Fritinancy

Swim or sink

It’s not often that I have a chance to write about the intersection of naming and swimming, two of my primary interests. But in the last seven days I’ve seen two swim-related names that caught my eye, for better and for worse.

I remember reading about Swimply—“a marketplace that connects owners of underutilized swimming pools with people seeking to gather, swim and escape locally”—not long after the company launched in June 2018. “That’s a really bad name,” I thought back then. “But hey—the founder is only 20 years old. Of course he’ll change it!” Right? Wrong.

It’s still Swimply—a portmanteau* of swim and simply—and it’s still bad.

Word of the week: #LochMess

#LochMess: A hashtag identifying the scandal involving 12-time Olympic swimming medalist Ryan Lochte, who, along with three of his U.S. teammates, claimed to have been robbed at gunpoint in Rio de Janeiro the night after their gold-medal performance in the 4 x 200 freestyle relay. Brazilian police investigators later determined that Lochte had lied about the incident, and that the four Americans had vandalized a gas-station bathroom while drunk and had been confronted by security guards demanding payment for damages. Lochte later repented publicly without exactly apologizing (he said he should have been “more careful and candid” in his description of the incident); on August 21 he told the Today Show’s Matt Lauer that he had “over-exaggerated” the story.

In social-media commentary, the incident was at first hashtagged #LochteGate, following the tried-and-true pattern for scandal nomenclature that originated with Watergate, the name of the hotel that housed the Democratic National Committee headquarters during the 1972 presidential campaign. Then, on August 18, Laya Maheshwari suggested an alternative.

Humble request to refer to the Ryan Lochte scandal not as #LochteGate but as #LochMess.

— Laya Maheshwari (@lazygarfield) August 18, 2016

The new hashtag, a pun on Loch Ness – home of the perennially elusive Loch Ness monster – combines the first syllable of Lochte’s surname with mess, which more accurately connotes the shifting narrative than any suffix suggesting “scandal.” What’s more, the monster, mythical or not, is a swimmer like Lochte. Well played, Laya Maheshwari!

Fun, Funner, Funnest

Here we go again.

 

 

“Get in the funnest sport there is.”

 

Ten industry partners, including the youth-sports organization USA Swimming and several swimsuit manufacturers, are collaborating on a summer-long campaign to encourage kids to join a swim club or team—in other words, to view swimming as a sport instead of a grimly utilitarian anti-drowning measure.

The campaign includes a series of promotional spots featuring kids having fun and showing off. In a column about the ads, the New York Times’s Andrew Adam Newman wrote:

The spots direct viewers to a website for the effort, SwimToday.org, and promote a hashtag that will not endear the organization to English teachers, #funnestsport.

It’s not the first time funnest (or funner, for that matter) has pushed peevers’ buttons. Back in 2008, Apple described a new iPod Touch as “the funnest iPod ever,” and “people all over the Internet freaked out,” wrote Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty. Ben Zimmer devoted a Visual Thesaurus column to funner and funnest, affirming that they are “real words,” albeit “nonstandard, colloquial, informal” ones. He provided historical perspective:

Why are reactions so strong against funner and funnest? Plain old fun has always gotten something of a bad rap: back in 1755, Samuel Johnson called it “a low cant word,” meaning that it was jargon from the underworld. Over the centuries, the reputation of fun has been rehabilitated, but only as a noun. Many usage guides still state bluntly that fun is a noun and not an adjective. But it's a plain fact that fun has increasingly been treated as an adjective by modern English speakers, even among those who object to adding the comparative and superlative suffixes.

In other words, most people today won’t protest if you say “The party was fun.” (In his new book Bad Language, which I wrote about earlier this week, Ammon Shea notes that fun began to be used as an adjective in the middle of the 19th century.) Still, “creeping ‘adjectivization’ can sometimes only go so far,” Zimmer observed:

Adding -er or -est is the most in-your-face way to flag a word as an adjective, since there’s no possible way of connecting it back to the original noun sense. That’s a bridge too far for many English speakers. But for a lot of people born in the last thirty or forty years, especially in the United States, there's nothing objectionable about funner or funnest, at least in informal usage. In another thirty or forty years, these words might even be considered acceptable in standard written English.

The argument failed to convince some of his readers. “I refuse to allow advertising to dictate the evolution of the language,” wrote one commenter. Funner is “gut-clenchingly awful,” protested another.

In the six years since that column was published, inventive comparatives and superlatives have flourished in ad copy. I’ve written about some of them: closerer and deliciouser, freshershist and Maker’s-er, goodest and funner-er. So why does funnest get singled out for special opprobrium?

@Fritinancy @andrewanewman @SwimToday #funnestsport Hmm....Why not #mostfunsport or #favoritesport. Those would trend nicely too.

— Karen Carlo (@kcarlotwentysix) July 30, 2014

OK, Karen. Fixed it.

“Which sounds the most fun to you?” Some peevers will say it’s still wrong, all wrong—that there should be a “like” after “should,” or that fun cannot, should not, must not ever be an adjective. Ammon Shea sums up the objections to fun as a noun like this: “If you try to use it adjectivally you might as well say ‘that was so enjoyment.’”

 

Something similar has been occurring, over roughly the same period of time, with stupider and stupidest. Ammon Shea devotes six pages in Bad Language to the debate over the status of stupider, which detractors insist is “not a real word.” Shea casts a rational eye. “In some cases,” he writes, “two-syllable adjectives can be modified with -er and -est, and in some cases they cannot—it depends largely on how the word ends. Those that end with a vowel, or a vowel sound (such as yellow or fancy), tend to be fine with -er and -est.”

And, he adds, “We did not used to be so worried about tacking –er and –est endings onto words. … Shakespeare was fond of inflecting adjectives in a way that would make a present-day English teacher burble, using honourablest, ancienter, eminentest, famousest, delectablest, and many such others.”

To return to the SwimToday hashtag, I vote in favor. It fits the subject: it sounds like what a kid having fun would say. (Linguists would say it’s in the appropriate register.) In fact, if I were the copywriter on that cannonball ad I’d swap out “which sounds most fun” for “which sounds funnest.” It’s just naturaler.

Besides, school’s out. Let’s relax the rules!

But even if you disagree, take heart: funnest is not evidence that the English language is headed for fiery doom. I’ll let Ammon Shea have the last word:

You can use funner and funnest, but you should bear in mind that anyone who chastises you for this use is unlikely to be interested in hearing your explanation for why it should be acceptable. These words will grate on the ears of many for some while to come. The process of an acceptable usage becoming unacceptable can be a long one, and the reverse process is true as well.

See you in the water.

Word of the Week: Afterdrop

Afterdrop: “A further cooling of core temperature [that] occurs after the victim is removed from the cold environment.” (Source: Hypothermia.org.) Also after-drop.

From the Open Water Chicago website:

When you first enter the water and begin your swim, your body reacts by constricting the peripheral blood vessels in your arms and legs. This helps prevent heat loss by consolidating your body heat into your core. And as long as you continue with your physical activity, you will easily preserve a stable temperature.

However, once you end your swim and exit the water, your body sends your blood back to the skin to “warm up.” Because your skin is very cold at this point, your blood actually gets colder and is then recirculated back to your core. In essence, your core body temperature actually decreases during this rewarming period in a phenomenon known as the “afterdrop.”

Afterdrop is part of the specialized lingo of physicians and emergency workers, and it’s also familiar to cold-water swimmers like me and other members of San Francisco’s Dolphin and South End clubs, where we swim year round, without wetsuits, in San Francisco Bay. Water temperature in our part of the bay ranges between 50°F/10°C (January) and 66°F/19°C (September, if ever). To prevent afterdrop, swimmers and boaters are advised to go horizontal; warm up gradually, preferably in a sauna or swaddled in blankets; and avoid drinking alcoholic beverages. (Some hypothermia resources recommend continued exercise. The truth, according to a physician I consulted, is “No one knows.”)

Dolphin Club member Dr. Thomas J. Nuckton, a specialist in pulmonary and critical care medicine, conducted a study of 11 Dolphin Club members who had swum from Alcatraz Island to San Francisco’s Aquatic Park on New Year’s Day in 1998. (It’s an annual tradition.) His findings, published in The American Journal of Emergency Medicine in 2000, included the observation that 10 of the 11 swimmers had experienced core afterdrop of at least 1.8°F. Nuckton also tells the story of 16 Danish fishermen who were rescued after spending an hour in open water; although they were able to climb aboard the rescue vessel, all of them later died of hypothermia.

The OED’s earliest citation for afterdrop (spelled after-drop in the dictionary) is a 1945 British report: “Rewarming must be rapid to cushion the ‘after-drop’ in temperature, which continues to fall for 10 to 15 minutes after the subject is removed from the cold water.” (That is, rewarming must commence quickly; it’s now considered risky to rewarm a patient too rapidly.)

The English word has a grim history, according to the OED: “Originally after German Nachsinken (1942 in a typescript document reporting the results of experiments on live subjects at the Dachau concentration camp, later used as part of the Nuremberg trials).”

Just When You Thought It Was Safe

Bikini, monokini, mankini, nun-kini, cheekini: there’s simply no stemming the flood tide of -kini inventions. Now—appropriately enough for the summer of Sharknado—behold the Sharkini.

 

 

Made to order by San Francisco model-slash-designer Bad Aby. Undisclosed fabric, leatherette teeth, chain-link shoulder strap; $100 at Storenvy.

(Via Laughing Squid.)

-Kini Season

In the beginning there was the bikini, which begat the monokini, the tankini, the burqini, the pubikini, and the mankini. Now meet their sister in swimwear, the nun-kini.

 

Kate Upton with Sean Hayes, Chris Diamontopoulis, and Will Sasso. Photo via The Hollywood Reporter.

The skimpy swim habit worn by Kate Upton in the recent Three Stooges film drew the ire of Catholic League president Bill Donohue, “who makes his living fecklessly complaining about cultural products we unreservedly enjoy,” according to the online publication Nerve. “The TV show never mocked nuns or showed infants urinating in the face of the Stooges,” Donohue lamented. (Note: There never was a Stooges TV show. Perhaps Donohue was thinking of Abbott and Costello.) Ms. Upton portrays one of several nuns in the film; another is played by Larry (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”) David. His character is named Sister Mary-Mengele.

Donohue referred to Upton’s “nun-bikini,” but in a response to Donohue a spokesperson for 20th Century Fox, the film’s distributor, called it a “nun-kini,” using the universal suffix for any novel swim garb. “I think we did the audience a favor by letting Kate Upton wear the nun-kini rather than Larry David—it could have gone either way,” the unnamed spokesperson told the Hollywood Reporter.

Speaking of babes, take a look at Babi-kini, whose tagline is “My First Bikini” and which sells teeny swimsuits for tiny tots. This one retails for $30:

 

Available in sizes small (birth to 12 months) to extra-large (5 to 6 years).

And over at TMZ, they’re celebrating “Spring-kini Season.”

 

 

For an impressively large collection of women’s-swimwear lore, see Bikini Science, whose sections include “Unitards and the -Tard Genius,” “Soutien-Gorge (the Bikini Top),” and “Bikiniology.”

You may also be interested in my original post about the -ini/-kini affix. Follow-ups here and here.

(Nun-kini story via Arnold Zwicky.)

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.

Put on a Suit and You'll Look Cute

By the time an item of clothing finds its way to Costco, you can bet it's been around for many fashion cycles. So although I pride myself on my au-courantitude, I was surprised on a recent visit to a nearby Costco to discover massive quantities of a garment I'd never heard of: the skirtini.

For the similarly clueless, a skirtini is a modest two-piece swimsuit consisting of a tank top and a skirted bottom. Here's a visual cue (from Lands' End):

In my defense, I will say that I pay little attention to swimsuit trends. That's because I am in that infinitesimal minority of American women for whom the purchase of a swimsuit is utterly angst-free. Indeed, for all my fashion mania I spend more time comparing goggle designs than I do worrying about my swimsuits. My excuse: for 17 years I swam on a masters swim team, and I still swim four or five miles a week in a pool or San Francisco Bay. Ergo, my needs are ridiculously basic: I buy Speedo one-piece racing suits, size 34, preferably in the flyback or recordbreaker style, from online stores like Swim Outlet or Sierra Trading Post. (Speedo is the only brand that fits my long torso, size 34 always works, and Speedo's Endurance fabric really, truly resists the ravages of chlorine.) The first time I try a suit on is when I'm ready to go into the water. I would never (a) pay more than $70 for a suit, (b) buy a suit with bra cups, ruffles, a skirt, or a halterneck, or (c) do anything except swim or kayak in a swimsuit.

But, as I said, I'm in the minority.

What caught my attention about the skirtini, aside from its appalling matronliness, was, naturally, its name. It's clearly a blend of "skirt" and the suffix "-ini," from "bikini"--except there's nothing bikiniesque about it. I began thinking about how we got from bikini to skirtini. Here's a little historical-sartorial-lexical summary.

Very Cool

Because naming things and writing for a living aren't quite punishing enough, I also swim in San Francisco Bay, where the average water temperature year round is 54°F (12°C). My base of operations is the Dolphin Swimming and Boating Club, which celebrates its 130th anniversary this year and where, aside from the advent of electricity about a century ago (and--hallelujah--saunas some time after that) and the admission of women in 1977, little has changed since the days of celluloid collars and handlebar mustaches.

Between December 21 and March 21 every year, the club sponsors a friendly Polar Bear competition. The objective is to swim at least 40 miles in the bay; the prize (in addition to bragging rights) is a little white marble block. I've earned a stack of six of those blocks; my personal Polar Bear record was 52 miles, which I found supremely challenging. A few years ago, though, a gentleman named George Kebbe shattered the record by swimming 356 miles during Polar Bear season. That's about four miles a day, on days when the water was as cold as 48 degrees and the air about ten degrees colder. (Okay, it's not Coney Island, but it's cold.)

This year George's record was tied, which is news in itself. But the way in which it was tied was even more remarkable. Read Carl Nolte's article in the San Francisco Chronicle about 47-year-old Ralph Wenzel, who swam four hours every day to match the 356-mile mark, and who could have surpassed it but chose not to. Nolte writes:

With a chance to break the record and set a new mark, he stood up and walked out of the water. It was clear he could have gone back in the bay, taken another lap around the Aquatic Park lagoon and torn up the record book.

"I don't feel like going back in again,'' he said. Asked why he didn't break the record, he shrugged and walked away to take a sauna. "If you don't mind,'' he said, "I'm a bit cold.''

In times when records are made to be broken and winners are hailed as superheroes, Wenzel seems to be a throwback to some other age.

He did not explain what he did, but others were willing to speak for him. "It took class and he has class,'' said Noelle Maylander, who was one of his swimming partners.

"He is a very modest man,'' said Rick David, who also swam with him. "He does not like to draw attention.''

Kudos to the Chronicle for choosing veteran reporter Nolte, a very classy writer, to write this account of a very classy athlete.

By the way, Ralph Wenzel scheduled his swimming regime around his day job. A native of Dresden, Germany--he immigrated to the U.S. in 1990--he co-owns Schubert's Bakery in San Francisco, which is almost as old as the Dolphin Club and which turns out some of the most gorgeous and delicious cakes and pastries I've ever eaten. Stop by when you're in the neighborhood.