Fritinancy

Words of the Year 2012: Fritinancy Edition

Politics and economics made 2012 a target-rich environment for us word-of-the-year trackers. Republican presidential-primary candidate Rick Santorum alone gave us blah, guillotine, snob, and non-faith. (Santorum’s surname has achieved its own scandalous notoriety.) From the Mitt Romney campaign we picked up tithing, retroactively, wazzock, Romneyshambles, and binders. Vice President Joe Biden made malarkey memorable, President Obama spoke sharply of bayonets, and the Republican convention spawned Eastwooding, from actor Clint Eastwood’s surreal dialogue with an empty chair.

Meanwhile, we struggled to remember the fiscal definition of sequestration – not to be confused with jury sequestration – and marveled at all the people looking up socialism and capitalism in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. We shopped for tribal prints and smoking slippers and earnestly practiced chewdaism. We worried about the Rampture and distracted ourselves by GIF-ing compulsively. “YOLO,” we said, shrugging.

But enough runners-up. My list of 14 WOTY nominees follows the jump. I limited my list to U.S. usages, and I adhered to the American Dialect Society’s criteria for selection, which stipulate that nominees be:

• demonstrably new or newly popular in 2012
• widely and/or prominently used in 2012
• indicative or reflective of the popular discourse

In addition, a nominated word can’t be “a peeve or complaint about overuse or misuse.”

In alphabetical order, then:

 

November Linkfest

The leaves are falling, the turkey’s defrosting: It must be time for the first Word of the Year 2012 announcement! Oxford Dictionaries, the traditional early bird, picked one WOTY for the US, GIF (the verb), and one for the UK, omnishambles. For background on omnishambles—which made a brief appearance in the US this year as well—see my post on “wazzock.” And for background on how Oxford chose GIF, see this hilariously be-GIFed blog post. 

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Turducken: chicken stuffed inside duck stuffed inside turkey. Cherpumple: cherry, pumpkin, and apple pies stuffed inside cake. Now online dictionary Wordnik invites readers to invent a new Thanksgiving-related Franken-word (portmanteau). “It could be a (horrific) new food, a feeling, or a phenomenon. The only rules are that they combine two or more words, and that they have to do with turkey-day.” Tweet your nominations with the hashtag #turkeyword.

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This one goes out to all you graphic designers and creative directors: horrible client feedback turned into hilarious works of art. (Full gallery at SharpSuits.net.)

“I’ll know what I want when I see it.” – Clients everywhere

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Astronomy and space startup Uwingu – that’s oo-WING-oo, the Swahili word for “sky” – is building “a baby book of names” for newly discovered planets. For 99 cents per nomination, you can submit a name to the database; for another 99 cents, you can vote for your favorite name on the list. The money goes to a good cause, of course. According to the Bad Astronomy blog, “The folks in charge are professional astronomers and space scientists at the tops of their fields, people like Alan Stern and Pamela Gay.”

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Cast your vote for the name of the year at Baby Name Wizard. The NOTY “isn't necessarily the most popular baby name,” writes BNW’s Laura Wattenberg. “It’s a name that changed during the course of the year, and points to more changes around us. It’s a one-name time capsule that reminds us of how names are woven into our lives, connecting to and reflecting everything that goes on in our culture.” The 2011 winner was Siri.

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Do we need a new name for the fiscal cliff? The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein proposes “austerity crisis”; his readers have their own suggestions, including Policy Meltdown, Lemmings Moment, Fiscal Spliff, and Mole Hill. (What’s the fiscal cliff, you ask? Here you go.)

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Corporate tagline or university motto? Take the quiz (it’s tougher than you’d think).

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Minor hockey (not to be confused with minor-league hockey) is divided into narrow age ranges, and the names for those ranges vary wildly and whimsically around the world. In Canada the 9-10 age group is called “Atom”; in France the 10-11 group is called Poussins (“young chickens”). More minor hockey lore at (where else?) Wikipedia. Hat tip: Bruce Fulton.

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Remember Cuil, the search engine that was supposed to be a Google-killer? It died in 2011, possibly of pronunciation failure. “You might think that making a pronounceable name is a no brainer,” writes Andrew Hennigan on his blog about communications, “but there are actually several separate issues you need to think about, and Cuil got all three wrong.” (Hat tip: FussFactory.)

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Green-suiter, Yuk, 2% Club and other West Point slang: a lexicon.

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What does the “signature” mean in “signature burrito”? Lexicographer Orin Hargraves, writing for the Macmillan Dictionary blog, says “signature” has been “so diluted by modern usage as to become meaningless.”

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Speaking of meaningless, William Germano has had it with passion. He writes in Lingua Franca: “In its new, overexposed phase, passion has come to mean something else. I’d hazard the definition ‘an outsized, all-consuming enthusiasm that leads to achievement.’ That seems to be where passion is drifting in our outcome-driven society: It’s become a word signifying the precondition of success.” I’ve written about passion overload a number of times myself, starting with a 2006 post, “Our Passion Is Your Problem.”

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The Romney campaign named its (badly botched) get-out-the-vote program Project ORCA, but why? Language Log’s Mark Liberman goes fishing: “It would be a little weird, in my opinion, to name a GOTV program after a boat used to hunt a fictional monster shark. Clearly the shark would be Obama, or perhaps Obama’s appeal — but in that metaphor, where are the Romney voters?”

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After Hurricane Sandy struck, New York City gained a new neighborhood: SoPo, for “South of Power.” As The Atlantic Wire’s Jen Doll tells it, “New York City has a history with this sort of name.” (Hat tip: @nextmoon.)

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From the public-radio show A Way With Words, hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette, here’s an excellent list of reference resources for writers and word lovers. A good place to start your holiday shopping!

Word of the Week: MOOC

MOOC: An acronym for “massive open online course,” an educational offering in which students and instructors are distributed (i.e., not in the same geographic location), enrollment is unrestricted (“open”), and course materials are dispersed across the Web.

MOOCs (rhymes with “flukes”) are seen by advocates as tools for democratizing education:

While the vast potential of free online courses has excited theoretical interest for decades, in the past few months hundreds of thousands of motivated students around the world who lack access to elite universities have been embracing them as a path toward sophisticated skills and high-paying jobs, without paying tuition or collecting a college degree. And in what some see as a threat to traditional institutions, several of these courses now come with an informal credential (though that, in most cases, will not be free). – “Instruction for Masses Knocks Down Campus Walls,” by Tamar Lewin, New York Times, March 4, 2012.

The oldest player in the MOOC world is Khan Academy, founded in 2006 by Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard. Khan Academy currently offers more than 3,200 free videos on a wide range of subjects in the sciences and humanities. Newer rivals include Udacity (“You learn by solving challenging problems and pursuing udacious projects”; founded in 2011 as an outgrowth of free computer-science classes at Stanford); edX (a joint venture between MIT and Harvard that will offer its first classes in Fall 2012); Udemy, a platform for taking and creating courses (both free and paid), launched in 2010 by two Turkish developers who moved to Silicon Valley; and Coursera (founded in 2011 by two Stanford computer-science professors; most classes are free). Last week, Coursera announced a major expansion in which a dozen major research universities—including Caltech, Duke, and UC San Francisco—will participate.

Related: MOOSe, a massive open online seminar. “Next year,” wrote the Times’s Lewin in her March 4 article, “Richard DeMillo, director of Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities, hopes to put together a MOOSe, or massive open online seminar, through a network of universities that will offer credit.”

The “massive” in MOOC and MOOSe may be influenced by the “massive” in MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) and MMOG (massively multiplayer online game). Those acronyms first appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively.

For more on the Americanization of "massive," see Ben Yagoda’s Not One-Off Britishisms blog.

How Livemocha Got Its Name

I’ve been researching the rise of online education for a project I’m working on. One of the companies in this growing field has a name that fits nicely into this week’s Life-or-Death theme: Livemocha.

 

 

Livemocha was founded in 2007 to bring language learning to a global audience. It currently offers courses in 38 languages, including Arabic, Japanese, Hindi, Urdu, Indonesian, Hebrew, and Turkish. Fees start at about $10 per course; students come from “every country in the world.” The website is elegantly designed, informative, and welcoming.

I originally encountered the Livemocha name out of context, and nothing about it suggested “education” or “language learning” to me. I was uncertain about the pronunciation: did “live” have a short vowel (suggesting an imperative verb) or a long one (suggesting “alive”)? Was “mocha” pronounced with a /k/ in the middle, like the color/coffee drink/city in Yemen; or phonetically, as in “cha-cha-cha”?

So I emailed the company to get the name story. The gracious reply came from Kira Fickensher, Livemocha’s community manager:

Livemocha is 2 parts: Live and Mocha. Live is pronounced lahyv as in “live broadcast” (the adverb/adjective form of the word). It represents live learning, live conversation, live practice - everything language learning should be. Self-study and online learning are such an essential evolution for language learning, because they are far more accessible and practical than traditional methods. But these need not exclude human interaction and immersion. Our approach of using social networking to reduce the barriers of distance actually bring [sic] live practice and immediate feedback into the act of self-study.

The second part of Livemocha is mocha, pronounced like the coffee drink. This is both a nod to our hometown of Seattle, which is known for its coffee culture, and a way of incorporating the ambience and sentiment of a coffee shop, where you can both study by yourself with a laptop or chat with a friend.

I’m glad the company gave this much thought to the name story; too many businesses with puzzling names default to “It’s just a name” or “It’s something our PR agency dreamed up.” And I’m happy to see those positive associations: “live learning” plus “sociable setting.”

But I’m a native English speaker. I wonder how well those meanings translate to a native speaker of, say, Mandarin Chinese (one of the top 10 languages spoken by Livemocha members). The pronunciation isn’t transparent, either: The short I, the ambiguous CH, and the V—pronounced B or W in various languages—could be confounding. Would a native Spanish speaker with no knowledge of English pronunciation be tempted to pronounce the name Lee-bay-MO-tcha?

Then there’s the leap required to get from “Livemocha” to “language learning.” The tagline—“Creating a World without Barriers”—is of only limited help: It could apply to a concert (think Live Aid or LiveNation), an international philanthropy (think Doctors without Borders), or a campaign for wheelchair access. I’m not saying the name and tagline need to be descriptive or pedestrian, but they should provide a clue about what’s being offered here.

My grade for the Livemocha name: B-minus. It’s distinctive and evocative if you speak English, and easy enough to pronounce once you see the word split. (The cursive treatment of the logo makes it a little clearer; an intercap M or a space between the words would be even better.) But it’s an oddly challenging choice for a global brand that focuses on cross-border fluency. It makes me wonder about the thoroughness of the pre-launch linguistic screening.

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Previously on Life-or-Death Week: Thanatourism, Death to Branding, Lifelike, Unleash Deadly.

 

Name in the News: Oikos

Seven people were killed and three injured yesterday when a man opened fire in a classroom at Oikos University, a small Christian college in Oakland. The shooter, who was arrested a short time later in nearby Alameda, is reported to be a 43-year-old former nursing student at the college who was “upset” over his recent expulsion from the school. (Local news report here.)

The story was appalling enough—and yet also, of course, familiar enough here in the gun-totin’ US of A—to make national headlines. My own first reflex was to wonder why I, an Oakland resident, had never heard of Oikos. And then I wondered about the name.

Oikos University was founded in 2004 by a Korean minister, Jongin Kim, who continues to serve as the university’s president. It is affiliated with a Korean-American church, the Praise to God Korean Church; its website is published in English and Korean. Its sole campus is in West Oakland, across the 880 freeway from the Oakland Coliseum complex. On the “welcome” page of the school’s website, Dr. Kim writes that the school’s main goal “is to foster spiritual Christian leaders who abide by God’s intentions and to expand God’s nation through them.” The school offers degrees in biblical studies, nursing, ministry, music, and Asian medicine.

“Oikos” is neither English nor Korean; it’s a Greek word that translates to “home” or “domain.” Oikos is one of the roots of economy (literally “home management”) and ecology (“study of habitats”). But in Christian doctrine it has a different specific meaning. Dr. David Jeremiah explains it on Christianity.com:

Every Christian has a web (an oikos) of familial and social relationships. And by following its twists and turns, every Christian will encounter those who do not know the Gospel—but who need to.

Who is in your Oikos? A Greek oikos, or household, was not only a nuclear family but also relatives, close friends, and nearby servants’ families. Our oikos includes those with whom we share kinship (blood or marital ties), interests (work, recreation, community), and proximity (neighbors, coworkers). Every Christian shares some space with people who have not heard the Gospel or seen it lived out in an authentic way.

Since I’m a secular Jewish verbal-branding person, the only Oikos I knew about until yesterday was the Greek yogurt, whose website explains the name thus:

We think it’s a great name for our Greek yogurt because it reminds us of a time when people’s homes were intimately connected with nature and most foods came from household gardens and family herds.

I do know just enough about Christianity, however, to recognize that the shooting of ten students on a Christian university campus—“a slaughter,” according to the Oakland Tribune—is a sad and grisly way to begin Holy Week.

Argosy

I know many of the colleges and universities in the Bay Area, but just last week, driving through Oakland on southbound 880, I was surprised to see a billboard for one I’d never heard of and whose name captured my attention: Argosy University.

Argosy University’s motto is “The better way to earn your degree.” They could do better.

The campus being promoted on the billboard is in Alameda; when I called to check facts, the lady on the phone said she thought it had moved there from Point Richmond in 2006. Although both of those cities are in the East Bay, the university calls this campus “San Francisco.”

Argosy is a four-year, private, for-profit university with campuses in 13 states. It’s had its share of controversies involving fraud, deceptive practices, and plagiarism. According to the online backgrounder, the Argosy system was established in September 2001 through the merger of three colleges: the American School of Professional Psychology, the University of Sarasota, and the Medical Institute of Minnesota. Among the university’s “notable alumni” is Sonja Fisher, who was crowned “Mrs. Corporate America” in 2009*.

So: What about the university’s name? Why “Argosy”?

Universitat Longa, Motto Brevis

In the course of researching classical vocabulary for a naming project, I found myself on the Wikipedia page that lists college and university mottos. There I found plenty of Latin and Greek: more than one “Fiat Lux,” which happens to be the motto of my own alma mater; the guaranteed-inoffensive “Sol Lucet Omnibus” (“The sun shines over everyone”) from Lusiada University in Lisbon; and the admirably concise and stoic “Surgite!” (“Push on!”) from Brock University in St Catherine’s, Ontario. I also found lots of truthy mottos: Harvard’s “Veritas,” Yale’s “Lux et Veritas,” Howard’s “Veritas et Utilitas,” the University of Łódź’s “Veritas et Libertas.” Unsurprisingly, Cardiff University has a Welsh motto (“Gwirionedd Undod A Chytgord,” which translates to “Truth, unity, and harmony”) and the Universidad del Pais Vasco has a Basque motto (the incantatory “Eman ta zabal zazu,” which means “Give and spread it,” and no, I’m not sure what “it” is).

But there were also revelations. Who knew—not I, that’s for sure—that Stanford University had a German motto? It’s “Die Luft der Freiheit weht,” and it means “The wind of freedom blows.” Oh yes, there’s a story behind that motto; Stanford’s former president, Gerhard Casper, told it at some length in a 1995 address.

If you were on Jeopardy and had to name the US university better known for its men’s basketball team than for its Anglo-Norman motto, what would be your guess? OK, I’ll give it to you: It’s Seton Hall, in South Orange, New Jersey, and the motto is “Hazard Zet Forward”—“Despite hazards, move forward.”

Two Canadian colleges have Native (First Nation) mottos: Thompson Rivers University’s is “Quansem Ilep” (“To strive ahead” in Secwepemc) and the University of Northern British Columbia’s is “En Cha Huná” (“Other people have their point of view” in the Dakelh language—and wouldn’t that be a lovely motto for the entire country of Canada?). Two Canadian colleges use Scottish Gaelic mottos—“Mo Shùile Togam Suas” (University of Calgary, “I will lift up my eyes”) and “Theid Dìchioll Air Thoiseach” (Cape Breton University, “Perseverance will triumph”). That appears to be two more Scottish Gaelic college mottos than you’ll find in all of Scotland.

I love that Macquarie University, in Sydney, takes its motto—“And Gladly Teche”—from the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. As far as I can tell, only Gallaudet, the private university in Washington for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, has an Aramaic motto; is it fitting that the motto is the nearly unpronounceable “Ephphata” (“Be opened,” from the New Testament)? I found it curious that five Dutch universities have English mottos. (“For quality of life”? Really, Wageningen University, I think you can do better.) I’m much more taken with Virije Universiteit’s “Gewoon bijzonder,” which means “Simply extraordinary” and seems, even to this Dutch-illiterate, like it would be fun to say.

Hard as it is to pick favorites, I’m going to single out one motto I found particularly charming and plain-spoken. It’s from an institution that was founded in 1894 in Swannanoa, North Carolina, as a high school for poor farm boys. In the 1920s it became a coed vocational school named for Warren H. Wilson, former superintendent of the Presbyterian Church’s Department of Church and Country Life; in 1967 it became a four-year college. In 1952 it earned the distinction of being one of the first colleges in the South to desegregate when college residents voted 54 to 1 to invite Alma Shippy, an African-American woman from Swannanoa, to join their ranks.

And the motto of Warren Wilson College? “We’re not for everyone... but then, maybe you’re not everyone.”

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The title of this post is my Dog Latin variation on Ars longa, vita brevis (“Art lasts, life is brief”). The image is the seal of Thammasat University in Bangkok, whose motto translates to “Be the finest, be fair, be the main engine of the society.” Thammasat also has an unofficial motto: “I love Thammasat because Thammasat teaches me to love the people.”

February Linkfest

The Name Inspector has detectified a disturbifying trend in namifying. Can you guessify what it is?

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Teachers take note: name development is an excellent way to engage kids with the mechanics of language. For evidence, read this post by Catchword name developer Aaron Hall about his very educational visit to a fourth-grade classroom.

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Inc. magazine asked seven advertising and branding pros their advice for writing memorable taglines. The answers include “Don’t be afraid of going long” and “Negative is not always a bad thing.” (Via Irene Nelson.)

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Speaking of ad agencies, why are so many of them now calling themselves “brand innovation companies,” “consumer engagement agencies,” “idea manufacturers,” and other euphemisms? Analysis from a chief creative officer (itself a title that didn’t exist in the Mad Men era). (Via Catchword.)

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It’s been a big week for gamers and linguists following the Jeopardy matchup between humans and IBM’s “Watson” (aka the Nerd Super Bowl). The conclusion airs tonight; meanwhile, read Greg Lindsay’s account in Fast Company of how he beat Watson three times in “top-secret sparring rounds.” If you missed the broadcasts, you can see the questions and answers on the Jeopardy archive, an almost-comprehensive 25-year database. Here’s Monday’s show; here’s Tuesday’s. Here’s contestant Ken Jennings in yesterday’s live Q&A about the contest on the Washington Post website. And here’s computational linguist Philip Resnick’s Feb. 14 post on Language Log, “Jeopardizing Valentine’s Day,” about what goes into Watson’s question-answering technology.

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You too can write a bestseller! Just fire up the Malcolm Gladwell book-title generator to create boffo titles and subtitles like Wink: The Power of Thinking While Simultaneously Flirting. (Via AWSamuel.)

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If you use a computer keyboard—and not, say, an IBM Selectric—here’s why you should never, ever insert two spaces after a period.

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Finally, à propos of not much: Craigslisp.

Nicely Named: End-of-the-Year Edition

Over the last 12 months—and, let’s face it, even longer—I’ve taken many corporate and product names to task. In the waning hours of 2010 I’d like to balance the books and hand out some awards for Excellence in Naming.

In alphabetical order, here are ten (plus one) very nice names.

Portmant-uh-oh

Among English speakers, there seems to be an irresistible, universal urge to coin words through blending word parts—to create what Lewis Carroll called portmanteau words. (Chortle, frabjous, and galumph are a few of Carroll’s famous portmanteaus.) But popular as they are, portmanteaus fail much more frequently than they succeed. In his book Predicting New Words, Allan Metcalf—the executive director of the American Dialect Society—estimates that only 5 percent of successful new words are blends. For every winner like brunch or smog there are countless losers like linner (coined from lunch plus dinner) and plerk (play plus work).

Those daunting odds don’t seem to be much of a deterrent, though, especially among novice name developers. Perhaps that’s because effective portmanteaus pack such a wallop. Consider Freakonomics, Edutopia, or Gymini. Each name clearly communicates two meanings while being easy to pronounce and fun to say.

Beware, though: hitting the target requires a practiced ear and semantic savvy. Without those abilities, you’re likely to miss by a mile—as do these less-than-effective portmanteau names that I’ve noticed recently.