Fritinancy

May Linkfest

The new-to-me verb “to knoll” comes from Knoll, the furniture brand named for founders Florence and Hans Knoll. Mike Pope writes in his Evolving English II blog that knolling refers to “aligning or squaring things (as on a desk), or more broadly, in what might be thought of as arranging things in an uber-anal-retentive way.” Mike’s post includes an “Always Be Knolling” video clip. I am a non-knoller—an anti-knoller, even—but I do like knowing the word and its origin.

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Pinterest is a dream medium for visual thinkers, but lately I’ve been seeing it used in some distinctly verbal ways. See, for example, Dipika Kohli’s board about naming that includes links to posts about taglines, the naming process, and common naming mistakes. I was especially pleased to discover “How to Name Things,” a thoughtful post on the ribbonfarm blog about naming and numbering. And I love the story about how ribbonfarm got its name.

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Worry more about creating a strong brand than about concocting a “pure” URL, advises Jay Jurisich of naming agency Zinzin. (Hear, hear!)

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Monday was “Name Day” in the U.S.: the day the Social Security Administration released its 2011 baby-name data. Read Nancy’s Baby Names and Baby Name Wizard for comprehensive coverage. (Each link goes to the first of several posts about the name data.) Some high/low points: Sophia is the number-one girl’s name for the first time; Tyler, Jayden, Isabella, and Miley are finally falling out of favor; and the girl’s name Harper rose in rank from 118th in 2010 to 54th in 2011. Also from Baby Name Wizard, the best sibling name set ever.

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The misuse of “whom” only seems like a recent problem. Language Log reminds us that the humorist James Thurber, tongue planted firmly in cheek, addressed the problem in 1929: “Take the common expression, ‘Whom are you, anyways?’ That is of course, strictly speaking, correct – and yet how formal, how stilted!”

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The University of Minnesota’s James M. Pilcher, who has been studying the origin of the taco for 20 years, tells the Smithsonian magazine that the name for the food item may have originated in the 18th century, in the silver mines of Mexico, where “taco” referred to little charges used to excavate the ore. “Taco” first appeared in print in the U.S. in 1905. Lots more fascinating history in that article, including the story of Taco Bell, named for its founder, Glen Bell. For more taco history, read the recent New York Times article about Gustavo Arellano, author of a new book, Taco USA.

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The Millions on books with one-word titles: “At their best, one-word titles distill content to its purest essence, which is what all titles strive to do, and then they stick in the mind. Sometimes, of course, they fall flat, and much of the time they’re just lukewarm and vague or, worse, falsely grand.”  (Hat tip: Diana Landau.)

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On the other hand: One hundred books whose titles start with “The Man Who…”

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Need to name a beverage? Just add zero.

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“A company needs a new name and it decides to engage its employees to come up with a new name,” writes guest blogger Mark Prus at DuetsBlog. “What could go wrong?” Plenty.

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Quick: How many fictitious brands from “The Simpsons” can you name?

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Bill Gardner of Logo Lounge identifies the most significant logo trends of 2012, and the names he gives the trends are as interesting as the designs. A sampling: Potato Chip, Anaglyphs, Sphere Carving, Peel.

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Why does the sentence adverb “hopefully” carry a stigma in some quarters while “obviously,” “seriously,” and “honestly” don’t? Linguist Geoff Pullum casts a gimlet eye on “five decades of foolishness,” hopefully put to rest now that the AP Stylebook permits “the modern usage of hopefully”—i.e., “it is hoped that.”

Word of the Week: Stockist

Stockist: A retailer or distributor that stocks goods for sale.

The American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition (2000), says stockist is “chiefly British,” and the OED concurs: all four of its citations are from British or Irish sources, the earliest from 1922. Recently, though, I’ve noticed that stockist has crept into American retail jargon, replacing the more familiar “store locator” or “where to buy.” A sampling:

Litter, a San Francisco-based wholesaler of “body jewelry.” All but three of Litter’s “stockists” are in the US.

The Hundreds, a Los Angeles-based seller of street wear and skate wear. Its “stockists” include stores in Norman, Oklahoma; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Murray, Utah.

RGB, “a product line dedicated solely to nail color and care.” The company is based in Los Angeles; its “stockists” are mostly in the US.

Mishka, a designer/manufacturer of T-shirts. It’s based in New York City and sells throughout the US (Gretna, Louisiana; Providence, Rhode Island; Chandler, Arizona) as well as in the UK, Europe, and Asia.

Remedy Quarterly, an independent food magazine published in Brooklyn. From the home page: “Want to see Remedy in person? Check out one of our amazing stockists, some of the best community bookstores around.” Those “stockists” are in Maryland, California, Illinois, “Massachusettes.” and other states.

Billykirk, a maker of bags, wallets, and belts for men. The company is based in New York; it does business internationally but most of its “stockists” are in the US.

In January, Ben Yagoda included stockist in his Not One-Off Britishisms blog (NOOB), which tracks British expressions “that have got popular in the U.S.” (“Have got” is itself a Britishism. Americans say “have gotten.”) He cited some examples (crediting me—thanks!), and commented:

I am now convinced that stockist is indeed happening in the U.S. However, it has not yet appeared in the mainstream media, only, apparently, in commercial communication. This puts it in the same category as bespoke: a phony, hype-y word that exists–and one hopes will stay–in the realm of advertising and promotion.

The protest comes too late, I suspect.

I can only speculate about the reasons for the mini-trend toward stockist. Is it an attempt to reach a global audience? Did stockist appear in a cult movie I’ve yet to see? Is the usage influenced by other trendy -ist and -ista words (socialist, completist, gallerist, recessionist, frugalista)? Is there a Hipster Retail Dictionary that I’m unaware of, with stockist on Page 1? Does each of these companies has a resident Brit on its staff who’s paid to contribute (CON-tribute, that Brit might say) across-the-pond lingo to lend a high-toned air to the proceedings? In other words, I didn’t get the original memo, but I’m seeing its effects.

It’s still early days—another NOOB—but I predict that stockist will be on the ballot for the 2012 UK-to-US Word of the Year, a contest held annually by Separated by a Common Language.

"To Contact" in 1918?

Like millions of TV viewers in the US and the UK, I’ve been under the spell of “Downton Abbey,” the period drama originally produced for Britain’s ITV and rebroadcast in the US on PBS. We’re now three episodes into Season 2, which opens in the middle of World War I and shuttles between a grand Yorkshire estate and the trenches of war-torn France. The attention to detail in clothing, automobiles, home furnishings, and telephones is extraordinary. The dialogue, however, isn’t always quite as authentic.

One out-of-place usage caught my attention in Episode 3, which aired last Sunday: contact as a verb meaning “to communicate with.” I heard it spoken twice: once by Cousin Isobel Crawley (at 10:09*: “I’ll try to contact Captain Crawley and explain to him what happened”) and once by Lord Grantham (at 25:35: “I don’t know how to contact her”).

By coincidence, I had recently researched the history of to contact for a column in the Visual Thesaurus, so I knew its use in “Downton Abbey” wasn’t just slightly amiss but grossly anachronistic.

Contact has been documented as a verb since 1834, but for decades it had a single meaning: to place in a such a manner that surfaces are touching. (That’s the literal meaning of the Latin root words.) The metaphorical sense of to contact—“to communicate with”—wasn’t recorded until 1927, and then only as an American colloquialism. The colloquial usage was still scandalous in Britain in 1935, when Sir Alan Patrick Herbert wrote What a Word! (wonderfully subtitled “Being an account of the principles and progress of ‘the word war’ conducted in ‘Punch’, to the great improvement and delight of the people, and the lasting benefit of the king’s English, with many ingenious exercises and horrible examples”). “A charming lady in the publicity business shocked me when we parted,” wrote Sir Alan, “by saying ‘It has been such fun contacting you.’”

Brits continued tsk-tsking about to contact for years. Here’s Eric Partridge in Usage and Abusage, first published in 1947:

If you feel that without this American synonym for ‘to establish contact with’ or, more idiomatically, ‘get in(to) touch with’ [a person], life would be too unutterably drear and bleak and ‘grim’, do at least say or write ‘to contact a person’, not contact with … Extremes of fashion bring their own corrective, and contact, the great word of the era of sales promotion and consolidation, shows signs of retiring to its proper place.

Fat chance, although the No Contact crowd had plenty of sympathizers on this side of the Atlantic, too. In The Careful Writer, originally published in 1965, Theodore Bernstein dismissed contact as “a fad word.” And Wilson Follett found it necessary to devote two hand-wringing columns to “contact, verb” in Modern American Usage (1966). An excerpt reveals the emotional valence of the dispute:

Persons old enough to have been repelled by the verb contact when it was still a crude neologism may as well make up their minds that there is no way to arrest or reverse the tide of its popularity. Persons young enough to have picked up the word without knowing that anyone had reservations about it may as well make up their minds that a considerable body of their elders abominate it and would despise themselves if they succumbed to the temptation to use it. …

If in doubt, contact your physician — this locution is as natural to the American of thirty as it is grotesque to the American of sixty, for whom the idea of surfaces touching is the essence of contact. The elderly can therefore see no fitness and no use for the word in its new sense, when the vocabulary already provides consult, ask, approach, get in touch with, confer with, and simply see.

“Repelled,” “crude,” “abominate,” “despise, “grotesque”—if those were the words being applied to contact in 1966, one can scarcely imagine the pearl-clutching, if not outright apoplexy, that would have resulted from its utterance in 1918.

Today, of course, we’ve made our peace with to contact and shifted our contempt to reach out. “Why not just say contact?” the peevers complain. Plus ça change.

For a discussion of other anachronistic language in “Downton Abbey,” see this article in the Daily Mail (UK), which considers the idioms “everything is rosy in the garden,” “get knotted,” and “logic pills,” all of which were unfamiliar to me. Meanwhile, in a recent Language Log post, linguist Mark Liberman took a look at “Just sayin’,” which was spoken in a DA episode set in 1916. Oh, and here’s that Visual Thesaurus column I wrote about reach out and contact.

UPDATE: Read Ben Zimmer’s columns on “Downton Abbey” anachronisms in the Visual Thesaurus and the Boston Globe.

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* The current episodes will be online through the end of the season. After that, you’ll have to rent or buy the DVD.

That Word

It does not mean what they think it means.

Liquid Gold Twined Necklace by Alexis Bittar, from alexisbittar.com.

Jack the Ripper was infamous. Bernie Madoff is infamous. Alexis Bittar—a charming and talented jewelry designer whom I once met at a Saks Fifth Avenue trunk show—is not infamous. What he is is famous (First Lady Michelle Obama is a fan) if not yet quite a household word.

The Bittar copywriter made a surprisingly common error: assuming that the addition of in- to famous would create a superlative meaning “intensely famous.”* As I wrote in a May 2008 post, infamous is never a favorable word; it means “notorious, ill-famed, having an exceedingly bad reputation.” In legal contexts, it may mean:

a. Punishable by severe measures, such as death, long imprisonment, or loss of civil rights.

b. Convicted of a crime, such as treason or felony, that carries such a punishment.

And speaking of treason, I’d also have suggested a substitute for treacherously in the second sentence of the necklace copy. The word means “hazardously” or “in a manner capable of betrayal”; in this context it suggests, all too unpleasantly, “puncture of the carotid artery by means of pointy costume jewelry.” I think what’s intended here is something closer to “enticingly” or “thrillingly.” Or maybe the little daggers “quiver” from pendants, suggesting not only their delicacy but their resemblance to arrows.

UPDATED at commenter Elisa’s suggestion:

 

More words in the That Word series: shrinkage, cliché, arriviste, bupkus, unrequited, sophistry.

 

* Likewise, some people seem to think that penultimate means “the pinnacle of ultimate,” when in fact it means “next to last.”

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Yes, the “That Word” reference is to The Princess Bride, which turns 25 this year. Inconceivable!

November Linkfest

Is it time to rename the beleaguered Euro? The IPKat blog, which covers intellectual-property issues in Europe and the UK, wants your opinion. At this writing, voting is almost evenly divided among Neuro, BizMark, and Tenax (“Latin for frugal, grasping, obstinate and stingy”), but some of the runners-up are pretty clever, too: the Meou (“Memberstate European Operating Unit”), the Markel (a blend of the German mark and “Merkel”), the Ohno (no explanation required). You have till midnight (GMT) Sunday to vote. Via @igornaming.

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“Consider Tide detergent, Taizi, whose Chinese characters literally mean ‘gets rid of dirt.’ (Characters are important: the same sound written differently could mean ‘too purple.’)” – “Picking a Brand Name in China Is a Business Itself,” New York Times, November 12. Pinyin News begs to differ: “Nope. The Mandarin name for Tide detergent is Tàizì. On the other hand, ‘too purple’ would be ‘tài zǐ,’ which is close but not the same.” (Hat tip: Ben Zimmer.)

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I’m loving Word Soup, the new Wordnik series that covers “strange, obscure, unbelievable (and sometimes NSFW) words” heard on television. A few from the October 28 post: Apparition American (a euphemism for “ghost”), turfucken (“sex with ducks”), and volumptuous (a Snooki-ism that blends “voluptuous” and “lump”). And from November 9: Moneyed American (a euphemism for “rich person”) and jägerbar (a were-bear that hunts). Say, Wordnik, how about turning Word Soup into a book?

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Speaking of TV, here in the US we’re impatiently awaiting Season 2 of Downton Abbey, coming to PBS January 8, 2012. In the meantime, Oxford Dictionaries gives us a guide to the language of the series, which is set in England just before and during World War I. No spoilers, thankfully, but plenty of interesting word histories—and some anachronisms, like “when push comes to shove,” which was primarily used in the US until 1958.

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A hat tip to the Wordnik Twitter feed for the link to “10 Words You Might Think Came from Science (But Are Really from Science Fiction).” On the list: robotics, zero gravity, blast off.

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Speaking of science fiction (not really), the Spaceage Portal of Sentence Discovery is a database of “interesting language patterns and elements,” including figures of speech, grammatical-syntactic structures, and “rhetorical maneuvers.” Search under the “clincher sentences” tag, for example, and read examples by Adam Gopnik, Todd Purdum, and Bill Bryson. Or: “Be of service to the universe by submitting examples that you yourself have discovered.” Fun and very, very useful. Via Sentence First.

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Do you believe it’s a cardinal sin to begin a sentence with a conjunction or end a sentence with a preposition? You are, in a word, wrong. Paul Brians, keeper of the indispensable Common Errors in English Usage website, has compiled a list of non-errors: “those usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually standard in English.” Included: “over” vs. “more than,” “raise” vs. “rear,” “between vs. among,” and—of course—”hopefully” and “momentarily.” (The late William Safire called these non-errors “incorrections,” a label Language Log has adopted.)

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I rarely post links to advice about writing because so much of it is tedious, dumb, or both. J. Maureen Henderson’s “How to Improve Your Writing,” which was published in Forbes last month, is different: it’s smart, practical, and funny. (First tip: “Do more of it. Maybe.” Second tip: “Read more. Possibly.”) The best piece of advice in the column: Edit other people’s work.

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“[S]lang is always doubting. It’s always questioning, it’s always cynical, it’s always undermining and it’s always been negative.” Lexicographer Jonathon Green, author of Green’s Dictionary of Slang (which retails for a decidedly upmarket $625), talks about his favorite subject with The Browser.

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Baby Name Wizard went shopping and discovered a nursery’s worth of shoes named Bella, Madison, Chloe, and Olivia. Surprisingly, “there’s almost no relationship between the style of name and the style of shoe.”

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Downtown Los Angeles once had streets named Faith, Hope, and Charity. “This last one, Charity Street, was a nonstarter. No one wanted to ‘live on Charity,’ so it was renamed with the grand title of Grand Avenue.” More on L.A. street names in L.A. Downtown News.

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Following up on my Tech Jargon of Yore post, here are more than 30 tech ads from that paleolithic era, the 1990s. Despite the weird kerning, this Radio Shack ad made me smile.

May Linkfest

Ever wonder how serial killers get their nicknames? Christopher Beam writes in Slate that most nicknames originate in the tabloid media. But there are exceptions, like the Unabomber (from an FBI code name) and the Zodiac killer (self-named). Related: Jag Bhalla pointed me to this Seinfeld script from 1998 in which Kramer invents some names for a serial killer. Denogginizer?

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Speaking of nicknames, derby girls—that’s how roller-derby competitors prefer to be known—have some colorful ones: Ovary Reaction, Hell O’Kittie, Val Catraz. But although some derby names are trademarked, “the vast majority of the thousands of U.S.-based derby girls have not” pursued legal protection for their names, write Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman in the Freakonomics blog. Instead, they’ve developed a surprisingly effective system of private regulation backed by the threat of social disapproval. And if dirty looks don’t do the trick, “there’s always violence.” (I wrote about the derby girls’ Master List of names here.)

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Mafia guys have colorful nicknames, too; one defendant in the Family Secrets trial, Joseph Lombardo, had three: “the Clown,” “Lumbo,” and “Lumpy.” But, writes Andy Grimm in the Chicago Tribune, “modern mobsters are so paranoid about wiretaps and FBI surveillance that they seldom even risk using a nickname.” (Hat tip: MJF.)

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Putrescine, moronic acid, dickite, and other unusual names of molecules.

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What are the Boylston, the Cambridge, the Ainsley, and the Hamilton? They’re all names of collar styles, as defined in an essential guide for the well-dressed gentleman, “Comprehending Copious Collars.” Please note: button-down describes a collar, not any old shirt with buttons down the front. (A longtime peeve of mine.)

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Here’s a gleeful discussion of pejorative nicknames for US locales, with –tucky blends (Springtucky, Pennsyltucky, etc.) leading the list. Most creative, and new to me: San Diego is “The Dirty Waffle” (Sandy Eggo). A few I didn’t see on the list: Lost Wages, Nevada; Slo Town (San Luis Obispo); Contraceptive (Contra Costa) County, California; and San Remote (Ramon), California. (Via @Wayword.)

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For decades, ad agencies were named for their founders. Now they’re named for … other things. Read the stories behind Zaaz, Odopod, Sra. Rushmore, and a dozen other agencies in the US and elsewhere.

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In March, Indianapolis copy editor Andy Hollandbeck (@4ndyman on Twitter) began compiling a sure-to-be-massive A to Z of Editorial Peeves, beginning with “alright.” He published the “I” list this week (i.e. vs. e.g., impact, incentivize), but you’ll certainly want to read all the entries.

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Speaking of copy editors and peeves, John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun makes the case for maintaining distinctions that matter: imply/infer, pallet/palate/pallet, discrete/discreet, reign/rein. He admits, however, that his confidence “has been shaken” on the compose/comprise issue.

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Modernist Cuisine is the six-volume, lavishly illustrated, 2,438-page set—list price $625—“that is destined to reinvent cooking,” according to its own publicity. Apparently all that lavish illustration left no room in the budget for proofreading, as this epic list of corrections and clarifications reveals. (Via Erin Brenner.)

Word of the Week: Declinism

Declinism: “The belief that something, particularly a country or a political or economic system, is undergoing a significant and possibly irreversible decline.” (Word Spy)

“Declinism” also describes an outlook on language, as Robert Lane Greene explains in his new book You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the politics of Identity. Writing about the punctuation grouch Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves)*, Greene says:

[N]ear the beginning of her furious little volume, she says that grammar and punctuation are “simply not taught in the majority of English schools.” if that was true wed expect that nearly everything written by people educated in england in the last few decades too look like this but it doesnt seem to be so Mistakes may be more common than Truss would like, but to say that grammar and punctuation are “simply not taught” in most schools beggars belief.

Language grouches have been singing that song for centuries, writes Greene, and it’s just as unwarranted as it was “when Swift said the same thing in 1712”:

Not only is declinism not new, as hundreds of years of examples show. It is not particular to the Anglophone world, either. Not only have English and American schoolmarms worried about “kids these days” for centuries. Similar concerns have nagged speakers of languages around the world throughout recorded history.

Cicero, for example, griped that standards of knowledge of Latin were “disgraceful.” And in the 19th century Jacob Grimm—one half of the Brothers Grimm, and a philologist as well as a fairy-tale collector—complained that “six hundred years ago every rustic knew, that is to say practiced daily, perfections and niceties in the German language of which the best grammarians nowadays do not even dream.”

 

 

According to Paul McFedries of Word Spy, “declinism” was coined in 1988 by the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington for an essay in Foreign Affairs. Huntington wrote:

In 1988 the United States reached the zenith of its fifth wave of declinism since the 1950s. The roots of this phenomenon lie in the political economy literature of the early 1980s that analyzed the fading American economic hegemony and attempted to identify the consequences of its disappearance.

McFedries calls declinism “the ‘apocalypse soon’ school of international relations”; its opposite is “triumphalism,” coined in 1964. “Declinism” appears to be a back-formation from the much earlier “declinist.” An 1831 citation for “declinist” appears in the Oxford English Dictionary, which (says McFedries) “mentions the ‘doctrine of the decline of science’ and labels one of its proponents as ‘the leader of the Declinists.’”

“Declinism” is used much less frequently in connection with language. Robert Lane Greene may have imported it from the language of political science; he is, after all, not a linguist but rather a journalist and expert in international affairs. He’s also a contributor to The Economist’s excellent language blog, Johnson.

Elsewhere in the world of isms: presentism, quotationalism, completism, and endism,

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* From Geoffrey Nunberg’s review of You Are What You Speak in the New York Times Book Review: “We’ve passed from the thoughtful homilies of Fowler to the pithy dictums of Strunk and White to the operatic curmudgeonry of modern sticklers like Lynne Truss, whose gasps of horror at the sight of a misplaced apostrophe are a campy cover for self-congratulation.”

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LOLcats image from Master Marf.

How Chitika Got Its Name

A couple of weeks ago, commenter Ben Trawick-Smith* asked why the name of tech company Chitika is pronounced CHIT-ika instead of the more predictable (in some languages) chi-TIK-a.

Good question, Ben. It turns out there’s a good answer. Well, good-ish.

First, here’s what Chitika says about itself:

Founded in 2003, Chitika (pronounced CHIH-tih-ka), is a full-service on-line advertising network serving over 3 billion monthly impressions across more than 100,000 websites.

(N.B: Any company name that requires a pronunciation guide has a couple of strikes against it from the get-go.)

Chitika’s offices are in Westborough, Massachusetts, but the company name comes from another continent. Again, from the About Us page:

What does Chitika mean? When Chitika co-founders, Venkat Kolluri and Alden DoRosario left Lycos in 2003 to start their own company, they sought a name that would suggest the speed with which its customers would be able to put up ads on their Web sites. Chitika, which means “snap of the fingers” in Telugu (a South Indian language), captured this sentiment and Chitika Inc. was born.

Difficult as it is to refrain from Chitika-Chitika-Bang-Bang jokes, I shall do so. I’ll also refrain from observing what happens when you make a small change in the first syllable of the name. Instead, I’ll point out that Chitika has a certain onomatopoetic quality—fast and snappy—and it can be fun to say. However, although Telugu has about 70 million speakers—that’s 2 million more than French—it’s unlikely that many of them are in Chitika’s target market, which means that for all intents and purposes “Chitika” is an empty-vessel name, with all the marketing challenges that burden any such name.

Chitika has other tsuris unrelated to its name. From a March 18 TechCrunch post:

Search-targeted advertising network Chitika reached a settlement this week with the Federal Trade Commission over illegally tracking consumers [sic] behavior online. According to the FTC, Chitika allowed users to opt out of having cookies placed on their browsers and receiving targeted ads, but unfortunately, Chitika’s opt-out only lasted 10 days. After this period, Chitika continued to track these consumers’ behavior on the web even though they opted out. This took place from at least May 2008 through February 2010, says the FTC. Chitika says this was an unintentional error in their tracking systems.

The post continues:

How much was it worth to Chikita to flaunt the privacy rules? Not much. Chitika tells us that it earned an estimated $0.55 from the users who requested to opt out but were tracked starting ten days after their request instead of ten years.

And yes, that’s an incorrect use of “flaunt”; the word that’s wanted here is “flout.”

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* Ben is the author of the excellent new Dialect Blog, “a place for hobbyists, actors, linguists and curiosity-seekers to learn about and discuss the dialects of the English language.”

Bouquets and Brickbats

Jim Mitchem, whose Twitter bio says he’s a “communications tactician,” has posted a critique of a ProFlowers ad that he saw on Weather.com.

 

 

“The problem with the ad is the headline,” Jim writes. Fair enough: I don’t like it either. But then:

Her Friends Will Be Jealous implies that I will buy these flowers. Meh. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. It’s passive logic. And you can’t afford to be passive when your audience isn’t really paying attention. Passive logic in advertising is roadkill.

He’d rewrite the line as “Make Her Friends Jealous.”

Boom. It’s quicker. It’s a call-to-action. It’s got some swagger. And most importantly, it’s active voice.

I agree with Jim that the ad could be more effective. But that’s where we part company. Jim is wrong about “passive logic” (I’m not even sure what that means) and “active voice,” he’s wrong about “swagger,” and he’s completely missed the biggest error in the ad.

Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Disagreeable

Ah, Capital One: Just when I think you’ve exhausted all your weird copywriting tricks, you bring out Jerry Stiller to lay another one on us.

 

 

Forget the Stone Age. I’m stuck in “is your savings” and I can’t un-mire myself. Surely I’m not alone in seeing a problem here with subject-verb agreement.

True, savings is a funny word. According to Garner’s Modern American Usage, it’s “technically” a plural, but “the phrase a savings occurs so frequently in modern usage that to label it an error would be futile.” Case in point: We give “a savings of $100” a grammatical pass.

But I’m less willing to condone “Is your savings…?” in the absence of a noun such as account after savings. Nearly all the examples I found online used a plural verb with savings when the construction was a question:

Are Your Savings Safe? (Telegraph, UK)

Are Your Savings Ready for Anything? (Credit Union National Association)

Assessing Bank Assets: Are Your Savings Safe? (Investopedia)

Are YOUR Savings Going Up in Smoke? (Rutgers Cooperative Research & Extension)

Are Your Savings Protected? (Moneywise)

I did see a declaratory exception on the home page of Savings Square*:

“This is your savings.” [Visual of a small black square.] “This is the interest applied to your savings.” [Visual of a green border added to the black square.]

This doesn’t bother me; here, “savings” is a singular entity. I certainly wouldn’t change the sentence to “These are your savings.”

But Capital One’s headline does seem peculiar, if not strictly wrong. I’m itching to rewrite it as “Are your savings…” I wouldn’t protest “Is your money stuck in the Stone Age”? And why not “Is your banking...”? After all, this Capital One campaign has been banging the “banking” drum, linguistically speaking, since the first ads appeared: see my previous posts on “banking like a Babylonian” and “1.30% vs. bupkus.”

Any grammar mavens care to weigh in?

From here, via TechCrunch.

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* Yes, it’s another square name!