Friday words #275

I have a new-to-me term today that involves branding. It pertains to when someone embraces a brand name, but they do it for purposes and in ways that the brand owner probably isn’t too happy about.

Here’s an example: the US right-wing group Proud Boys has a particular fondness for polo shirts made by the company Fred Perry. Or consider the right-wing marchers at the Charlottesville rally in 2017 who carried TIKI® torches (a brand name owned by Lamplight Farms, Inc.), which were previously known more for backyard parties.

These are examples of hatejacking: when a brand is hijacked in ways outside the control of the company and that imbues the brand with messaging that’s interpreted as hateful.

This type of appropriation might not have any sort of message—for example, the Charlottesville marchers didn’t choose their tiki torches (as far as I know) for some ideological reason; they just wanted torches.

Or the groups might choose brands that are deliberately non-ideological. When white supremacists decided that khaki pants from The Gap were part of their uniform, it wasn’t that The Gap was an ideological beacon for them; it was that they wanted something normcore that contrasted with hate-associated togs like, say, white robes and hoods: “Hey, look at us, we’re just normal folks!”

But hatejacking can also come about when a group embraces a brand because they perceive it to align with their beliefs. Early in the Trump administration, a spokesman for New Balance, the shoe company, endorsed Trump’s policies on trade with China and the TPP. The remarks generated a backlash from many, but a neo-Nazi blogger declared that New Balance was therefore the “Official Shoes of White People.” Yick. Other “endorsements” by fringe groups have been declared for brands like Papa John’s Pizza, Wendy’s, and the Detroit Red Wings hockey team based on some sort of perceived (but usually accidental) affinity.

No matter why a group like this decides it loves a brand, it’s generally not good for that brand. Brands stand to suffer “reputational risk” if they’re seen to be affiliated with groups that many people disapprove of. They have to release statements and run media campaigns to try to disassociate themselves from the groups who’ve hatejacked their brands.

Update 19 Jul 2021: The issue of how your brand is embraced can be tricky even if you explicitly position yourself as appealing to a demographic that includes people with extremist views, as the people found out who created Black Rifle Coffee Company.

Long story short: when it comes to hatejacking, there really is such a thing as bad publicity.

On to origins. Friend Kim recently shared a video that shows a guy (Tim Wilborne) who together with his kids repairs the battery in his electric lawnmower.

At one point he notes that something is “sordered.” It took me a few beats before I realized that he was saying soldered but with a pronunciation that’s different from mine, using a lower and longer vowel, plus an intrusive R. He says it multiple times, so it’s his normal pronunciation. You can hear it a few times starting at about 4:20 in the video:

Anyway, this reference to solder and soldering made me wonder where that word comes from. It turns out it’s another word whose etymology is in plain sight, but only because it was changed to be.

Solder ultimately comes from the Latin word solidare, meaning “to make solid,” in turn from solidus, meaning “solid.” If you’ve done any soldering, you’ll know how that works: you heat some sort of metallic stuff that flows into a joint. When the metallic substance cools, it creates a solid joint. Lead used to be popular because of its low melting point, but it’s also very bad for health, so now solder is made with other metals.

The -l- in the middle was gone by the time we got the word from French in the 1300s. Early versions of solder in English show up as soudur, soudre, sowder, sawder. It’s still Sodder as late as the 1700s; in his dictionary, Johnson lists both solder and soder (“metallick cement”).

The spelling with -l- alternates with the non-l spelling in the 1600s and beyond. Starting in the mid-1700s or so, solder started being consistently spelled with -l– . A similar thing happened with some other words as well when people wanted the spelling to more accurately reflect the etymology (“re-Latinization,” as Douglas Harper calls it). The -b- in debt and doubt was added in this way, as was the -c- in victuals and the -l- in salmon, all despite how the words were pronounced.

In the video, Wilborne’s pronunciation of solder, with the lower vowel, is a more British one, nicely illustrated by the Collins dictionary entry for the word. Interestingly, the British pronunciation as provided in the Collins and Oxford dictionaries includes an L (SOUL-der), and both dictionaries say that the American pronunciation doesn’t have it (SAW-der). This, like the -t- in often, might have become a standard pronunciation to match the written form.

Wilborne doesn’t include an -l- in his pronunciation, but he does include an -r-. He sounds a bit Southern to me (he’s in Virginia), which might mean that he has a non-rhotic accent (that is, he “drops R’s”). But in non-rhotic dialects people frequently add (unspelled) R’s, such as between vowels. So maybe that’s the source of his pronunciation.

Anyway, it was interesting to hear this word spoken by someone who has a different dialect. And bonus, it was a cool video for learning how to replace a 12-volt cell in a lawnmower battery.

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