He lived 91 richly productive years, attended a live theater production eleven days before he died, enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner with friends the day before his death. Who can ask, as the Gershwin song goes, for anything more? But we fans are greedy: The death of the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, on November 26, after a long life of creative brilliance, leaves us wanting still more.
So here’s a little more.
A partial list of Sondheim musicals in chronological order, via Teepublic
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Cleo Levin wrote for Slate about “ridiculously surreal” made-for-Amazon brand names: “Here were a series of names that were not only unknown to me, but also quite perplexing: Artfish, Wishpig, Sweatyrocks, Demonlick, and Pukemark.”
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Ben Zimmer wrote for Beyond Wordplay about Washington’s new Planet Word Museum, which opened via virtual ribbon-cutting—with President Obama as a surprise guest—on October 22.
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“When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
That was the phrase in a tweet sent on May 28 from the @realDonaldTrump account—and retweeted by the official White House account—that caused Twitter to append a notice of rule violation: “This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible” (capitalization sic). If you want to see the original tweet, you need to click “View.” Replies to the tweet are hidden.
Twitter’s action provoked a lively discussion of First Amendment protections (which don’t apply to private companies, even publicly traded ones) and the source of the rhyming threat (a statement in 1967 by Miami’s chief of police, about which the president claimed ignorance—possibly because a staffer with greater historical knowledge had suggested the line).
But historian Peter A. Shulman had something else on his mind.
Curious about the once again omni-present word "looter," I looked up the etymology.
— Peter A. Shulman (@pashulman) May 29, 2020
I was.. surprised!
Without looking, where does the word come from?
Any guesses?
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Last month I wrote about the henchman in a New York Daily News headline, “All the President’s Henchmen.” This week my new Visual Thesaurus column looks at the whole phrase, which is an example of a snowclone, or phrasal template. (Other well-used snowclones include “X is the new Y” and “Eskimos have N words for snow.”)
“All the president’s men” and its variations – including “All the President’s Lawyers” (a podcast), “All the President’s Mess” (a recurring feature on MSNBC), and “All the President’s Mendacity”(another Daily News headline) – trace their origins to the 1974 Woodward-Bernstein book about Nixon and Watergate. And that title was a variation on All the King’s Men (1946), the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Robert Penn Warren … which itself came from the old Humpty Dumpty rhyme, which was popularized by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass (1871) but didn’t originate there.
Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers for three months. Here’s an excerpt:
In The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, the renowned British folklorists Iona and Peter Opie quote one of their sources as saying the rhyme may be “one of those pieces the antiquity of which ‘is to be measured in thousands of years, or rather it is so great that it cannot be measured at all.’” There are similar rhymes in many European traditions, the Opies write, “and it seems undeniable that they are connected with the English rhyme.” …
The “Humpty Dumpty” name pre-dates the character in the rhyme. In the late 17th century, according to the OED, humpty dumpty was a drink made of ale boiled with brandy. A century later, humpty dumpty was a jocular term for “a short, dumpy, hump-shouldered person."”Because of the latter association, there has been speculation – never substantiated – that the Humpty Dumpty in the rhyme was King Richard III, who was depicted as a hunchback in Shakespeare’s play and other sources. Another faux etymology was proposed by David Daube, a British professor who wrote in a 1956 issue of The Oxford Magazine that Humpty Dumpty was a siege engine that “sat on a wall” and was used unsuccessfully in 1643, during the English Civil War. But the Opies dismissed Daube’s theory as “a spoof” and “ingenuity for ingenuity’s sake.”
Read the rest of the column (and leave a comment)!
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Rhyme in advertising, once a well-practiced art form, is now almost defunct. As I wrote in the Visual Thesaurus a few years ago (“Ads That Rhyme: Past Their Prime?”), “By the time Orson Welles intoned ‘We will sell no wine before its time’ — a slant or ‘imperfect’ rhyme — for the Paul Masson brand in the late 1970s, Americans were experiencing verse fatigue. Within a few years, rhyming jingles had all but evaporated.”
Still, I have a soft spot for those rhyming ads of yore, which were often catchy and well crafted. So it was with a hopeful heart that I discovered a full-page, inside-back-cover ad for Geico with a seven-line verse in the March 12 issue of the New Yorker.
Alas, poetic justice was not to be served.
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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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In my new column for the Visual Thesaurus, “Ads That Rhyme: Past Their Prime?”, I look at the so-called golden age of rhyming ads and slogans—the 1940s through the 1970s—and ask whether rhyme still has a place in advertising.
Full access is restricted to subscribers; here’s an excerpt:
The very popularity of rhyming ads and slogans probably contributed to their demise. By the time Orson Welles intoned “We will sell no wine before its time”—a slant or “imperfect” rhyme—for the Paul Masson brand in the late 1970s, Americans were experiencing verse fatigue. Within a few years, rhyming jingles had all but evaporated. Instead of jingles we began to hear licensed or commissioned pop songs—soundtracks that establish a mood rather than urge a purchase. Nike’s licensing of the Beatles’ “Revolution,” in 1987, is often cited as a turning point; since then, ads have featured the familiar songs of Johnny Cash (for Choice Hotels), M.C. Hammer (Purell), Robert Palmer (Applebee’s), the Lovin’ Spoonful (Kohl’s), and many other artists. (See a longer list here.) Commissioned original music is rarer, and it often takes the lazy way out by spoofing a familiar childhood tune: see, for example, this current ad for Norfolk Southern, which “updates” the “Schoolhouse Rock” song “Conjunction Junction”; and Stephin Merritt’s lugubrious reworking of “The Wheels on the Bus,” for Volvo.
Read the rest of “Ads That Rhyme: Past Their Prime?”
Blog bonus:
A recent ad for the Ford C-MAX hybrid minivan gives a depressing picture of the current state of versifying:
When you’re carrying a lot of weight,
C-MAX has a nice little trait,
you see, C-MAX helps load your freight,
with its foot-activated liftgate.
Here’s a slightly more successful attempt at rhyming, a Dr. Seuss tribute from Prius:
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Let’s play the name game!
Boku! “BOKU enables people across the globe to pay for the things they love using the one device they’re never without.” Phonetic spelling of French beaucoup (much, a lot). Based in San Francisco, with offices in London, Berlin, and Singapore.
Loku! “At Loku, we have built the first-of-it’s-kind [sic] local analytics technology that gathers and synthesizes local information from the web & social media.” Possibly from “location” plus “you.” Based in Berkeley.
Zoku! “Zoku is dedicated to providing unique products for the home. We are a collective of creative individuals who create things that will make our lives better through intelligent design and engineering.” No name story provided, but zoku means “tribe,” “clan,” or “family” in Japanese. Based in Hoboken.
Roku! “Roku launched the first product designed to deliver movies from Netflix instantly on TV, using the power of the Internet.” Based in San Francisco. Roku is the Japanese word for “six”; more about Roku here.
All together now …
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