Dictionary.com’s word of the year for 2017 is complicit. The selection is based on the number of online lookups, which spiked in March, when SNL featured a perfume ad parody; and in April, when Ivanka Trump said she didn’t know “what it means to be complicit.”
Collins Dictionary, based in London and Glasgow, got a head start on the WOTY competition in early November, selecting fake news over runners-up such as unicorn, echo chamber, and gig economy. (Related: My November 2016 post on fake.)
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You’ll find the story behind this week’s word, blue falcon, over at Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing. What does blue falcon have to do with swearing? A couple of hints: It’s a bit of coded military jargon that became a Twitter hashtag after an emotional speech delivered by White House Chief of Staff (and retired Marine general) John Kelly.
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Linguist Arnold Zwicky examines the “ostentatious euphemism” beat the snack out of, as seen in a recent Jack Link’s ad. I’ve written about ostentatious euphemisms myself – “Ship my pants,” “Look at the booking view,” “Do you give a cup?” – and am glad to know what to call them.
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A linguist walks in a Mexican restaurant in southern Arizona – several of them, in fact – and takes note of the various kinds of Spanishes on the menu, from mock to minimal to weirdly translated.
Eater magazine published a five-part series on bad restaurant names, from bad puns to “distressingly sexual” to “crimes against language” to “just really bad.” Start with Part 1 and follow the links at the end to read about the others.
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The names of some of the world’s most successful brands – from Accenture to Zantac – were widely ridiculed when they were first announced. In my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, “Why Do We Hate New Names?”, I look at the causes of name aversion and the reason we eventually change our minds. (Hint: Zajonc effect.)
Access to the article is restricted to subscribers (please subscribe!). Here’s an excerpt:
Why do we tend to react strongly and negatively to unfamiliar words, which, after all, have no power to physically harm us? Probably because humans are wired to reject novelty. In our prehistory, any mysterious plant might have been toxic; any strange person could have posed a threat. We favor familiarity in our environments – and our words. “It is common to bat away linguistic novelty – ‘It won't catch on’,” wrote the language expert Henry Hitchings in 2011. “Such disdain is tinged with anxiety, and to speak of ‘our’ language is to identify the source of this fear. For while no one truly owns English or any other natural language, we feel proprietorial about the language that we speak and write. As a result we are apt to look on linguistic changes – including new words – as personal affronts.”
Two hundred fifty years ago, Hitchings adds, the lexicographer Samuel Johnson disparaged the noun finesse as “an unnecessary word which is creeping into the language.” I’d add that a century ago, the writer and language-advice-giver Ambrose Bierce told Americans to avoid the adjective talented because “there was never the verb ‘to talent’.” In the same vein, a lot of people hated lunch, jeopardize, and the verb to contact – that last usage until as recently as the 1960s. We know how those controversies ended.
Read the rest of the column. And thanks to Jan Freeman, author of Write It Right, for the Ambrose Bierce examples!
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Elsewhere on the web, I’ve written a few posts for Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing, that I’ve neglected to flog here. Earlier this month, I wrote about “AF,” the sweary acronym that’s made a commercial debut in New York subway ads for FoodKick, a meal- and booze-delivery service. I also took a figurative bite out of the idiom “shit sandwich,” and rounded up a bunch of sweary-yet-edifying links. While you’re over at Strong Language, check out my collaborators’ posts, too, and leave a comment or a “like” to give us a reason to keep on keeping on.
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“Broadly speaking,” Winston Churchill may or may not have said*, “short words are best, and old words when short are the best of all.” With Oath, the name of the new division that will house AOL and Yahoo’s media and business-to-business properties after those two companies merge, parent company Verizon gets a twofer: short and old.
The name was revealed in a cryptic tweet from AOL CEO Time Armstrong on Tuesday afternoon: “Billion+ Customers, 20+ Brands, Unstoppable Team. #TakeTheOath. Summer 2017.” Twitter predictably piled on, not without justification. But I solemnly pledge to give the new name a fair hearing.
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I’m generally skeptical of corporate-storytelling advice, but Andy Raskin’s “How to Design Your Company Story” is just wacky enough – its hypothetical company is called FairyGodmothers.com – to win me over.
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An illustrated guide to Republican metaphors for the Affordable Care Act, from goat to puzzle to house of sand.
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There’s going to be a sweary-face emoji. (Hat tip: Ben Zimmer.)
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Why do so many robot names sound alike? FastCoDesign put the question to name developer Christopher Johnson, who explained that Kuri, Yui, Yobi, et al. “sound like the kind of names you might give your dog.”
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Speaking of machines and names, Amazon’s Alexa is making life miserable for a lot of people named Alexis, Alex, and Alexa.
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Some good advice from Nielsen Norman Group, the user-experience people, on writing headlines, page titles, subject lines, and other “microcontent.”
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PROFANITY BREAK!
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Is shitgibbon the simian epithet of the year? After Daylin Leach, a Pennsylvania state senator, used the word in a tweet aimed at @realDonaldTrump, Ben Zimmer did some scholarly analysis for Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing; and for Slate’s Browbeat blog.
Then the MetaFilter crowd weighed in. (Sample: “No mention of the shitgibbon’s closest primate relative, the poontangutan?”)
Linguist Gretchen McCulloch considered “the origin and constraints of shitgibbon compounds.” (She thinks douchebaboon “would actually work just fine,” but shitbaboon and shitcanoe “are both pretty bad.”)
Geoff Nunberg – you may know him as linguist Geoff Nunberg from NPR’s “Fresh Air” – waxed poetic.
@bgzimmer @stronglang @browbeat Or to summarize the story as a double dactyl: pic.twitter.com/6im5FrMcEe
— Geoffrey Nunberg (@GeoffNunberg) February 12, 2017
And The Forward’s language columnist, Aviya Kushner, surveyed the whole megillah, observing parenthetically: “Many of us, even if we aren’t senators or linguists, can use a little bit of fun right now, and why not turn to insult-making as stress relief?”
Finally, we bid adieu to the zoo and consider the shit show. Or is it shitshow?
"Shit show" and "shitshow" are neck and neck in our data, and also in the world in general. https://t.co/nFAEvStqG1
— Kory Stamper (@KoryStamper) January 30, 2017
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END OF PROFANITY BREAK.
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How do new drugs get those strange-sounding names? (See also my post from last September about the psoriasis drug Taltz.)
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Where does new slang comes from?
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Australia has some pretty awesome ads about dying, I'll give it that pic.twitter.com/ib2aAmOmbK
— Matt Novak (@paleofuture) February 15, 2017
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The surprising history of snowflake as a political insult.
I love this. Such a sublime failure of understanding how the 'putting the X into Y' headline fórmula works. pic.twitter.com/LU2cwXkwxb
— Nick Parker (@nickparker) February 10, 2017
Ben Yagoda has been seeing a lot of better in advertisements, and he doesn’t feel good about it.
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There’s better, there’s worse, and then there’s Thee Worst.
“Thee Worst” is Dutch for “tea sausage.” Hat tip: @AbsP.
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“Now that a sneering, orange man-child is sinking his tiny fingers into every aspect of American life, [branding] experts believe activism will become nearly as ubiquitous in the brand world as it is on college campuses.” Let’s see what they have to say.
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HOW ALL CAPS CAME TO SIGNIFY SHOUTING.
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In the 1950s, English translations of a statement by Martin Niemöller – a German Lutheran pastor who had at first supported Adolf Hitler’s rise to power but was later imprisoned for opposing the Nazi regime, and spent the last years of World War II in a concentration camp – began circulating in the United States. The statement (sometimes called a poem) was based on speeches Niemöller had begun giving in 1946. There are various versions, of which this one is perhaps the best known. All of the versions end in the same way: “Then they came for me / and there was no one left / to speak for me.”
“The quote was that rarest of things,” writes Megan Garber in The Atlantic: “a political argument grounded in religious tradition.”
In the last few weeks, Niemöller’s words have been revived and revised by people protesting the actions of the Trump/Bannon/Pence presidency – in particular, the ban on Muslims entering the U.S. The new slogans begin, like the original, with “First they came,” but they end in defiance.
“First they came for the Muslims and we said, “Not this time!”
Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor who was a Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2016, put it slightly differently:
The text is “infinitely malleable,” writes Garber, and, despite being 70 years old, uniquely well suited to 21st-century protest:
“First They Came” … is particularly attuned to the needs of the modern protest: It offers wisdom about the evils of the past, in an attempt to prevent more evils of the future. To use its language is to claim an understanding of history—and an understanding, too, of how readily its mistakes can be repeated by those who fall victim to the luxuries of forgetfulness. It is #neveragain, and #neverforget, with the subjects added in. It is a poem made powerful by its pronouns: They-I-I, They-I-I, They-I-I, They-no one-me.
However!
This is the 21st century, and some of the new endings would make a starchy Lutheran pastor gasp, or faint. Here’s the one that’s gotten the most play:
“Not today motherfucker.” Via Amy Schumer on Instagram, among others and elsewhere.
I’ve also seen “Not today, asshole,” which was already a well-established meme by the time of the protests.
But there’s still another twist to the story.
Last week, at a March for Refugees in Salt Lake City, a woman named Karla held a hand-written sign that managed to be sly, tender, and subversive all at once.
This is Karla. I want Karla to see herself on the news. #RefugeesWelcome #SLC #LDS #protest #MarchForRefugees pic.twitter.com/lZ0U8LNgnw
— Jenn (@jlms_qkw) February 4, 2017
What a time to be alive, when even #PoliteMormonMoms are part of #TheResistance.
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Since 2009 I have observed Festivus – the holiday for the rest of us, celebrated on December 23 – by publishing misspellings, grammar flubs, and punctuation errors committed in the name of commerce. It’s all been lighthearted and lightly instructive: my way of honoring The Airing of Grievances, a mock-tradition of this mock-holiday.
This year, however, my grievances are much more grievous than a misplaced apostrophe or a misspelled brass plaque.
Like many of you, I was dismayed by the 2016 presidential campaign, its outcome, and its aftermath. As I surveyed the devastation, I saw root causes in the practices of my own industry – marketing and branding – and in the ideology of technology, which now permeates the general culture.
And so my grievances this year aren’t minor infractions but rather more serious sins. Here, as I see it, is how we came to this sorry pass.
Via Pinterest. An authentic Festivus pole would be unadorned: decorations are “distracting.”
Continue reading "The airing of grievances: A Festivus wail" »
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