Fritinancy

Word of the week: Sprachgefühl

When your livelihood involves plying words rather than, say, grinding coffee beans or uploading cat photographs or welding slabs of sheet metal, your success or failure depends on skill and knowledge, to be sure. It also depends on a sixth sense that, even though the words in question may be English ones, has a German name: sprachgefühl. It means, literally, “a feeling for language” – sprach is related to English “speech,” and fühl to “feel” – and like some other mouth-filling German words (weltanschauung, gemütlichkeit, schadenfreude) seems both slightly untranslatable and immediately, intuitively understandable.* With sprachgefühl, you’ve either got it or you don’t.

 

“We are Sprachgefühl.” from a cartoon guide for German-language learners called, appropriately, Sprachgefühl.

Words of the year 2016: Fritinancy edition

This post marks my eighth annual foray into word-of-the-year (WOTY) speculation. My first such summing-up, in 2009, included birther, Tea Party, and FAIL, among other lexical units. How things have changed. Or not.

As in the past, my choices for 2016 follow the guidelines of the American Dialect Society, which will choose its own WOTYs on January 6, 2017, at its annual meeting in Austin, Texas. (If you happen to be in the vicinity, the vote is open to the public, and it’s hella fun.) There are a few new ADS categories this year – political word of the year, digital (tech-related) word of the year, slang word of the year, WTF word of the year – and there’s always the possibility of even more categories being nominated from the floor. (For my own list, I’ve created three new categories: Obscenity of the Year, Import of the Year, and Spoonerism of the Year.) Nominated words don’t have to be brand new, but they do need to “show widespread usage by a large number of people in a variety of contexts and situations, and which reflect important events, people, places, ideas, or preoccupations of English-speakers in North America in 2016.”

The Fritinancy list, in alphabetical order:

Haus hunting

Why is the German word for house suddenly trending among hipsteresque businesses? I’m still puzzling over that question after having spotted this trifecta over two days in Los Angeles:

Word of the Week: Pee Wall

Pee wall: An exterior wall in a public place that has been treated with urine-repellent paint. Also called anti-pee wall and pee-proof wall.

In July, the city of San Francisco, where public urination is a rife and malodorous problem, coated nine walls with a special super-hydrophobic substance called Ultra-Ever Dry. “At a molecular level,” the San Francisco Chronicle informed its readers, “the coating creates a surface texture with geometric shapes with peaks, or high points, that repel most water-based and some oil-based liquid. That means the painted surfaces will spray urine right back at the shoes and pants of unsuspecting relief-seekers.”

The concept was borrowed from Hamburg, Germany, where Ultra-Ever Dry was applied to walls in the St. Pauli district. The use of an informal/slang term for “urination” also appears to be an import.

“Hier nicht pinkeln! Wir pinkeln zurück”: “Don’t pee here! We pee back.” Image via Spiegel online.

 

 

According to the website of Ultratech International, makers of Ultra-Ever Dry:

Ultra-Ever Dry is a superhydrophobic (water) and oleophobic (hydrocarbons) coating that will repel most water-based and some oil-based liquids. Ultra-Ever Dry uses proprietary omniphobic technology to coat an object and create a surface chemistry and texture with patterns of geometric shapes that have “peaks” or “high points”.  These high points repel water, some oils, wet concrete, and other liquids unlike any other coating.

San Francisco has also introduced “Pit Stop” stations to the city’s “most impacted neighborhoods,” according to the Department of Public Works website. The Pit Stop facilities operate on limited schedules, mostly weekday afternoons.

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If you’re interested in the subject of public elimination, I recommend The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, by Rose George, an English journalist who traveled around the world to investigate fancy flush toilets and luxurious bidets as well as the lives of the 2.6 billion people who live without any waste-disposal system whatsoever.

 

July Linkfest

Your counterintuitively spelled business name of the month is QuiQui.me. It’s so bad, writes Domain Name Wire, that “the company includes the pronunciation in its logo.” Reminds me of Nyoombl.

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How an artist brought an obscure 17th-century word, “parbunkells,” back to life.

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Grube Therapy

If you’re considering a coined name for your company or product, it’s helpful to keep in mind a general rule of English pronunciation: When a vowel precedes a single consonant that’s followed by an e, the first vowel is long. Double the consonant and the vowel becomes shortened.

Later: long a. Latter: short a. Miler: long i. Miller: short i.

Yes, yes, there are exceptions. But coined words are like hoofbeats: we expect a horse, not a zebra. We look for simplicity, not conundrums.

Which is why Gruberie is problematic.

The Ultimate Advertising Machine®

Two German companies. Two ads. Two strikingly—suspiciously?—similar slogans.

 

 

“The Ultimate Lighting Machines.” Holtkötter. Page 161, New York Times T Magazine, March 22, 2015. In non-logo appearances, the name is spelled Holtkoetter.

 

 

“The Ultimate Driving Machine.” Screen grab from the 30-second BMW “Hello Future” spot that aired during the 2015 Super Bowl.

 

“The Ultimate Driving Machine” has been BMW’s tagline since 1975, when it was created by the American ad agency Ammurati & Puris; the company filed for trademark protection of the line in 1981. (In 1990, Rawlings Golf in Northridge, California, registered the identical slogan for use with golf clubs. That trademark was abandoned in 1992, possibly under pressure from Bayerische Motoren Werke Aktiengesellschaft.) Just before the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, Canada, the carmaker took a detour with a campaign called “Joy” that was supposed, according to the company’s vice president of marketing, to “warm the brand up.” BMW loyalists were not impressed, and in 2012 “The Ultimate Driving Machine” was once again in the driver’s seat.

“The Ultimate Lighting Machines” has a shorter history. (BMW has been BMW since 1916; Holtkötter Leuchten GmbH was founded in West Germany in 1964.) Holtkoetter Lighting, Holtkötter’s Minnesota-based U.S. division, was denied trademark protection of the slogan in 1997, and abandoned its claim. It tried again in May 2013 under a new dba, St. Paul Lighting, and two months ago—on February 3, 2015—the mark was registered. The record is mum on whether BMW USA raised any objections during the process.

Like BMW driving machines, Holtkötter/Holtkoetter lighting machines are not for bargain hunters. The slender chrome floor lamp in the ad costs almost $1,000; a starkly dramatic chandelier will set you back more than $2,000.

The trademark database also shows that Holtkoetter has received trademark protection for at least one other “ultimate” slogan: “The Ultimate LED.” That product, a light bulb, is not to be confused with “The Ultimate Led Zeppelin Experience,” a tribute band.

December Linkfest: WOTY Edition

Words of the year from around the globe!

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As usual, Oxford Dictionaries was first out of the gate, nearly a month ago, with its WOTY choices. And the winner was… vape. 

As e-cigarettes (or e-cigs) have become much more common, so vapehas grown significantly in popularity. You are thirty times more likely to come across the word vape than you were two years ago, and usage has more than doubled in the past year.

Which means I may have been just a little ahead of schedule when I included vape on my 2013 words-of-the-year list.

(“Hard to imagine a more vapid choice,” scoffed Allan Metcalf, executive secretary of the American Dialect Society.)

Oxford’s list of runners-up includes bae, budtender (a Fritinancy word of the week in August), and normcore (a Fritinancy word of the week in March).

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Merriam-Webster’s word of the year—based on a spike in number of lookups on the dictionary’s website—is culture:

Culture is a big word at back-to-school time each year, but this year lookups extended beyond the academic calendar. The term conveys a kind of academic attention to systematic behavior and allows us to identify and isolate an idea, issue, or group: we speak of a “culture of transparency” or “consumer culture.” Culture can be either very broad (as in “celebrity culture” or “winning culture”) or very specific (as in “test-prep culture” or “marching band culture”).

This year, the use of the word culture to define ideas in this way has moved from the classroom syllabus to the conversation at large, appearing in headlines and analyses across a wide swath of topics.

Runners-up include nostalgia, insidious, legacy, and feminism.

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The kanji of the year, chosen by the Japanese Kanji Proficiency Society, is zei (“tax”):

The twentieth Kanji of the Year took a total of 8,679 votes, or 5.18% of the total 167,613. The reasons for its selection are clear: on April 1 this year the government raised Japan’s consumption tax for the first time in 17 years, bringing it from 5% to 8%. Meant to bolster funding for the country’s future social security needs, this tax hike impacted Japanese wallets and brought about drastic swings in the economy as a whole, with consumers front-loading major appliance, vehicle, and home purchases ahead of April 1 and curtailing spending after the higher rate went into effect. Two straight quarters of negative growth thereafter convinced Prime Minister Abe Shinzō to put off the next planned rate hike, from 8% to 10%, until the spring of 2017.

Hat tip: Rochelle Kopp and Richard Smart.

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The German word of the year is lichtgrenze, the “border of light” created by thousands of illuminated helium balloons that were released November 9 to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall. Other words on the German list were less celebratory: “It was a year of terror, strikes, and football frenzy.”

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Geoff Nunberg, the linguist-in-residence on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” picked God view as his word of the year:

It’s the term that the car service company Uber uses for a map view that shows the locations of all the Uber cars in an area and silhouettes of the people who ordered them. The media seized on the term this fall when it came out that the company had been entertaining itself and its guests by pairing that view with its customer data so it could display the movements of journalists and VIP customers as they made their way around New York.

Nunberg continued: “What we’re talking about here, of course, is the sense that the world is getting more and more creepy. … Creepy is a more elusive notion than scary. Scary things are the ones that set our imagination to racing with dire scenarios of cyberstalkers, identity thieves or government surveillance — whereas with creepy things, our imagination doesn't really know where to start.”

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Also in radioland, Ben Schott presented the most ridiculous words of the year, from the ridiculous active nutrition (“sports nutrition for people who don’t exercise”) to the appalling catastrophic longevity (“insurance-speak for people living too long”). Schott writes the Jargonator column for Inc. magazine; he spoke with NPR’s “The Takeaway.” (Link includes full audio and partial transcript.)

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Here’s a reminder that there are as many Englishes as there are words of the year: the Australian National Dictionary Centre selected shirtfront as its word of the year for 2014. It’s a verb, it comes from the vocabulary of Australian Rules football, and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott used it in a threat to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin:

The term was little known outside of its sporting context, although the figurative use has been around since at least the 1980s. Abbott’s threat to shirtfront Putin, and the word itself, was widely discussed and satirised in the Australian and international media.

The ANDC’s shortlist includes man-bun, Ned Kelly beard, and coward punch.

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Baby Name Wizard’s choice for name of the year is not a “real” name. Or is it?

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Writing for Slate’s Lexicon Valley blog, Jane Solomon, senior content editor and lexicographer at Dictionary.com, suggests some candidates for technology WOTY, including glanceable, digital detox, and disconnectionist. (Hat tip: Anthony Shore.)

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Finally, a non-WOTY link (unless you consider swear words to be perennial words of the year): Two of the best ling-writers around, Stan Carey (in Galway, Ireland) and James Harbeck (in Toronto), have launched Strong Language, “a sweary blog about swearing.” It’s a group blog, with many fine writers signed up as authors. (I hope to contribute occasionally as well, on the topic of vulgarity in advertising.) So far, you can read Gretchen McCulloch on the syntax of “fuck,” Mededitor on synonyms for “prostitute” in The Sot-Weed Factor, Iva Cheung on “shit” as a contronym, Karen Conlin (Grammargeddonangel) on “jackass,” and James Harbeck on the phonology of cusswords. You can follow Strong Language on Twitter, too.

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I’ll publish my own Words of the Year list later this month. And on January 9, at its annual meeting in Portland, the American Dialect Society will announce its winning candidate. Stay tuned.

June Linkfest

Remember when ads were dense with copy and every new product was magical? A delightful Tumblr called A Word from Our Sponsor does.

 

“The miracle of Philco’s mystery control is hard to believe!” (1938)

 

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Is the Great American Tagline dead? Copyranter thinks so.

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On the other hand, corporate jargon is alive and thriving, as the Use Sparingly Tumblr makes abundantly clear.

 

Via Girls of a Certain Age.

 

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Speaking of jargon: “Are you a native full-stack visiongineer who lives to marketech platishforms? Then come work with us as an in-house NEOLOGIZER and reimaginatorialize the verbalsphere!” And other amazing new jobs you’ve never heard of because they were just invented. Hat tip: @trochee.

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How many synonyms for “flip-flops” do you know?

Image via The Flip-Flop Appreciation Society.

 

When I was a kid we called them “thongs” or “zoris.”

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What exactly can you expect when you commission a $5 logo from Fiverr? To find out, Sacha Greif invented a company (“SkyStats”) and tested the waters. Among his conclusions: “Fiverr apparently sees nothing wrong with designers appropriating other people’s work. And not only do they tolerate it, they even directly profit from it since they feature these fake work samples prominently.”

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Ten words that “The Simpsons” invented. Via @Wordnik. Speaking of Simpsons inventions, years ago I wrote three long posts about fictional brands in “The Simpsons.” Here’s the original post, the 2008 update, and the 2009 update.

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And speaking of fictional brands, Russell Falk of FVM Strategic Communications analyzed the logo of a madeupical company in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit:

Cherevin may be the evil aggressors of economic warfare, but I’d love to have them as a client. They could teach me about propping up housing markets, and I might be able to offer them a nugget or two about reducing security breaches through better interaction design. Plus, I bet it’s fun to get a project brief with the objective of ‘instilling fear and obedience.’

I’ve written a few posts about fictional brands myself.

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“The NFL wouldn’t rename the Redskins, so we did.” – A Hundred Monkeys blog. See also my April 9 post about the Redskins and other troubled names.

UPDATE: This morning (June 18), the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, an independent tribunal of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, recommended that the federal registrations for “Redskins” trademarks be cancelled. Read the TTAB fact sheet.

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Thirteen words so “untranslatable” that even a professional linguist like Michael Covarrubias (aka Wishydig) can’t figure them out.

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“A name is meaningless until you give it meaning,” “Try to avoid name envy,” and other naming advice worth heeding from Will Burns, CEO of Ideasicle.

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“Half of living American Brittanys are between the ages of 19 and 25” and other insights into personal- name trends. (Hat tip: Karen.)

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“Does it look like a pig? Are you sure?” How to name animals in German. Via @stas and @chrys.

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Mice well, minds well, maze whale, midas whale, mieswell, and more than 40 other incorrect spellings of “might/may as well,” retweeted almost daily by The Minus Well.

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One more fun Twitter account: Power Vocab Tweet, an exercise in “speculative lexicography”—i.e., made-up words with random definitions.

 

jinglingly, adj. on or relating to the modern era; since the Middle Ages

— Power Vocab Tweet (@PowerVocabTweet) June 12, 2014

Power Vocab Tweet was invented by the creator of Everyword, which recently completed its mission to tweet every word in the English language. From the blog:

On the surface, Power Vocab Tweet is a parody of “word-of-the-day” blogs and Twitter accounts. My real inspiration, though, comes from the novel Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin. In that book, a group of underground linguists invent a language (Láadan) that “encodes” in its lexicon concepts that aren’t otherwise assigned to words in human languages. …

The definitions are generated via Markov chain from the definition database in WordNet. The words themselves are generated from a simple “portmanteau” algorithm; each word is a combination of two “real” English words of the appropriate part of speech. (The forms of the words and text used to generate the associated definition aren’t related.)

Word of the Week: Afterdrop

Afterdrop: “A further cooling of core temperature [that] occurs after the victim is removed from the cold environment.” (Source: Hypothermia.org.) Also after-drop.

From the Open Water Chicago website:

When you first enter the water and begin your swim, your body reacts by constricting the peripheral blood vessels in your arms and legs. This helps prevent heat loss by consolidating your body heat into your core. And as long as you continue with your physical activity, you will easily preserve a stable temperature.

However, once you end your swim and exit the water, your body sends your blood back to the skin to “warm up.” Because your skin is very cold at this point, your blood actually gets colder and is then recirculated back to your core. In essence, your core body temperature actually decreases during this rewarming period in a phenomenon known as the “afterdrop.”

Afterdrop is part of the specialized lingo of physicians and emergency workers, and it’s also familiar to cold-water swimmers like me and other members of San Francisco’s Dolphin and South End clubs, where we swim year round, without wetsuits, in San Francisco Bay. Water temperature in our part of the bay ranges between 50°F/10°C (January) and 66°F/19°C (September, if ever). To prevent afterdrop, swimmers and boaters are advised to go horizontal; warm up gradually, preferably in a sauna or swaddled in blankets; and avoid drinking alcoholic beverages. (Some hypothermia resources recommend continued exercise. The truth, according to a physician I consulted, is “No one knows.”)

Dolphin Club member Dr. Thomas J. Nuckton, a specialist in pulmonary and critical care medicine, conducted a study of 11 Dolphin Club members who had swum from Alcatraz Island to San Francisco’s Aquatic Park on New Year’s Day in 1998. (It’s an annual tradition.) His findings, published in The American Journal of Emergency Medicine in 2000, included the observation that 10 of the 11 swimmers had experienced core afterdrop of at least 1.8°F. Nuckton also tells the story of 16 Danish fishermen who were rescued after spending an hour in open water; although they were able to climb aboard the rescue vessel, all of them later died of hypothermia.

The OED’s earliest citation for afterdrop (spelled after-drop in the dictionary) is a 1945 British report: “Rewarming must be rapid to cushion the ‘after-drop’ in temperature, which continues to fall for 10 to 15 minutes after the subject is removed from the cold water.” (That is, rewarming must commence quickly; it’s now considered risky to rewarm a patient too rapidly.)

The English word has a grim history, according to the OED: “Originally after German Nachsinken (1942 in a typescript document reporting the results of experiments on live subjects at the Dachau concentration camp, later used as part of the Nuremberg trials).”