Fritinancy

Are Americans ready for knickers?

When I, an American, think of “knickers” I generally think of something like this (and I suspect I am not an outlier):

“Men’s Knickers – Khaki Twill,” via Historical Emporium, San Jose, California (“Authentic products and old-fashioned service” since 2003).

 

Across the pond, and Down Under, they think of something more like this:

“Know your knickers!” via Kayser Lingerie, Australia. Not for men.

 

But I’ve recently learned of two women’s-underwear brands doing business in the US that are trading on the British/Aussie sense of knickers. Which leads me to wonder whether we USians are about to adopt this sense of knickers into our retail vocabularies. (Or re-adopt, as I’ll explain in a bit.)

February linkfest

This month’s book recommendation is Uncanny Valley: A Memoir, by Anna Wiener, who, as a twenty-something in 2012, left a low-paying publishing job in New York to work in the world of San Francisco tech startups. Until she moved across the country, she writes, it had never occurred to her “that I might someday become one of the people behind the internet, because I had never considered that there were people behind the internet at all.”She goes to work for company founders even younger than she is, managing millions of dollars of seed money and wearing “startup twinsets, branded hoodies unzipped to reveal T-shirts with the same logo.” Wiener’s voice is original and unforgettable: a mixture of skepticism and gullibility, of clarity and befuddlement. San Francisco is “an underdog city struggling to absorb an influx of alphas.” (Perfect.) San Franciscans, “living in neighborhoods where every other storefront had a pun in its name, were corny.” (True, alas.) Notably, Wiener declines to identify by name any of the companies she works for or near: they are, instead, “the social network everybody hated,” “an app for coupon-clipping,” “the online superstore” with the “chelonian” founder (a word I had to look up).

For more on the “uncanny valley” of the title—in tech, it refers to the dropoff in humans’ acceptance of robots when those creations’ appearance becomes eerily lifelike; in Wiener’s book, it also refers to Silicon Valley—see my December 2009 post.

January linkfest

You’re probably heard of babies named after brands: Porsche, Chanel, Armani, and, lest we forget, Tiffany. Now the Baby Name Wizard blog tells us about three baby names from the 1980s and 1990s that were inspired by TV advertising.

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On the other hand, you could name your offspring after a tech company or product. You wouldn’t be alone. (CNBC)

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It’s the last call for words of the year for 2018: Lynne Murphy pronounces “MSM” the US-to-UK WotY and “whilst” its UK-to-US equivalent. (I may have had something to do with the latter selection.) Over at his Not One-Off Britishisms blog, Ben Yagoda takes the measure of whilst.

Word of the week: Bracket

“Is there a Trump firing bracket?” asked Josh Marshall, the editor and publisher of Turning Points Memo on Twitter. It was the beginning of March Madness, the annual NCAA basketball championship, and the middle – or the beginning of the middle, or the end of the beginning – of a dizzying string of dismissals from the White House. The latest departure: FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, two days before he would have been eligible to retire with his full pension.

The answer to Marshall’s question: Yes.

Word of the week: Rhino

You know it as a shorter, simpler way to say “rhinoceros.” But in the 17th and 18th centuries rhino was slang for “money,” and the related adjective rhinocerical was slang for “wealthy.” And no one is sure why.

These are not the rhinos you’re looking for. (But they sure are cool in Black Panther.)

 

Rhinoceros, from Greek roots meaning “nose-horned,” entered English around 1300; it referred to the herbivorous odd-toed ungulate, two species of which are found in Africa and three in Southern Asia. Rhino- also appears in combination forms such as rhinoplasty (plastic surgery of the nose; first appearance in print: 1828); rhinolaryngitis (1891); and rhinovirus (1961). As the shortened form of the animal name, the word first appeared in print in 1870. But nearly two centuries earlier it was popularly used in England to mean “cash,” and by 1697 the idiom “ready rhino” (or “ready rino”) was in circulation.

 

Word of the week: Thirst trap

Jennifer R. Bernstein wasn’t the only one stumped by this sentence, lifted from an article by Michael Hafford in Playboy whose headline reads “F—k Your Chella Bod. I Love Mine As Is and I’m Still Going to Coachella.” 

what do words even mean anymore pic.twitter.com/vPDk5msppX

— Jennifer R Bernstein (@jenniferrenu) April 15, 2017

Context helps: The story is about preparing for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, an event that’s taken place annually since 1999 and whose first weekend ended yesterday. Still, this particular sentence would have made no sense in 1999 or in 2009, and it would have required some decoding even five years ago. Because I am so old that I pronounce “Coachella” the way most Southern Californians of my generation do, with four syllables – Kids These Days pronounce it “co-chella,”* although this audio guide gives both options – I needed to do a fair amount of research, which I will share with you now.

Fashion word watch: Cold shoulder

Today is the final day of New York Fashion Week (NYFW), the seven-day period during which designers present their new collections — Spring/Summer 2017, this time around — to the press and well-heeled clients. (The event has been called Fashion Week since 1993; for half a century before then, it was known as Press Week.) With apparel on our minds, it seems like a good time to look at a curious fashion term that’s been all over fashion reporting this season – but, like much of fashion itself, turns out to be recycled.

The term is cold shoulder, and in its typical mid-price-point manifestation it looks like this:

Bailey 44 “Deneuve” Cold Shoulder Body-Con Dress, $138 at Nordstrom.

Fashion writers talk about it like this:

If you're obsessed with off-the-shoulder everything, but can't imagine wearing the trend post-summer, we've got some good news: On Saturday, It label Self-Portrait confirmed that the cold-shoulder aesthetic is here to stay, just with some epic new variations. – Refinery 29, September 11, 2016

(That short passage contains a grand slam of style jargon: obsessed, It label, cold shoulder, and epic.)

To be classified as a true cold-shoulder dress or top, the arms must be at least partially covered and the shoulders exposed. (No halter tops, in other words, and no off-the-shoulder peasant blouses.) Unlike a lot of fashionspeak, that makes a certain amount of sense.

But wait: Isn’t cold shoulder also an established idiom in the English language with an unattractive meaning – a show of disrespect or contempt, a snub? It is indeed. So how did this negative term become attached to objects of desire?

Word of the week: Lam

Lam: An escape, especially from custody; an act of running or flight.

Headline and photo via Atlas Obscura, August 5, 2016.

 

On the lam is favored by journalists aiming for a combination of wry humor and tough-guy slang. For some reason, it’s especially popular in animal stories: I found news reports of goats, a cow, a steer, a capybara, and a lynx on the lam. (The lynx attacked four lambs while on the lam.) The recent found-panda story isn’t even the first collocation I found of on the lam and red panda: Masala the red panda escaped from a zoo in Eureka (California) in November 2015 and spent “a few tense days on the lam,” according to SFGate.com. It also shows up in stories about murder suspects, mob bosses, and a fugitive rabbi.

The phrase arose in the U.S. underworld; it first appeared in print (as “take it on a lam”) in a 1904 book, Life in Sing Sing, according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang. It entered widespread use in the 1920s and has been kept alive ever since by detective novelists and the aforementioned journalists. Its origin isn’t known for sure, but it may have developed from a verb lam, possibly of Scottish origin, that has meant “to beat” or “to strike” since the late 1500s. It would thus be related to lambaste (a blend of lam and baste, to thrash). If so, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, “the word [lam] has the same etymological sense as the slang expression beat it.”

September Linkfest

Jeans-maker Wrangler doesn’t want you to go Wrongler.

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Canadian retailer Kit and Ace – see my post about the company name here – is adding coffee shops to its boutiques: The first Sorry Coffee opens tomorrow in Toronto. “Sorry” can mean “worthless” or “inferior,” but here it’s “an attempt to poke fun at Canadians — a winking nod to the quick-to-apologize stereotype,” co-founder J.J. Wilson told the Star. Be sure to pronounce it the Canadian way: SORE-ee.

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A Post About “Piss”

My first post for Strong Language (“a sweary blog about swearing”) is up today. It’s not exactly about swearing per se but rather about the use of a vulgar idiom, a pot to piss in, in the headline of an ad for antique silver that appeared in the New Yorker earlier this month. I also do a quick survey of other piss idioms, a surprising number of which emerged in the 20th century. And I finish with a couple of brand names that incorporate piss, which was one of George Carlin’s famous “seven words you can’t say on television.”

Check out the post—and while you’re there, spend some time with my distinguished partners in profanity: Ben Zimmer on colorful fuck idioms found in the Dictionary of Regional English; James Harbeck on the the in “what the fuck”; Stephen Chrisomalis on “how many swears can we give?”; Mister Slang (Jonathon Green) on some wonderful 18th-century vulgarisms (you’ll never think of nonsense in the same way again); and much more.