Fritinancy

May linkfest

This month’s book recommendation is The End of October, by Lawrence Wright, the New Yorker staff writer best known for his deeply researched nonfiction (The Looming Tower, about Al-Qaeda and 9/11; Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief). This new book, however, is a novel, although you’ll be forgiven for mistaking it for journalism.

It’s set in a time very much like the present (the US president is “self-conscious about his girth” and keeps a tanning bed in the White House Cosmetology Room—an actual room in the actual White House), in which a viral pandemic spreads from Indonesia to the hajj in Mecca to a submarine under the Atlantic to North America and beyond. Our hero, epidemiologist Henry Parsons, scrambles to decode the virus and prevent its spread while civilization’s institutions crumble on every continent. If the plot is a little overstuffed and the dialogue speech-y, you’re unlikely to care, because the story is so eerily prescient and timely. (Wright began writing the book in 2015 and turned in the manuscript in 2017, long before COVID-19 broke out.) Wright’s journalistic background serves him well: you’ll learn a lot—painlessly—about viral reproduction, cytokine storms, and the workings of submarines. I listened to the audiobook, which is well narrated by Mark Bramhall: it’s the audio equivalent of a page-turner. 

Ix-nay on the is-the-season-tay

Once again, I regret to say, we find ourselves deep in the season of the overworked Yuletide cliché. And what a bleak season it is this year. According to the Fourth Estate, ’tis the season for

• identity thieves
• gift card theft
• burglaries, thefts, and crimes
• charity imposters
• payment fraud
• package theft
• infectious disease
• deer-related crashes
• traffic jams
• cyberattacks
• and stress.

’Tis also the season to eat poorly, to avoid office party lawsuits, to lock your doors, to drive sober or get pulled over, to be driven mad by Christmas music, to disregard reason, and – alas – to be racist.

The picture isn’t entirely grim. ’Tis also the season for Wisconsin cheese and for tear-by-hand packing tape.

And also for this.

Yes, it's the season. We get it.

Dear copywriters, editors, and reporters: Do you really think you’re being clever with your “’Tis the season” line? Trust us: you are not. I refer you to that wise man John McIntyre, of the Baltimore Sun, reminding us to beware holiday clichés:

“’Tis the season”: Not in copy, not in headlines, not at all. Never, never, never, never, never. You cannot make this fresh. Do not attempt it.

And yet, and yet. So much ’tis, so little seasoning.

The evidence:

 

A mailing from West Elm that I received October 5, when ’twasn’t the season for much of anything.

 

What season is it?

Why, ’tis the ’tis-the-season season!

You could look it up

This is the top half of a full-page ad for Salesforce Tower that appeared in last Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle.

 

From the Wikipedia entry: “Salesforce Tower, formerly known as the Transbay Tower, is a 1,070 ft (326 m) supertall office skyscraper under construction in the South of Market district of downtown San Francisco.” It was built on spec; naming rights went to Salesforce.com after the cloud computing company leased 714,000 square feet and became the building’s anchor tenant.

 

The headline of the ad isn’t much of a headline at all. It’s cribbed directly from Oxford Dictionaries (syllabification, phonetics, definition, and example sentence) and the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus (synonyms). As reading material, it’s boring. As an advertising strategy, it is as shopworn and ineffective as that ancient device of the inexperienced public speaker who opens with “The dictionary defines community as …” As logic, it’s a fallacy called argumentum ad dictionarium – “the act of pulling out a dictionary to support your assertions” – and it’s cleanly eviscerated on RationalWiki.

Dictionary-definition copy is lazy. It’s unpersuasive. It doesn’t convey a distinction or a benefit; it doesn’t evoke an emotion or express a call to action. It borrows authority rather than staking its own claim.

’Tis Away, ’Tis Away, ’Tis Away All!

Like snowflakes, the ’tis the season headlines at first seem pretty, harmless, and unique.

And then the flurry turns into a sodden blizzard.

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Happy ’Tisgiving!

’Tis-the-Season season came early this year! Why, ’twasn’t even Halloween when Saks Fifth Avenue gave us “’tis the treating hour” in a New York Times ad .

 

 

Page A5, October 29.

’Tis the “’Tis the Season” Season

Here on the ’tis beat, we have a zero-tolerance policy. As Baltimore Sun copyeditor John McIntyre has repeatedly reminded us in his roundup of holiday clichés:

“’Tis the season”: Not in copy, not in headlines, not at all. Never, never, never, never, never. You cannot make this fresh. Do not attempt it.

Is anyone listening? Not bloody likely.

Here’s Henry Fuhrmann, head of the Los Angeles Times copy desks, posting on Twitter. Note the date:

It is with heavy heart that I report that the phrase *'tis the season* passed unscathed through the copy desk this week. I blame myself.

— Henry Fuhrmann (@hfuhrmann) November 6, 2014

I’ve been conducting my own heavy-hearted research in the halls of commerce. Here is this year’s gallery of offenders.

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What Season Is It?

That’s right—it’s ’tis season!

About eight months ahead of schedule.

 

Ad for Sonoma Land Trust, San Francisco Chronicle, March 29, 2014

 

I’m tempted to say “Christmas came early,” but John McIntyre would probably make me walk the plank.

March Linkfest

“We’ve turned learning vocabulary into an addictive game,” says Vocabulary.com, which this week announced its new app (iPhone and iPad only, for now). Vocabulary.com’s chief technology officer, Mark Tinkler, told Fast Company that some people play “over 10 hours a day. It’s crazy.”

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The name of the 131-year-old Orient-Express—the subject of a Paul Theroux travel memoir and an Agatha Christie murder mystery—will no longer be attached to hotels and restaurants. The new name, Belmond, was developed by AgencySacks and “is derived from Latin for beautiful and world,” according to Belmond’s chief marketing officer, Ralph Abruzza. Read an interview with Abruzza about the name change—which will not affect the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express train—and a backgrounder that includes the brand-launch presentation. News to me: Belmond, né Orient-Express, owns New York’s ‘21’ Club. (Skift)

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Moriarty. Mordred. Voldemort. Mordor. Morlock. What’s the deal with “mor,” asks James Harbeck: “Is there something to the syllable that suits it for melancholy, darkness, and villainy?” (The Week)

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Is Netflix responsible for the rise of “queue” in American English? (New Republic)

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You’ve probably heard about Facebook COO Sheryl “Lean In” Sandberg’s campaign to ban the “bossy” descriptor for girls and women. Perhaps you’ve tangentially wondered, as I did, why cows are frequently called “Bossy,” at least in the U.S. There are two theories, and “no matter which of the two theories you pick, you end up in Latin.” (World Wide Words)

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In China, LinkedIn is “Ling Ying” (literally “lead elite”) and BMW is “Bao Ma” (“precious horse”). How branding consultancies manage the Chinese language gap.  (Advertising Age, via Marjanne Pearson.)

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From Pandemic to Yellow Top: 41 brand names given to drugs in “The Wire.” (Mental Floss, via Wordnik.)

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And speaking of fictional drug names, here’s a great big old Wikipedia list of them. (I wrote about one of those names, Ablixa, last year.)

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Languages that have contributed to English vocabulary: a nifty historical infographic (Lexicon Valley)

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If you must do naming research, here’s how not to do it. (Tip: Never ask “Is this name easy to say?”) (Lexicon blog)

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I attended my first roller derby match a couple of weekends ago, and couldn’t believe my ears when the announcer said that Fatal Dreidel would be skating for the Oakland Outlaws. Not only is that her actual nom de derby, it turns out there’s a whole subgenre of Jewish derby pseudonyms, including Mayhem Bialik, Yom Tripper, and Hebrewno Mars. (Jewniverse, via Diane Fischler.)

For more on derby names, see my May 2011 linkfest and law professor Dave Fagundes’s “Talk Derby to Me” (great title!), on “intellectual property norms governing roller derby pseudonyms,” published in 2012 in the Texas Law Review.