Fritinancy

"I Am a 'Shape' "

The nounification of verbs – “the ask,” “the get,” “the reveal” – continues apace. Nominalized verbs are even showing up in job titles (or anti-titles).

Here’s Seth Merrin, the founder and chief executive of the global trading network Liquidnet, in an April 26 interview in the New York Times, “Saying Goodbye to Titles, and Hello to Reponsibility”:

 Q. And what made you decide to do away with titles?

A. We eliminated them early on because we started getting all this title creep. Someone came to me once and said we had 15 titles or something, and I said: “That’s it. We’re done. No more.” I don’t want people to aspire to get a higher title. I want people to aspire to take on more responsibility. More responsibility gets them more recognition. …

Q. But you must have some hierarchy.

A. Everyone has managers, but the elimination of titles means that everyone has a right to state their opinion. We define levels by the responsibility you have in the company. So I am a “shape.” Most of the folks on the leadership team are shapes. We help shape the direction of the company. The people next level down are “guides.” The level below that are “drives,” and below that are “solves” and then there are “creates.” A working group came up with those levels. I just think they nailed it.

(Emphasis added.)

Related: On the adjective-nominalization front, see my post about FleishmanHillard’s new slogan, “The Power of True.” 

The Whole True and Nothing But the True

“The New Look of Public Relations,” New York Times business section, April 29:

Fleishman-Hillard, which was founded in 1946 as Fleishman, Hillard & Associates, will rebrand itself this week as FleishmanHillard, with elements that include a new logo and a new slogan, “The power of true” — no relation, presumably, to “Truth well told,” the slogan of McCann Erickson Worldwide, or “Truth and design,” the slogan of MediaVest.

Well, obviously there’s no relation! Those other guys still use nouns as nouns; FleishmanHillard taps the zeitgeist by nounifying an adjective. (See Xfinity’s “The Future of Awesome,” ULTA’s “Welcome to Fabulous,” and others.)

Note, too, the evolution of the agency’s name, from the sober, legalistic “Fleishman, Hillard & Associates” to the crisply hyphenated “Fleishman-Hillard” to today’s smashedtogether FleishmanHillard. Because who has time for spaces and punctuation? Certainly not a global communications agency.

More on the new slogan from the Times story:

“ ‘True’ is the central concept we’re rebranding on, to deliver on our promises to be the trusted adviser to guide you through the maze of choices,” said Dave Senay, president and chief executive at FleishmanHillard in St. Louis, which since 1997 has been part of the Diversified Agency Services unit of the Omnicom Group, the second-largest agency holding company after WPP.

And on the rebranding:

Mr. Senay said rough patches are likely in the transition. Referring to the employees who have worked on public relations assignments at the agency, he said, “about a third are turned on by” the new vision, “about a third will go along with it and about a third will not get it.”

 

On the Visual Thesaurus: Shall We Plus?

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, “Shall We Plus?”, looks at the evolution of “plus” from preposition, adjective, and noun into a verb. Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers; here’s a sample:

Enterprise Rent-A-Car is also positive about plussing — although “Plus Your Life,” the slogan for the “enhanced Enterprise Plus loyalty program,” is ambiguous.

The phrase makes marketing sense only if we understand “plus” to be a verb meaning “improve.” At first glance, though, it's easy to think it means “And your life.” That was Washington Post copy editor and usage-guide author Bill Walsh's mocking interpretation: he tweeted a photo of one of the “Plus Your Life” ads and commented, “If you're willing to die for Enterprise Rent-A-Car.”

Read the rest of the article, which includes more examples of verbified “plus” from marketing and – a surprise to me – government.

And also see my March 2013 post on the Sutter Health slogan “We Plus You.”

April Linkfest

As recently as a few decades ago, most parents gave their children names that would help them fit in: to a family, a clan, or the culture at large. Now a lot of parents want exactly the opposite: names that stand out, as though children were boxes of cereal competing for shelf space. Standing out is the new fitting in. Three recent articles examine the trend:

• “What Baby Names Say About Everything,” in the Boston Globe, looks at how researchers are using the trove of online data about baby names.
   
• “How Much Does Your Name Matter?” is a Freakonomics Radio podcast about the effect of a personal name on school performance, career success, and other outcomes. It opens with a story about a sociologist who named his children E and Yo.
   
• “What Is a Popular Baby Name?” is Laura Wattenberg’s objective and surprising analysis of name popularity. “Even the most popular name in America is given to just one out of every 177 babies,” writes Wattenberg, the author of the respected – and, yes, popular – Baby Name Wizard blog.

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More personal-name news: Nancy’s Baby Names recommends 11 interesting links, including an article about popes’ names, a story in Kashmir Life about Kashmiri naming practices, and posts about sharing and “stealing” baby names.

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I nodded enthusiastically while reading this post on the Lexicon Branding blog on why client-written creative briefs are usually inadequate. (Read my own take on creative briefs for naming projects.)

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NPR has launched an excellent new blog called Code Switch that covers “the frontiers of race, culture, and ethnicity.” Code switching is a term from linguistics, and many of the posts are about language. Start here, with the introductory post “How Code Switching Explains the World.”

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Mexagon? Crunchwich? Origami Tostada? How Taco Bell names its new products. (Hat tip: Karen.)

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Nine red flags before naming your startup – a rare sensible article about name development and trademark.

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Word aversion, word hatred, word peeves:

Why do tech neologisms make people angry? by Tom Chatfield, author of Netymology: A Linguistic Celebration of the Digital World. (Via Wordnik.)

Those irritating verbs-as-nouns (a solve, an ask, the reveal), by Henry Hitchings, author of The Language Wars and impartial observer of language change.

In praise of sensible peeving, on The Economist’s language blog, Johnson, applauds Chatfield and Hitchings for their “sensible contributions to an all-too-often senseless debate.”

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Nine things you probably didn’t know about swear words. And speaking of swearing, don’t even think about using “tabernacle” in  a French-language children’s book that might be read in Quebec. (Via Sesquiotic.)

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“Should I rename my business?” A handy flow chart from brand consultancy A Hundred Monkeys.

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The rather surprising etymology of “dismal.” It’s completely unrelated to “dismay,” by the way.  (Via Language Hat.)

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The New York Times creates haiku from news articles:

How does our algorithm work? It periodically checks the New York Times home page for newly published articles. Then it scans each sentence looking for potential haikus by using an electronic dictionary containing syllable counts. We started with a basic rhyming lexicon, but over time we've added syllable counts for words like “Rihanna” or “terroir” to keep pace with the broad vocabulary of The Times.

A sample:

The air was sticky,
and guerrillas carrying
rifles served him tea

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Instead of awesome, you could say … well, lots of things. (Via Nancy Nall.) 

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The call for entries for the Clio Awards, the Oscars of the advertising agency, used a series of “sliced” images to make industry statistics memorable. They’re striking and clever, except for the last one, “What Creatives Wear to the Clio Awards Ceremony.” Here’s a detail:

 

“Hideous jacket designed by hot but untalented girlfriend.”

Last I heard, there were also a fair number of women creatives in the ad industry. But you won’t see them represented here. Read Ms. magazine’s take, “Mad Men and the Clio Awards: How Much Has Really Changed Since 1965?”

That’s a More

Wherever you turn in Ad Land nowadays, some innocent modifier is being shamelessly nouned. Here’s today’s example: Mr. More, Embassy Suites’  “embassador,” in a recent ad for the hotel chain. 

 

“Maximum more for your moolah.”

 

According to a press release, Mr. More is “a quirky ‘bleisure’ (business + leisure) traveler who’s always looking for ‘more of more’ and ‘less of less’.”

(And no, Embassy Suites didn’t invent “bleisure”: The word-blend started showing up in the UK a few years ago and is being used by at least one New York hotel that isn’t Embassy Suites.)

The Embassy Suites campaign started in 2012, a leap year, with the theme “366 Days of More.” (The campaign ended last week.) Nounified more also showed up in “our insane devotion to always giving you more of more” and “a more-tastic amount of more.” The ads were directed by Roman Coppola, son of Francis Ford.

Now, more, like good, is sometimes a real noun, as in “The more you read the more you know.” Note the definite article, though. Embassy Suites’ more isn’t that kind of more; it’s a nounified modifier.

The insurance company Safeco has it both ways with more:

“It’s like a museum. I’m afraid to touch anything.”

The tagline in these ads is “Some people want more out of life. We insure the things that make more possible.” “More out of life” is an idiom that functions as a noun (the object of want); while in make more possible, more functions as “moreness.” Or maybe “more more-tastic moreness.” Who knows.

Watch more Safeco spots at AdWeek.

(Hat tip to Ben Yagoda for the Safeco ad.)

Nonplussed

A few observations about the new marketing campaign for the Bay Area’s Sutter Health medical group.

 

Outdoor ad, Van Ness Avenue at Filbert Street, San Francisco.

First, who says “with child” in 2013? Even on Downton Abbey, set between 1912 and 1922, characters were constantly saying that so-and-so was “pregnant.” (The casual use of the word was almost certainly anachronistic: the Online Etymology Dictionary tells us “pregnant” was a taboo word until the mid-1950s. “Expecting” and “in the family way” were far more common.)

“When you’re with child, we’re with you” is earnest but clunky: “with child” and “with you” aren’t really parallel here.

But what will puzzle most people about the ad is the slogan: “We Plus You.”

Here it is on the website:

The logo? Your guess is as good as mine.

 

It isn’t intended as a mathematical statement, with plus as a conjunction: “We plus you equals good health,” or something like that. No, plus is clearly a verb here: “It’s how you plus us, and we plus you.”

 

“Because you plus us … and we plus you.”

 

I remember some talk about to plus a couple of years ago, when Google launched its social-media service Google Plus. To give a stamp of approval to something on Google Plus, you click a “+1” icon. Users started referring to the action as “plussing.”

But it turns out Walt Disney had Google beat by almost 70 years. According to How to Be Like Walt: Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life, a chatty/motivational 2004 biography that refers to its subject by his first name, Walt Disney emphasized “the plus factor” to his artists and designers:

Sometime during the 1940s, Walt coined the term “plussing.” Normally, the word “plus” is a conjunction, as in “two plus two equals four.” But Walt used the word as a verb—an action word. To “plus” something is to improve it. “Plussing” means giving your customers more than they paid for, more than they expect, more than you have to give them. … He began by plussing Mickey Mouse with sound, then plussing the Silly Symphonies with color. Walt plussed the skills of his artists by sending them to art school at his own expense. Walt’s relentless quest for excellence kept him at the leading edge of his industry—and left his competitors, well, nonplussed.

Sutter Health may be using “plus” in this “improvement” sense. Or maybe it’s saying “You complete me.”

“We Plus You” isn’t the only bit of peculiar wordplay in the Sutter Health campaign. Here’s a full-page print ad in the March issue of San Francisco magazine:

 

 

“We specialize in You-ology.”

You-ology? Right down the hall from Your-ology, where you can get that prostate exam.

 

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Re the title of this post: nonplussed does not mean nonchalant, although a lot of people think it does.

Let's Grammar!

Another adjective-turned-noun in an ad campaign! This one, Hooters’ “Step into Awesome,” was featured yesterday on AdFreak:

Hooters and its ilk are known as “breastaurants.” You’re welcome.

In response, and in honor of National Grammar Day – next Monday, March 4* – I submitted this haiku to Editor Mark’s Tweeted Haiku Contest:

“Step into awesome,”
says Hooters: just more proof
that nounifying’s hot.

So far, mine looks to be the only grammar haiku about a brand. True to my school, I am.

You can play, too: Tweet your haiku before 10 p.m. EST Saturday with the hashtag #grammarday. Complete rules here. Yes, there are prizes!

Here are some other tweeted submissions to this year’s contest:

He said that English / doesn’t have the subjunctive. / Would that it were so.... #grammarday

— ときどきぜんぜん (@tokidokizenzen) February 27, 2013

“I before e” rule / and a warm wind in winter: / lies, all goddamned lies. #grammarday

— Kory Stamper (@KoryStamper) February 27, 2013

The ‘he-him’ method / will defeat your confusion / regarding ‘who-whom.’ #grammarday

— Mike McFarland (@mcfarland_mike) February 27, 2013

I am an error/And I will reveal myself/After you press send #grammarday

— Arika Okrent (@arikaokrent) February 27, 2013

That last tweet was promptly followed by:

Make that “send” #grammarday

— Arika Okrent (@arikaokrent) February 27, 2013

One more from me:

Dear yoga teacher: / If you say “lay down” once more, / I’ll hurt you. No lie. #grammarday

— Nancy Friedman (@Fritinancy) February 27, 2013

UPDATE, March 4: I’m pleased to announce that Arika Okrent’s tweet (above) took top honors in the haiku contest. And I’m surprised and very pleased to report that my yoga-teacher rant placed third. Read all about it.

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* March forth!

Now with Even More Good!

“This nouning of adjectives thing is really getting out of control,” Ben Yagoda tweeted earlier this month. As evidence, he attached this photo:

 

I did a little sleuthing and discovered the perpetrator of “Just Add Good”: Chobani Greek yogurt, which was using the slogan throughout its website.

 

 

 

By the way, although Chobani calls its product “Greek yogurt,” the company was founded by a Turk, Hamdi Ulukaya, who lives in upstate New York near one of the company’s plants. According to the Wikipedia entry, Chobani comes from the Turkish-via-Persian word for “shepherd,” chob-ban (literally, “he who carries a stick”). An archived Chobani FAQ claims chobani is a Greek word. I don’t know any of those languages well enough to weigh in.

About a week ago Chobani switched from “Just Add Good” to a new slogan that uses “real” as a noun:

 

But there’s still plenty of nounish good to go around. Not to mention nounish awesome. Naked Juice billboards all over the Bay Area proclaim that the product has “1 lb. of awesome in every bottle,” which makes it “worth its weight in good.”

The slogan plays on the familiar idiom “worth its weight in gold.” 

 

Naked Juice is based in Monrovia (Los Angeles County). The company was founded in 1983; the juice was originally sold “towel to towel on the beaches of Santa Monica, Calif.”

During Sunday’s Oscars broadcast I saw back-to-back ads with nounified good. In both of them, good is something that goes. Here’s “Get Your Good Going” from Blue Diamond Almonds:

 

The voiceover says:

Good is in every Blue Diamond Almond.
From Whole Natural to Wasabi and Soy Sauce.
Good is a catalyst. Good is contagious.
It’s a wonderful feeling. A magical feeling.
And once it gets going, there’s no stopping what you can do.

New York Life, the biggest life-insurance company in the U.S., wants us to “Keep Good Going”:

 

“It takes all kinds of good to make a family.”

Good is, of course, a legitimate noun as well as an adjective: “the greater good”; “packaged goods”; “the good, the bad, and the ugly.” But Chobani, Naked Juice, Blue Diamond, and New York Life want us to think of good as a nounified adjective, the better to force an association with originality and playfulness – or simply to make us stop and pay attention.

This part-of-speech switching, also known as anthimeria, has become an established feature of contemporary advertising. If the trend continues, it’s possible to envision a future in which all adjectives have become nouns, all nouns have become verbs, and every adverb has been pressed into service as the name of a startup.

Discover Your X

Henry Alpert of Action Copy emailed to alert me about a mini-trend in commercial calls to action: Discover your X, in which X is some non-noun pressed into nounish service.

Henry’s first example:

“Discover your Interesting.”

Zite is an app that “delivers your personal slice of the Zeitgeist.” (Yes, Zite comes from Zeitgeist.) It’s hard to tell whether interesting is capitalized because it’s meant to be a proper noun or because the proofreading was haphazard.

Henry’s second example:

“Discover your Why.”

 

 

The slogan appears on an online-education site whose name may be Start with Why (the URL), Inspire Action (the home-page headline), Why University (one of the things being sold) or Simon Sinek (the name of the developer). Honestly, the site makes it really challenging to find your What.

Elsewhere on the site we see “Learn your Why.”

And also “Share the Why,” “Clarify your Why,” and “Articulate your Hows.”

Unlike interesting, why is legitimately a noun from time to time (“the hows and whys of logo design”), as well as an adverb, a conjunction, and an interjection.

A third example of the trend appeared in my in-box earlier this week: “Find your inner fabulous!”

 

HerRoom turns underwear into a verb (I think) and fabulous into a noun.

Besides the discover/find trope and the anthimeria—the use of a word outside its customary part of speech—the theme here is personalization: it’s your why, your interesting, your inner fabulous. This is a trend of its own, one I first wrote about in 2009 (“But Enough About Me”). In 2010 I devoted a Visual Thesaurus column to the subject (“The You Decade”). Back in 2007, the late Christopher Hitchens wrote much more elegantly about it for Slate; his essay is also titled “The You Decade.” Hitchens wrote:

Perhaps global-scale problems and mass-society populism somehow necessitate this unctuous appeal to the utter specialness of the supposed individual. What you can do to stop planetary warming. How the maximum leader is on your  side. The ways in which the corporation has your  needs in mind as it makes its dispositions. The candidate who wants to hear your  views.

Almost six years later, the political is, if anything, even more personal. You may not have much influence on climate change or gun violence, but hey—you can own “interesting.” If you can find it, that is.

What Is Happy?

An adjective, you say? Not so fast.

Sometimes it’s a noun.

 

Bus-stop ad for Target’s “instant happy” gift card (or “GiftCard”).

 

Sometimes it’s part of a compound verb.

 

Cover of designer Jonathan Adler's new book, 100 Ways to Happy Chic Your Life. “Happy Chic” is a Jonathan Adler trademark for bedding, candles, tableware, furniture, and other products.

 

 

And sometimes it’s a name.

Happy, one of the seven dwarfs in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.