told an interviewer in 2007. In fact, he never owned a car.

TV ads today have shorter spans (15 seconds is the norm) and more sophisticated techniques than they did in Cal Worthington’s heyday. But for sheer memorability, you can’t beat those “Go See Cal” ads. Are they the antecedent of “Better Call Saul” on AMC’s “Breaking Bad”? I wouldn’t bet against it.

RIP OMG

Two moments of silence, if you please.

Obit #1: FierceCable, July 23, 2013.

Cablevision Shutting Down OMGFAST Wireless Broadband Service

Cablevision (NYSE: CVC) said Tuesday that it is shutting down its OMGFAST wireless broadband service in Florida next month. …

“OMGFAST will be discontinuing its voice and broadband services.  We are in the process of notifying existing customers so they can identify alternative services,” Cablevision told FierceCable in a statement late Tuesday. While Cablevision didn't announce a specific shutdown date for OMGFAST, a recorded message on its customer service line Tuesday said that service in Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton and 10 other cities would be discontinued on Aug. 19.

(Via my brother Michael the cable maven.)

 

Obit #2: TechCrunch, August 5, 2013.

OMGPOP Team Tried to Buy Back Its Site, but Zynga Killed It Instead

OMGPOP almost got an extra life, but Zynga said ‘game over’. Zynga just finalized plans to shut down OMGPOP, the game developer of Draw My Thing it acquired for $200 million in March 2012.  But multiple sources familiar with Zynga tell TechCrunch the OMGPOP team was in direct contact with Zynga leadership in an attempt to buy back the site or continue operating it, yet Zynga refused.

 

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Word of the Week: Cucoloris

Cucoloris: A screen with oddly shaped holes cut through it, placed before a light source to throw diverse shadows on an otherwise uniform surface. (Source: Idiom Savant: Slang As It Is Slung.) Also spelled cucaloris, kookaloris, kukaloris, cookaloris, cucalorus, etc. Shortened to cookie, kook, or cuke. Alternate names: gobo, ulcer, dapple sheet.

 

Wooden cucoloris, B&H Photo and Video, New York.

 

The film critic Roger Ebert, who died last week, included kookalouris in Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary, published in 1994. From his entry:

Popular in the 1930s; back in style again with the movies of Steven Spielberg, who uses a kookalouris with underlighting to show faces that seem to be illuminated by reflections from pots of gold, buckets of diamonds, pools of fire, pirate maps, and radioactive kidneys.

(Read more of Ebert’s movie tropes, including Inevitable Sister, Mid-Wife Crisis, Wunza Movies, and “Fruit Cart!”, in an excerpt published in the Visual Thesaurus. And scroll down for more on Ebert.)

It’s fairly well established that cucoloris, however you spell it, comes from the world of Hollywood cinematographers. Beyond that, however, the word’s origins and etymology are frustratingly unclear. In an episode that aired last year, Grant Barrett, co-host of the radio show “A Way with Words,” told listeners that he’d spent “days” researching a Double-Tongued Dictionary entry for cookie.

“Hollywood is filled with people who like to invent myth,” Barrett said. “I counted seven different origin stories for this term, and they’re fun, but they’re throwaway.” The best story he encountered is from a footnote in a 1954 issue of the Western Folklore journal, which called cucoloris “a coined word of no special philological significance or implication.” The writer did suggest, however, that cucoloris “might be related to the famed director George Cukor.”

Barrett’s etymological note for the cookie entry doesn’t mention Cukor, but it doesn’t reach any other satisfying conclusions, either:

A claimed etymology is that kukaloris is Greek for “breaking of light,” but there seems to be no evidence to support this, nor can the etymological claims in the 2001 cite below* be verified. Another claim is that it is named after its inventor, a Mr. Cucoloris; however, this, too, lacks supporting evidence.

* The word “cucaloris” comes from the Greek for shadow play.» —by Ivan Curry Directing & Producing for Television Nov. 29, 2001.

Nor is there evidence to support the assertion in TV Tropes:

The word cukoloris is Gaelic and means “ghost charm.” How a Gaelic word became a standard term in film production is unknown.

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A note about Roger Ebert: I never met or corresponded with him, but I was among his many admiring readers and Twitter followers—even when I was muttering “WTF?” about his conclusions. In 2010, I attended a program at the San Francisco International Film Festival at which he received an award; cancer had already taken away his ability to talk, but his impish wit and pointed opinions suffered not a bit from the intervention of a speech synthesizer. After answering questions from the stage of the Castro Theater, he introduced Julia, which starred Tilda Swinton – “Saint Tilda,” Ebert called her – and which Ebert assured us was a great, great film we were privileged to see. (Released in 2009, it had been largely ignored by theaters.) Now, I grant that Swinton is never less than fully committed to a role, but Julia was godawful: violent, amoral, ugly, pointless, and, at 144 minutes, seemingly interminable. About a third of the audience left before it was over. I stuck it out, but – to borrow a phrase Ebert himself made famous – I hated, hated, hated this movie. And yet I loved Ebert for championing it, and for being not just a critic but also an exuberant fan. I will miss him a lot.

Michael Cronan, 1951–2013

Many of us who work in branding are mourning the death of Michael Cronan on January 1. Cronan, who lived and worked in Berkeley, was an artist, graphic designer, product developer, brand strategist, and teacher. With his wife and creative partner, Karin Hibma, he also created names for many companies and products, most notably TiVo and Kindle. He had been diagnosed with cancer five years ago.

I met Michael Cronan a couple of times over the years and was impressed by the breadth of his skills – he truly merited that overused term “Renaissance man” – and his generous, thoughtful manner. I wrote in 2008 about how Cronan named Kindle.

In 2009, Steve Rubenstein wrote a more detailed profile of Cronan for the San Francisco Chronicle, which I recommend to you. It opens with Cronan and Hibma noodling around with Scrabble tiles, looking for promising combinations. Dealing with clients, Cronan told Rubenstein, is “at least as tricky” as dealing with Scrabble tiles. “Very few clients have any idea what they’re asking for,” Cronan said. “They need a name and a logo and, to them, it’s like they need a loading dock or an actuarial table.”

But it’s so much more, as this passage from the article reveals:

The creation of TiVo is ancient history in the advertising racket, Cronan said, but the story bears repeating. Cronan and Hibma held a half dozen meetings in Silicon Valley with the manufacturer, hashing out possible names for the device. At the time, a competitor was marketing a similar gizmo, called Replay, and Cronan needed something better.

TiVo, Cronan knew, was the right thing to call the device, even though its manufacturer was more impressed with some other choices that Cronan was kicking around: Lasso and Bongo. Lasso was a contender, Cronan said, because the device lassos TV programs the way a cowboy lassos cattle. And Bongo was a possibility because the gizmo had two round things on top, like bongo drums. But both of those names, Cronan felt, were lousy. In all, Cronan recalled, the designers were considering no fewer than 800 names for the product.

None said television as well as TiVo did, Cronan argued. And with its capitalized V in the middle, it sounded revolutionary as all get-out. After Cronan, also an award-winning graphic designer, came up with the logo for the product - that smiling, walking television with the rabbit ears - Replay never knew what hit it.

For more about Cronan and Hibma’s approach to the naming process, read this Q&A on the Wordnik blog, published just over a month ago.

Michael Cronan’s life and work were an inspiration to all of us who build brands. His death is a huge loss.

August Linkfest

Crowdsourcing a name for a new apple-flavored Mountain Dew beverage seemed like such a good idea. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, plenty. “Suddenly, its gallery of suggestions featured such winners as ‘Gushing Granny,’ ‘Diabeetus,’ and my personal favorite, ‘Fapple’.” Mountain Dew now says the campaign was created by a local customer, not the company; the “offensive content”—created by unknown pranksters—has been scrubbed from the “Dub the Dew” website.

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My two posts about the origins of the expression “the whole nine yards” (here and here) continue to be among the most-searched entries on this blog. But the story isn’t finished: New research has unearthed a couple of citations that go back to the 1950s, a full decade earlier than previously assumed. Read Ben Zimmer’s Word Routes column about the new findings, “Stretching Out ‘The Whole Nine Yards’.”

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Speaking of idioms: Absolutely nobody knows where the phrase “round robin” comes from.

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The most-loathed words in the English language, according to readers of The Atlantic, include moist (of course!), curate, slacks, and artisanal.

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Love logos? Love data? Check out Emblemetric, a new blog by James I. Bowie about trends in logo design. No seat-of-the-pants stuff, this: Bowie bases his reports on more than 1.2 million logos in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database. Sample finding: “The use of two stars as a design element in US logos increased by 170 percent in 2011 over the preceding five-year period. Looking back over time, we can see that, following a pronounced dip in the 1970s, logos with two stars have been claiming an increasing share of new trademark filings for the last three decades.” Be still, my geekish heart.

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Set aside several hours to wander happily through the History of Advertising Trust, “the largest archive of British advertising in the world.” There’s also a lovely gallery of ghost signs. (Via @boswellaffleck.)

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At Union Square Café, a “K1” is a diner who will be proposing to his date. At Michael’s New York, “Lawn” is a chopped salad chopped extra fine. Ben Schott deciphers these and other secret codes used in the dining rooms and kitchens of some well-known New York City restaurants, .

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Eleven wonderful words with no precise equivalent in English. Quite a few are new to me, including bilita mpash (Bantu for “the opposite of a nightmare”) and ya-arburnee (Arabic for “may you bury me,” i.e., the expressed hope that you die before your beloved does). (Hat tip: @ourboldhero).

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What’s the nerdiest preposition of them all? Nope, not “notwithstanding.” Not even close.

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Lexicographer Kory Stamper on color definitions in Webster’s Third International Dictionary: “You could spend an hour alone getting lost in ‘cerise’ (‘a moderate red that is slightly darker than claret (sense 3a), slightly lighter than Harvard crimson (sense 1), very slightly bluer and duller than average strawberry (sense 2a), and bluer and very slightly lighter than Turkey red’). No doubt people did. That may explain why we don’t define colors this way anymore.”

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I want a wall-size poster of this Is the New diagram, which documents “every instance of the phrase ‘is the new’ encountered from various sources in 2005.” Samples: “October is the new December,” “staying in is the new going out,” and “flat is the new round.” (Via Diane Fischler.)

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“Ms. and Mrs.,” a small personal-care-products company, was constantly being misidentified, usually as “Mr. and Mrs.” So the founders hired professionals to come up with a new name. Smart move. (Via @alanbrew.)

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A wonderful list of paradoxes from virtually every discipline. I’m still pondering the Service Recovery Paradox: “Successfully fixing a problem with a defective product may lead to higher consumer satisfaction than in the case where no problem occurred at all.” (Via @operativewords.)

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I’m sure you’ll have quibbles and additions, but this Digital Trends list of “The top 10 worst car names of all times” includes some incontestable champions, like the Studebaker Dictator and Isuzu’s Mysterious Utility Wizard. (Via @lexiconbranding.)

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From the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog, Mary Norris on “Semicolons; So Tricky”: “I thought semicolons were just inflated commas, and I realized that I had no idea how to use them, and was afraid it was too late to learn, so I decided to do without them. I stuck with what I knew: the common comma, the ignorant question mark, the occasional colon, the proletarian period.”

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From the New York Times’s Opinionator blog, Ben Yagoda on “The Point of Exclamation”: “A friend’s 12-year-old daughter once said that in her view, a single exclamation point is fine, as is three, but never two. My friend asked her where this rule came from and the girl said, ‘Nowhere. It’s just something you learn.’”

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Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl and transformative editor of Cosmopolitan, died Monday. From the New York Times front-page obit: “She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger.” Ouch. It’s easy to mock Brown, and Cosmo, but let’s not forget that in the early years of Brown’s editorship the magazine published work by Patricia Highsmith, John Fowles, and Tom Wolfe, as these covers from the 1960s attest. And brava to Brown for saying this in 1964:

I personally don’t feel that the world is going to the dogs or that young people are inferior to their counterparts of a previous generation. Our moral codes have changed slightly, but what we have now is a lot better than the days of stricter moral codes when there was child labor, no equality for women, no federal aid for destitute people, plenty of robber barons and lynching.

Source: Bad Girls Go Everywhere, Jennifer Scanlon’s 2009 biography of Brown. (Hat tip: The Hairpin.)

Nora Ephron, 1941-2012

I didn’t know Nora Ephron, but that isn’t stopping me from taking her death—yesterday, of leukemia—very personally. Just a couple of weeks ago, after all, she’d been in my car, talking about her career at the New York Post, her incipient bald spot (she called it “my Aruba,” and you really have to hear her explain why), and that travesty known as the egg-white omelet. She sounded feisty and funny and thoroughly, you know, alive.

OK, she wasn’t physically in my car. But her voice was there, reading her most recent collection of essays, I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections, an audiobook I’d checked out from the library. I listened to all three discs, and then I listened to them again. And I remembered, again, how much Nora Ephron has meant to me.

Most of the tributes to Ephron have focused on her hugely successful movies. I’m sorry to say—which is, by the way, a phrase I associate with Ephron, as is “by the way”—that I remain a grumpy skeptic. Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and When Harry Met Sally are too slick and schmaltzy for my taste, with heavy-handed soundtrack cues telling you exactly what to think and when to weep.

It was her journalism and essays that made me an Ephron fan, beginning with pieces in Esquire like “A Few Words About Breasts” (whose slam-bam ending was shamelessly swiped by Lionel Shriver in her novel So Much for That) and continuing through her sharp-eyed, hilarious work for The New Yorker and Huffington Post, some of which was collected in I Feel Bad About My Neck (2006) and I Remember Nothing (2011). Here was a woman who could be smart and funny on deadline. I loved her ear for the rhythm of a sentence and her eye for everyday nuttiness and sadness. I wanted to learn from her. I wanted to imitate her. I wanted to be her.

Except, probably, for the miserable marriage to that two-timing bum Carl Bernstein. Which, of course, she turned into a best-selling novel and hit movie, both called Heartburn. Take that, Watergate Boy.

You can listen here to an excerpt from the title essay of I Remember Nothing. (Thank you, Amazon.) And here—because you know how much I love umlauts—is an excerpt from one of my favorite recent Ephron essays for The New Yorker, a Stieg Larsson parody called “The Girl Who Fixed the Umlaut”:

Salander opened the door a crack and spent several paragraphs trying to decide whether to let Blomkvist in. Many italic thoughts flew through her mind. Go away. Perhaps. So what.Etc.

“Please,” he said. “I must see you. The umlaut on my computer isn’t working.”

He was cradling an iBook in his arms. She looked at him. He looked at her. She looked at him. He looked at her. And then she did what she usually did when she had run out of italic thoughts: she shook her head.

“I can’t really go on without an umlaut,” he said. “We’re in Sweden.”

But it wasn’t all wit on wry for Ephron. Read or listen to “Pentimento,” her essay about Lillian Hellman, in I Remember Nothing, to see how Ephron could illuminate the contradictions of a legendary personality and eulogize the painful end of a long friendship.

The New Yorker’s Ariel Levy, who interviewed Ephron for a 2009 profile in the magazine, has written a graceful remembrance. The New York Timesobituary, by Charles McGrath, is comprehensive and revealing. (I’d forgotten all about Ephron’s directing debut, This Is My Life, which flopped.)

Then there’s NPR’s tribute, which combines a report by Neda Ulaby (whose name would no doubt have tickled Nora Ephron no end) with an intro and outro by “Morning Edition” anchor Renee Montagne. In the outro, at about 3:23, Montagne flubs the title of Ephron’s final essay collection, calling it I Can’t Remember Anything.

I wish Nora Ephron were here. She’d have the perfect comeback.

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More on Ephron: Noreen Malone at New York magazine and Emily Yoffe atSlate (both via Nancy Nall).

 

Russell Hoban, 1925-2011

I was saddened to read of the death this week of Russell Hoban, the author of two of the most memorable, startlingly original works of fiction I’ve ever read: Riddley Walker and The Mouse and His Child.

Hoban was born in Philadelphia but lived for the last four decades in London; his later fiction was strongly influenced by English history and culture. (In the Acknowledgments to Riddley Walker he credits the novel’s genesis to his first visit to Canterbury Cathedral, on March 14, 1974. He began work on the novel exactly two months later; it took him five and a half years to complete.) As a young man Hoban worked as an advertising copywriter and illustrator, and the skills required for those jobs—word play, storytelling, visual acuity—surely helped shape his unique writing style.

The Mouse and His Child, published in 1967, may be the only children’s book in the English language with an epigraph by W.H. Auden. The story is archetypal: It’s Christmas, and a tramp rescues a broken and abandoned wind-up mouse-child pair from a trashcan. He sets them on a road, winds up the father, and issues a blessing: “Be tramps.” And that’s the last we hear from the tramp until the very end of the book. The rest of the novel tells of the mouse pair’s adventures as they seek to become “self-winding.” This being a fable, they meet an assortment of talking animals whose pronouncements are sometimes menacing, sometimes amusing, sometimes gnomic. (“‘Beaver plus Teeth times Gnaw times Time times Tree equals Treefall,’ said Muskrat.”)

With Riddley Walker (1980), we plunge into a darker, even more inventive world, several millennia in the future. Long ago, a nuclear holocaust devastated most of the planet, and the survivors have lost almost all knowledge of technology and culture. Do you ever wonder how English might look and sound a few thousand years from now? Here is the first sentence of the novel:

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the last wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.

I wrote about Riddley Walker in an October 2006 post about the books I can’t forget:

Speculative, post-apocalyptic fiction generally leaves me cold, but Riddley Walker is sui generis. It’s set in the nuclear winter of some future England, where humans and dogs are enemies. Twelve-year-old Riddley, newly orphaned, undertakes a coming-of-age quest in which Punch and Judy puppet shows—one of the most ancient of Anglo-Saxon theatrical traditions—figure prominently. But it’s the language, not the plot, that sets this novel apart. In Hoban’s vision, and Riddley's first-person narrative, the English language has become as deconstructed as society itself; England is “Inland,” America is “Eusa,”and the Archbishop of Canterbury (whose office has somehow survived) is “the Ardship of Cambry.”

According to the Times obituary, Hoban’s final novel, Soonchild, will be published early next year.

In 2006, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Jim Higgins wrote an appreciation of Riddley Walker. He includes it in his obituary of Hoban, published in his “Recommended Reading” blog.

P.S. Yes, I know that Hoban is better known in some quarters as the author of the Frances books for young children. I haven’t read those books, but this lovely appreciation of them by Lawrence Downes makes me want to.

R.I.P. William Safire, Edward Gelsthorpe

The American language lost two influential figures this month, one widely known among the reading public and the other known mostly to students of corporate America.

The passing on September 26 of William Safire, the Nixon speechwriter turned New York Times columnist, was promptly and thoroughly reported, as the deaths of media figures generally are. The Times obituary, by veteran reporter Robert McFadden (no mean wordslinger himself), included this vivid snapshot:

He was hardly the image of a button-down Times man: The shoes needed a shine, the gray hair a trim. Back in the days of suits, his jacket was rumpled, the shirt collar open, the tie askew. He was tall but bent — a man walking into the wind. He slouched and banged a keyboard, talked as fast as any newyawka and looked a bit gloomy, like a man with a toothache coming on.

Safire was not, as McFadden reports, "a talented linguist"; he wasn't a linguist at all, but rather an enthusiastic amateur with a zest for word play and a lively interest in language. Of Safire's long-running On Language column, McFadden wrote:

There were columns on blogosphere blargon, tarnation-heck euphemisms, dastardly subjunctives and even Barack and Michelle Obama’s fist bumps. And there were Safire “rules for writers”: Remember to never split an infinitive. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. Avoid clichés like the plague. And don’t overuse exclamation marks!!

Although genuine linguists loved to criticize Safire (see Mr. Verb, Wishydig, and Language Hat), I think most would agree with their colleague Benjamin Zimmer that Safire "will be remembered fondly for his openness, humanity, and thoughtfulness."

I was a regular Safire reader, but I'd never heard of Edward Gelsthorpe, who died September 12, until I read his obituary. But I certainly know his work for companies like Bristol-Meyers, Ocean Spray, and Hunt-Wesson. You probably do, too. Here's one example from the Times obituary:

Mr. Gelsthorpe, a salesman turned marketer, was known for his ability to sniff out consumer desires and get new products into stores quickly. At Bristol-Meyers, for example, when an amateur inventor walked into the company’s Manhattan headquarters proposing that deodorant be applied like ink from a ballpoint pen, he bought her idea on the spot; Ban, introduced in 1955, became one of the company’s most successful toiletry products.

The Times obit doesn't mention it, but Gelsthorpe was also a pioneer of what's now called corporate social responsibility. In the early 1970s, while he was president of Hunt-Wesson, he launched a number of programs that were well ahead of their time, including a partnership with Ralphs Grocery Company in Southern California that helped poorer customers get the most food value from their limited budgets. He was also an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War.

For language mavens and branding folks, however, Gelsthorpe's biggest contributions were Cran-Apple* (a juice blend invented to sell cranberries year round instead of only at Thanksgiving) and Manwich (Sloppy Joe sauce in a can).

The introduction of Ocean Spray's Cran-Apple in 1964 represented the first time cran- detached itself semantically from cranberry, paving the way for Cran-Grape, Cran-Raspberry, Cran-Pomegranate, and Crantini. Linguists eventually took notice of this phenomenon and dubbed it "cranberry morpheme," which got shortened to "cran-morph." In 2006, Benjamin Zimmer wrote about cran-morphs in Language Log:

The segment cran- in cranberry is opaque, though it looks like it's a modifier for the transparent morpheme -berry. Indeed, cranberry was only ever fully transparent in the Low German dialects from which the term was borrowed, where it was kraanbere or 'crane-berry.' Since English underwent the Great Vowel Shift, the semantic connection between the cognate forms cran- and crane has been lost. But the opacity of cran- has allowed for a reanalysis of the morpheme to "stand for" cranberry in new compounds like cran-grape and cran-raspberry. Such cran-morphing has yielded many productive suffixes in the 20th century: -burger, -(o)holic, -(o)rama, -(a)thon, -(o)mat, -(o)nomics, -gate, etc. (In the case of -burger, the new morpheme quickly became lexicalized as the standalone burger.)

As for Manwich, introduced in 1969 by Hunt-Wesson, it's both a cran-morph—-wich standing in for sandwich—and possibly the ur-man-word. Without Manwich, would we have mandles, manbags, mancession, Man Glaze, or manscaping? I suspect not.

The classic Manwich slogan, by the way, remains “A sandwich is a sandwich, but a Manwich is a meal.” I love this Manwich commercial:

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* I was amused to notice that the Times's auto-link for the "Apple" in Cran-Apple goes to "more information about Apple Inc."