Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
A world of Tweet™
WHILE checking last week’s column, we idly wondered whether “Tweet” is a trademark. The answer, of course, is yes. On 27 May 2010, Twitter for use of the word – when it relates to the firm’s well-known primary activities.
Reading up on trademarks may be seen as evidence that Feedback really, really needs to get out more. But following the trail to the bitter end has its pay-off. This comes in the shape of a pending application from Twitter, at that runs to about 9400 words wanting “Tweet” to be trademarked for more than 750 uses in 16 classes, from which we select entirely at random: “patches and plugs for repairing vehicle tyres; carnival costumes; corsets; knickers; pens; and pencils”.
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This bold trademark application has not yet been granted by the examiner, so use “tweet” – with wild abandon and in a variety of contexts – while you still can.
When Harry Byrne directed us to we hoped to find a purveyor of scalars – numbers with no direction specified – but weren’t surprised to find a range of “anti-radiation” flimflam
Fruitloops sans frontières
FEEDBACK would hate to give the impression that fruitloopery is exclusively or even mostly an affliction of English speakers, but we are a bit hindered by not knowing what to search for. For example, out of the 81 languages that Google currently attempts to translate, just three come back with results for “fruitloop”: Haitian Creole gives “frwitloup”; Serbian a direct transliteration into Cyrillic characters; and Yiddish a word that transliterates back as “froytloop”.
Make of that selection of languages what you will.
Dutch treat
ASSISTANCE in showing fruitloopery internationally comes, however, from Derek Suchard, who provides translations from the website of a holistic thingy in Utrecht in the Netherlands – . There Dutch-speakers can find out that “the Great Copper Pyramid is active… to restore your DNA to its original structure. During the dedication of the Pyramid, two totem animals have undertaken to support every traveller in the path to his or herself.”
One of these animals is the Bear, who is wonderfully described as seeking “the sweet taste of truth”. All this comes with a photo of an irritatingly elegant room containing a pyramid made of standard 25-millimetre copper tubing.
Also, there’s “regression with cosmic rays”, which might imply statistics and radiation, though we suspect the pyramid people try to avoid both.
The offence of juxtaposition
TRAVELLING on London’s Underground, Robert Harding was intrigued to see, side by side, an exhortation to “Take the Run, jog or walk 100 km, 50 km or 25 km…” and an advert featuring treatment for intense knee pain. He suggests that we need a name for such pairings.
Back in the day, unfortunate juxtapositions of editorial copy and images or adverts in newspapers were dubbed “Wimbornes”. One Ronald Knox, a Cambridge college chaplain and detective-fiction writer – who was the subject of – had a scrapbook of such infelicities, opening with a picture of a footballer above the caption: “Lady Wimborne, who has adopted the new windswept style of hairdressing”.
Can we extend this term into the digital age?
A name for naming names
FEEDBACK gains Robert Harding’s approbation for our “wonderful service to the English language, naming concepts, situations or phenomena that currently do not have a concise handle”. He notes that this activity itself needs a name.
The product of this activity would clearly be nomennomenclature. The previous sentence might well be nomennomennomenclature. But what would the verb be? To denominnominate?
Anti-deterministic names
CONTINUING in the vein of the naming of things, James Whalley asks what to call a “contradiction between name and character or occupation”. This is the opposite of nominative determinism, which Feedback has frequently abjured. His example is Agatha Christie’s sentence “In vain Inspector Slack redoubled that energy that so belied his name.”
Bernard Morcheles submits the , Davis, Andrew Waterhouse. And Peter Norton submits Flip dePage, listed as proofreader of magazine: but the editor confesses that Flip is a fiction.
We therefore denominominate some of these as examples of nominative contradeterminism.
A quantum-encrypted village
FINALLY, the little village of Hanley Swan sits, Mike Corcoran tells us, between the UK cryptography headquarters GCHQ in Cheltenham and the research hub of Malvern. He attaches a photo of a sign at a village store: “We recharge quantum keys”. This, he observes, seems to show that “technology spill-over is alive and well in this entrepreneurial area!” (A more mundane possibility is that many locals have an excitingly named brand of .)
Feedback also sees in the photo that the shop has left blank the identity of its video camera controller, contrary to European on the protection of personal data, and subsequent legislation. This, too, appears to uphold a regional tradition.