Eleventy
A retail rabbit hole and a visit to the Tolkienverse.
Something I was doing on the Nordstrom website the other day — I can’t remember what it was — prompted the algorithmic appearance of an item of clothing from a brand I’d never heard of until that moment: ELEVENTY.
The name sounded childlike but the prices were all grown up (and up): $395 for a wool baseball cap, $695 for “distressed” jeans, $1,895 for a linen shirtdress.
Where had this brand and name come from?
To my surprise, although ELEVENTY is not just an English word but in fact — as I was soon to learn — an Old English word, the brand turned out to be Italian.
The brand’s English-language website, EleventyMilano, offers not just men’s and women’s clothing and accessories but also children’s wear — tiny suit jackets and cashmere trousers fit for princelings and baby oligarchs — and home and gift sections.
There’s some About Us copy that may have landed more eloquently before its journey from Italian to English:
At Eleventy Milano, we believe in the idea of a world in which people aspire to become the best version of themselves through their gestures and actions.
Smart luxury is a modern interpretation of the human journey in the world with a versatile and casual style.
At Eleventy we recognize ourselves in believing in the importance of family relationships and in the continuous search for the positive side.
For us, style and elegance are not “seen” but rather “perceived” and luxury is not shouted, but noticed.
Our main characters are being genuine, humble, positive and confident.
Being Eleventy means connecting with yourself.
But the name? There’s no explanation. So I headed to the virtual stacks to do some research.
The eleventy I was familiar with is the jocular eleventy: a very large but indefinite number like “umpteen”1 or “umpty-nine” or “gazillion.” Here’s a fine example from Joe McVeigh’s language blog:
Welcome back to “Articles About Language By People Who Don’t Know What They're Talking About”. This is episode number eleventy majillion.
The OED dates this sense of eleventy to 1841 — where it first appeared not in backwoods America, as I would have guessed, but in a London (UK) publication.
But there’s a much older and more serious eleventy with roots in Old English, where endleofan literally meant “one left” (over ten) and hund endleofantig was “110.” (The -tig suffix gradually became Modern English’s -ty ending.) Old English also had hund twelfty, 120.
It took J.R.R. Tolkien, a philologist before he became a novelist — his first job was at the Oxford English Dictionary, and he taught Old English at Pembroke College from 1925 to 1945 — to bring eleventy’s original meaning into the modern era.
I am only slightly embarrassed to confess that I am no kind of Tolkien expert; of his fiction I’ve read only The Hobbit, when I was about 20, and I’ve never seen any of the film adaptations. Fantasy is not my genre of choice. But I know a little about Tolkien’s language interests, and I know that Tolkien’s fantasy novels, beginning with The Hobbit, published in 1937, were heavily influenced by Old English, Old Norse, and related Old languages. I filled in the large gaps in my knowledge with some good scholarly resources such as Glǽmscrafu (“The Glittering Caves,” or “Tolkien’s linguistic cellar”). There’s also the Inklings blog (2004-), named for the literary society Tolkien belonged to at Oxford University. The Inklings devotes an entire page to eleventy-one, which opens by citing this passage that opens the first chapter of The Lord of the Rings:
Each year the Bagginses had given very lively combined birthday-parties at Bag End; but now it was understood that something quite exceptional was being planned for that autumn. Bilbo was going to be eleventy-one, 111, a rather curious number, and a very respectable age for a hobbit (the Old Took himself had only reached 130); and Frodo was going to be thirty-three . . .
Tolkien died in 1973, at 81. Undeterred by this premature demise, on January 3, 2003, thousands of his fans around the world “raise[d] their glasses in a global toast to ‘the professor’” in honor of what would have been his eleventy-first — 111th — birthday.
How do we get from Tolkien’s Middle Earth, whose denizens wear “green velvet breeches, red or yellow waistcoat, brown or green jacket” to the sprezzatura of Eleventy Milano? It’s a mystery to me, but maybe that’s the wrong winding path. Maybe Eleventy Milano has a different, secret origin story: Spinal Tap’s “going to eleven,” perhaps. Or maybe to a speaker of Italian eleventy sounds like a close cousin of elevated, which, as we all know, a state everyone must now aspire to (and which Eleventy Milano’s prices certainly are).
Eleventy lives on not just in Milan and in the hearts of Tolkien fans but also in a publication on Medium called, of course, Eleventy-One. It consists of author Bryce W. Merkl Sasaki’s book reviews of exactly 111 words each, rated on a scale of one to eleven. Alas, the project appears to have run out of steam in two-thousand twelfty-one.2
More retail rabbit holes:
Shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue, now by appointment only (September 2024)
What color is “washed”? A Massimo Dutti mystery (April 2024)
Fashion Brand Company (February 2024)
What are “Veblen goods”? (January 2024)
Unlike eleventy, umpty is a relatively new word: Merriam-Webster traces it to military slang circa 1905.
I may have gotten this fanciful number entirely wrong, but I’m going to leave it anyway.
“At Eleventy we recognize ourselves in believing in the importance of family relationships…”
That is indeed an interesting translation turn-of-phrase. (Is there a word for that?) Today I plan to work ‘eleventy’ and ‘I recognize myself in believing’ into ordinary discourse.
When Google Translate was in its infancy, I used to amuse myself by going to various foreign language websites and translating the page. I picked ones where I had some familiarity with the language. Oh, the felicitous poetry it produced. I would read it aloud for best effect. The Italian-English, for whatever reason, was the best.
I appreciate your appreciation of Tolkien's appreciation for OLD English wordplay. I have no idea what EleventyMilano is doing; they probably made the mistake of letting a geek into the marketing department. But I thought you'd like to hear my mother's review of Peter Jackson's (technically impressive but ... ) first part of "The Hobbit." "It's ugly men, fighting."