Fritinancy

Barbie, #Unedited

After decades of depicting artificially enhanced women in its annual swimsuit issues, Sports Illustrated has teamed up with a real doll to promote the 50th anniversary of the magazine feature.

The Barbie cover wrap appears on 1,000 copies of the magazine. Inside: a four-page Barbie ad spread. The issue hit newsstands on February 18.

 

Barbie herself turns 55 this year; her waist has gotten a little thicker, her feet a little flatter, and her thighs even more toothpick-like, but she’s still perky and game. In fact, the theme of the swimsuit-issue ad tie-in is #Unapologetic—yes, with a social-media-friendly hashtag. (New York Times ad critic Stuart Elliott noted that the singer Rihanna got there first with a November 2012 album called “Unapologetic”; Rihanna “often uses the hashtag #Unapologetic in social media,” Elliott wrote.)

The coordinated campaign has kicked up some controversy. But I remained neutral until yesterday, when a full-page ad, designed to look like an open letter, appeared in the main news section of the New York Times.

Now I wish Barbie would #ShutUp.

The headline is clever enough.

“Why posing for Sports Illustrated suits me.”

 

And the first sentence—“I am a doll”—seems to promise a playful, self-mocking first-person confessional. But the rest—all 500 words of it—is, I am sorry to say, as painful as a hike in five-inch stilettos: awkward, rambling, poorly punctuated, cliché-ridden. It’s like listening to one of those extemporaneous pageant-contestant speeches.

“Over time, I’ve become an icon,” Barbie humble-brags, “and as with all icons, I’ve been pulled into the cultural conversation”:

My bathing suit now hangs beside a Presidential power suit, Pastry Chef hat, and Astronaut gear in a wardrobe reflecting the more than 150 careers I’ve pursued to illustrate for girls that they can achieve anything for which they aim.

That’s a 40-word sentence. Did you make it through all the prepositional phrases? Note the Random Capital Letters and the tortured effort to avoid ending the sentence in a preposition. Barbie loves a zombie rule.

Barbie also loves “conversation”:

Every year, Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit [sic] drums up conversation and controversy.

Barbie is a little confused about what “word” means.

I, for one, am honored to join the legendary swimsuit models. The word “model,” like the word “Barbie^®,” is often dismissed as a poseable plaything with nothing to say. And yet, those featured are women who have broken barriers, established empires, built brands, branched out into careers as varied as authors, entrepreneurs and philanthropists. They are all great examples of confident and competent women.

I had not realized that a word could be dismissed as a poseable [sic] plaything.

Naturally, there’s a rousing finale, more appropriate for a middle-school debate tournament than for the nation’s newspaper of record.

So the Swimsuit issue is out, and there’s bound to be a conversation or two about the women in it. Ask yourself, isn’t it time we teach girls to celebrate who they are? Isn’t there room for capable and captivating? It’s time to stop boxing in potential. Be free to launch a career in a swimsuit, lead a company while gorgeous, or wear pink to an interview at MIT. The reality of today is that girls can go anywhere and be anything. They should celebrate who they are and never have to apologize for it.

If you’re keeping score—and since we’re talking about Sports Illustrated, why not?—that’s three “conversation”s.

Forget the sociology and gender politics for a minute: It’s depressing to see such amateurish copywriting from a major American brand. (Barbie is owned by Mattel, whose 2013 revenue was more than $6 billion; sales of Barbie products account for almost half of the revenue.) A full-page ad in the Times costs between $60,000 and $100,000. For a tiny percentage of that sum, Mattel or its agency could have hired an experienced copywriter to create a witty ad that burnished Barbie’s reputation rather than providing critics with more ammunition.

Then again, the closest Barbie has ever gotten to an actual writing career is “News Anchor.”

“A flair for journalism—and power pink!”

You can read the full text of the Times ad here, and there’s a roundtable discussion of the campaign in a recent Times “Room for Debate.” If you’re #undeterred, you can buy a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Barbie at Target for $19.99.

Word of the Week: Affluenza

Affluenza: “A painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.” – Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, by John de Graaf et al. (originally published 2001). Coined from affluence and influenza. Affluenza is sometimes defined as a contemporary version of “keeping up with the Joneses.”*

Last week, a juvenile-court judge in Texas apparently took the “influenza” part of “affluenza” seriously when she sentenced Ethan Couch, a 16-year-old from a wealthy Fort Worth family, to a mere 10 years’ probation for killing four people and critically wounding two others in a drunken-driving car crash. Prosecutors had sought a 20-year prison sentence, according to a New York Times story:

Judge [Jean] Boyd did not discuss her reasoning for her order, but it came after a psychologist called by the defense argued that Mr. Couch should not be sent to prison because he suffered from “affluenza” — a term that dates at least to the 1980s to describe the psychological problems that can afflict children of privilege.

A USA Today story went into more detail about the affluenza “affliction,” defining it as a condition “in which children — generally from richer families — have a sense of entitlement, are irresponsible, and make excuses for poor behavior because parents have not set proper boundaries.” The legal ploy quickly was dubbed “the affluenza defense.”

The term in fact dates back to at least October 1979, according to Word Spy, but its earliest documented use—by the Washington Post critic Tom Shales, who may have offhandedly coined the word—was in a nonmedical context. Writing about the author Ann Beattie, Shales noted that “a Boston paper even referred to the people she writes about, usually disenchanted orphans of Affluenza, as The Beattie Generation.”

[Update: A message last week from Christopher Phipps on the American Dialect Society listserv included a 2001 Chicago Tribune article about new words that traced “affluenza” back to 1954. A follow-up message, from Garson O'Toole, provided a 1908 (!) citation from a London publication that included  “affluenza.” Clearly, this is a word that has been invented many times over many decades.]

In 1997, PBS aired an hour-long documentary, “Affluenza,” and a “solution-oriented sequel,” “Escape from Affluenza.” The website for the two films treated “affluenza” both as a made-up illness (complete with diagnosis and treatment) and as a quasi-geographic construct (“escape from affluenza”). Also in 1997, Jessie O’Neill, a psychotherapist and a great-granddaughter of a president of General Motors, published The Golden Ghetto: The Psychology of Affluence, in which she defined affluenza as “the psychological dysfunctions of affluence”—“these collective addictions, character flaws, psychological wounds, neuroses, and behavioral disorders caused or greatly exacerbated by the presence or desire for excess money”—and devoted a chapter to exploring the condition.

Since then, affluenza has been the subject of a PhD dissertation at Antioch University and has appeared in the titles of at least four books not by de Graaf et al. It is invoked by lawyers and financial planners who advise wealthy families. It has also spawned at least one semi-jocular, not-very-successful spinoff, afflufemza, coined by Sandra Tsing Loh in 2006 to describe her “malaise,” “wherein the problems of affluence are recast as the struggles of feminism, and you find yourself in a dreamlike state of reading firstperson essays about it, over and over again.”

The Texas affluenza case prompted criticism from psychologists who objected that affluenza is “junk science” (perhaps akin to the Twinkie Defense). Even the psychologist who testified in the trial, G. Dick Miller, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that he regretted using the word. “We used to call these people spoiled brats,” he said.

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* Literary footnote: The Joneses of that idiom are sometimes said to be the birth family of the writer Edith Wharton, née Jones (1862-1937). However, The Phrase Finder traces the saying to Arthur (Pop) Momand's Keep Up With The Joneses comic strip in the New York Globe, first published in 1913. According to The Phrase Finder: “The ‘Joneses’ in the cartoon weren't based on anyone in particular, and they weren't portrayed in the cartoon itself. Jones was a very common name and ‘the Joneses’ was merely a generic name for ‘the neighbours’.”

Word of the Week: Slow TV

Slow TV: Television dramas whose gradual, deliberate pacing and literary structure – “unrushed, atmospheric narratives,” as Salon’s Matt Zoller Seitz described them – demand patience and engagement on the part of the viewer. Current or recent examples include the Danish series “The Killing”; the BBC’s “The Hour”; and the American shows “Mad Men,” “Game of Thrones,” and “The Wire.”

Critic-turned-opinion-writer Frank Bruni, of the New York Times, observed in early April:

Slow TV pushes back at the instant gratification and empty calories of too many elimination contests, too many reality shows, too many efficient, literal-minded forensic dramas that perhaps keep certain plot threads dangling but tie up the episode’s main mystery by the hour’s end.

The descriptor “Slow TV” began appearing in the U.S. press around 2010. In a June 2010 review of “Memphis Beat,” Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley placed Slow TV in context:

Slow Food, a movement that began in Italy in the 1980s as a protest against agribusiness and fast food, promotes organic farming and regional cooking. That cult of less-is-more parochialism spread to other fields, including tourism (Slow Travel) and investment (Slow Money).

Now there is Slow Television.

In November 2010, the Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Goodman included “Rubicon” and “In Treatment” in the category:

These shows are the ultimate examples of what can best be described as Slow TV. It’s not quite a fad or a revolution — and given the dismal ratings, no one involved should feel comfortable about their futures — but you can’t give HBO and AMC enough credit for making shows like this in the first place.

Earlier citations for “slow television” come from Scandinavia, where the term referred to marathon, non-narrative coverage of an ordinary event. In 2009, for example, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) aired the complete seven-hour train trip from Bergen to Oslo – and then topped that feat with live coverage of a 134-hour voyage by ship from Bergen to Kirkenes. Both programs were popular successes. In February 2013 NRK aired a 12-hour broadcast about firewood, described as “slow but noble television.”

But the earliest citations I found are from Australia. David Dale, writing in February 2005 for the Sydney Morning Herald, presaged the current meaning of “slow TV” in a column about the slow-paced “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” and “Desperate Housewives”:

It was reminiscent of the marketing campaign for the new Orient Express train in the 1980s: “In a world where everything is fast and cheap, we are very slow and very expensive.” Then in the ’90s came the slow food movement, which argues that human beings are healthier and happier if they take time to appreciate what they are eating. Perhaps we are about to see a “slow television” movement.

(SlowTV is also the name of an Australian Internet channel that delivers “interviews, debates, conversations and public lectures about Australia’s key political, social and cultural issues.”)

In a November 2011 article for the BBC News Magazine, reporter Jon Kelly looked into the rise of slow TV. The growing popularity of the boxed set, which allows viewers to watch long-running programs on their own schedule, accounts for part of it. In addition:

[T]he pace of slow TV invites viewers to actively engage with the programme, rather than their normal treatment as passive, argues Dr Amy Holdsworth, lecturer in film and television studies at the University of Glasgow and an expert in small-screen history.

“Part of the appeal is working things out for yourself,” Dr Holdsworth adds. “They allow the space for viewers to invest in them and make connections for themselves.

“These days there is definitely more of an appreciation of what you can do with TV as a form - you can have so much more character depth in 80 hours than you can in a two-hour film.”

Who Are You Calling ‘Rock Star’?

Enough already, says culture critic Carina Chocano:

A cursory search of the Internet reveals that people and things referred to in the media as ‘‘rock stars’’ include Rand Paul, the archbishop of Canterbury, the Samsung Galaxy S 4 smartphone, the Swedish mystery writer Camilla Lackberg and Pope John Paul II. Clearly, it’s high time we bought the term a watch and retired it.

—“On Rock Stars and ‘Rock Stars,’” New York Times Sunday Magazine, March 31, 2013. (The article is a bonus feature available in the replica edition to subscribers only. Here’s the accompanying article about business “superstars.”)

Because

Advertisers are “speaking the language of social media,” writes New York Times ad columnist Stuart Elliott:

The language of social media — “fans,” “friend request,” “like,” “social network” and, yes, “status update” — is increasingly appearing in advertising, whether or not those ads are running in social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Here’s one of Elliott’s examples: a print ad from paper company Domtar.

If Domtar had really wanted to sound current, the headline might have borrowed a popular meme and inverted the headline: “Because PAPER.”

 

For students of marketing history, “Paper Because” evokes a famous and long-running campaign for “feminine-hygiene” products – a subject once so taboo that it could be referred to only elliptically. And, as it turned out, beautifully.

 

Suzy Parker in a 1958 Modess ad. Via Museum of Menstruation.

The Modess campaign, which ran from 1948 to the early 1970s, featured “probably the most elegant ads ever made for menstrual products,” according to the Museum of Menstruation, which displays a gallery of the ads. Read more about the “Modess … Because” campaign in a 1986 history of Modess parent company Johnson & Johnson.

Word of the Week: Pre-Drinking

Pre-drinking: “Chugging cheap alcoholic drinks before heading out to a bar, club, or sporting event.” – “ ‘Pre-drinking’ or ‘Pre-funking’ Common Among Young Alcohol Users,” Los Angeles Times, November 8, 2012. Also called pre-gaming, pre-partying, pre-loading, or frontloading.

Young drinkers’ reasons for pre-drinking include saving money, “getting in the mood,” and “facilitating contacts with potential sexual partners,” according to a new Swiss study to be published in the February 2013 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research. It’s risky business, the L.A. Times reports:

Researchers found that when students drank prior to going to a bar or club, they drank more than they would otherwise. On average, pre-drinking students consumed seven drinks, and students who drank only at a bar or event consumed just over four drinks.

The researchers surveyed 183 Swiss adults, with a median age of 23, over five consecutive weeks. They used a recently developed cellphone assessment technique to collect reports. The legal drinking age in Switzerland is 16.

Florian Labhart, one of the study’s authors, was quoted by Science Daily as saying that “pre-drinking has been found in about one third of all on-premise drinking, which is a very high rate.” Pre-drinking rates in the United States may be even higher than that, according to Shannon R. Kenney, a sociology professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles who did not participate in the study. Kenney told Science Daily:

“In fact, due to U.S. legal drinking age requirements, pre-drinking may be most prevalent among underage drinkers in the U.S. … Research shows that underage drinkers may be motivated to pre-drink to achieve a ‘buzz’ or become intoxicated before going to a licensed premise where they cannot legally consume alcohol, such as a bar, club, concert, or sporting event.”

Happy new year! And if you pre-drink, please don’t pre-drive.

Word of the Week: Prepper

Prepper: A person who is actively preparing for large-scale emergencies such as natural disasters and the breakdown of the social and political order. A more moderate and positive-sounding synonym for “survivalist.”

Preppers have been featured in at least two national newspapers in the last week. “For Preppers, Every Day Could Be Doomsday,” was published November 17 in USA Today:

The number of preppers is unknown, but a poll done for National Geographic Channel in September indicated that 28% of Americans knew one. Preppers meet-up networks are proliferating on social networks. Doomsday Preppers is the network's most-watched series[.]

An article in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, “How to Survive Societal Collapse in Suburbia,” focused on the mainstreaming of the survivalist movement. The article includes a photograph of Ron Douglas, his wife, and their six children, surrounded by a year’s worth of disaster-preparedness supplies. The reporter, Keith O’Brien, accompanied Ron Douglas to a Starbucks near Denver:

Many so-called survivalists would take pride in keeping far away from places that sell espresso drinks. But Douglas, a 38-year-old entrepreneur and founder of one of the largest preparedness expos in the country, isn’t your typical prepper.

The modern-day prepper movement has its origins in the Cold War, when American families were encouraged to stock personal fallout shelters for an expected nuclear attack. The movement, which has waxed and waned over the years, got a big boost in the late 1990s amid (groundless) fears about a Y2K computer bug. The preparedness industry is thriving again, reports Keith O’Brien, spurred by the 9/11 attacks, Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and even the Mayan calendar. A subspecies of preppers believes that the presidency of Barack Obama (almost always referred to as Barack Hussein Obama or BHO) is a sign of the apocalypse.

The prepper movement has its own jargon, which is heavy on acronyms. One of the most popular terms is TEOTWAWKI, which stands for “the end of the world as we know it” and is pronounced tee-ought-wah-kee. (A Y2K glossary, still online, defines it as “shorthand for a predicted calamity involving the breakdown of society, whether due to Y2K or any other perceived threat.” The term was borrowed from the title of the 1987 song by R.E.M.)

The very extensive glossary on SurvivalBlog (“The daily web blog for prepared individuals living in uncertain times”) includes this basic prepper vocabulary:

BOB: Bug-Out Bag (a survival kit for leaving in a hurry)

G.O.O.D. kit: Get Out of Dodge Kit, synonymous with BOB.

Group therapy: Full automatic fire.

MASCAL: Mass casualty.

PPPPPPP: Prior Poor Planning Produces Pitifully Poor Performance.

SMUG: Seriousness, Manageability, Urgency, and Growth (scales for evaluating disasters)

SS&S: Shoot, Shovel, and Shut up – a philosophy about feral dogs.

Also in circulation: WTSHTF (“when the shit hits the fan”).

Watch clips from Doomsday Preppers on the National Geographic Channel’s website. Or be a doomsday denier like The Onion:

Long Reads for a Long Weekend

We have a three-day weekend here in California, in honor of the holiday called Columbus Day (traditionally), Indigenous People’s Day (in Berkeley and elsewhere), and Exploration Day (according to a group of scientists who are petitioning the government for an official name-change). It’s a good opportunity to catch up on some long-form reading. Here are three pieces I recommend.

“Villager and Me” is Andrea Lee’s reminiscence—sparked by an encounter with an ad in a 1969 issue of The New Yorker—of the “proto-preppie” women’s fashion brands Villager and Ladybug. “Up and down the East Coast,” Lee writes, “in that American provincial period before the invasion of international brands, before ‘Love Story’ had graven the word ‘preppie’ into the national consciousness, boarding-school girls and country-club wives swathed themselves in Ladybug and Villager. Until, of course, the zeitgeist swept them off to become hippies.”

A typical Villager dress—which I remember well from my own West Coast girlhood—looked like this:

“Rustling softly downwards, like the quality of mercy…”

The clothes were demure, but the ad copy and color names could cause an impressionable girl to swoon with desire. The real story here, though, is about the man behind Villager and Ladybug, Max Raab, “a brilliant mercurial Jewish Philadelphian, son of a garment manufacturer whose ambition was to make the cheapest blouse in town.” Here’s Lee on Raab:

A lifetime maverick with a passion for jazz and movies, Raab flunked out of high school, fought in the Korean war, pumped gas, delivered mail, and sold televisions and Fuller brushes before coming up with the idea that made his—first—fortune. I like to imagine that he built the Villager and Ladybug concept on his wistful outsider’s view of the style Philadelphia débutantes were after when they borrowed their boyfriends’ Oxford cloth shirts. By the time I was mooning over the ads, there were over a hundred Villager shops with rustic wooden floors nationwide, and his line of upscale feminine sportswear had earned a hundred and forty million dollars. “I know women better than they know themselves ” Raab said in a New York Times interview. “The Waspy girls all want that country look, and the Jewish girls want to look like the Wasps. I knew I had a winner.”

Raab enjoyed “a long, sublimely quirky career” that included producing out-of-the-mainstream movies such as A Clockwork Orange. (Lee: “When I read that, I just sat for a minute imagining Shetland cardigans and A-line skirts mingling in his brain with Malcolm McDowell and his droogs.”) When he died, in 2008, Raab was working on a film about Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya.

Andrea Lee used to contribute regularly to The New Yorker; this article—online only—is the first writing of hers I’ve seen in quite a while. More, please!

*

In a very different elegiac vein is this interview in The Awl with the writer Fran Lebowitz, who achieved meteoric success in the late 1970s and has been famously afflicted with writer’s block—but not talker’s block—ever since. If you’ve seen the 2010 HBO documentary about her, Public Speaking, you’ll be familiar with some of the territory covered in the Q&A—in particular, the gay culture of the 1970s and the effect of the AIDS epidemic on the New York arts audience. Lebowitz is so quotable that it’s hard to pick just one excerpt, but I’ll try: “The memories of people are very short. As we know, because otherwise we certainly wouldn't still have Republicans in office.”

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The British author and journalist Steven Poole is fed up with the cult of foodism. Poole’s excellent rant in the Guardian (UK), “Let’s Start the Foodie Backlash,” is an excerpt from his new book, You Aren’t What You Eat; in it, he takes on “food raves,” “feastivals,” cooking shows, and the language of menus: 

It is an interesting question, meanwhile, why the word “baby” in menu descriptions does not disgust us. Surely the last things we want to eat are babies. But perhaps once we are lulled into an imaginative world where a “baby” lamb or the “baby” queen scallop can be “resting” (in the scallop’s case, resting itself on another baby, this time a “baby gem”, since vegetables too – baby carrots, baby greens – can share in the general babyhood of all nice things, and participate in tottering towers of babies all stacked up for our gastric enjoyment), we are cocooned in such a euphemistic dream that the incipient act of putting these “baby” organisms into our mouths doesn’t register as the horrific dissonance it otherwise might.

Poole traces the word “foodie” back to 1982 and “foodist” to the late 19th century—for hucksters selling fad diets, “which is quite apt,” he tartly observes.

Happy exploring!

Word of the Week: Civility

Civility: Behavior or speech appropriate to civil interactions. Adopted from Middle French civilité in the late 14th century, but with a different sense: “civil order” or “citizenship.” Something closer to the current sense came into currency in the 16th century, but later fell out of favor for several centuries. A 19th- or even mid-20th-century speaker of English probably would be puzzled by the way “civility” is used, for example, by Allegheny College, which last week closed nominations for its second annual Prize for Civility in Public Life. The prize

seeks to honor elected officials who showed authentic, courageous civility in an important moment and/or those who have demonstrated steadfast respect for opposing points of view throughout their career. Each year, two awards will be given – one to a proud Republican and one to a proud Democrat. The award will be used to shine a bright light on passionate partisans, on both sides of the aisle, who have shown that meaningful civility is not incompatible with strongly held beliefs.

Last year’s winners were the columnists Mark Shields and David Brooks.

The Allegeny College sense of “civility” is surprisingly recent, according to Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist and professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. In his new book, Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years, Nunberg writes that  to Victorians “incivility suggested merely an impertinent coachman or a stall-keeper who addressed one as ‘boss’ rather than ‘sir’.” In the early 20th century “civility was merely a genteel term for a formally correct courtesy” — a sense we retain in the admonition to “keep a civil tongue in your head.” As late as the 1950s, says Nunberg, “critics writing about serious social concerns like juvenile delinquency spoke about a ‘breakdown of manners and morals’; incivility didn’t come into the picture.” The definition of civility as “respectful debate in a democratic society” had become, Nunberg writes, “effectively obsolete.”

So what brought civility back to life? Nunberg says the word was “disinterred” in the 1960s for a specific political purpose:

[To critics], the social upheavals personified by the hippies, anti-war protesters, and campus radicals offered provocations that transcended mere breaches of decorum or anything that could be conveyed by pallid old words like impolite, rude, and discourteous. With its musty connection to citizen and civic, a resuscitated incivility implied that the demonstrators’ dress and rude comportment was of a piece with their attacks on the political order.

In an editorial published just before the 1968 presidential elections, Nunberg writes, the Wall Street Journal “inveighed against what it called the New Incivility” of student protestors and “enraged Negro spokesmen.” In 1969 alone, civility and incivility appeared in more New York Times editorials than they had in the previous half-century, “nearly all of them dealing with campus turbulence. … By the Clinton years, the words were fifteen times as frequent in the press as they had been during Eisenhower’s presidency.”

Nunberg notes dryly that it’s no coincidence “that the new sense of incivility emerged at the same time that asshole came of age as a reproach for social misconduct.” He goes on:

For all that people invariably speak of civility as an abiding virtue, in its new guise it’s actually a sharp break with the past. To evoke civility is to presuppose that old-fashioned manners and politeness aren’t morally compelling by themselves… An age in which even moralists can speak of “mere manners” and “mere courtesy” is very different from the one that preceded it, despite the specious continuity of values that “civility” is supposed to provide.

See also Steve Baird’s post on trademark civility.

For more on asshole (and bad-ass in brand language), see my September 18 post.

 

Junk and Pride

A couple of language notes from San Francisco Pride, the annual celebration that culminated yesterday with the Pride Parade from Market and Beale streets to Civic Center.

I spotted “Touch Our Junk!” on the marquee of the Nob Hill Theatre (not on the parade route). The façade was festooned with rainbow bunting.

 

Nob Hill Theatre, 729 Bush Street, San Francisco. (Shot through my windshield.)

“Junk” as a slang synonym for “male genitals” became a “cri de crotch” (as the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus put it) in late 2010, after a software engineer named John Tyner refused the full-body security scan at San Diego International Airport. “If you touch my junk, I’m gonna have you arrested,” Tyner told the screener. The trope quickly evolved into “Don’t touch my junk!” The Nob Hill Theatre marquee playfully inverted (ahem) the quote, turning a threat into an invitation.

As Ben Zimmer wrote in a December 2010 “On Language” column in theNew York Times, “junk” had been introduced into the lexicon of genital euphemisms in 1983, in a gay-themed short story by Ethan Mordden called “The Hustler”:

Since it’s doubtful that the young popularizers of junk were familiar with Mordden’s fictional forerunners, something about the sound and sense of the word must have made it ripe for reinvention. Tom Dalzell, whose latest book is “Damn the Man!: Slang of the Oppressed in America,” sees junk catching on euphemistically: “To diminish the shock, we call the genitals childish names or use vague and sometimes coy euphemisms —down there, unit or thing.” The Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky concurs, adding stuff as another euphemistic model forjunk. Unlike these other terms, however, junk is a harsh monosyllable evocative of four-letter taboos.

The other language innovation I observed was Bay Area OccuPride, whose name is a nifty blend of occupy (the American Dialect Society’s 2011 Word of the Year) and pride, the one-word tag for “celebration of gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender identity and achievements.”

 

OccuPride’s adaptation of the gay rainbow flag.

OccuPride was formed to protest the commercialization and corporatization of the Pride observances.

As for “gay pride,” the phrase first appeared in print in the Washington Post’s June 29, 1970, coverage of a march that “was the climax of what its organizers called ‘Gay Pride Week’.” (Note the use of quotation marks around Gay Pride Week.) “Pride” was chosen because it’s the antithesis of “shame”; earlier slogans had included “gay is good” and “gay liberation.” The success of “pride” is often credited to Brenda Howard, an activist in New York City who helped organize the first-anniversary commemoration, in 1970, of the Stonewall riots.

“Pride” is also, of course, the collective noun for a group of lions. This association has been made explicit in some usages of “gay pride.”

Gay pride of lions bracelet. Flickr photo by itsalovelycake.

 

According to the OED, “pride” is also an obsolete term for sexual desire (“esp. in a female animal; heat”). It’s also one of the seven deadly sins. Columnist and author Dan Savage wrote in a June 1999 issue of The Stranger:

Webster’s defines pride as “inordinate self-esteem,” or “a reasonable and justifiable self-respect." Whether inordinate or justifiable, pride was an effective antidote: as more gays and lesbians committed the sin of pride, fewer were victimized by shame.