Fritinancy

On the Visual Thesaurus: Understanding 'Maven'

How did a Yiddish noun with Hebrew roots and a sardonic connotation become a popular brand name, a scientific backronym, and even a baby name?

That’s the question I address in “Understanding Maven,” my May column for the Visual Thesaurus. I trace the spread of maven in mainstream culture back to a regional ad campaign in the 1960s and to two widely read journalists, William Safire and Malcolm Gladwell. As for the “Maven” baby name, it seems to be an extension of the Irish girl’s name Maeve—even though “Maven” is a masculine noun in Yiddish.

Access to the column is paywalled for three months; here’s an excerpt:

Maven’s real tipping point was … well, The Tipping Point, the 2000 book by Malcolm Gladwell that asserted that “ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do.” Long before “influencer” became a job description, Gladwell divided influential people into three groups: connectors, salesmen, and—you guessed it—mavens. Mavens, Gladwell wrote, “are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know”:

The critical thing about Mavens is that they aren’t passive collectors of information. It isn’t just that they are obsessed with how to get the best deal on a can of coffee. What sets them apart is that once they figure out how to get that deal, they want to tell you about it too. 

The Tipping Point became a best-seller and a favored reference in leadership seminars and marketing courses. It also enhanced our vocabulary. Not only did it make “tipping point”—a term used mostly by scientists beginning in the late 1950s—a household phrase, it educated thousands of readers about maven. Many of those readers went on to start companies that they named “Maven,” often explicitly acknowledging their debt to Gladwell and The Tipping Point.

Read the rest of the column.

UPDATE, May 27: The software company Mavenlink, which I mention in the Visual Thesaurus story, has been renamed Kantata following a merger. According to the press release, the new name “was inspired by ‘cantata’ – a classical music composition that intricately and beautifully combines multiple voice and instrumentation elements. This style of classical music is a metaphor for the collaborative creation that is the foundation of all successful professional services organizations.” 

December linkfest

Happy Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us! The traditional Airing of Grievances seems superfluous this year: we’ve been airing and grieving for most of 2020. So let us gather quietly—and virtually—around the traditionally unadorned Festivus pole and wish for feats of strength to get us through the season.

Festivus T-shirt from Snorg Tees. Read my previous Festivus posts.

 

Now let’s open some link-y presents!

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“May your belly make you scream”

What could be more timely, more fitting, more historic, and more folkloric* than a post about disease-curses? They’re very much a thing in Dutch—where kanker (cancer) is just about the worst thing you could wish upon an enemy—and in Yiddish, where you might say about someone you despise, “He should have Pharaoh’s plagues and Job’s scabies.”

 

 

I write about those curses and many others in my latest post for Strong Language, the sweary blog about all kinds of swearing. Take a break from coronavirus coverage and those maddening Rose Garden briefings to learn a thing or two about imprecations with some real bite.

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* Thank you, Car Guys.

New name beat: Tushy

I’ll get into the whence and wherefore of this brand name in just a bit. But before I do, an observation: It’s never a good idea to pick a name for your company and its namesake product that is also the name of a widely promoted festish-y photo site. Needless to say, the founder of HelloTushy.com (the subject of this post) didn’t ask me about Tushy.com (the fetish-y one), or I wouldn’t be writing this preamble.

To be perfectly clear, this is the Tushy we’re talking about.

Tushy: “For people who poop.”

 

And if you’re averse to crude language, you may want to stop reading right now.

The case of the coded acronym

I’m over at the Strong Language blog today with a story about a Hollywood recording studio that recorded some of the biggest names of the 1960s and 1970s: the Doors, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, Linda Ronstadt. The studio’s own name was the acronym T.T.G., which may have stood for “Two Terrible Guys.” Or it may have stood for a Yiddish-Arabic expression that was considerably swearier.

Words of the Year 2015: Fritinancy Edition

The WOTY party has begun, and I’m arriving fashionably (or maybe just breathlessly) late. Back in early November, Allan Metcalf nominated basic for the honor; a couple of weeks later Dennis Baron, aka Dr. Grammar, anointed singular they and Oxford Dictionaries selected an emoji, “Face with Tears of Joy.” Merriam-Webster, which chooses its WOTY based on volume of online lookups, selected -ism. The spoofy Emmett Lee Dickinson Museum (named after “Emily’s third cousin, twice removed – at her request”) has been posting one WOTY candidate every day in December, along with runners-up. (I confess I’d never heard of Dick Poop, but I like it.) And over at the Visual Thesaurus (where I’m a contributing writer), Ben Zimmer has nominated a couple dozen notable words that surfaced this year in science, business, news, and pop culture.

My turn now. To compile my Words of the Year list, I followed the American Dialect Society's criteria for selection:

• demonstrably new or newly popular in 2015
• widely and/or prominently used in 2015
• indicative or reflective of the popular discourse
• not a peeve or a complaint about overuse or misuse.

Word of the year: Refugee

Most useful: Mx.

Most likely to succeed: Ghosting

Least likely to succeed: Left shark

Euphemism of the year: Netflix and chill

Most creative: Shipping

Most outrageous: Measles party, schlonged (tie – it was an outrageous year!)

Most unnecessary: Microaggression

Most productive: -shaming

Read on for the full WOTY list – 20 words in all – and brief definitions. Words previously featured on this blog are linked to the relevant posts. And follow the American Dialect Society for news of its WOTY vote on January 8.

December Linkfest

Into the final weeks of 2015 with one final link roundup!

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Lucy Kellaway, who writes about language and writing for the Financial Times, has created Guffipedia, “a repository for the worst jargon I’ve seen over the years.” All the devils are here: onboard more resource, flex-pon-sive, diverse hairdos, etc. ad nauseam. “The point of Guffipedia,” writes Kellaway, “is not just for you to admire the extent of my guff collection, but to help me curate it going forward, as they say in Guffish.” Good point of entry: the many Guffish euphemisms for you’re fired. (Hat tip: Molly Walker.)

Word of the Week: Gefatke

Gefatke: A pancake made of chopped fish and grated potatoes. A portmanteau of gefilte (literally “stuffed”) fish and latke; both words are Yiddish in origin.

“We already have the Cronut, crookie and pretzel croissant,” writes Michele Henry, a staff reporter for the Toronto Star. “Why not the gefatke? Or is it a lafilte?”

Latkes, Henry reminds us, are traditionally eaten at Hanukkah, the eight-day festival of lights that ends this year at sundown December 24. “But, at most other times of the year, we lavish holiday tables with different goodies, including a sort of fish-loaf — shaped into pucks and poached — called gefilte fish. It’s an acquired taste.” (It’s also the perfect substrate for the hottest horseradish you can tolerate.)

Henry continues:

Still, this nice Jewish girl thought we’d be remiss, in this age of hybrid foods, not to squash together two of my culture’s most storied dishes, turning gefilte fish and latke into gefatke (or, if you prefer, lafilte). 

She enlisted Toronto chef, restaurateur “and member of the tribe” Anthony Rose to realize her vision. Then her Star colleague tweaked it just a bit, adding some Thai fish sauce for a little extra flavor. (Recipe here.)

As a portmanteau, gefatke lacks the recognizability of last year’s Thanksgivukkah. The inclination is to rhyme the stressed second syllable with cat, which suggests an unwelcome (though probably not inaccurate) connection with dietary fat; latke, by contrast, rhymes roughly with plot-keh. (The vowel sound in ke is a schwa.) The alternative, lafilte, is just too Frenchy for this dish.

The recipe, however, sounds delish. If you’re in New York, you may want to make your gefatkes (or whatever you call them) with artisanal gefilte fish from the nicely named Gefilteria. Or you can make your own gefilte fish from this recipe, courtesy of the equally nicely named Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen in San Francisco.

There are no sons named Wise at Wise Sons. The deli takes its name from the “wise son” of the Passover ritual. The Jewish year 5771 translates (approximately, depending on the precise date) to the civil year 2011.

 

Happy Hanukkah and, as Julia Child would have said in Israel, b’te-avon!

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Hat tip: Q. Pheevr, via tweet.

On the Visual Thesaurus: Ish

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at ish, a flexible little suffix with multiple meanings that’s increasingly seen in titles (ABC-TV’s “Black-ish”), brand names (the Berkeley bookstore Bookish, the Oakland T-shirt company Oaklandish, the vintage-furniture etailer Chairish), and brand descriptors (anonymish). In some places, ish has even attained independent status (Ish Watch; Ish, a children’s book).

Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers (only $19.95 a year!). Here’s a shortish excerpt:

Bookish: This word has meant “literary” or “enthusiastic about reading” since the mid-16^th century. When attached to a noun, ish gives the sense of belonging to that thing or person, or having its nature or character. Many noun + ish blends express disparagement: consider childish, sluggish, shrewish, foolish, selfish, and many others. Other times, as with bookish (or feverish or freakish), the sense is neutral. In addition to the Berkeley bookstore, there’s an ebook reader called Booki.sh, which uses the Saint Helena country-code domain extension .sh.

Read the rest of the column.

Related: Raffish.

Blog bonus #1:

Here’s the normal Bookish logo.

 

And here’s the Halloween version.

Via a tweet from San Francisco Chronicle book editor John McMurtrie.

 

Blog bonus #2:

I figured someone would ask about Ish Kabibble, so even though he’s unrelated to the topic at hand I did some research.

Ish Kabibble was the stage name of Merwyn Bogue (1907-1994 or 1908-1993, depending on the source), a cornet player in Kay Kyser’s big band. The origin of the pseudonym is debated. Here’s an excerpt from the World Wide Words entry:

This dismissive slang expression came into existence in the USA quite suddenly around 1913 with the ostensible meaning “I should worry!”, which means, of course, “Don’t worry!” or “Who cares?”. It had quite a vogue for a decade or two and was the name of a character played by Merwyn Bogue on a 1930s radio show called Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge (they don’t make titles like that any more).

Those of us who sift the detritus of language for fun and profit are intrigued by it. It looks and sounds Yiddish and the phrases nish gefidlt, nicht gefiedelt, and ich gebliebte have all been suggested as sources. The idea of a Jewish connection was reinforced in 1914 when Harry Hershfield began his cartoon strip Abie the Agent in Hearst newspapers, which featured the car salesman Abraham (“Abie”) Kabibble.

Many people at the time certainly thought it was Yiddish, and it’s notable that some Anglicised it to “I should bibble” or “we should bibble”. But it was equally firmly said by contemporaries that no Yiddish connection existed at all.

 

July Linkfest

Good news for “Downton Abbey” fans: your favorite posh soap opera will soon be an actual soap (and related beauty products). Bad news for American fans: the 10-piece collection will be sold only at not-particularly-posh Marks and Spencer in the UK. Each package is adorned with an apposite quote from one of the episodes. (Via The Beheld.)

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Fun with words: Who or what is the “peter” in “peter out”?

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May the farce be with you: William Shakespeare’s Star Wars (“In time so long ago begins our play, / in star-crossed galaxy far, far away”) and  Star Wars: Vader’s Little Princess.

Image via EW.

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11-X, MAX, AIO, MIND, FACE, and other rejected Xbox names.

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“Congressional acronym abuse: An overly in-depth analysis of congressional acronym usage in bill names.” A tidbit: “Some acronyms are more popular than others. The most popular word, SAFE, is used 131 times.” See also Ben Zimmer’s May 2012 column on the “backronym of the week: Ex-PATRIOT Act.” 

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Do Apple’s new ads signal a renaissance for long copy? “Sadly, but definitely, not. The copy is dire. Vacuous, boring, self-regarding and counter-productive. It starts with a glimmer of promise – the point about designing things with the user in mind – but then goes precisely nowhere with it.” (Via Deborah Schneider.)

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Arika Okrent on the phonetic pitfalls of shm- reduplication: “‘Confusion, shmonfusion’ or ‘confusion, conshmusion’? Do you let your shm- wander, or make it stay up front where you can keep an eye on it?” (See also my posts on shmeat, Schmap, Libros Schmibros, and Burglar Schmurglar.)

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What not to name the baby, San Francisco version. Tips for techies: “You have the added handicap of being in a field where naming products comes up all the time. You probably even think you're good at it. Unfortunately for fetuses, there is a pretty big difference between names that would be appropriate for a baby and names appropriate for a wearable pedometer.” (Via Nancy’s Baby Names.)

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Speaking of babies, Neil Whitman was recently baffled by a product called Babiators: “All at once, not only did I have to infer the existence of aviators as a noun referring to a kind of eyewear instead of a group of airplane pilots; I also had to take it in as part of an offensively cute portmanteau word, in a display for a product that shouldn’t even exist.”

“Safe, durable, and awesome sunglasses for kids.”