Fritinancy

Naming Notes from TV Land

"Every division of the company is reaching out to the middle of the country. Our new mammogram machine is called the Get 'Er Done 2000." — Network executive Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), 30 Rock (Oct. 15).

"Then I came up with the best baby name of all time: Drizzle." — McKinley High School quarterback Finn Hudson (Cory Monteith) to his pregnant girlfriend Quinn Fabray (Dianna Agron), Glee (Oct. 14). *

Speaking of baby names, when 30 Rock's Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) decides he needs a baby girl to make his life complete, he already has the name: Chewbaqueena (Dec. 3).

Remember the S.S. Minnow, the shipwrecked vessel on Gilligan's Island (1964-1967)? It was named for Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow, who in 1961 gave a speech decrying television as "a vast wasteland." Minow's daughter Nell Minow is a movie critic and chairwoman of the Corporate Library, a research group specializing in corporate governance. -- "Nell Minow and C.E.O. Compensation," New Yorker, Oct. 12, 2009.

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* "Finn" and "Quinn" are themselves über-zeitgeist-y baby names. Check out their trend lines on Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager.

Friday Names Roundup

It's been an omnium-gatherum kind of week, so let's finish in the same spirit.

1. A highly subjective (and very amusing) list of the ten worst restaurant names in Houston. My favorite: a sushi restaurant named Todai. I imagine the food is to die for. (Via @she_eats). See also "Nine of the Weirdest Restaurant Names in Existence." Although the latter list first appeared in the SF Weekly, the editors missed a famous local landmark, the Fly Trap. (It's now called Zaré at Fly Trap, but they can't fool me.)

2. Does global warming need a porn name? A New Scientist blog wonders whether a sexier appellation would "provoke a ... passionate response from the apathetic masses." Apparently "global burning" is popular with Christian groups. (Via Jon Carroll.)

3. Speaking of smut, Isabella Rossellini has produced Green Porno, a series of short films about animals' reproductive habits. Watch here, on the Sundance Channel site. Then get yourself a new name from the Green Porno name generator. I'm Linda Larvae!

4. I'm probably the last person in the Bay Area to learn that there's a pitcher for the San Francisco Giants named Merkin Valdez. I realize he was born in the Dominican Republic, but still: couldn't someone have told his parents what "merkin" means? (Hint: It doesn't mean this.)

September Linkfest

Seven links in honor of September (from septimus, meaning "seventh"):

1. If you're a fan of global football (soccer), you may know the teams NAC Breda, Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata, and Sampdoria. But do you know what those names mean? Even if you don't follow soccer, this article from the Guardian (UK) is fascinating. (Hat tip: Lance Knobel.)

2. If Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations were published today, it would be titled Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them—am I right? Check out other contemporary retitlings at Your Monkey Called, and be sure to read the comments. The post got picked up by Kottke.org, where commenters submitted a slew of new suggestions. (Then: Infinite Jest. Now: Epic LOLZ.)

3. Syntactic ambiguity ("The man saw the boy with the binoculars"), independence of syntax ("Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"), lexical ambiguity ("Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo) and other linguistic example sentences, in English and 18 other languages. (Via @thatwhichmatter.)

4. News Dots, from Slate, is a brilliant interactive map of how every story in the news is related to every other story. Updated daily. (Via @poniewozik.)

5. I've long known the unfortunate slang meaning of "Nancy." Turns out just about every name has a dark side, at least according to Urban Dictionary.

6. Who knew there were so many varieties of doughnuts in the world? Sixteen in Spain alone.

7. Finally, tomorrow represents a rare confluence: Rosh Hashanah and Talk Like a Pirate Day.  I couldn't find a glossary of Yiddish or Hebrew pirate-talk, so here are the next-best things:

• Yiddish lyrics to Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance
• Talk Like a Pirate in German. (Hey, German and Yiddish are related!)
• A 2006 Jewish Journal article about Jewish pirates.

Oyrrrggh!

Name of the Year Brackets Announced!

March Madness has begun, but I'm not talking about college basketball. No, it's the annual insanity that is Name of the Year that has me studying brackets and placing side bets. Go here to read about the tournament and here to see the ballot.

As in the past, there will undoubtedly be some white-knuckle moments. I predict a sudden-death match between Chastity Clapp and Crystal Metheny in the Bulltron Regional, and a very close race between Moonlit Wang and Brooklyn Pope in the Chrotchtangle [sic] Regional. But I'm sure Uranus Golden, Nutritious Love, and Telephone Mtoko have their devoted fans as well.

The ballot went up at 12:01 a.m. (EDT) today, and already Nancy's Baby Names has picked a final four. How about you?

About NOTY:

Name of the Year was founded in 1983 on an Ivy League campus. Its mission has remained unchanged: to discover, verify, nominate, elect and disseminate great names. All names included here are, to the best of our knowledge, real. No malice is intended.

Other Voices, Other Names

I'll have something original up later this week; in the meantime, enjoy what some of my confrères in nomenclature have to say:

From Killian & Company¹, an ad agency in Chicago, "The Curse of the Three-Initial Name," whose very first sentence had me pumping my fist and saying "Yessss!":

Naming a company should never be left to its owners; their lack of objectivity often leads to the dreaded Three Initial Company Name, a mis-branding mistake that puts them at a permanent disadvantage.

You know what they're talking about: TCL, ZTE, BYD, etc. (All of those acronyms are the "names" of actual Chinese companies. Let's just say that China is a mighty nation that excels at many endeavors, but branding is not among them.)

Killian's conclusion:

[A] zero-content, opaque name is (transparently) all about you, and not about your customer. It's not about what they need or want, has no implied benefit, takes no position, fails to differentiate, and conveys bupkes² to prospects who want to be persuaded. A three-letter puzzle name is an inside joke, with the customer left out.

(Earlier in this essay Killian uses the expression "tinker's damn," which I had learned as "tinker's dam." Turns out the latter is a bowdlerized spelling. Who knew? Well, these guys, for one.)

*

NameWire, the blog of Strategic Name Development in Minneapolis, is generally a straightforward chronicle of branding and naming news. But yesterday Diane Prange cut loose with "2008 Celebrity Baby Names Find Inspiration from Popular Product Names." I wish it were satire; alas, all names are reported accurately. For example, in product naming we have the "Invented Spelling" category--the RAZR phone, Geox shoes. Parallels in celebrity baby naming include Wynter (the offspring of Brittany and Harold Perrineau, whoever they may be) and Jaxson (child of Eric Mabius, of "Ugly Betty"). "Place Names" brands include Amazon, Olympus, Oshkosh, and Alamo; actual human parents have named their unsuspecting babies Bronx (Ashlee Simpson), Egypt (Paris Bennett), and Dakota (Jessica Lynch). Don't miss the sly dig at the very end of the post.

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¹ While you're visiting the Killian site, do peruse the Cover Letters from Hell, but preferably not while you're eating unless you don't mind laughing so hard you choke. Even the Killian Contact Us page is funny. ("Fax? Fuggetaboutit. Faxing is sooooo 20th century.")

² I love that they used bupkes here. It's one of my favorite words. Say it a few times. See what I mean?

Baby Name Wizard's Name of the Year

In 2008, happiness—and ordinariness, commonality, and headline-worthiness—was just a thing called Joe, which nabbed first place in Baby Name Wizard's 2008 Name of the Year contest. 

Baby Name Wizard's Laura Wattenberg writes:

That's Average Joe, Joe Blow, a good Joe, say it ain't so Joe...or rather "Amtrak Joe" Biden, Joe Six-Pack and Joe the Plumber. ... After the 2008 presidential campaign, Joe has reclaimed its position as the proud baby-name symbol of the American masses.  Even Joe Six-Pack has been elevated from couch potato status to icon, as if we measure our national character in 12-ounce servings.

Second runner-up is Cullen, which showed up on the U.S. Olympic swim team (Cullen Jones) and in the teen vampire movie Twilight (Edward Cullen). "In January, Cullen was barely on the radar as a baby name; from now on it's a player," Wattenberg writes.

First runners-up are all the Palin children's names: Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, and Trig. Here's what Wattenberg  has to say; I've added the emphasis because I find the two final sentences so alarming:

When Sarah Palin became the Republican vice presidential nominee, her children's names became a sensation.  Much of the country was fascinated, puzzled, even horrified.  Yet in places like Alaska and Utah those names aren't so weird at all, and places like Alaska and Utah are often leading indicators of name trends to come.  The Palin kids performed a cultural service, making broad swaths of Americans take their first look at the naming revolution that is sweeping our country.  If you still think of Jill and Tracy as popular names, it's time for a wake up call.  Neither name ranks in the top 1000 for girls, while Essence, Karma, Shyann, Chasity and Armani all do.

Yes, that's Chasity, with one T; the dictionary version, Chastity, isn't in the U.S. top 1000.

Last year's BNW name of the year was Barack.
 

Names of the Year

The  influential and very readable Baby Name Wizard blog is accepting nominations for the 2008 name of the year. Add your suggestion, or second a nomination, in a comment on the post. 

Before you do, though, be sure to review the rules and past winners. The NOTY must be a first (given) name that rode the zeitgeist to prominence during 2008. Criteria for the final choice include:

- A dramatic change in the name's usage or social meaning

- A reflection of a broader cultural theme, or influence on broader style trends

- Readers' votes (frequency of nominations, and compelling arguments)

Note that last year's NOTY was Barack—nice forecasting, Baby Name Wizard!—which means Barack is ineligible this year, as are other past winners.

Using the same criteria, what brand name would you nominate for Brand of the Year? It need not be the name of a new product or company, but it must in some way reflect events or themes of 2008.

Here are a few I'd include in the pool:

1. Bear Stearns: It dominated the headlines for a season and saw its image transformed from standard-bearer to pariah of the financial-services sector's woes. Suddenly, its gloomy name seemed uncannily apt.
2. Twitter: It launched in 2007, but came of age in 2008, thanks in part to the Beijing Olympic Games and the U.S. presidential election, which were the subjects of countless tweets. This was also the year that many serious news organizations joined Twitter. And just this month a Twitter furor was responsible for bringing down an ad campaign by Motrin, the pain reliever owned by giant consumer company Johnson & Johnson. 
3. Açaí: Okay, it's a Brazilian berry, not a trademark. But it's become a brandable ingredient in products from energy drinks to hair conditioners. Pretty soon, everyone will know it's pronounced ah-sigh-ee.
4. Obama: It was transformed from "funny-sounding" or "foreign" to "global household word." The name meets the criteria for international acceptability: its vowel-consonant-vowel structure is easily pronounced in virtually every language. And if you doubt that a presidential candidate—and now president-elect—can be called a brand, read this interview with Sol Sender, the Chicago graphic designer who designed the Obama "O" logo. "[T]o the degree that the campaign spoke to millions of people," Sender says, "it may have become a symbol for something broader — some have termed it a movement, a symbol of hope." By the way, Sender designed only the primary logo; all of the official variations were handled by the campaign itself. (Hat tip: Mxrk.)

The Trig Factor

I know there are more important issues to raise—and I'm doing my best to raise them on my Twitter stream—but the subject of the Palin children's names keeps bothering me. And I'm not alone. 

Joe Queenan writes today about "America's Silly Kid Names"¹ in the op-ed section of the Los Angeles Times:

When I heard that John McCain's running mate had children named Track, Willow, Bristol, Piper and Trig, I was floored. My reaction, like that of many of my acquaintances, was: Forget her views on religion, abortion, immigration or that bridge to nowhere, the American people are not going to let a person with children named Track, Willow, Bristol, Piper and Trig anywhere near that red button. The American people are too sensible for that, too traditional for that, too classy for that.

Au contraire. A lot of Americans, myself included, want to believe that this is still the country we grew up in, a country where no one even dreamed of giving their children names like Brooklyn or Rhiannon or Darcy. We want to believe we are still living in a country where even the silliest Irish Americans hesitated to name their daughters Shannon, and, when they did, at least made sure not to spell it "Shannen." We want to believe we are still living in a country where naming children is a cultural self-preservation tactic, a means of maintaining an institutional memory of the ethnic and religious groups from which the newborn has sprung, a way of maintaining a link with a heroic past rather than a cute or ironic future.

But that country no longer exists. American children are no longer named after prophets, warriors, healers or cultural titans; they are named after Welsh fairies, characters in science-fiction movies, the outer boroughs of New York and trees. This is a country where people name their children Tron. Where no one can spell the name "Sean" correctly. Where people actually expect their progeny to go through life with names like Skyler. And in some cases, to do it unarmed.

Read the rest of the piece.

 

In related news, at the gym this morning I overheard a what-is-to-be-done political conversation at the end of which one woman, a middle-aged Ukrainian immigrant, summarized with a sigh: "Such a nice country, with so many idiots."

 

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¹ My brother Michael, who forwarded the link to me, says that in the newsprint version, the headline was "Willow, Weep for Us."

 

Baby Names, Palin Style

If your reaction to the names of Sarah and Todd Palin's children—Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, and Trig—was "awesome!!! :-)," then you'll be delighted to discover the Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator, which will guide you to your own set of kR33ATiv All-American names.

I put the SPBNG through its paces, using some friends' names. Results (first and middle names):

Fog Piles, Rust Mustang, Bash Budweiser, Knife Pile, Wood Corps. (Those are the girls, duh.)

Clop Clutch, Stick Freedom, Drill Swollen, Turbine Yukon, Flack Gobbler. (The boys.)

My own Palin-style name: Comma Liberty. Whoa. Does that thing know me? Free the serial comma!

(Hat tip: Beancounters, on Twitter.)

P.S. Last night, Writes Like She Talks hosted a liveblogged discussion of the second Sarah Palin interview on ABC. My favorite line came from "Renee" in reference to Palin's assertion that she understands foreign affairs because she can see Russia from Alaska: "I can see the moon. I should be in charge of space policy."

Short for "Trigger"?

Bad Baby Names offers expert commentary on the Palin nomenclature system:

No matter what your politics are, I think we can all agree that Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, and Trig Paxson Van could have used a re-think. Particularly the first two and the last one. Particularly because Trig doesn't appear to be any kind of "Nordic" name, as the family claims. There's "Trygg", a Norwegian name which means "safe" or "reliable" - but there's unfortunately no "brave victory." Maybe they should have just been straight with us and confessed it's short for "Trigger." NRA family, you know? Or maybe "Trigonometry?" Palin's probably good with numbers?

Willow? I'll survive. Piper? Not my fave, but hey. But Bristol is a girl. And Track is... a sport. And Trig just really, really, really needs to be good at math in high school. At least algebra. Seriously.

Read my own observations on the subject here.