Fritinancy

The Cadillac of Language Columns

2009-11-06T07:35:41-08:00

That would be Ben Zimmer's "On Language" column in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, "Cadillac Thrives As a Figure of Speech." In fact, I'd encourage you to read it even if I weren't quoted in it.

Here's a tasty passage in which I'm not quoted; it's worth reading anyway, as is all of Ben Zimmer's writing:

It was perhaps a bad sign when, in a print ad in 1979, Cadillac felt the need to remind consumers that it was still “the Cadillac of cars.” As the fortunes of Cadillac declined in the ’80s and ’90s, the old laudatory expression became a source of pop-cultural satire: Krusty the Clown on “The Simpsons” endorsed an S.U.V. called the Canyonero as “the Cadillac of automobiles”; the rental-car attendant in the film “Get Shorty” assured John Travolta's character that the Oldsmobile Silhouette was “the Cadillac of minivans.” Most recently, in the HBO series “The Wire,” when the young female thug Snoop is sold what a salesman calls the Cadillac of nail guns, she dismisses his pitch with the line, “He mean Lexus, but he ain’t know it.”

I sure miss "The Wire."

Opportunism Knocks

2009-11-05T10:32:36-08:00

This ad for Saks Fifth Avenue appeared on page A3 of Monday's New York Times:

I skimmed along until opportunistic brought me up short. Opportunistic? Really?

It's clearly the wrong word. But why? And what should it have been?

Some background: Opportunity, opportune, and opportunist(ic) share a Latin root, opportunus, which means "favorable": it's a contraction of ob portus, "toward the harbor." An opportunity is a favorable time; opportune, the adjective, means "favorable," "timely," or "convenient." Both words came into English around 1400.

But opportunist, opportunism, and opportunistic entered the language much later, between 1870 and 1881, and have very different shadings. They were borrowed from opportunismo, a word used in 19th-century Italian politics to mean "making a profit from the prevailing circumstances." Opportunistic now generally means "unscrupulous" or "taking selfish advantage of circumstances without regard for ethics."

(Opportunistic also has a medical meaning: An opportunistic infection is one that takes advantage of a weakened immune system.)

So when Saks asks customers whether they fall into the "opportunistic" category, is it asking whether they're greedy and unethical?

Why, yes it is. But I'm pretty sure it doesn't intend to.

I think, but can't say for sure, that Saks means something closer to "Are you interested in a well-timed opportunity?" That's too wordy for a small-space newspaper ad, so the copywriter evident looked for a shortcut. And ended up veering way off course.

According to the newest edition of Bryan Garner's Modern American Usage—a standard reference for writers and editors—opportunistic and opportune are sometimes confused. Garner cites this example: "Now is the most opportunistic [read opportune] time for this type of product." In Garner's Language Change Index, the substitution of opportunistic for opportune is classified Stage 1: Rejected.

(I found an even more absurd example on Twitter: "More grounded, more humble, more selfless makes us more opportunistic." Nope: being more humble and selfless makes you less opportunistic.)

But substituting opportune won't work in the ad. A time can be an opportune; an event can be opportune. Not a person.

Let's take another look at the Saks ad and see whether we can make it more logical and less insulting.

Three categories of shopper are being addressed: the owner of vintage clothing, the overscheduled shopper, and the woman interested in a rare opportunity to meet a pair of jewelry designers. We're looking for a concise, interesting way to sum up the third woman's identity and motivation and to point to the payoff: come to the store tomorrow evening. Unless we want to rewrite the whole ad, we can be relaxed about parallel structure: the first statement leads off with a noun, the second with an adjective. But we need to stick to the question-answer format. And we should consider the Saks brand image: upscale, authoritative, a bit breezy.

A few options:

Time to chat? Meet the Faraone Mennella designers...

Discovery seeker? Meet the Faraone Mennella designers...

An eye for the next new thing? Meet the Faraone Mennella designers...

Connoisseur? Meet the Faraone Mennella designers...

However, none of these substitutions gets at whatever sense of "opportunity" the writer originally had in mind.

Any suggestions?

Any Color, As Long As It's Printable

2009-11-04T06:23:51-08:00

General Motors, apparently not satisfied with a $30 billion government bailout, is asking U.S. citizens to chip in just one more tiny little thing: a color name for the new Chevy Volt, the world's first mass-produced extended-range electric vehicle.

From the photos, I'd say it looks silverish-greenish. But hey, we're Americans! We can do better!

So GM sponsored a contest (deadline was this morning, I regret to inform). And then Autopia, Wired.com's car blog, spread the word.

And the fun began.

Suffice it to say that Autopia's readers exibit little of the earnest enthusiasm of the official entrants. Compare the two sets of comments and judge for yourself.

My favorites: Lame Green, Data Gathering Blue Disguised As a Contest Green, and Socialist Red ("Darn right we should be able to name it we paid for it").

And special credit to Some Guy, who submitted "Can't Afford to Hire Our Own Marketing Firm Green" on the GM site.

Hat tip: Anthony Shore, who commented on LinkedIn: "It's a contest. What could possibly go wrong?"

Webster's New World Dictionary Word of the Year

2009-11-03T10:47:43-08:00

It's distracted driving.

From Webster's Word of the Year website:

A sign of the times surely, distracted driving is another reflection – and consequence – of our ongoing romance with all things digital and mobile and the enhanced capabilities they provide. While it now may be easier and quicker to feed our multitasking habits, it is not always safe, and many jurisdictions are formalizing that position by making it a crime to text or otherwise use a cellphone while driving. In other words, CrackBerry users beware, lest a charge of DWD (driving while distracted) or DWT (driving while texting) stain your record, not to mention endanger yourself and others.

Distracted driving is an example of hypallage, also known as "transferred epithet." Translation: It isn't the driving that's distracted, but the driver. In today's edition of Word Routes, Ben Zimmer expands on hypallage and on Word of the Year (WOTY) contests.

Webster's New World Dictionary always makes one of the earliest WOTY announcements. Other WOTY selections will follow in the next couple of months. The big kahuna of such contests is sponsored by the American Dialect Society, which will reveal its 2009 WOTY at the society's annual meeting, to be held in Baltimore in January.

Not only that: ADS is currently accepting nominations for Word of the Decade 2000-2009. The previous Word of the Decade (1990-1999) was web.

Webster's 2008 WOTY was overshare.

___

Poster image from here.

Word of the Week: Mockolate

2009-11-02T07:44:27-08:00

Mockolate: A derisive term for an ingredient used as a chocolate substitute that contains cocoa solids but no cocoa butter. Cheaper than real chocolate, mockolate is sometimes found in inexpensive confections and baked goods, sometimes described as "chocolate-y coating" or "milk compound chocolate."

Mockolate hasn't yet shown up in published dictionaries. (Mocktail, however, appears in the fourth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, published in 2006.) The online Double-Tongued Dictionary provides a single citation for mockolate, from a 2008 Seattle Post-Intelligencer article, "On a Mission for 'True' Chocolate." The article quotes molecular biologist Andy McShea, chief operating officer of Theo Chocolate, who provides a more general definition of the word than the one I've provided above:

Andy McShea is a Harvard-trained molecular biologist using his scientific talent in Seattle to promote "true chocolate" and steer consumers away from inadvertently ingesting all that other brown sweet stuff he says is often unhealthy, morally questionable and not the real thing.

"We like to call it 'mockolate,' " said McShea, his British accent rising with indignation. "Most of the stuff sold as chocolate out in the world today is not really chocolate."

But mockolate predates that citation. CandyBlog, which reviews confections from around the world, wrote in October 2005 that the brown coating on Almond Roca and Cashew is "not real chocolate, but it's pretty good mockolate." The word gained currency during the spring of 2007, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was considering proposed changes to food standards to allow “a vegetable fat in place of another vegetable fat named in the standard (e.g., cacao fat)” when manufacturing chocolate. "Chocolate lovers read that as a direct assault on their palates," reported the Washington Post:

Chocolate purists, of which there are apparently many, have undertaken a grassroots letter-writing campaign to the FDA to inform the agency that such a change to the standards is just not okay with them. More than 225 comments to the petition have been processed so far by the agency, and chocolate bloggers are pressing for more. In the annals of bureaucratic Washington battles, this is a sweet one.

Food bloggers took up the cause, and Guittard, a premium chocolate manufacturer based in the Bay Area since 1868, put up a website, www.don'tmesswithourchocolate.com (since removed). In the end the FDA rejected the proposed changes.

However, mockolate can still be found in the candy aisle. The candy blog ZOMG, Candy! diligently alerts consumer to mockolate in confections such as 5th Avenue.

The earliest citation of mockolate I could find was in the Nov. 16, 1995, episode of Friends, "The One with the List," in which Monica gets a job making food with a synthetic chocolate substitute called Mockolate (presumably meant to be a brand name), which has "a taste that'll last till Christmas." A commenter on CandyBlog helpfully provided relevant chunks of dialogue from that episode. Here's one:

MONICA: Ok, this is pumpkin pie with mockolate cookie crumb crust. This is mockolate cranberry cake, and these are mockolate chip cookies. Just like the Indians served.

RACHEL: Oh my god.

MONICA: Oh my god good?

RACHEL: Oh my god, I can’t believe you let me put this in my mouth.

PHOEBE: Oh, oh sweet lord! This is what evil must taste like!

Photo from EW.com. (That's EW as in Entertainment Weekly, not ewwww.)