Fritinancy

Fear, Loathing, and a Couple of Other Things

Chalk it up to overwork or brain stasis, but when I learned about an iPad/iPhone app named FLUD, I went completely blank. I couldn’t pronounce the name or make sense of it.

 

 

The all-capitals spelling means it’s an acronym, right? But what do the letters stand for? At first I thought FLUD was a play on FUD, the popular business acronym for “fear, uncertainty, and doubt.” FUD was, famously, what IBM salespeople instilled in the minds of their potential customers—because, as we know, “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.”

So maybe FLUD stood for “fear, loathing, uncertainty, and doubt”? I wished Hunter S. Thompson were still around so I could ask him.

Then I remembered one of my favorite Gary Larson cartoons.

 

Cat Fud, by Gary Larson (1985)*

CAT FLUD: for really clueless felines.

I pondered this for a while and then had a new insight. Could the FLU in FLUD mean “we’re viral and contagious”? But what about the D? Diagnosis? Deadline? Drama?

Reading FLUD’s self-description didn’t help much:

FLUD is a personalized mobile news ecosystem with a vision to empower its users to interact with each other to access, engage and broadcast content that is relevant to them.**

The company, which is based on San Diego, uses words like “sexiness,” “awesomeness,” and  “robust” on its website. “FLUD” suggested none of those things to me.

I finally got my light-bulb moment about 55 seconds into a relentlessly perky local-news clip on the FLUD homepage. I’ll cut to the Big Reveal:

The name is pronounced flood—as in “a flood of news,” I suppose.

Just one reader’s opinion, but a “flood” of news sounds like the problem, not the solution. And “FLUD” looks like one of those Awesomely Bad Military Acronyms that Wired.com is fond of mocking.

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* Gary Larson (The Far Side) has never authorized the online publication of his cartoons, so what you see here is a photo of a Far Side mug that was sold on Etsy. Here’s a view of the original cartoon panel.

** In this “news ecosystem,” it appears that copyeditors are an endangered species.

A Bin Laden Lexicon

Some of the words and phrases that caught my attention in coverage of Osama bin Laden’s death:

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Abbottabad:  The city in northern Pakistan where bin Laden was found and killed is named for a British army officer, Major James Abbott (1807-1896), who founded the town in 1853. It’s pronounced with the stress on the second syllable: ah-BAHT-ah-bahd. The –abad suffix, also found in place names such as Islamabad and Hyderabad, comes from a Sanskrit word meaning “dwelling” or “town.” 

New York Times

James Abbott dressed as an Indian nobleman, 1847. (Hat tip: @johmcquaid)

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Double tap: “After bursts of fire over 40 minutes, 22 people were killed or captured,” writes Marc Ambinder in “The Secret Team That Killed bin Laden” (National Journal). “One of the dead was Osama bin Laden, done in by a double tap -- boom, boom -- to the left side of his face.” (Via @stevesilberman.) GunTec Dictionary defines “double tap” as a “colloquial term for the firing of two shots one immediately after the other at the same target.” UPDATE: As I note in a comment, below, the double tap technique is credited to two British police chiefs in 1930s Shanghai. They devised the method to overcome the limits of full-metal-jacketed ammunition. 

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SEAL: The bin Laden mission was carried out by “the specially trained and highly mythologized SEAL Team Six, officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group” (Ambinder). SEAL is a navy acronym for “sea, air, and land.”

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DevGru: A compression of “development group.” Ambinder writes that SEAL Team Six “was known even to the locals at their home base Dam Neck in Virginia as just DevGru.” DevGru is part of the Joint Special Operations Command, “an extraordinary and unusual collection of classified standing task forces and special-missions units” (Ambinder).

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Kinetic: Military euphemism meaning “lethal.” From the Ambinder article:

Recently, JSOC built a new Targeting and Analysis Center in Rosslyn, Va. Where the National Counterterrorism Center tends to focus on threats to the homeland, TAAC, whose existence was first disclosed by the Associated Press, focuses outward, on active “kinetic” -- or lethal – counterterrorism missions abroad.

Related: Read my April 2008 post on “post-kinetic development.”

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“Killed in training accidents in eastern Afghanistan”: Department of Defense code for “died in a JSOC operation that went bad” (Ambinder).

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Triumphalism: An attitude or feeling of victory or superiority. From the Whatever It Is, I’m Against It blog:

I’m not sorry to see bin Laden dead, but I can’t share in the triumphalism currently flooding the airwaves, nor do I feel any sense of relief, since I don’t expect this to change anything.

Related: Read my April 2011 post on triumphalism’s opposite, declinism.

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Honorific: “A title, phrase, or grammatical form conveying respect, used especially when addressing a social superior.” (American Heritage Dictionary) Media blogger Jim Romenesko reported this morning that the New York Times would no longer use the “Mr.” honorific in front of Osama bin Laden’s name, at the request of News Managing Editor Jill Abramson and Executive Editor Bill Keller. From the associate managing editor’s memo: “Without a ‘Mr.’ in front of his name, it was decided that we should capitalize the ‘B’ in Bin Laden on second references.”

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Halo effect: “How Big Will the Osama Halo Effect Be for Obama?” reads the headline on a post by Stephen J. Dubner on the Freakonomics blog. Dubner writes: “The halo effect is often short-lived — but will it, in this case, live long enough to power Obama through an election cycle?” The halo effect is “an effect whereby the perception of positive qualities in one thing or part gives rise to the perception of similar qualities in related things or in the whole” (American Heritage Dictionary). It was first described in a 1920 paper by the American psychologist Edward L. Thorndike, “A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings.”

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Also see this Visual Thesaurus compilation of notable words from President Obama’s May 1 announcement of bin Laden’s death.

Word of the Week: FOMO

FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out. A “debilitating psychological condition . . . most commonly characterised by a subject’s obsessive, distressing, intrusive thoughts about whether somebody, somewhere else, might be having a better time than they are.” (Definition by way of the I Suffer from F.O.M.O. Facebook group, which has 494 members.)

Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch, wrote about FOMO on her blog last week, while South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) was taking place in Austin:

FOMO is a great motivator of human behavior, and I think a crucial key to understanding social software, and why it works the way it does. Many people have studied the game mechanics that keep people collecting things (points, trophies, check-ins, mayorships, kudos). Others have studied how the neurochemistry that keeps us checking Facebook every five minutes is similar to the neurochemistry fueling addiction. Social media has made us even more aware of the things we are missing out on. You’re home alone, but watching your friends [sic] status updates tell of a great party happening somewhere. You are aware of more parties than ever before. And, like gym memberships, adding Bergman movies to your Netflix queue and piling up unread copies of the New Yorker, watching these feeds gives you a sense that you’re participating, not missing out, even when you are.

FOMO first appeared in Urban Dictionary on October 2, 2006. An April 9, 2007, article in BusinessWeek, “Today’s Students: Living Large,” introduced the acronym to a different audience:

An epidemic has hit America’s top MBA programs. At Harvard Business School, it’s called FOMO: fear of missing out. Symptoms include a chronic inability to turn down invitations to any party, dinner, or junket attended by anyone who might be a valuable addition to one’s network—no matter the cost.

With their incomes about to get a big boost at graduation, many students are spending far more than absolutely necessary, in part on luxuries like leisure travel and in part on networking events. Nobody wants to quibble over the costs when they're partying with folks who may advance their career.

The article was published before the current recession; students—and the rest of us—may not be living quite as large these days, but FOMO can still be a powerful motivator (or affliction).

An Australian travel company, STA Travel, uses FOMO in a tongue-in-cheek sales pitch and contest:

Tell us the last time you had travel FOMO for your chance to WIN the trip you missed!

FoMo may also stand for Former Mormon. Fomo is the name of a company that sells products made from low-pressure polyurethane foam.

Note: FOMO should not be confused with MoFo, which is the abbreviation and Web address of a large law firm. And also something else.

BWLDRD

My admiration for retailer Anthropologie’s nomenclature is a matter of public record. I appreciate the whimsy of Who’s Got the Button Top, the alliteration of Scaffold & Scrim Cardigan, the bilingual savoir-faire of Stazione Trench, the specificity of Rotherhithe Oxfords. I like the literary character of these names, and I admire the obsessiveness that nurtures them.

Which is why I was puzzled and, yes, bewildered when, earlier this week, I received an email announcement of Anthropologie’s new spinoff, which launches on Valentine’s Day.

 

 

What is this BHLDN? Is it an acronym? (“Brides Heart Low Droopy Necklines”?) A large legal partnership? A stock-exchange symbol? A texting abbreviation?

No, apparently we’re meant to take our cue from “Behold”: We’re supposed to fill in the blanks and pronounce the brand “Beholden.”

Alack! Alas! And also WTF!

Because while both “behold” and “beholden” come from the same Old English source, their meanings diverged almost 600 years ago. “Behold” lost its “hold” sense and today means “observe” or “look upon”; while “beholden,” a rarely used adjective, maintains its archaic meaning of “morally obligated” or “duty bound.”

The fact that “beholden” is archaic bothers me less than the fact that it’s so inappropriate for a bridal business. BHLDN has no romance, no elegance, no flirtatiousness: it lacks any of the promise one seeks in a bridal brand. If Anthro wanted us to think “to have and to hold,” they’ve missed the mark. If they wanted us to think that a bride is “beholden” to her mate, they’re just cuckoo. 

Then there’s the mystery of the capital letters and the missing vowels. What was Anthropologie thinking? (The press, by the way, has been divided on how to represent the name: New York Magazine spells it Bhldn; Glamour spells it BHLDN. Fashion blog TheGloss spells it BHLDN and originally speculated that the name was to be pronounced “Buildin’.” Way to spread a consistent message, Anthropologie.) Was the marketing team taking a cue from publicly traded parent company Urban Outfitters, Inc., which now styles itself as URBN (its ticker symbol and URL)? At least URBN has one vowel. BHLDN isn’t edgy or alternative; it’s dopey. It  begs to be backronymed: “Betty Has Less Draper Now.” “Bless Her Little Drippy Nose.” “Blink Hard Learning Dismal News.”

Sorry, Anthropologie. This isn’t “turning tradition on its ear”—it’s slathering three-egg omelet on your face.

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In other news, beginning tomorrow (Friday) I’ll be stepping away from 21st-century technology for a few days. If your comment doesn’t reach me before I untether, I’ll review and publish it on Monday.

Six Naming Questions You May Have Overlooked

Let’s say you’ve spent a lot of time and money developing a name that’s distinctive, legally available, and a good match for your naming brief. You can still end up with a less-than-desirable name if you neglect to ask  these important questions.

1. How will it look in lower-case spelling? A name like IfByPhone or PopUpEdu depends for clarity on intercap letters. On Twitter and other applications, however, the name may appear in all lower-case letters—ifbyphone, popupedu—with a potential loss of intelligibility and pronounceability.

2. How will it look in black and white? Color can transform your company or product name into a sharp-looking logo. But for some applications—press kits, white papers, email—you won’t have the benefit of color. If you rely on color to make your point, as the Big Ten athletic conference did in its recent logo redesign, you risk losing your message. (I’m not saying that Big Ten is necessarily confusing anyone, but a smaller organization that attempts a similar strategy may be asking for trouble.)

3. How will it read in the newspaper? Speaking of black-and-white, print journalism isn’t dead yet. No matter how stridently you insist on accent marks or punctuation in your name (Aol. and Yahoo!, I’m talking to you), the business reporter on deadline is unlikely is share your obsession.

4. How does it sound on the telephone? Or in everyday conversation, for that matter? I've written previously about the counterintuitive pronunciation of Virgance. Here’s an even more-boggling example: μTorrent, a popular file-sharing client, is spelled with the Greek letter μ (mu), which is commonly pronounced mee (in modern Greek), myoo (in English), or micro (in scientific measurements). But μTorrent’s URL is utorrent.com. The program’s Swedish creator, Ludvig Strigeus, “usually” pronounces the name as “you torrent” but has also suggested “microtorrent,” “mytorrent” (my, pronounced mee, is Swedish for μ), and “mutorrent” as possible pronunciations. For a consumer-facing company or product, this much word-of-mouth confusion would be catastrophic; it’s not exactly wonderful for μTorrent, either. (See also #3, above.)

5. Do you have a misleading or undesirable acronym? I’m currently talking with a prospective client, a startup, whose working name is a three-word idiom that ends in a word starting with “U.” Reduced to its initials, the company looks like a university. That’s misleading, but it could be much worse: the initials could be a real WTF.

6. Finally, do proceed carefully with those qrazy Q-names. I still don’t know whether QRANK is pronounced “cue-rank” or “crank.” And that makes me cranky.

 

“The Industry Standard for Child-Centric Gift-Delivery Solutions”

Santa Claus is coming to town, and he doesn’t want to see any branding inconsistencies. Just in the nick of time, Quietroom, a UK branding agency for financial-services companies, introduces the Santa Brand Book.

 

 

 

 

I especially like “‘Santa’ backwards is atnas, which is Lithuanian for chimney.”

UPDATE: The Santa Brand Book is now on YouTube, complete with dramatic music (by Mussorgsky).

Via Swiss Miss.

“That Name Is So Bad, It Feels Like a Scam from Nigeria”

Beginning at 3:31, Helen Hunt, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and other entertainers critique “American Jewish World Service” and its acronym, AJWS.

 

 

For a good cause, to be sure.

Hat tip: Bobbie Altman.

Friday Naming Roundup

Canada’s Canwest Newspaper Group, which was bought by businessman and former Canadian politcian Paul Godfrey earlier this year, is now called Postmedia Network. “Canwest” always sounded to me like a tuna factory, while “Postmedia” sounds like “the party’s over,” which may not be far from the truth. Mr. Godfrey, naturally, tells a more rousing tale in a memo to employees that was reproduced in The Tyee, an independent news blog based in British Columbia:

What we arrived at was a name that looks to both the past and the future. It highlights the journey of our industry and our brands. It showcases the evolution of the technologies that we use to move news and information to our readers and audiences. And it represents our strong value proposition to marketers, advertisers and our partners.  

(Hat tip: Luc LaTulippe.)

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The Pentagon may be changing PSYOP, its acronym for “psychological operations,” to MISO, which stands for Military Information Support and/to [sic] Operations. More savory, or more watered down? As an anonymous commenter on the Small Wars Journal blog pointed out, “So instead of PSYOPers they’ll be MISOgynists?” My own gripe: that ungainly “and/to.” (Sources: Wired and Johnson, which calls the spelled-out new name “tongue-numbing.”)

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The campaign to adopt “hella”—a versatile intensifier that originated in the Bay Area—as the prefix for 10 to the 27th power (1 followed by 27 zeros) continues to gather steam. The Los Angeles Times reports that UC Davis physics student Austin Sendek’s Facebook pro-hella petition has more than 60,000 supporters. Fritinancy first reported on the “hella” campaign back in February (scroll down to the final item). (Hat tip: MJF.)

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Did you know that the ASICS, a brand of athletic footwear that originated in Japan, is an acronym derived from a Latin phrase, “Anima sana in corpore sano” (a healthy soul in a healthy body)? Learn about how eight other sneakers companies got their names over at Mental Floss. My favorite story is the one about PF Flyers.

Oh Say, Kin You See?

In the beginning, back in 2007, there was Amazon’s Kindle. A mildly controversial name—burning books? really?—but not on account of its first syllable.

Turns out, though, that more kindred were on the horizon.

In May of this year, Microsoft introduced its new mobile phone, the Kin. (Or as the official communications put it, the KIN.*)

And just this week, also from Microsoft, comes Kinect, an Xbox 360 peripheral which Gizmodo calls “a webcam on steroids that plugs into the console's USB port that looks like it belongs with a PS3.” The name (Gizmodo again) is meant to suggest “connect” and “kinetic.” It’s “horribly confusing,” writes Gizmodo’s Mark Wilson, “to those of us who played Nike’s Kinetic.”

Can you say “kinsiderable kinsumer kinfusion”?

Words and names starting with K have a certain allure, going back to Kodak and Special K and continuing through 21st-century baby-naming trends. (See my 2007 post, “If Any Letter Defines Modern American Name Style, ‘K’ Is It.”) And kin has its own inherent power: It’s a very old word (cyn in Old English) that originally meant family, race, kind, or nature. It’s unrelated except orthographically to kinetic, which comes from Greek kinein, “to move.”

But Microsoft’s Kin isn’t connected (sorry) to Kinect, and neither Microsoft product has any kinship (sorry again) with the Kindle.

A more paranoid observer than I might suspect a kinspiracy. As my grandmothers would have said, kinehora.

UPDATE, July 1: The Microsoft Kin is dead.

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* What exactly is up with all these faux acronyms? (Mockronyms?) Yesterday I told you about the CODA. Today it’s the KIN. Will everyone PLEASE STOP SHOUTING?

Thanks to Mike Pope for the link to Gizmodo's article about Kinect.

Names in the News: Coda

If you live in California, by the end of 2010 you may be able to buy the Coda sedan, the new all-electric car from Coda Automotive. The company is based in Santa Monica; the chassis, a modified Mitsubishi, is from China, as is its lithium-ion battery, although Coda is hoping to build a new battery plant in Ohio (with a little help from the U.S. government).

I recognized “coda” from musical terminology: it’s the closing passage of a movement or composition. (The source is the Italian word for “tail.”) But I couldn’t get from there to “forward-thinking,” “innovation,” and “transforming the traditional car sales and service model.” Nor did I understand the all-caps spelling in the logo and throughout the website. Is CODA an acronym? For what?

I found an answer, sort of, on the AutoBlogGreen site, which posted a video from Coda (or CODA). There, the definition of “coda” is given as “a musical phrase that brings a piece to an end so a new one can begin.” And, the voiceover continues, “that is just what this car can do: usher in the electric car era.”

I’m still not convinced. When I see “coda,” I hear “The End.” Period. Unless I’m faking a New Jersey accent, in which case I’m really confused. Da Coda or Dakota?

And I’m still baffled by the acronym-like spelling, which only the company uses. Everyone in the media seems to be ignoring it.

In other respects, Coda fits squarely into what’s becoming a predictable naming convention for electric vehicles. So far we’ve seen the Chevy Volt, the Nissan Leaf, and—from Canada—the ZENN, which stands for Zero Emission No Noise. They’re all four-letter, one-syllable names*. Perhaps their brevity is meant to represent the short driving range of the cars.

I give other elements of the Coda verbal brand a B-. The Coda website is, for the most part a clear and effective blend of technical explanation and social conscience along with some clever wordplay such as “End Dependence Day” and “100% Fuel Deficient.” (But “Flip gas prices the bird” strikes my ear as both awkward and immature.) I saw some lazy writing, too, such as an overdependence on “actually,” which comes across as defensive. (“Actually, the CODA's 90-120-mile range will satisfy 94% of typical daily driving routines”; “Actually, about 35% of the components used in the CODA are manufactured in the U.S.”) The blog appears to have been delegated to a junior copywriter or intern (a sadly typical state of affairs for corporate blogs); its tone is simultaneously rambling and breathless: “Join CODA this Saturday in standing up for and supporting what we like to call ‘End Dependence Day,’ a day when we are no longer dependent on foreign oil and are free from all of the environmental degradation that it causes.”

In comments, perhaps you could suggest a suitable acronym for CODA.

To the ER, stat! We have a Coda Blue!

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* Commenter Q Pheever correctly points out that Coda is a two-syllable name.