Archive for the 'Language' Category

So Obama is mocking McCain’s recommendation that we need a commission to look at the causes of the current financial crisis, saying that we already know what caused it, and that a commission is just a way of putting off doing something about it. No argument there.

But I’m finding it odd that McCain keeps referring to this commission he wants as “a 9/11 commission.”

New York Times, 16 September:

“We need a 9/11 commission, and we need a commission to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it,’’ he said. “And I know we can do it and how to do it.”

AHN, 16 September:

Speaking from Florida, McCain said on CNN the nation had been “the victim of greed, excess and corruption on Wall Street” and that “we’re going to need a 9/11 Commission to find out what happened and what needs to be fixed.”

The Hill, 16 September:

“We’re going to need a 9/11 Commission to find out what happened and what needs to be fixed,” the Arizona senator said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

If he wants a commission, then fine — he wants a commission. But what does he mean when he says he wants a 9/11 commission? A commission is a commission. Was there something about the 9/11 commission that somehow set it apart from all other commissions (apart from the fact that it was about 9/11), thus creating a new genre of commission to be known as a 9/11 commission?

If Senator McCain bought a blue car, and referred to it as his blue car, and then bought a red car, would he then refer to the red car as his new blue car?

All the pundits over at MSNBC are debating themselves about whether tonight is going to be about Obama declaring himself the nominee, or Clinton celebrating her own campaign and stealing his thunder.

But maybe they’re missing something. Clinton is going to be speaking at Baruch College. Here’s the school’s release about it.

New York, NY – June 3, 2008 – Presidential candidate Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) will address throngs of supporters at a celebration marking the close of the Democratic Party’s primary election season this evening at Baruch College’s Athletics and Recreation Center (ARC).

The event is scheduled to begin at 7 PM. The ARC will be closed to students and the general public at 3 PM, and the 24th Street entrance to the Newman Vertical Campus will be open for ticketed guests at 6 PM. Students, faculty, and staff should use the 25th Street entrance for classes and other events after 6 PM.

The Clinton campaign website indicates that tickets are no longer available for the speech. The major news channels are expected to provide live coverage of the event.

Senator Hillary Clinton’s campaign team chose Baruch College as the site of their primary election season finale.

They chose Baruch. I wonder why they chose Baruch over all the other places they could have held the address…

The word “baruch” is related to brucha, meaning a blessing in Hebrew. It’s also the equivalent of the Arabic and Swahili “barack.”

See where I’m going with this? Is Clinton going to give Obama her blessing tonight?

Updated, Three Hours Later

Yeah, maybe not.

I’ve never cared for my family name: Gladstein. When my grandfather came through Ellis Island, they didn’t change his surname — just the pronunciation. It was originally pronounced “GLOT-shtine” but they changed it to “GLAD-steen”. Oddly enough, I find that the original pronunciation just rolls off the tongue, but apparently, even after almost 45 years of practice, I don’t pronounce the current version of my name very clearly. If someone asks me my name and I tell them “Gladstein,” they almost invariably repeat back “Blansky?”

On top of that, when I briefly attempted to learn German, the professor in my class told me what my name means. I won’t mention it here, but it is not brave leader, or god’s gift, or even decent enough fellow.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about names and naming of late. There are people who make their living naming things: companies, products, etc. But naming people is another matter. My mother was given the name Edith Claire at birth, supposedly in honor of some dead relative named Edith. However, nobody liked the name Edith (and I don’t think they liked Edith herself, either), so before the ink on the birth certificate was dry, people started calling my mother Claire Edith. So there, Edith, whoever you were.

I’ve been putting together a little project in my copious free time, listing names that could be real, and have a certain something else that sets them apart. I’m sure you’ll figure it out pretty quickly. If you have any to add to the list, let me know.

• Anne Teeter
• Bela Kose
• Claire Voyant
• Ella Meneaux
• Ellie Tate
• Farrah Field
• Helen Bach
• Luke Askew
• Paris Ochs
• Paula Titian
• Perry Farrell
• Phyllis Stein
• Herman Ütichs

Remember this?

At about 2:05 into the video, Cronkite says,

From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 PM Central Standard Time — 2:00 Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago.

“President Kennedy died”

I bring this up because I got up this morning, fed the cats, made myself some coffee, booted up the old ‘puter and switched on the eye of hell to see if there was anything in the news. That’s when I heard Heidi Collins, her hair done all wrong today (hey CNN hair people — it doesn’t help to make her head look like a rectangular prism) announce that “Henry Hyde has passed.”

“Henry Hyde has passed”

The moment I heard that, I remembered Cronkite from 44 years ago. Actually, as I remembered it, Cronkite had simply said, “President Kennedy is dead.” (N.B.: I was four months old when Kennedy was assassinated. Obviously, I didn’t remember it from seeing it live. In fact, my mother tells me that when the news of Kennedy’s death was announced, I was in front of our apartment building in Brooklyn, playing on a patch of grass.) But my point remains the same: he gave it to us straight.

Whether that particular phrase was in Collins’ script or she said it of her own accord, it just makes me wonder why journalists on the eye of hell have decided it’s better to feed us euphemisms. Is it their place to soften the blow when they bring us bad news? Not only does “passed” sound softer than “died,” to my ultra-sensitive atheist ears, it’s tied in with passed on to something else — that is, it’s tantamount to Collins announcing, “Henry Hyde is in Heaven, sitting at the right hand of our lord and savior, Jesus Christ.”

Hyperbole? Well, duh. I’d like to think that an anchor on any channel other than CBN would be fired if they took things that far. But the point stands. It’s the news. Give me facts, and don’t dilute them with the kind of language you use around children to keep from upsetting them.

Dear McDonald’s,

I notice that in one of your recent advertisements for the double cheeseburger, you describe the sandwich as “melty” and “beefy”. I’m familiar with the latter word, which Webster’s defines as

1 a : heavily and powerfully built [a beefy thug] b : SUBSTANTIAL, STURDY [beefy shock absorbers]
2 a : of or suggesting beef [a beefy flavor] b : full of beef [a beefy steak]

Since I don’t eat beef, I’ll just give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that at least one of those definitions accurately describes your burger. It does seem fairly sturdy in the ad.

This brings us to that other adjective: melty. I looked, and it’s just not in there. It’s not really a word, folks.

I’m guessing you got it from Taco Bell, with their “melty, melty, melty” cheese. Well, I’m here to tell you that Taco Bell is wrong, and I would have thought you’d know better than to use a word just because they do. If Taco Bell jumped off a cliff, would you follow them?

I’m very disappointed in you.

Dear Universal Technical Institute,

That name of yours is quite a mouthful — Universal Technical Institute. Ten syllables in those three words. Of course, if the institute really is universal (on top of being technical), it must be a pretty big place. But that’s neither here nor there… well, again, if it’s universal, then I suppose it really is both here and there. But I digress.

Considering the length of the name and the cost of time on the eye of hell, I can understand why you’d feel the need to come up with an abbreviated version. I wonder, however, if you considered possibilities like “UniTech,” “UTech,” “UT” or “Universal” before you decided to go with UTI, which in case you didn’t know, already has a pretty common usage for something other than technical institutes, universal or otherwise.

One other question: do your vending machines serve cranberry juice?

I wrote a post last year about the use of the phrase “all new” in advertising, but I assure you, this post is all new.

Remember the Ford Taurus? It was pretty popular back in its time. In fact, I think it beat out the Accord as the most popular car in the US for a year or two. It was discontinued just a year or two back, and replaced with the all new Ford 500. The 500 wasn’t such a big hit, though.

Well, Ford is going to make everyone happy now, as the 500 is to be replaced with the all new 2008 Taurus. That’s a picture of an ‘08 Taurus to the right, and the picture above is an ‘06 500. Do you see what I see?

I see two almost identical cars. The new model doesn’t have the chrome strip along the side, the taillights are different, and it looks like the front turning signals might be slightly different as well, but that’s about it. So basically, what those deep thinkers at Ford have done is to take a not new model, attach a not new name to it, and come up with what they refer to as an all new product.

While I’m on the subject, the old all new post mentioned the use of the term “hit” being used for any program on the eye of hell, whether it received a large audience or not. Well, I saw a promo for Fox’s new game show, “Don’t Forget the Lyrics” last night. I think the program has aired once or twice at this point. Did they refer to it as a hit? Actually, no, they didn’t. Instead, the promo spoke of the “Don’t Forget the Lyrics phenomenon.” At first, that kind of threw me. Is a phenomenon bigger than a hit? Then I realized they’re probably just using the dictionary definition of the word: an observable fact or event, or an object or aspect known through the senses rather than by thought or intuition. That’s fair. I mean, I haven’t seen the show, but I think it’s safe for me to assume that if I were to tune in, I would experience something through my senses.

I just prefer not to find out exactly what that experience might be.

I received a piece of snail mail today from the State Office of Tourism up in Maine (home of the Mainiacs). The flyer references travelinmaine.com, but if you try going there you’ll just be redirected (a 302, if you care about such things) to the site I’ve linked to.

The redirect isn’t what prompted me to write about it, though. I’ll give you the content inside the brochure, and you see if you can figure out what caught my attention.

We could give you
countless
reasons
to visit Maine.

But this format really
lend itself better to like
four.

So here we go.

1. The incredible outdoor activities, like mountain biking, hiking, fishing, beach bumming, bird watching, golfing, boating and so much more.
2. The food. Lobster, clams, mussels, chowder, blueberry pie and tons of other yummy treats.
3. The shopping. We’ve got it all from quaint seaside boutiques to incredible outlets to the one and only L.L. Bean.
4. The short travel time. Take a train or come on up in your car. Either way, you’ll get here faster than you can say dream vacation. Oh, and if you do make the trip, you’ll find out what other great things Maine has to offer.

Did you, like, catch it? No, it’s not the fact that it actually takes longer to get to Maine than it does to say “dream vacation.” I’ll cut them some slack on that one.

It’s that “but this format really lends itself better to like four” bit. Like four? Just who is the target of a travel brochure that uses that sort of grammar? Admittedly, I slip in a “like” every now and then, although I’m happy to say that the only time I use “totally” in a context like “it’s totally raining out there” is when I’m mocking the people who actually think that statement somehow communicates more than saying, “it’s raining out there”. However, I don’t think that a printed brochure that uses “like” instead of “about,” “around,” or “approximately” is better at targeting me or anybody else. It’s not as if they chose to do the whole thing in slang. True, there are plenty of sentences that aren’t sentences, but we see that in practically every piece of advertising (”New. Just for you.”)

Honestly, I don’t know what they were going for. It certainly didn’t make me want to like spend time like up like there. Totally.

Tags:
Maine,
Travel,
Tourism,
Marketing,
Slang

As long as I can remember, manufacturers have been tacking a description of a car’s features right onto it, for all to see. As certain selling points become more common, cars will stop visually bragging about them and will come up with new ones. Just off the top of my head, some of the features I’ve seen plastered onto cars are as follows:

• Front wheel drive
• Fuel injection
• Automatic
• DOHC
• Four Wheel Drive, along with its cousins
  • All Wheel Drive
  • 4 x 4
  • Quattro
  • 4-matic
• Hybrid
• 4 speed
• 5 speed
• 6 speed
• V6
• V8
• V12
• Rotary
• 16 valve
• 32 valve

One that’s apparently been around for decades, but that I’ve only noticed in the past few years is “Hemi“. My earliest memories of the Hemi idea are of those two hapless schmucks who dream of being able to answer in the affirmative to the question, “That thing got a hemi?”

What I don’t get is the choice of the name “hemi” for this feature. I mean, I can go to the official hemi site and read about it:

What is a Hemi?

Hemi is short for hemispherical, half of a sphere, the shape of the combustion chamber in the early Hemi engines. Why the hemispherical shape?

When you look at a high-performance engine, the valves are canted to position the intake and exhaust ports for best airflow into and out of the cylinder. Most reacing engines, up to the time the Chrysler Hemi was introduced in 1951, had canted valves. So do all Hemi engines — the FirePower/Firedome/Red Ram, the 426 Hemi — and the New 5.7L and 6.1L Hemis. The way to enclose these canted valves in a chamber is the half spherical, or hemispherical shape, which gives best airflow.

Fine. I get what it means. But the “hemi” part of “hemispherical,” just like “semi” and “demi,” means “half”. Doesn’t that seem a bit odd? We’re talking about big, powerful engines, put in vehicles with names like “Magnum,” “Ram” and “Charger”. Now, why do they choose to use names like that for the models? Because they connote big and powerful. They’re ultra-manly. Driving one of these vehicles is a way of saying (or hoping you’re saying) “I am big. I am powerful. I have an enormous willy.”

“Hemi,” while it’s an accurate name from an engineering standpoint, just doesn’t send that message. People know it means half, don’t they? It seems to me that the message this sends is something along the lines of “I’m a big, powerful man with a big powerful dick and I drive a big powerful truck. Why yes, I’d love some tea, but just a demitasse. Any more than that and I’ll have to go pee pee.”

Tags: Cars, Trucks, Chrysler, Dodge, Hemi, Magnum, Ram, Charger

Dear Taco Bell,
I’ve been wondering about your “authentic carne asada steak.” That’s some fancy kind of steak, like Kobe beef, right? I imagine you’ve got people who spend their lives massaging cattle just to make your customers’ taquitos that much more special. Am I right?

See, I don’t speak Spanish, but I looked it up, and I figure this has got to be a coincidence. Carne asada has to be special. It can’t just be what it translates to, which is cooked meat. I bet after they slaughter the special carne asada cattle, they use their skins to make rich Corinthian leather.

Right?

Tags: Taco Bell, Carne Asada, Fast Food