Fritinancy

Nicely Named: Beeminder

In Monday’s Word of the Week post I briefly mentioned Beeminder, a commitment device to help people overcome akrasia and achieve their goals.

 

 

I like the Beeminder name, I wrote, because it suggests industriousness. But there’s a lot more to say about the name,  and I’m pleased to report that the Beeminder said much of it in a September 2011 blog post.

Co-founder Daniel Reeves wrote that Beeminder was originally called Kibotzer, a blend of kibitzer (Yiddish for someone who gives unasked-for advice—accent on kib, please) and bot (“a machine or program that interacts with you in a vaguely human way”). Thus Kibotzer: “A bot that bugs you about how fat you are.”

That’s cute, but when the founders decided to turn their hobby into a real business, they acknowledged that the name had to go. “Kibotzer” turned out to be hard to pronounce, and not enough people knew what a kibitzer was.

So they cast about for a new name. I hope they started with a naming brief—the blog post doesn’t mention it, and I’m sorry to say that many startups skip this essential step—but at least they “filled pages with candidate names.” That’s good: you need a lot of names, in a lot of styles, before you start narrowing the field. And the also-rans mentioned in the post show a lot of good lateral thinking: Flakeproof, Goalbugger, even Funky Goal Medina.

I wasn’t surprised to learn, however, that Beeminder came from someone outside the core team: founders are often too close to the problem to recognize the most effective solution. Once Beeminder was on the table, its advantages were evident. Here’s how co-founder Reeves spells it out:

1. Beeminder is a “me-binder” — a self-binding tool.
2. “Beeminder” rhymes with “reminder”.
3. It’s about “minding your goals” in the “mind your p’s and q’s” sense. (“Bee-mindful”)
4. Our esteemed co-founder Bethany Soule goes by “Bee”.
5. Bees are just cute (and hard-working!).
6. Beeminder sends reminders with a motivational sting.
7. Beeminder helps you make a beeline for your goal.
8. You use Beeminder because you want to be minded.

It’s not just that Beeminder evokes multiple meanings, it’s that all of the meanings are positive and relevant. Together, they add up to a strong, clear story that’s fun to tell—and to repeat to friends.

By happy coincidence, Ben Yagoda of the Not One-Off Britishisms blog wrote earlier this week that “minder”—a Britishism meaning “a person in charge of something”—is increasingly popular among speakers of American English. He cites four recent “minder” appearances, including one in the TV show “Gossip Girl.”

Word of the Week: Resistentialism

Resistentialism: “The theory that inanimate objects demonstrate hostile behavior toward us.” – Anu Garg, The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two: The Hidden Lives and Strange Origins of Common and Not-So-Common Words. 

Photo source: You’ll Eat It & Like It!

From Garg’s entry in the book:

If you ever get a feeling that the photocopy machine can sense when you’re tense, short of time, need a document copied before an important meeting, and then it breaks down on purpose, you’re not alone. Now you know the word for it. As if to prove the point, my normally robust DSL Internet connection went down for two hours just as I was writing this. I’m not making this up!

I was surprised that resistentialism had never been a Word of the Week, because it’s a word I have found invaluable ever since I first heard it, some 15 years ago. Just last week I encountered it again in an enlightening and often amusing book I’ve been reading, Bozo Sapiens: Why to Err Is Human, by Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan*. The Kaplans write at the beginning of Chapter IV:

Life calls us out of the private fastnesses of our heads into a world of things, things we valiantly attempt to steer, start, or stop—and this opens a whole new playground for error. The English humorist Paul Jennings once proposed an alternative to the existentialist nausee that was then washing across from Paris: resistentialism. This “somber, post-atomic philosophy of pagan, despairing nobility” held that “things are against us.” And it seems they still are: rather than the masters of the physical world, we remain mere “no-things,” doomed to be pushed around by scornful and uncooperative objects—pianos that mock our sausage fingers; computers that develop transient but alarming hypochondria; keys, socks, and teaspoons that scurry off to their secret covens and never return.

Word Spy (Paul McFedries) tells us that resistentialism first appeared in print in 1963 “[o]r possibly earlier; I saw conflicting dates, which were probably just resistential computer errors.” The passage in question appeared in “Report on Resistentialism,” which was published in The Jenguin Pennings:

Go into any of the little cafés or horlogeries on Paris’s Left Bank (make sure the Seine is flowing away from you, otherwise you’ll be on the Right Bank, where no one is ever seen) and sooner or later you will hear someone say, ‘Les choses sont contre nous.’ ‘Things are against us.’

McFedries offers a corollary:

A related term that makes the occasional appearance is FOBIO —- Frequently Outwitted By Inanimate Objects. I hereby propose what I humbly suggest is a better term: FOILED — Frequently Outwitted by Inanimate, Lame Electronic Devices.

For examples of resistentialism in action, see the blog Things Are Against Us. See also The Case of the Disappearing Teaspoons, a summary of a study by two Australian scientists, published in 2005, that concludes:

People have no control over teaspoon migration; escape to a spoonoid planet and resistentialism are equally plausible explanations.

More isms (austerianism, declinism, endism, et al.) here.

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* The Kaplans are mother and son; she’s a historian who has also co-authored two books about mathematics; he’s a writer and filmmaker. Michael Kaplan also writes a blog called Bozo Sapiens.

How Cataphora Got Its Name

Cataphora is an employee-owned technology company based in Redwood City, California. It tracks and predicts human behavior, often for investigators and litigators. According to the company's website, it is "the world's authority on the implications of personal and organizational behavior as evidenced by the use of electronic media."

In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Cataphora founder and CEO Elizabeth Charnock, a theoretical mathematician, said her company has built "the only search engine in the world that will find things that aren't there."

So where did they get the name? Cataphora figures you'd ask. Its website includes an "Our Name" page, titled "Once You Know to Look for Them . . ." The sentence continues in the body copy:

...you can see cataphora everywhere!

Cataphor (plural: cataphora) is a grammatical term describing a word or phrase that refers to something that is identified later in the sentence. For example, in the sentence:

"If you want them, there are cookies in the kitchen"

"them" is a cataphor – you don't know what "them" refers to until "cookies" comes along later in the sentence.

The significance of a piece of evidence is often not apparent until further information is revealed at a later time. The name Cataphora neatly captures our specialty – making sense of potentially cryptic evidence by putting it into its proper context.

Cataphora is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable. Its literal meaning, in the original Greek, is "a lethargic attack, a bringing down, a fall." Let's hope Cataphora's clients aren't obsessed with etymology.

I don't think I've encountered another technology company whose name comes from the lexicon of grammar. Are there others?

Word of the Week: Drunkorexia

Drunkorexia: A combination of self-imposed starvation (or bingeing and purging) and alcohol abuse. A blend of "drunk" and "anorexia."

The syndrome is described in the New York Times Style section, March 2, 2008:

Drunkorexia is not an official medical term. But it hints at a troubling phenomenon in addiction and eating disorders. Among those who are described as drunkorexics are college-age binge drinkers, typically women, who starve all day to offset the calories in the alcohol they consume. The term is also associated with serious eating disorders, particularly bulimia, which often involve behavior like bingeing on food — and alcohol — and then purging.

According to the report, related coinages include manorexia (the male version of anorexia, an affliction more commonly associated with women), orthorexia (an obsession with what is perceived as healthy food), and diabulimia (practiced by some diabetics who refused to take insulin, which can cause weight gain; however, it does not necessarily involve the purging associated with bulimia).

Mr. Verb is concerned that playful word-blends can minimize potentially fatal health problems:

Using blends here not only makes these terms distinctly non-clinical sounding, but it also feels awkward given concerns about glamorizing eating disorders (like here), not to mention that we surely don't want to do anything that sounds like it trivializes them.