Fritinancy

If the Bray Fits

As we ladies know, shopping for a bra that fits properly requires advanced degrees in math, mechanical engineering, and patience. If it isn’t the weird size system (in the US, anyway) it’s the creepy salesman. And still we are doomed to a Sisyphean failure loop: 80 percent (or 85 percent or 99.9 percent) of women are Doing It Wrong, as we are repeatedly reminded.

So it’s encouraging to see a startup—based in Israel—dedicated to helping women find “a good bra that fits just right,” in the words of founder Orit Hashay.

If only they could have found a name that fits better than Brayola.

 

Cue the donkey.

The logo—nicely executed to resemble a lingerie label—does its darnedest to lift and separate the pink bra from the black yola. There are just two problems. First: Most of the time we’ll see the name in only one color. And second: In English, “-yola” is not a suffix. But “-ola” is, especially in commercial names. Its history goes back to Pianola (a mechanical piano invented in 1895 or 1896) and thence to Victrola (1905) and Crayola (1903, coined from craie, the French word for chalk, and ola from oleaginous).

And let’s not forget payola, supposedly coined from pay and Victrola and defined as the payment of cash or gifts in exchange for airtime.

Crayola, payola … Brayola. It’s really, really hard to get past a long-A sound in the first syllable.

And I wish I didn’t hear an echo of bresaola (breast-ola?), the Italian cured meat.

 

 

Brayola gets lots of love from loyalist commenters who visited a recent TechCrunch post. Good for them. But I must call it as I see it: The company name is either a cross-linguistic blunder or an attempt at humor that falls, well, flat. There’s nothing like the suggestion of bray to make you look like an ass.

If Ms. Orit Hashay had given me a call, I’d have said: “You’re in Israel, girlfriend! Name the company Bra Mitzvah!”

Read my other underwear posts.

¡Ay, Ay, Ay!

It’s bad enough that an optometric office is using a wretched bilingual pun as its name.

Eye Carumba, 4 Embarcadero Center, San Francisco

 

What’s worse is that, having opted to go with a wretched bilingual pun, the optometrists didn’t get their vision checked before ordering the sign. The second word of that Spanish interjection is spelled caramba, not carumba.

Even that proud underachiever Bart Simpson—whose first words, after all, were “¡Ay, caramba!”—knows better.

(By the way, caramba is a minced oath, the sort of thing you get when you substitute goshdarnit for goddammit. In this case, the word being minced is carajo, a vulgarism for “penis”; idiomatically, “¡Ay, carajo” means “Oh, fuck!”)

I might accept “Eye Caramba” (not “Carumba”) as the name of a hip, whimsical retailer of eyeglass frames à la Warby Parker. Or, even better, a hip, whimsical retailer of children’s eyeglass frames. But the name is out of focus for an optometrist’s office: a silly, misspelled pun just doesn’t say “skilled and experienced medical professionals dedicated to the improvement of my vision.”

Word of the Week: Intercalary

Intercalary (adj.): Inserted into the calendar to make the calendar year correspond to the solar year. Said of a day or month—for example, February 29 is an intercalary Leap Day. Pronounced with the accent on the second syllable (in-TURK-uh-larry).

A couple of days ago I caught up with the most recent episode of “30 Rock” and was surprised to see intercalary in, of all places, the Xfinity Comcast On Demand* episode description. The text on the screen read:

Jack learns that Leap Day is more than just an extra day to do business while Liz spends her first intercalary holiday helping Jenna seduce an Internet billionaire.

That isn’t quite accurate: Liz has been around for several leap years (she’s 41); she just hasn’t yet celebrated Leap Day at work. During the episode (directed by Steve Buscemi!) she’s introduced to an alternate universe of Leap Day traditions: the mandatory wearing of yellow and blue; the legend of Leap Day William, who lives in the Mariana Trench and emerges every four years to trade children’s tears for candy; and the holiday classic Leap Dave Williams, in which the title character is played by Jim Carrey. With gills. (Catchphrase: “Real life is for March!”)

Watch the full episode (until March 30, 2012). 

There has never (yet) been a Leap Dave Williams movie, but there was a movie called Leap Year starring Amy Adams and Matthew Goode. It was a modest box-office success despite a barrage of negative reviews. In a mysterious bit of poor timing, the movie was released not in a leap year but in 2010.

Elsewhere in Leap Year festivities:

• Honda is promoting its “all-new” CR-V with the Leap List, which invites website visitors to share what they’d like to do before getting married, changing jobs, turning 50, or some other goal. The lists can be submitted for a chance to win a CR-V.
• Zappos has a 365-day return policy, but there’s a Leap Day loophole in the fine print: “If you purchase on 2/29 of a Leap Year, then you have until 2/29 the following Leap Year to return those orders. That's four whole years! Woot!” (Hat tip: Dustbury.)
• Number one on San Francisco Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik’s list of Leap Day suggestions: “Twitter taboo, Facebook forbidden on Feb. 29. Just hush.” Number two on the list: “The above does not apply to columnists.” Or bloggers?

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*In January 2011 Comcast completed its takeover of NBC Universal, the parent company of the network on which “30 Rock” appears. Comcast, or something that resembles it, is frequently spoofed on the show as KableTown (“with a K … because CableTown with a C was already the name of a store that sold cable-knit sweaters and legal said we had to spell it with a K”).

Let's Verbify Everything!

And then nounify it!

Pier 1 Imports, San Francisco.

 

Nothing says “new” like a new word*, right? (Definition of “freshification,” according to the website: “Puts softness in & gets the blah out.” Ampersand sic.)

As I’ve noted previously in this space, “-ify” is one of the branding world’s suffixes du jour. The Name Inspector published a post last year about what he called “a disturbifying trend in namifying”; he cited Adify, Spotify, Predictify, and many other coinages. (In a comment, I wondered whether these names were created under the influence of the antidepressant/bipolar drug Abilify.) Pepsico’s CEO Indra Nooyi has is spoken enthusiastically about “the opportunity to ‘snackify’ beverages and ‘drinkify’ snacks.” Stephen Colbert had some fun with “snackification” in a January show. 

But the home-décor sector is relatively conservative, and until “freshification” I hadn’t seen much evidence of wordplay at retail chains like Pier 1. The word, or the concept, seems to be having a positive effect: the company’s stock price and sales revenue have climbed—or climbified—over the last several months.

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* Not 100 percent new: Freshify is a WordPress theme.

Totes Adorbs Dog Food

From the not-new-but-new-to-me files:

TV food-show host Rachael Ray, known for her bubbly manner, inventive vocabulary, and shortcut recipes, lends her name and image to a brand of dog food called Nutrish. The brand was introduced in mid-2008; all proceeds from its sale go to Rachael’s Rescue, which helps abandoned and mistreated animals.

 

If you think I’m going to mock the “Nutrish” name, think again. It’s just about perfect.

• It’s consistent with the casual, playful Rachael Ray brand vocabulary. On her cooking shows, Ms. Ray sprinkles abbreviations like “delish” and “stoup” (a hybrid of “stew” and “soup”). She refers to herself as “Rach.”
• It conveys a benefit—nutrition—in a lighthearted way that emphasizes the joy (rather than the chore) of dog ownership.
• It’s right in step with the vogue for truncations like totes (totally), adorbs (adorable), skedge (schedule), and obvs (obviously). For more on this trend, see Stan Carey’s “ ‘Ledgebag’ is totes amaze,” and Ben Yagoda’s “Totes cray-cray abbrevs.”

 

I like the simplicity and near-rhyme of this slogan, too.

 

Nicely named, Rachael Ray. Have a biscuit!

(Hat tip: MJF.)

FSHN STTMNT

Where does a style-savvy girl have to shop to buy a vowel nowadays? I’m looking at you, BLK DNM, the newish anti-fashion fashion boutique in downtown Manhattan that the New York Times profiled last week. (Reporter Jon Caramanica called BLK DNM “in essence an aggressively priced Uniqlo or Gap for the upper echelon of the invisible.”)

Is BLK DNM texting shorthand for “black denim”? Maybe. Maybe not. Urban Dictionary says “d’n’m” stands for “deep and meaningful.” Perhaps BLK stands for “bulk.” Or “blerk.” Or “bollocks.”

I’d dismiss BLK DNM as a pretentious anomaly if I hadn’t seen evidence that it is in fact part of an annoying trendlet. Let’s take a look:

• BHLDN, which I wrote about a year ago, is Anthropologie’s entry into the wedding-fashion market. As I said in the post, it begs to be backronymed. (“Beware Hardly Literate Dumb Names”?)
  
  
• Asmbly Hall, a new boutique on San Francisco’s Fillmore Street, scrounged up enough cash to buy a couple of A’s, but had to cut the E (and an S) out of the budget.

 

• JNSQ, “the first independent, multimedia style magazine for iPad,” takes its name for French texting shorthand for “je ne sais quoi,” which means “I don’t know what.” How we’re supposed to pronounce the name? Moi, je ne sais pas. The online version of the company, according to a TechCrunch post, is called Jenesqua. Gen-ess-kwa? Donnez-moi un break.
  
  
• The Gap is catching the consonantal drift, too. Its new online catalog, Styld.by, “taps fashion bloggers from popular sites including FabSugar, Lookbook.nu, and Refinery29, to style and showcase pieces of Gap clothing,” according to a post on Co.Create, Fast Company’s branding/entertainment/tech blog. (The “by” in the name looks like a country code, but isn’t: the URL is www.styld-by.com. There is no .by country code … yet.) Styld.by was created by a San Francisco agency called AKQA. AKQA doesn’t stand for anything except a certain JNSQ. 

Of course, the whole thing started several years ago when tech companies like Flickr, Plnnr, and Dlvr.it (RIP) eliminated vowels to obtain short domain names. It sends one message when a scrappy startup cheats on spelling and quite another when the vowelless name belongs to an image-conscious fashion brand. By belatedly jumping on the bndwgn, are retailers trying to sell us austerity? Or are they just moving too fast to vowel up?

"Get Your X On"

Last week the Brand New blog critiqued the new logo and ad campaign for the Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority, which has rebranded the lake’s south shore as “Tahoe South.” The review, which focuses on the typeface, is generally positive: “This is probably not the best destination branding job of the year, but definitely one of the best examples of commissioned lettering with a strong purpose.”

The review doesn’t mention the new tagline, “Get Your Vacation On.” Here’s the tag in an ad:

 

Rebranding by Duncan/Channon, San Francisco.

 

“Get Your Vacation On” is a new twist on a formula whose contemporary source is “Get your groove on” (“to get something going,” e.g., “to dance”) from the early to mid-1990s. In her textbook African-American English: A Linguistic Introduction, published in 2002, Lisa J. Green noted that “get one’s X on” was “extremely productive.” Among the examples she listed: get my chill on (“to rest”), get my eat on (“to eat”), and get my praise on (“to worship”).* Green doesn’t include a much earlier example, “get your habits on,” which was discussed in the American Dialect Society’s listserv in 2005. “Get Your Habits On” was the title of an 1899 song that inspired many sequels and imitations, including one sung by Bessie Smith in 1933 (sample lyric: “I like you when you got your habits on”).

The Washington, DC, go-go band Rare Essence recorded “Get Your Freak On” in 1995; the Missy Elliott song from 2001, “Get Ur Freak On,” is unrelated.

The 2003 remake of Freaky Friday used “Get Your Freak On” as a tagline.

“Get your freak on” can be sexual or non-. An example of the former: Last October, a TSA agent added a handwritten note—“GET YOUR FREAK ON GIRL”—on a luggage-inspection notice given to a female passenger whose bag contained what she later described as “a personal item.” The passenger was a blogger, so the note found its way to Gawker.

 

Some non-freaky twists on the formula:

• Get Your Preak On is the slogan for the Preakness InfieldFest, held in May in conjunction with the Preakness Stakes.
  
  
• Get Your Geek On is “a weekly show about all things geek.”
  
  
• Get Your Geek On is also the slogan of GeekTheLibrary.org (“Whatever you geek, the public library supports it all”). For more on this slogan—and on geek used as a verb—see Ben Zimmer’s Word Routes column from November 2010.
  
  
• Get Your Craft On is the name of a crafts blog.
  
  
• “Get Your Roll On” was a 2000 single by the hip-hop duo Big Tymers .
  
  
• In 2008, Apple used “Get Your Groove On” as a slogan for the iPod Shuffle. The earliest citation for “get your groove on” in the Online Slang Dictionary is dated 1999.
  
  
• “Get Your Drink On” shows up all over the Web. It’s the name of a regular column about bars and cocktails in SF Weekly, a Bay Area publication.
  
  
• In its August 17-24, 2005, issue, Boston’s Weekly Dig newspaper used only “Get Your X On” headlines. ADS-L contributor Steven Kleinedler noted several of them: “Get your wiseacre on,” “City Hall told to get its green on,” “South End gets its sashimi on,” and the very meta “Get Your Get Your ___ On.” Kleinedler said the editor’s letter explained it all; unfortunately, the issue is not online, so I can’t share it with you.

“Get your X on” may or may not be related to the simpler and less variable “get it on,” which arose in the 1950s as a musical command and later took on a sexual connotation. (Marvin Gaye released “Let’s Get It On” in 1976.) In “get it on” the emphasis is on the on; in “get your X on” the emphasis is usually on “X.”

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* Thanks to Stan Carey and Ben Zimmer for the link to African-American English.

Guest Post at Duets Blog: Who Owns “White Elephant”?

My guest post about confusing iconography, “A Tale of Two Elephants,” was published this morning at Duets Blog (“Collaborations in Creativity and the Law”). The elephants in question are idiomatic ones used as brands: one belongs to the Oakland Museum of California’s annual White Elephant Sale; the other was used by Goodwill in its holiday promotion, “I’m Dreaming of a White Elephant.” Which institution owns the elephant? And just what is a “white elephant,” anyway. Your elephantine questions answered here.

P.S. I wrote about an elephant of another color in a 2009 post, “The Pink Elephant in the Living Room.”

Word of the Week: Nomophobia

Nomophobia: Fear of being without a cellphone. Coined from no + mobile + phobia.

The first documented usage of nomophobia appeared in Britain in March 2008 after a study commissioned by the UK post office found that nearly 53 percent of people surveyed felt anxious when they lost their phone or had no coverage. The syndrome “has been found to induce stress levels similar to those of wedding day jitters and trips to the dentist,” reported the Metro (UK).

A more recent survey conducted by SecurEnvoy, which specializes in digital passwords, found that the numbers have increased to 66 percent. The Los Angeles Times reported last week that “People 18-24 tend to be the most nomophobic (77%), followed by people aged 25-34 (68%). The third most nomophobic group is 55 and older.”

The Times story used the more-common American term cellphone. But as Ben Yagoda reported last year in his Not One-Off Britishisms blog, the British import “mobile” is on the rise in the US. “The traditional U.S. equivalents have been, in order of adoption, cellular phone, cell phone and cell,” Yagoda wrote. He pointed to a Google Ngram showing the soaring incidence of mobile in American English between 1998 and 2008.

If you’re going to do it right, Yagoda noted, you should pronounce mobile “to rhyme with so vile.” And he added: “For a true telephonic Britishism, use on (instead of at) before giving your number, as in ‘Ring me on 555-1212.’”

 

http://britishisms.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/mobile/

Restaurant Names in the News

Noted recently:

Food Coma, a bánh mì and crêpe café, opened this month in Oakland’s Uptown neighborhood. Its tagline is “Eat. Drink. Eat. Pass out. Repeat”; the logo emphasizes the “pass out” part of the instructions. Death and near-death are surprisingly popular themes in gastronomic naming right now: see Dead Letter wine, Dead Fish restaurant, and Death’s Door spirits. (Via SFEater.com.)

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Wales Today reports that a Welsh prison, HMP Cardiff, will open “a fine dining restaurant” called Clink. It’s a nice play on words: Besides being a slang term meaning prison, “clink” is the sound of two beverage glasses saluting each other. For some reason I’d assumed that “clink” for “prison” was a relatively recent Americanism. Wrong: the OED says it surfaced in mid-16th century England. Clink was the name “of a noted prison in Southwark” (a district in London) and was “later used elsewhere (esp. in Devon or Cornwall) for a small and dismal prison or prison-cell, a lock-up.” Now you know. (Via @brandstrat.)

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CLINK. is also the name of a restaurant in Boston that occupies the site of “the storied Charles Street jail.” Yes, the name is in all caps, and yes, that’s a period. As in “sentence,” perhaps? (Via @wisekaren.)

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And from the Department of What Did You Expect, a diner in his 40s suffered a heart attack last Saturday while eating the Triple Bypass Burger at the Heart Attack Grill (tagline: “Taste Worth Dying For!”) in Las Vegas. He survived. Other patrons were unfazed. “It says right on the door, it's hazardous to your health,” diner CJ Beeman told the local Fox channel. I wish the gentleman a speedy recovery, and I certainly hope that if he ever visits Oakland he isn’t tempted to eat at Food Coma. (Via @dustbury.)