Fritinancy

December Linkfest

The A.V. Club looks back at the year in band names. It was a good year for punctuation themes: W-H-I-T-E, Friend Slash Lover, TL;DR. (Hat tip: Henry Alpert.)

*

In Word Routes, Ben Zimmer looks at the year in words. His list partially overlaps mine, but he also singles out a few I didn’t catch: twinkling, lip dub, and narb, for starters.

*

A different take on words of the year: Merriam-Webster reports on the words that spiked in online lookups over the last 12 months. From April 15: ersatz, after the US Postal Service admitted that the new Statue of Liberty stamp mistakenly features a photograph of the half-size replica at the New York New York Casino and Resort in Las Vegas.

*

Laura Wattenberg of  Baby Name Wizard announces the name of the year for 2011. It represents, she writes, “the rise of the virtual name.”

*

Why are informers called “rats” and spies called “moles”? The Explainer, at Slate.com, explains.

*

Buzzfeed picks the 90 best Twitter accounts of 2011. Yeah, they overlooked Fritinancy again.

*

Trendwatching’s list of “12 crucial consumer trends for 2012” includes, as usual, some over-the-top coinages, including flaw-some (“To consumers, brands that behave more humanly, including exposing their flaws, will be awesome”), eco-cycology (“Brands will increasingly take back all of their products for recycling … and recycle them responsibly and innovatively”), and emerging maturialism (“Expect frank, risqué or non-corporate products, services and campaigns from emerging markets to be on the rise”).

*

Last year the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan organization that lobbies for government transparency, published a tongue-in-cheek name generator for political action committees (PACs). The generator randomly spews out names like Fanciful Floridians Against Cruella de Vil and Captains of Industry for Growth—names you’d never expect to see in real life. Except … it turns out that dozens of real PACs lifted their names from the Sunlight Foundation generator.

*

Linguist Lauren Gawne, who blogs as Superlinguo, recently presented what may be the world’s first academic paper on LOLcats and language. (“Don’t call it kitty pidgin!”) Watch the presentation.

*

Speaking of linguists doing cool stuff, Erin McKean wrote earlier this month about “the secret language of bros”—aka the dudeification of English—for the Boston Globe. “Perhaps the most unlikely bro- blend,” she reports, “is Bronies, used to refer to male fans of the ‘My Little Pony’ television cartoon and toys.”

*

And speaking of manly lingo, Old Spice has a new holiday ad campaign that brings back the original “man your man could smell like,” Isaiah Mustafa. As “MANta Claus,” Mustafa promises to buy gifts for all 7 billion people on Earth. See all 36 MANta Claus videos here, and read my February 2010 post on Mustafa’s original work for Old Spice.

*

Lowering the Bar, the legal blog, reports (in a post titled “Assorted Stupidity #32”) on two new government-project names. PRODIGAL is being developed by Georgia Tech for the Pentagon; the name is an acronym for “Proactive Discovery of Insider Threats Using Graph Analysis and Learning.” (LtB: “Translation: it reads your mail.”) And Palantir is the name of a company that’s working with the CIA on data-mining. LtB: “Nerds like myself will know that palantir is taken from ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ in which a palantir is a crystal-ball-type item that was created with good intentions but virtually always deceived and corrupted the user. And that’s the name they picked.”

*

Real Android phone name or silly, randomly generated Android phone name? Honestly, it’s hard to tell. (Via @ahundredmonkeys.)

*

Where does the term “stocking stuffer” come from? Former Boston Globe language columnist Jan Freeman investigates.

*

“There is nothing inherently disrespectful about Xmas,” writes Dawn McIlvain Stahl at Copyediting.com. “Those who use it are not putting an X where Christ used to be. You could even say that those who use Christmas are putting a Christ where X used to be.”

*

On the other hand:

Via John McChesney Young; also here.

Dude, Where's My Fruity Pink Cocktail?

Misty Harris, a reporter for Canada’s Postmedia News, got in touch yesterday after she read my post about the Man Iron.* She said she’d recently noticed that Earls Kitchen and Bar, a chain with locations throughout Canada (and in a few US cities), offers a weekly special for men.

 

Here’s the fine print from the bar menu:

Earls White Peach Bellini | $4.50 | made with all natural peach syrup, appleton estate vx rum, peach liqueur and sparkling white wine

Earls White Peach BRO-llini | $7.25 | same great Bellini - always a double, always in a man glass

I’d venture to say it takes a whole lot of confidence—or a heaping helping of man irony—to step up to the bar and order a BRO-llini. By the way, if you need to ask what a “man glass” is, you probably should stick to cream soda.

(Yes, that’s Patrick Gallagher, who plays Ken Tanaka on “Glee.”)

___

*Read Misty’s article about the Man Iron, BRO-llinis, and manbags, which includes a few comments from yours truly. For more bro- compounds, please refer to the Encyclopedia BROtanica.

The Man Iron

Now that home-economics classes have been relegated to the dustbin of history and modern clothes dryers are equipped with an “ironing” setting, does anyone iron clothes anymore? Not from the looks of it, according to my highly subjective survey-by-looking-around. My findings were confirmed by a Writer’s Beat discussion forum, which tipped its hand by asking, “Why do people iron their clothes?” Representative response: “If god wanted us to iron, why make clothes with Dry Clean Only labels?” And a bit further off topic: “If you spray Pam on an iron you can make really great grilled cheese sandwiches with it.”

Well, I think ironing is important, and I enjoy doing it; in fact, it’s my favorite household chore. Also, as regular readers know, I like a good man-brand. (See my posts on ManQuarium, MANdle candles, and manscaping.) So it was with considerable interest that I read a recent Jezebel post about the Man Iron, aka the GC4490, from Philips, the Dutch electronics manufacturer.

 

 

The Man Iron: how Darth Vader maintains his wrinkle-free appearance?

The Jezebel post refers to a testosterone-drenched press release for the iron (“robust black casing …. exudes masculinity … practically unbreakable … crushes the opposition … intense 100g of steam … bulldozing [!] creases”). However, the post lacks a link to that press release, so I couldn’t verify its accuracy.* Nor could I find it on the Philips website. I did find a PDF of the product manual which calls the GC4490 an “anodilium soleplate man iron for an endless excellent gliding experience.” (I think Philips made up “anodilium”—I found a cancelled trademark filing for the term in the USPTO database.) The product manual also refers to the GC4490 as a “2400 W power tool for ironing” that “helps you blast all creases away easily.” I counted eight references to “power” or “powerful.”

The GC4490 was introduced in Europe last year; a May 2010 report in Springwise.com noted that the iron comes in a solid case “like a new hammer drill” and retails for about €80 ($96). Last week’s flurry of coverage by Jezebel and other outlets seems to portend a US debut, but I didn’t see the product in Philips’s online store.

Naturally, the Man Iron news has prompted some Iron Man word play as well as some scoffing. Here’s Glamour.com’s Tracey Lomrantz:

I find this almost as ridiculous as “Safety Girl” tools, which make home improvement so much more fun because they’re pink! For the record, I learned to iron from a former boyfriend and my dad handles most of the wrinkle-releasing duties at my parents’ house, and they both managed just fine without the premium sports car of steaming.

Sex-role stereotyping aside, what to say about the Man Iron name? It’s certainly consistent with a naming trend that began in 1969 with Hunt-Wesson’s Manwich. (I wrote about Manwich and its namer, ad man Edward Gelsthorpe, for the Visual Thesaurus back in 2009.) Man-brands and coined man-words—from Seinfeld’s mansierre and man-fur to Borat’s mankini and the U.S. economy’s mancession—serve a couple of purposes. As language maven Mark Peters has observed, “most man words are coined to describe men behaving like women, or at least stereotypical women. Men aren't supposed to worry about cancer, receive alimony, or get Brazilian waxes, so manogram, manimony, and manzilian”—and Man Iron—“are created.” Man-words are also a jokey way to relieve tension—to say, in effect, “Dude, why so serious?”

I do think, though, that Philips missed an opportunity to revive the ultimate in high-performance de-wrinkling technology: the electric mangle.

Mangle photograph from here.

A mangle presses fabric between heated rollers; it’s a staple of commercial laundries but used to be made for household use, too. (In fact, Miele still makes a home mangle but calls it a “fold-down rotary iron”; at $1,999, it requires a major commitment to crispness.)

The pressing-type mangle is unrelated, etymologically, to the verb meaning “to mutilate or disfigure; to ruin.” The verb comes from Old French mangoner, “to cut to bits.” The noun comes from Dutch and Middle High German and ultimately from Late Latin manganum. Here’s the wonderfully relevant part: manganum means “catapult” and derives from Greek manganon, “war machine.” Besides “mangle,” manganon gave us “mangonel,” “a military engine used during the Middle Ages for hurling stones and other missles.” 

Need I point out that the first syllable of all these words is man?

The mangle: an industrial-strength answer to a man-sized problem. Gentlemen, start your crease-bulldozing engines. 

___

* UPDATE: I am now in possession of the original Philips press release and can confirm every word. Unfortunately, the release is in Word so I can’t link to it.

___

P.S. If you really want to get serious about it, buy Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, by Cheryl Mendelson, which devotes an entire chapter to the science and craft of ironing. Ms. Mendelson, who lives in New York City with her husband and son, has a PhD in philosophy and a Harvard law degree and still found time to write—elegantly and persuasively—an 896-page guide to contemporary housekeeping. From the introduction to the chapter on ironing: “There is nothing like keeping the hands busy with some familiar work to free the mind. You can learn Italian while you iron, as a friend of mine did, or you can simply think.”

Word of the Week: Muffler Man

Muffler Man: A larger-than-life-size fiberglass statue used for commercial purposes, often by gas stations to promote muffler sales. Muffler Men are found throughout the United States in various guises; they stand between 18 and 25 feet tall and have hollow bodies, broad shoulders, “well-chiseled” facial features, and big, blocky shoes.

 

Muffler Man with muffler, Escondido (Southern California). From Weird California.

 

The definitive source for Muffler Man lore is the Roadside America website, which features photo galleries, a guide to subspecies (Noble Savage, Happy Half-Wit, etc.), and an interview with Steve Dashew, whose company, International Fiberglass in Venice, California, created hundreds of Muffler Men between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s, when Dashew retired. Dashew told Roadside America that the first Muffler Man was a Paul Bunyan figure built for the PB Café in Flagstaff, Arizona, in about 1962. After Dashew bought the company in 1963, he signed agreements with Texaco, Phillips, and Uniroyal, as well as with restaurants and retail stores, to make branded versions of the original mold.

 

Muffler Man with hot dog. (Wikipedia.)

 

How to identify a Muffler Man. (Roadside America.)

 

The Uniroyal Gal, rumored to be modeled after Jacqueline Kennedy, came in two versions: bikinied or beskirted.

 

Beskirted Uniroyal Gal in Peoria, Illinois. (Roadside America)

I’ve seen Muffler Men from time to time over the years and never given them much thought. (Disclaimer: I grew up in Los Angeles, where early and frequent exposure to restaurants shaped like hats, doughnuts, and owls no doubt made me a jaded observer of surreal real estate.) It wasn’t until I read a recent post in Brave New Malden—a British blog, I am chagrined to report—that I learned the term “Muffler Men” and realized that the big statues I’d been blithely disregarding all this time were a recognized folk-art medium.

One of the oddest and most endearing subspecies of Muffler Man is Chicken Boy, who loomed for many years over an eponymous restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. (Broadway between Fourth and Fifth streets, for those who know the territory.) Chicken Boy—a chicken-headed man holding a symbolic bucket of deep-fried chicken parts, something you probably don’t want to think about too deeply—was customized from an International Fiberglass mold in the late 1960s. When Amy Inouye moved to L.A. in the mid-1970s, she took an immediate shine to Chicken Boy; as she writes on the Chicken Boy website, “he communicated to me that if he could be okay living in LA, I could be okay living in LA.”

Cover of an early Chicken Boy catalog, featuring the Boy himself.

The restaurant closed in 1984, and Amy Inouye set about saving the statue, which she calls “the Statue of Liberty of Los Angeles.” It took 23 years, but Chicken Boy at last found a new home atop Inouye’s design studio in Highland Park, just north of downtown L.A. In the interim, Inouye published the Chicken Boy Catalog for a Better World, “a catalog of gift items including Chicken Boy logo merchandise and things Chicken Boy would be proud to have in his home or give as a lovely hostess gift.” (I was an early subscriber to the catalog, and I’m happy to say you can still buy many CB items here.)

 

One more digression: In addition to the beefy, humanoid Muffler Men, there’s a different species of muffler men that are actually crafted from mufflers and other auto parts. Muffler Men, published by the University of Mississippi Press in 2000, is a scholarly examination by folklorists Timothy Corrigan Correll and Patrick Arthur Polk of the handmade muffler sculptures that take the form of “cowboys, dogs, robots, space aliens, and a host of other creatures.” This breed of muffler men is not exclusive to the United States; Correll and Polk report that they’ve heard of sightings in Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Holland, and elsewhere.

What Men Want: Fours and Sevens

Last month, the British publishing company Bauer Media introduced a new weekly magazine for men, Gaz7etta, described online as “the perfect mix of news and style, with a healthy dose of business, politics and sport.” The magazine itself is not online; the 60-page pilot issue was distributed free in department stores and as a supplement within Bauer’s other magazines, including Gaz7etta’s counterpart for women, Grazia.

I’ll get to the odd spelling of Gaz7etta in a minute. But first, a few words about Gaz7etta’s intended readership.

Give Me Some Men

What a week! First, the hometown team won the World Series. Then my home state, in a spasm of common sense, rejected two candidates who had spent humongous chunks of their fortunes in an attempt to prove that they’d be wise stewards of the public coffers.

And just now I’ve learned that two of my very favorite linguistic phenomena—man-words and “-preneur” coinages—have been combined into a single name: MENtrepreneurs™.

Amy Reynaldo, a Twitter pal and the author of the enlightening Crossword Fiend blog, alerted me to this development in an email in which she forwarded a message a (male) Facebook friend* had received. I reprint it here verbatim.

Hey, [USR-FirstName], you’re invited to join in our conversation about your business and how you’re doing under the current economy. Fifteen million men run a small business completely alone. We constitute half of ALL businesses in the US. 
Join a FREE forum or small online group and share about your business while bonding with other enterprising men-of-valor based on trust and strengths. You’ll get:
Valuable Tools
Critical Feedback
Trusted Peer Support
Reduced Chronic Stress
Expanding Opportunities
[USR-FirstName], come learn some things an easier way than alone!
Daniel Comp
MENtrepreneurs™ Founder
MENtrepreneurs™ is a for-profit social enterprise created by Intelligent Netware LLC

Here’s Amy’s postscript:

Not only have the MENtrepreneurs made up a man-word—not only have they hyphenated “men-of-valor”—not only are they ridiculous at the core because male business owners are hardly a put-upon group in need of special networking opportunities—but they also have sent out a mass mailing of letters addressed to “Hey, [USR-FirstName].”

I’d like to second all of Amy’s comments and add a few of my own:

• Preposition watch: we live in an economy, not under one.
• “Reduced Chronic Stress” still sounds chronic and stressful.
• Surely there is a more felicitous way to say “come learn some things an easier way than alone!”

I do recommend checking out the MENtrepreneurs website. There you’ll discover an “Induction” section (what? not a MENifesto?) that compares business failure to “deaths from polio, and most scourges of mankind”; an article titled “Riding My MANstrual Cycle” (I am not making this up); and this plaintive appeal (all punctuation, spelling, and capitalization sic):

Roughly 14 million men-in-business in the US are dying of solitude, without a single employee, and yet we create 71% of all new jobs. We naturally hide in our caves hoping our issues will ‘work out’ or go away. That’s NOT valor. Isolation is literally a health risk equal to obesity or smoking. Why Step up and change the statistics? Because we MUST.

For you gearheads, there’s a nonsensical formula amid the rotating home-page banners.

Please don’t ask me to explain the semicolon after “because.” Maybe it’s a math thing.

The site is filled with misspellings (“What Other’s Say”; “We GUARENTEE IT!”), poor grammar (from the founder’s letter: “I remember laying on the floor”), RANDOM CAPS, and peculiar “quotes.”

But let it not be said that MENtrepreneurs founder Daniel Comp is a male supremacist. He and his wife, Angelina Musik-Comp, also founded MOMtrepreneurs, a network for business-minded women. (I’ll grant that MENtrepreneurs is a slightly less craptastic name than MOMtrepreneurs.) The Comps have a poignant personal story, which they tell frequently. Numerous endorsements—from Kay Bailey Hutchison, the U.S. senator from Texas (herself not a mantrepreneur), Rick “Good Hair” Perry, the just-reelected Texas governor, and others—attest to Daniel Comp’s brilliance and empathy.

I hope that’s fair and balanced enough for you. Because honestly, MENtrepreneurs is so painfully close to self-parody I don’t know whether to laugh, groan, or send a condolence card. Thanks for the tip, Amy!

__

* UPDATE: The Facebook friend has agreed to be identified. He is the estimable Mike Selinker, a game developer who also creates puzzles for Games magazine. Mike’s blog, “The Most Beautiful Things,” is well worth reading; I suggest you start with a Sept. 26 post titled “The Most Beautiful Modern Neologism: Crowdsourcing.”

October Linkfest

Or should it be Oktoberlinkfest?

*

In case you didn’t notice the embedded link in my post about the Gap logo flap, allow me to formally introduce you to Your Logo Makes Me Barf, a blog with a clearly stated beat: “Bad logos, awful logos, and logos that are even worse than that.” Occasionally, YLMMB critiques barfy names, too; check out the series on “X By Design” names.

*

Speaking of barfy names, Johnson, the language blog of The Economist, has compiled a little list of “novelty names that contain unnecessary punctuation, bogus foreign accents and diacriticals, random use of capitals or lower-case letters, and so on.” Commenters have been gleefully adding their own nominations. I’ve griped here about Co. and Co:, two gratuitously punctuated design/brand agencies. (Hat tip: Hanging Noodles.)

*

Ever wondered who would live in the rooms pictured in “lifestyle” catalogs like Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware? Catalog Living—the creation of Los Angeles actor/writer/comedian Molly Erdman—reveals the secret, stylish lives of “Gary” and “Elaine,” using actual catalog photos and invented storylines. Here’s one of my recent favorites:

  “On a cold winter night, nothing pleases Gary and Elaine more than snuggling up in their comfy metal chairs and tossing around the decorative polyhedron.”

*

Up against a writing deadline? Write or Die—“putting the ‘prod’ in productivity”—lets you set your word goal, your time goal, the grace period, and the consequences of failure (beware the Electric Shock Mode!). Via Swiss Miss.

*

As regular readers know, I have a bit of a mania for man-words like mansplain and mancession. So does language maven Mark Peters, whose recent column for Good magazine explores man-caves, manssieres, Man Laws, and other hypermasculine lingo. (Oh, and he quotes me, so naturally I’m pleased.)

*

The blog of British retailer Debenhams has compiled a dictionary of fashion portmanteaus to help customers decipher the meanings of neologisms like jardigan (“a thick, jacket-like cardigan”) and meggings (“male leggings”). But really: whorts? (Via Lori Burwash.)

*

More fashion: Mighty Red Pen ponders the proliferation of “Sherpa-lined” garments this season, and concludes: “A Sherpa is a person. . . . So, a jacket lined with Sherpa? Ew.”

*

Trademark/branding expert Kevin Houchin lays down the law—well, he’s a lawyer—on how to avoid lame names. His posts add up to a clear, concise primer on name categories, trademark strength, and brainstorming tips. I especially like this tip: “Force something unfamiliar into the mix.”

*

John Gruber compares Microsoft’s press releases with Apple’s and concludes, “You can accuse Apple of hyperbole, but not opaqueness.” (Hat tip: Lance Knobel.)

*

I would probably love maps even if I didn’t depend on them so pathetically. (I have a terrible sense of direction.) I especially love fanciful or imaginary maps, so I’m especially pleased to see xkcd’s Updated Map of Online Communities, a recent revision of the 2007 original. (The updated map will soon be available as a poster; you can place an order now.) Ethan Bloch of Flowtown has created his own 2010 Social Networking Map, which differs pretty significantly from xkcd’s. Meanwhile, Ian Huebert’s lovely Literary City map, which first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2009, is finally available as a poster from Electric Works in San Francisco.

Word of the Week: Mansplain

Mansplain: To explain something to a woman in a patronizing manner that “takes it as a given that she doesn’t already know whatever it is he is going to tell her.” (From a February 2010 Fannie’s Room post on “the art of mansplaining.”) Coined from man plus explain.

The earliest citation I found for mansplain is an April 25, 2009, entry in Urban Dictionary. This definition maintains that either sex can be guilty of mansplaining; however, most of the writing about mansplaining assumes that the ’splainer is indeed a man. As, for example, in this May 2009 essay on mansplaining by Karen Healey:

Mansplaining is when a dude tells you, a woman, how to do something you already know how to do, or how you are wrong about something you are actually right about, or miscellaneous and inaccurate “facts” about something you know a hell of a lot more about than he does.

Bonus points if he is explaining how you are wrong about something being sexist!

And in January 2010 Kate Harding wrote:

Here’s a thing about mansplaining and why I care a lot about it: it is annoying, and frustrating, and insulting, and deeply rooted in institutionalized sexism, and often profoundly harmful to women. We talk about all of that. What we don’t always talk about is how easily it shades into gaslighting: your reality is false, my reality is true. The biggest mansplainer I’ve known made me doubt my sanity for years; I am still recovering. This isn’t just a supremely sexist and problematic internet habit. It can be a psychologically violent act.

(Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse in which the tormenter makes the victim doubt his or —usually—her sanity. The term comes from the 1938 play Gas Light and from the film adaptations that followed, in particular the 1944 version directed by George Cukor and starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer.)

Rebecca Solnit, a writer of formidable intellect (Wanderlust, River of Shadows, A Paradise Built in Hell), is frequently credited with spelling out the theoretical underpinnings for mansplain in an April 13, 2008, op-ed column for the Los Angeles Times, “Men Who Explain Things.” She wrote:

Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men. Every woman knows what I mean. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence.

From there, Solnit expanded her argument into the areas of date rape, marital rape, workplace sexual harassment, and the global rights of women. She did not, however, use the word mansplain.

Read “You May Be a Mansplainer If…” on Thus Spake Zuska, a science blog.

Hat tip to Fake Erin McKean, whose September 3 tweet introduced me to the word mansplain (but not the concept, which I've known and experienced for many years).

__

Mansplaining icon from Big Bad Wolf. “Oh, gosh, thank you so much for mansplaining this to us!” has assumed the status of a meme.

Word of the Week: Manllow

Manllow: A pillow bearing the image of an “ideal man.”

Manllow was apparently coined by self-described “art geek and fashion freak” Lala Liu, whose Manllows shop on Etsy defines a Manllow as “half man half pillow.” The copy goes on to describe Mannlows as “[t]he greatest gift of all time. 105% creepy, 5% loveable [sic] or 105% loveable, 5% creepy. You pick.”

A less-awkward spelling would have been Manillow, but it’s possible Ms. Liu was concerned about legal action from the artist formerly known as Barry Alan Pincus.

Depicted above is the Edward Cullen Manllow (sold out, alas), named for the vampire protagonist of the wildly successful Twilight series, as portrayed by actor Robert Pattison. (This particular example might have more appropriately been named a Vampillow.)

The Edward Cullen Manllow was included in Salon’s “10 Most Baffling ‘Twilight’ Products,” a list that includes condoms, a tampon case, and amber-hued contact lenses. See a slideshow here.

Read more posts celebrating man-words.

Underwear Week: Something for the Boys

With Father’s Day just over a week away, your thoughts may naturally be turning to mirdles. Or to Core Precision Undershirts. Or even to Bubble Butt Underwear with Frontal Enhancement (with Anti-Muffin Top elastic).

Welcome to the compressed, lifted, and superconfident world of mirdles: shapewear (or, let’s be honest, girdles) for men. Please open your man-words dictionary and make the necessary insertion.

Spanx, which has achieved near-generic status in the women’s-shapewear market, introduced its Man Spanx line in February, and the cotton “compression undershirts,” at $55 to $58 a pop, have been “a huge retail hit,” according to a recent New York Times report. “Men may not be talking about it, but they’re buying it,” Nickelson Wooster*, men’s fashion director at Neiman Marcus, told the Times.

Man Spanx may have the edge in name recognition, but it’s not alone, or even first, in the category. Sculptees, whose name strikes me as too diminutive for manly men, sells torso-constraining “sculptwear for men,” including the Pex, the Slim, and the T-Slim. Bubbles sells products for women as well as men (to understand why the company is called Bubbles, check out the women’s “butt bras”); the brand’s giddy nomenclature includes the Toolbox, the Jackpot, the Beach Bum, and—for the ladies—Bump-on-a-Rump. Bubbles also wins the Sassiest Slogan prize: “Take Your Gluteus to the Maximus!”

While a some men may buy mirdles to look svelter, others require a more technical sell. Writing last year in the Boston Globe (“Me and My Mirdle”), Christopher Muther, who may be responsible for coining “mirdle,” explained:

The trick with men . . . is that you can't call a girdle a girdle. You have to stress that it has other benefits, like it will help with posture (I know so many men who are concerned about their posture) or a sore back.

That’s where Equmen—an Australian brand whose name, I’m guessing, resembles “acumen,” emphasis on the men—swaggers in. I lifted the image at the top of the page from the Equmen website to show you just how very, very seriously this company takes its geekery. No sly double-entendres here: Instead, it’s all about the “Core Precision,” the “targeted ventilation,” and the “HELIX-MAPPING™ body response technology.” (In case you couldn’t tell at a glance, the drawing is a diagram of HELIX-MAPPING™.)

Here, for example, is a testimonial from a physiotherapist about the efficacy of Equmen garments:

The garments definitely help with postural support as they encourage optimal horizontal extension and retraction of the Scapulae, (upper central key points) giving a Scapulothoracic neutral posture. The value in this for function is to lessen kyphotic stress in the primary curvature which physiologically eases counter-stress in the secondary curvature of the segments. The wearer should therefore be aware of less effort and mechanical stress particularly with prolonged standing or sitting and may, indeed, notice improved ergonomics with upper limb activity.

I’m sure we’re all in favor of less kyphotic stress in the primary curvature.

In the end, though, it may take more than improved ergonomics to get men into the new tighty whities. As the Man Spanx ads put it, “Behind every man is a really great woman.” Or as a pushy determined customer named Christine wrote to Equmen:

I received my order the other day, and without any explanation handed the v-neck undershirt to my husband. After wrestling into it (he hates anything close-fitting) and moaning about how tight it was, his face suddenly change [sic] to amazement! He said he couldn't believe how great he felt, his sciatic pain stopped IMMEDIATELY, said he felt he could fill his lungs with more air and swears he's 2 inches (5cm) taller.

After a few hours he took the shirt off because he said it was making him feel exhausted having his back made so straight, but next morning it was back on again making him feel like Terminator LOL.

Atta girl, Christine! I’m LOLing with you. Your next assignment: Get him into mantyhose.

Previously on Underwear Week:

• Diapers cross the poop barrier.
• Why bra sizing makes no sense.
• Relief for the heartbreak of cameltoe.

__

* Nickelson Wooster! A relative of Bertie’s, perhaps?