A frequently experienced tv commercial in recent days, encountered at first only through the audio, which I heard to be for a local carpet company called, apparently, effing gee or effing G, involving the verb F or eff /ɛf/, an initialistic euphemism for fuck. Given my nature and my professional interest in taboo vocabulary, it would be fair to think of my perception as Freudian mishearing, of who knows what original. But, surely, a carpet company wouldn’t choose a name with fucking encoded in it, maybe playfully conveying that it was fucking good (though that would be a bold commercial move).
The next time I heard the ad, I understood the company name to be effigy, which is at least an English word (and not a swear), but baffling as a company name. Significantly, having heard the name originally as beginning with /ɛf/, that perception persisted.
Next time around, I shifted my perception to something more likely, in which /ɛf/ is in fact a letter name: FnG, that is F&G. This would be a common pattern in company names; a sampling of F&R companies:
F&R Auto Repair (Woodland CA), F&R Auto Sales (Hialeah FL), F&R Towing (San Jose CA), F&R Engineering (Roanoke VA), F&R American Fine Fragrance (Winston Salem NC)
Finally, I looked at the screen, and saw that the company’s name was indeed initialistic, but was S&R, not F&R. /f/ and /s/ are minimally distinct acoustically, so are often confused in perception. My initial perception was skewed towards /f/ because of my bias towards fucking — and so towards fucking and effing — and once established that perception persisted, despite repetitions of /s/.
The actual company. S & G Carpet “Your flooring store of choice for northern California” (showroom locations in Rancho Cordova, Rocklin, Elk Grove, Pleasant Hill, Dublin, Santa Clara, San Jose, and Cupertino), and a very persistent advertiser.
Now, the natural question is what the initialistic abbreviation S&G stands for. The F&R in F&R American Fine Fragrance (above) is Fulton & Roark, referring to specific people whose family names begin with an F and an R. What about the S&G in S&G Carpet?
I have read an assortment of descriptions and histories of the company, without finding any reference anywhere to an S or a G. Presumably there were such people, but their role on the company has been suppressed, leaving only their initials. So S&G is now an orphan initialism, which has figuratively lost its parents — by literally losing its source words:
orphan initialism ‘a sequence of letter names that is no longer an abbreviation for some full name, but is (legally) just a name composed of a sequence of letter names’
(They’ve come up many times in my postings, on Language Log and this blog. And here they are again, unexpectedly.)
September 16, 2024 at 2:03 pm |
From Mike McManus on Facebook, with an FnG sighting:
September 17, 2024 at 10:13 am |
I just spent a minimal moment of internet research (Google and Wikipedia) to check that I’m not repeating something *utterly* baseless, so …. When “SRI International” took on that form of name, changing from “Stanford Research Institute” and formally separating from Stanford University, there was a widely rumored sense that Stanford wanted the separation so that the University would not be thought responsible for some of the activities at the Institute. What I recall hearing was that the trigger issues were research programmes regarded as blatantly unscientific, in particular “remote viewing”. What today’s cursory internet search came up with was “The institute formally separated from Stanford University in 1970 due to concerns about its military-funded work and the university’s perceived connection to the military-industrial complex.” which, if I’m not misreading, puts the shamefaced distancing on the other part.
September 17, 2024 at 11:17 am |
The orphaning of the initialism took place before my friends and family were associated with SRI and before my association with Stanford began, so I have no particular insight into the orphaning, though the common belief has been that military funding was a central issue.
Meanwhile, SRI International remains a striking example of an orphan initialism.
September 17, 2024 at 10:27 am |
I happen to be a sometime customer of F&R (the Fulton and Roark one), as I sprung for deodorant in their “Calle Ocho” scent, out of civic pride as a former Miamian.
And I used to get angry-mumbly at radio spots which used oddly-pronounced initialisms or hard-to-guess-the-spelling names, and never spelled them out. For a while my target was “Beemoh Harris” until I conceded that everyone else in the world knew that was “BMO Harris”.
At another time, there was sponsorship from a law firm with a name apparently from two founding partners, one of which was very unclear how to spell and the other was an absolutely common and unambiguous English name. The hard one came first, so it was hard to look up. And when they would give the firm’s webaddress, it was the hard name in full form and two letters standing for the easy one — if only they had turned it around! (But of course this was not a genuine practical concern, as I had no reason to want to contact the law firm; I guess I was just channeling an online copyeditor who wants things just-so!)
September 17, 2024 at 11:24 am |
I have had my moments of annoyance, shading into anger, with opaque initialisms; I’m working at cultivating calm (since I don’t see how I can change anything).
September 18, 2024 at 10:02 am |
A minor chapter in the annals: Years ago, driving through rural North Carolina, searching for some life on the radio in between NPR-free zones, I came upon a station identifying itself, to my shell-like ears, as WFAG. I was a bit taken aback: surely no radio station, much less one in a conservative Southern state, would accept such a designation from the FCC, if indeed that worthy body would assign such a designation.
Upon listening further, I realized that the station’s call letters were actually WFHE. FAG and FHE sound nearly identical, and it occurred to me that the similarity could be exploited as a multiple pun: “f-h-e” sounds like “f-a-g” when the letters are spoken individually, and “fhe” as a word could be pronounced like the word “fay” (or “fey” or “fae”), which I’ve seen used as a synonym for “gay” (though I’ve no idea what the current status of the word is in the community).
(I have since learned that there is a radio station with the call letters WFAG, a low-power FM station in Valdosta, Georgia.)