Are names destiny? I can’t help wondering whether Ellen Jovin, a communications expert and language maven whose surname rhymes with rovin’, was fated to travel to 47 states with her portable Grammar Table, and then write a book about her adventures called Rebel with a Clause: Tales and Tips from a Roving Grammarian. She certainly took to the project with energy and élan, and the result is a book so delightful that it could win over even the grammarphobic and the grammar-shy.
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I was as surprised as Language Hat (Stephen Dodson) to learn that balk may be acquiring a new meaning that’s pretty much the opposite of the traditional one. (I was not surprised, as he was, that the “l” in balk is silent; I’ve always pronounced the word that way on the very few occasions I’ve used it.)
It turns out there’s a lot about balk that’s interesting. For one thing, it’s spelled baulk in the UK. This was news to me, but not completely surprising, because after all the Brits colorfully and flavorfully insert a u in the center of a lot of words.
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You’d think I’d have known this word for years and years instead of for just a few days, because cacography describes a wide swath of brand naming. Also, I like -graphy words in general (choreography, biography, typography, cinematography, lexicography, orography), all of which have some connection to writing, which is what the Greek root graphein signifies. And I’m also (immaturely) drawn to words beginning with cac- and kak-, my very favorite being kakistocracy. The front part of those cac- and kak- words comes from Greek again: kakistos means “worst,” but it’s probably related to an even older root that means “to defecate.” Thus kakistocracy is, roughly, “government by shitty people,” and cacography is, well, shitty writing.
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Fictional African countries are in the news these days thanks to the U.S. commander-in-chief’s name-checking “Nambia” and anticipation building for the Black Panther movie. (Marvel Comics fans will recall that the Black Panther hails from the land of Wakanda.) Naturally, there’s a Wikipedia entry on fictional African countries – updated to include Nambia. And here’s Marvel’s Black Panther wiki, which includes the Wakandan map and flag.
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From A-bomb to to zoom: the Weed Blog’s extensive—indeed, staggering—lexicon of slang terms for marijuana. (I discussed one of those terms, 420, in a post published earlier this week.)
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Speaking of specialized lexicons, check out The D.C. Manual of Style and Usage, Washington City Paper’s entertainingly written and copiously illustrated guide. One of my favorite entries: “Blelvis: A portmanteau of ‘black’ and ‘Elvis.’ Refers exclusively to D.C.’s mostly elusive, semifamous busker; he likely never uses the words ‘portmanteau’ and ‘busker,’ but he can sing every song in the Elvis Presley catalog.” Also: “Hipster. A term that is somehow both loaded and meaningless. If you feel compelled to use it, talk to an editor.”
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The new first-person-shooter game Destiny, released in September, features a huge arsenal of weapons, and I can only imagine the brainstorming sessions that produced names like Praedyth’s Revenge, Pocket Infinity, Strange Suspect, and the excellent Doctor Nope. The Australian game-review site Kotaku provides a ranking of all 74 names. (Via Our Bold Hero.) IGN lists the weapons by category (pulse rifles, fusion rifles, rocket launchers, etc.).
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An “ally” is what British soldiers in Afghanistan call “a battlefield fashionista--desirables include having a beard, using a different rifle, carrying vast amounts of ammunition, being dusty and having obscene amounts of tattoos and hair.” A “crow” is a new soldier recently out of training. From a guide to Afghanistan battlefield slang published by BBC News. (Via Language Hat.)
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You had me at “you had me at”: Ben Yagoda on the post-Jerry Maguire life of a meme.
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If you’re curious about the origins of Toyota model names, this CarScoops explainer is a reasonable starting point. The Camry got its name from Japanese kanmuri, meaning “crown”; the Supra is a direct borrowing from Latin (“above”). But this story about the Yaris made me wonder: “Yaris is an amalgamation of words from Greek mythology and German. In Greek mythology, ‘Charis’ was a symbol of beauty and elegance. Toyota swapped the ‘Ch’ with ‘Ya’ – German for ‘yes’ – to symbolise the perceived reaction of European markets to the car’s styling.”
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The predictably zany stories of how some British ad agencies—Doofer, tenthree, A Large Evil Corporation, and others got their names.
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Tom Magliozzi, co-host of NPR’s long-running “Car Talk,” died November 3 at 77. In his honor, here’s a link to one of my favorite features of the show: the punny staff credits, from sculling coach Rose Dior to assistant disciplinarian Joaquin D’Planque. (Via Henry Fuhrmann.)
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Cherpumple? So 2010. A Houston bakery’s pumpecapple piecake (pumpkin + pecan + apple) is this year’s turducken of desserts. (Via Barry Popik.)
Image via Houston Eater.
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Five contemporary authors tell how they titled their books. (My own semi-facetious take on book titling here.)
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And speaking of novels: “Can’t get a deal for that novel manuscript? Try ad agencies. Young & Rubicam commissioned Booker award-nominated novelist William Boyd to tell any story he wanted as long as it featured a Land Rover vehicle.” By Ad Broad, who calls herself “the oldest working writer in advertising.”
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From veteran name developer David Placek, founder of Lexicon Branding, some tips to help startups avoid making naming mistakes. First piece of advice: The name “doesn’t have to be clever. It just has to communicate.” And, adds Placek, stop it already with the -ly names. Yep.
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Last week the mail brought a sample of Dove Deep Moisture Nourishing Body Wash with NutriumMoisture [sic]. Yes, I puzzled briefly over “Nutrium” (the singular form of nutria?) and the “moisture” redundancy,* but that’s not what I want to talk about today.
Here’s the package insert.
“We’re excited for you to take the One Shower Challenge!”
“Excited for you to take” is one of the newish “excited for __” constructions that I’ve been noticing in speech and writing. The Dove copy was my first encounter with the phrase in a commercial context, but it turns out to be more common than I’d thought. (See below.) Indeed, it represents a convergence of two hot lingua-trends: preposition creep—a term I’m borrowing from English professor and language writer Ben Yagoda—and, more generally, excitement overload.
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Yes, I think so.
Q. When referring to a zombie, should I use the relative pronoun who (which would refer to a person) or that (since, technically, the zombie is no longer living)? Essentially, does a zombie cease to become a “person” in the grammatical sense?
A. Let’s assume this is a serious question, in which case you, as the writer, get to decide just how much humanity (if any) and grammatical sense you wish to invest in said zombie. That will guide your choice of who or that.
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As we all know, verbing weirds language. And, like it or not, it’s everywhere. (See showrooming, subtexting, “Let’s Tonic,” et al.) But nouning – turning a modifier into a noun – is also increasingly popular in commerce, and it’s also changing our perceptions about what language “should” be.
Take “funness,” which Apple has been using for several months in its iPod Touch marketing. As Ben Zimmer has noted in columns for the Boston Globe and Word Routes, now that “fun” has successfully shifted from noun to adjective, you have to add “-ness” to turn it back into a noun.
But other brands aren’t even bothering with nounifying suffixes. Instead, they’re simply putting adjectives to work as nouns.
Here are nine recent examples of nouning in brand slogans. In each case, the advertiser could have made a conventionally nounish choice (“Welcome to possibility,” “The future of awesomeness”) but instead grabbed our attention, for better or worse, with a functional shift, also known as anthimeria.
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The leaves are falling, the turkey’s defrosting: It must be time for the first Word of the Year 2012 announcement! Oxford Dictionaries, the traditional early bird, picked one WOTY for the US, GIF (the verb), and one for the UK, omnishambles. For background on omnishambles—which made a brief appearance in the US this year as well—see my post on “wazzock.” And for background on how Oxford chose GIF, see this hilariously be-GIFed blog post.
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Turducken: chicken stuffed inside duck stuffed inside turkey. Cherpumple: cherry, pumpkin, and apple pies stuffed inside cake. Now online dictionary Wordnik invites readers to invent a new Thanksgiving-related Franken-word (portmanteau). “It could be a (horrific) new food, a feeling, or a phenomenon. The only rules are that they combine two or more words, and that they have to do with turkey-day.” Tweet your nominations with the hashtag #turkeyword.
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This one goes out to all you graphic designers and creative directors: horrible client feedback turned into hilarious works of art. (Full gallery at SharpSuits.net.)
“I’ll know what I want when I see it.” – Clients everywhere
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Astronomy and space startup Uwingu – that’s oo-WING-oo, the Swahili word for “sky” – is building “a baby book of names” for newly discovered planets. For 99 cents per nomination, you can submit a name to the database; for another 99 cents, you can vote for your favorite name on the list. The money goes to a good cause, of course. According to the Bad Astronomy blog, “The folks in charge are professional astronomers and space scientists at the tops of their fields, people like Alan Stern and Pamela Gay.”
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Cast your vote for the name of the year at Baby Name Wizard. The NOTY “isn't necessarily the most popular baby name,” writes BNW’s Laura Wattenberg. “It’s a name that changed during the course of the year, and points to more changes around us. It’s a one-name time capsule that reminds us of how names are woven into our lives, connecting to and reflecting everything that goes on in our culture.” The 2011 winner was Siri.
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Do we need a new name for the fiscal cliff? The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein proposes “austerity crisis”; his readers have their own suggestions, including Policy Meltdown, Lemmings Moment, Fiscal Spliff, and Mole Hill. (What’s the fiscal cliff, you ask? Here you go.)
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Corporate tagline or university motto? Take the quiz (it’s tougher than you’d think).
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Minor hockey (not to be confused with minor-league hockey) is divided into narrow age ranges, and the names for those ranges vary wildly and whimsically around the world. In Canada the 9-10 age group is called “Atom”; in France the 10-11 group is called Poussins (“young chickens”). More minor hockey lore at (where else?) Wikipedia. Hat tip: Bruce Fulton.
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Remember Cuil, the search engine that was supposed to be a Google-killer? It died in 2011, possibly of pronunciation failure. “You might think that making a pronounceable name is a no brainer,” writes Andrew Hennigan on his blog about communications, “but there are actually several separate issues you need to think about, and Cuil got all three wrong.” (Hat tip: FussFactory.)
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Green-suiter, Yuk, 2% Club and other West Point slang: a lexicon.
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What does the “signature” mean in “signature burrito”? Lexicographer Orin Hargraves, writing for the Macmillan Dictionary blog, says “signature” has been “so diluted by modern usage as to become meaningless.”
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Speaking of meaningless, William Germano has had it with passion. He writes in Lingua Franca: “In its new, overexposed phase, passion has come to mean something else. I’d hazard the definition ‘an outsized, all-consuming enthusiasm that leads to achievement.’ That seems to be where passion is drifting in our outcome-driven society: It’s become a word signifying the precondition of success.” I’ve written about passion overload a number of times myself, starting with a 2006 post, “Our Passion Is Your Problem.”
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The Romney campaign named its (badly botched) get-out-the-vote program Project ORCA, but why? Language Log’s Mark Liberman goes fishing: “It would be a little weird, in my opinion, to name a GOTV program after a boat used to hunt a fictional monster shark. Clearly the shark would be Obama, or perhaps Obama’s appeal — but in that metaphor, where are the Romney voters?”
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After Hurricane Sandy struck, New York City gained a new neighborhood: SoPo, for “South of Power.” As The Atlantic Wire’s Jen Doll tells it, “New York City has a history with this sort of name.” (Hat tip: @nextmoon.)
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From the public-radio show A Way With Words, hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette, here’s an excellent list of reference resources for writers and word lovers. A good place to start your holiday shopping!
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I was surprised, as many regular New Yorker readers were, to see a long essay by Joan Acocella, “The Language Wars,” in the magazine’s May 14 issue. Acocella is the New Yorker’s long-time dance critic; I hadn’t known she was also a language maven. Yet there she was, using a new book by Henry Hitchings, The Language Wars: A History of Proper English, as an excuse to disparage language descriptivists—that is to say, pretty much all contemporary linguists and lexicographers—as flame-throwing anarchists who are also, paradoxically, elitists. (Or as the New Yorker prefers it, élitists.) One of the descriptivists she singled out, Steven Pinker, wrote a stinging response that has been published in the current issue.*
But apparently that wasn’t enough merde-stirring for the New Yorker. Yesterday, the magazine’s Page-Turner blog published a post by Ryan Bloom with the finger-wagging title “Inescapably, You’re Judged by Your Language.” After a pass at talking about appropriate register and dialect (“Know thy audience, know thy friends”), Bloom cuts to the chase. “Why should we bother to learn prescriptive English—the grade-school rules—if it isn’t our natural dialect?” he asks, rhetorically. Because:
Repugnant as it may be, the simple answer is that we need to learn prescriptive English because that’s the way the people in power communicate. As far as daily survival is concerned, it doesn’t matter whether the origins of this linguistic power structure are racist, classist, or élitist, or whether they’re based on the whims of dead white males. This is how the system works right now, today, and in order to best get the attention of those in power, to begin to effect change, we must be able to use their dialect. We must know their rules.
I’m neither a linguist nor a lexicographer, so I’m not qualified to talk about descriptivism and prescriptivism with any authority.** But I am qualified to tell Ryan Bloom that if he thinks “prescriptive English” is “the way the people in power communicate,” he and I are living on different planets. Maybe “prescriptive English” is how the powerful people at the New Yorker speak and write. But as far as I can tell from my sorties into other corridors of power, it sure ain’t how “the system works right now.”
You want to know how “people in power”—company presidents, board chairmen, politicians, and other members of the .01 percent—communicate? I’ll tell you. They say and write things like “between you and I” and “please circle back to Fred and myself.” They write “alot” and “alright.” They “hearken back.” They use comma splices. They confuse your and you’re, rein and reign. They’ve never met a Business Concept that didn’t merit Promotion through Capitalization. They smiled benignly upon the 43rd president of the United States—a former person of power—when he publicly said misunderestimate and Grecians. They didn’t see what the fuss was all about.
Need more evidence? Listen to Ursula M. Burns, the CEO and chairman of Xerox, in a recent interview with NPR:
What I found there was an organization that accepted me for whom I was.
Xerox ranks #127 in the Fortune 500. Ms. Burns has a master’s degree in engineering from Columbia. I’d say she is one of those “people in power” Ryan Bloom is talking about. And yet she used whom incorrectly (and quite emphatically) in the interview. I don’t know why. Maybe she once learned a “rule” about whom following prepositions (as it does in “for whom the bell tolls”). Maybe, like many people in and out of power, she thinks whom just sounds ritzier than plain old who. She’s doing it wrong, but who’s going to tell her?
I say all this not to shame, blame, or point with alarm. (OK, just a little.) I’m just saying that Ryan Bloom has been misinformed. To all appearances, knowledge of proper “prescriptivist” grammar is not a prerequisite for survival at Xerox. Or, like it or not, at most other companies. Other things matter more: enthusiasm, connections, the right degree from the right university, the willingness to work nights and weekends. “Correct” language? That’s for pedants and peevers, not for American go-getters and success-seekers.
I do maintain that there are good reasons—clarity and consistency foremost among them—for mastering some rules of language usage. But the notion that we plebes need to speak and write “correctly” so as to impress the higher-ups is simply nonsensical. The rich and powerful may have more money and political clout, but when it comes to “correct” speech and writing they’re as clueless and error-prone as everyone else.
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*Someone else wrote a completely bonkers letter that bemoaned usage “horrors” such as “Did you finish your homework yet?” and claimed that “a locution like ‘exact same’” is “indicative of the depth to which American English has sunk.” I kid you not. (One Language Log commenter suggested that the letter was an example of Poe’s Law, which states that without signals like emoticons, it’s difficult to tell whether extremism on the Internet is sincere or satirical.)
**The linguists at Language Log have done their usual excellent job analyzing the current brouhaha: see Mark Liberman (here and here) on the Acocella story and Ben Zimmer on Bloom’s blog post. See also Jessica Love’s essay on “what the New Yorker got wrong” in The American Scholar. (Update: Read Steven Pinker’s response to Acocella, “False Fronts in the Language Wars: Why New Yorker Writers and Others Keep Pushing Bogus Controversies,” published May 31 in Slate.)
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