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April 20, 2011, 2:30 pm

Elsewhere: Frightseeing, Palidays and Set-Jetting

A recent article for The Independent Online detailed a number of travel-related buzzwords, including:

Babymoons | Babymoons are holidays for mums and dads-to-be take before the baby arrives. Rest, relaxation and pampering – all within easy reach of home – are normally the priorities for babymooners.

Frightseeing | Frightseeing involves taking part in a tours or daytrips that have a darker side.

Palidays | On a paliday, you bypass hotels by staying with friends or family.

Set-jetting | Set-jetting is travelling to locations that were once the setting for films.

Click here for more.

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December 17, 2010, 9:59 am

Cat 6 and Competitive Commuting

Terms for spontaneous races between cycle commuters.

Writing for The Times’s City Room blog, J. David Goodman noted that many city cyclists are engaging in unofficial competitions during their commutes:

Some have even coined a term — “Cat 6” — for these street-level, just-for-fun contests. It jokingly refers to a made-up sixth category of amateur bicycle racers, one below the five official levels.

According to Goodman:

A recent article in Good magazine about competitive commuting has touched off lively conversation on cycling blogs and across the Web. Some cyclists cheered the notion, admitting to frequently speeding up to challenge others, while many, including racers and the die-hard all-weather commuters, thought the whole notion was laughable.

In Good magazine, Allison Butch observed:

Also called “the great commuter race” and “hipster racing,” cat-6 racing is the unspoken urban tradition of trying to go faster than, and not get passed by, a stranger on your bike.

(The titfer is tipped to Word Spy who spotlighted the term competitive commuting.)

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November 1, 2010, 2:00 pm

Grey Nomads

Peripatetic retirees in Australia.

Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald, Aaron Cook reported on increased sales of recreational vehicles and spotlighted a term associated with itinerant retirees in Australia:

Although the tag “grey nomads” was coined more than a decade ago, new data shows nomad numbers are booming like never before.

The president of the Recreational Vehicle Manufacturers Association of Australia, Richard Raven, said the number of recreational vehicles built in Australia is expected to reach 24,000 in 2010, at least 5000 more than any other year. About 10 per cent of these are motorised, with the rest made up of caravans and camper-trailers, Mr Raven said.

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October 27, 2010, 2:00 pm

Cuddle Class

A row of economy class seats which converts into a flat bed or couch.

“Economy air travel need no longer be referred to as “cattle class,” and passengers don’t have to squeeze into tight seats,” Matthew Hall wrote for AolNews.

Beginning next year, money-conscious long-haul travelers can take “cuddle class” and book a row of seats that convert into a couch or bed.

Planned by Air New Zealand for trans-Pacific flights, the “Skycouch” is a row of three regular seats redesigned to create a space for children to play or a flat surface for adults to relax and sleep.

According to Hall, a row of three seats will cost the price of two and a half economy seats, and will be large enough for a couple or a family with a young child.

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October 21, 2010, 10:00 am

Escargot Operations

Striking truck drivers in France who are blocking fuel depots by driving at a snail’s pace.
 (Escargot = snail.)

Writing for The Associated Press, Jenny Barchfield commented on strike action in France against government plans to raise the retirement age:

Strikes by oil refinery workers have sparked fuel shortages that forced at least 1,000 gas stations to be shuttered. Other stations saw large crowds. At an Esso station on the southeast edge of Paris on Tuesday morning, the line snaked along a city block and some drivers stood with canisters to stock gasoline in case of shortages. …

Police in the northwestern town of Grand-Quevilly intervened early Tuesday morning to dislodge protesters blocking a fuel depot, which had been completely sealed off since Monday morning, local officials there said. No one was hurt in the operation, the officials said.

Truckers have joined the protest, running so-called “escargot” operations in which they drive at a snail’s pace on highways. On Tuesday, about 20 truckers blocked an oil depot in Nanterre west of Paris operated by oil giant Total, turning away fellow truckers coming to fill up with gasoline. Police stood by but did not intervene.

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July 6, 2010, 10:00 am

Biodetectives

A German nickname for bees whose honey is tested to check for air pollution.

Writing for The Times, Tanya Mohn reported on a novel means of testing the air quality at German airports:

The Düsseldorf International Airport and seven other airports are using bees as “biodetectives,” their honey regularly tested for toxins.

“Air quality at and around the airport is excellent,” said Peter Nengelken, the airport’s community liaison. The first batch of this year’s harvested honey from some 200,000 bees was tested in early June, he said, and indicated that toxins were far below official limits, consistent with results since 2006 when the airport began working with bees.

Beekeepers from the local neighborhood club keep the bees. The honey, “Düsseldorf Natural,” is bottled and given away as gifts.

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June 28, 2010, 3:00 pm

Bluecifer

Nickname for a giant blue horse statue at Denver Airport.

Reporting for USA Today, Harriet Baskas noted that a 26-foot tall statue of Anubis – the Egyptian god of the dead – located outside Denver International Airport is causing disquiet among some passengers. It is, according to Baskas, not the only unpopular piece of artwork at the airport:

Matt Chasansky, the public art administrator at Denver airport, has watched all the YouTube videos, answered many e-mails and read all the internet postings about the secret messages allegedly embedded in murals, sculpture and other art pieces in the airport. He’s glad people are responding emotionally to the airport’s collection but insists concerns about strange doings at DEN are just misunderstandings. …

“On its website, the airport notes that “a few fanciful conspiracy theories have been generated” by Leo Tanguma’s mural titled Children of the World Dream Peace, but that none of those far-out theories “were intended by the artist.” And both the airport’s telephone-hold message and brochure for the self-guided art tour make reference to the uneasy feelings some travelers get from the glowing red eyes of the 32-foot tall blue Mustang by Luis Jiménez, who died while working on the sculpture. Dubbed “Bluecifer” by detractors, the sculpture rearing up on the road leading to the airport has spawned Facebook pages and campaigns calling for its removal.

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May 5, 2010, 3:00 am

Après-Tea

Unlikely term for the après-ski scene in Afghanistan.

Writing for The Guardian, Jon Boone discussed ambitious plans to develop a ski industry in Bamiyan Valley, Afghanistan. Boone interviewed Chad Dear, a development worker and ski consultant who, along with his partner, believes that “central Afghanistan has some of the best ‘outback skiing’ in the world”:

Dear thinks many tourists will elect to stay above the snowline for days, skiing over huge areas, overnighting in shelters used by farmers in the summer that could be converted into winter refuges. And it’s a fair bet that Bamiyan’s après-ski scene will never boast beery Brits, downing glühwein at the bottom of the chairlifts as the sun sets over the mountains. Instead it’s chai, and maybe some rice, naan and greasy meat on the roof of a farmer’s house.

What Dear calls the “après-tea” experience would be worth a holiday in itself. First of all, the scenery is extraordinary. Below the snowy peaks, farmers living in mud houses busily plough their fields with ox teams. The sense of time travel is only broken with the occasional sighting of a satellite dish, a sign that, after years of neglect, things are starting to pick up here. And that is the other benefit of skiing in Bamiyan – contributing much-needed cash to subsistence farmers in the high, isolated valleys of a poor and neglected province that could use all the help it can get. Not only were the famous giant Buddhas blown up by the Taliban in 2001; the fundamentalist militia was also responsible for massacres of the largely Hazara population (Afghanistan’s most put-upon ethnic group).

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May 4, 2010, 4:04 am

Fish Hook Maneuvers and Moose Tests

Safety tests designed to assess the stability of a car.

Noting that Toyota has recalled 9,400 Lexus GX 460s amid rollover concerns, The Wall Street Journal’s Joseph B. White spotlighted two terms particular to vehicle safety testing:

The tests administered by different groups can differ, sometimes markedly. The NHTSA’s SUV stability test includes a so-called “fish hook” maneuver – patterned after a test used by Toyota, according to government documents. The vehicle, controlled by a robotic steering system, heads down a straightaway at 50 miles per hour. The steering machine then turns the wheel left and then right, and holds the right turn for half a second before straightening out. The maneuver is repeated with more severe steering angles.

This test will cause the wheels to lift off the ground if the vehicle is top-heavy or has a poorly designed suspension system. The NHTSA considers the vehicle to have “tipped up” in an unsafe manner if instruments detect that the inside wheels (the right hand side in a vehicle turning right) have lifted two inches or more off the ground.

Government agencies, automotive magazines and auto makers elsewhere in the world evaluate vehicle stability using tests designed to simulate the panicky steering that can get motorists into trouble. An automotive magazine in Sweden flipped over a Mercedes-Benz A-class in 1997 with a fast lane-change test dubbed the “moose test,” so named because it simulated the maneuvers required to evade a moose (or elk) in the road. A chastened Mercedes redesigned the car and installed stability control, and the revamped A-Class passed.

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April 15, 2010, 4:58 am

VIP Passenger Syndrome

The theory that certain high-profile passengers may have a deleterious effect on airline pilot safety – controversially associated with the crash that killed Polish president Lech Kaczynski and 95 others.

According to Andrew Osborn and Matthew Day in The Telegraph, Russian aviation experts have suggested that “VIP passenger syndrome” may have contributed to the air disaster which killed the Polish president Lech Kaczynski and 95 passengers and crew on April 10:

Black box recordings have confirmed that the pilot, Arkadiusz Protasiuk, an experience airman serving with the Polish air force, had ignored warnings to divert to another airport because of heavy fog.

However, it has been suggested that Mr Kaczynski did not want to miss a ceremony for the 22,000 Poles massacred by Soviet forces in the Second World War and may have urged the air crew to continue trying to land the plane.

Viktor Timoshkin, an aviation expert, said: “It was quite obviously ‘VIP passenger syndrome.’ Controllers suggested that the aircraft’s crew divert the plane to an alternate route. I am sure that the commander of the crew reported this to the president. But in response, for whatever reasons, he had a clear order to land.”

In August 2008, Mr Kaczynski “shouted furiously” at a pilot who had disobeyed his order to land his plane in then war-torn Georgia for safety reasons. He later tried to have Captain Grzegorz Pietuczak removed from his post with the Polish air force for insubordination, however, Donald Tusk, the Prime Minister intervened. Captain Pietuczak was later awarded a medal for carrying out his duties conscientiously for his refusal to land having judged the risks.

A Russian aviation expert said yesterday: “If he tried to land three times and fell on the fourth then he probably had the 2008 incident in mind and that was why he felt he had to land at any price. In effect, he did not take the decision but the main passenger on board did – even if the main passenger did not utter a word to the pilot.”

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February 17, 2010, 12:00 pm

The M.L.K. of Fatties

A fan’s description of the film-maker Kevin Smith, after Smith protested his removal from a flight on the grounds of his weight.

Kevin Smith took to Twitter to vent his frustration at having been asked to leave a Southwest Airline flight from Oakland, California, to Burbank because the pilots judged he was too large to occupy a single seat.

As the The Los Angeles Times noted, Smith’s tweets attracted considerable attention:

The response from many of Smith’s followers has been unequivocal.

On Sunday, one named @chaseronio likened the director to no less than Martin Luther King Jr. in a tweet: “Ur the MLK of fatties.”

“I have a Dream,” Smith twittered back with deadpan aplomb. “And two lunches (meatball parm & Trix). And a couple of Twinkies. And a Diet Coke.”

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February 16, 2010, 1:06 pm

The 1549ers

The self-defining nickname used by passengers of Flight 1549, which crashed into the Hudson River in January 2009.

One year on from the “miraculous” emergency landing of Flight 1549, The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington reported on the strong bonds that have formed between the plane’s passengers:

In the weeks following the crash, the survivors were drawn to one other. They call themselves “1549ers,” and feel as if they are members of a rare club – only they can understand the extreme trauma that they have been through.

Slowly, organically and with no outside involvement or help, they began to coalesce. First, the 1549ers started to contact each other by email to check their fellow passengers were OK. A Yahoo group was formed for the surviving passengers, and they began to hold internet chats, therapy sessions in which they swapped notes on how they were faring and tips on how to cope.

Then spontaneous reunions were held, usually in Charlotte, where many of the passengers lived, or in New York. They called the reunions “celebrate life parties” and revelled in the second chance they had been given.

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November 3, 2009, 12:00 pm

Mordida

A Mexican euphemism for a bribe – literally, a “bite.”

Minnesota state senator Michelle L. Fischbach recently made headlines after her family came face-to-face with a Mexican tradition of bribery while on vacation in Cancún. As Elisabeth Malkin explained in The Times:

The police took [Fischbach's husband's] driver’s license and told him they would take him to jail unless he came up with $300, she said. The patrol car escorted the family back to the hotel, where she says the group came up with the money. The officers declined to write a receipt.

What the police may not have expected, however, was that Mrs. Fischbach was a Minnesota state senator – or that she would complain so effectively. …

On Wednesday, the episode made front-page news in Mexico after Cancún officials released the information to news organizations, some eight months after the event. (Yes, those police officers were fired long ago.)

And in Paynesville, Minn., an hour and a half northwest of St. Paul, the Fischbachs got a check in the mail for about 4,000 pesos, about $300, from the Cancún city government reimbursing them.

The transit officer’s “mordida,” which translates roughly as “a little bite,” is standard practice in Mexico.

According to reports from travelers, the “mordida” extracted by civil servants has long been part of Mexican life. Indeed, a 1946 Times article calls the bite “historic,” but notes (rather hopefully) that it may be on its way out.

Co-vocabularists are invited to share their experiences of bribery or graft and any associated terms for donations, fees, inducements or kickbacks.

Update | A number of co-vocabularists have pointed out that “mordida” translates as “bite,” not “little bite,” as stated previously. This error has now been corrected. “Little bite” denotes the figurative sense of the term, though one co-vocabularist suggested the word “nibble” might be more appropriate. Apologies.

October 8, 2009, 3:45 pm

Strap Hanging

When truck drivers carrying supplies across Afghanistan “piggy-back” U.S. Army patrols to shield their passage through dangerous routes.

Reporting for The Washington Post on American efforts to secure the Pech River Valley in Afghanistan, Greg Jaffe described a new usage for a term usually associated with commuting:

Afghan trucks, carrying supplies for U.S. and Afghan military bases, are regularly attacked when they travel without security on the main road.

Usually the truck drivers wait at the opening of the valley for a U.S. Army patrol to pass and then they follow it, a practice soldiers have dubbed “strap hanging.” Lining the sides of the road are the remains of scorched trucks belonging to drivers too impatient to wait for an informal escort.

September 21, 2009, 12:00 pm

Chikan and Eve Teasing

Terms describing the sexual harassment of women in Japan and India.

Police in Japan have instigated a clampdown against the “scourge of groping” which plagues women traveling on Tokyo’s rail and metro network, Justin McCurry reported recently for The Guardian:

Undercover police officers have been dispatched to notorious train lines across Tokyo in a new offensive against chikan, a catch-all term that covers groping, sexual rubbing and surreptitious mobile phone photography.

According to McCurry, the problem of chikan is so widespread that almost two-thirds of young women in Tokyo say they have been “touched inappropriately” while commuting. McCurry noted:

The crackdown came in response to a recent jump in cases involving groups of men who use online chat rooms to arrange where and when to target women. At least 100 websites list prime groping locations, offering hints on how to fondle undetected and, if that does not work, evade arrest.

One site advises would-be gropers to select carriages with doors that open near platform escalators or staircases – perfect escape routes.

Several men arrested in recent months have admitted being encouraged by the websites and emboldened by the prospect of working as part of a group. A typical tactic is to position two men in front and behind a victim, while as many as six other men block the view of other passengers.

Meanwhile, in India, The Times’s Jim Yardley revealed:

The problems of taunting and harassment, known as eve teasing, are so persistent that in recent months the government has decided to simply remove men altogether. In a pilot program, eight new commuter trains exclusively for female passengers have been introduced in India’s four largest cities: New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Calcutta.

The trains, Yardley said, “are known as Ladies Specials.” Indian trains have long had ladies-only carriages but over-crowding often means that men make use of these carriages.

See also: Super-Dense Crushload

About Schott's Vocab

Schott’s Vocab is a repository of unconsidered lexicographical trifles — some serious, others frivolous, some neologized, others newly newsworthy. Each day, Schott's Vocab explores news sites around the world to find words and phrases that encapsulate the times in which we live or shed light on a story of note. If language is the archives of history, as Emerson believed, then Schott’s Vocab is an attempt to index those archives on the fly.

Ben Schott is the author of “Schott’s Original Miscellany,” its two sequels, and the yearbook “Schott’s Almanac.” He is a contributing columnist to The Times’s Op-Ed page. He lives in London and New York.

His Web site can be viewed at benschott.com, and his Opinion pieces here.

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Vocab of Note

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  • Tsukin-ist

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  • News Sandwich

    A technique reportedly used to deliver bad news to the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

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