Fritinancy

May Linkfest

Newt Gingrich—remember when he ran for president and talked about building bases on the moon?—now appears to be campaigning for Andy Rooney’s old slot on “60 Minutes.” “We’re really puzzled,” he tells his YouTube audience, a look of grave concern furrowing his brow, a familiar-looking device in his hand. “We spent weeks [!] trying to figure out whaddya call this.” This is what you and I call a cell phone or a mobile phone or a smartphone, but that doesn’t satisfy Gingrich. He’s soliciting new, more precise names for the gizmo he used to call “a handheld computer.” Commenters have been gleefully obliging; my favorite nominations are Talkie-Viewie (maybe “TV” for short?), roundcorner-camera-communicati­ons-email-apps-thingy, iMoon, and horseless telephone. (Via TechCrunch.)

Meanwhile, linguist Geoffrey Pullum, posting at Language Log, has “an inkling of what moved Gingrich to embark on his piece of burbling.” It’s all about the naïve lexical global Whorfianism, obviously.

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I caught this a few days too late for Underwear Week but can’t resist sharing it anyway. Triumph, the Swiss bra company, last week introduced its concept bra of the year at a Tokyo press conference. The theme: “branomics,” “a playful take on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ‘three-arrow’ economic revival plan,” according to Reuters. “We hope that as the Japanese economy grows, we can also help bust sizes to get bigger,” said a Triumph spokeswoman. (Via The 3% Conference.)

Image via AdFreak. Note arrows.

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Merriam-Webster, the dictionary company, is having a photography contest for word lovers that looks like a lot of fun. Deadline for submissions: May 26. (Via Emily Brewster.)

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Speaking of photography, here’s a pop song dedicated to stock photo clichés: “groom on phone with angry wife,” “bearded man is looking grave,” “black and white handshake,” and many more. (Via Igor blog.)

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And speaking of photography and contests, GeoGuessr combines street-view photos with a test of your geographical knowledge. Challenging and addictive. (Via PopeHat.)

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Maps! I love ’em. And I especially love maps that combine geography, history, biography, and name lore, like this interactive map of San Francisco place names, developed by Noah Veltman.

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This advice from Baby Name Wizard about overcoming naming remorse works for company and product naming, too.

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Andris Pone of Coin Branding, in Toronto, applauds Frogbox, a “green” moving company in more than one sense. It’s a great brand story, Andris writes: “The Frogbox positioning statement, From one pad to another, exemplifies the message of ease by creating a promise (completely delivered on) that one can move from their old home to their new one with all the difficulty of a hop.”

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Here’s a nifty infographic on how corporate logos evolve.

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Corporate buzzword-wise, “delight” is shaping up to be the new “passion.” (Via MJF.)

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You’ll need to subscribe to Visual Thesaurus to read Mike Pope’s excellent column, “What’s in a -Nym?”, which goes beyond antonyms and synonyms to more obscure and fascinating terms like contranym, retronym, and backronym. But of course you’re already a subscriber.

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From Idibon, a language-data company: how to name a racehorse.

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Finally, in honor of the return of the cicadas to the eastern U.S., here’s a reprise of my plug for Cicada-licious: Cooking and Enjoying Periodical Cicadas, the cicada cookbook produced by the University of Maryland cicadamaniacs (their term). Yes, I have a well-documented fondness for -licious names.

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I also can’t resist an opportunity to combine entomology, etymology, and a plug for Fritinancy. As language maven Ben Zimmer—my editor at Visual Thesaurus—observed in an email to me:

I noticed that the first OED cite for “fritin(i)ancy” is from Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, talking about cicadas. (In this edition, it’s actually “fritinnitus.”) Johnson defined “fritinancy” as “the scream of an insect, as the cricket or cicada” (citing Browne) and subsequent dictionaries used similar definitions. (Johnson didn’t define “cicada,” oddly enough.)

My original post about Fritinancy cited Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), which mentioned crickets but not cicadas. The post was written before I had access to the OED online, a weak defense but the one I’m sticking with.

In other cicada news, linguist Arnold Zwicky has written about “swarmageddon” and “cicadapocalypse,” and science writer Carl Zimmer, brother of Ben, examined the remarkable life cycle of this long-lived insect. Carl Z’s editors at the Times consulted with Ben Z to come up with a pronunciation guide: “cicadas (usually pronounced sih-KAY-duhz).”

But, Ben told me, “there are plenty of people who pronounce it KAH, and many dictionaries give it as an acceptable alternate. I don’t have a good sense of the regional distribution of the two pronunciations, though.”

Perhaps Fritinancy’s readers can help.

That Word

They keep using it. It does not mean what they think it means:

No, not “lubricating,” although I’ll get to it in a bit. First, though, I want to talk about “servile.”

The “Servile Brands” headline is from Trendwatching, a global brand-analysis company. In its October 2012 trend briefing, Trendwatching defines its terms this way:

Yes, consumers are more demanding, time-starved, informed, and choice-saturated than ever-before (we know you know). For brands to prosper, the solution is simple though: turn SERVILE. This goes far beyond offering great customer service. SERVILE means turning your brand into a lifestyle servant focused on catering to the needs, desires and whims of your customers, wherever and whenever they are.

(Their emphasis.)

Is that in fact what “servile” means? No, it is not. Unlike most Trendwatching lingo—keep reading for examples—“servile” is a real word with real definitions and connotations. It isn’t a neutral term meaning “of service”; rather, it means “abjectly submissive,” “slavish,” “relating to servitude or forced labor.” Its synonyms are “obsequious,” “toadyish,” “sycophantic,” and “fawning.” 

Not a positive association in the bunch. Indeed, the strong whiff of slavery that attends “servile” should disqualify the word from the marketing lexicon. It’s an adjective best reserved for Uriah Heep, one of Dickens’s least admirable characters, and others of his ilk.

Trendwatching—which calls itself “one of the world’s leading consumer trends firms”—has a decade-long record of coining attention-getting names, many of them peppy portmanteaus, to describe marketplace phenomena. Back in October 2010, the company devoted a trend briefing to what it  called Brand Butlers. From what I can tell, “Servile Brands” is just a more offensive twist on “Brand Butlers.”

You can’t accuse Trendwatching of not trying. Its trend archives include a heap of isms—Newism, Maturialism, It-ism, Foreverism, and Nowism—and a river of sumers: Tasksumers, Twinsumers, Citysumers, Trysumers, Sellsumers, Transumers. Trendwatching has also given us Minipreneurs and Teenpreneurs*, Insperiences and Cribtimonials, Perkonomics and Excusumption,

Trendwatching’s motto might as well be “X Is the New Y.” One trend briefing was titled “Catching-up is the new looking ahead.” Brand Butlers: “Serving is the new selling.” Nowism: “Why currency is the new currency.” And Servile Brands? “Why for brands, serving, assisting, and lubricating is the new selling.”

(A few words about “lubricating”: Back in 2004, Trendwatching used “daily lubricants” as a category title for “the fast growing class of products and services that cater to consumers' need for simplicity, and that literally lubricate daily life.” Um, OK. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of “lubricating” and “servility” can’t help sounding slightly smutty.)

Once in a blue moon, Trendwatching coins a term that catches on: Pop-up Retail (first used in January 2004), Massclusivity (November 2003). But for every one of those keepers there are 20 clunkers like Snobmoddities.

As for Servile Brands, off the top of my head I can think of several catchy-yet-more-appropriate alternatives: At Your Service, SuperServe Us, Serves You Right. Or, if they wanted to stay with the portmanteau theme, Servantage, Serveriffic, ServeAce, or Servalicious.

But “servile,” no matter how much you lubricate it, sticks in the craw.

Hat tip: LowDudgeon. “That Word” credit goes, of course, to The Princess Bride.

Elsewhere in That Word: Sophistry, infamous, arriviste, bupkus, unrequited.

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* See more -preneur blends in my “Enterprising Language” post.

Nail-omics

This week has brought sightings of Ryanomics and Zombie Reaganomics. It also brought this:

 

Stylenomics, a new nail color from Essie, is “a wealthy, rich and opulent dark green.” It’s featured in a full-page ad in the mammoth September issue of Vogue.

I last wrote about Essie’s fanciful color names in May 2011. The current season’s palette includes Recessionista, No Place Like Chrome, and Don’t Sweater It.

I wrote about the very productive (and brandable) -omics suffix—Freakonomics, Geckonomics, Vespanomics, et al.—in April 2011. Since then, I’ve learned about someone even more obsessed with omics than I am: Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist who teaches at UC Davis. The omics suffix is “a language parasite,” Eisen told the Wall Street Journal last week. (A chart accompanying the article is titled “Increasingomics.”) In his blog, The Tree of Life, Eisen documents the “bad omics word of the day”; past honorees have included culturomics, museomics, circomics, and circadiomics. Eisen’s Twitter handle, by the way, is @phylogenomics.

UPDATE: Read Ben Zimmer’s Word Routes column about the distinction between omics and nomics.

Nomics

This headline, for an article about Tiger Woods’s foundering golf-course business, appeared on the front page of the New York Times business section a couple of Sundays ago. (The online headline is more search-engine-friendly.)

 

 

“Tigernomics” made me think, of course, of Year of the Tiger Names. But it also reminded me that “-nomics” continues to be the go-to suffix for every trend in search of a pseudo-scientific reason for being.

Here, for example, is a banner I snapped last month at discount retailer Loehmann’s in San Francisco:

 

Dictionary-type syllabification: very scientific!

 

Loehmann’s introduced the Loehmannomics sale during 2009’s Recession Spring and has repeated the event each March.

And there’s more:

• Insurance company GEICO, which employs a Cockney-talking animated gecko in some of its TV spots, ran print ads last fall touting “Geckonomics 101: A Primer on How to Save Money Car Insurance.”
• Socialnomics is the title of a book published in 2010 (subtitle: “How Social Media Transforms the Way We Do Business”) and a related blog.
• “Happynomics” surfaced in 2007 after Deutsche Bank published a paper on four strains of capitalism: “happy,” “less happy,” “unhappy,” and “Far Eastern.” (Huh?) The term was revived last month when British Prime Minister David Cameron decided to create a national happiness index.
• Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage and Dirty Dishes, by Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson, was published earlier this year. There’s a blog, too.
• Nieman Journalism Lab coined “newsonomics” in a recent headline about the New York Times’s new paywall.

Back in August 2007, The Economist’s advertising columnist, David Kiley, asked (or stated—the headline ends with a period) “Is ‘–onomics’ the new ‘-Gate.’” His subject: Emotionomics, “a new book by a marketing guy named Dan Hill.” Kiley hadn’t yet read the book:

But the mere title makes me think I’d be smart to tack “onomics” onto my next book. It’s an obvious attempt to catch some wind from the prop wash (a pilot’s term to describe the wind forces you encounter when flying behind another plane) of “Freakonomics.”

Since that article was published, Freakonomics has sired a sequel book, SuperFreakonomics; a blog; a movie; and—not a joke!—a pair of pants. That’s some prop wash!

Recall, however, that Freakonomics wasn’t a wholly original coinage. The -nomics trend goes back to Nixonomics, invented in late 1969 as “an umbrella term for the economic policies of President Richard Milhous Nixon.” (Source: World Wide Words.) Nixonomics begat Reaganomics, Clintonomics, Bushonomics, and Obamanomics. (Two authors have written books titled Obamanomics. The subtitle of the one by John R. Talbot, published in July 2008, is “How Bottom-Up Economic Prosperity Will Replace Trickle-Down Economics  in the Obama Presidency”; the subtitle of the one by Timothy P. Carney, published in November 2009, is “How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses.”)

The hyperproductive -nomics suffix has also given us ergonomics (coined around 1950), burgernomics (coined by The Economist in 1986 to describe an informal index of purchasing power parity), and Enronomics (“a fraudulent accounting technique that involves a parent company making artificial paper-only transactions with its subsidiaries to hide losses the parent company has incurred through business activities”).

What do you predict the next -nomics will be?

UPDATE: In a comment, Joel Makower drew my attention to Vespanomics, “the ecological, economic, and personal satisfaction one achieves after buying a Vespa scooter.” We can tell that Vespanomics is Real and Serious because the definition includes syllabification and random diacritical marks: VÉS PÁ NÄM ÍKS.