Fritinancy

What Does “Artisan” Mean?

In my latest column for Visual Thesaurus, online today, I look at the shifting meaning of artisan in mass-market branding. The word originally meant “a craftsperson who uses traditional or non-mechanized methods.” (And manufacture literally meant “to make by hand,” but that’s another story.) Today, however, it has some strange bedfellows—or tablefellows—including Domino’s new Artisan Pizzas, which cost $7.99 each and are only kidding about the artisan part. “We’re Not Artisans,” reads Domino’s home-page banner, “But This Might Just Convince You We Are.”

 

Domino’s new “Artisan Pizza”: an inside joke? Photo from GrubGrade.

You’ll have to subscribe to read the full article (just $19.95 a year!). Here’s an excerpt:

In branding, “artisan” has become less a descriptor than an honorific. It’s shorthand for something desirable and time honored, and it’s defined largely by its context. The artisan cheese at your local farmers’ market may in fact have been made by artisans. At Domino’s Pizza, “artisan” is the verbal-branding equivalent of a parsley garnish: attractive but not nutritionally significant. The same can be said—according to the research organization Datamonitor—for many of the 800 or so food products introduced in the last five years that use “artisan” in their names.

Read the rest of “Mass-Market Artisans.”

 

Speaking for myself, whenever I see “artisan” I think about the Artesians. Does anyone else remember that ad campaign for Olympia beer?

 

UPDATE: Read “Hand-Crafted Hype: How 'Artisan' Food Became Forever Debased,” in New York magazine's Grub Street blog.

Other posts in the “What Does It Mean?” series: What Does “Urban” Mean?, What Does “Community” Mean?, What Does “Main Street” Mean?

The X Community

The other day I noticed this tweet from renowned Twitter wit Bad Banana:

 

“The apathy community”: genius. (And “But whatever” ices the cake.) Because maybe you’ve noticed, as I have, that this whole community thing has gotten out of hand.

I’m not referring, of course, to the actual cracked-pavement-and-stucco community in which I dwell. Nor am I referring to “Community,” the occasionally very funny NBC series.

I’m talking about disease communities like “the HIV community,” “the diabetes community,” and “the cancer community” (and sub-communities like “the breast-cancer community”). (In the 19th century, was there a “consumption community”?) And faux communities like “the intelligence community” and “the arts community.”

This plague of communities begs to be spoofed, and Bad Banana isn’t the only one to have risen to the challenge. Also on Twitter, in May, the comic Andy Borowitz mock-announced: “Playboy’s 3-D Centerfold Creates Excitement in Masturbation Community.” (The tweet was later deleted, for reasons unknown, but not before I wrote it down.) 

Last month, a Berkeley blogger, Infospigot, ended a post about a dead deer on a city street with this rumination:

I wonder how long it will take word to spread in the carrion-eating community of the choice meal awaiting out there.

During the TV season just ended, I counted three  four snarky “communities” on “30 Rock”: “the celebrity community” (in the Valentine’s Day episode), “the pervert community” (in “Future Husband”), “the porn community,” and “the janitor community” (the last two in “Khonani”).

Pious overuse has brought us to this pass, my friends. Tony Proscio, author of In Other Words: A Please for Plain Speaking in Foundations*, defines “community” as “a corral for keeping people together in your own mind.” He continues:

[I]n phrases like “the intelligence community,” “the arts community,” or “the child-welfare community,” the word drops a deliberate scrim in front of a bunch of shadowy people whom no one is expected to identify. Most of the time, those who use such phrases really mean to say “people in these fields whom I consider important, but can’t or won’t name.” Used that way, the word falsely pretends to give information while actually blotting out important details.

I’m sure all of us in the language-blogging community will say: Hear, hear.

___

* I wrote about In Other Words in a 2006 post, “Resisting the Jargon Juggernaut.”

What Does "Urban" Mean?

I'm not talking about the dictionary definition: an adjective meaning "of the city," derived from Latin urbanus and ultimately urbs, "city." Because that doesn't explain what "urban" is doing in this phrase, reproduced verbatim from a report I heard recently on my local public-radio station:

Like most urban cities, Oakland...

Like most city-ish cities?

No, of course not. "Urban cities" may seem redundant, but the reporter had something else in mind. Increasingly over the last few decades, "urban" has acquired a secondary meaning: "dominated by a racial minority, usually African-American."

 

What Does "Main Street" Mean?

There's been a lot of talk about "Main Street" in political speeches and news articles lately. It's a metonym—a word that represents an associated concept, as "White House" represents "the presidency"— that's usually used in opposition to another metonym, Wall Street.

Used this way, I suppose "Main Street" stands in for "just plain folks" or "mom-and-pop stores," or that creepily voguish concept, "small-town values." But I can't do any local research, because there's no Main Street in Oakland, where I live. (We do have a Broadway and, naturally, a Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.) Berkeley's main street is Telegraph Avenue. San Francisco's Main Street is on the far fringe of the Financial District and much less representative of that city than, say, Market Street or Castro Street. Los Angeles, where I grew up, has a Main Street that for years has pretty much been synonomous with Skid Row. (Digression: The first Skid Row was Seattle's Skid Road, a dirt path along which logs were skidded to the sawmill.) But Los Angeles's symbolic main street is Hollywood Boulevard, and many of its actual main thoroughfares—as well as its historic main street—have Spanish names: La Brea, La Cienega, Ventura, Sepulveda, Olvera.

The Main Street that evokes the most associations for me is the one in Sinclair Lewis's 1920 novel by that name. There, Main Street stands for everything parochial, ignorant, and self-satisfied about small-town America. But I'm guessing that's not what all those politicians and editorial writers are thinking about.

But what do they mean? Linguist Eric Baković has been thinking about Main Street as buzzword, and he's a little annoyed. "I don't live on Main Street," he writes in Language Log:

It's not that I don't understand the metonym (and why it might have once sounded like the perfect phrase to oppose "Wall Street" with), I just don't find it very effective — that, or the relative novelty of it (for me) wore off very, very quickly and now it just sounds cliché and, quite frankly, devoid of content.

Be sure to read the comments on the post, which broaden the discussion to street metonyms in general (Madison Avenue = advertising; London's Fleet Street  = newspaper publishing) and to nuances I, for one, hadn't considered. For example, John Baker observes:

 

In addition to its small town/retail implications, "Main Street" today is often used to refer to the real economy and operating companies, as opposed to Wall Street, which refers to the virtual economy and financial intermediaries. "Main Street" and "Wall Street" are probably more meaningful to most people than "real economy" and "virtual economy." "Main Street" does not mean "your street," so Bush was making a different (and smarter) reference with those words.

Update, Oct. 2: Language Log has published a couple of follow-ups to its original "Main Street" post. This one further explores what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi meant by "Main Street and everyday Americans." And this one, which includes a William Hamilton cartoon for the New Yorker, traces the history of the metonymic uses of "Wall Street" and "Main Street."

P.S. For another view of Main Street—and some distraction from the political and financial news— rent State and Main, about what happens to a small Vermont town when a movie crew decides to shoot there. (Hint: those townfolk are a whole lot more streetwise, Main- and other-, than the movie people counted on.) The movie, which appeared and disappeared too quickly in early 2001, was written and directed by David Mamet, master of cynical dialogue; the dream cast includes Alec Baldwin, Sarah Jessica Parker, Rebbeca Pidgeon (Mamet's wife), Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Ricky Jay, Julia Stiles, and Patti LuPone.