Fritinancy

February Linkfest

Does something called VerMints belong in your mouth? Jessica Stone Levy thinks not.

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“The meaning of love in your dictionary is wrong. The meaning of love is the Jonas Brothers”: and other reader submissions to the online Merriam-Webster Dictionary, compiled by M-W lexicographer Kory Stamper.

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Why nauseating diamond ads are here to stay. Gretchen Gavett’s article for the Harvard Business Review includes this boggling tidbit: Tiffany has had a lock on the top right corner of Page 3 in the New York Times for more than 100 years. (More on diamond marketing here.)

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When words collide: Neal Whitman considers the “neat linguistic trick” that produces the movie title A Good Day to Die Hard, the portmanteaus netiquette and spork, and the expression sweet tooth fairy.

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Designer Ben Pieratt has created a “brand in a box”—name, logo, URL, social-media accounts, website theme, and more—that he’s selling for $18,000. It’s up to the buyer to choose how to use it. The brand’s name is Hessian, which Pieratt says he chose to honor Richard Hess, an advertising art director who died in 1991. Until I learned that, I assumed it had something to do with the German mercenary soldiers who fought on the British side in the American Revolution, or possibly a type of coarse woven cloth. The domain included in Pieratt’s brand package is dot-tv, which may be a deal-breaker for potential buyers. Read more at AdFreak.

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At the New Yorker blog Culture Desk, a gallery of weird stock photography from DIS Magazine, accompanied by an interview with DIS.

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“To us, the unicorn symbolizes the never-ending quest for mastery”: a Tumblr of the absurd, pretentious, and just plain daffy things branding agencies say about themselves, from the understandably anonymous Agency Wank.

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In a similar vein: Design Jargon Bullshit, ripped from actual websites. Sample: “We designed a series of bubbles that represented both the idea of the consumer as having options and the letter ‘o’.”

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An unofficial campaign to change the Kentucky state motto from “Unbridled Spirit” to “Kentucky Kicks Ass” has more than 12,000 Facebook “likes.” “We certainly would not sanction or endorse that phraseology,” sniffed a state tourism department spokesman. Better buy the T-shirt now. (Via Patrick Cox.) (More ass news here.)

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I’m betting some of the people who admired the “So God Made a Farmer” spot for Dodge Ram that aired during the Super Bowl had never heard of Paul Harvey, the right-wing radio broadcaster (1918-2009) who provided the soundtrack. (Harvey is credited with coining “Reaganomics,” “skyjack,” and “guesstimate”; he supported Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and opposed school busing in the 1960s, but eventually opposed the Vietnam War and supported abortion rights.) It didn’t take long for GMaF parodies to appear. Here’s God Made a Factory Farmer, God Made a Realtor, God Made a Gay Man, and God Created Transit. And here’s some background on the Dodge ad. (This just in! So God Made a Banker, via MJF.)

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I’ll wrap this up with something substantial: “102 Spectacular Nonfiction Stories from 2012,” selected by Conor Friedersdorf and presented in alphabetical order by author’s last name. Not only does the list contain a whole bunch of articles I missed last year, it includes several publications I’d never heard of, like Idle Words and Defunct. I’m looking forward to getting acquainted.

Something Special for the Ladies

Women, do you feel locked out of the consumer playground? When you go shopping, do you say to yourself, “Golly, I sure wish they made a car/Chardonnay/chocolate bar/pen just for women?”

Nope, didn’t think so. But that hasn’t stopped manufacturers from trying.

One recent example: the Honda Fit She’s [sic]. How do we know this car is for women? Well, there’s a heart instead of an apostrophe in “She’s.” It’s available in pink or “eyeliner brown.” And it comes with a PlasmaCluster A/C system “that pumps out specially treated air that improves your skin.”

 

Via BoingBoing.

So far, the She’s is – I can’t believe I just typed “She’s is” –available only in Japan. But you can buy lady-wine right now, right here in the U.S.

 

Be. wines at my local supermarket, Piedmont Grocery.

Be. wines were introduced earlier this year by Beringer, the oldest continuously operating winery in the Napa Valley (established 1875).

 

“Get in the mood.” Be. point-of-purchase poster at Piedmont Grocery.

The brand is targeted at “eighties babies*,” according to Beverage Underground, an industry blog. A Beringer spokesman, Stephen Brauer, explains:

“Be. is about inspiring Millennial women to open up to the exciting world of wine without taking it too seriously. … This launch of this brand is particularly important to us because the women behind its inception are among the most curious and influential in the industry right now. We want to make sure they feel inspired to explore and are rewarded with a small but exciting indulgence.”

The name is a truncation of Beringer; I’m guessing that’s why it’s punctuated with a period. It also also works as an imperative, and it’s easily extended into other brand language: Pinot Grigio is called Be.Bright; Chardonnay is Be.Fresh. The store locator, I regret to inform, is labeled “Find your Be. Spot.”

I’ll give them this: Be. is a whole lot classier than most of the other names in the women’s-wine category – names like Happy Bitch, MommyJuice, and Mommy’s Time Out. (For more in-depth coverage, see Jessica Stone Levy’s posts on “drinking with my ladybrain.”)

Need a snack with your vino, girlfriend? Cadbury (now part of Mondelēz International!) has just the thing: Crispello chocolate, “three curved crispy wafer shells, each one filled with a smooth creamy center, dipped in Cadbury milk chocolate,” according to a press release. It’s “a lighter way to eat chocolate,” says Cadbury, which is why it’s OK for XX types.

Because, as we know, women need a lot of coaxing to get over our well-documented hormone-linked aversion to chocolate. 

Just one little question, Cadbury: If it’s for gals, shouldn’t it be Crispella?

For more on “needlessly gender-specific products,” see this Businessweek slide show, which includes the now-notorious Bic for Her pen.

And for something a little more high-toned, read “Hey, Lady!” a conversation between Ben Yagoda and Maria Yagoda.

Let's let the Flight of the Conchords have the last word on the L-word.

 

 

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* Blonde ones, from the looks of it.

Declension

Maxim

 

 

Maxima

 

 

Maximus.

Maximus is a Polish vodka brand acquired last year by Brown-Forman Corporation, which also owns the Jack Daniels and Southern Comfort brands.  If you think “man throat” and “rise and conquer” are suggestive, you should see the old European TV spots, which really put the gluteus in the Maximus.

See more kitschy-cool Maximus print ads by 81-year-old Civil War painter Mort Künstler at Buzzfeed.

Scratch That

Three more ads that reach for a home run by striking out:

 

“Politics Philosophy Culture Talking Heads Experts”

Boston Review ad on the Los Angeles Review of Books home page (may be gone by now).

 

Buick Regal GS: From “Buick” to “Quick” … and from clear to confusing. Is there a quarterback in the picture?

 

“Things money can’t buy: love happiness time.”

San Francisco MUNI bus ad for ExecSF.com, a $25-an-hour personal-assistant service. ExecSF.com is not to be confused with ExecSF.org, the website for Executives Without Borders, “the bridge between those in the non-profit world and those in the business world.”

More strikeout ads here.

UPDATE: Just after I published this post I saw this tweet from Anna Holmes:

September Linkfest

New York City gangs take their names very, very seriously, according to “Gang ‘Slang’ers,” in the New York Post. “It took us about a month to come up with our name,” said Piff Montana, a member of the Get Touched Boyz of Jamaica, Queens. … We wanted a name that would make an impact.” The full list of 300 or so gang names reveals a preoccupation with numbers and precinctspercentages: there are gangs called 5 Precinct Percent, 10 Precinct Percent, 40 Precinct Percent, and so on up to 122 Precinct Percent. (Hat tip: NameFlash. And thanks to Dave for correcting me on "precinct.")

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New additions to World Wide Words: eastwooding, mirror fasting, underbragging, and gramping. No, gramping is not a misspelling of glamping.

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Looking for a title for your book? You can’t go wrong with “The Elements of ___,” says Poynter.org’s Roy Peter Clark, who lists more than 25 knockoffs of the Strunk and White original. Here’s the one that inspired his post:

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Before she founded the online dictionary Wordnik, Erin McKean worked on the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, a reference that isn’t just for writers but is also by writers—i.e., various writers were invited to contribute notes on words that interested them. One of the writers assigned to McKean was the late David Foster Wallace, who, she writes, approached the copyediting phase as if “someone invited him to an all-day grammar seminar (with celebrity photo signings and vendor's expo hall), combined with a debating society picnic, where the topic was ‘RESOLVED: This Comma Should Be Removed.’ (You're not surprised, are you?)” Read the whole delightful account at “It was wonderful, marvelous, magnificent, superb, glorious, sublime, lovely, delightful ...”

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The Chamomile Tea Party was formed in 2010 as an alternative to “the rancor between the political left and right” in the US. It’s using modified World War II posters to get the point across, and you can view and download the posters on Flickr.

 

By outtacontext.

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In brand naming, many clients panic if a name is more than five letters long. According to Baby Name Wizard, there’s a contrary trend in baby-boy naming, at least in the US: fear of short names. Finn becomes Finnegan, Quinn becomes Quinlan, and—most boggling of all—Levi becomes Leviathan (“the twisted serpent to be killed at the end of time”) or Leviticus (the third book of the Old Testament, notable mostly for its litany of laws about skin diseases, sacrifices, and genital discharges).

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Fellow name developer Chris Johnson (aka The Name Inspector) has created my new favorite Pinterest board: the Wall of Namifying, “logos of companies whose names end with -ify (or, in one case, -efy).” As you probably know, I share his obsession. (And speaking of Pinterest, I’m trying my hand at a similar project: cataloguing the many, many -ly names and logos.)

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Linguist Arnold Zwicky collected some wonderful names of minor-league baseball teams, including the Albuquerque Isotopes, the Colorado Springs Sky Sox, the Fort Wayne Tincaps, and the Lansing Lugnuts. Then he followed up with an imaginary list of his own. I’m rooting for the Baton Rouge Compacts.

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From the Autoextremist blog, a slightly jaundiced guide to the latest auto-industry terms. An “accidental tourist” describes “executives devoid of the qualifications necessary to properly perform the duties assigned to them”; “greenage” is a program’s environmental potential. (Hat tip: Lance Knobel.)

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Speaking of jaundiced, there’s nothing like a Condescending Corporate Brand Page to say “We're a big corporate brand using Facebook. So look out for us asking you to like and share our stuff in a faintly embarrassing and awkward way.” Read more about the CCBP in Fast Company. (Note: the CCBP is British in origin—its URL contains “corporate bollocks”—but the themes are, alas, universal.)

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He is the very model of an amateur grammarian.

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I attended the Brand New Conference last year, when it was held in San Francisco, but couldn’t make it to New York for this year’s conference. Thankfully, organizer Armin Vit has compiled the best quotes and tweets from the event. Here’s a provocative opinion from UK designer Miles Newlin: “Stories have an end, and unless you want to think of your brand as having an end, then forget the storytelling idea, and forget people who talk about brand storytelling.”

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See what happened when New York Magazine sent a reporter to TechCrunch Disrupt SF to ask startup founders about their “chronically misspelled” company names. It’s, uh, Osom. (Thanks, Jessica!)

August Linkfest

Crowdsourcing a name for a new apple-flavored Mountain Dew beverage seemed like such a good idea. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, plenty. “Suddenly, its gallery of suggestions featured such winners as ‘Gushing Granny,’ ‘Diabeetus,’ and my personal favorite, ‘Fapple’.” Mountain Dew now says the campaign was created by a local customer, not the company; the “offensive content”—created by unknown pranksters—has been scrubbed from the “Dub the Dew” website.

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My two posts about the origins of the expression “the whole nine yards” (here and here) continue to be among the most-searched entries on this blog. But the story isn’t finished: New research has unearthed a couple of citations that go back to the 1950s, a full decade earlier than previously assumed. Read Ben Zimmer’s Word Routes column about the new findings, “Stretching Out ‘The Whole Nine Yards’.”

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Speaking of idioms: Absolutely nobody knows where the phrase “round robin” comes from.

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The most-loathed words in the English language, according to readers of The Atlantic, include moist (of course!), curate, slacks, and artisanal.

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Love logos? Love data? Check out Emblemetric, a new blog by James I. Bowie about trends in logo design. No seat-of-the-pants stuff, this: Bowie bases his reports on more than 1.2 million logos in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database. Sample finding: “The use of two stars as a design element in US logos increased by 170 percent in 2011 over the preceding five-year period. Looking back over time, we can see that, following a pronounced dip in the 1970s, logos with two stars have been claiming an increasing share of new trademark filings for the last three decades.” Be still, my geekish heart.

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Set aside several hours to wander happily through the History of Advertising Trust, “the largest archive of British advertising in the world.” There’s also a lovely gallery of ghost signs. (Via @boswellaffleck.)

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At Union Square Café, a “K1” is a diner who will be proposing to his date. At Michael’s New York, “Lawn” is a chopped salad chopped extra fine. Ben Schott deciphers these and other secret codes used in the dining rooms and kitchens of some well-known New York City restaurants, .

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Eleven wonderful words with no precise equivalent in English. Quite a few are new to me, including bilita mpash (Bantu for “the opposite of a nightmare”) and ya-arburnee (Arabic for “may you bury me,” i.e., the expressed hope that you die before your beloved does). (Hat tip: @ourboldhero).

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What’s the nerdiest preposition of them all? Nope, not “notwithstanding.” Not even close.

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Lexicographer Kory Stamper on color definitions in Webster’s Third International Dictionary: “You could spend an hour alone getting lost in ‘cerise’ (‘a moderate red that is slightly darker than claret (sense 3a), slightly lighter than Harvard crimson (sense 1), very slightly bluer and duller than average strawberry (sense 2a), and bluer and very slightly lighter than Turkey red’). No doubt people did. That may explain why we don’t define colors this way anymore.”

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I want a wall-size poster of this Is the New diagram, which documents “every instance of the phrase ‘is the new’ encountered from various sources in 2005.” Samples: “October is the new December,” “staying in is the new going out,” and “flat is the new round.” (Via Diane Fischler.)

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“Ms. and Mrs.,” a small personal-care-products company, was constantly being misidentified, usually as “Mr. and Mrs.” So the founders hired professionals to come up with a new name. Smart move. (Via @alanbrew.)

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A wonderful list of paradoxes from virtually every discipline. I’m still pondering the Service Recovery Paradox: “Successfully fixing a problem with a defective product may lead to higher consumer satisfaction than in the case where no problem occurred at all.” (Via @operativewords.)

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I’m sure you’ll have quibbles and additions, but this Digital Trends list of “The top 10 worst car names of all times” includes some incontestable champions, like the Studebaker Dictator and Isuzu’s Mysterious Utility Wizard. (Via @lexiconbranding.)

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From the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog, Mary Norris on “Semicolons; So Tricky”: “I thought semicolons were just inflated commas, and I realized that I had no idea how to use them, and was afraid it was too late to learn, so I decided to do without them. I stuck with what I knew: the common comma, the ignorant question mark, the occasional colon, the proletarian period.”

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From the New York Times’s Opinionator blog, Ben Yagoda on “The Point of Exclamation”: “A friend’s 12-year-old daughter once said that in her view, a single exclamation point is fine, as is three, but never two. My friend asked her where this rule came from and the girl said, ‘Nowhere. It’s just something you learn.’”

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Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl and transformative editor of Cosmopolitan, died Monday. From the New York Times front-page obit: “She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger.” Ouch. It’s easy to mock Brown, and Cosmo, but let’s not forget that in the early years of Brown’s editorship the magazine published work by Patricia Highsmith, John Fowles, and Tom Wolfe, as these covers from the 1960s attest. And brava to Brown for saying this in 1964:

I personally don’t feel that the world is going to the dogs or that young people are inferior to their counterparts of a previous generation. Our moral codes have changed slightly, but what we have now is a lot better than the days of stricter moral codes when there was child labor, no equality for women, no federal aid for destitute people, plenty of robber barons and lynching.

Source: Bad Girls Go Everywhere, Jennifer Scanlon’s 2009 biography of Brown. (Hat tip: The Hairpin.)

Car Names in the News

Toyota plans to sell its new Spade minivan only in Japan, but that hasn’t stopped North American automotive writers from deploring the name—a racial slur since the Reconstruction era. According to The Truth About Cars, Toyota claims that “Spade” is a portmanteau of “space” and “wide” and also the strongest suit in a deck of cards. It’s going to be difficult for native Japanese speakers to pronounce: one of my language-maven Twitter followers says it will sound something like “su pa edo.”

For more on controversial “spade” branding, see my 2006 post about Jay-Z’s endorsement of Ace of Spades Champagne.

(Via this tweet by @nameflash.)

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A tiny new electric car developed by MIT’s Media Lab has an unusual name: Hiriko. The name looks like it could be Japanese, but in fact it’s the Basque word for “urban.”

Artist’s rendering of Hiriko cars in front of Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum. From Pacific Standard.

It’s a clever naming strategy for a unique car. Linguists consider Basque to be a language isolate: the only language in its family. As far as I know, this is the first time the Basque lexicon has been tapped for a car name.

According to Pacific Standard magazine, the Hiriko measures 100 inches long but folds for parking down to 60 inches. It will be sold only in fleets as a complement to city transit systems. In prototype, it was called the CityCar.

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Korean carmaker Kia is introducing a new sedan for the 2013 model year called Quoris. Autoblog sniffs:

Kia says Quoris is “derived from the English words ‘core’ and ‘quality,’” but something was clearly lost in translation here, as Quoris is not only difficult to pronounce, it is utterly meaningless. Yes, we know it follows in a long line of such car names, but we doubt this is going to be seen as one of the good ones.

Oh, come on now. “Quoris” is only slightly more difficult to pronounce than “quorum” and “chorus.” As for meaningless, can you honestly say that Quoris is worse than Tiguan? Than Yaris? Than Kia’s very own, very peculiar cee’d?

But That’s a Car Name!

A few years ago I was hired to name an apple. Not an Apple: an apple, the kind that grows on a tree. This particular apple was a new cultivar that needed a name to compete against Golden Delicious and Pippin and Winesap in supermarkets. My client was the growers’ group that had developed the fruit.

I presented several names, including one I thought was an especially strong candidate: Avalon. The name had an excellent and appropriate story, I told the client. It comes from Welsh afal, which means “apple.” (Etymology doesn’t always matter, but in this case it was too perfect to ignore.) In the Arthurian legends, Avalon is the island where Excalibur was forged. (Power, magic, legend: all positive attributes.) Avalon was sometimes called “the Fortunate Isle.” (Happy apples!) Add to that, I said, the fact that the word rolls deliciously off the tongue.

There was silence on the other end of the phone line. Finally, the client’s spokesman spoke:

“Avalon,” he said tentatively. “Isn’t that a car name?”

Guest Post on Duets Blog: Nova Has Never Meant "No Go"

In a guest post for Duets Blog, I look at one of the most popular and persistent of all naming myths: the one about the Chevrolet Nova. The car hasn’t been produced since 1988, but the story about how the Nova name “failed” in Spanish-speaking countries—because it means “no go,” according to the legend—lives on.

Guess what? “Nova” isn’t “no va,” and the Nova sold well in Latin America.

Read the post to learn more about the “Nova” myth and why it has proved so surprisingly durable.

Some of my other guest posts for Duets Blog: white elephants, the Aveda trademark, Los Doyers, Festivus.

 

Steamy

Stanley Steamer:

Identical twins Francis and Freeland Stanley in their Stanley Steamer automobile, circa 1898. The company’s slogan was “Power—correctly generated, correctly controlled, correctly applied to the rear axle.” Photo from here.

  Stanley Steemer:

 

Stanley Steemer carpet cleaner, a nationwide franchise business founded in 1947 in Columbus, Ohio. The founder’s name was Jack Bates.

 

Stanley’s Steamers:

 

Stanley’s Steamers, San Francisco: “Fine pedestrian dining since 1974.” The company was founded by law student Stanley Roth, who successfully fought City Hall to become San Francisco’s first food-cart vendor. Stanley’s Steamers still thrives; it’s now joined by more than 100 rival food carts that chug along the city’s streets peddling gumbo, crème brulée, adobo, lumpia, curry, madeleines, bao, escargots, and almost anything else you have an appetite for.

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Related, a little bit: steampunk.