Fritinancy

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. 

July Linkfest

Good news for “Downton Abbey” fans: your favorite posh soap opera will soon be an actual soap (and related beauty products). Bad news for American fans: the 10-piece collection will be sold only at not-particularly-posh Marks and Spencer in the UK. Each package is adorned with an apposite quote from one of the episodes. (Via The Beheld.)

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Fun with words: Who or what is the “peter” in “peter out”?

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May the farce be with you: William Shakespeare’s Star Wars (“In time so long ago begins our play, / in star-crossed galaxy far, far away”) and  Star Wars: Vader’s Little Princess.

Image via EW.

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11-X, MAX, AIO, MIND, FACE, and other rejected Xbox names.

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“Congressional acronym abuse: An overly in-depth analysis of congressional acronym usage in bill names.” A tidbit: “Some acronyms are more popular than others. The most popular word, SAFE, is used 131 times.” See also Ben Zimmer’s May 2012 column on the “backronym of the week: Ex-PATRIOT Act.” 

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Do Apple’s new ads signal a renaissance for long copy? “Sadly, but definitely, not. The copy is dire. Vacuous, boring, self-regarding and counter-productive. It starts with a glimmer of promise – the point about designing things with the user in mind – but then goes precisely nowhere with it.” (Via Deborah Schneider.)

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Arika Okrent on the phonetic pitfalls of shm- reduplication: “‘Confusion, shmonfusion’ or ‘confusion, conshmusion’? Do you let your shm- wander, or make it stay up front where you can keep an eye on it?” (See also my posts on shmeat, Schmap, Libros Schmibros, and Burglar Schmurglar.)

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What not to name the baby, San Francisco version. Tips for techies: “You have the added handicap of being in a field where naming products comes up all the time. You probably even think you're good at it. Unfortunately for fetuses, there is a pretty big difference between names that would be appropriate for a baby and names appropriate for a wearable pedometer.” (Via Nancy’s Baby Names.)

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Speaking of babies, Neil Whitman was recently baffled by a product called Babiators: “All at once, not only did I have to infer the existence of aviators as a noun referring to a kind of eyewear instead of a group of airplane pilots; I also had to take it in as part of an offensively cute portmanteau word, in a display for a product that shouldn’t even exist.”

“Safe, durable, and awesome sunglasses for kids.”

June Linkfest

The headline calls them “30 Most Overused Buzzwords in Digital Marketing,” but one of them, “P-commerce” (“participatory commerce” or “Pinterest commerce,” depending, I suppose, on context), is underused in my world: it was new to me. I’ve definitely seen a lot of “gamification,” though.

Full Dilbert comic here.

“I’m sorry to say that gamification (a verbing in -ify from the noun game) is not some twisted invention of Scott Adams’s,” linguist Arnold Zwicky wrote in a May 20 post on his blog. Zwicky devoted most of his post to a discussion of “garbage,” and concluded: “So the pointy-headed boss’s gamification rewards count as garbage, trash, and rubbish, maybe junk as well, and are on their way to becoming waste and refuse.”

One of the words on the “30 most overused” list, “showrooming,” was a Fritinancy word of the week in April 2012.

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If you live in the United States, there’s an excellent chance you live in Emmaland or Sophialand.

I remember when all women named Sophia were about 90 years old, like Dorothy’s mother on “Golden Girls.” And in a few decades, it shall once again come to pass.

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Prosecutor, Lariat, Ranger, Roundup: What are all those macho herbicide names telling us?

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“The Art of the Brick,” Edward Sawaya’s new exhibit at Discovery Times Square, is “a Legoistic survey of art masterpieces,” according to a recent New York Times review that introduced me to the acronym AFOL: Adult Fan of Lego. AFOL and many other Lego terms – but not “Legoistic,” which is wonderful – are defined in the Lego Glossary. (“SNOT: Studs Not On Top. A building technique that places LEGO elements on their sides or even upside down to achieve the shape or structure the builder wants in their creation.”)

“Lego,” in case you didn’t know, is a contraction of Danish leg godt: “play well.” It’s never pluralized. Here’s the Lego Glossary entry for “Legos”:

Oh no you didn’t! Technically, the official plural form for more than one element of LEGO is “LEGO® brand building bricks”. That’s ridiculous, though, so most LEGO fans refer to one or more bricks as “LEGO”, following the grammatical convention of “fish” and “sheep.”

Insisting on all capitals, however, is just silly.

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Linguist Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages, looks at 12 old words – kith, wend and eke among them -- that have survived by being fossilized in idioms.

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After 60 years of sanctions, Coca-Cola is back in Myanmar (Burma). How to sell Coke to people who’ve never tasted it? “They had to keep it simple, and they had to find the right message. A message, it turns out, that was hidden more than a hundred years back in the Coca-Cola archives.”

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“Dear NSA: Those slides are hideous.” Designer Emiland De Cubber suggests a radical remake for that PRISM presentation.

Shopgirl "So"

I spotted this sign at Coverings in San Luis Obispo, home of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

“We are so hiring.”  The small red type reads: “(and a professional, motivated, energetic, team oriented attitude).”

 

It’s not just the photo that tells you that the target market is young and female. It’s also that little word “so” – and, more to the point, the way it functions as a verb-intensifier.  

So+verb is new enough that it doesn’t have a fixed name. I’m calling it Shopgirl So because of the retail association here, but in a November 2011 blog post linguist Arnold Zwicky called it GenX So (“named that for its spread in people from Generation X”). An undated and equally scholarly post at Yale Grammatical Diversity Project calls it Drama SO. (“So” is all caps to convey emphasis; according to YGDP, “In Drama SO constructions, so must receive the highest pitch accent in the sentence.”)

Or you could go back to the beginning and call it Clueless So, in acknowledgment of the movie of that name, released in 1995: “Oh thank you, Josh, I so need lessons from you on how to be cool.”

In fact the OED, in a 2005 addendum, gives that Clueless line as the earliest citation for so+verb (“definitely, decidedly. Freq. in negative constructions”). The construction also showed up in TV’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” as early as 1996 (“We so don’t have time”).

(“So” is a busy little syllable these days. I’ve written previously about “not so much” = “not at all” in advertising; see also Ben Yagoda in Lingua Franca, “So It Turns Out That Everyone’s Starting Sentences with ‘So’.”)

Intensifiers in general are often associated with the speech of girls and women, and so+verb is no exception, as all of the above examples suggest. Zwicky, however, says the connection may be spurious:

The stereotypical associations of GenX so are to young white women (in the U.S.), no doubt because of its prominence in the movies Heathers (1988) and Clueless (1994). Studies of actual usage (though admittedly small in scale) suggest that the actual association with women, while apparently real, is smaller than the stereotype would suggest; and as the GenXers have aged, they seem to have carried this usage with them, and it’s spread to many people not in GenX (like me).

The other line in the sign that caught my attention was the slightly unidiomatic “gift for the gab.” The standard idiom is “the gift of [the] gab” (“an ability to speak easily and confidently”), but that’s not my main gripe. I’m just not happy about “gab” in this context: call me old-fashioned, but I’d prefer that sales associates not “talk idly or incessantly, as about trivial matters” while on the job.

Note too the cheerleading for corporate passion in the ad.

Related trivia: Travel writer Dan Buettner called San Luis Obispo “the happiest city in America” in his 2011 book Thrive. And Cal Poly SLO’s mascot is called Musty the Mustang.