Fritinancy

On the Visual Thesaurus: That extra S

The inspiration for my July column for the Visual Thesaurus came from a magazine ad for a Schick razor.

 

“Shave forwards and backwards”

 

When I worked as a copyeditor, I was trained to lop off the s at the end of words like forward and backward. It’s what American editors do (but not our British counterparts, who tend to keep the s at the end of all those directional -ward words). Yet here was an ad in an American magazine for an American brand, and here were forwards and backwards. Was this a new trend?

May linkfest

Hotels.com registered the longest URL in internet history “to prove it has more than hotels.” (Adweek)

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“One very recent scandal in immigration politics in Britain was, improbably, named after a ship that sank decades ago.” (Lingua Franca) .

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Kim Kardashian’s decision to name her new lingerie line “Kimono Intimates” has provoked charges of cultural appropriation. But all Jezebel – and I – could think of was a 30-year-old condom brand.

 

Word of the week: Wypipo

Maybe you’ve never seen the word wypipo. I’d never seen it myself until a couple of weeks ago. But just say it aloud, or even silently: WYE-pee-poh.

Still not getting it? Take a look at this:

Via The Lisa B Experience (Lisa Beasley)

 

No? Here; I’ll help: Wypipo is white people with a dash of baby-talk and a lot of eyeroll. It’s used almost exclusively by people of color, almost always as a term of condescension, disparagement, or outright hostility. Its origins, like those of many slang terms, are murky, but there’s a better than zero probability that it was born on social media, where eye dialect thrives. (I first encountered it on Twitter.) As a written word, it’s pretty recent: Urban Dictionary has only two entries, the earliest of which is dated January 29, 2016: “Twitter slang or dialect that with read aloud sounds like ‘white people’ which is its actual meaning.” The example sentence in that entry is: “Girl wypipo are crazy, they let their dogs lick their mouths.”

It will probably not surprise you to learn that usage of wypipo has grown exponentially since the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, during the weekend of August 12.

The case of the forbidden letters

(Part of my Naming 101 series.)

The naming brief was comprehensive and clear, except for one line toward the end: “No names that begin with A, B, or F.”

Wait. What?

July linkfest

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.

To nape, perchance to dream

Welcome to another installment of “Brands That Don’t Understand English Vowel Sounds”! Our subject today comes courtesy of David Lloyd Clubs, established in 1982 and headquartered in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, UK, so unfamiliarity with the language is most likely not an excuse. The company calls itself “Europe’s premier racquets and fitness provider,” but the new class it announced last week is especially tailored for people who prefer to get fit without actually moving around. This is what it’s called:

 

World’s greatest derp

Federal-level idiocy was on full, florid display this week. On Sunday, the current occupant of the White House and Mar-a-Lago took to Twitter to share his innermost thoughts, and got so carried away he misspelled the word principles.

It’s probably not a word he’s had much occasion to use.

Name in the news: Cold Fire

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we’re having our usual cool and foggy summer. But in the hotter inland and upland parts of the state, wildfire season is entering its third month. A couple of weeks ago, I drove home from Los Angeles on I-5, near where the poetically named Sand Fire was consuming more than 41,000 acres in the Santa Clarita Valley. The name suggested a hellish haboob, but in fact the fire was named for nearby Sand Canyon.

Most wildfires are named that way: after local landmarks. “The commander on the scene often uses a nearby geographical feature to describe the fire, but he's not bound by any official rules,” Daniel Engber wrote in a 2005 Slate article about fire-naming. “He first suggests a name to the interagency fire dispatcher, who passes it along in fire reports, dispatches, and so on.”

How, then, to explain the Cold Fire, which is currently raging in Napa and Yolo counties?

Cold Fire near Lake Berryessa, August 3, 2016. Photo via The (Santa Rosa) Press-Democrat.

April linkfest

Good news for liberal-arts majors: “Behind Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana are not just software engineers. Increasingly, there are poets, comedians, fiction writers, and other artistic types charged with engineering the personalities for a fast-growing crop of artificial intelligence tools.” (“The Next Hot Job in Silicon Valley Is for Poets,” Washington Post.)

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A small hotel group, Small Luxury Hotels of the World, is “ditching photos entirely in its new campaign and running text-only ads that flatter the target market by suggesting they'd never fall for typical tourism marketing anyway.” (“This Hotel Group Is ‘Unadvertising’ Its Properties with Intentionally Dull, Text-Only Ads,” AdWeek.)

 

 

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March linkfest

Tuscan chicken, Tuscan toilets, Tuscan hummus: What exactly does Tuscan mean, anyway? (The New Yorker)

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How do nouns become verbs? Why are we OK with buttering our bread or boycotting a business, but clench our teeth at impacting and efforting? (JStor Daily) More on how branding weirds language (by me).

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And 1 extra grammatical error than Original Ready Crust too. pic.twitter.com/uAT87Bw5LV

— Jonathon Owen (@ArrantPedantry) March 14, 2016

 

 

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A 12-stanza poem composed entirely from the titles of SXSW panels.

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