Fritinancy

“First they came”: Evolution of a meme

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.

Bad advertising of the Bay Area: Thumbtack

In the last two and a half years, Thumbtack, which matches customers with local service professionals, has raised $255 million in funding. If the company had spent the merest fraction of that sum on a professional copywriter with an elementary understanding of how advertising works, it could have come up with something more effective than this existential shrug of a billboard.

“We don’t know.” <Shrug> 8th and Harrison streets, San Francisco

 

It’s not that I don’t get the tiny, unconvincing joke, O Hipster Ad Agency. Nothing rhymes with orange. Haha.

Here’s the thing (and it pains me to have to point this out):

Billboards are meant to grab your attention in a split-second. They’re not supposed to be convoluted in-jokes. They’re supposed to sell.

And they’re supposed to sell your stuff. Not roses, not “this billboard,” not even florists or poets. If you’re Thumbtack, you want people who see your ad to grok the glories of Thumbtack.

At the risk of repeating myself: We don’t know? Are you effing kidding me? Your website says you’re “reshaping local economies.” You’re “getting things done.” If you don’t know, who does?

And finally: Why is the most important message – “Hire skilled pros for absolutely everything” – in the tiniest type?

A good ad should make you smile in instant recognition. It should be memorable and motivational. It should leave you with a positive impression of the advertiser.

It shouldn’t make you feel like your soul’s been sucked out of your body and sacrificed to the gods of snark.

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Previously in Bad Advertising of the Bay Area:

• Lyft
• Salesforce
• SF Environment / Talking Is Teaching (a double feature!)
• Go Tahoe North
• Sunlee jasmine rice

 

 

 

Superlativest

Spotted on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland: a sign plugging the Jack in the Box Buttery Jack burger.

“Juiciest. Butteriest. Craviest.”

 

 

Sticklers will tell you that of those three adjectives, only juiciest is legit. I’m more concerned about the logical fallacy. Juicy and buttery (and their superlative forms, legit or not) describe the burger itself. But who or what is doing the craving?

.@Fritinancy @JackBox So, the burger is juicy and buttery but somehow is also animate such that it itself has cravings and is thus "cravy"?

— Kevin Sullivan (@languageNhumor) October 27, 2016

Also defying logic: the nutritional value of this sandwich. It contains 820 calories, 470 of them from fat. Its 1150 milligrams of sodium constitute 48 percent of the recommended daily allowance. (Hold the fries!)

Jack in the Box is also proudly serving – and coining – brunchfast, which would seem to require another superlative: brunchfastest.

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Elsewhere in the supersized world of advertising adjectives: funnest, Maker’s-er, closer-er and delicious-er, gooder-est.

A Zen koan from Google

This outdoor ad is composed of simple English words, 10 of which have only one syllable. And yet it’s enigmatic nearly to the point of unintelligibility.

 

“Now goes viral, then scrambles to scale. Next means everyone goes to the launch party.”

 

And pop goes the weasel?

I spotted the sign on Van Ness Avenue, near San Francisco’s Civic Center and some distance from Google headquarters (35 miles away), Pier 48 (four miles away and the site of the Google Cloud Platform Users Conference, which begins today), or any other relevant landmark. It’s a short stroll from the ad to the symphony hall and opera house, but I doubt music aficionados are in the target demographic.

Here, for the benefit of everyone who isn’t fluent in Techlish, is my attempt at decryption:

May Linkfest

Trademark

“When Simon Tam dropped out of college in California and moved to Portland, Ore., to become a rock star, the last tangle he imagined falling into was a multiyear battle with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office over his band’s name.” The trademark tussle over “The Slants,” which the USPTO has deemed “disparaging” and thus ineligible for protection. (For a more technical perspective, see this Brent Lorentz post at Duets Blog.)

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“Your mission statement shouldn’t necessarily be the same thing as your trademark.” Trademark lawyer Jessica Stone Levy on why companies should think twice before registering names like Food Should Taste Good and WannaBettaButt?

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“Falling in love with an internal development name prior to completing a full trademark search and legal review is one of the most common problems companies encounter.” Trademark lawyer Tara Benson on avoiding trademark pitfalls. 

 

Science

What is the Moon’s real name? (Hat tip: Michele Hush.)

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Look for more alphanumeric names like H1N1: The World Health Organization gets tough on disease-naming. 

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Profanity

“You go to their Twitter profile: ‘I’m passionate about brands!’ You’re what? Dude, get a fucking girlfriend.” Veteran adman Bob Hoffman on why we’re living in the golden age of bullshit in advertising and marketing. (Video)

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How and why Lexicon, one of the world’s most influential branding and naming agencies, developed its first iPhone app: a profanity checker.

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“Though badass is historically associated with male pugnacity, perhaps the most striking change is that the word is now often used by and about women.” Jesse Sheidlower—a lexicographer and author of The F Word—tracks the history and soaring popularity of an all-purpose descriptor. (I wrote about badass in brand names in 2012.)

 

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Words and Language

“Webster was a visionary—even a radical—so far ahead of his time, in fact, that grammar and style guides are only now catching up with him.” Linguist Rosemarie Ostler on why Noah Webster, “the founding father of American English,” would have loved Urban Dictionary. (Hat tip: MJF.)

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The strange charm of cutthroat compounds like pickpocket, scarecrow, and, well, cutthroat: Stan Carey on these rare English words “that have a long, colourful history and constitute a very interesting category.” (I wonder how the newish fondleslab fits in?)

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Dictionary.com—offices right here in Oakland!—is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Its latest additions to the word-hoard include anecdata, microaggression, haptics, and a couple of Fritinancy favorites: dox and astroturfing.

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Taglines

“Finding a quick description that was also consumer friendly was exceedingly difficult. But when the founders did come up with the right tagline, the effort was well worth it: ‘The moment we started using the right language, it was like night and day.’ How the right tagline helped turn luxury-products company Cuyana around.

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Baby names

The 2014 Social Security Administration stats on baby names are out, and the Baby Name Wizard blog has discovered some interesting trends in the data. The biggest trend? What naming expert Laura Wattenberg calls “the great smoothing of American baby names”: goodbye “chunky” names (Jayden, Jessica), hello “silky,” vowel-rich names (Amanda, Mia, Noah, Liam).

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Speaking of popular names, here’s a fun tool to discover what your “today baby name” would be, based on the ranking of your own name in the year you were born. The tools works backward too: If I’d been born in the 1890s, chances are I’d have been named Minnie. More than a time-waster, the tool can be a big help in character-naming. (May take a while for the tool to load.)

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Advertising

“She originally went by Flo White, then Lord of the Strings. She eventually settled on the Period Fairy. It was more straightforward.” A new ad from category-busing Hello Flo, which sells a Period Starter Kit to adolescent girls.

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Errata

Which words are most commonly misspelled? Readers of the Lingua Franca blog speak up.

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A new plaque at AT&T Park honoring San Francisco Giants pitcher Madison Bumgarner commits two punctuation errors (apostrophe, hyphen) in the first line. Another reminder, as if we needed one, that it pays to hire a proofreader before casting that encomium in bronze.

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Name of the Year

Which will it be: Lancelot Supersad, Jr., or Amanda Miranda Panda? There’s still time to cast your vote.

April Linkfest

Don’t read “How to Name a Baby” to learn how to name a baby. Read it for insights into historical baby-naming trends and to confirm your hunches (e.g., “the popular girl name Reagan is for Republicans”). Also: charts!

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Given names are “one of the last social acceptable frontiers of class war.”Also: nominative determination, implicit egotism, and how the Internet has made baby naming more difficult. Part 1 of a four-part podcast series about names from Australian radio network ABC. The presenter, Tiger Webb, has an interesting name story himself. (Hat tip: Superlinguo.)

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The not-so-secret jargon of doctors is full of acronyms: a flea—fucking little esoteric asshole—is an intern, an FLK is a “funny-looking kid,” and an “SFU 50 dose” is the amount of sedative it takes for 50 percent of patients to shut the fuck up.

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Ever wonder what value-creating winners do all day? Here’s Business Town to enlighten you. It’s “an ongoing project attempting to explain our highly intangible, deeply disruptive, data-driven, venture-backed, gluten-free economic meritocracy to the uninitiated. With apologies to Richard Scarry.”

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Stop your whinging, Brits: a lot of those so-called Americanisms you profess to detest—like “gotten” and “fall”—were originally English.

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The spectacular neon art of the Walker Collection of American Signs, a swath of advertising history auctioned earlier this month in Proctor, Arkansas.

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Attention, domain shoppers and everyone who believes the best defense is an offensive offense: the .sucks domain went on sale in early April. There was an immediate buying frenzy; consumer advocate Ralph Nader promoted it in a commercial as “a protest word.” Now ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has asked U.S. and Canadian regulatory agencies to determine whether the the domain’s high price—$2,499 during the “sunrise” period—is illegal. (For more about the unusual relationship between Vox Populi—which secured the rights to sell the .sucks domain—and ICANN, see John R. Levine’s blog.)

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“The decision is made. The name won’t be changed.” – Tim Mahoney, head of marketing for Chevy, speaking to the Detroit Free Press about the Bolt electric vehicle, whose name is strikingly similar to that of the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid. In fact, a Spanish speaker would pronounce the two names identically. (Hat tip: Jonathon Owen.)

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I’ve been saying this for ages, but now I can quote the Harvard Business Review: Group brainstorming is a waste of time.

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“A brand of snack bars is made ‘in small batches at our own makery’. Makery? I am guessing that ‘makery’ is a portmanteau for ‘made-up bakery’.” Steven Poole on why the language of food packaging makes him sick. (Hat tip: Lynne Murphy.)

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Remember wack slacks, lamestain, and swingin’ on the flippity-flop? Of course you don’t. Why grungespeak was the greatest language hoax of the 1990s.

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Chart: How to say “It’s all Greek to me” in 30 languages. (For Greeks, it’s all Chinese.)

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Negative polarity item, critique drift, and other terms—many of them linguistic—that have caught the eye of tech writer/editor Mike Pope.

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Lindström, Minnesota, is getting its umlaut back.

English is the language where diacritics go to die. Except in Minnesota. #missionumlaut. h/t @SPNoir @JKealing pic.twitter.com/8q80R4n6nR

— Patrick Cox (@patricox) April 15, 2015

And don’t forget all those gratuitously umlautted brand names!

Signs of Weirdness

One side of a sandwich board in front of the John Fluevog store on Grant Avenue, San Francisco:

 

“Know You’re Weird!”

 

The other side:

 

“No, You’re Weird!”

 

The resemblance to the “Keep Calm and Carry On” oeuvre is probably not coincidental, but the weirdness and wordplay are pure Fluevog. The Canadian shoe company is weird and proud of it, starting with its name—John Fluevog is the founder and chief designer—and carrying on, as it were, through the merchandise.

Take, for example, this current boot, the Angelina.

 

 

Or a chunky, four-color Mary Jane called the Sam.

The Escarpin has a ball-and-claw heel inspired by the cabriole legs of Louis XV furniture.

 

 

The men’s styles are equally striking.

The Alexander. (A metallic cap-toe oxford? Brilliant.)

 

Sometimes the weirdness overlaps with pure design genius.

The Neptune, perfect for a gala at the natural history museum or a stroll through the Everglades.

 

Lots of companies pay lip service to customer service and community, but Fluevog is the rare business that follows through. Its community (or “Flummunity”) includes a marketplace (“Fluemarket”) for secondhand Fluevog shoes and an invitation to submit a shoe design. Quite a few submissions have made the cut. (It’s “open source,” so no one gets paid, but the citizen-designer gets a free pair and the honor of having the design named after her or him.)

I’m a Vogger myself: I own two pairs of Fluevog sandals (these and these), whose styling skews toward the less-weird end of the Fluevog spectrum but is still distinctive enough to elicit admiring comments. (I think they’re admiring.) The shoes are beautifully made and very, very comfortable.

I wrote about the Fluevog.com FAQ page in 2007. A few of my favorite Fluevog Q’s:

“Who played vibes with Benny Goodman’s big band between 1936 and 1940?”

“Why are Fluevogs so expensive?”

“Are John Fluevog Angels really Satan resistant?”

 

Oh, Say Can You See?

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the writing of “The Star Spangled Banner,” which became the national anthem of the United States in 1931. In Baltimore, where Francis Scott Key wrote the lyrics, celebrations and historic events began on Flag Day, June 14, and will continue through Defender’s Day, September 14.

I’m guessing some anonymous wit at the U.S. Postal Service had the occasion in mind when she or he penned this tribute:

Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

 

As I’m sure you know, the anthem’s notoriously hard-to-sing melody was lifted from a popular 18th-century British drinking song, “To Anacreon in Heaven,” whose refrains include this couplet:

Whilst, snug in their clubroom, they jovially twine
The Myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's Vine. 

In other words: wine, women, and song.

May Linkfest

I’ve been interested for years in advertisers’ penchant for turning adjectives into nouns and nouns into verbs. In his regular column for The Week, James Harbeck, a linguistics-trained editor, looks at why these switches—collectively known as anthimeria—work. It’s all about bisociation: “You have two things operating on two different planes or according to two different scripts, and at the point where the two meet, you jump from one to the other. … Bisociation tickles your brain, and that’s just what marketers want to do.”

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Here’s something lovely: Vernacular Typography, “dedicated to the documentation and preservation of vanishing examples of lettering in the everyday environment.” A project of the New York Foundation for the Arts, it catalogs ghost signs, Coney Island signs, no-parking signs, subway signs, grammatical-error signs, and much more.

Graham Home for Old Ladies, catalogued in the Architectural section.

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Think it might be fun to name a racehorse? Be sure you read the Jockey Club’s naming rules first. Here, for example, are three types of ineligible names:

• Names clearly having commercial, artistic or creative significance;
• Names that are suggestive or have a vulgar or obscene meaning; names considered in poor taste; or names that may be offensive to religious, political or ethnic groups;
• Names of winners in the past 25 years of grade one stakes races.

There are 14 additional no-nos on that list.

( Via Dustbury.)

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Why do so many Chinese restaurants in the U.S. and around the world use “Tasty” in their names? Victor Mair investigates at Language Log. Commenters weigh in with other Chinese-restaurant name trends, including “Panda,” “Garden,” and “Wok ’n’ Roll.”

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Oxford Dictionaries has an app that identifies your “birthday word”: a words that entered English the year you were born. If you’re an OED subscriber, you can narrow the field to the month as well as the year. Read Dennis Baron (Dr. Grammar) on his own birthday word, “gobbledygook.”

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Why do we call parrots “Polly”? The answer, says Mental Floss, has almost nothing to do the feminine nickname.

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Reason #46,312 to love the Internet: Every Apple reference on “Futurama” and “The Simpsons.”

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Reason #46,313: The best worst names in superhero comics, compiled with frightening thoroughness by Drew G. Mackie of Back of the Cereal Box. A few of my favorites: Egg Fu, Microwavebelle, Flemgem, and Rice O’Rooney (the San Francisco Threat). If you don’t know why the last one is so bad it’s good, watch this. 

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Electric-car manufacturer Tesla recently abandoned its Model E trademark, and Duets Blogger Martha Engel wonders whether Ford Motor Company—which still owns the Model T mark, as well as its own Model E trademark—had something to do with it. Meanwhile, the Oatmeal’s Matthew Ingram waxes rhapsodic about his Tesla Model S: he loves everything about it except the name. He prefers “Magical Space Car.”

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On April 22 the New York Times launched The Upshot, an online section that focuses on politics and policy. The name was chosen over 45 also-rans, including Crux, Kernel, Sherpa, and Uncharted. Why did The Upshot prevail? “It’s simple and straightforward,” the editors write, “and there’s no inside joke or historical reference you’ll need to understand what it’s about: a clear analysis of the news, in a conversational tone.”

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Now that Pied Piper, the fictional startup in HBO’s “Silicon Valley” series, has an official logo, how well does it stack up?

 

Betabeat (“The Lowdown on High Tech”) does a comparative analysis and pronounces it “safe” but “off to a good start.” The green color, notes Betabeat, signals equilibrium, harmony and balance. And according to Hindu tradition, the green chakra represents self-love — which, to be fair, is the only kind of love anyone in Pied Piper is getting so far.” Via Brand New. (Also see my post about the Pied Piper name.)

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In November 2012, voters in Washington State legalized marijuana use and authorized the licensing of retail outlets to sell cannabis. (Voter turnout, Wikipedia notes with no apparent irony, was 81 percent, “the highest in the nation.”) Now that Seattle’s first pot stores have been chosen by lottery, let’s take a look at their names. Lots of greens (Greenjuana, Evergreen, Street of Greens, Green Vision, Greenco, Behind the Green Door), quite a bit of 420 (Seattle 420, 420 PM Corp, Highway 420, 420-911), and a few whose owners appear to be fans of “The Wire” (Bellinghamsterdam, Vansterdam, Hamsterdam, New Vansterdam). Kinda meh, if you ask me, but hey—it’s still a budding industry. (Hat tip: Benjamin Lukoff.)

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In related news, Fast Company’s Co.Design blog talks to four cannabis-industry experts about “how to brand a high-demand, once-illegal product.” Cherchez les femmes, says Cheryl Shuman, who points to “stiletto stoners”—successful working women who smoke pot—as a key demographic. (Hat tip: Irene Nelson.)

Shopgirl "So"

I spotted this sign at Coverings in San Luis Obispo, home of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

“We are so hiring.”  The small red type reads: “(and a professional, motivated, energetic, team oriented attitude).”

 

It’s not just the photo that tells you that the target market is young and female. It’s also that little word “so” – and, more to the point, the way it functions as a verb-intensifier.  

So+verb is new enough that it doesn’t have a fixed name. I’m calling it Shopgirl So because of the retail association here, but in a November 2011 blog post linguist Arnold Zwicky called it GenX So (“named that for its spread in people from Generation X”). An undated and equally scholarly post at Yale Grammatical Diversity Project calls it Drama SO. (“So” is all caps to convey emphasis; according to YGDP, “In Drama SO constructions, so must receive the highest pitch accent in the sentence.”)

Or you could go back to the beginning and call it Clueless So, in acknowledgment of the movie of that name, released in 1995: “Oh thank you, Josh, I so need lessons from you on how to be cool.”

In fact the OED, in a 2005 addendum, gives that Clueless line as the earliest citation for so+verb (“definitely, decidedly. Freq. in negative constructions”). The construction also showed up in TV’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” as early as 1996 (“We so don’t have time”).

(“So” is a busy little syllable these days. I’ve written previously about “not so much” = “not at all” in advertising; see also Ben Yagoda in Lingua Franca, “So It Turns Out That Everyone’s Starting Sentences with ‘So’.”)

Intensifiers in general are often associated with the speech of girls and women, and so+verb is no exception, as all of the above examples suggest. Zwicky, however, says the connection may be spurious:

The stereotypical associations of GenX so are to young white women (in the U.S.), no doubt because of its prominence in the movies Heathers (1988) and Clueless (1994). Studies of actual usage (though admittedly small in scale) suggest that the actual association with women, while apparently real, is smaller than the stereotype would suggest; and as the GenXers have aged, they seem to have carried this usage with them, and it’s spread to many people not in GenX (like me).

The other line in the sign that caught my attention was the slightly unidiomatic “gift for the gab.” The standard idiom is “the gift of [the] gab” (“an ability to speak easily and confidently”), but that’s not my main gripe. I’m just not happy about “gab” in this context: call me old-fashioned, but I’d prefer that sales associates not “talk idly or incessantly, as about trivial matters” while on the job.

Note too the cheerleading for corporate passion in the ad.

Related trivia: Travel writer Dan Buettner called San Luis Obispo “the happiest city in America” in his 2011 book Thrive. And Cal Poly SLO’s mascot is called Musty the Mustang.