Fritinancy

Word of the week: Based

It’s not uncommon for words originally used as slurs to be reclaimed with pride by the targeted group. Queer was reappropriated by gay people, deplorable by Trump supporters, and Impressionist by 19th-century artists.

It’s much less common for a pejorative term to be reclaimed twice. Yet that’s what’s happened with based.

Based was in the news earlier this year after confrontations between pro- and anti-Trump groups in Berkeley, California. Kyle Chapman, a 41-year-old Trump supporter, was arrested at a rally in early March for hitting an Antifa protester over the head with a stick. Chapman’s fans dubbed him Based Stickman and began creating a legend around him. Chapman, who was released on bail, had already racked up a colorful rap sheet that included three felonies. He was arrested a second time on April 10.

Based Stickman regalia. (Image source.)

 

 

Here a Meow, There a Meow, Everywhere a Meow Meow

I’m serious. Everywhere.

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First sighting: in a story from early September about a BBC radio announcer (oops, presenter) who admitted snorting a drug called mephedrone—street name “meow meow.” Precisely how meow meow got that sobriquet is subject to some debate, but it may derive from the drug’s chemical name, 4-methylmethcathinone, or MM-CAT for short. According to a 2011 Mindhacks post, journalists (and one anonymous Wikipedia editor) were responsible for popularizing the feline nickname.

 

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Then I attended a performance at Berkeley Repertory Theatre by the post-post-modern cabaret artist known as Meow Meow.

 

Melissa Madden Gray in character as Meow Meow. “This is a performer who has always seemed more of a bird than a cat.” - Crikey

 

The show is directed by Emma Rice of Kneehigh, a terrifically inventive British theater group. Through October 19.

 

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Meow Meow Tweet is an apothecary. In Brooklyn. It has stockists!

 

No explanation for the name. Naturally, they tweet.

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Miaow Miaow cuttlefish flavoured [sic] crackers are made in Malaysia. I discovered them at my favorite food emporium, the Berkeley Bowl Marketplace.*

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Berkeley Bowl is a wonderland of Asian snacks.

 

A blog called Revolting Foods of America published a catty review of these squiddy crisps last year. I’m inclined to be more generous, although the crackers (not really crackers in the US sense; more like small tentacle-shaped chips) are too sweet for my taste. You should, however, check out the review to gaze in wonder at a full-size photo of the package art, which is worthy of Jules Verne.

 

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Just one Meow, but three M’s.

 

Mmmeow party picks (“cool cats with good taste”) from Fred and Friends. I’m not sure why they belong in the San Jose Museum of Art gift shop, but that’s where I found them.

 

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It’s Meow Time!

  

 

The Meow Mix jingle was introduced with the Meow Mix brand in 1974. “Tastes so good, cats ask for it by name” was the brand’s most memorable slogan. It never should have changed.

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* The BBM’s original store, across the street, was in a repurposed (unpinned? deballed?) bowling alley.

“Just Say Know”

Leafly, which calls itself “the world’s largest cannabis information resource”—and which Business Insider has called “Yelp for weed”—took out a full-page ad in Sunday’s New York Times to congratulate New York State for passing the Compassionate Care Act, which legalizes the medical use of marijuana. The ad ran on Page 19 of the main news section.

 

The Times ad, via Leafly.

 

A version of the ad also appeared on the Times website. Someone with a puckish sense of humor placed it adjacent to media reporter David Carr’s Monday column.

 

 

Carr, in case you didn’t know, published a memoir in 2010 about his drug-and-booze-plagued youth and adulthood. Here’s a bit of the book review that ran in the Times:

Back in the 1980s, when he was a reporter for an alternative weekly in Minneapolis and later for a local business monthly, Carr had a cocaine problem that spiraled downward from snorting to smoking to injecting. He also drank too much, did some low-level dealing and was arrested innumerable times.

Of course, the ad placement could be a coincidence.

The Leafly ad works on several levels. It depicts smartly attired, purposeful-seeming young adults who, we’re told, have fought serious illnesses.  (Marijuana: It’s not just for stoners!) It strikes a serious, science-y tone with those faux periodic-table abbreviations for cannabis strains. (The tamer ones, to be sure. You’ll have to visit the Leafly website to read up on Matanuska Thunder Fuck, Jack the Ripper, or AK-48.)

And it puns effectively on “Just Say No,” the much-trumpeted (and mocked) slogan—inspired by a comment by Nancy Reagan, wife of the president—of the U.S. War on Drugs* campaign of the 1980s and 1990s.

Mrs. Reagan saying no with a smile. Via The College of William & Mary, “Mainstream Drug Use in America.”

 

“Just Say Know” is appropriate to Leafly’s “knowledge is power” brand. Here’s an excerpt from the company’s press release about the Times ad:

We want to help New York patients learn about cannabis and make responsible and informed consumer choices about the product best suited for their medical conditions. Patients need a reliable, mainstream information portal about cannabis that is free of classic stoner stereotypes, and we truly believe that Leafly is the resource for them.

Note the language:

Responsible. Choices. Information. Medical conditions. Resource. 

Very earnest. Very judicious. Very smart.

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention the Leafly name, one of the dozens and dozens of Names That End in -ly—apps, startup companies, news organizations, and more—that are so very popular at the moment. It’s a name that blends into the brand landscape so predictably, so boringly, that you’re hardly aware that it represents a substance that will still get you prison time in a majority of jurisdictions. (To date, only 23 states and the District of Columbia have legalized some form of marijuana commerce.)

Indeed, almost everything about the ad and the company speaks in reassuring tones and mainstream tropes. The only suggestion of rule-breaking—and it’s a faint one—appears in the tiny type under the #justsayknow hashtag: “A Privateer Holdings company.” Privateer—“a private equity firm shaping the future of the legal cannabis industry”—takes its name from a seventeenth-century term for an armed, privately owned vessel commissioned for war service by a government.

In short, the ad seems to be signaling a new era in legal, mainstream marijuana marketing.

Here’s what Jesse Walker wrote about the ad in the libertarian publication Reason:

The most striking thing about the ad is that it isn’t striking at all. It would be easy to flip past this quickly without recognizing that it's about cannabis—and even if you do pause long enough to see what's being advertised, the idea of an ad for a marijuana review site in The New York Times just doesn't sound all that bizarre anymore. That’s when you know a social revolution is succeeding: when it starts to feel banal.

 

Previously on #WeedWeek: Budtender.

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* Or, as some of us prefer to call it, the War on Some Drugs.

May Linkfest

I’ve been interested for years in advertisers’ penchant for turning adjectives into nouns and nouns into verbs. In his regular column for The Week, James Harbeck, a linguistics-trained editor, looks at why these switches—collectively known as anthimeria—work. It’s all about bisociation: “You have two things operating on two different planes or according to two different scripts, and at the point where the two meet, you jump from one to the other. … Bisociation tickles your brain, and that’s just what marketers want to do.”

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Here’s something lovely: Vernacular Typography, “dedicated to the documentation and preservation of vanishing examples of lettering in the everyday environment.” A project of the New York Foundation for the Arts, it catalogs ghost signs, Coney Island signs, no-parking signs, subway signs, grammatical-error signs, and much more.

Graham Home for Old Ladies, catalogued in the Architectural section.

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Think it might be fun to name a racehorse? Be sure you read the Jockey Club’s naming rules first. Here, for example, are three types of ineligible names:

• Names clearly having commercial, artistic or creative significance;
• Names that are suggestive or have a vulgar or obscene meaning; names considered in poor taste; or names that may be offensive to religious, political or ethnic groups;
• Names of winners in the past 25 years of grade one stakes races.

There are 14 additional no-nos on that list.

( Via Dustbury.)

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Why do so many Chinese restaurants in the U.S. and around the world use “Tasty” in their names? Victor Mair investigates at Language Log. Commenters weigh in with other Chinese-restaurant name trends, including “Panda,” “Garden,” and “Wok ’n’ Roll.”

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Oxford Dictionaries has an app that identifies your “birthday word”: a words that entered English the year you were born. If you’re an OED subscriber, you can narrow the field to the month as well as the year. Read Dennis Baron (Dr. Grammar) on his own birthday word, “gobbledygook.”

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Why do we call parrots “Polly”? The answer, says Mental Floss, has almost nothing to do the feminine nickname.

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Reason #46,312 to love the Internet: Every Apple reference on “Futurama” and “The Simpsons.”

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Reason #46,313: The best worst names in superhero comics, compiled with frightening thoroughness by Drew G. Mackie of Back of the Cereal Box. A few of my favorites: Egg Fu, Microwavebelle, Flemgem, and Rice O’Rooney (the San Francisco Threat). If you don’t know why the last one is so bad it’s good, watch this. 

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Electric-car manufacturer Tesla recently abandoned its Model E trademark, and Duets Blogger Martha Engel wonders whether Ford Motor Company—which still owns the Model T mark, as well as its own Model E trademark—had something to do with it. Meanwhile, the Oatmeal’s Matthew Ingram waxes rhapsodic about his Tesla Model S: he loves everything about it except the name. He prefers “Magical Space Car.”

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On April 22 the New York Times launched The Upshot, an online section that focuses on politics and policy. The name was chosen over 45 also-rans, including Crux, Kernel, Sherpa, and Uncharted. Why did The Upshot prevail? “It’s simple and straightforward,” the editors write, “and there’s no inside joke or historical reference you’ll need to understand what it’s about: a clear analysis of the news, in a conversational tone.”

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Now that Pied Piper, the fictional startup in HBO’s “Silicon Valley” series, has an official logo, how well does it stack up?

 

Betabeat (“The Lowdown on High Tech”) does a comparative analysis and pronounces it “safe” but “off to a good start.” The green color, notes Betabeat, signals equilibrium, harmony and balance. And according to Hindu tradition, the green chakra represents self-love — which, to be fair, is the only kind of love anyone in Pied Piper is getting so far.” Via Brand New. (Also see my post about the Pied Piper name.)

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In November 2012, voters in Washington State legalized marijuana use and authorized the licensing of retail outlets to sell cannabis. (Voter turnout, Wikipedia notes with no apparent irony, was 81 percent, “the highest in the nation.”) Now that Seattle’s first pot stores have been chosen by lottery, let’s take a look at their names. Lots of greens (Greenjuana, Evergreen, Street of Greens, Green Vision, Greenco, Behind the Green Door), quite a bit of 420 (Seattle 420, 420 PM Corp, Highway 420, 420-911), and a few whose owners appear to be fans of “The Wire” (Bellinghamsterdam, Vansterdam, Hamsterdam, New Vansterdam). Kinda meh, if you ask me, but hey—it’s still a budding industry. (Hat tip: Benjamin Lukoff.)

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In related news, Fast Company’s Co.Design blog talks to four cannabis-industry experts about “how to brand a high-demand, once-illegal product.” Cherchez les femmes, says Cheryl Shuman, who points to “stiletto stoners”—successful working women who smoke pot—as a key demographic. (Hat tip: Irene Nelson.)

January Linkfest

I’ve always wanted to name a perfume. Maybe I should just invent my own, as Sarah Marshall of The Hairpin did with her Unreleased Celebrity Fragrances: Acedia by Louis CK, Sherlocked by Benedict Cumberbatch, and a bunch of others, each with a pungent description.

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Continuing with the made-up names theme, here’s a crayon collection with grown-up color names:

 

I’m digging “Void of Existential Anguish Black.”

Via Arnold Zwicky, who adds a story about the Eagle Shirtmakers color-naming contest of 1961, which yielded submissions like Roe Cocoa, Unforeseeable Fuchsia, and Noblesso Beige.

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Also from Arnold Zwicky: How the dobro got its name. Dobro is a registered trademark of the Gibson Guitar Corporation, which means we all should be capitalizing it; it’s also an eponym, a portmanteau, and a word meaning “goodness” in most Slavic languages.

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“We gave you way too big an advance to call this book Freakonomics,” said the publisher of the book that gave rise to an entire freakin’ industry. Briefly considered as substitutes: Economics Gone Wild, Bend It Like Veblen, and Dude, Where’s My Rational Expectation?

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Earlier this month, the American Dialect Society voted phablet – the coinage that describes a smartphone-tablet hybrid – the word Least Likely to Succeed. (Phablet shared the dubious distinction with YOLO.) In a Word Routes column, Ben Zimmer traces the origins of phablet and ponders why nobody loves the word. (For the record, I’d revive an old word, tabloid, to replace phablet. Here’s my 2009 post about tabloid’s fascinating history.)

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Let’s squeeze in one more Word of the Year 2012 story. This one’s by linguist Arika Okrent, who rounds up eight countries’ words of the year, from entroikado (Portugal) to watture (France). J’aime beaucoup watture!

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“Focus more on connotations and less on definitions” – Lexicon Branding’s advice for choosing a name.

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“The next time someone tells you that they can’t accept a name with risk, consider asking them if pouring money into a brand that no one notices and no one cares about is more or less risky than investing in one that just might have a shot.” – Tate Linden, founder of the branding agency Stokefire, in a Q&A with the Wordnik blog.

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Whoever named the top 10 cannabis strains of 2012 was having way too much fun. (Via a tweet from Whatever It Is, I’m Against It.)

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What can the online dating site OKCupid teach us about naming? It’s all about standing out from the crowd, says Beth Gerber of Catchword Branding.

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Ever remember hearing that HAL, the computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, was meant to represent big bad IBM? (Just move the letters H-A-L forward one space in the alphabet.) A new video sets out to prove that the theory isn’t so farfetched after all.

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Ben Schmidt, who’s written about anachronisms (or prochronisms) in Mad Men and Downton Abbey, listens for anachronisms in Lincoln, the Stephen Spielberg movie written by Tony Kushner. Examples: “barrage” (of artillery) didn’t enter the lexicon until 1900, and “peace talks” wasn’t coined until the Vietnam War. Bonus for Lincoln-lingo nerds willing to pay for the privilege: Ben Zimmer’s Boston Globe interview with Kushner. There’s a related (free) article at Word Routes.

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How did Lockheed Martin’s famous Skunk Works get its name and mascot? The Zinzin blog follows the scent and tracks down the story.

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What’s your favorite legal word? The ABA Journal’s readers testify. (Via a tweet from Beauty Marks.)

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Two from Ad Freak: The ad agency pronunciation guide…

 

 

.. and a taxonomy of ad-agency names.

 

(Click to embiggen.)

Word of the Week: Ganja-preneur

Ganja-preneur: “An American capitalist profiting from the recent pseudo-legalization of marijuana in the U.S. by opening up a dispensary that sells the plant in smokeable form to registered medical marijuana patients.” (Urban Dictionary, Jan. 15, 2010.) Also spelled ganjapreneur.

 

San Francisco Chronicle, May 19, 2012. Headline was changed in the online version.

 

Ganja, a synonym for marijuana, is the English spelling of gānjhā, the Hindi word for “hemp,” which comes from Sanskrit gañjaḥ (“hemp”). According to the OED, ganja first appeared in print in 1800, in a letter from the Duke of Wellington. In recent years it has become a prefix in many slang terms, including ganjacologist, ganjanomics, ganjarrhea, and ganj o’clock. (Thank you, Urban Dictionary!) 

Ganjapreneur T-shirt from Etsy.

 

For many other -preneur blends, including ecopreneur, funpreneur, mommypreneur, and warrior-preneur, see my 2009 post “Enterprising Language.”

Swag and Schwag

Now that we’ve taken a swig of swagger, the current word of the week, let’s look at swagger’s siblings, swag and schwag.

First, we’ll dispense with a bit of etymythology: swag is not an acronym for “stuff we all get,” no matter what the New York Times Sunday Styles section tells you. (Indeed, a correction to that effect was published Sept. 26.) It can, however, be an air force acronym (U.S. or Canadian) for Scientific, Wild-Assed Guess (distinguished from the layperson’s WAG, your basic wild-assed guess).

Word on "The Wire"

I came late to "The Wire," the HBO series that will begin its fifth and final season in January. For one thing, I don't subscribe to HBO. For another, I'd been unimpressed by all the other premium-channel hits my friends raved about. "Sex in the City"? Slightly amusing, mostly annoying. "The Sopranos"? Alternately boring and annoying; basically, I just couldn't sustain any empathy for any of the characters. (Even Carmela, and I love Edie Falco.) I dropped in on "Deadwood" too late in its run to have the faintest idea what was going on; maybe I'll give it another try sometime, but what I did see and understand I found uninvolving. I made it through one and a half episodes of "Six Feet Under": I love black humor, but this show was too arch and artificial for my taste. Ditto for "Mad Men," which aired on a channel I do subscribe to and which was about advertising, something I care about. I watched three episodes, admired the clothes and the furniture, but resented being hammered by every knowing cultural reference: no seatbelts--got it; smoking while pregnant--ditto; anti-Semitism and sexism--yep, got those too.

Final reason for not watching "The Wire": I had jumped to the conclusion that it was Just Another Cop Show. I'd seen enough of that genre to know all the formulas.

Well, I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

I discovered the first season (2002) of "The Wire" in the DVD section of my branch library and was hooked as soon as I heard the opening music (Tom Waits's alt-gospel "Way Down in the Hole," sung during the first season by the Blind Boys of Alabama; each season opens with a different cover of the same song). Plot, characters, camerawork, dialogue, sense of place: everything about "The Wire" is orders of magnitude better than anything you've ever seen on TV. The show's co-creator, David Simon--a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun who's written two nonfiction books about Baltimore and who was a writer on "Homicide"--compares his vision to those of Dickens, Tolstoy, and Euripides. Simon has a robust ego, but I wouldn't argue with him. I raced through the first season, then watched it a second time with the commentary track, then raced over to the local video store to rent the second season. I'm now midway through the third season. (Each season features the same principal characters but with a different case, and a different part of Baltimore, as its focus. The first season centered on the drug trade in the projects; the second was about corruption in the stevedores' union; the third went into the corridors of City Hall; the fourth was about the schools. Elements of previous seasons' plot lines carry over every year, just as storylines weave through, say, the chapters of War and Peace.) I've slowed down: the fourth season has just come out on DVD, and it'll be quite a while before I can see the fifth season, unless I break down and subscribe to HBO.

Margaret Talbot has written a terrific piece about "The Wire" and David Simon in the Oct. 22 issue of the New Yorker, full of inside info and great quotes. In it I learned that the fifth season of the show will take place "at a downsizing newspaper called the Baltimore Sun," with several former reporters and editors playing roles. Talbot writes:

Some of the dialogue from the fifth season is taken word for word from the Sun’s newsroom. Simon recalled, “There was this writer, Carl, who every day would eat the same thing for lunch: cottage cheese. One day, somebody walked by and saw him staring down into his cottage cheese, poking it with a spoon and saying to himself, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck.’ That’s in there.”

Sounds exactly like some of the newspaper guys I used to work with. Talbot goes on:

Viewers of “The Wire” must master a whole argot, though it can take a while, because the words are never defined, just as they wouldn’t be by real people tossing them around. To have “suction” is to have pull with your higher-ups on the police force or in City Hall; a “redball” is a high-profile case with political consequences; to “re-up” is to get more drugs to sell. Drugs are branded with names taken from the latest news cycle: Pandemic, W.M.D., Greenhouse Gas. “The game” is the drug trade, although it emerges during the course of the show as a metaphor for the web of constraints that political and economic institutions impose on the people trapped within them. And, in one memorable neologism, a penis is referred to as a “Charles Dickens.”

There's also "ambo," for "ambulance." And the way the cops refer to themselves--"He's good police," pronounced PO-leece. Talbot writes:

Simon is an authenticity freak. He said, “I’m the kind of person who, when I’m writing, cares above all about whether the people I’m writing about will recognize themselves. I’m not thinking about the general reader. My greatest fear is that the people in the world I’m writing about will read it and say, ‘Nah, there’s nothing there.’ ”

Curiously--some would put it more strongly than that--"The Wire" has never won an Emmy. (It was nominated only once, for a script written by the crime novelist George Pelecanos.) It draws a viewing audience of only about 4.4 million; last season 13 million people watched "The Sopranos" each week. Talbot writes that the people who watch "The Wire" fall into two groups: "people who identify with the inner-city characters, and critics." (Participants in the show's bulletin boards seem to fall into the former camp. One of them wrote recently: "i think jimmy is Da man for whenever he has the chance to be an @$$ hole he back to people who did it to him, like the floating body from season 2 ep 1 that was a classic.") Talbot observes: "Sometimes the fan base of 'The Wire' seems like the demographics of many American cities—mainly the urban poor and the affluent élite, with the middle class hollowed out."

Toward the end of the profile, Talbot reports on a trip she took with Simon to New Orleans, where he's been researching his next series, about that city's music community. Oh, goody. Looks as though an HBO subscription is definitely in my future. Meanwhile, back to Season Three.