Fritinancy

The Airing of Grievances

Today is Festivus, the holiday “for the rest of us” made famous by Seinfeld and celebrated since 1997. Of the principal Festivus traditions—which include a bare aluminum pole and Feats of Strength—my favorite, naturally, is the Airing of Grievances. Here, for the third consecutive year, are my grievances, culled from a vast universe of commercial language violations. (Past Grievances: 2009, 2010.)

The Airing of Grievances

Today is Festivus, a holiday for the rest of us, which means it’s time once again for the annual Airing of Grievances. I’ve made my list; how about you?

Airing of Grievances form may be downloaded here.

Grievance the First: Spotted at Bed Bath & Beyond.

There must have been 300 of these Draftdodger® door cozies at BB&B when I visited a store in San Francisco in early December, and as far as I could tell, every single one had the same misspelling on its package. (P.S. There’s no hyphen in drawstring.)

Grievance the Second: From a story about private jets in the Sunday New York Times Magazine.

Marketing critic Rob Walker writes the “Consumed” column, but I don’t blame him for the appearance of imminently where a near-homophone, eminently, is called for. I blame the copy desk. (Imminently means “about to occur.” Eminently means “extremely.”)

Grievance the Third: The taint of ’tis. Since Thanksgiving I’ve received seven e-mails from online merchants with “’Tis the season” in subject line or body copy.

 

I defer to John McIntyre, who lays down the copyediting law against clichés at the Baltimore Sun and on his blog, You Don’t Say:

“’Tis the season”: Not in copy, not in headlines, not at all. Never, never, never, never, never. You cannot make this fresh. Do not attempt it.

The only thing worse than a “’Tis the season” headline is a “’Tis the season” headline with a backward apostrophe.

Grievance the Fourth: The following phrases are expressed in two words with a space between the words: in spite, never mind, all right (also all righty), at least, more so, a lot. I don’t give a fig what the album title was or what the band’s name is. If you want my attention, use the standard spelling.

Grievance the Fifth: On the other hand, intact is one word. Keep it intact, you might say. That is my advice to the “homeschooling examiner” who criticized a “democrat candidate” for misspelling lobbyist—and proceeded to misspell “intact” and mis-punctuate everywhere. It is also my advice to Read Write Web.

 

Seeking Proofreaders

This full-page ad from Thor Equities appears in today’s New York Times on Page 11 of the business section.

The large green text beneath “693 Fifth Avenue” reads:

Imagine recreating the facade of the former Takishamaya building in the image of your brand; that’s the opportunity presented by 693 Fifth Avenue.

Whoops: The name of the Japanese retail store chain, which was founded in 1829 and until June of this year occupied 693 Fifth Avenue, is spelled Takashimaya, not “Takishamaya.”

And here’s the kicker, in the closing paragraph:

I’m having a seizure.

P.S. As long as I’m making changes, I’d circle the semicolon in that paragraph I quoted above. A colon or a period would be make the statement more powerful.

On Visual Thesaurus: More Ranting About “Lay Flat”

In my latest Visual Thesaurus column, published today, I continue flaying “lay”—as in “Lay Flat Collar T-Shirts” from Hanes. You may recall that I launched this rant last week here on Fritinancy; in today’s column, I provide some historical examples of grammar-flouting ads. The full column is available to subscribers only (so subscribe already!); here’s an excerpt:

For examples of real outrage over grammar-defying slogans ... we need to go back to the Mad Men era. In 1954, the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company introduced the Winston brand with the slogan "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should," setting off a cultural skirmish, if not an actual war. Like, not as? Horrors! The poet Ogden Nash published a verse in The New Yorker that included the line "Like goes Madison Avenue, like goes the nation." Walter Cronkite, then the anchor of The Morning Show on CBS, took a principled stand, refusing to read such illiteracy on the air. An announcer filled in for him. (This was in the days when broadcast journalists routinely read ads as well as news, so Cronkite's principles were not exactly unsullied.)

Naturally, the uproar only increased public awareness of the new brand. Within months, according to Malcolm Gladwell's account in The Tipping Point, Winston vaulted to second place in the American market; by 1966—still using the "like a cigarette should" slogan—it had become the country's bestselling brand. Before retiring the slogan in 1972, Winston ran ads whose copy defiantly asked, "What do you want, good grammar or good taste?" The final nail in the coffin, so to speak, had come in 1961, when Merriam-Webster accepted "like" as a conjunction in its Third International Dictionary—and used the Winston slogan as an example. (For this and other sins, the New York Times called the dictionary "bolshevik.")

Read the full column here.

Hot Under the Collar

I’m writing a longer piece about Hanes Lay Flat Collar T-Shirts for the Visual Thesaurus, but I have too much surplus crankiness not to preview my thesis here.

Let’s start with an email promotion starring Michael Jordan that appeared last week in inboxes around the country, including that of my brother Michael, who forwarded it to me:

 

 

“Lay Flat Collar Tees”? I am shuddering as I type those words. Why? Because:

1. A hen lays eggs. A collar lies flat. Unless we’re using the past tense: “Yesterday, my collar lay flat. Today, alas, it lies crumpled in the corner.”

2. Compound adjectives take hyphens. If you must (really? must you?), it’s “Lay-Flat Collar.” (In some places on the Hanes website, it even appears as “Layflat Collar.” That noise you hear? It’s my convulsive whimpering.)

3. It’s a T-shirt, and T-shirts by definition don’t have collars! They have necklines. Here, take a look: “T-shirt: A short-sleeved, collarless undershirt” (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition; emphasis added). 

In years gone by, I would not be bleating my complaints in lonely isolation; egregious errors such as these would have brought out a horde of outraged self-appointed grammar enforcers. But standards have sunk so low—yes, I said “have sunk,” not “have sank,” because that’s how I roll—that I’ve been hard pressed to find even a peep of protest. Oh, all right, one peep: in a Hanes commercial that mocks a kindly gentleman who dares to suggest that “lie” is preferable to “lay” in this context.

Here’s the best/worst part:

See the first sentence? “A collar that lies flat.” Yes, apparently some heroic copywriter at Hanes couldn’t bear the shame and found a way to insert the correct language into the guarantee. Give that person a raise!

I mean, really. Even a dog can learn the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs.

Cartoon by Harry Bliss.

Put Me In, Coach

I'm reading the sports section these days because the only sport I follow, swimming, is at last getting its quadrennial day in the sun. (And what a day it is! Two words: Dara Torres. Okay, two more: Michael Phelps.) Good news for me; bad news for newspaper sportswriters who regard swim-meet assignments as hardship duty. (Except for the ogling of the nearly naked bodies.) For four years they cover big-money sports that involve balls and the verb "to play," and then, just before the Olympics, they're shuttled off to some natatorium in Nowheresville--this year it's Omaha--and plunged into a weird subculture whose rituals include full-body shaving. They don't understand swimming technique or training, they can't tell the players even with a scorecard, and when they try to dash off some savvy-sounding copy they flail like beginning butterflyers.

I'm willing to overlook most of that. I'm grateful just to read names and race results. But I do get ticked off when I have to read painful usage errors that would have been caught by a copyeditor if all the copyeditors hadn't gotten the axe in the last round of layoffs (or been outsourced to India).

Here, for example, is the San Francisco Chronicle's Scott Ostler in this morning's paper with a wrapup of yesterday's Olympic trials.

Example #1:

Dara Torres isn't held together with bubblegum and bailing wire.

Dumb, dumb sentence, but what really made me cringe was bailing. It's baling wire, as in "wire that's used to tie bales of hay together."

Example #2:

[Amanda] Beard: "I can't get to sleep at night, so I take sleeping pills." Doesn't that make her loggy?

Loggy? No, logy--pronounced with a long o. ("Loggy" would necessarily be pronounced with a short vowel.) It means lethargic or sluggish.

Neither error was corrected in the online edition, by the way. Sigh.

Looking Presidential

A couple of type designers analyze the logos of the presidential candidates for readers of the Boston Globe. Some excerpts:

• "The Hillary logo has the look of an '80s newspaper layout or an investment company."
• "The Edwards type is very Wal-Mart, tabloid, middle class. Not a whiff of high-powered lawyer."
• "Obama's ... serifs are sharp and pointed; clean pen strokes evoke a well-pressed Armani suit."
• "Huckabee has the most inexplicable selection of typography and graphics, from the six floating stars to the white stripe seemingly stolen from the Coca-Cola logo."
• "[Romney's] graphics are puzzling. The eagle logo has the head of the US Postal Service logo and body of the Norwegian flag flowing behind it."
• "[Giuliani's] message is all about Rudy, name recognition. The enlarged R introduces the other letters like a big, protective parent."
• "From the perfectly centered star to the perfectly spaced type, [McCain's] entire design looks like a high-end real estate company."

In conclusion: "If we were to predict the results based on typography and design, we would pick McCain and Obama."

Via The Ridger, who's peeved--as am I--by the misplaced apostrophe in the Globe's sidebar heading, "All the Candidate's Logos." (Just one candidate with many logos?) Not only that, but on the "all logos" page there's an extraneous comma: "type designers, Sam Berlow and Cyrus Highsmith..." Does anyone work on the copy desk anymore?

Bonus link: Obama has the hardest-working logo of any presidential candidate.

Read my earlier post on candidates' logos.

What Not to Say

Every year since 1975, Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, has published a "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness." The 2008 list, edited from more than 2,000 nominations, represents "a perfect storm of overused and abused words and phrases that pops organic, to a post-9/11 world decimated by webinars."

In short: a list that "is what it is."

One of my pet peeves, wordsmithing, made the list this year. It's a word I frequently hear to describe the work I do--work I prefer to call writing. In my experience, wordsmith is always used by non-writers and always in a tone of condescension, the way dauber is used to describe an amateur artist. "Wordsmithing" implies "tinkering" and "I'd do it myself if I had the time, but I'm much too busy and important and highly paid to dirty my hands with manual labor."

A synonym, to tweak, also needs banishment.

And while we're at it, let's get rid of verbiage, too. I suspect that people who use "verbiage" instead of "language," "writing," or "text" think they're honoring the craft by giving it a hifalutin Latiny flourish. In fact, verbiage means "wordiness": Merriam-Webster's primary definition is "a profusion of words, usually of little or no content." (Verbiage comes to us from a Middle French word, verbier, meaning "to chatter.") I don't write verbiage. I write words, sentences, and paragraphs; headlines, taglines, and copy. You want verbiage, get yourself a Verb-o-Matic.

(Via You Don't Say. Meanwhile, over at Wishydig, linguist Michael Covarrubias takes a contrarian view of this list and other "banned words" lists.)

Update: Linguist Ben Zimmer, in a post on the Oxford University Press blog, takes aim at the inclusion of decimate on the list and notes: "In general, the list is most informative as a barometer of pet peeves about language: what is it that gets under people’s skin, so much so that they think words (or particularly disliked senses of words) should be removed from the lexicon forthwith?"

Related bonus link: The Los Angeles Times's list of "cringe-worthy turns of phrase that have been cluttering up the language in recent years," including community, existential threat, and metrics. (Hat tip: MJF.) Business-school types are forever using metrics to mean measurement or gauge. But to the average American reader or listener--trust me on this; I've asked around--metrics means "something they use in Europe instead of inches and pounds." Jargon is OK when you're absolutely certain your audience will understand it; when in doubt, use a simpler expression.

The Price Is Wrong

Bridgestone Tire is running a full-page national magazine ad this month with this offer:

Get Up to $100 Dollars Back

I know the dollar is weak, but the dollar symbol ($) is still pronounced dollars. You don't need to artificially prop it up with the redundant spelled-out version. Use one or the other, not both.

(Oh, and I'm very sorry to report that Bridgestone's tagline is "A Passion for Excellence." I'd prefer a moderate enthusiasm for proofreading.)

Gimme a Spright

In yesterday's New York Times business section, an article headlined "Coke Struggles to Keep Up with Nimble Rivals" included this sentence:

Under Mr. Isdell, Coke is now trying to be a more spritely buyer.

That adjective should be spelled sprightly. The word is an odd example of English orthography becoming more complex rather than simpler over time: the noun form is indeed sprite, from Latin spiritus, "a small supernatural being; an elf or pixie." Sprite has been around since 1303, according to The Online Etymology Dictionary. But the adjective (and it is an adjective, despite that -ly suffix) became the more Germanic-looking sprightly around 1596, and that's the only accepted spelling to this day.

And, yes, Coca-Cola does own Sprite, the lemon-lime beverage introduced in 1961 as a competitor to 7-Up, so I did wonder briefly whether there was a little in-joke going on at the Times. But the misspelling is so common that I think it just slipped past the copy desk.

As long as we're in the bottled-beverage aisle, did you notice that Coca-Cola has just acquired "Energy Brands, known as glacéau," the makers of Vitamin Water? Glacéau is a clever enough portmanteau of the French words for "ice" and "water," but the totally superfluous acute accent is a dead giveaway that no one there parlay-voos. (In fact, glacéau is headquartered in Queens.) And the lower-case "g" is going to have copy editors gritting their teeth, and reaching for bottles of the hard stuff, for years to come. As for "Energy Brands, known as..." is that like "My name is Theodore but call me Beaver"? No clue. (For more on "hyperforeignism," read the ever-acute Mr. Verb here and here.)