Fritinancy

Word of the week: White-caller crime

The first incident that made national headlines occurred right here in Oakland, directly across Lake Merritt from where I live. On April 29, a white woman later identified as Jennifer Schulte made a 911 call to report that two African American men were barbecuing in an area not designated for charcoal grills. A woman named Michelle Snider filmed the call on her own phone; the video, posted to YouTube, has attracted more than three million views. Also viral: the “BBQ Becky” meme.*

“BBQ Becky” on her phone, via BBC.

 

Acronyms on the menu

Two signs in two restaurants, both in my general neighborhood in Oakland.

1. Choriz-O-M-G at Chipotle on Lakeshore Avenue.

 

Chipotle is also running a “BOGO” promotion – Buy One, Get One –for active, reserve, and retired members of the armed services.

For other commercial uses of OMG, see my 2012 post.

Nicely named: Gateway

What’s so special about “Gateway”? Not much, at first appraisal. The word appears in more than 600 trademarks, including that of a pioneering U.S. computer company founded in 1985 in Sioux City, Iowa. (That company, whose original name was Gateway 2000, used a Holstein cow as its mascot; it was bought in 2007 by Taiwan-based Acer, which also acquired Gateway.com and which now produces computers under the Gateway brand.)

“Gateway” names abound in the San Francisco Bay Area thanks to the region’s association with the Golden Gate and the bridge that spans it. There are Gateway apartments, a Gateway Bank, a Golden Gateway hotel, and a long-planned Gateway Park at the foot of (confusingly) the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge.

But the Gateway I want to praise here is Oakland-based Gateway Incubator, which is named for a different sort of gateway.

Word of the week: Motto

Motto: A brief statement that expresses a goal, ideal, or principle. From the Italian motto, “a saying or legend attached to a heraldic design,” and ultimately from Latin muttum (“grunt” or “word”). Related to French mot (“word”) and English mutter (“to mumble”).

I’ve written so much and for so long about slogans and taglines that I was surprised to find that I’d never written about the meaning and uses of motto. I’ll get to the distinctions between those words – motto, slogan, and tagline – in a bit. First, though, the reason to talk about motto this week.

This was never supposed to happen

And yet, somehow, it did.

Outdoor ad for Lyft. Harrison between 8th and 9th streets, San Francisco, January 30, 2016.

Hella to Pay

In the Bay Area—and maybe where you live, too—“hella” is hella ubiquitous. I’ve spotted it three times recently in some unexpected contexts.

Signs of Concern

I enjoy a little word puzzle as much as, or maybe more than, the next public-transit user. But two Bay Area bus-shelter signs, both for worthy nonprofit organizations, go beyond puzzling to confounding.

Here’s the first one:

 

SF Environment, Fillmore Avenue, San Francisco, April 26, 2015.

 

 

“Do You Really Want the City 7 x 7 x 7?” asks this poster. I stood in front of it for a couple of minutes, trying to stitch together “Do you really want the city” and “7 x 7 x 7.”  What could it possibly mean?

Mull it over while I show you the other ad.

Siri, Tell Me the Name of the Advertiser

You’re cruising along at 25 mph in Oakland when you glimpse a billboard across the street. You see it for about two seconds, across three lanes of traffic, before you drive by. What registers? What’s being advertised?

 

“Siri, find me a place above 50°.” Broadway near 51st Street.

 

I’ll tell you what I saw: an ad for Siri, the iPhone voice app. Or maybe, on second thought, an ad for kayaks. In, I dunno, Alaska.

It wasn’t until a third and slower drive-by that I caught the much smaller type in the lower right-hand corner: “Real summer. Real close.” And beneath that line, in even smaller type—at last—the name of the advertiser: GoTahoeNorth.com.

In other words, this is the 2014 edition of the you-poor-suffering-San-Franciscans campaign that GoTahoeNorth introduced last year. The first time around, I said I liked the catchy slogan (“Winter, Spring, Winter, Fall”). What went wrong this year? Simple: the agency led us astray by name-checking an unrelated brand. After we see the “Siri” billboard we aren’t thinking about Lake Tahoe, we’re thinking about iPhones.

Moral: It’s not enough to come up with what you think is a clever line. You have to remember the context as well. What works in a static medium like print may not work in the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t environment of outdoor advertising. When you’re pitching to a moving target, you need to make sure they see your name, not some other brand’s, writ large.

Tangent: The Tahoe North folks have a harder sell this year, because here in the San Francisco Bay Area we’re enjoying an exceptionally warm summer. Last week daytime temperatures climbed into the 80s in San Francisco, and one overnight low in the middle of the week was the warmest on record for that date—a near-tropical 63°. (It’s more July-typical for San Francisco’s daytime high temperatures to be in the low 60s.)

Here’s an even weirder tidbit. Where I swim in San Francisco Bay, we’ve been recording water temperatures of 66° and 67°, about four degrees above normal. Some veteran bay swimmers have been overheard grumbling that the water’s too damn warm. Not I: after two weeks of 49° water in January, I’m happy to revel in this quasi-Hawaiian treat.

So, Siri, I’m happily staying put. See you next year, when I hope you’ve counseled GoTahoeNorth on a better way to sell its summer weather to us flatlanders.

 

Word of the Week: Apothecary

Apothecary: A drugstore or pharmacy; a person who prepares and sells drugs or medicines.

When apothecary entered English in the mid-1300s, it had a more general meaning than “druggist.” Its late-Latin source, apothēcārius, meant “store-keeper”; the Latin word came from Greek apothēkē, “a repository or storehouse.” That older meaning persists in two close linguistic cousins of apothecary: Spanish bodega (a small grocery store) and French boutique (a small retail shop).

Until recently, apothecary had a musty reputation in American English: Its usage had declined steadily for the last 150 years (see the Google Ngram), and when it appeared at all, it was often in histories or historical fiction.

Lately, though, there’s a subtle but noticeable uptick, especially in certain quarters—including my own Oakland environs—characterized by a critical hipster mass. And its meaning appears to be reverting to the medieval one.

Some examples:

Hog’s Apothecary, which opened on 40th Street in September 2013, is “a gastropub where beer and sausage rule,” according to a November 2013 review in Oakland magazine:

[J]ust as a pharmacy serves an array of cures for ailments, so Hog’s Apothecary serves a number of “cures” to its patrons. [Co-owner John] Streit says, “The idea is that when you make sausage or make bacon, you put a cure on the meat. And we have an array of drinks, and some people rely on that as their cure.”

I noted a couple of other interesting items about Hog’s Apothecary.

• It uses the recently coined “Jewel Box” appellation to refer to its micro-neighborhood, which is near Emerald, Ruby, Garnet, and Opal streets. Like most Oaklanders, I’ve always referred to the area as the Temescal.
• Its motto is “Locavore meets locapour.” I’m familiar with “locavore”— it was the Oxford word of the year for 2007—but this was my first encounter with “locapour.”
• It uses old-timey design and typography to match old-timey “apothecary.”

 

Just a few blocks from Hog’s is Homestead Apothecary, which opened in March 2013. Homestead Apothecary (no relation to Homestead Restaurant, about half a mile away) fits the popular image of an apothecary: it sells medicinal herbs and offers “community centered holistic education.”

A couple of neighborhoods over, on Grand Avenue, you’ll find Ancestral Apothecary, dedicated to “remembering and reclaiming folk & indigenous medicine.”

And a few blocks up Grand, the stylish and pricey McMullen boutique includes an “apothecary” section on its website for lotions and potions. (The online cupboard is currently bare.)

Apothecary also shows up in Brooklyn, the Oakland of New York. In addition to druggist-style apothecaries like Bridge Apothecary and Heights Apothecary, I spotted a haircare/cosmetics apothecary in the Woodley & Bunny salon and an apothecary section in the By Brooklyn website where you can buy soaps, candles, scents, and lotions—all made in Brooklyn, of course.

Name in the Wild: Wheels of Justice

I snapped this sign on Mountain Boulevard in Montclair Village, a neighborhood of Oakland:

Wheels of Justice Cyclery

 

An odd name for a bicycle shop, I thought. I seemed to recall a proverb, or a quote from a famous person, along the lines of “The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.” Well, what bicyclist wants slow, grinding wheels?

I looked it up, and it turns out the original quote is a little different, although it’s frequently misrepresented: It has to do with “the mills of the gods” rather than “the wheels of justice,” and it goes all the way back to ancient Greece. In his poem “Retribution,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow singularized the deity:

Though the mills of God grind slowly;
Yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience he stands waiting,
With exactness grinds he all

But guess what? This is totally beside the point! Because the name of the shop has nothing to do with Longfellow or the Greek Skeptics. It’s an eponym. The owner’s name is—wait for it—Justice Baxter.

Now, “Justice” is a fairly uncommon boys’ name in the United States. The Baby Name Wizard Name Voyager shows it appearing out of nowhere sometime in the 1980s. (I don’t know Justice Baxter’s age, but he’s owned the bicycle shop since 2002, so he may have been born right around then.) The name’s popularity among boys peaked at 411 per million babies in 2006, and it’s been dropping ever since.

 

 

Also in the 1980s, “Justice” began showing up as a girls’ name. It hasn’t been as popular for girls, but that graph line is still rising.

 

 

Baby-name experts have categorized Justice among the new “virtue names”—21st-century counterparts to the Faith, Hope, Charity, Patience, and Comfort so popular with the Puritans. Other “new virtue names” include Logic, Rhyme, Reason, Destiny, Curiosity, Savvy, and, yes, Virtue. 

A female Justice—17-year-old Justice Toliver—was in the news last week because of a tragedy: She was the victim of a fatal shooting in her Oakland, California, apartment. The prime suspect, her 14-year-old brother, turned himself in to police yesterday.

A word of warning: Don’t even think about naming a child of either sex “Justice” if you live in New Zealand. Since 2001, according to Harper’s Index (August 2013), New Zealand’s Registrar of Births, Deaths, and Marriages has rejected baby names 311 times. Sixty-two of those rejections have been for the name “Justice.”

Yes, that headline would read “Justice Denied in New Zealand.”