My wife and I are just back from 20th Annual Jack Daniel’s World Championship Invitational Barbecue, a little disappointed—in the context of this blog, at least. I devoted a full chapter of my book The Grill of Victory: Hot Competition on the Barbecue Circuit to clever team names. With 60+ teams BBQ gathered in Lynchburg, Tennessee, for this prestigious competition, I fully expected to be collecting a pigpun full of additional daring, inventive BBQ team names. Especially considering that the teams hailed not only from across the continential U.S., but also from across the world—including Canada, England, Ireland, Estonia, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey and Poland.
There were a couple of inventive names I’d not seen before. “Moonswiners,” “Charlotte’s Rib,” “Pellet Envy” and “The Will Deal Catering and BBQ Co.” tested the limits of punning, and “Carcass Cookers” and “4 Legs Up BBQ” brought a bit of smokey poetry to the game. Other than those, and others I’ve already chronicled (such as “Natural Born Grillers”), the names weren’t nearly as delightful as I’d hoped. But then again, these teams were in Lynchburg to compete in Jack Daniel’s cooking competition, not my private wordplay competition. And 4 Legs Up BBQ won the competition they had set out from Great Bend, Kansas, to win.
Word-roasting aside, I was happy with our days visiting friends, sampling BBQ, quaffing beers (but no Jack Daniel’s—how did I let that happen?). How happy? Happy as one of the teams that’s been around for a while. Happy as:
I had agreed to have dinner with friends the other night, but Doc begged off because of family commitments, Jim begged off because the voices told him to, and I begged off because Jim’s voices told me to. Or, rather, I found myself irrationally busy. All this despite the fact that the dinner had been planned for months, with the obligatory stern instruction, “Mark your calendar.”
Fellow snarker JohnnyB—just about the only one of the group able to honor the commitment—chastised us thusly:
Just read this in Everything You Know About English Is Wrong:
The phrase “mark your calendar” does not mean “write this event in on your calendar so you won’t schedule something else in that same time period.”
“Mark your calendar” is a bastardization, by bastards, of a Latin term “mar curcalen dare” meaning “I challenge you to swirl around in the sea,” which means nothing.
As does my commitment to dinner engagements, apparently. And as does today’s post, here just for the fun of it.
A thought inspired by the recent landfall of Hurricane Gustav and my far-behind-in-my-reading of James Lee Burke’s Last Car to Elysian Fields:
Years ago I attended a business convention in the city of Elision, Louisiana.
Elision is not the name of the city, though it certainly sounds like a good Cajun name—the convention was in New Orleans. Before I left, a colleague asked me, “When you’re down there, find something out for me. Is the city name pronounced with four syllables—new-or-lee-ans—or three—new-or-leens?”
On my return, I reported: “One: nawlns.”
Elision is the act of eliminating letters or syllables when pronouncing a word. Think of libary instead of library, wershester sauce instead of worcestershire sauce, dint instead of didn’t. (The opposite—inserting letters or syllables in pronunciation, as in sherbert instead of sherbet—might be known as “anti-elision” or “confusion.” And who the hell knows what it’s called in instances like Farve instead of Favre.)
And while we’re on the topic, I hereby declare today National Elision Day. Why today of all days? It’s Wensday, of course . . .
(And, oh yeah—Arlo Guthrie? He votes for three syllables:)
Two recent word coinages chronicled over at Word Spy speak to principles of neology at its best, and at its worst—each locution representing both qualities:
Interestingly, both are business-related, which, I might venture, may be mostly a function of changing business conditions fueling the need for coinage (pun absolutely intended).
As coinages, these two words represent opposites of sorts:
Social notworking is the blatant pun, used to describe “Surfing a social networking site instead of working.” Call it social porn.
Murketing is a subtler construction, possibly considered a pun and possibly considered a portmanteau—meshing two words (murky and marketing). Murketing describes “A form of marketing where the product or service is not mentioned or shown” (think of those TV ads that leave you with that deep “Huh?”-response.) Whereas notworking is an opposite of the original word, murketing is a shade of the original—a quieter shade.
These represent neology at its worst because on their surfaces, neither word accomplishes what their definitions claim they do. To my ear, social notworking speaks a cynical implication that social networking itself is not working, rather than workers are not working because of social networking. And to that same ear (or maybe the other one), murketing sounds equally cynical, a drudging insult with surreptitious resonances of murk—not only the dark, clouded denotations of the word itself, but also the swallowed, secretive pronunciation of the word when spoken aloud. Marketing is a happier, broader, more open word. Murketing is a huddling, skulking word.
So why are these examples of neology at its best? I’m a cynic; I’d like to think that my suggested misinterpretations are true.
By the by, Mr. Everything You Know About English Is Wrong now looks forward to quitting his day job and notworking when he receives expected checks from all major companies—as in this blog he has not mentioned or shown any of your products or services. He’s a murketing genius!
I admit to feeling cookie deprived. The grand celebration that resulted when the Kellogg company brought back Hydrox cookies on August 21 took me by surprise—mainly because I’d never heard of Hydrox cookies. My obliviousness came not because the treats were before my time; they were very much in my time, but I guess I was too caught up in almond windmill cookies, edible wax lips, Milk Duds, Mallo Cups, and those little wax bottles filled with some kinda sugar liquid inside to pay attention to this pre-Oreo crème-sandwiched-by-chocolate cookie.
Hydrox cookies were introduced in 1908 by Sunshine Biscuits. Competitor Oreo came double-rolling along in 1912. (Neither of which are my time, in case you were wondering.) Eighty-eight years later, Keebler swallowed up the Biscuits, and Kellogg subsequently gobbled up the elves in an apparent quest to monopolize companies beginning with K. Comes 2003, and Kellogg dropped the cookie brand, since renamed (more on that in a moment).
Fading sales apparently doomed Hydrox. I’ve not seen a lot of detail on what might have forced a sales decline, but I’ll offer a possible contributor. The name.
Certainly, a number of factors worked against Hydrox, though the product itself is not likely at fault given how ravenous the fandom is (apparently phone calls and letter-writing inspired the revival). But for the moment consider a name that I don’t think aged very well, one that now sounds like a plant food, a faucet-spigot cleaner, a character in a Douglas Adams novel, or Godzilla’s next wrestling partner. Hydrox wandered into later decades that were characterized by product-naming mania, particularly in the tech, pharmaceuticals and household cleaning product sectors. And in fact, a Hydrox Laboratories (slogan, “Solutions for Your Solutions”—honest) issues a line of beauty and health care products, ranging from facial astringent to perineum wash to kiwi melon shampoo (which probably doesn’t taste too good between chocolate wafers).
The Hydrox name is a portmanteau of the atomic components of water: hydrogen and oxygen (water . . . cookie . . . get the connection? because I don’t). Keebler in infinite elfin wisdom changed the name to Droxies. Catchy, eh? Or maybe I should say, Catchies? I’m not sure what Droxies sounds like, but of all the possibilities, none of them seems edible. Kellogg made dropsy with the Droxies, but now on the cookie’s hundredth anniversary the company is bringing the brand back for a while.
That makes me happy for the cookie’s many fans. To them, I say enjoy. Myself, I’m going to slink into a corner and pout until they bring back Screaming Yellow Zonkers.
The following represents why I love words, and why I love true word people:
Nancy over at the Fritinancy blog snarked yesterday about a recent press release using the phrase “plutonic relationships” when more than a few of us know that the subject was actually “platonic relationships.”
Nancy’s sharp introduction to the malapropism was . . .
If Men Are from Mars … and women are from Venus, are some relationships from Pluto?
Evidently many people wish to hook up with someone who looks like a cartoon dog, or possibly someone who is small and icy, with an eccentric orbit, who thinks they’re a planetary celestial body, but really aren’t.
The thesis expressed in [Nancy’s] quotation from Blubet, with its reference to “a hidden sexual desire or chemistry that secretly sparks between them,” actually resonates rather nicely with the OED’s definition of the geological sense of the word ‘plutonic’: “Pertaining to or involving the action of intense heat at great depths upon the rocks forming the earth’s crust; igneous.”
Ensuing comment from yours truly who non-humbly had to jump into the fray, herein semi-humbly presented:
Further to Q. Pheevr’s point, I suspect that “plutonic” relationships may actually source back to “plutonium” and not “pluto” (neither former planet nor dog). My evidence is that like plutonium, platonic relationships have half lives.
All this can be summed up as a matter of preference in these matters of love, of course: You say pla-tato, I say plu-tuto; let’s call the whole thing off.
File under “A spoonful of sugar helps the etymology go down . . .”
Who would have thought that candy could be so educational? Our audiovisual aid today:
Tart in its various forms has various origins:
The sweet: as in the dessert tart, coming to English in the 1200s from French.
The tart: as in the adjective tart, meaning “sharp, piquant,” originating from an Old English word teart, with intense meanings of pain and suffering
The sweet and tart: as in the pejorative tart applied to prostitutes, promiscuous women and occasionally men. This version of the word was sweet in that it was used in a positive sense when it appeared around the mid 1800s; it took pejorative connotations not long after.
So where does the candy come in? SweeTarts is a cleverly effective name in that it describes the confection’s sweet/sour flavors while recalling the positive word sweetheart. Significant to the word lovers among us is the fact that it almost certainly displays in its SweeTart/sweetheart pun the true origin of the once-nice now-pejorative noun tart. No, not the spicy nature of a type of woman. The heart of your sweetheart.
We’re not precisely sure how the word originated, but the two most likely explanations involve either a shortening of sweetheart or a shortening of jam-tart, a Cockney rhyming slang version of sweetheart.
Now class, your assignment includes reading four bags of M&Ms to prep for both spelling and math class next week.
Over at the Fritinancy blog, Nancy Friedman lures me with two fascinating subjects. One is Diana Rigg, who portrayed Mrs. Emma Peel on the original Avengers. The other is . . . um, what was I talking about?
I was talking about . . . it will come to me . . Peel, a homonym of peal, which rhymes with heal, a homonym of heel, which is a subject of fashion blogs, which . . . Oh yeah! Nancy’s primary subject (well, to her anyway) was mistaken words and phrases, with examples from fashion blogs. Such blogs, Nancy writes, “sometimes allow their enthusiasm for the subject to override their inner spellcheckers. (I’d assumed that most people learned the difference between heel and heal in, say, fourth grade, but such is apparently not the case.)” But homonym failure is a side topic in this particular Fritinancy post. The real topic is Diana Rigg.
Or . . . something else. The topic was . . . I remember now: eggcorns. The subject was “eggcorns,” also known as “mondegreens”: words and phrases created by mishearing the source words and phrases. (My earliest personal eggcorn affliction was thinking John Fogerty and Creedence sang not “There’s a bad moon on the rise” but “Hail the bathroom on the right”). While listing various eggcorns Nancy has seen in fashion blogs, she writes:
“With avengence.” Oh, I love this one. I spotted it in a comment to a funny/alarming Daily Mail (UK) article on age-inappropriate fashion: Carol wrote that her husband “hates [her gypsy skirts] with avengence [sic].” Here we have “a vengeance” compressed into a package that folds in the concept of to avenge (to take vengeance on behalf of). Carol may also be under the lingering influence of The Avengers. Can you believe that Diana Rigg just turned 70? I’ll bet she looks fab in gypsy skirts.
Umm, what was the subject? (Concentrate, Brohaugh, concentrate.) Eggcorns! Another eggcorn Nancy identifies is the frequent misunderstanding of midriff as midrift. I don’t understand why this is surprising, as my own mid has been drifting for some time now.
I just hope Diana doesn’t notice.
And while we’re at it, here are some Avenger moments of thesauretical banter, cliche reversal, verbal fencing, undercover wordplay, cleverly unintelligible military jargon—and John Steed’s misdirected taste in women:
:
, 
and 
. Feel free to 
