Fritinancy

Word of the week: Sportswashing

I first heard sportswashing in a story that aired in mid-March on NPR’s 1A program, “How Countries Use Sports to Improve Their Image.” The story provided a definition:

Sportswashing is the practice of laundering one’s reputation through sports; whether that be through team ownership, hosting a major tournament, or sponsorship. A country or politician gets involved with the hope that some of the sport’s popularity will improve their image.

Although it was unfamiliar to me, neither the word nor the practice is new. Sportswashing (or the British English variant sportwashing) was coined in 2015 by Sport for Rights, an Azerbaijani campaign to expose that country’s “attempt ‘to distract from its human rights record with prestigious sponsorship and hosting of events’, including the European Games hosted in Baku that year,” as the Oxford Words blog put it.

 

Protesters in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 2015. Image via Frontline Defenders.

 

In the seven years since, there have been plenty of other examples of sportswashing: Saudi Arabia buying the English Premier League team Newcastle United in 2021; China hosting the Winter Olympic Games in February 2022; Qatar hosting the next World Cup in November 2022. Earlier this year, American professional golfer Phil Nickelson admitted to biographer Alan Shipnuck that his association with the Saudi Golf League was “sportswashing.” (“They’re scary motherfuckers to get involved with,” Mickelson said of the Saudi regime. Perhaps he said it approvingly; who knows.) Reaching further back, NPR pointed to Adolf Hitler's reasons for hosting the 1936 Olympic games.

Word of the week: #LochMess

#LochMess: A hashtag identifying the scandal involving 12-time Olympic swimming medalist Ryan Lochte, who, along with three of his U.S. teammates, claimed to have been robbed at gunpoint in Rio de Janeiro the night after their gold-medal performance in the 4 x 200 freestyle relay. Brazilian police investigators later determined that Lochte had lied about the incident, and that the four Americans had vandalized a gas-station bathroom while drunk and had been confronted by security guards demanding payment for damages. Lochte later repented publicly without exactly apologizing (he said he should have been “more careful and candid” in his description of the incident); on August 21 he told the Today Show’s Matt Lauer that he had “over-exaggerated” the story.

In social-media commentary, the incident was at first hashtagged #LochteGate, following the tried-and-true pattern for scandal nomenclature that originated with Watergate, the name of the hotel that housed the Democratic National Committee headquarters during the 1972 presidential campaign. Then, on August 18, Laya Maheshwari suggested an alternative.

Humble request to refer to the Ryan Lochte scandal not as #LochteGate but as #LochMess.

— Laya Maheshwari (@lazygarfield) August 18, 2016

The new hashtag, a pun on Loch Ness – home of the perennially elusive Loch Ness monster – combines the first syllable of Lochte’s surname with mess, which more accurately connotes the shifting narrative than any suffix suggesting “scandal.” What’s more, the monster, mythical or not, is a swimmer like Lochte. Well played, Laya Maheshwari!

February Linkfest

Rebranding Cupid, just in time for Valentine’s Day. 

 

By Massive Media. See also my February 2010 post about another Valentine’s Day rebrand, this one by Under Consideration for Studio 360.

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An order of roastbeef with a side of stalefish? Yes, we’re talking snowboarding lingo. The Wall Street Journal’s Rachel Bachman interviews snowboarders; Ben Zimmer, at Slate, analyzes “I’ll just huck it,” which caused an “overanxious” BBC presenter to “freak out.”

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Leave it to the inventive and enterprising Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl, to turn language peeves (“literally,” “could care less,” “very unique,” et al.) into a card game in which the object is “to annoy your opponent to death.” She’s raising money for Peeve Wars through Fund Anything; contribute now to claim your own card set or another nifty reward.

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Speaking of peeves, the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg has had it up to here with verbal anachronisms in otherwise classy TV shows—like, say, Showtime’s Masters of Sex: “We live in a golden age of production design—but only for what we see, not for what we hear. Script-wise, anything goes, including the lexical equivalents of a jukebox in a frontier saloon or a zip-up toga on a Roman senator.” See also a response and amplification from the master of anachronism-spotting, Ben Schmidt. (As you may recall, this stuff annoys me, too.)

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Some people peeve about new, “unnecessary” words. But language blogger Stan Carey defends them: “Avoiding new and ‘needless’ words in formal contexts is all well and good, but what’s wrong with a grand superfluity elsewhere? Will the language look untidy if words float around not filling vital gaps? Will they gum up the works?”

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“We think first / Of vague words that are synonyms for progress / And pair them with footage of a high-speed train.” This Is a Generic Brand Video, from McSweeney’s, of course.

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Orenitram, a drug for pulmonary arterial hypertension, is an ananym: The name was created by reverse-spelling the first eight letters of the name of the drug company’s CEO, Martine Rothblatt. But that’s just the beginning of a truly remarkable name story, reported by Catchword.

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The new BuzzFeed style guide answers the really tough spelling and usage questions: Is bitchface one word or two? (One.) Is there an E in chocolaty? (No.) What’s the proper abbreviation of douchebag? (d-bag.) What’s the difference between wack and whack? (Look it up; it’s in there.) And, FYI, the word is spelled whoa. Don’t make us repeat ourselves.

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“Writing and editing are linked but distinct enterprises, and distinct temperaments are involved. Very few people can move smoothly from the one enterprise to the other.” – John McIntyre, one of the few. 

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The second lives of dead US brands: Woolworths thrives in Australia, Nextel in Latin America, Friendster in Southeast Asia, Mister Donut (“Misudo”) and Pan Am in Japan. (Hat tip: Rochelle Kopp and Shogannai.)

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Arika Okrent sorts out 11 brands with plural problems (topping the list: LEGO).

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A linguist (Gretchen McCulloch) explains doge grammar: “[B]roadly speaking, second-generation internet language plays with grammar instead of spelling.”

 

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Who names the color of the year? Professional namers, that’s who. The Boston Globe interviewed Bay Area name developer Anthony Shore for his insights into color naming; the article is headlined—care to guess?—“What’s in a Name?” (I tackled the subject of color names myself for a 2011 Visual Thesaurus column.)

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From the indispensable TV Tropes, the periodic table of storytelling.

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Speaking of charts and taxonomies, here’s a “marketing technology landscape supergraphic”—the logos of 947 companies in 43 categories—created by Scott Brinker.  Wow. Very names.

 

Read Brinker's follow-up post about the chart.

Word of the Week: Kizzle Kazzle

Kizzle kazzle: In the sport of curling, “a delivered stone that is intentionally wobbled to compensate for water, slush or snow on the ice surface.” (Source: Wikipedia.) Etymology uncertain: None of my standard references, including the Oxford English Dictionary, has an entry for the word, and other sources repeat the Wikipedia definition. Could it be onomatopoetic? Scottish dialect? Maybe one of you well-informed readers will enlighten us.

Curling has been an Olympic sport since the 1998 Nagano games; before then, it had sporadically been included as a demonstration sport. The sport—played by two teams of four players each who sweep a concave convex stone across the ice toward a fixed mark in the center—originated in 17th-century Scotland, where it resembled lawn bowling on ice; curling probably came from “the motion given to the stone,” says the OED.

The OED cites an 1890 history of curling:

Curling, when first practised, appears to have been a kind of quoiting on the ice..Coiting, kuting, or quoiting, was for a long time the word in common use to describe the game, and in some districts it is still applied to it.

Quoit has been in the English lexicon since the late 14th century, possibly from Old French coite, a flat stone. The game of quoits is related to the game of horseshoes.

Curling competition in the 2014 games, in Sochi, Russia, will begin Monday, February 10. The evening competition will include a USA-Norway match, sure to be avidly followed even by curling ignoramuses like me, because:

The 2014 Norwegian men’s curling team, wearing colors inspired by their country’s flag.

According to a New York Times report, the Norwegian team has another uniform “that’s black and flowery and could be called grandmother-chic.”

 

You may remember these flashy dressers from the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver, BC:

The pants outshone the silver medals.

 

The Norwegian women’s curling team demonstrated similar flair.

World Women’s Curling Championships, Swift Current, Saskatchewan, March 23, 2010.

 

The uniforms stood because in curling, according to the Times, “athletes traditionally wear black and draw little notice outside curling circles.”

The best part about this uniform story, for me at least, is its local angle: The Norwegian teams’ uniforms are made by Loudmouth Golf (excellent company name) in Foster City, California, 22 miles southeast of San Francisco. Before the 2010 Winter Olympics, the company was best known, if at all, for wildly patterned golf pants and college-football fanwear.

The wacky uniforms “kind of took the edge off everything,” Norway team member Christoffer Svae told the Times reporter:

 “When our games were not going too well, we’d look at each other and think, Oh, you look like a clown. So it made us feel at ease.”

Read the rest of the Times story, which, alas, yields no further insight into kizzle kazzle.

Meddling

I couldn’t help myself: When I received this email last week from Jigsaw, the UK-based women’s retailer, I had to get involved.

“Gold Metal Winners of the Season,” read the headline. And yet…

… there were no metallic elements in evidence.

 

No gold in the rest of the email, either.

You’d think that with the incessant media harping on Olympic medal count, someone at Jigsaw—hello, proofreader!—would have recognized the erroneous homophone and fixed it. But no.

So I did what had to be done: I tweeted about the mistake. To its credit, Jigsaw promptly expressed chagrin.

 

Cute tweet—although I can’t help meddling one more time. There are two Ls in “metallurgist,” Jigsaw. (Yes, on both sides of the pond.)

Let this serve as a reminder to companies that send emails to their customers: Those emails are advertisements. They need to be professionally written and edited and proofread before they’re sent. (I bet you double-check the prices. The words are important, too.)

Careful with those tweets and Facebook posts, too.

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Does it seem as though I’ve picked on Jigsaw before? You’re right.

Word of the Week: Wazzock

Wazzock: A stupid or annoying person; an idiot. British slang; OED’s earliest citation is dated 1976 (“Stood there like a wazzock on the pavement”). Origin officially unknown (but keep reading).

I’m familiar with many British insults—wanker, tosser, berk, chav, etc.—but wazzock was new to me until last Friday. That’s when I encountered it in a New Yorker blog post about Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s gaffe-fest in London. The headline on the post: “The Problem with ‘Mitt the Twit’: He’s a Wazzock.”

 

 

A recap: Romney arrived in England on Thursday, one day before the opening ceremony of the 30th Olympiad, and proceeded to shoot himself repeatedly in the foot. He told a US reporter that “there are a few things that are disconcerting” about London’s Olympic preparations; referred to the “backside” of 10 Downing Street; addressed Labour party leader Ed Miliband as “Mr. Leader” (this US convention is not OK in the UK; some Brits thought Romney had simply forgotten Miliband’s name); and bragged about his “Anglo-Saxon heritage.” (A roundup of Romney’s blunders here.)

“Mitt Romney is perhaps the only politician who could start a trip that was supposed to be a charm offensive by being utterly devoid of charm and mildly offensive,” wrote the Telegraph’s Alex Spillius. His colleague at the Telegraph, Lucy Jones, was the first to label Romney a wazzock. (“Who does Mitt Romney think he is?” Jones fumed.) When I checked Google on Monday morning, there were 114,000 results for “Romney wazzock.”

So what does wazzock mean? The New Yorker’s Cassidy, who grew up in Yorkshire, attempted an explanation:

According to some accounts, a wazzock, in the original usage, was a bull’s penis. When I was young, it was used to describe a hapless idiot who blunders around doing and saying things he or she shouldn’t. Wazzocks don’t necessarily have bad intentions, but they tend to bring trouble to themselves and others. Romney, for all his business success and Harvard degrees, sometimes seems to fit the description.

I’ve also come across some speculation that wazzock is derived from wiseacre (“know-it-all”), which came into English in the 1590s from Dutch wijssegger ("soothsayer").

There is no evidence whatsoever that wazzock is related to the Budweiser “Wassup?” commercials (or the parodies).

At least one other potential Word of the Year candidate surfaced in the coverage of Romney’s undiplomatic visit: Romneyshambles. It’s a pun on omnishambles, which was coined by the British writer/director Armando Iannucci, who specializes in political satire. (His first American TV show is Veep, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus.) In a 2009 episode of Iannucci’s BBC series The Thick of It, the hilariously vitriolic and profane communications director, Malcolm Tucker (played by Peter Capaldi), tells another character that she’s “a fucking omnishambles.” (Watch the scene here.)

“Omnishambles” entered the real-world political scene in April 2012, in the British House of Commons. World Wide Words reported that Labour leader Miliband called the coalition government

an omnishambles because of several serious policy and public-relations blunders, including some unexpected consequences of the Chancellor’s budget of the previous month. The Daily Mail commented that omnishambles “described the combination of tragedy and farce that characterises modern politics” and the word has been gleefully taken up by many commentators, some even in the Conservative press.

Unlike Barack Obama’s name, which produced dozens of riffs during the 2008 campaign and beyond—Obamamentum, Obamanomenon, Obamania, Barack the Vote, and so on— “Mitt Romney” has given punsters little to work with besides the “Mittens” nickname. “Romneyshambles”—a perfect pun on a splendid made-up word—may be the first name-game breakthrough of the 2012 campaign.*

Bonus link: A serious take on Romneyshambles from Paul Krugman.

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* I refuse to count Santorum.

The Worst Font in the World

Simon Garfield devotes the final chapter of Just My Type: A Book About Fonts (published in the US in 2011) to a rogue’s gallery of “the worst fonts in the world.” Number one on his list: the official typeface of the 2012 Olympic Games. In honor of the games, which open in London today, here’s an excerpt from Garfield’s critique:

The London 2012 Olympic Typeface, which is called 2012 Headline, may be even worse than the London 2012 Olympic Logo, but by the time it was released people were so tired of being outraged by the logo that the type almost passed by unnoticed. …

Like the logo, the uncool font is based on jaggedness and crudeness, not usually considered attributes where sport is concerned. Or maybe it’s an attempt to appear hip and down with the kids—it looks a little like the sort of tagging one might see in 1980s graffiti. It also has a vaguely Greek appearance, or at least the UK interpretation of Greek, the sort of lettering you will find at London kebab shops and restaurants called Dionysus. The slant to the letters is suddenly interrupted by a very round and upright o, which may be trying to be an Olympic Ring. The font does have a few things going for it: it is instantly identifiable, it is not easily forgettable, and because we’ll be seeing so much of it, it may eventually cease to offend. Let’s hope they keep it off the medals.

Sample of 2012 Headline via Fast Company.

 

You can read the entire “worst fonts” chapter at Fast Company. Believe it or not, the much-scorned Comic Sans (which Garfield calls “type that has gone wrong”) didn’t make the list. That’s how bad the eight worst fonts in the world are.

Read my 2007 post about the controversial 2012 Olympic Games logo.

Bonus link: “My Utter Lack of Olympic Spirit,” by British novelist Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy, A Long Way Down).

Olympics Notebook

Thoughts from three days of Games:

• I caught some flak for saying so on Twitter, but I'm liking NBC's new slogan, "Chime In." "Chime" is an allusion to the network's old three-note audio logo, which was first heard on radio in 1929. And "chime in" makes it seem interactive.¹ Compared to broadcasters' pathetic past sloganeering attempts--anyone remember ABC's "TV Is Good"?--it's practically Shakespearean. As much as I like the slogan, though, I'm a whole lot less fond of the promotional ad that turns the network's stars into shills. By the way, the NBC chimes were the first sound to receive trademark protection, in 1950. And those three notes? They're G3, E4, and C4 (middle C). More on the NBC chimes here.
• Would it be too much to ask NBC to identify the expert commentators at the events? Who the heck was China expert "Josh" at the opening ceremonies? I watched and listened for a couple of hours and never found out. Who was doing the fencing commentary? He was terrific--I learned a lot. (Those little staccato runs the fencers make? They're called stutter steps.) And I know that "Rowdy" is Rowdy Gaines, the three-time Olympic gold medalist (100m freestyle), but if you don't normally follow swimming you might find it helpful to be reminded now and then.
• I can't distinguish one car commercial from another. 
• Tell me again why it's OK for NBA players to participate in the supposedly amateur Olympic Games?
• During Olympics programming I saw two of the stunning new United Airlines commercials, "Sea Orchestra" and "Two Worlds."  I was wowed by the inventive animation (reportedly even more gorgeous in high-def) and by the music. United has been using Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" as its theme for more than 20 years, but I can't recall a more effective or creatively scored version than this one, performed by the L.A. Phil.² Creating this spot and others in the campaign was an international effort; read more here. Watch all four spots here.
• The McDonald's ad "Victory" has no dialogue--just irresistible music ("A Minha Menina" by the 1960s Brazilian band Os Mutantes) and an equally irresistible story: at a kids' soccer match, the winners gloat--but the losers get Happy Meals. Would I prefer it if the kids were eating carrot sticks and homemade cookies? Yes, I would. Do I think McDonald's is evil? Yes, I do.  Nevertheless, I love this commercial. Agency is DDB/Chicago.

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¹ Emphasis on "seem." In real life, NBC worked feverishly to prevent Olympics fans from getting a real-time jump on the network's tape-delayed opening ceremonies; the New York Times 's Brian Stelter called it "digital whack-a-mole."

² The ad is so gorgeous, you're tempted to forget what a living hell the actual experience of flying is nowadays. On the other hand, it helps to remember that the campaign is promoting international first- and business-class travel. They get Gershwin; we get peanuts.

Bad Sports

Chris, a London-based marketing wonk (his term) by day, rails against the logo for the London 2012 Olympic Games, unveiled yesterday, calling it "an abomination." He's hardly alone; almost as soon as the design was announced, a petition urging the Olympic Committee to "scrap and change this ridiculous logo" began circulating on the Web.

Chris weighs in:

The design is also incredibly busy, unlike the simple, smooth designs online. The irregular double edging on the shapes jumps all over the place for no reason, leaving slivers of yellow (or white) which will look utter shit when shrunk down to a low resolution. The numbers themselves, spelling out 2012 (or ZOiZ) are not at all immediately obvious - which is why everyone thinks it looks like Lisa Simpson giving head, or a man vomiting with his right arm raised. ...

Even the detailing is terrible; the font spelling out the word “london” is like some bastard offspring of Comic Sans, unlike the soothing and graceful sans serif fonts that are often used today. The Olympic rings sit awkwardly within the “O”, their neat regularity totally clashing with the shape surrounding them. In order to conform to the colour scheme, the five colours the rings are normally depicted in (symbolising the five continents of the world) all have to be totally disregarded in favour of uniform white. So much for embracing and symbolising diversity.

In short, this was a logo designed with print in mind with little clue as to how it will appeal to an Internet generation. It confuses garish with interesting, and smacks of a deeply insecure yearning to be relevant and appealing to youth, despite being about twenty years out of date. It totally disregards Olympic history or actual diversity in favour of an incredibly narrow-minded preconceptions.

Look on the bright side: it should be easy to use the logo in a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle.

The agency responsible for the logo, Wolff-Olins (which Chris says earned £400,000 for the gig), also created The Gap's (Product) Red brand, which Chris dismisses as "another mid-life crisis."

In what may be an Olympic first, the brand has its own web site apart from the 2012 Games site.

(For links to previous Games' logos; go here.)

Update: Kottke.org points to this defense of the logo in Speak Up, a group-authored graphic-design blog. "Part of the problem is that the logo comes with too much hyperbole, rhetoric, metaphors and inflationist meanings," writes Mexico-born, Brooklyn-based designer Armin Vit. And yet: "Whether you like it or hate it, the work is extremely unique and memorable. More so than any of the last Olympic Games [pop up] and I would even go as far as comparing it with the 1968 Mexico Olympic program in terms of a radical approach."

Update #2: Coudal Partners, a very sharp ad agency in Chicago, also likes the chosen logo: "Just like you, our first reaction was shock. But we talked about it all morning. By 3pm, we decided we love it. And here are ten reasons why you should, too." (Via Logic + Emotion.)