Fritinancy

AOL Dot Dot Com

AOL, which began life 20 years ago as American Online, next month will become Aol. when it spins off from Time Warner. And no, the period after "Aol" is not a typo. On the contrary, it's an opportunity for C-level executives to exhibit their A-plus storytelling abilities.

Here's what (Ms.) Sam Wilson, managing director of the New York office of Wolff Olins, the agency that effected the transformation, told the New York Times:

The period in the logo was added to suggest “confidence, completeness,” Ms. Wilson said, by declaring that “AOL is the place to go for the best content online, period.”

Tim Armstrong, AOL's chairman and chief executive officer, likes the period so much that he's given it a nickname:

Mr. Armstrong said he liked to describe the period as “the AOL dot” because “the dot is the pivot point for what comes after AOL,” whether it is e-mail, Web sites or coming offerings that will “surprise people.”

Gee, they get all that out of a period? I'd love to hear them spin the interrobang.

I think that Aol. will still be pronounced ay-oh-ell, at least officially. I, however, propose to call it aoili. Very tasty with asparagus.

Seriously, though, if anyone there is listening: Nobody outside your company cares about your cute punctuation. No newspaper is going to comply with your internal style guide. Normal people write Macy's, not Macy*s, E-Trade, not E*TRADE, and Guess, not Guess?* Bill Walsh, a copy chief at the Washington Post who blogs at The Slot, devotes a chapter to this subject in his invaluable book The Elephants of Style. He writes:

I find a certain satisfaction ... in observing that the Web's conventions permit no decorative punctuation in addresses--it's www.yahoo.com and www.etrade.com. Those who lowercase the names of all Web companies should think about this.

Back to today's headlines:

Here's the AOL press release. (Yes, it includes the word "passionate." What did you expect? Also "uniquely dynamic," "world-class experiences," and "bold and exciting.")

PR Daily points out that AOL also plans to lowercase a third of its staff: that is, lay them off. (Hat tip: John Ochwat.)

Read what some British designers have to say about the redesigned AOL logo.

Read what Om Malik of GigaOm has to say.

And for an extra helping of snark, read Ad Age, which has posted an obituary for AOL's long-running mascot, Running Man. (Hat tip: Ben Zimmer.) I'll get you started:

Our copy desk has a suggestion of where you can stick that period ... uhm, right next to Yahoo's exclamation point.

UPDATE: Brand New, a design blog that specializes in before-and-after critiques, has published a long post about Aol. that includes many proof-of-concept images.

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* I love the story, possibly apocryphal, about the woman who wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the "Guess?" logo. A stranger approached her on the street, appraised her chest, and said, "Um ... 34DD?"

Pharma Friday

For the condition your condition is in:

1. Have you seen the full-page newspaper ads for HUMIRA (yes, they use all caps), the rheumatoid arthritis drug from Abbott Laboratories that promises to put the fun back in dishwashing? Seriously: There's a photo of blue household gloves up in the corner, and a headline that chirps, "Doing Dishes Could Be a Splash ... and is just one of the daily activities you may be able to do with less pain and stiffness." Last month the San Francisco Chronicle's Jon Carroll devoted a column to the absurdities in that ad—the list of risks and contraindications covers just about everything short of leprosy. But he didn't address my own quibble: When you turn the page and read the legal boilerplate, you see this heading: HUMIRA® (HU-MARE-AH). Huh? I would have said hu-meer-ah or hu-my-rah, but there's no way I would pronounce an i like an a. So what gives? Here's my theory: Humira (I refuse to yield to the all-caps mandate) is a semi-acronym for Human Monoclonal Antibody in Rheumatoid Arthritis. If it were a real acronym, it would be spelled HuMAiRA ... and pronounced Hu-mare-ah, as prescribed. Someone deleted the a but forgot to alter the pronunciation. (P.S. Forget about dishwashing gloves: One of the contraindications is an allergy to latex.)

2. They may spell it AcipHex, with a capital H to tip us off to pH balance, but it's still pronounced ass effects. Which would be fine if it were a hemorrhoid medication, but it's not. (Hat tip: Barry Nordin.) UPDATE: See Wishydig's 2008 post on the reasoning (?) behind AcipHex.

3. Drug name or soccer team? Take the quiz. I scored 100 percent, which is either fantastic or pathetic. (Hat tip: Anthony Shore.)

4. Talk about designer drugs: Create your own, named for you and customized for symptoms of your choosing. Say hello to Nancitol, the answer to itchy, flaky thorax, vermilion rashes, and difficulty ruminating! (Hat tip: Karen at Verbatim.)

August Linkfest

A late-summer harvest of idioms, acronyms, neologisms, and hench-words:

"At the drop of a heartbeat." "A bull in a candy shop." "Green behind the ears." They're all odd amalgamations of familiar idioms collected at Conflation, whose editors write:

The purpose of this website is not to provide an inert list of expressions that can be chuckled at and then put aside. We have compiled this collection with the genuine hope that readers will deliberately use conflations in their day-to-day lives. These expressions should be studied and memorized to the point where the reader is comfortable using them in proper context without hesitation or awkwardness. It should be pointed out that conflations are not to be slipped into conversation with the intention of fooling the uninitiated. Conflation is not an inside joke. Any pleasure gained from successful conversational usage should be derived from the knowledge that you are activating the evolution of language toward a vernacular of resistance.

Could be a fun party game, too. (Via ThatWhichMatter, which does not appear to have a website but is well worth following on Twitter if you're interested in language. UPDATE: And which just launched a Tumblr log.)

A different species of neologism is the specialty of Mark Peters, curator of Wordlustitude. Guest-posting at the Oxford University Press blog, Peters writes about the "underrated prefix" hench-, which turns up most famously, but hardly exclusively, in henchman. (The title of the post is "Send in the Hench-poodles!") To wit:

I’ve found uses of henchblob, henchboob, hench-chicken, hench-Cylon, henchdemon, henchgoat, henchidiot, hench-lady-men-partners, hench-monster, henchscum, hench-wench, plus spokeshenchman, sub-sub-henchman, under-henchlings and many others.

Who doesn't love a "hench-wench"? By the way, hench comes from Old English hengest, meaning horse or stallion: a henchman was originally a groom.

Ben Schott, author of the Schott's Miscellanies and occasional contributor to the New York Times op-ed page, writes a Times blog, Schott's Vocab, where he documents new words and phrases. Once a week he hosts a contest in which readers submit their own inventions. Read the results of the most recent competition, to devise "weasel words, euphemisms, dysphemisms and circumlocutions for items in the news."

I recently discovered Beg to Differ, the bright blog produced by Brandvelope Consulting in Ottawa, and couldn't resist subscribing. Two posts sealed the deal: "The 25 Worst Acronyms in the World" (RUMPS? WinCE? MANPADS?) and "25 Meaningless Tag Lines" (Exxon: "We're Exxon.").

Another new discovery, this one via Editrix: Funny Typos, Misspellings, Bad Grammar & Engrish, which delivers the goods, or the bads. Examples: a DeLonghi coffeemaker with a "permanent god filter" and a hand-lettered sign for a "Hugh Sale." Hugh Sale, meet Hugh Reductions.

Speaking of errors, NPR's Page Not Found page transforms a wrong turn into a jolly adventure.  "It's a shame that your page is lost, but at least it's in good company," the page consoles. "Stick around to browse through NPR stories about lost people, places and things that still haven't turned up." Links go to stories about Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa, "Your Luggage," and other missing people and things.

The Estonian language uses lots of umlauts and is related to Finnish and not much else. That was all I knew about Estonian until I found this well-written (in English), gorgeously illustrated Brief Guide to Estonian, which made me want to learn more. Did you know that Estonian has 14 grammatical cases, no grammatical gender, and no articles (definite or indefinite)? Or that there's an Estonian Sign Language, used by about 2,000 people? Just knowing that sort of thing makes me happy.

Bad Brand Names: Smub

I thought one solid week of Bad Brand Names would suffice for a while, but no: it's raining bad names. Please allow me to be your umbrella.

Smub is a new technology company with offices in Lyon, France, and Redwood City, California. Its principals are all French, and perhaps to their ears the name sounds charming or hip or clever. In English, I'm sorry to say, it falls between ludicrous and offensive. According to ReadWriteWeb, "Smub" is an acronym for "smart multi-use bookmarking," but that's no excuse.* There's nothing smart about this name.

Granted, the service itself sounds useful. Here's what ReadWriteWeb wrote:

Smub.it offers a drop-dead simple social sharing and bookmarking tool that proves especially useful for iPhone and other smart phone users. ... [It] requires only that users type "smub.it/" to the left of the URL they wish to bookmark or share. Then, whether it's viewed on a mobile device or a computer, the browser goes to Smub's ten-button interface where users are presented with a modest but functional selection of link-sharing options. The service effectively eliminates the need for copy/paste functions and takes a few steps out of iPhone users' sharing process.

Note the .it (Italy) domain extension, which turns "Smub" into an imperative: "Smub it!" Techies love this sort of verbification. Trademark lawyers, on the other hand, loathe it. They want us to use trademarked names as adjectives only: "the Smub social-sharing service."

But back to the name itself. What exactly is wrong with Smub? For starters, its sound—muffled, blunted, nasally congested—is in direct opposition to the streamlining purpose of the product. Not only that: In English, words that start with smu- have negative connotations: smudge, smut, smug. Smub is one consonant away from snub and not far from snob. Zero positive associations.

And let it not be overlooked that Smub is bums spelled backward.

From the looks of it, the Smub team has invested a lot of time and brainpower into an application with some genuine utility and elegance. Why not expend just a quarter of that energy on the name?

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* I was unable to find this definition on the Smub site or blog.

Word of the Week: Nom

Nom: Slang term, widely circulated through blogs and Twitter, that simulates the sound of eating enthusiastically. Frequently repeated as an interjection ("Cookies! Nom nom nom"); also used, by extension, as a verb ("I'm nomming on some yummy cookies") and an adjective ("Those cookies are nommy!"). Urban Dictionary identifies other builds on nom, including nomilicious, nomable, nomtastic, nommage ("something good to eat"), and nomability. However, nomosexual has a different etymology; it's defined as someone uninterested in sex ("no mo'").

The gustatory nom is attributed to the Sesame Street character Cookie Monster (1969-present), who says "Om nom nom nom" while eating omnivorously. In the last couple of years nom has been widely disseminated through the medium of LOLcats; it's defined in a LOLcat Dictionary as "to eat fuds."

Here is an unusually sophisticated (and bilingual) use of nom in a LOLcat photo (from I Can Haz Cheeseburger):

Perhaps inevitably, there have also been sightings of Obama noms.

Following the recent legalization of same-sex marriage in Iowa and Vermont, another nom has been audible: NOM, the National Organization for Marriage, which purports to "protect marriage and religious liberty." On Twitter, the organization's handle is nomtweets, which has caused some confusion and annoyance among the nom-as-fuds crowd. "TAKE BACK THE NOM," tweeted Washington reporter Ana Marie Cox on April 10, endorsing another tweet that commented: "It's sad that the Right has appropriated our most adorable netspeak for their hate campaigns." Capital-letter NOM seems to exhibit a tone-deafness similar to that of other right-leaning causes: its newest initiative is called 2M4M, an abbreviation of "Two Million for Marriage." Apparently no one at NOM did the minimal research necessary to discover that M4M is a long-established (pre-Web) gay-personals-ad abbreviation of "Men for Men."

The acronym NOM can also be an acronym for No Offense Meant, Natural Organic Matter, and many other phrases. In French, perhaps needless to say, nom means name.

UPDATE: Watch a spot-on parody (from "RIM") of the National Organization for Marriage's alarmist "Gathering Storm" video.

In Search Of

If you've ever done business with businesses of any size, you've encountered the acronym ISO, which represents the world's largest developer and publisher of international standards (or, as the organization itself likes to call them, International Standards). You usually see "ISO" followed by "9000" or "9001" or the suffix "-compliant." I can't explain what the numerals stand for—ISO has developed more than 17,500 standards for a huge range of industries, from health-care technology to clothing to agriculture, so the 9000 must stand for something other than that aggregate number. Maybe it's the ninth in a series of standards, with three zeroes added as placeholders. But that's just a guess. No doubt one of you will enlighten me.

Until this week I thought I knew what "ISO" stands for: International Standards (or maybe Standardization) Organization. It turns out I was wrong. In English, the group's name is International Organization for Standardization. What gives?

Here's what ISO says:

Because "International Organization for Standardization" would have different acronyms in different languages ("IOS" in English, "OIN" in French for Organisation internationale de normalisation), its founders decided to give it also a short, all-purpose name. They chose "ISO", derived from the Greek isos, meaning "equal". Whatever the country, whatever the language, the short form of the organization's name is always ISO.

That's a nice story, but it doesn't work for me. "ISO" would be the organization's name  if it were pronounced as a word (eye-so or ee-so) or if there were no non-initialized alternative (as with AARP, which dropped "American Association of Retired Persons" in 1999¹).

For the record, I am not a fan of acronyms.

(Hat tip: Catherine Newton.)
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¹ Very prescient of them! They must have suspected that by 2009 no one would be able to afford to retire.

Dueling ACK!ronyms

This is the sort of trouble you're asking for when you go sliding down the all-initial-caps slope:

The Employee Freedom Action Committee (EFAC) continued its $30 million dollar¹  campaign with a new television advertisement premiering during tonight’s Presidential Debate coverage. EFAC is spending $2 million airing the ad which, in addition to running during tonight’s debate, will run heavily in seven states that EFAC has been targeting since May. The campaign has criticized Senators and candidates who support the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

Got that? The EFAC is criticizing the EFCA, getting all up in its FACE, you might say.

Still, it was nice to see 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern, now 86, taking a righteous stand in the ad. Even though I still have no idea who's on first.

Read the story and watch the ad at LaborPains.org.

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¹ Sic. You don't need "dollar" when you use the dollar symbol.

How Acne Got Its Name

No, not dermatological-affliction acne;  Swedish design conglomerate Acne.

Acne, pronounced ACK-nay by the locals, stands for Ambition to Create Novel Expressions.¹ It's best known in the States as a denim line, but in reality jeans aren't even the half of it. Acne, the enterprise, is a collective ideas machine powered by a diversely talented and, it's worth mentioning, drop-dead-beautiful team of designers and agents. Since 1966, when ["mastermind" Jonny] Johansson founded the house with three friends, its Ambition has yielded a film company, a digital graphics division, a toy department, and Acne Paper, a large-format biannual culture magazine that runs an intoxicating mass of information: optimism in print. Everything but the magazine's Paris office--jeans and the extensive men's, women's and children's lines; the art and advertising agencies, too--is housed in Acne headquarters, a former bank in Stockholm's Gamla Stan, or Old Town.

-- Jane Herman in Vogue, September 2008

The feature story isn't online, but you can read more from fangirl Jane Herman about Acne here, where she gives the pronunciation slightly differently: ACH-nay. FYI, current-season Acne jeans for women are priced at $249 to $299 a pair; a denim clutch bag is $900 at Nordstrom. And parents take note: there's an Acne Jr., which "develops and produces character-based toys and concepts." 

Other Swedish initialisms you may know:

ABBA, which got its name from the first letters of the first names of the band's members: Anni-Fried, Benny, Björn, and Agneta.

IKEA, from the initials of the founder's name (Ingvar Kamprad), the farm where he grew up (Elmtaryd), and his home county (Agunnaryd).

H&M, the international chain of low-price clothing stores; the initials stand for Hennes (Swedish for "hers") and Mauritz (for Mauritz Widforss, the name of a Stockholm hunting-equipment store acquired by the company in 1968).

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¹ Hm. Sounds like a backronym to me.

Profile THIS

I hate filling out those chirpy "My Interests" profiles for social-networking sites. What am I, Playmate of the Month? Usually I just ignore them. Would that I had the wit of The Assimilated Negro, who subverts the whole exercise and turns it into a poem of protest.

I admire that blog title, too. The author ("a moneylancing writer," according to his more straightforward profile) frequently refers to himself by its initials, TAN, which works perfectly. In fact, it's one of very few acronyms this anti-acronymista feels good about endorsing.

And the blog itself? Very nice indeed. Good stuff on "the negro hipster," Claire Huxtable, the mysterious whitening of Beyonce Knowles, and the music of Nas and Common. And do not miss An Open Letter from a Black Guy to His Average-Sized Penis. I started to quote from it here, but then I couldn't figure out when to stop quoting. Or laughing. Just go over there and read it yourself. (Okey-dokey pokey! Had to get that in.)

Discovered in Orange Tangerine's blogroll.

Below the Belt

It seems to me that as the concept of "appropriate attire" vanishes from the public sphere--pajamas in the supermarket? why not, dude?--and the evidence of excessive caloric intake is ever more visible, our language for describing shameless bodily displays is becoming correspondingly more inventive, elaborate, and body-part-specific. I am naturally thinking of cameltoe (a k a "the other cleavage"), a startlingly apt and vivid metaphor, especially considering that its users are unlikely to be Bedouins or zookeepers. Then there's muffin-top (a k a "belly roll"), which seems to have originated in an Australian sitcom, "Kath and Kim"; it was named Australia's word of the year for 2006 and is now almost as international as "OK."

New to me, but well known to the cool kids for some time now, is FUPA, which I first encountered earlier this week in Kersten's comment on a You Look Fab post. It's an acronym, which allows for some definitional flexibility. Acronym Finder defines it as "Fat Upper Pelvic Area," while the most popular definition on Urban Dictionary is "Fat Upper Pubic Area." Both interpretations suggest gender neutrality. However, the group singing "The FUPA Song" (watch the YouTube video) assigns an unequivocally feminine meaning to the "P" in FUPA. (Read the comments for some alternate glosses.)

If you're still wondering what on earth I'm talking about, you can check out the photos at FUPA Hunter, but don't say I didn't warn you. This is raw, in-your-FUPA documentation. This is muffin-top on steroids, inhuman growth hormones, and a side of fries.