Language Follies 4

Live and learn.

A pop-up ad flashed across my screen the other day. It was for an Italian luxury fashion house. The ad stated the company’s name and beneath it “High Jewelry.” I was struck by that combination of adjective and noun. I proceeded to Google the term to see if it was a neologism concocted by the emporium. To my surprise, it turned out that the term was used by almost every swank bauble purveyor on the planet. As the old song goes, “Diamond bracelets Woolworth doesn’t sell, baby.”

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Some time last year my email box got filled up with unrequested recipes. Just as suddenly as they appeared, they have since disappeared from my daily feed. I wondered at the unappetizing names some of the dishes had— for example, Detention Casserole, Cemetery Cake, and Funeral Cake. I imagine the last two would well serve as dessert after a Tombstone Pizza.

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I am sure that companies shell out shedloads of gelt to alleged branding experts, who with their voodoo methods conjure up the perfect names for their clients’ products (and sometimes the companies themselves). I direct your attention to two brands that I have just come across:

Icebreaker Bras

Salamander Resorts   

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If you don’t want (or need) a new name for your product, you might prefer to tinker with language in other ways. 

Perhaps remembering the old (sexist) claim that “men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” here’s a company that isn’t advertising eyeglasses or spectacles; they are in the business of merchandising “eye appliances.”

Pretentious? Moi? 

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I have just learned that that fine old maker of boat shoes—Sperry—dropped the classic designation of their product—“Top-Sider”—some eight years ago. Here’s how the product is now listed on the company’s website:

“Authentic Original™”! Trademarked! What a gas!

What, I wonder, would an “Inauthentic Original” or an “Authentic Unoriginal” boat shoe look like? 

(By the way, you can buy them—trademark and all—at about half the price at Amazon.)

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The Tyranny of the Noun

I get very perturbed when I find ordinarily intelligent people totally misusing classical expressions because they have been seduced by a noun. 

(1) Take for example the expression “Bronx cheer.”  

You’re watching a sporting event—say a hockey game. The visiting team has been filling the home team’s net with goals. Finally, an easy shot is aimed at the goalie, who stops it faultlessly. The crowd responds with a slow, rhythmic clap, which the broadcast announcer proclaims is a “Bronx cheer.” Wrong!

He is misled by the noun. A round of hand clapping is generally a cheer. But in the circumstances, the modifier “Bronx” would seem to fit the sarcastic intention of the fans. Sarcasm is a form of irony—specifically, the seeming approval of a negative.

The Bronx cheer, on the other hand, is a straightforward expression of disapproval. It is also known as the raspberry—blowing air through the mouth while flapping the tongue.

(2) Recently, I have encountered a number of personages using the expression “Hobson’s choice.” Focusing on the noun, they are beguiled into thinking that they are faced with a choice—a hard choice (or why should it be modified?)—something like a dilemma. But in reality, here we have a true example of sarcasm, for the word “choice” is a wildly inappropriate signifier of what is going on. 

The phrase has a historical background. Thomas Hobson (born 1545) owned a livery stable in Cambridge, England. When renting a horse, he decreed that the patron had one choice—he had to accept the mount nearest the stable door. Basically it was take it or leave it. Thus, in truth, the “choice” was no choice at all.

Those who use "Hobson’s choice" as a substitute for a dilemma are turning centuries of usage on its head.

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Dev Shah is the 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee Champion

Dev, a 14-year-old speller from Largo, Florida, representing the SNSB Region One Bee, correctly spelled “psammophile” to win the Bee.

You can say it’s sour grapes, if you want. I am a lousy speller, and I surely would not get past the first round in any spelling bee. But I maintain that spelling bees are about as absurd an educational experience as can be imagined. Consider the most recent contest: the winning word was “psammophile.” Now who the hell needs to know how to spell that word (what does it mean, anyway?)? Maybe there are people out there in the wide world who dash off a few notes daily with psammophile all over them—but I doubt that a 14-year-old is one of those scribes. 

I used to tell my students to pay attention to the small everyday words—like “their,” “they’re,” and “there.” Those words we reflexively scribble down without checking, and are therefore more likely to be misspelled than big words like “delicatessen,” which we might use once in a millennium—and, if then, we would most likely look it up in a dictionary, because we are in doubt about the spelling.

Somehow I can’t imagine having a child of mine sitting around all day with a dictionary cramming into his available brain cells thousands of words that he will never have need to access. I would push him out the door and tell him to kick a ball around. And if he was good enough, and never let down the team, he would never be on the receiving end of a Bronx cheer.

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A spelling bee is to literacy as a hot dog eating contest is to Julia Child.