Fritinancy

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.

March Linkfest

When did the Central Intelligence Agency start being called “the Company”? If you have evidence of a published example from before 1966, the OED wants to hear from you. Don’t worry, you won’t lose your security clearance.

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The iPhone could have been called the TriPod, the Mobi, or the TelePod, none of which would have been bad. The ePad Femme, on the other hand – “the world’s first tablet just for women” – suffers from more than a bad name. (Hat tip for both: Catchword.)

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Related: an honest iPad commercial.

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OK, just one more iThing link: the CTA Digital Pedestal Stand for iPad 2/3/4 with Roll Holder. (Via Virginia Postrel.)

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Three common mistakes in company naming, as told by three sadder-but-wiser business owners. (Related: my own post, Seven Ways to Go Wrong with Naming. )

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Another sadder-but-wiser tale: How not to name your restaurant. Author David Lizerbram, a trademark lawyer, leads off the story by observing: “It’s always astonishing to me that businesses will invest countless dollars in every aspect of their operations while relying on a name that will only bring legal issues.” Hear, hear!

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Speaking of trademark strength, this 1950 infographic is a thing of beauty.

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If you’re launching a fashion brand, should you follow the traditional route and name it after yourself (which worked fine for Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, and Betsey Johnson)? Or should you follow the lead of some younger designers and choose a quirky name like Creatures of the Wind? Mark Prus, guest-blogging for Duets Blog, weighs the costs and benefits of “strange” as a naming strategy.

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Glad to see I’m not the only one who’s wondering about the proliferation of gratuitous umlauts in brand names. (Via @TimberlakeLaw.)

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Viewy, yellow-ammer, cooshy, and other words from Parade’s End – not the recent BBC/HBO series but the Ford Madox Ford tetralogy on which Tom Stoppard based his script.

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The Atlas of True Names “reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings, of the familiar terms on today's maps of the World, Europe, the British Isles and the United States. For instance, where you would normally expect to see the Sahara indicated, the Atlas gives you ‘The Tawny One’, derived from Arab. es-sahra “the fawn coloured, desert’.”

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From a glossary of American mountain-man lingo: “Arkansas toothpick” (a large, pointed dagger), “possibles” (a mountain man’s personal property), “terrapin” (dog meat).

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Blinkies, peelies, catalinas, and other words from the world of extreme couponing.

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Another one of those wonderful Wikipedia entries: a list of English-language idioms derived from baseball. (Via The Editor’s Desk.)

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Two takes on the evolution of “LOL” from “laughing out loud” to “just kidding”: from Anne Curzan at Lingua Franca and from Stan Carey at Sentence First. Stan includes a video clip of linguist John McWhorter (“Texting is not the death of writing. Texting is fingered speech”). 

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Finally: what if Seinfeld were still on the air?

 

Nonplussed

A few observations about the new marketing campaign for the Bay Area’s Sutter Health medical group.

 

"When you're with child / We're with you." Outdoor ad, Van Ness Avenue at Filbert Street, San Francisco.

First, who says “with child” in 2013? Even on Downton Abbey, set between 1912 and 1922, characters were constantly saying that so-and-so was “pregnant.” (The casual use of the word was almost certainly anachronistic: the Online Etymology Dictionary tells us “pregnant” was a taboo word until the mid-1950s. “Expecting” and “in the family way” were far more common.)

“When you’re with child, we’re with you” is earnest but clunky: “with child” and “with you” aren’t really parallel here.

But what will puzzle most people about the ad is the slogan: “We Plus You.”

Here it is on the website:

The logo? Your guess is as good as mine.

 

It isn’t intended as a mathematical statement, with plus as a conjunction: “We plus you equals good health,” or something like that. No, plus is clearly a verb here: “It’s how you plus us, and we plus you.”

I remember some talk about to plus a couple of years ago, when Google launched its social-media service Google Plus. To give a stamp of approval to something on Google Plus, you click a “+1” icon. Users started referring to the action as “plussing.”

But it turns out Walt Disney had Google beat by almost 70 years. According to How to Be Like Walt: Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life, a chatty/motivational 2004 biography that refers to its subject by his first name, Walt Disney emphasized “the plus factor” to his artists and designers:

Sometime during the 1940s, Walt coined the term “plussing.” Normally, the word “plus” is a conjunction, as in “two plus two equals four.” But Walt used the word as a verb—an action word. To “plus” something is to improve it. “Plussing” means giving your customers more than they paid for, more than they expect, more than you have to give them. … He began by plussing Mickey Mouse with sound, then plussing the Silly Symphonies with color. Walt plussed the skills of his artists by sending them to art school at his own expense. Walt’s relentless quest for excellence kept him at the leading edge of his industry—and left his competitors, well, nonplussed.

Sutter Health may be using “plus” in this “improvement” sense. Or maybe it’s saying “You complete me.”

“We Plus You” isn’t the only bit of peculiar wordplay in the Sutter Health campaign. Here’s a full-page print ad in the March issue of San Francisco magazine:

 

 

“We specialize in You-ology.”

You-ology? Right down the hall from Your-ology, where you can get that prostate exam.

 

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Re the title of this post: nonplussed does not mean nonchalant, although a lot of people think it does.

January Linkfest

I’ve always wanted to name a perfume. Maybe I should just invent my own, as Sarah Marshall of The Hairpin did with her Unreleased Celebrity Fragrances: Acedia by Louis CK, Sherlocked by Benedict Cumberbatch, and a bunch of others, each with a pungent description.

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Continuing with the made-up names theme, here’s a crayon collection with grown-up color names:

 

I’m digging “Void of Existential Anguish Black.”

Via Arnold Zwicky, who adds a story about the Eagle Shirtmakers color-naming contest of 1961, which yielded submissions like Roe Cocoa, Unforeseeable Fuchsia, and Noblesso Beige.

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Also from Arnold Zwicky: How the dobro got its name. Dobro is a registered trademark of the Gibson Guitar Corporation, which means we all should be capitalizing it; it’s also an eponym, a portmanteau, and a word meaning “goodness” in most Slavic languages.

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“We gave you way too big an advance to call this book Freakonomics,” said the publisher of the book that gave rise to an entire freakin’ industry. Briefly considered as substitutes: Economics Gone Wild, Bend It Like Veblen, and Dude, Where’s My Rational Expectation?

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Earlier this month, the American Dialect Society voted phablet – the coinage that describes a smartphone-tablet hybrid – the word Least Likely to Succeed. (Phablet shared the dubious distinction with YOLO.) In a Word Routes column, Ben Zimmer traces the origins of phablet and ponders why nobody loves the word. (For the record, I’d revive an old word, tabloid, to replace phablet. Here’s my 2009 post about tabloid’s fascinating history.)

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Let’s squeeze in one more Word of the Year 2012 story. This one’s by linguist Arika Okrent, who rounds up eight countries’ words of the year, from entroikado (Portugal) to watture (France). J’aime beaucoup watture!

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“Focus more on connotations and less on definitions” – Lexicon Branding’s advice for choosing a name.

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“The next time someone tells you that they can’t accept a name with risk, consider asking them if pouring money into a brand that no one notices and no one cares about is more or less risky than investing in one that just might have a shot.” – Tate Linden, founder of the branding agency Stokefire, in a Q&A with the Wordnik blog.

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Whoever named the top 10 cannabis strains of 2012 was having way too much fun. (Via a tweet from Whatever It Is, I’m Against It.)

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What can the online dating site OKCupid teach us about naming? It’s all about standing out from the crowd, says Beth Gerber of Catchword Branding.

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Ever remember hearing that HAL, the computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, was meant to represent big bad IBM? (Just move the letters H-A-L forward one space in the alphabet.) A new video sets out to prove that the theory isn’t so farfetched after all.

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Ben Schmidt, who’s written about anachronisms (or prochronisms) in Mad Men and Downton Abbey, listens for anachronisms in Lincoln, the Stephen Spielberg movie written by Tony Kushner. Examples: “barrage” (of artillery) didn’t enter the lexicon until 1900, and “peace talks” wasn’t coined until the Vietnam War. Bonus for Lincoln-lingo nerds willing to pay for the privilege: Ben Zimmer’s Boston Globe interview with Kushner. There’s a related (free) article at Word Routes.

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How did Lockheed Martin’s famous Skunk Works get its name and mascot? The Zinzin blog follows the scent and tracks down the story.

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What’s your favorite legal word? The ABA Journal’s readers testify. (Via a tweet from Beauty Marks.)

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Two from Ad Freak: The ad agency pronunciation guide…

 

 

.. and a taxonomy of ad-agency names.

 

(Click to embiggen.)

August Linkfest

Crowdsourcing a name for a new apple-flavored Mountain Dew beverage seemed like such a good idea. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, plenty. “Suddenly, its gallery of suggestions featured such winners as ‘Gushing Granny,’ ‘Diabeetus,’ and my personal favorite, ‘Fapple’.” Mountain Dew now says the campaign was created by a local customer, not the company; the “offensive content”—created by unknown pranksters—has been scrubbed from the “Dub the Dew” website.

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My two posts about the origins of the expression “the whole nine yards” (here and here) continue to be among the most-searched entries on this blog. But the story isn’t finished: New research has unearthed a couple of citations that go back to the 1950s, a full decade earlier than previously assumed. Read Ben Zimmer’s Word Routes column about the new findings, “Stretching Out ‘The Whole Nine Yards’.”

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Speaking of idioms: Absolutely nobody knows where the phrase “round robin” comes from.

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The most-loathed words in the English language, according to readers of The Atlantic, include moist (of course!), curate, slacks, and artisanal.

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Love logos? Love data? Check out Emblemetric, a new blog by James I. Bowie about trends in logo design. No seat-of-the-pants stuff, this: Bowie bases his reports on more than 1.2 million logos in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database. Sample finding: “The use of two stars as a design element in US logos increased by 170 percent in 2011 over the preceding five-year period. Looking back over time, we can see that, following a pronounced dip in the 1970s, logos with two stars have been claiming an increasing share of new trademark filings for the last three decades.” Be still, my geekish heart.

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Set aside several hours to wander happily through the History of Advertising Trust, “the largest archive of British advertising in the world.” There’s also a lovely gallery of ghost signs. (Via @boswellaffleck.)

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At Union Square Café, a “K1” is a diner who will be proposing to his date. At Michael’s New York, “Lawn” is a chopped salad chopped extra fine. Ben Schott deciphers these and other secret codes used in the dining rooms and kitchens of some well-known New York City restaurants, .

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Eleven wonderful words with no precise equivalent in English. Quite a few are new to me, including bilita mpash (Bantu for “the opposite of a nightmare”) and ya-arburnee (Arabic for “may you bury me,” i.e., the expressed hope that you die before your beloved does). (Hat tip: @ourboldhero).

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What’s the nerdiest preposition of them all? Nope, not “notwithstanding.” Not even close.

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Lexicographer Kory Stamper on color definitions in Webster’s Third International Dictionary: “You could spend an hour alone getting lost in ‘cerise’ (‘a moderate red that is slightly darker than claret (sense 3a), slightly lighter than Harvard crimson (sense 1), very slightly bluer and duller than average strawberry (sense 2a), and bluer and very slightly lighter than Turkey red’). No doubt people did. That may explain why we don’t define colors this way anymore.”

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I want a wall-size poster of this Is the New diagram, which documents “every instance of the phrase ‘is the new’ encountered from various sources in 2005.” Samples: “October is the new December,” “staying in is the new going out,” and “flat is the new round.” (Via Diane Fischler.)

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“Ms. and Mrs.,” a small personal-care-products company, was constantly being misidentified, usually as “Mr. and Mrs.” So the founders hired professionals to come up with a new name. Smart move. (Via @alanbrew.)

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A wonderful list of paradoxes from virtually every discipline. I’m still pondering the Service Recovery Paradox: “Successfully fixing a problem with a defective product may lead to higher consumer satisfaction than in the case where no problem occurred at all.” (Via @operativewords.)

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I’m sure you’ll have quibbles and additions, but this Digital Trends list of “The top 10 worst car names of all times” includes some incontestable champions, like the Studebaker Dictator and Isuzu’s Mysterious Utility Wizard. (Via @lexiconbranding.)

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From the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog, Mary Norris on “Semicolons; So Tricky”: “I thought semicolons were just inflated commas, and I realized that I had no idea how to use them, and was afraid it was too late to learn, so I decided to do without them. I stuck with what I knew: the common comma, the ignorant question mark, the occasional colon, the proletarian period.”

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From the New York Times’s Opinionator blog, Ben Yagoda on “The Point of Exclamation”: “A friend’s 12-year-old daughter once said that in her view, a single exclamation point is fine, as is three, but never two. My friend asked her where this rule came from and the girl said, ‘Nowhere. It’s just something you learn.’”

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Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl and transformative editor of Cosmopolitan, died Monday. From the New York Times front-page obit: “She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger.” Ouch. It’s easy to mock Brown, and Cosmo, but let’s not forget that in the early years of Brown’s editorship the magazine published work by Patricia Highsmith, John Fowles, and Tom Wolfe, as these covers from the 1960s attest. And brava to Brown for saying this in 1964:

I personally don’t feel that the world is going to the dogs or that young people are inferior to their counterparts of a previous generation. Our moral codes have changed slightly, but what we have now is a lot better than the days of stricter moral codes when there was child labor, no equality for women, no federal aid for destitute people, plenty of robber barons and lynching.

Source: Bad Girls Go Everywhere, Jennifer Scanlon’s 2009 biography of Brown. (Hat tip: The Hairpin.)

July Linkfest

If you’ve been following the big science news of the month/year/century/millennium, you know that the “Higgs” in “Higgs boson” is British physicist Peter Higgs. But you may not be aware that “boson” was named for an Indian scientist, Satyendranath Bose. (Note: The Higgs boson is not to be confused with the Higgs bos’n or the Herrgs berson.)

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Ten weird rules that control how planets are named.

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Five words with surprising etymologies. I knew the “California” story, but was indeed surprised by “partridge.”

Let's Verb!

Remember the Starbucks “Let’s Merry” slogan from the 2011 holiday season? It was no fluke. Recently I’ve seen two new examples of “Let’s X” branding, in which X = a non-verb enlisted to play the part of a verb.

Tanqueray has a new campaign that doubles down on the anthimeria. The campaign slogan, “Tonight We Tanqueray,” turns the brand name—legally speaking a modifier, as in “Tanqueray gin”—into a verb. And one of the ad slogans, “Let’s Tonic,” turns a noun into a verb.

 

Shot from the window of my car in San Francisco (Columbus near Washington).

The campaign comes with a manifesto:

Tonight. Tonight we off the cellphone, retire the email. And save it for another day. We slow it down, drag it out and downshift day into night. Then throw in a few limes, a few rocks, maybe toss in some juice. A wink. A toast. Give her cheek a little love. Tonight we raise our glasses and let them kiss.

Note the Mafia-style use of “off” as a verb.

“Tonight We Tanqueray” reminded me of those much-parodied “Tonight, Let It Be Löwenbräu” commercials from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. Here's one from 1979.

 

  

“Here’s to good friends/Tonight is kinda special…”

The jingle was sung by the late Arthur Prysock, “the Barry White of beer commercials,” according to one YouTube commenter.

A second Tanqueray ad instructs “us” to “Grab the Night by the Junipers.” Here’s a version of the ad on the website.

Juniper berries are, of course, a key ingredient in gin. And “Grab X by the horns” (or, more crudely, “by the balls”) is a well-documented idiom. But I wonder how many passers-by will figure it out.

The idiom was a lot clearer in the marketing materials for the 2004 film Dodgeball:

In Australia and Europe, the tagline was “Grab Life by the Balls,” plural.

The second example of “Let’s [non-verb] X” comes from Amsterdam-based Let’s Pizza, which has been dispensing hot pizza via vending machine to customers in Europe for about three years. Which surprised AdFreak: “How did Europe get these things three years before us, anyway? The universe got that backwards.”

 

According to the UK website:

Let’s Pizza kneads the dough, forms a round, adds tomato sauce, layers toppings – and then bakes it all in front of your very eyes. There are no frozen pizzas here; Let’s Pizza is a mini-pizzeria that’s open 24 hours a day!

And here’s the news you’ve been waiting for: PizzaMarketplace.com reported last month that Let’s Pizza will introducing its first machines to the U.S. market later this year. A ten-and-a-half-inch pizza will cost about $6 and deliver 646 calories. In Europe, that probably translates to “dinner for the family”; in the U.S. it will probably be marketed as “personal size.”

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More examples of anthimeria in branding here.