Fritinancy

Creative Contributions

This week I’m looking at microstyle and the way in which small bits of copy can make a big impact. Today: making donations less boring.

The inspiration for today’s post is the new Los Angeles Review of Books, “the first major, full-service book review to launch in the 21^st century, designed to exploit the latest online technologies in ways that respond to a significantly transformed publishing world.” LARB was founded in response to a serious problem:

The disappearance of the newspaper book review supplement (papers in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Des Moines, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington and elsewhere have shuttered or radically shrunk theirs) has been accompanied by an explosion of titles in the book market. The net result: twenty times as many titles are published each year than were in 1980, and we have one twentieth of the serious book reviews.

LARB intends to be “a largely self-supporting nonprofit institution” that pays “decent rates to our reviewers.” To that end, it’s inviting tax-deductible contributions. Nothing newsworthy here—except for the wording of the home-page prompt (“Help Us Build This Thing!”) and the names of the giving levels.

No “Silver,” “Gold,” and “Platinum” here. No, this online giving page is aimed squarely at its target audience, which cares deeply about books, literary criticism, and a vibrant marketplace of ideas. The giving levels, from plain old “Reader” up to “Founding Reader,” flatter your intelligence while challenging you to think not just about the size of your donation but also about the intensity of your commitment.

I attempted something similar when I worked with Children’s Fairyland, the oldest storybook theme park in the United States, on the language of a new adopt-an-animal campaign. Instead of leaving the donation field open-ended or simply suggesting dollar amounts, I created playful yet appropriate giving levels that suggested “helping our animals”: Companion, Best Friend, Caretaker, Keeper, and Guardian.

It’s easy to default to dollar increments when you create a donation form. But attaching meaningful, relevant names to giving categories transforms the act of contributing into something greater than writing a check or authorizing a funds transfer: it becomes an act of identification with a cause.

Unsatisfying Subject Line of the Day

This email from Saks Fifth Avenue arrived in my inbox this morning.

 

 

An exclusive Tory Burch event that will “leave me wanting more”? Sounds like an invitation to disappointment. To leave someone wanting more means to under-deliver. Saks, however, is trying to say something quite different: “When you see the new Tory Burch collection, you’ll want more clothes!”

How can I be sure? Here’s the footer on the email: 

 

 

An email subject line may seem like a minor detail, but remember: it’s the first message a customer sees, and it can make the difference between opening an email and sending it directly to Trash.

This isn’t the first time I’ve suspected that Saks is employing copywriters who aren’t entirely comfortable with American English vocabulary and idioms. See my November 2009 post about “opportunistic.”

Cheeky!

I received this email from the shapewear company Spanx yesterday, under the subject line “Introducing the Perfect Pick-Me-Up”:

“Manage their assets.” Geddit?

It’s not every woman who wants to augment her derriere, but I’m happy to learn there’s now a name for the little tushy-embiggeners that will do the job: butt-lets.

Here’s Spanx’s web copy:

SPANX introduces its cheekiest product yet—the Booty-Booster Short. This style, which gives a whole new meaning to the phrase fanny pack, is best for those who want more junk in their trunk! Now you can achieve the look of a naturally round rump thanks to this highly constructed, booty-enhancing design with optional butt-lets that add a cheek size!

(Another line on the Spanx website reads “Free shipping . . . no butts about it!”)

“Butt-lets” is almost certainly a pun on another bit of industry jargon: “cutlets,” or even more explicitly—as in the case of a product from Miss Oops—“chicken cutlets.”*

Here’s what that product’s web copy says:

Feeling down? Here’s something to perk you up….Chicken Cutlets by Miss Oops! These silicone breast inserts are perfect to perk your girls up and add some cleavage without going under the knife.  Each pair comes in a plastic travel case.  Chicken Cutlets will increase your bosom by 1 full cup size.

I haven’t been able to determine when “cutlets” replaced “falsies” in the lexicon of nonsurgical breast enhancement, but when the New York Times addressed the topic in a May 2009 story about the Miss California beauty pageant (“The Beauty of Chicken Cutlets”), writer Tara Parker-Pope adopted a wide-eyed tone:

“There’s plenty of ways of getting to more proportion without doing breast implants,” [pageant director Keith] Lewis said. “Many of the girls use chicken cutlets.”

What?

“You use chicken cutlets,” he said. “You use tape. You use anything that you can to enhance the line. There’s lots of tricks of the trade.”

I was surprised the show’s co-anchor Maggie Rodriguez didn’t ask for a clarification of the chicken cutlet line. Is it widely known that pageant contestants stuff their bras with raw poultry? Wouldn’t this place them at higher risk for salmonella infection?

As it turns out, a “chicken cutlet” is the common term used for a silicone bra insert that is used to create the illusion of larger breasts. Apparently they get their name from the fact that they look like cuts of boneless chicken.

More about Spanx here, here, and here. Bonus link: If you’re a New Yorker subscriber, or can cozy up to one, Alexandra Jacobs’s story about Spanx, from the March 28, 2011, issue, is a riot and a revelation. To take just one example: It was in this article that I learned that “apex” is industry jargon for “nipple.”

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* Did you think yesterday’s chik’n post was the last you’d hear about chickens for a while? Hah!

Word of the Week: Doc-Buster

Doc-Buster: A documentary film that becomes an unusually successful hit. A blend of documentary and blockbuster; apparently coined by filmmaker Morgan Spurlock in tongue-in-cheek reference to his new release, Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.

Spurlock, whose 2004 documentary, Super Size Me, was nominated for an Oscar, told a reporter from the CBS business channel BNET:

My producer and I were talking about all these blockbusters like Iron Man that had these product placements. And we wondered if a documentary that had those same partnerships and co-promotion could be a blockbuster?  Could we have a ‘doc-buster’?

In the film’s official trailer, Spurlock describes his project as a film “all about product placement, marketing, and advertising, where the entire film is funded by product placement, marketing, and advertising.”

In the New York Times review, published April 22, critic Stephen Holden writes:

[Spurlock’s] idea for a “doc-buster” supported by corporate sponsors, he says, was a tough sell. Telephone calls to several hundred companies are met with indifference and sometimes suspicion, which is not surprising because “Super Size Me,” for all its humor, attacked McDonald’s.

Blockbuster has an interesting and diverse history. It was coined by the US military around 1942 to describe a high-explosive bomb capable of destroying (“busting”) a city block. (The OED calls the verb bust an Americanism for “burst”; however, Dickens used it in that sense in Nicholas Nickleby and Martin Chuzzlewit.)

In the 1950s, blockbuster acquired two figurative meanings: the entertainment meaning (1957) and a racial/economic meaning (1959). The entertainment sense gave rise to the name of movie-rental chain Blockbuster, which was founded in 1985, filed for bankruptcy in 2010, and was sold at auction to Dish Network earlier this month.

The racial/economic sense is illustrated in this 1967 citation from the British weekly The Spectator:

The ‘block-buster’ is a figure in American urban life who has yet to emerge in this country. He is a property dealer who by subterfuge introduces black residents into all-white neighbourhoods.

Documentary has lent itself to a few blends, notably docudrama (a movie or TV program based on fact). Besides doc-buster, I found two other humorous coinages based on blockbuster: mock-buster (“a low-budget movie with a title and plot similar to a current blockbuster film”) and bonk-buster (“a bestselling novel that features numerous sex scenes”). (Both citations from Word Spy.) For more on bonk, see Mary Roach’s nonfiction book with that title.

“Sheer Celestial Hubris”

Frank Bruni, who writes The Tipsy Diaries for the New York Times, takes a skeptical look today at “Celestial Come-Ons and Other Booze-Selling Ploys,” starting with a spirit that seems to have a spiritual pedigree.

For weeks — months, actually — I could do little more than stare at it, this ostensibly precious nectar with an outrageously precious name.

Angel’s Envy, its makers call it, and they had sent me, as well as other journalists who write about spirits, a sample. Not a bottle: that would have been routine and would have suggested that their creation, a bourbon whiskey put through some unusually elegant paces, could be splashed around wantonly, in large quantities. Instead they packaged the sample in a vial of sorts, corked in the manner of wine. I was reminded of the tiny, gemlike vessel whose quaffable contents bestow youth (and no small measure of agita) upon Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn in “Death Becomes Her.”

With an infusion of Angel’s Envy, what would become of me? On a recent evening I sipped the serum and experienced ... a whiskey sweeter and smoother than most, and appealing to a point. But its taste left less of an impression than its promotion, reflective of how fanciful, even silly, the marketing of boutique booze has become.

There is, for starters, that name: Angel’s Envy. I’ll try not to type it as often here as I’ve murmured it to myself, chuckling each time at its reach, its sheer celestial hubris. When you call something Angel’s Envy, you’re inviting mockery and sowing the seeds of disappointment, because you’ve basically promised nothing less than liquid rapture: heaven on the rocks.

What were the runner-up names? Zeus Juice? XanaDew?

Bruni also sampled a couple of pretentiously named vodkas:

A vodka called Xellent boasts of being made with water from the Titlis glacier in the Swiss Alps. But if you’re partial to the Austrian Alps, worry not. The vodka Puriste uses water from there. Please note the horizontal line over the I on the bottle, and make sure your pronunciation is guided by it.

Puriste sells for about $40 for a 750ml bottle; Angel’s Envy goes for $45.

That Puriste logo looked awfully familiar to me. Where had I seen something very, very similar? Oh, yes:

 

Look! A horizontal line over the E and a dieresis over the I! 

Read the rest of Bruni’s very amusing column.

Read my posts about Effen vodka, Vampire wine, Dead Letter Office wine, and assorted absinthe brand names.

How Prohibition Changed Branding and Language

Next month marks the 92nd anniversary of the ratification of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States.” Twelve months after ratification, at midnight on January 17, 1920, the Prohibition Era began; it lasted until 1933, when the 21st Amendment was ratified.

You may think you know something about Prohibition—speakeasies, Al Capone, Eliot Ness, bathtub gin, bootleggers. You may even be picking up historical tidbits amid the entertaining fictions of Boardwalk Empire, the HBO series, produced by Martin Scorsese, that concludes its first season on Sunday night. But trust me: until you’ve read Daniel Okrent’s splendid history of the era, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition—published earlier this year—you’re as uninformed as I was about what the historian Taylor Branch, in a jacket blurb, calls “the one glaring ‘whoops!’ in our constitutional history.”

Source: The Social Work History Station.

Okrent, who was the New York Times’s first public editor, did a staggering amount of research for Last Call—his “sources” section is almost 19 pages long—yet there isn’t a dry (pun intended) sentence in the book. It’s a thoroughly intoxicating read.

There’s the stranger-than-fiction cast of characters, including Mabel Walker Willebrandt, aka “The Prohibition Portia,” who served as assistant attorney general of the United States from 1921 to 1929 and liked to start her day with an ice-cold bath; Warren Bidwell Wheeler, general counsel of the Anti-Saloon League, who was considered by a critic to be “the most masterful and powerful single individual in the United States”—and who is largely forgotten today; and Sam Bronfman, the Moldovan-Jewish-Canadian liquor magnate who supplied a thirsty United States with an endless stream of bootlegged liquor. “It was almost fated that the Bronfman family would make its fortune from alcoholic beverages,” Okrent writes; “in Yiddish, which was their mother tongue, bronfen is the word for ‘liquor.’”

Then there's Okrent’s writing, which is packed with wry humor and pungent turns of phrase. “The prevailing government parsimony” of the Prohibition era, he writes, “hovered like a scowl over the administrations of Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover.” Of the propaganda aimed at presidential candidate Al Smith, Okrent writes: “It was the sort of speculation that could make a Catholic-hater quiver with the joy that can be induced only by the thrill of loathing.”

For me, many of the book’s most fascinating revelations have to do with language and culture. From slang to brand names, from travel to politics, Prohibition had an impact that far outlasted its 13-year tenure.

Here are some of the ways Prohibition changed American English and the language of commerce.

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!

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* 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.”

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.

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

Underwear Week: Relief for the Heartbreak of Cameltoe

Underwear Week continues at Fritinancy with a product whose name manages to be both descriptive and suggestive . . . in every sense.

Here’s the story. Shannon (no last name given) was in yoga class when she had an uh-oh moment:

Cute tight little yoga pants, front row, right by the big mirrors for the whole class to check out my yoga poses, and something else...the dreaded... “cameltoe.” That's where the idea for Camelflage was conceived.

Yes, Camelflage, “the original visual privacy garment”; the panty “specifically designed to smooth out your feminine parts under tight clothing.”

Or as Shannon puts it:

a patent pending women's panty that has a built in flexible, breathable, insert to smooth out her "Labia Majora" AKA "cameltoe." Covering the insert is a Sportek wicking fabric that pulls moisture away from your body and keeps you dry.

(Technically speaking, labia majora are not “AKA cameltoe” unless they’re squooshed into too-tight clothes. But hey—props to Shannon for getting “labia majora” onto an underwear website.)

Camelflage: Say it soft and it’s almost like praying. I am in awe of that name. And the juxtaposition of high and low—the vivid street slang of cameltoe, the coy fastidiousness of the tagline and “feminine parts,” the pastel prettiness of the logo and site design—is some kind of brilliant.

Hat tip to Beauty Marks, who writes:

“Visual privacy undergarment” - you just can't beat that as a product descriptor.

Be sure to link through to the Beauty Marks post and from there to the “Camel Toe” video, a musical warning about crotchal calamity.

Underwear Week: Why Bra Sizing Makes No Sense

I'm assuming this subject will be of more direct interest to my female readers, but I hope the gentlemen will be amused (titillated?) by the photo and will stay for the marketing story.

Women’s clothing sizes are notoriously inconsistent and irrational—they vary from brand to brand, country to country, and year to year—but brassiere sizing is subject to a particularly baroque illogic, at least in the United States. That is, it seemed like illogic until I learned, just recently, how it came to be.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, bras are sized in two dimensions: band circumference and cup depth (or volume). The band should fit snugly directly under the breasts, which is where the first measurement is taken. But here’s where the weirdness comes in: That number—let’s say it’s 32.5 inches—is not your band size. No, your band size is that number plus an additional 4 or 5 inches—in other words, 36 or 38. And your cup size is the difference in inches between your underbust measurement and your actual bust measurement.

So why the addition exercise? Why can’t we just buy a band size to match our actual underbust measurement? (This is, in fact, the way it works in Europe: If you’re 70 centimeters under your bust,  you’ll wear a size-70 bra.)

I happened upon the answer while browsing a the website of a lingerie retailer called HerRoom.* The site includes an extensive bra-fitting section—because bra fitting, as we all know, requires years of advanced study—and one of its features is a six-and-a-half-minute video called “How to Measure and Fit a Bra,” narrated by HerRoom’s founder and president, Tomima Edmark.** It's full of interesting information: Did you know, for example, that the tape-fitting system was devised by bra manufacturers in the 1930s, and was never intended to be used by women larger than 38D? Well, now you do.

But the most fascinating revelation for me was about those mysterious extra inches. Here’s Ms. Edmark:

Now, why do we add these inches to our measurement to find our band size? Well, it’s actually a fun story about early marketing. Just after WWII when this system was created, the ideal hourglass figure of the day measured 36,24,36. Women wanted to think their measurements were close to this ideal. The manufacturers needed the under bust measurement to make the bra fit correctly since the actual bust measurement of say 36 wasn’t helpful. Thus they hatched the idea of adding the additional inches to make a woman’s bra size sound more desirable. A 36B certainly sounded more desirable than a 31B. So, this is why the inches are added, and we continue with it still today.

“A fun story ”? More like “those dumb dames will believe anything we tell them.” It was the original vanity sizing, and women fell for it, even though it entailed a pointless extra step in an already tedious and frustrating measurement process. (“Round to the closest whole inch, either up or down. For example, if your measurement is 29 3/8", round to 29". If your measurement is 29 1/2" or more, round to 30".” Would men put up with this? I think not.)

Curiously, bra cup sizing developed (so to speak) independently from the band-measurement chicanery. Warners, a still-extant bra manufacturer, created the A-B-C-D cup system for the U.S. market in 1935. According to the fashion-history website Fashion-Era, it wasn't until “well into the 1950s ” that Britain adopted the U.S. standard; U.K. corset manufacturers used “coy terms like junior and medium.” But confusion still reigns: for larger cup sizes, U.S. manufacturers pile on the Ds (DD, DDD, DDDD), while their  British and European counterparts more logically proceed to E, F, and G.

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The 1963 Maidenform ad, and many others from the “I dreamed . . .” series, from Found in Mom's Basement.

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* It's an excellent website, and I’m sure it’s a wonderful company, but I still maintain that “HerRoom” sounds like phlegmy throat clearing.

 ** Before she founded HerRoom, Tomima Edmark made a fortune as the inventor of “the wildly successful Topsy Tail,” a hair accessory. Her unusual first name, she tells us, “is a venerable family name from the Orkney Islands off the northern tip of Scotland” that has been passed down through her mother’s family since at least the 18th century. It’s pronounced “like ‘Jemima,’ but with a ‘T’.”