Fritinancy

Naughty Names

There are names that push the envelope and names that push buttons. Here are three names that do both—one of them deliberately, one of them wrongheadedly, and one of them seemingly without a clue.

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On one level, Bootie Babe, a nail polish and fragrance brand, is a playful pun on “beauty.” On another, it’s one more example of the assification of American branding. (See my previous posts on this subject: “Booty Pageant,” “Bottoms Up,” and “Cheeky!”) You could say the callipygian packaging is cute … or lewd.

 

Image from Pinkii.

The company, which is based in San Francisco, was founded in 2011 by Mark O’Hara, whose previous experience had included forming a 15-piece funk band called SuperBooty. According to the website, O’Hara launched Bootie Babes singlehandedly, designing the logo and website, applying for trademarks and patents, and overseeing product development. He clearly had fun with color names, which aim to appeal to tweens and teens. The purple on the left, above, is called Purp Slurp, and the blue is Hella Baloo. (Whether the overt sexuality is appropriate for this demographic is a subject I’ll leave to other critics.)

Unfortunately, O’Hara also seems to have taken the DIY approach to the rest of the brand language, which is an amateurish, trust-deflating mess. Here’s a line from the “Info” page:

SuperBooty President and CEO Mark O’Hara wanted to create a humorous, bold and truely [sic] unique beauty product that would literally “stand out” from the competition.

And the product name is misleading. This is a bootie—i.e., a short boot:

Gentle Souls “Barne Voyage,” via 6pm.com

And this is a booty:

Beyoncé, via Viennie V. (The headline on the story is “Beyoncé’s Booty Is Inspiration for Rare House Fly’s Name.”)

Yes, they’re pronounced identically. But their different suffixes are clues to their different meanings. And wouldn’t “Booty Babe” make a clearer reference to “beauty”?

Then again, maybe not.

(Hat tip: The Beheld.)

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Erin McKean tweeted me a photo of Sloshee margarita ice pops and wrote: “Saw this at the grocery store and thought you’d enjoy the name.”

 

Well. The name is an obvious pun on “slushy/slushee/slushie,” a generic term for a syrupy-sweet crushed-ice beverage. Unfortunately, Sloshee also evokes “sloshed,” a synonym for “intoxicated.” Alcoholic beverages can promise romance, adventure, and sex, but getting wasted? That’s a no-no.

But that may be the least of Sloshee’s troubles. For one thing, the company (based here in Oakland, I regret to say) can’t decide whether its name is “Sloshee” or “Sloshees.” (I couldn’t find a trademark application, so maybe the founders are still making up their minds. Or they may be lost in a product-testing haze.) The website admits to “a year of business and legal hurdles” before the 2009 launch. The copywriting hurdles still haven’t been surmounted. From the About page:

Sloshees started in July of 2004 after observing how fun and refreshing popsicles can be after a hot summer day. We thought to ourselves, wouldn't it be awesome if popsicles had alcohol in them? The idea was formed over a few beers but it took almost 5 years to solidify into a business.

“A few beers”? Next time, try coffee.

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And speaking of stumbling over hurdles, reader Stacey Kimmel-Smith, an equestrian who blogs at Behind the Bit, sent me an email about a clothing brand she’d seen at a tack shop in New Jersey.

 

 

“The company is European,” Stacey wrote, “and I wonder if maybe they selected the name without knowing that it sounds like a ‘bad word’ in English.”

When I finally stopped laughing, I checked out the Horze website. It’s replete with unintentional humor:

Who is Horze? Click here to see a movie. [Safe for work!]

Team Horze. [Cheaper by the dozen?]

This is the nature of Horze. [They’re born that way.]

Try it out yourself: Imagine strolling into a tack shop and saying, “Show me your Horze.”

There may be a cultural excuse here: Horze is a Finnish brand, launched in 2003 as an offshoot of Finn-Tack. Surely, though, there must have been at least one English-speaking person around to warn the founders that changing the S in “horse” to a Z results in “whores,” not Equine Zorro.

When I shared the Horze link on Twitter, Jonathon Owen (@ArrantPedantry) reminded me of this much-shared writing exercise posted on eBaum’s World:

 

Portmanteaumania

Seen around the Internet recently:

The POREfessional is “a PRO balm that minimizes the appearance of pores.” A blend of “pore” and “professional”; from Benefit. I can’t explain why PRO is in all caps.

 

 

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On April 24, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese asked Facebook fans to “like” a post. (“You never know what may happen,” was the teaser.) More than 4,600 people followed orders, and in return Kraft “liked” them back by mentioning each and every one of them in a six-minute “Likeapella” music video. A blend of “like” and “a capella.”

(Via AdFreak.)

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A slogan from SEAT, the Spanish car company that’s owned by Volkswagen: Enjoyneering. A blend of “enjoy” and “engineering.”

From the website:

When you get behind the wheel of a SEAT car, you don’t just go for a drive, you go for an experience. One that will capture your imagination and touch your emotions.

That’s the essence of ENJOYNEERING. … You see, ENJOYNEERING isn’t just about engineering quality cars today. It’s about bringing more enjoyment to the roads of tomorrow.

(Thanks to reader Louis De La Foret for the tip.)

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Honda, on the other hand, wants you to stop using all that social media. Specifically, the auto company last month offered a $500 reward to the people most active on Pinterest if they’d take a 24-hour intermission—a Pintermission—to go out and, you know, do stuff.

The ads (by agency RPA) are medium-clever, but “Pintermission” suggests 20 minutes in the lobby after the first act of The Caretaker.

Names in Brief

Berkeley-based Annie’s Homegrown, Inc., makers of organic macaroni and cheese, went public this week; shares rose 89 percent on the first day of trading. My favorite part of the story, other than the local angle? The ticker symbol. It’s BNNY.

“Rabbit of Approval”

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Are makeup names too lewd? That was the conclusion of Sara Buntrock, who co-founded the cosmetics company What’s Your Virtue? as an alternative. No Vamp, Orgasm, or Fuggen Ugly here: WYV’s Lip Bliss line has inspirational color names like Devotion, Curiosity, and Generosity. (Via The Beheld).

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Drumroll, please: Your 2011 Name of the Year is Taco B.M. Monster, the actual name of a Dutch pharmacoepidemiologist. My own pick in the annual contest, Courvoisier Winetavius Richardson, finished second.

March Linkfest

It’s been a good month for numbered lists about names and naming. Starting with the longest list: Paola Norambuena, senior director of verbal identity at the global branding agency Interbrand, identifies 10 of the most common naming mistakes, including one that tops my own list: “Forgetting that naming is as strategic as it is creative.”

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In a guest column for Fast Company, Matt Gordon and Nick Foley of Landor’s Chicago office enumerate eight principles of product naming, from “Make it memorable” to “Expect its story to involve.” The title’s a bit misleading, because they cover corporate names, too—including one of Landor’s own, Accenture. Sneaky devils. (Via @operativewords.)

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Catchword’s Beth Gerber, a brand strategist and creative director, points out five ways in which product naming differs from company naming. “A company name is an umbrella,” Beth writes. “A product name, a hat.”

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Trademark lawyer Jessica Stone Levy just received her first Birchbox delivery of cosmetic samples. Gather ’round as she opens the lid and reveals the branding hits and misses within. Like Jessica, I snickered over “For hair on days of unwash,” the legend on Lulu Organics Hair Powder.

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I’ve been sending Ben Yagoda’s “Rules for Quotes” to a lot of people who probably wish I’d just shut up already. But a) it’s excellent advice from a language expert and b) for some reason, writing quotes is trickier than you’d think. Even if you’re in the business (*cough* *publicists*) of writing quotes.

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You may have noticed that slut has been in the news a lot lately, thanks to a certain bloviator whose name rhymes with Flush Flimflah. (Not to brag or anything, but I was totally ahead of the slut curve.) Language mavens and cultural critics have been quick to offer analysis and opinion. I especially liked linguist Geoff Nunberg’s recent commentary on “Fresh Air”: “Maybe someday ‘slut’ will be as comically dated as ‘bounder’ or ‘cad,’” Nunberg observed. “But in recent times, it has actually become stronger and more offensive”—to the point that it’s sometimes spelled with an asterisk replacing the U.

Not here, though.

I’m predicting that “slut” will be on the short list for Word of the Year.

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My new favorite Tumblr, ANIMALS TALKING IN ALL CAPS, also got on the slut bandwagon: “HELLO, AND WELCOME TO PLANNED PARENTHOOD, YOU SLUTTY SLUT. WHAT’S THE PROBLEM TODAY? YOU WANT A SLUTTY MAMMOGRAM TO DETERMINE WHETHER OR NOT YOU’VE GOT SLUTTY BREAST CANCER?” Go see the whole thing. (Hat tip: Nancy Nall.)

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Would you buy a condo in a building named Vertigo? The very thought makes The Name Inspector a little queasy.

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And speaking of queasy, not to mention crappy:

 

 

Yes, that’s Crapi Apartments, and no, it isn’t PhotoShopped. A dyslexic version of “Capri”? No budget for a proofreader? You tell me. The building is on Overland Avenue in West Los Angeles, and you can look it up. (Thanks, Judith!)

Nu? Me Again?

I thought I’d exhausted the subject of “new me” soundalike names in last week’s post (“Nu? Me?”). Then I visited MyHabit, Amazon’s daily deal site for “fashion and lifestyle” products, and discovered a clone that had escaped my attention:

 

NuMe sells hair dryers, curling irons, and other hair products, some with coy names like 3 Sum and 4 Play. The About Us copy leaves no ambiguity about the pronunciation of the company name:

NuMe offers a Nu Style, a Nu Change and a Brand Nu You!

Best not to dwell on the copy, which is unencumbered by the proofreading process. (“Availabel in two colors”; “It’s digital controls make it simple to set the right tempuarture for any hair type.”) I will point out, however, that the company is based in Van Nuys, California. In theory, at least, there are native English speakers—and editors—close at hand.

When your message is “the highest quality products” and the importance of perfect grooming, it’s a good idea to practice what you preach in every aspect of your business.

Fewer Calories

We’ve been seeing a lot of this:

Spotted at Costco and on the StriVectin website

 

And this:

From the Economist’s Johnson blog, Jan. 12, 2012

 

And let’s not forget the Mercedes “less doors” ad, which I wrote about in November.

So it was mildly amazing (as presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is fond of saying) to see this ad in the New York Times today:

 

Not less calories: fewer. Courageous trend-bucking and traditional-rules-of-grammar-obeying, American Beverage Association!

Of course, as count nouns go—nouns that can be modified by a numeral and which occur in both singular and plural form, and which therefore “require” fewer—you can hardly get more countable than “calories.” But there’s another consideration: When you’re peddling expensive sugar water, you want to project a virtuous image. The beverage folks could have gone with “less”—as Stan Carey points out in his language blog, there’s plenty of historical precedent for that choice—but then they would have risked the wrath of traditionalists.* No one will write angry letters over the choice of “fewer” here. Sugary sodas: the wholesome, grammatical choice!

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* In the body copy of the ad (too small for legibility here), there’s another “fewer” that strikes my ear as hypercorrect: “While New York City had its own school program, our industry’s efforts in New York State and across the country have led to 88% fewer beverage calories in schools overall.” (Emphasis added.) Percentages are generally included among the exceptions to the less/fewer “rule” (more like a guideline); since the reference here is to a decrease in aggregate calories, I’d have gone with “less.”

January Linkfest

Balloting has begun in the Name of the Year contest, now in its 29th year of providing merriment at others’ expense. The ground rules, in case you’ve forgotten: all names are real, many are from the world of sports, all comments are welcome, reporting of results may take a while. In the first round, I’m quite smitten with Courvoisier Winetavius Richardson, “armed robbery suspect.”

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From A Walk in the Words, links to four very interesting articles about language and sports, including a 2006 American Speech paper about Homeric and hypocoristic nicknames in professional baseball and hockey. Seriously. You’ll love it.

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People “get very worked up about” the naming of neighborhoods, observes University of Chicago sociologist Gordon Douglas. The Atlantic surveys the neighborhood namescapes of several cities, including Indianapolis, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. (Via Dustbury.) Related: check out this wonderfully detailed neighborhood map of my own city, Oakland. Be sure to embiggen it for the full effect. (Via Our Oakland.)

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Eavesdrop as some New York City building developers brainstorm names for their new properties. Some of the coinages, writes the New York Times’s Joanne Kaufman, “are as whimsical as those of movie stars’ children.”

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Why wait and worry about whether your thesis will be published? Submit it to The Journal of Universal Rejection and know for sure!

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Your own surname is usually a safe choice for your company or product name, but not when, for example, your name is Mustee and you make shower stalls. Susan Perera talks eponyms and perceptions on the trademark-and-marketing blog Duets Blog.

 

They’re not real pros, just “pros.”

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How potato-chip brands use language to position their products: a scholarly yet appetizing essay by linguist Dan Jurafsky in his blog, The Language of Food.

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Wrong pronoun choice, lack of the subjunctive, lay/lie errors: Erin McKean bravely reveals the horror of ungrammatical song lyrics.

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Speaking of errors, did you screw up and write “sneak peak” instead of “sneak peek” in a tweet? There’s a bot for that, the excellently named Stealth Mountain. (Yes, a sneaky peak.) Misspell the phrase and Stealth Mountain will tweet back a mild-mannered correction: “I think you mean sneak peek.” Check out the favorites page, which reveals that people do not always appreciate being led onto the path of knowledge. Shocking, I know. (Via Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic.)

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A staggeringly comprehensive lexicon of slang terms and acronyms used by doctors and veterinarians. Or: why a HOPEFUL does not inspire hope. (Via Language Hat.)

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At last, the beauty product we’ve all been waiting for: Fotoshop by Adobé (a-doe-BAY). With pro-pixel intensifying hydro-jargon microbead extract!

 

By Jesse Rosten.

The Extrasensory Umlaut

Burt’s Bees, the natural-personal-care company, has launched güd, a new line of body, hand, and hair products, self-described as “a novel and extrasensory approach to natural beauty created for the of-the-moment woman…that’s you!”

There’s an umlaut (or dieresis) over the u in “güd,” but these aren’t Motörhead-style rock dots.

Pictured: Orange Petalooza body mist. It took me several minutes to realize that it’s petal-ooza (the oozings of petals?) and not pet-alooza, which looks like something you’d spray on an animal companion. Products are also available in Floral Cherrynova and Vanilla Flame, names that have been strenuously engineered to appeal not so much to an “of-the-moment woman” as to an 11-year-old girl.

Everything about güd is cute—make that cüte—from the URL (gudhappens.com) to the girlish lower-case name to the rollover copy (“Hey, it’s time to boogy till you just can’t boogy no more”). The About page reminds us that “the name güd actually has a smile built right in.”

OMG, it does! LOL.

Sometimes the copy is downright icky, as in this header for the body lotion section: “Skin will be wonderfully hydrated. But not so hydrated that you make a sloshing sound when you walk.” Let’s hope not.

The güd line is being sold at Walgreen’s, Target, and Ulta stores. “Or,” confides the über-chatty copy, “you could just buy whatever güd stuff you’re looking for on this very site! Aren’t the interwebs wonderful?”

Grüvy!

Additional unlikely umlauts here, here, here, and here.

October Linkfest

I haven’t written about Kindle Fire, the name of Amazon’s new tablet device (although I have written about how the Kindle got its name). But that’s mostly because a couple of my colleagues covered the territory so well on their own blogs. The Name Inspector called the Kindle Fire name “redundant” and “metaphorically incoherent.” But Catchword gave the name an A and said it was “short, catchy, evocative, and stands out in the marketplace.” Me? I agree with the Name Inspector’s logic, but I don’t think customers will approach the name logically. Kindle Fire is a good-enough name. 

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Not many national retailers dare to name their wares as esoterically as Anthropologie does. If you’ve wondered where names like Varvara Maxi Dress and Hypsometric Tint Cardi (from the current season) come from, the style blog In Pursuit of Pretty Things is here to help with a helpful Anthropologie primer. (I took a stab at decoding Anthropologie product names myself in a 2009 post.)

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Need more Anthro? A new blog, Anthroparodie, does a nice job of spoofing the genre. I liked the Bucolic Spider Crusher: “Constructed of pure, river-washed stone from an Appalachian rivulet, this invention—ancient, yet ever-effective in its simplicity—allows you to leisurely macerate arachnids and insects of all varieties into a silky pulp.”

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How did we go from the disparaging X of Brand X to the “entertainment-focused, tech-forward” X of X Games and X Prize? Lexicon Branding’s director of linguistics, Will Leben, analyzes the evolution of X in brand naming and makes a few predictions.

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At first blush, the story sounds like David v. Goliath: Suburban mom starts a skin-care brand for girls, names it for her daughter (awwww), and gets sued for trademark infringement (oh noooo) by big, similarly named cosmetics company. But there’s more to Willa v. Wella than meets the sentimental eye. Trademark lawyer Lara Pearson sorts out the issues on her Brand Geek blog: “It’s nice to want to name your product line after your daughter, but that doesn’t mean you can. If my kid were named Nikey, do you really think I could name my clothing store that too?” (UPDATE, Oct. 14: Willa company founder Christy Prunier settled the trademark dispute with Procter & Gamble, which owns Wella, and won the right to use the Willa name. According to an earlier article, Prunier’s legal fees amounted to an estimated $750,000—substantially more than the average small business could have afforded.)

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Laurel Black thought she’d come up with a really clever name for her design business: Anaglyph. I think you can tell where this story is headed; read the sadder-but-wiser conclusion on Laurel’s blog.

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The new operating system for the Windows Phone boasts that it’s “a smarter way to app.” On his Evolving English II blog, Mike Pope notes that this verbification may represent a first for the very versatile app,which was voted 2010 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society.

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Are you ready for alphalux, blingamalism, freesumerism, and menaissance? They’re all real coinages found on a UK style sheet that covers future trends. There are many more, and I had to look every damn one up. See the whole list on Rantings of a Sub-Editor.

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A new book, The Wage Slave's Glossary, is a compilation of words we use to describe work in 21st-century America: from Blackberry prayer to Xerox subsidy, giganomics to microboredom. Here’s a sampling in The Atlantic. (Hat tip: aem76us.)

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NASA’s two robotic spacecraft, code-named GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B (for Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory), need real names “that capture the spirit and excitement of lunar exploration.” So the agency is holding a contest, open to U.S. students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Names must be accompanied by a short essay explaining your choices. Deadline: November 11. The winner(s) and their teacher(s) will be invited to participate in a teleconference with GRAIL mission team members. (Via A Hundred Monkeys.)

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Robert Lane Greene, author of You Are What You Speak and contributor to The Economist’s language blog, Johnson, dispels 10 myths about language, including “You can’t end a sentence with a preposition” and “English has spread because it is flexible and open to new words.” I wrote about Greene and You Are What You Speak in an April 2011 post.

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Here’s a sweet idea: Turn your first name into a candy brand, courtesy of the NameCandy candy-name generator. I’m Nanchoco-Rocks (“hunks-o-chocolate with real Nancy!”). And you?

On the Visual Thesaurus: Making Sense of Odd Color Names

Inch Worm! Dead Spaniard! Synergy! Commercial color names—for everything from cosmetics to crayons to house paint—sure have gotten bizarre lately, haven’t they?

Or have they?

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus takes a historical perspective and concludes that odd color names have been around for a long, long time—centuries, in fact—and for good reason. You’ll need to subscribe to read the full text; here’s something to tempt you:

Almost as soon as carmakers expanded beyond Henry Ford’s “any color as long as it’s black,” color namers got creative. In 1936, you could buy a new Cadillac in Thessalon Green, Cannon Smoke, Pomerang Brown, or Nakhoda Blue. In 1970, some Dodge models were available in Panther Pink, Go Mango (orange), and Sublime (a light, bright green); the Plymouth color chart that year included Vitamin C (orange), Sassy Grass Green, and Moulin Rouge (reddish-purple). Also in 1970, Ford went psychedelic with color names like Hulla Blue, Anti-Establish Mint, and Freudian Gilt. (Explore the Auto Color Library to see color charts for other models and years.)

And although the color names of contemporary cosmetics certainly push the boundaries of comprehension (for proof, see the Stupid Nail Polish Names blog), metaphorical color naming is—again—old hat. Revlon introduced vivid red Fatal Apple lipstick and nail polish in 1945, followed by Where’s the Fire? in 1950 and—most famously and enduringly—Fire and Ice (another bright red) in 1952. A rival cosmetics brand, Hazel Bishop, stuck with plain descriptive names like Dark Red. Revlon is still in business; Hazel Bishop disappeared as an independent brand in the early 1960s. Meanwhile, I’m Not Really a Waitress—a shimmery red introduced by OPI in 1999—is one of the best-selling nail enamels in history.

And here’s a little bonus story about color names, which I discovered after my VT deadline. (Thanks, Louise Mallory, and thanks, Google+!) The author is Scott Nesin, and the story is about his four-year-old son, who’s conceived an urgent but mysterious project that requires a trip to the hardware store.

I lead him to the small paint cans, having temporarily forgotten the do-it-yourself mode while deciding if I should let the impulse shopping go on. At the paints:

“Ok, what colors?”

“Red, and blue.”

“Ok, they have Colonial Red and Apple Red. You can see the colors on the labels at the top. Which do you want?”

“Apple Red. I like apples.”

He didn’t even glance at them. Who needs colored labels when the paints have such precise names?

One last color story, this one from Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, a wonderful 1948 movie that’s mostly a send-up of the advertising business. Besides Myrna Loy (featured in the clip), the movie stars Cary Grant, Melvyn Douglas, and Louise Beavers.