Fritinancy

April linkfest

You know how Google names its Android versions after sweets like Kit Kat and Marshmallow? Well, writes Justin Pot, Microsoft should name its updates after dogs. (How to Geek)

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Speaking of Kit Kat, the brand is hugely popular in Japan, in part because “Kit Kat” translates to “You will surely win.” (Fortune; h/t MJF)

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A century ago, dozens of American girls were named Milady because of the success of a new product: the Milady Décolleté Gillette safety razor, developed to remove underarm hair. (And did you know that “underarm” was coined as a euphemism for “armpit”?) (Baby Name Wizard)

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November linkfest

Dictionary.com’s word of the year for 2017 is complicit. The selection is based on the number of online lookups, which spiked in March, when SNL featured a perfume ad parody; and in April, when Ivanka Trump said she didn’t know “what it means to be complicit.”

 

 

Collins Dictionary, based in London and Glasgow, got a head start on the WOTY competition in early November, selecting fake news over runners-up such as unicorn, echo chamber, and gig economy. (Related: My November 2016 post on fake.)

Names of the year 2016

The American Name Society is accepting nominations for Names of the Year, with the winners to be announced at the society’s annual meeting in Austin, Texas, on January 5, 2017. Anyone can play; submit your nominations before January 3.

Here are my own nominations in the categories established by ANS – names “that best illustrate, through their creation and/or use during the past 12 months, important trends in the culture of the United States and Canada.”

Word of the week: Tsundoku

Tsundoku: The constant act of buying books and never reading them but instead letting them pile up.

I have a particular type of tsundoku that involves never reading most of the Kickstarter book projects I support.

— Iva Cheung (@IvaCheung) February 12, 2016

How Sony Got Its Name

In the spring of 1955, the first Totsuko transistor radio, the size of a large pack of cigarettes, rolled off the production line in Tagajo, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. It never went on sale – its grille bent and peeled off in hot weather – but it was promising enough that the Bulova Watch Company, in New York, placed an order for 100,000 of them. Bulova wanted to rebrand the radios with its own corporate name, but Akio Morita, the owner of the company that made the radio, refused. Professional pride was one reason. But another, writes Simon Winchester in Pacific* (2015), was that “just a few days prior to receiving the order, he and his colleagues had decided to rename their company, to call it Sony.”

January Linkfest

Two years ago, the American Dialect Society selected hashtag as its word of the year for 2012. Last week, for its 2014 word of the year, the ADS chose an actual hashtag, #blacklivesmatter, the slogan that—as the press release put it—“took on special significance in 2014 after the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. and Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., and the failure of grand juries to indict police officers in both cases.” It was the first time in the contest’s 25 that a hashtag had been selected for the distinction. The vote at the Hilton in Portland, Oregon, was nearly unanimous, but the response has been anything but. (“It’s not a word” and “It’s too political” were two of the negative reactions.) Read Ben Zimmer, chair of the ADS New Words Committee, on the WOTY selection (and on other words discussed at the meeting). For supporting viewpoints, see Anne Curzan’s post on the Lingua Franca blog (“The linguistic work of hashtags is especially interesting”) and linguist/librarian Lauren B. Collister’s post on her own blog (“a pretty historic moment for the field of linguistics for a number of reasons”). For a dissenting view, see Schnaufblog: “Call me old school -- I like the idea of a word as a combination of form (sound, gesture, writing) and meaning (lexical or grammatical) that can combine with other words according to the rules of grammar to form a clause.”

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.

Names in the News: Illegal Pete’s, Mirai, Pineapple

In Fort Collins, Colorado, a Mexican restaurant chain called Illegal Pete’s is being targeted by immigrant-rights groups that say the name is derogatory and offensive because of “the i word,” as in “illegal immigrant.” The chain’s owner, Pete Turner, opened the first Illegal Pete’s in 1995; he told the New York Times the name “was inspired by the name of a bar in a novel and by his late father, also named Pete, who had a rebellious streak.” “I never intended it to be about undocumented immigrants,” Turner told the Times. “Never. Not once.” Turner, who calls himself a pro-immigrant liberal, says he gave serious consideration to a name change. But in early November he announced, in a long letter on the company website, that he’d decided against it. Readers’ comments have been almost unanimously supportive.

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This week Toyota announced that it would start selling a hydrogen fuel cell sedan in 2015 (sticker price: $57,500). The futuristic car has a name to match: Mirai, which means “future” in Japanese.

Mirai nameplate via Toyota blog.

 

The name sounds good to non-Japanese ears, too. Mira means “look” in Spanish, “aim” or “objective” in Italian, and “watch intensely” in French. In Sanskrit it means “ocean,” a fitting association with hydrogen. And in the Slavic languages mir means peace.

For a different take on “Mirai,” see linguist Victor Mair’s post for Language Log. A pertinent passage:

[O]ur English word “future” is firmly rooted in an Indo-European belief that it will come to pass / be / exist. The Sinitic term, in contrast, is more skeptical, and indicates an uncertainty about the very possibility of that which has not yet arrived. It seems to me that, if we accept the philosophical implications of the term, mirai / wèilái will keep receding and never quite arrive.

Toyota Mirai via AutoBlog Green.

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Print magazines, once dismissed as dead-tree relics, are proving to be pretty hardy after all. California Sunday, an independent monthly (for now) that’s distributed with the state’s biggest newspapers, made a splashy debut October 5. Now Airbnb, the lodging-rental company that’s out to disrupt the hospitality industry, has launched Pineapple, a quarterly publication for hosts (who may choose to share it with their paying guests). According to a New York Times article, the 128-page winter 2014 issue carries no advertising and contains features on San Francisco (where Airbnb is headquartered), London, and Seoul.

Why Pineapple? For centuries—since Columbus’s second voyage, according to some accounts—the fruit has symbolized hospitality and luxury. Pineapple names and images are common in the hospitality industry, and pineapple tchotchkes abound.

Pineapple welcome flag, MadAboutGardening.com.

 

 

 

Pineapple Hospitality, a Bellevue, Washington-based chain of boutique hotels.

 

 

A different Pineapple Hospitality: distributors of “green” amenities for hotels.

 

 

 

“It Couldn’t Please Me More” (The Pineapple Song) from the stage version of Cabaret (cut, sadly, from the movie). So rare! So costly! So luxurious! I searched in vain for a clip from the original Broadway show, in which the immortal Lotte Lenya played Fraulein Schneider.

 

Word of the Week: Titch

Titch: A small person.

This sense of titch* was new to me until very recently, when I encountered it in a brief New York Times Sunday Magazine story about Fatyo, a Japanese retailer that specializes in apparel that is—quoting directly now from the Fatyo website—“Metropolitan, tough. Real and daily, casual clothes. Identity always on the street. Representing Tokyo. FAT.” (Not phat: FAT.)

The Times story, in full:

Euphemism-averse sneakerheads might consider buying clothes from Tokyo-based Fatyo, a tell-it-like-it-is streetwear brand that sizes not with traditional words or numbers but with more descriptive terms: “titch” and “skinny” on the small end of the spectrum, “fat” and “jumbo” on the other. The website burbles: “Being Fat. Wanting to be FAT. Being more like you, to be FAT.” It might be a tough sell in Japan, where the obesity rate is an enviable 3.5 percent.

This illustration accompanied the story:

 

 

In English-speaking countries, when sizes aren’t expressed numerically they’re usually given as Extra-Small, Small, Medium, Large, and Extra-Large. J. Crew, the American retailer, caused a bit of a furor earlier this year when it introduced clothes with an XXXS label. (For more on this move, and on “vanity sizing” in general, read “Who’s Buying J. Crew’s New XXXS Clothes?” in the New Yorker; for a larger historical perspective, read Kathleen Fasanella on the history of women’s sizing.)

I’d read (and tweeted) about Fatyo’s unusual size categories in June, but back then only the “fat” and “jumbo” designations had made headlines and raised eyebrows. Now titch piqued my curiosity. Did it have a Japanese origin, like skosh (from sukoshi, meaning “little”), to which many Americans were introduced via Levi’s ads in the 1980s? (Levi’s even trademarked the phrase “with a skosh more room.”)

 

Via Ebay.

 

Not at all, as it turns out. Titch is “a mainly British and Australian colloquial term,” according to the authoritative source World Wide Words. And it’s an eponym—sort of.

Here’s the WWW explanation:

The original was Little Tich, a famous music hall performer whose real name was Harry Relph. He was born in 1867 with slightly webbed hands that had an extra finger on each. He stopped growing at age 10 and as an adult was only 4 ft 6 ins tall (about 1.4 m). As a child, he was nicknamed Tichborne because he was short and stoutly built, like Arthur Orton, the famous fraudulent claimant to the Tichborne inheritance.

Little Tich himself, via World Wide Words.

 

 

In case you’re not up on your Victorian legal scandals (I certainly wasn’t), the Tichborne case centered on Roger Tichborne, heir to the Tichborne baronetcy, who was presumed to have died in a shipwreck in 1854.

World Wide Words has this to say about the spelling of titch:

At some point — it’s hard to be sure when, though presumably long enough after Little Tich’s death in 1928 for the link to him to be broken — the spelling largely shifted to titch to match that of rhyming words like itch, pitch and stitch.

I still don’t know how titch made its way to Japan. A British or Australian copywriter? One of those quirky borrowings with a lost history? I await the wisdom of the Internet.

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* I’d occasionally heard titch in the sense of “a small amount,” as in “I’ll have a titch more coffee.” This sense may be related to touch.

Word of the Week: Fukubukuro

Fukubukuro: Grab bag or mystery bag containing unidentified items and sold at a substantial discount. Literally “lucky bag.” From Japanese fuku (“lucky”) and fukuro (“bag”); fukuro changes to bukuro because of a Japanese morphological phenomenon called rendaku, which affects the initial voicing of consonants.

A Japanese New Year’s custom since the late Meiji period (early 20th century), fukubukuro were introduced by Tokyo’s Ginza Matsuya department store and later spread to other retail establishments. Merchants in Honolulu’s Ala Moana Shopping Center adopted the tradition in 2004, and many Sanrio stores in the United States observe it as well.

A fukubukuro bag is one of the rewards offered by the Kickstarter campaign for a new daily-deals site, Meh.

Meh logo.

Meh—an interjection meaning “I’m unimpressed” whose coinage is often attributed to the cartoon character Lisa Simpson—is the deliberately under-promising name for a site whose creators say will “keep it simple and stupid” by presenting a single deal each day:

It may amuse you. It may perform a necessary function in the digestive system of capitalism. Once in a while, it may even offer a kick-ass deal on something you actually want. But it isn't going to change your life, or give you more powerful orgasms.

As for the fukubukuro reward, it’s

a century-old tradition we're borrowing from the Japanese, where people buy crap in bags sight unseen and then are crushed by the inevitable, certain disappointment. (And for this Kickstarter-edition fukubukuro, we created a custom, original, one-page comic that you could call collectible if you have little understanding of that word.)

“The possibilities are literally unlimitless!” the copy concludes with feigned, oh-so-ironic enthusiasm.

Meh is a project of Mediocre Laboratories, whose low-expectations name I wrote about last year. Matt Rutledge, Mediocre’s founder, “founded e-commerce site Woot a decade ago and is generally considered the granddaddy of the daily deal,” writes TechCrunch reporter Ryan Lawler. Amazon bought Woot for $110 million in cash in 2010.