Fritinancy

Word of the week: Measles

On Friday, August 17, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported that a case of measles had been confirmed in “a non-resident tourist” who had visited six Santa Monica businesses within a three-day period earlier in the month. No details about the tourist were provided, but at least two of the restaurants he or she visited – Ivy’s at the Beach and Chez Jay – are considered “celebrity hangouts,” with pricey menus that have no options for children. That could suggest that the person is an adult, even though measles – a highly contagious viral infection spread by coughing or sneezing – is commonly considered a disease of childhood.

That is, it used to be a common disease of childhood, one that afflicted hundreds of thousands of children in the United States every year, and killed as many as 30 percent of them, usually from complications such as measles pneumonia. Measles can also cause blindness, mental retardation, and – in children born to mothers who contract the disease – permanent deafness. Overall, the risks are much greater for infected adults than for children, but it’s no picnic for kids, either. (Keep reading.)

Word of the week: Soy boy

Settle in with a nice tofu sandwich and some edamame as I tell you about soy boy and how it became the insult of choice among alt-right troglodytes – the sort of chuckleheads who call Trump “god emperor.” 

 

Via Reddit/The_Donald. Note pussy hat.

September linkfest

“What linguists sometimes call ‘genericisation’ of brand names has a grimmer name among marketing types: “genericide”. The Economist’s Johnson on google, photoshop, xerox, and other examples of brand genericization.

 

A trademark-defense ad from Xerox, 2011. Yes, “zipper” used to be a trademark-protected brand name. Source.

 

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Related: The lawyers at Velcro® want you to know – in full-throated song – that the competitors’ product is properly called hook and loop tape. (Thanks, David!)

Word of the week: Spoonie

I’ve followed Tinu Abayomi-Paul on Twitter for years, but I only recently noticed that her profile included the hashtag #spoonie, a term unfamiliar to me.

 

 

So I did a little research.

World’s greatest derp

Federal-level idiocy was on full, florid display this week. On Sunday, the current occupant of the White House and Mar-a-Lago took to Twitter to share his innermost thoughts, and got so carried away he misspelled the word principles.

It’s probably not a word he’s had much occasion to use.

Words of the year 2016: Fritinancy edition

This post marks my eighth annual foray into word-of-the-year (WOTY) speculation. My first such summing-up, in 2009, included birther, Tea Party, and FAIL, among other lexical units. How things have changed. Or not.

As in the past, my choices for 2016 follow the guidelines of the American Dialect Society, which will choose its own WOTYs on January 6, 2017, at its annual meeting in Austin, Texas. (If you happen to be in the vicinity, the vote is open to the public, and it’s hella fun.) There are a few new ADS categories this year – political word of the year, digital (tech-related) word of the year, slang word of the year, WTF word of the year – and there’s always the possibility of even more categories being nominated from the floor. (For my own list, I’ve created three new categories: Obscenity of the Year, Import of the Year, and Spoonerism of the Year.) Nominated words don’t have to be brand new, but they do need to “show widespread usage by a large number of people in a variety of contexts and situations, and which reflect important events, people, places, ideas, or preoccupations of English-speakers in North America in 2016.”

The Fritinancy list, in alphabetical order:

Word of the week: Derangement syndrome

Tomorrow is Election Day in the United States, the culmination of an unprecedentedly nerve-combusting season of political warfare. It’s been a campaign for which derangement – a mental disturbance; a disruption of the regular order – would seem to have been invented. It would even seem to merit the coining of derangement syndrome: an extreme response, often untethered from empirical reality, to a particular candidate or elected official.

There’s plenty of evidence. 

The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics, by Maureen Dowd (2016)

Word of the Week: Janopause

Janopause: “An annual challenge to abstain from drinking during the month of January.” Source: Eatymology: The Dictionary of Modern Gastronomy, by Josh Friedland, published in 2015 by Sourcebooks.

Holy Moley!

When I first encountered the Twitter account @mymomsmole, about a week ago, my reaction was swift and sympathetic.

“I sure hope she’s seeing a dermatologist,” I said to myself.

That’s because I was thinking of this mole:

 

Via DoctorsHangout.com

 

Instead of this one:

May Linkfest

Trademark

“When Simon Tam dropped out of college in California and moved to Portland, Ore., to become a rock star, the last tangle he imagined falling into was a multiyear battle with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office over his band’s name.” The trademark tussle over “The Slants,” which the USPTO has deemed “disparaging” and thus ineligible for protection. (For a more technical perspective, see this Brent Lorentz post at Duets Blog.)

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“Your mission statement shouldn’t necessarily be the same thing as your trademark.” Trademark lawyer Jessica Stone Levy on why companies should think twice before registering names like Food Should Taste Good and WannaBettaButt?

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“Falling in love with an internal development name prior to completing a full trademark search and legal review is one of the most common problems companies encounter.” Trademark lawyer Tara Benson on avoiding trademark pitfalls. 

 

Science

What is the Moon’s real name? (Hat tip: Michele Hush.)

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Look for more alphanumeric names like H1N1: The World Health Organization gets tough on disease-naming. 

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Profanity

“You go to their Twitter profile: ‘I’m passionate about brands!’ You’re what? Dude, get a fucking girlfriend.” Veteran adman Bob Hoffman on why we’re living in the golden age of bullshit in advertising and marketing. (Video)

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How and why Lexicon, one of the world’s most influential branding and naming agencies, developed its first iPhone app: a profanity checker.

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“Though badass is historically associated with male pugnacity, perhaps the most striking change is that the word is now often used by and about women.” Jesse Sheidlower—a lexicographer and author of The F Word—tracks the history and soaring popularity of an all-purpose descriptor. (I wrote about badass in brand names in 2012.)

 

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Words and Language

“Webster was a visionary—even a radical—so far ahead of his time, in fact, that grammar and style guides are only now catching up with him.” Linguist Rosemarie Ostler on why Noah Webster, “the founding father of American English,” would have loved Urban Dictionary. (Hat tip: MJF.)

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The strange charm of cutthroat compounds like pickpocket, scarecrow, and, well, cutthroat: Stan Carey on these rare English words “that have a long, colourful history and constitute a very interesting category.” (I wonder how the newish fondleslab fits in?)

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Dictionary.com—offices right here in Oakland!—is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Its latest additions to the word-hoard include anecdata, microaggression, haptics, and a couple of Fritinancy favorites: dox and astroturfing.

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Taglines

“Finding a quick description that was also consumer friendly was exceedingly difficult. But when the founders did come up with the right tagline, the effort was well worth it: ‘The moment we started using the right language, it was like night and day.’ How the right tagline helped turn luxury-products company Cuyana around.

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Baby names

The 2014 Social Security Administration stats on baby names are out, and the Baby Name Wizard blog has discovered some interesting trends in the data. The biggest trend? What naming expert Laura Wattenberg calls “the great smoothing of American baby names”: goodbye “chunky” names (Jayden, Jessica), hello “silky,” vowel-rich names (Amanda, Mia, Noah, Liam).

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Speaking of popular names, here’s a fun tool to discover what your “today baby name” would be, based on the ranking of your own name in the year you were born. The tools works backward too: If I’d been born in the 1890s, chances are I’d have been named Minnie. More than a time-waster, the tool can be a big help in character-naming. (May take a while for the tool to load.)

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Advertising

“She originally went by Flo White, then Lord of the Strings. She eventually settled on the Period Fairy. It was more straightforward.” A new ad from category-busing Hello Flo, which sells a Period Starter Kit to adolescent girls.

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Errata

Which words are most commonly misspelled? Readers of the Lingua Franca blog speak up.

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A new plaque at AT&T Park honoring San Francisco Giants pitcher Madison Bumgarner commits two punctuation errors (apostrophe, hyphen) in the first line. Another reminder, as if we needed one, that it pays to hire a proofreader before casting that encomium in bronze.

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Name of the Year

Which will it be: Lancelot Supersad, Jr., or Amanda Miranda Panda? There’s still time to cast your vote.