Fritinancy

September linkfest

I’ve read more books about Trump, Trumpism, and What It All Means than is probably healthy for me, but until I read Thank You for Your Servitude, by Mark Leibovich (Penguin Random House, 2022), I’d never laughed my way through a Trump book. Leibovich, a veteran Washington correspondent (New York Times, The Atlantic), focuses not on “your favorite president” but on the lickspittles and soul-sellers who sought relevance through their obeisance to him, most notably Senators Rubio (R-FL), Cruz (R-TX), and Graham (R-SC), all of whom had been loudly contemptuous about TFG  before he became the nominee and they made the bread-butter connection. Leibovich is the rare insider with an outsider’s sense of irony, and he’s a master of the snappy sentence. Here’s one example, about former Republican National Committee Reince Priebus, who became 45’s much-put-upon first chief of staff: “No matter how much Trump had roiled the Republican water, it remained Priebus’s job to carry it.”

June linkfest

“The use of rainbows as logo design elements has fallen back almost to its pre-1970s level, while the use of rainbow colors in logos has taken off.” (Emblemetric)

Image via Emblemetric

 

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Remember tronc, possibly the worst corporate name ever? You can forget it now. (The Verge)

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After 27 years, Greece has finally agreed to the formal name of its northern neighbor, the Republic of North Macedonia. (BBC)

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This ad for Texas Congressional candidate Mary Jennings “MJ” Hegar sets a new standard for political advertising: It’s well written, brilliantly edited, and engaging.

August Linkfest

“Gen Z” is a lazy name, says the BridgeWorks consulting firm, which wants to replace it with “GenEdge.”

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You say Zomato, I say Zulily: The Name Inspector has been wondering about the Z-substitution trend in company naming.

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The Australian bird known as the Bell Miner doesn’t mine anything, and it doesn’t feed on bell-shaped substances. Spicks & Specks explores the fascinating false etymology. (Via Language Hat.)

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A track called “Worth It” from the girl group Fifth Harmony has been the summer’s surprise hit. Sonia Saraiya traces the cultural history of the “I’m worth it” affirmation, from L’Oreal advertising onward. (Bonus link: Read my 2013 column for the Visual Thesaurus about “I’m worth it” and “You deserve a break today.”) 

 

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How do you translate a colloquial, nonliteral expression like Trainwreck—the title of the new Amy Schumer feature film—into non-English languages? IMDb has a list of global akas; Mashable has helpfully re-translated some of them. (Not included in the Mashable list: Y de repente tú (“And suddenly you”), probably the most romantically inclined of the bunch. In France, by the way, the official title is Crazy Amy—yes, in English.

 

Translation of the French Canadian title, Cas désespéré.

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Egotarian, Tinderella, ghosting, and other new words Mike Pope has recently encountered. “I apologize in advance that a lot of these terms are unpleasant,” he adds.

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Seriously, Spellcheck? 

 

(Via James Harbeck.)

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Three guys were watching HBO’s “Silicon Valley” when it occurred to them to create a dictionary of jargon used on the show. The result is Silicon Valley Dictionary, where you’ll find definitions for terms like This changes everything (“Nothing has changed. Pure marketing”) and Awesome journey (“used when a startup has failed”).

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The New Devil’s Dictionary is a jaundiced update of Ambrose Bierce’s famous 1906 lexicon. Sample definition: “war on drugs (n.): The noble enterprise of preserving the sanctity of alcoholism.”

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And speaking of alcohol: Bianca Bosker reports for the New Yorker on “the state of modern winespeak” and “the nearly decade-long crusade against overwrought and unreliable flavor descriptions.”

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More on this theme: Did you know that there is a color called Drunk-Tank Pink? From Mental Floss, 19 colors you’ve probably never heard of. (Bonus link: Read my 2011 column for the Visual Thesaurus, “Where Have All the Ordinary Color Names Gone?”

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What can you buy at a Canadian homo store? What was 7-Eleven’s original name? The lore and lingo of convenience stores, presented by Wordnik’s Angela Tung.

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Politico: Donald Trump talks like a third-grader! Language Log: Hold on just a minute there!

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And for you fans of swears and swearing, I have a new post on Strong Language about “shit happens” and its many variants.

July Linkfest

Your counterintuitively spelled business name of the month is QuiQui.me. It’s so bad, writes Domain Name Wire, that “the company includes the pronunciation in its logo.” Reminds me of Nyoombl.

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How an artist brought an obscure 17th-century word, “parbunkells,” back to life.

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June Linkfest

Remember when ads were dense with copy and every new product was magical? A delightful Tumblr called A Word from Our Sponsor does.

 

“The miracle of Philco’s mystery control is hard to believe!” (1938)

 

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Is the Great American Tagline dead? Copyranter thinks so.

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On the other hand, corporate jargon is alive and thriving, as the Use Sparingly Tumblr makes abundantly clear.

 

Via Girls of a Certain Age.

 

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Speaking of jargon: “Are you a native full-stack visiongineer who lives to marketech platishforms? Then come work with us as an in-house NEOLOGIZER and reimaginatorialize the verbalsphere!” And other amazing new jobs you’ve never heard of because they were just invented. Hat tip: @trochee.

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How many synonyms for “flip-flops” do you know?

Image via The Flip-Flop Appreciation Society.

 

When I was a kid we called them “thongs” or “zoris.”

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What exactly can you expect when you commission a $5 logo from Fiverr? To find out, Sacha Greif invented a company (“SkyStats”) and tested the waters. Among his conclusions: “Fiverr apparently sees nothing wrong with designers appropriating other people’s work. And not only do they tolerate it, they even directly profit from it since they feature these fake work samples prominently.”

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Ten words that “The Simpsons” invented. Via @Wordnik. Speaking of Simpsons inventions, years ago I wrote three long posts about fictional brands in “The Simpsons.” Here’s the original post, the 2008 update, and the 2009 update.

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And speaking of fictional brands, Russell Falk of FVM Strategic Communications analyzed the logo of a madeupical company in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit:

Cherevin may be the evil aggressors of economic warfare, but I’d love to have them as a client. They could teach me about propping up housing markets, and I might be able to offer them a nugget or two about reducing security breaches through better interaction design. Plus, I bet it’s fun to get a project brief with the objective of ‘instilling fear and obedience.’

I’ve written a few posts about fictional brands myself.

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“The NFL wouldn’t rename the Redskins, so we did.” – A Hundred Monkeys blog. See also my April 9 post about the Redskins and other troubled names.

UPDATE: This morning (June 18), the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, an independent tribunal of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, recommended that the federal registrations for “Redskins” trademarks be cancelled. Read the TTAB fact sheet.

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Thirteen words so “untranslatable” that even a professional linguist like Michael Covarrubias (aka Wishydig) can’t figure them out.

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“A name is meaningless until you give it meaning,” “Try to avoid name envy,” and other naming advice worth heeding from Will Burns, CEO of Ideasicle.

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“Half of living American Brittanys are between the ages of 19 and 25” and other insights into personal- name trends. (Hat tip: Karen.)

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“Does it look like a pig? Are you sure?” How to name animals in German. Via @stas and @chrys.

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Mice well, minds well, maze whale, midas whale, mieswell, and more than 40 other incorrect spellings of “might/may as well,” retweeted almost daily by The Minus Well.

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One more fun Twitter account: Power Vocab Tweet, an exercise in “speculative lexicography”—i.e., made-up words with random definitions.

 

jinglingly, adj. on or relating to the modern era; since the Middle Ages

— Power Vocab Tweet (@PowerVocabTweet) June 12, 2014

Power Vocab Tweet was invented by the creator of Everyword, which recently completed its mission to tweet every word in the English language. From the blog:

On the surface, Power Vocab Tweet is a parody of “word-of-the-day” blogs and Twitter accounts. My real inspiration, though, comes from the novel Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin. In that book, a group of underground linguists invent a language (Láadan) that “encodes” in its lexicon concepts that aren’t otherwise assigned to words in human languages. …

The definitions are generated via Markov chain from the definition database in WordNet. The words themselves are generated from a simple “portmanteau” algorithm; each word is a combination of two “real” English words of the appropriate part of speech. (The forms of the words and text used to generate the associated definition aren’t related.)

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.)

March Linkfest

“We’ve turned learning vocabulary into an addictive game,” says Vocabulary.com, which this week announced its new app (iPhone and iPad only, for now). Vocabulary.com’s chief technology officer, Mark Tinkler, told Fast Company that some people play “over 10 hours a day. It’s crazy.”

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The name of the 131-year-old Orient-Express—the subject of a Paul Theroux travel memoir and an Agatha Christie murder mystery—will no longer be attached to hotels and restaurants. The new name, Belmond, was developed by AgencySacks and “is derived from Latin for beautiful and world,” according to Belmond’s chief marketing officer, Ralph Abruzza. Read an interview with Abruzza about the name change—which will not affect the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express train—and a backgrounder that includes the brand-launch presentation. News to me: Belmond, né Orient-Express, owns New York’s ‘21’ Club. (Skift)

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Moriarty. Mordred. Voldemort. Mordor. Morlock. What’s the deal with “mor,” asks James Harbeck: “Is there something to the syllable that suits it for melancholy, darkness, and villainy?” (The Week)

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Is Netflix responsible for the rise of “queue” in American English? (New Republic)

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You’ve probably heard about Facebook COO Sheryl “Lean In” Sandberg’s campaign to ban the “bossy” descriptor for girls and women. Perhaps you’ve tangentially wondered, as I did, why cows are frequently called “Bossy,” at least in the U.S. There are two theories, and “no matter which of the two theories you pick, you end up in Latin.” (World Wide Words)

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In China, LinkedIn is “Ling Ying” (literally “lead elite”) and BMW is “Bao Ma” (“precious horse”). How branding consultancies manage the Chinese language gap.  (Advertising Age, via Marjanne Pearson.)

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From Pandemic to Yellow Top: 41 brand names given to drugs in “The Wire.” (Mental Floss, via Wordnik.)

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And speaking of fictional drug names, here’s a great big old Wikipedia list of them. (I wrote about one of those names, Ablixa, last year.)

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Languages that have contributed to English vocabulary: a nifty historical infographic (Lexicon Valley)

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If you must do naming research, here’s how not to do it. (Tip: Never ask “Is this name easy to say?”) (Lexicon blog)

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I attended my first roller derby match a couple of weekends ago, and couldn’t believe my ears when the announcer said that Fatal Dreidel would be skating for the Oakland Outlaws. Not only is that her actual nom de derby, it turns out there’s a whole subgenre of Jewish derby pseudonyms, including Mayhem Bialik, Yom Tripper, and Hebrewno Mars. (Jewniverse, via Diane Fischler.)

For more on derby names, see my May 2011 linkfest and law professor Dave Fagundes’s “Talk Derby to Me” (great title!), on “intellectual property norms governing roller derby pseudonyms,” published in 2012 in the Texas Law Review.

September Linkfest

How many languages can you identify from 20-second audio samples? Play the Great Language Game and find out. The game is multiple choice; selecting between two samples—say, Hindi vs. Italian—is relatively easy, but just wait till you get to the Bosnian-Serbian-Maltese-Estonian matchup.

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“Italian doesn’t have a y in native words but has no problem with the ones from English, as with Milan’s CityLife.” – Linguist Will Leben on how names and words cross borders.

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“Is the best Chinese translation for an English word a transliteration that is 100% faithful to the original?” A bilingual naming expert analyzes the Bing case study.

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Renaming the Ghetto Tracker app doesn’t even begin to solve the problem.

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Which is the name of the Burning Man camp and which is the name of a company in the S&P 1500? A scholarly (really!) comparison by Tyler Schnoebelen, a Stanford PhD and data scientist at Idibon.

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An alphabetical tour of the best libfixes, from -ana to –zilla, with stops at -kini, -licious, and -nomics, compiled and annotated by Neil Whitman.

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“Business-speak, with its heartless euphemisms and empty stock phrases, is the jargon that everyone loves to hate,” writes Joshua J. Friedman* in the Boston Globe. But hold on: It turns out that expressions like “low-hanging fruit,” “impactful,” and “at the end of the day” are “as common in sports, politics, social science, and other spheres as they are in business.” For more on the research behind Friedman’s story, see this Mark Liberman post about “impactful” and this one on “moving forward,” “low-hanging fruit,” and “at the end of the day,” both on Language Log.

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“Terminology-wise, I find it interesting that we never had cyber-phones. The mobile/cellular phone became the cell and then evolved into the smart phone, not the cyber-phone.” – On the bizarre evolution of “cyber,” from sex to security to war. (Via Wordnik.)

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A taxonomy of rules and non-rules for writers, by the estimable copy editor and journalism professor John McIntyre. 

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Never mind the Eskimos: How many words do the Scots have for snow?

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From Bryan A. Garner, editor-in-chief of Black’s Law Dictionary and author of the indispensable Garner’s Modern American Usage, comes a challenging vocabulary quiz. It’s aimed at lawyers, but all 20 words are ones a well-read layperson should know. (To answer your question: I scored 19/20. And I’m not going to tell you which word tripped me up.)

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I’m betting on “red line” making it to the finals of the 2013 Word of the Year vote. Here’s a rundown of where the phrase comes from, what it signifies, and why it’s so popular in political discourse.

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I linked to the UK creative agency Asbury & Asbury earlier this month, in my post about Yahoo’s new logo. But I can’t resist sharing a couple more links to the clever work of this unusual team: Hall of Unwanted Dotcoms (“a list of 20 unclaimed addresses, all fewer than seven letters, one syllable and easy to pronounce”) and Corpoetics (“a collection of ‘found’ poetry from the websites of well-known brands and corporations”).

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* As it happens, I have a relative named Joshua J. Friedman, but he isn’t this reporter.

Taking the Piss

Who’s minding the store at Target? A week ago Consumerist reported that the retailer was selling a plus-size dress in a color unflatteringly called Manatee Gray. (A manatee is also known as a sea cow.) This week there’s been a cross-lingual dustup over a sandal style called “Orina,” which means “urine” in Spanish.

 

Image from Yahoo Shine. Target quickly removed the product page and is said to be renaming the style.

 

“Does no one speak Spanish at Target HQ or have access to this thing we call Google?” asked Consumerist reporter Mary Beth Quirk. No and no, apparently. Target’s initial defense was that “orina” means “peaceful” in Russian. As though Russian rather than Spanish were the second-most-spoken language in the United States, after English.

I learned about Target’s number-one problem via a tweet from Mighty Red Pen, who also sent me a link to Yahoo Shine’s coverage of the story. Full marks to senior editor Lylah M. Alphonse, whose recounting of other notable naming gaffes sets the record straight on the Chevy Nova “no-go” myth.

Target isn’t the only business with Orina issues. A similar etymological fallacy led to the naming of Café Orina in the Bay Area city of Concord, California.

 

When Maura Storace sent me the photo, she commented, “I wonder if the coffee they serve is amber-colored?”

The café’s About Us page includes this earnest explanation:

Meaning of Orina
Its source is Eirene, a Greek name meaning “Peace.”

Narrative: This was the name of the Greek goddess of peace. Until the 20th century, it was commonly pronounced in three syllables (i-REE-nee).

Very nice, but there are almost 700,000 native Spanish speakers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and only a relative handful of Greek speakers.

Moral: Check several bilingual dictionaries before committing to a lovely-sounding exotic name. And know your market.

And as long as this post is already in the toilet, here’s Kmart’s new TV spot, which – incongruously for a retailer not known for creative marketing – takes positive glee in its potty humor. The much-repeated tagline is “Ship my pants.”

 

 

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For more on the British idiom “taking the piss” – not to be confused with “taking a piss” – read this.

Squirrel!

It’s funny how you can go for months without seeing “squirrel” in print, and then, bam, two sightings within three days.

The first squirrel is a red herring. It appears in Joseph Epstein’s Wall Street Journal review of Yip Harburg: Legendary Lyricist and Human Rights Activist, a biography by Harriet Hyman Alonso of the man who wrote the lyrics to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “April in Paris,” and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” Harburg was born Isidore Hochberg in New York City in 1896; he changed his name to Edgar Y. Harburg in 1934 but was generally known as E.Y. Harburg or Yip Harburg.

Why “Yip”? In his review, Epstein says the nickname “came from the Yiddish word for squirrel, yipsl, which his parents called him when he was a child.” But the Yiddish word for squirrel is actually the Slavic-derived veverke; no Yiddish dictionary contains yipsl. According to Alonso, who devotes the first chapter of her book to the origin of “Yip,” Harburg related the yipsl-squirrel story to the oral historian Studs Terkel. Alonso passes it along without further comment, as does Epstein.

It’s entirely possible, though, that Harburg was pulling Terkel’s leg – or being squirrelly (“cunningly unforthcoming or reticent”). Because while yipsl has no meaning in Yiddish, the acronym YPSL is both meaningful and relevant: it stands for Young People’s Socialist League, which was founded in 1907 as the student arm of the American Socialist Party and whose members were known as – yep – “Yipsels.” In a 2004 column for The Jewish Daily Forward, the pseudonymous language columnist Philologos wrote that “Harburg was a political radical who was blacklisted in Hollywood in the 1940s, and it is possible that he was nicknamed ‘Yipsel,’ subsequently shortened to ‘Yip,’ because of his YPSL-like views even if he never was a YPSL member.” Other distinguished Yipsels or sympathizers included the political scientist Daniel Bell, the literary and social critic Irving Howe, the writer Saul Bellow, and the journalist (and eventual neoconservative) Irving Kristol.

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The second squirrel is a semi-secret one.

Secret Squirrel Cold Brew Coffee is a bottled coffee concentrate; one 16-ounce bottle makes six to seven eight-ounce drinks. The company is based in Studio City (Los Angeles County), but according to the clumsily written FAQ the name has a different geographic origin:

Growing up in Washington DC area a secret squirrel was something like knowing a shortcut around traffic, or knowing the hideaway parking spot, or knowing the unknown electrical outlet in the coffee shop. It only seemed fitting for this centuries old method for brewing coffee that few people know about.

(That awkward dangler at the beginning of the paragraph is one good argument for editors. Another is knowing how to hyphenate compound adjectives. Elsewhere on the website, a proofreader would have caught “anyway” for “any way,” sentences that end without periods, and introductory clauses without commas. But I digress.)

I have no idea whether the D.C. story is true – anyone care to confirm? I do know, however, that “Secret Squirrel” was the title character of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon that aired for a few seasons in the mid-1960s and was briefly revived in the 1990s. The character was a spy; whether it got its name from the Washington shortcut or vice versa, I cannot say.

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Finally, a few squirrel tidbits:

• The Latin word for squirrel, sciurus, translates to “shadow tail.”
• In many Germanic languages the word for “squirrel” translates to “oak kitten.” (It’s Eichhörnchen in German.)
• The Spanish word for “squirrel,” ardilla, translates to “like a flame.” (From arder, to burn.)
• See “squirrel” translated into almost 300 languages, including Klingon, here.

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And here’s my favorite cinematic squirrel sighting, or near-sighting:

Dug the Dog, from Up (2009)