Fritinancy

December linkfest

Happy Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us! When you’ve completed the traditional Feats of Strength you may feel like you deserve a celebratory quaff. There are several Festivus beers and ales; here’s one from Market Garden Brewery in Cleveland. They registered the trademark in October 2015.

There’s also a Festivus Maximus sparkling wine, but it’s only tangentially about the made-up December 23 holiday and “Seinfeld.” It’s actually a Baltimore Ravens story: “Festivus Maximus” was coach Brian Billick’s substitute phrase for “playoffs,” a word he superstitiously wouldn’t allow players to utter in the runup to the 2000 Super Bowl (which Baltimore would go on to win).

And now—drumroll, please—it’s time for the traditional Airing of Grievances. In order from serious to frivolous:

Grievance #1: U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, “Democrat” of West Virginia.
Grievance #2: Punitive abortion laws.
Grievance #3: Expensive, hard-to-find Covid test kits.
Grievance #4: People who still haven’t gotten Covid vaccinations.
Grievance #5: TFG. Enough already.
Grievance #6: Movies that run more than two hours. Looking at you, Nightmare Alley.
Grievance #7: Remakes. See #6.
Grievance #8: Sequels.
Grievance #9: Prequels.
Grievance #10: Holiday promotions that include the phrase “’Tis the Season.”

Read my previous Festivus posts.

Wordy miscellany

The American Dialect Society, the OG Word of the Year anointer, usually holds its WotY contest in person, and it’s always a rollicking event. This year ADS is soliciting nominations and taking reservations online, and there’s a bonus pre-event event: On December 10 at 12 pm EST/9 am PST, famous word guy Ben Zimmer, in partnership with Washington’s new Planet Word Museum, will explain the nomination and selection processes and talk about his year’s likely candidates. Register here (free). Or you can skip directly to registration for the ADS livestream on December 17, and nominate up to five words while you’re at it.

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“What’s the word?/Thunderbird!/How’s it sold?/Good and cold.” More about the word (and the wine) at Modern Drunkard magazine.

December linkfest

The last linkfest of 2017! Let’s exorcise this miserable year with some amusing and edumacational links. And have yourselves a merry little Festivus.

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Drew Magary is back with the 2017 edition of his Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma catalog: “More than any reindeer parable or silly children’s rhyme, it is THIS catalog and its splendidly useless items wherein you and I can discover the TRUE meaning of Christmas, which is that it delays the pain and horrors of this shit world at least until after New Year’s.”

“You listen to me, Williams-Sonoma: There will NEVER be a fondueassaince. Ever.”

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September Linkfest

Today is National Punctuation Day, a semi-whimsical holiday invented in 2004 by journalist and marketing guy Jeff Rubin. I leave it to others to wail over missing commas and misplaced apostrophes. I celebrate in my own way: by recognizing creative, quirky, and mysterious punctuation in logos, brand names, and marketing communication. (Check this space on Friday for another story about a mysteriously punctuated brand name!)

 

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In July, A+E Networks relaunched its Bio. channel—yes, that’s Bio-with-a-period—as FYI,—yes, that’s FYI-with-a-comma. The channel’s programming “covers a range of stories and experiences that reflect how people actually live their lives today” and “embraces an adventurous, personalized and non-prescriptive approach to peoples’ [sic] taste, space, look, story and more.”

I have no idea what that means. I do know that it’s people’s, people.

 

“The comma is always a lighter hue and alludes to the idea that there is always something more on FYI.” – Loyalkaspar, the branding agency that designed the new logo.

Additional print work was done by Los Angeles agency And Company. Yes, that is its name.

And Company has its own punctuation story:

And Company logo.

Via Brand New, which had this to say about “FYI,”:

The name of the new channel is certainly catchy. Not only does it work on the same level as other popular cable channels like AMC, TNT, FX, TBS in that it’s an acronym but it also works as lexicon commonly used in verbal and written communication when saying “for your information” proves to time-consuming.

The name is fine. The comma is annoying.

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I’d somehow missed the news that in late 2013 Verizon introduced a tablet device named for a punctuation mark: the Ellipsis.

 

A November 2013 upgrade announcement.

 

“Ellipsis”--“a series of dots that usually indicates the intentional omission of a word, sentence, or whole section of a text without altering its meaning”—comes from a Greek word meaning “omission.” Maybe Verizon was thinking of ellipse or eclipse. Honestly, I have no idea.

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Speaking of ellipses, Language Log recently considered their hidden meaning. Are the three dots a marker of melancholy? Confusion? Exasperation? Advanced age? Be sure to read the comments.

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This bath mat from InterDesign is called the iDry Mat!—their exclamation point, not mine. I have no idea why it’s there, but it took me an absurdly long time to stop seeing the “i” as a Spanish-style inverted exclamation mark.

 

 

In her National Punctuation Day roundup for Time, Katy Steinmetz notes that “Exclamation marks are becoming harder to avoid, for those who would like to avoid them.” Why? “Because people need something to fill the gaps left by informative cues we get only in face-to-face communication—the raised brows, the wide eyes, the smile.” 

Not sure what this has to do with bath mats, but hey! Whatever!

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Some punctuation says “Get with the program(ming).”

 

sf.citi stands for San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology and Innovation. I asked my Twitter followers how they interpreted the logo and I got various answers: “Looks like source code.” “The parentheses signal that a variable is being declared: many possible values, only one operation.” I also learned that SF is a generic object-oriented programming language (although that may not be relevant here). Charles Hill (Dustbury) probably hit the nail on the head when he said the logo is meant to convey “We can handle it, whatever it is.”

One of sf.citi’s projects is Circle the Schools.

 

It looks like source code. But sometimes an apple is just an apple.

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Ding*—yes, Ding-with-an-asterisk—is the new name of Ezetop, a service that allows owners of pre-paid mobile phones to add credit (in UK parlance, “to top up”). (Ezetop remains the name of the Irish parent company.)

Not to be confused with Bing, of course.

 

Brand New once again found the name “quite catchy”: “It sounds like you just won a prize—ding!” But a few commenters pointed out that the asterisk should have six points “like the star key on a phone.”

As for me, I find it irksome that “top up” is hyphenated so randomly on the website. The verb should be hyphenless (but isn’t, except when it is).

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Is it co-worker or coworker? June Casagrande of Grammar Underground lays down the (short) line:

Perhaps it’s my AP Style background, but I greatly – greatly -- prefer “co-worker.” Without the hyphen, the first thing I see is “cow.” The whole word looks, at a glance, like it’s pronounced “cow irker.” I’ve worked with a lot of people over the years, and as far as I know, none of them has a history of harassing cattle.

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Speaking of confused punctuation, Non Talbot Wels (that’s his real name) tweeted this photo of a Pepsi Next promotion:

 

 

Taste less sugar? Tasteless sugar? A period or dash at the end of the second line would have been in excellent taste.

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Looking for a suitable gift for NPD 2015? For $125, Art We Heart will sell you an Ampersand Garden wall hanging, handmade in Los Angeles of air plants, wood, and moss and measuring about 11 inches square.

 

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Previous National Punctuation Day posts: 2007, 2009, 2013.

 

 

 

December Linkfest

On the last linkfest of 2013, the Internet gave to me:

The ugliest Christmas sweater of them all: From REI, so it isn’t just hideous, “it’s packed with technical features and built to withstand decades of holiday wear.” Oh, it’s also fake.

 

Christmas carol grammar. On Mental Floss, Arika Okrent identifies the troll in “troll the ancient Yuletide carol” and the “yon” in “Round yon virgin.” And on Visual Thesaurus (subscription required), Erin Brenner takes on the lie/lay distinction in carols, using examples such as “Long lay the world in sin and error pining.”

Sheep counting. Stan Carey, author of the fine blog Sentence First, explains an old counting system used by shepherds in some parts of the UK. All together now: yan, tan, tethera, pethera, pimp…

A language map of Britain. From the Oxford Dictionaries blog:  “In the summer of 2012, supreme language-lovers David and Hilary Crystal set off on a tour round Britain, visiting 57 sites associated with key developments in the English language.”

New reindeer names. Laura Wattenberg of the Baby Name Wizard blog offers a 21st-century update to Dasher, Dancer, Blitzen, et al: “Now, Skylar! now, Stryker! now Ryker and Jaxon! / Now, Cabot! now, Copland! now Sawyer and Paxton!”

A new stadium name. Berkeleyside reports that the field-naming rights at UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium sold for $18 million to Kabam, a mobile-gaming company founded by three Cal grads. It’ll still be Memorial Stadium: the naming rights cover only the field.

Up-to-date military slang. The movies always get it wrong, writes Ben Brody in the Global Post: “Soldiers fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have developed an expansive new military vocabulary, taking elements from popular culture as well as the doublespeak of the military industrial complex.” It’s “bird,” not “chopper,” and an “oxygen thief” is a useless soldier. Hat tip: Ben Zimmer and Kevin Grant. (Bonus link: my 2007 post about Iraq war slang.)

Much doge. Wow. Psychologist and language columnist Jessica Love writes in The American Scholar about “the delicate dance between humor and inscrutability” in two Internet memes, doge and because + noun. If you haven’t yet become acquainted with doge, here’s a best-of-gallery. (Hat tip: Angus Grieve-Smith.) Wondering how to pronounce “doge”? Slate interviewed several experts and then let the Internet decide. “Wow. Such confused” polled a strong third.

Image via Slate.

Fifty shades of blue. Can you discern the difference between LinkedIn blue and Disqus blue? IBM blue and Evomail blue? Test your powers of perception at Name That Blue, then graduate to pinks, reds, purples, greens, and a whole lot of tech companies you’ve never heard of.

Helvetica the perfume. “We have created the ultimate Modernist perfume – a scent distilled down to only the purest and most essential elements to allow you, the content, to convey your message with the utmost clarity.” Translation: for $62, not including tax and shipping, you get distilled water in a clear bottle with a label.

“For those who dare to be the same.” Image via AdFreak.

Hideous holiday music. I note with sadness the passing in 2013 of Jim Nayder, curator of Chicago Public Radio’s Annoying Music show (frequently heard on NPR); and of Regretsy (“Where DIY Meets WTF”), the blog that compiled the very worst of Etsy craft projects. But there’s hope for both camps of mourners: the multitalented April Winchell, who ran Regretsy for four years (posting as Helen Killer), can still be found on her eponymous blog. And in an effort that would do Jim Nayder proud, she’s compiled her own catalog of wretched holiday tunes, from “Homo Christmas” (by Pansy Division) to the Bethlehem Rap, from “I Yust Go Nuts on Christmas” and “Yingle Bells” by that great, great faux-Swedish entertainer Yogi Yorgesson (né Harry Stewart) to the world’s worst version of “O Holy Night.”

And speaking of holiday traditions, watch this space for my annual Festivus Airing of Grievances, coming later this week.

December Linkfest

A new language quarterly, aptly called Babel, brings linguistics to a general audience without dumbing down the subject. Published at the University of Huddersfield (UK), the magazine covers “issues relating to many different human languages” – and some non-human ones, including, in the first issue, Venusian. I’m already looking forward to the second issue, which will include an article about “the secret linguistic history of brand names.”

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At Word Routes, Ben Zimmer recaps the year in words and picks his word of the year. (Surprise – it isn’t fiscal cliff.) I published my own list earlier this week.

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Do not ask science-fiction author John Scalzi to write for free. No, really – don’t even think about it.

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In the 1920s, when TV was still in its infancy, retailers used fake television broadcasts to trick customers into entering stores. Smithsonian magazine’s Paleofuture blog explains how it was done. 

Faked TV demonstration from 1926, via Smithsonian.

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From caucus to urbane: the words that spiked each week this year in look-ups at Merriam-Webster online.

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Catalog love: Your L.L. Bean Boyfriend. He’ll “build you a table and then have sex with you on it.” (Via Girls of a Certain Age.)

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From Jen Doll at The Atlantic Wire, the best (worst) typos, mistakes, and correrctions [sic] of 2012.

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Holly Buchanan of Marketing to Women Online picks the  commercials that did the best job of marketing women in 2012. She has strict criteria:

In order to pass The Buchanan Test a commercial must do three things. It must feature women who:

1. Are outside of the home
2. Are in a role other than that of "mother"
3. Are NOT doing yoga

(For comparison, see Bechdel Test.)

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“So it looks like the New Orleans Hornets are going to change their name to become the Pelicans.” A defense of the new team name by Barry Petchesky at Deadspin. (Naughty language advisory.)

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From my favorite info-viz site, Muckety (“Mapping the paths of power and influence”): The Trump Fund for the Gutting of Red Herrings and other think tanks we’d like to see in 2013.

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I grew up in Los Angeles and always wondered why the Ralphs supermarket chain didn’t have an apostrophe in its name. Now, thanks to Los Angeles magazine, I know: the business was founded (in 1873, at Fifth and Hill streets) by George Ralphs.

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“Twitter is a machine for continual self-reinvention”: Matt Haughey on why he loves Twitter and hates Facebook.

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Something to play with while you’re waiting in line to see The Hobbit, which opens in theaters today: the hobbit name generator and the Elvish name generator. (Via @Wordnik.)

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Like it or not, the “fiscal cliff” metaphor is here to stay. Linguist George Lakoff explains why.

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“I sculpt baby names from love, from hatred, from the reality of this hellhole of a world that you’re forcing an innocent life to endure.” Bob Powers, artisanal baby namer, at McSweeney’s. Yes, he jests. Mostly. (Via Karen Wise.)

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Over at The Atlantic, sociology professor Philip Cohen asks: Why don’t parents name their daughters Mary anymore? (Also via Karen Wise.)

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From Copyranter: The best men’s underwear commercial ever.

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According to Helen Sword, author of a column for the New York Times and creator of something called the Writer’sDiet test, a “zombie noun” is any noun (proliferation, formation, indication) that “cannibalizes” a verb. Now linguistics grad student Josef Fruehwald, blogging at Val Systems, delivers an incisive counterpoint. “Ain’t nothing like exploiting the collective dysmorphia of a nation to push your quarter-baked usage decrees,” says he.

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Via the brilliant Maria Popova at Brain Pickings: Alice in Wonderland as a subway map.

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And to all a good night.

Let's Noun!

As we all know, verbing weirds language. And, like it or not, it’s everywhere. (See showrooming, subtexting, “Let’s Tonic,” et al.) But nouning – turning a modifier into a noun – is also increasingly popular in commerce, and it’s also changing our perceptions about what language “should” be.

Take “funness,” which Apple has been using for several months in its iPod Touch marketing. As Ben Zimmer has noted in columns for the Boston Globe and Word Routes, now that “fun” has successfully shifted from noun to adjective, you have to add “-ness” to turn it back into a noun.

But other brands aren’t even bothering with nounifying suffixes. Instead, they’re simply putting adjectives to work as nouns.

Here are nine recent examples of nouning in brand slogans. In each case, the advertiser could have made a conventionally nounish choice (“Welcome to possibility,” “The future of awesomeness”) but instead grabbed our attention, for better or worse, with a functional shift, also known as anthimeria.

 

Electable Collectibles

The first presidential debate will be held tonight, in Denver; the general election is less than five weeks away. So it’s time to ask a serious question: How are the campaigns shaping up tchotchke-wise?

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At 7-Eleven stores in 34 states, you can let the caffeine do the talking – and the predicting. And you get to keep your cup as a souvenir. Last Friday, you didn’t even have to pay for the coffee.

 

 

According to 7-Eleven’s 7-Election website, President Obama cups have a substantial lead over Mitt Romney cups everywhere except Idaho and West Virginia.

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Berkeley’s family-owned Virginia Bakery is holding its own consumption contest. To cast your vote, buy a photo-decorated sugar cookie.

Guess who’s winning?

According to a report on the Berkeleyside news site, the bakery has sold presidential cookies in previous elections, but this is the first time it’s tracking the results. As one commenter observed, “Finally … a chance to eat the rich.”

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From tasty to tasteless:

 

 

This “Obama reusable cloth pantyliner pad,” sold by Mimi’s Dreams on Etsy, is “the perfect size for teenagers and petite women.” Ladies, don’t you want a muumuu made of that fabric? (Via Buzzfeed.)

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Speaking of the curse, here’s SNL’s ad for g.o.b. tampons—made for women by the men of the GOP. (“Now with wings!”)

The brand name is a parody of o.b. tampons, which were developed in the early 1960s by a German gynecologist, Judith Esser. “o.b.” name is an abbreviation of “ohne binde,” German for “without napkins.”

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And staying in the nether regions, Say It With a Condom is back with the 2012 edition of candidate condoms.

 

Obama condoms: “Intended to get the general public laid, not laid off.”

Romney condoms: “For the elitist penis.” Four years ago, according to my notes, it was the Obama condoms that made that “elitist” claim.

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A concept only, but what a great concept: Barack Obama, the Blue Note years, from the British pop-culture blog Voices of East Anglia.

Lots more album covers at the link. (Via Girls of a Certain Age.)

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The Sassy Gator, another Etsy seller, is offering this embroidered T-shirt in babies’ and children’s sizes for $20.

 

“Mitt Romney Is My Homeboy”

“Homeboy”? Really? A tip for Sassy Gator: Mitt Romney ain’t your homeboy unless your home has a car elevator.

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This Obama Birther Certificate Tray from Fishs Eddy* proved so popular that it’s now backordered until December. 

Perfect for serving pupu to your Democratic friends … or crow to the Republicans.

Fishs Eddy is also selling this 10-ounce Barack Obama mug  and a companion Michelle Obama mug. Nothing for the competition except a Republican elephant puzzle.

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Wish it would all just stop already? I feel your pain. And I have just the remedy: this political ice pack, available at Uncommon Goods.

Freeze, use,  repeat until Election Day.

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* The story behind the Fishs Eddy name: “It was 1986 and we were driving around the back roads upstate New York (code for lost). We stumbled upon a small hamlet called Fishs Eddy. It was a perfectly odd name so we borrowed it for our just-opened shop near Gramercy Park.”

Names in the News: Shopycat

Earlier this week retail giant Walmart launched a “social gift finder” called Shopycat. The service, developed by @WalmartLabs and available as a Facebook app, suggests gifts based on friends’ Facebook use.

My two cents: Shopycat is a bad name. I’ll explain why in a minute. First, though, a bit of background.

Off topic: When did “in-store” lose its hyphen?

Here’s what TechCrunch had to say about Shopycat:

The system is smart enough to understand the sentiment behind a Facebook status update, too, not just the keywords involved. So, for example, if you posted “I hate Twilight!” as a Facebook status update, Shopycat won’t recommend that your friends buy you the “Breaking Dawn” Blu-Ray. It also knows what items are more “giftable” than others, using algorithms that examine a number of signals, including recency, uniqueness (e.g., a collector’s edition over a standard edition) and the aggregate buying behavior of shoppers on Walmart.com.

Depending on your perspective, the Shopycat service is either ingeniously useful or disturbingly creepy in that special they-know-what-you’ve-been-thinking Facebook way. But no matter. We’re talking about the name today. And the name is a dud.

Potty Humor

You have to hand it to Poo-Pourri.

“Forever changing the bathroom experience.” Note angel tooting on throne.

For starters, the product has a catchy rhyming slogan: “Spritz the bowl before you go and no one else will ever know!” You just don’t see enough versification in marketing copy nowadays.

I also give Poo-Pourri credit for coming right out and saying “stinky poop smell” instead of some wan euphemism.

And the brand extensions evince what one of my readers once called “dedication to the theme.” To name just a few: Trap-a-Crap (“a natural Before-You-Go spray that takes the odor away”), Déjà Poo (another “before-you-go” spray; what a name!), Heavy Doody (yet another “preemptive bathroom scent”), Pooch-Pourri (spray it on your pet’s coat), and Royal Flush (“the fresh essence of eucalyptus works in synergy with spearmint”). Do I need to add that most of these products are available in gift packaging? For that very special, thick-skinned someone, it goes without saying.

Poo-Pourri is, of course, a pun on “potpourri,” which since the mid-18th century has signified a miscellaneous collection. It often refers specifically to a fragrant medley of dried herbs and flowers. It didn’t start out that way, as the word’s etymology reveals: pot pourri literally means “rotten pot” in French (from Spanish olla podrida, ditto)—the English cognate of pourri is “putrid.”

Which makes Poo-Pourri even more … redolent than you’d first suspect.

More experiments in excremental branding here, here, here, and here.

Hat tip: Nancy Nall.

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P.S. Speaking of potty humor, I recently learned that American Standard, the toilet manufacturer, is headquartered in Piscataway, New Jersey. Yes, Piscataway. Piss. Scat. Away. Well played! Now, if only they had a branch office in Flushing, New York.