Fritinancy

Name in the news: Azuma

The design-critique blog Brand New last week reviewed the new look of LNER, a British railway with a nearly century-old history under various names and owners. The most recent owner was Virgin, which operated the line as Virgin Trains East Coast (VTEC); the railway is now owned by the UK’s Department of Transport, and the LNER acronym – which stands for London North East Railroad – is appearing again for the first time since 1948.

The point of the review was, of course, the new LNER logo, but what caught my eye was a paragraph about three-quarters of the way down about the newest fleet of trains. Brand New says they’re “nicknamed” Azuma, but in fact Azuma is their official name.

 

Moreover, “Azuma” isn’t entirely new; the LNER/Azuma identity designer, Brand Cooke, tells us that it had been developed by VTEC – in 2016, according to a Wikipedia page – and was already familiar to passengers.

But what does this un-British-sounding name signify?

Word of the week: Jitney

This week, the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency (SFMTA) will consider approving a new permit program for private transit vehicles, or PTVs. These vehicles – currently, Chariot is the only one operating in the city – use shuttle vans and a smartphone app; they are “open to the public, charge individual fares and operate on fixed routes,” according to the SFMTA website.

Bureaucrats may call them PTVs, but these vehicles are better known by an old slang term: jitney. And I was surprised to learn that both the word jitney and jitney transportation have deep roots, and routes, in California.

A “super jitney bus” in San Francisco, 1970s. Photo via SFMTA.com.

Word of the week: Thyristor

Thyristor: A A four-layered semiconductor rectifier in which the flow of current between two electrodes is triggered by a signal at a third electrode. (Source: Oxford Dictionaries.) Coined in the 1950s from thyratron, a kind of thermionic tube (from Greek thura, “gate” or “door”) and transistor. Pronounced THIGH-wrist-er.

“…said no one ever”

I spotted this ad from 511.org, the Bay Area’s transit and traffic hub, last weekend on the back of a 10-Townsend Muni bus in San Francisco:

 

“Every minute in traffic is a dream come true, said no one ever.”

This was never supposed to happen

And yet, somehow, it did.

Outdoor ad for Lyft. Harrison between 8th and 9th streets, San Francisco, January 30, 2016.

While the Getting’s Good

In New York City, you can summon a limo with an app called Gett.

TechCrunch calls Gett “Uber without surge pricing.”“Gett rides are $10 in central Manhattan, anywhere between Houston and Central Park South, no matter what day of the week.”

 

You can tell your Gett driver to take you to Lincoln Plaza to see a screening of Gett.

Gett—it's the Hebrew word for a religious divorce—is an Israeli courtroom drama that opened in the U.S. in February. New York Times critic Manohla Dargis called it “gripping cinema from start to finish.”

 

Curiously, the ride-hailing app Gett was developed in Israel, where Hebrew is, of course, one of the official languages. In most of the 32 cities in which it operates, the company is known as GetTaxi.

 

Confused? You could just stay home and watch getTV.

 

“A new television network that brings the classic films you love to your living room.” (Read my Visual Thesaurus column on “classic.”)

 

getTV is owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment. It launched in February 2014.

  

Got it?

Danny Kaye and Basil Rathbone in The Court Jester (1955)

The ’Tis Season

The lights, the carols, the shopping-mall Santas: verily, ’tis ’Tis the Season season once again. The ’tis-ing started early this year (mid-October!) and shows no sign of abating. In fact, this year I discovered a Tis the Season store—correction, “Christmas Shoppe”—in Millersburg, Ohio. (The apostrophe on that Tis is mysteriously missing.) And if the website design is any indication, this is a place to shoppe till you droppe in a queasy stupor.

 

Cliché: check. White-outlined letters: check. Olde Englishe spelling: check. Busy background photo: check. Squiggly clip art: check.

Misspelled “its”: check.

So that’s where the apostrophe went!

The Changing Names of California's Freeways

Historian Kevin Starr writes:

Freeways were initially given poetic-evocative names, drawn from historic, literary, or geographical sources: the Cahuenga, the Bayshore, the Redwood, the Ramona, the Cabrillo, the James Lick, the Nimitz. In the second phase of development, freeways tended to take on the names of their destinations—the Hollywood, the Long Beach, the Santa Ana, the San Bernardino—as in August 1954 when the Arroyo Seco Parkway became the Pasadena Freeway. In the third phase of development, freeways were to become known primarily by their numbers—the 10, the 5, the 880, the 101—for they were now part of an integrated state grid, scheduled for integration into an interstate system.

-- Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963. Golden Dreams is one of eight volumes in Starr’s Americans and the California Dream series; Kevin Starr is a professor of history at the University of Southern California and the former state librarian of California (1994-2004).

In the Bay Area, many residents (and traffic reporters) still refer to the Bayshore and the Nimitz (and to the Warren Freeway, State Route 13). No one in Northern California, however, would call the Nimitz Freeway “the 880”: up here, we prefer our freeway numbers anarthrous. For more on that subject, see the second half of my 2011 post “Thinking, Doing, Engineering, Amazing.”

Word of the Week: HOHO

HOHO: Acronym for “hop-on hop-off.” (Sometimes spelled HoHo.) Describes a type of sightseeing bus that allows passengers to disembark whenever they reach a stop that interests them, then re-board when it’s convenient. Tickets are valid for a specified period of time, typically 24 hours.

Hop-on hop-off buses are used by tour operators in many cities around the world (and even in the Grand Canyon), but the use of HOHO as a semi-official acronym appears most frequently in connection with the Indian tourist industry.

Above: logo for HOHO Delhi. From the FAQ:

Q : Can you explain me what is “Hop On Hop Off”
A : Hop-On Hop-Off tour, you have the freedom to spend time at each sightseeing. Your ticket will allows you to board any bus.

There are indications that the HOHO acronym is spreading to other parts of the world; see, for example, this query on TripAdvisor about a “HoHo bus” in New York City and this post on The Rome Toolkit, which notes that there are “no less than seven hop on, hop off tour (HOHO) sightseeing buses operating daily in Rome.” The London Toolkit also refers to “two major operators of the standard HOHO buses.”

A la franglais: “L’OpenTour” HOHO bus in Paris.

 

A British visitor to New York City reported in 2012 that “the HoHo bus” delivered “excellent value for money” and was “a brilliant way to see the city and get your bearings.”

HOHO buses are typically double-decker with open tops and a lowered rear platform for easy boarding and disembarking. One of the newer HOHO buses in London is officially called the New Bus for London (NB4L) and unofficially called the Boris bus, after Boris Johnson, the city’s mayor.

Those Adimab Ads

I originally wrote about the Adimab cable-car ads in January 2011, when the company – which is in the antibody-discovery business – was one of several advertisers using the colloquial tag “not so much.”

 

 

At the time there was a reason for a small biotech company based in Lebanon, New Hampshire, to advertise on San Francisco cable cars: there was a health-care conference in town. According to the In Vivo blog, Adimab bought every ad on the Powell Street cable cars for a week.

Two years later, though, the ads keep chugging along, halfway to the stars, and I continue to puzzle over them. Lately I’ve been seeing the ads on the Hyde Street cable cars, which tend to be used almost exclusively by tourists, few of whom appear to be in a big hurry about anything, let alone antibody discovery.

For a company that boasts that its “integrated antibody discovery and optimization platform provides unprecedented speed from antigen to purified, full-length human IgGs,” the ads are positively whimsical.

 

“Antibody discovery. More. Better. Faster. Pick any three.”

 

“Think you’re set with antibody discovery? You were set with dial-up once too.” (Oh, snap!)

 

“Why did the antibody cross the road? Because it didn’t die in development.” (Scientist humor!)

 

One of the ads is in Chinese Japanese (thanks, Erin!). Translation, anyone?

 

The ads must be working (as recruiting ploys, maybe?), but I have no idea why.

Also a mystery: what “Adimab” means.* I tried to find out (email, voicemail), but no one at the company responded. I did learn from the website that one of the founders, a gentleman named Tillman U. Gerngross, is “one of world’s leading yeast biotechnologists” and a professor of bioengineering at Dartmouth. Originally from Austria, he previously co-founded GlycoFi, Inc., which was acquired by Merck. I cannot tell you what the U in his name stands for.

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* Commenter Alex did a Google search and learned that Adimab stands for Antibody Discovery Maturation Biomanufacturing. (Quite the mouthful.) Although I've now received a friendly email from a company spokesman, he did not confirm this name-origin story.