Fritinancy

Attack of the ACK!ronyms

Let's pause for a moment to imagine the name-development process that led to this press release:

Today, i-mate introduced two 3G new Windows Mobile 5.0 devices. The i-mate JASJAM, the rebranded HTC TyTN (aka "Hermes") and the i-mate SP JAS, the rebranded HTC MTeoR (aka "Breeze").

On second thought, let's not. You know you're in trouble when your unpronounceable acronyms have inscrutable nicknames. And I won't even attempt to navigate "two 3G...5.0."

Hat tip to Stoked Brands.

The Whole Nine Yards

I was reading Patricia Leigh Brown's interesting article on hemp cultivation in California in Monday's New York Times--all about the idiotic anti-marijuana prejudices that prevent this perfectly useful crop from being grown legally--when I came across a new-to-me etymology: the relationship between "canvas" (the fabric) and "cannabis" (the Latin word for "hemp" as well as the hifalutin term for pot).

That sent me down a pleasant little rabbit hole of fabric names and their derivations. Here are some of my favorites.

Muslin, the plain-woven cotton fabric, comes from al-Mawsil, the Arabic pronunciation of Mosul, the city in Iraq that's in the news these days more for its materiel than for its material.

Denim derives from serge de Nimes--serge fabric (a type of twill) from the town of Nimes, France.

Calico, another humble cotton fabric (usually printed), was named for Calicut, the traditional capital of northern Kerala, India.

Chenille, the fuzzy-bumpy fabric of so many bathrobes, is the French word for "caterpillar"; it came to French from Latin canicula, or "little dog" (following the same logic as our term "woolly bear" for caterpillar).

Gingham, the familiar stuff of checkered shirts and tablecloths, comes from Malay genggang.

Seersucker was called shirshakar in Urdu; it means "milk and sugar," and describes the fabric's alternating smooth-and-raised texture.

Mohair has nothing to do with the hair of the mo; it was originally mukhayyar--Arabic for "choice."

And the trademark Viyella, a luxurious wool-and-cotton blend, is an approximate pronunciation of the fabric's place of origin: Via Gellia in Derbyshire, England.

IMglish As a Second Language

BuzzWhack has saved us the embarrassment of public head-scratching by compiling a mini-dictionary of IMglish, 462 acronyms used in instant messaging.

The list tells a vivid little story of Best Friends Forever who Love You Like a Sister and Miss You So Much that--If You Know What I Mean and I Think You Do--they'll tell you Far More Than You Ever Wanted to Know.

A few standouts:

P911: My parents are coming!

SHCOON: Shoot hot coffee out of nose

LSHMBB: Laughing so hard my belly is bouncing

SNERT: Snot-nosed rude egotistical teenager

YYSSW: Yeah, yeah, sure, sure, whatever

And for those of you who simply can't get enough buzz, The Buzzword Dictionary: 1,000 Phrases Translated from Pompous to English--goes on sale Friday, September 1.

Search Me

Jakob Nielsen, who has been called the king, guru, pope, and czar of web usability, as well as "the smartest person on the web," has an excellent article on "findability"--writing for search engine optimization (SEO)--in his August 28 Alertbox column. His pithy summary:

Familiar words spring to mind when users create their search queries. If your writing favors made-up terms over legacy words, users won't find your site.

Nielsen uses one of my favorite quotations to make his point, Winston Churchill's "Short words are best, and the old words when short are best of all." Even better than short words, says Nielsen, are precise and familiar words--the words real people are likely to use when they search.

More Nielsen tips:

• Supplement made-up words with known words--words your customers use in everyday business practice.
• Play down marketese and internal vocabulary. "Call a spade a spade, not a digging implement. Certainly not an excavation solution."
• Supplement brand names with generic terms. Don't abandon the 95% of prospects who are searching for the problem and don't yet know the name of your solution.
• Avoid politically correct terminology--say "blind" or "limited vision" instead of "visually challenged."

Here's my own two cents:

• Don't compromise the integrity of your web content by including intentionally misspelled terms because you expect some users will misspell their search terms. It's simply not worth the damage to your credibility and professional image.
• Writing clear, simple, "findable" prose is a lot tougher than concocting flowery piffle or jargon soup. To cite another great writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Easy reading is damn hard writing." Do your SEO homework, and then hire an experienced web writer who knows how to seed text with search terms so the result seems natural and graceful.

Word of the Week: Spave

Spave: To save by spending, whether or not you need the item you're buying. From Word Spy:

People who spave... have an unofficial motto: The more you buy, the more you save. This sounds at first like some twisted brand of mathematics — call it Retail Math or Shopaholic Math. But the spaving secret is to purchase something — in particular, an item that you would have bought anyway — at a reduced price. For example, if you go to the mall and see an item you need that normally costs $50 on sale for $25, you'd save $25.

Problems arise when the shopper confuses the "reducing expenses" sense of "saving" with the "accumulating money" sense. The shopper would figure that, although he only needs one of them, if he were to buy two of the sale item, then he'd have "saved" a whopping $50. "Heck, I'm making money here," he says to himself. "Why not buy four of them and save $100?"

The Mysteries of Naming, Chapter 3

Naming can seem mysterious because it's riddled with myths.

And when a name-seeker approaches the naming process armed with myth rather than truth, the myth inevitably gets in the way. So let's take a few minutes to examine ten common myths about name development.

1. All the good names are taken. It often seems so, but it simply isn't true. As the linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum has said, "If you have an original thought, the English language will not let you down." English gives us access to a very large toolbox: portmanteau words like TiVo (from "TV" and "vote") and Rolodex (from "rolling" and "index"); compounds like YouTube and SecondLife, which combine common words in unexpected ways; and real words applied arbitrarily, like Song (for an airline) or Dove (for soap or ice-cream bar). And there are coined words (Kodak), words borrowed from other languages (Zima), and word snips (Expedia, Flickr). Hey--I'm just getting warmed up!

2. We're smart; we can name it ourselves. Sure, you're smart. But do you have three to eight weeks to dedicate to the naming process? Do you know how to break through a creative block and generate hundreds or even thousands of names--not just a dozen? Can you manage the decisionmaking process so that everyone feels acknowledged and respected?

3. Professional namers are expensive. Some are. Some aren't. And sometimes it depends on how you define "expensive." How much value will you attach to this name? How long do you expect it to last? In how many places will the name be seen and heard? Calculate the cost of professional naming services as an investment in value rather than as a loss against revenue, and you may view the expense differently.

4. The name has to start with an "A." Or a "Z." Or a "K." To which I respond: Says who? Sometimes there's a legitimate reason for a specific letter or sound at the beginning of a word, but often the preference is arbitrary and based on false assumptions. Let's work together to discover the name that sounds and looks best for the company or product you're naming--not for a hypothetical category-buster.

5. The best names are short names. There are plenty of exceptions to this mythical rule. Technorati: ten letters, four syllables, and at the top of every blogger's chart. Habitat for Humanity: eighteen letters, eight syllables, and usually pronounced in full. The short-name fixation (or myth) was born during the early years of the web-domain gold rush, when it was assumed that dim-bulb consumers with fat fingers wouldn't be able to (a) remember or (b) type URLs of more than five letters. We all know better now.

6. The best name would be "Microsoft." I always ask naming clients what brand names appeal to them, and "Microsoft" usually tops the list. "I see," I reply, sounding thoughtful. "So you want a name that means 'small' and 'limp'--is that right?" It's not the name "Microsoft" that appeals; it's the equity of the brand--its meaning to consumers. As a name, "Microsoft"--or "Micro-Soft," as it was originally known--seemed pedestrian even in the 1970s ("Altair" sounded much cooler). Persistence and success turned the name into a brand worth envying. Are you willing to invest what it takes to turn your new name into a brand star?

7. If you're really good, you can deliver a name in a week. I can certainly deliver a name--heck, even a list of 200 names--in a week. But I can't deliver good names unless we've taken the time to determine your naming objectives and criteria. And I can't deliver usable names unless I have to time to thoroughly check them. To do all that, I need a bare minimum of three weeks. Six to eight weeks is safer, especially if we run into legal obstacles.

8. We don't need/can't afford international linguistic checks. In The Making of a Name, authors Steve Rivkin and Fraser Sutherland tell the story of a Landor Associates naming project that resulted in the corporate name Telemon. "It was wonderful," said the head of Landor's naming division, "until we went to Thailand, where it means 'intercourse with your mother.'" If you're doing business internationally, you'll want to know what your name means in your overseas market. It's another cost/value assessment that can save you money--and face--in the long term.

9. We don't need to bring the CEO (or COO, or VP of marketing) in on this. Unless you're creating a name waaaay down on the branding chain--a sub-brand in an existing nomenclature system--you bet your top executives need to sit around the table when we discuss what the name should or shouldn't be. If someone in your organization is likely to veto a final name choice, that person needs to be involved in the process from the beginning. (With BlackBerry turned off, please.)

10. If the domain is taken, we can't use the name. Not so fast. If a domain isn't in active use, it may be buyable. (It's easier than you may think.) And there are plenty of ways to fine-tune a URL to create an available domain name. Focus more on trademark availability--a trademark challenge can cost you serious money--and worry less about the WWW.

Read "The Mysteries of Naming: Chapter 4."

Read "The Mysteries of Naming: Chapter 2."

Read "The Mysteries of Naming: Chapter 1."

 

Branded by the Right

I went to the Commonwealth Club yesterday to hear linguist Geoffrey Nunberg talk about his new book, Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show. The subject was ostensibly political speech--in particular, the way in which conservatives have appropriated certain words such as "freedom," "values," and "elite" while turning "liberal" into an epithet of scorn. But the word I kept hearing was "branding."

Nunberg pointed out that in the 1950s and 1960s, Americans took much of their everyday vocabulary from the social sciences; phrases such as "status symbol" and "organization man" (and "inferiority complex" and "juvenile delinquent") became common parlance. But beginning in the 1970s, Nunberg said, "marketers became the new cartographers of the American landscape." As a result, we no longer think of "branding" as something cowboys inflict on bovines (in the 1960s, there even was a TV series called Branded; the hero was constantly trying to escape his "brand"). And we sprinkle our conversation with words like "upscale" and "demographics." Gradually but inexorably, we've stopped being citizens--it happened right around the time civics stopped being part of the public school curriculum--and started being consumers. Of everything from health care to education to television shows to, yep, politics.

Branding is a powerful means of articulating a message. But it also can create artificial polarities in which MyBrand dukes it out with YourBrand: "Cool" Macs vs. "stodgy" PCs, the "new Alero" vs. "your father's Oldsmobile" (yeah, that one really worked!), this year's skinny jeans vs. last year's tragically outmoded flares. All too often, it's a distinction without a difference.

And that's Nunberg's point about political branding: it forces us into identity groups defined by brand names and articles of consumption. Volvo, Brie, and Chardonnay have been attached to "liberals" for so long that it's easy to overlook that Republicans outbuy and outconsume all three products. (Brie is a convenient symbol for conservatives to associate with liberals, said Nunberg, because it's pale, soft, runny, and French.) As sociologist Alan Wolfe has written, Americans--Democrats, Republicans, Greens, libertarians--have more in common than you'd assume from listening to AM talk radio. Nunberg pointed out that while "Brand Nashville" may connote country-western music, in fact the number-one radio station in Actual Nashville plays adult-contemporary music. That means Billy Joel, not Bubba.

Funny thing, though: We're beginning to see a branding backlash, both in the political arena (witness the dismal drop-off in voter turnout) and in the marketplace. Product marketers are scrambling to adapt to the world of "brand hijack," in which consumers rather than companies define the brand experience. And blogging is redefining the political experience. It's all very well to reclaim language, as Nunberg and others urge. But if we don't listen carefully, we'll be using that language to tell a meaningless story.

More Blather & Jargon, Inc.

Who among us has not furrowed a brow and wrinkled a nose upon being served an indigestible bolus of corpspeak such as "Structuring working partnerships that team with client resources, operations, and infrastructures" or "Developing and managing complex information technology lifecycles"?

LInguist Geoffrey K. Pullum of Language Log describes his despair at reading those phrases and others amid the web prose of Denver-based Gerbig Management. Pullum writes:

Yes, one wants to say, but what do you do when you get to the office? It all makes me realize that the Language Log corporation just doesn't have enough sloganware, mission-statementry, or marketspeak to belong to the modern business world. We just sit around writing stuff about language . . . We should be structuring linguistic resources to team with client communicational information infrastructures, assessing root neuropharmopsychosociolinguistic concerns for targeted linguistic lifecycle technologies, managing linguistic risk quotients to assist partners in navigating increasingly complex morpholexicosyntactic environments... That sort of thing. I think I just made my head hurt.

Take a couple of aspirin, Geoff, and read on. Lois Beckwith, a former corporate-communications drone who, therefore, knows whereof she speaks, is here to help you with The Dictionary of Corporate Bullshit: An A to Z Lexicon of Empty, Enraging, and Just Plain Stupid Office Talk. Tongue planted firmly in cheek, Beckwith tackles such perennial offenders as "bandwidth" and "actionable" and opens the kimono on a phrase I find particularly annoying:

at the end of the day

1. not the literal end of the day, as in sunset, 5:30 p.m., 7:00 p.m., etc. The end result, The final analysis, When all is said and done, When the pedal hits the metal, When the shit hits the fan, When I'm reviewing my mutual fund balances and realize my kid is going to a state school . . . A phrase uttered in conclusion by managers who are supposedly explaining a somewhat nonsensical corporate tenet/idea/policy/decision that probably does not make sense. ("At the end of the day, it is what it is.") A nice way to end a thought, thrown in to infuse a statement with an air of authority, common sense, and definitive finality. A common leitmotif; it just sounds good.

Net-net, it's a win-win. Or not-not.

You Talkin' to Me?

Everyone hates obnoxious public cell-phone users, but no one does anything about them. Until now.

Coudal Partners, a Chicago design and advertising agency, is fighting back with SHHH, the Society for HandHeld Hushing. Go to this page and download a PDF of a SHHH card, which politely informs the recipient that "We are aware that your ongoing conversation about _________ is very important to you, but we thought you'd like to know that it doesn't interest us in the least. In fact, your babbling disregard for others is more than a little annoying."

There's a whole lot more to enjoy on the Coudal site, which is possibly the most literate design-agency site in the entire universe. You could easily spend a couple of hours with the list of Museum of Online Museums, which includes such otherwise easy-to-miss exhibits as the Whistling Records Collection and the Gallery of Cigarette Pack Graphics. Spend a pleasant few minutes at Verse by Voice listening to sound clips of people reading their favorite poems into a telephone voice recorder. And by all means don't miss "Copy Goes Here," an eleven-minute feature film about the secret life of an ad agency. You'll laugh and--if you're a copywriter--I guarantee you'll cry.

From Those Wonderful Folks Who Brought You the Blitz

It's springtime for laundry with the new Axxis(tm) washing machine from German appliance maker Bosch. I'm sure they'll welcome queries from Italian and Japanese partners.

Slogan contest, anyone? How about "We Have Ways of Making You Wash." Or "Cleanliness Is Next to World Domination."

As Seth Godin observes, "Human beings have short memories."