Fritinancy

Dead to the World

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-May, with the fog bearing down hard on the bay and a look of weary desperation on every shopper’s face. They were all looking for something, but I had a sneaking suspicion what they were looking for wasn’t hardboiled euphemism. Not on Floor 2, in Bedding. Not with a spa velour cover.

 

La-Z-Boy Big Sleep memory foam contour pillow at Bed Bath & Beyond. Discontinued, defunct, passed away, crossed the bar, picked up the harp, took its last rest.

 

“You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was.” – Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

 

The Big Sleep (Warner Bros., 1946).

World Capitals

For reasons best left undisclosed*, I recently found myself looking up facts about California cities. I wasn’t searching for nicknames or mottoes, but somehow I ended up on Wikipedia’s List of City Nicknames in California, and … well, there went the afternoon.

The list doesn’t include one city nickname I’ve always liked: Manteca, in Central California, is known as Fat City. (Manteca is Spanish for “cooking fat.”) But it does contain plenty of nuggets, many of them new to me (a California native). I learned, for example, that Chatsworth, in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, is sometimes called San Pornando, and that San Francisco has more nicknames (ten) than any other California city.

Then there are all the “X of the world” cities and towns. A lot of them.

I’d known, of course, that Castroville is the Artichoke Center of the World and that Gilroy is the Garlic Capital of the World; indeed, I’ve attended the Artichoke Festival and the Garlic Festival. But some of the other world capitals surprised me:

Auburn: Endurance Capital of the World. (The Sierra foothills city, about 50 miles east of Sacramento on I-80, is “home to some of the most challenging and historic endurance events on the planet.”)

Bishop: Mule Packer Capital of the World.

Chico: Almond Capital of the World.

Fallbrook: Avocado Capital of the World and Raisin Capital of the World. (But also see Selma, below.)

Forestville: Poison Oak Capital of the World. (Hey, I’ve been to Forestville. It ain’t that bad!)

Holtville: Carrot Capital of the World. (I had to look up Holtville on a map. It’s a town of about 6,000 in Imperial County, about 10 miles east of El Centro.)

Indio: Date Capital of the World. (I have fond memories of spring vacations in Indio. It’s in the hot, dry Coachella Valley, near Palm Springs on the map but worlds away in style. We’d always stop at Shields Date Gardens to order date shakes and watch a grainy black-and-white documentary called The Romance and Sex Life of the Date.)

Shields Date Gardens, via Canuck Rennsau’s Flickr stream.

 

Lodi: Tokay Grape Capital of the World and Zinfandel Capital of the World.

McCloud: Blackberry Capital of the World. (Really? Well, it’s a nice little town up near the Oregon border in the spectacular Siskiyou Mountains. Worth a detour.)

Oakdale: Cowboy Capital of the World. (Don’t tell Bandera, Texas.)

Oxnard: Lima Bean Capital of the World and Strawberry Capital of the World. (Watch out, Watsonville!)

Pearsonville: Hubcap Capital of the World. (Pearsonville, pop. 17, is home to at least one very enthusiastic resident.)

Salinas: Lettuce Capital of the World.

Selma: Raisin Capital of the World. (Yes, there’s a Selma in California.)

Tulelake: Horseradish Capital of the World. (Sadly, the horseradish industry is shrinking.)

Watsonville: Strawberry Capital of the World. (Don’t tell Oxnard.)

Willow Creek: Bigfoot Capital of the world. (Had to look this one up, too. It’s in Humboldt County, near the Trinity River. Population about 1,000.)

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I understand the inclination toward superlatives, but where city mottoes are concerned, I prefer the poetic: Modesto’s sublime “Water Wealth Contentment Health,” Del Mar’s much-imitated “Where the Turf Meets the Surf,” Redwood City’s briskly reassuring “Climate Best by Government Test.”

I’m drawn to dark mottoes, too, like San Francisco’s “The City That Waits to Die.” But no California city beats Colma, just south of San Francisco, which Wikipedia reminds us was “founded as a necropolis in 1924.” One of Colma’s mottoes is “It’s Good to Be Alive in Colma”; it’s known as “The City of the Silent” and as “The City That Waits for ‘The City That Waits to Die’ to Die.”

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* Because they’re boring.

The Long Coffee Break

I learned about Death Wish Coffee too late to include it in my week of death brands posts. But better late (haha) than never.

 

Image via AdFreak.

Death Wish comes with a caveat:

Disclaimer:  This is not your regular morning coffee.  This is not your store bought coffee. You will not find this coffee at your local diner or at your sissy Starbucks. Death Wish Coffee is the most highly caffeinated premium dark roast organic coffee in the world. This is Extreme Coffee, not for the weak. Consider yourself Warned.

One pound—beans or ground—costs $19.99.

Too bad Death cigarettes (1991-1999) aren’t still around. They’d be the perfect accompaniment to a cup of Death Wish.

 

Image from Making the Modern World.

Death cigarettes were the brainchild of British branding guy B.J. Cunningham. Watch a 2010 video of Cunningham talking about—what else?—branding.

Unleash Deadly

Just in time for Life-or-Death Week here at Fritinancy, Karen sent me this photo of a display at Dick's Sporting Goods in Natick, Massachusetts:

Predator Lethal Zones soccer footwear.

 

Deadly? Those candy-colored shoes look pretty cheerful to me. The lethality is more overt in an Adidas video that shows the shoes (“boots” in the UK) being shot from artillery.

But what about the slogan, “Unleash Deadly”? Rest assured  that the grammar is deliberately off. Yes, transitive “unleash” normally takes a noun as object (“Unleash the hounds!”). Despite its -ly suffix, “deadly” is an adjective here, which makes “Unleash Deadly” parallel in structure to another famously iconoclastic slogan, Apple’s “Think Different.”

 

Adidas is using the #unleash hashtag in social media.

 

To those of you who are wringing your hands over this evidence of the decline and fall of “good grammar,” here’s a gentle reminder: Advertising is supposed to command your attention, not lull you with predictability. “Unleash the Predator LZ” or “Unleash Deadly Force” would be grammatically correct but undistinguished. “Unleash Deadly”—clipped, memorable, ominous—makes you look twice.

And, as you’ve noticed, it does that by incorporating the D-word—formerly off limits in branding, now a hot trend.

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Previously on Life-or-Death Week: Thanatourism, Death to Branding, Lifelike.

 

Names in the News: Lifelike

In his campaign speeches, Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney has been touting his business experience, especially his work as chief executive of the investment firm Bain Capital. Lately, though, that experience has come under scrutiny. Some of the attention has focused on one of Bain’s smallest and least successful investments: the Lifelike Co., which sold customized dolls that resembled their little-girl owners. The duration of Romney’s involvement in Lifelike has called into question the candidate’s claim that he began a “leave of absence” from Bain in 1999.

From the Washington Post, July 14, 2012:

Romney served on the Lifelike board from its founding in the mid-1990s until 2001, according to the former governor’s financial disclosure forms and other public records. Romney described his responsibility as a board member in his testimony in 2002 before a state panel considering a challenge to his eligibility for the ballot.

This being Life-or-Death Week at Fritinancy, I’m more interested in the name of that defunct company—forced into liquidation in 2003, according to the Wall Street Journal—than in financial arcana.

Here’s the Post’s description of Lifelike’s product:

Lifelike occupied a specialty niche in the doll business: 2-foot high replicas of actual children, fashioned using photographs supplied by parents. They sold for $150, under the brand name “My Twinn.’’

“Lifelike” is a descriptive name not just for the company but also for Romney, whose public persona has been characterized as “wooden” and “robotic.” In April, the candidate’s wife, Ann, said on a Baltimore radio show: “[I]f people think the candidate seems too stiff at times as the host suggested … we better unzip him and let the real Mitt Romney out’.” (As several commentators later noted, this was not the most felicitous of phrasings.)

Romney had personal connections to Lifelike—a college and business-school friend brought him the investment idea—but might he also have been charmed by the product name? After all, My Twinn is pretty darn close (as Romney himself would put it) to “Mitt Win.”

Back in January, New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd rubbed it in:

He has clearly brought a My Twinn on the trail — a plastic replica of a candidate who’s often described as a plastic replica: white teeth, gelled hair, windowpane shirt, Tommy Bahama jeans.

The Lifelike Co. is dead and buried, but the Lifelike name lives on in other quarters. Las Vegas has a Lifelike Hair Center that specializes in hair replacement, restoration, and retention. LifeLike Productions, in Point Reyes Station, California, is “a leading producer of state-of-the-art multimedia marketing tools”; it owns the lifelike.com domain. There’s also a Canadian Lifelike Dolls magazine, whose readers collect “reborn” dolls (also known as “living dolls” or, creepily, “unliving dolls”): vinyl dolls manufactured to look like real human babies. A 2003 book, Life Like Dolls: The Collector Doll Phenomenon and the Lives of the Women Who Love Them, was written by a man, A. F. Robertson. It devotes three pages to the My Twinn brand.

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More Life-Or-Death posts: Thanatourism, Death to Branding.

 

Word of the Week: Thanatourism

Thanatourism: Travel to destinations involving death and tragedy, including battlefields, disaster sites such as Hiroshima, and museums commemorating atrocities. From Greek thanatos (death) + tourism. Also called dark tourism, grief tourism, atrocity tourism, and morbid tourism.

Thanatourism was coined by A.V. Seaton, a British scholar specializing in the study of tourism. In a 1996 paper, “Guided by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism,” Seaton traced the activity of thanatourism back to the Middle Ages; it was revived during the Romantic period of the late 18th early 19th centuries. For the Romantics, Seaton wrote, Pompeii was the ultimate thanatoptic travel destination.

“Dark Tourism,” in the November 2010 issue of The Atlantic magazine, explored how Cambodia is turning “its bloody history into a sightseeing boom.” The article opens in Anlong Veng, site of a shrine to the murderous dictator Pol Pot:

The Cambodian government plans to develop this sun-baked, mine-riddled frontier town into a theme park devoted to the Khmer Rouge, the brutal regime that murdered perhaps 15 percent of Cambodia’s population when it ruled from 1975 to 1979. The planned park is of a piece with Cambodia’s larger effort to capitalize on the atrocities of its past—and to tap into a booming global industry in travel to macabre destinations, known as thanatourism.

“Dark tourism” was coined by John Lennon—not the late Beatle but a professor at Glasgow Caledonian University and author of Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster. The Atlantic article cites Lennon as asserting that

a global demand for “authentic” attractions has turned thanatourism into an increasingly profitable sector of the tourism business. More than a million people visit Auschwitz annually, while millions more take in the Tower of London. Today’s Lonely Planeteers flock toward the bridge over the Kwai River, synonymous with the brutality of the Japanese army during World War II, and the Wolf’s Lair, where Hitler survived an assassination attempt in 1944. Tour companies offer package trips to Baghdad, Sarajevo, and Chernobyl.

Thanatourism is on sound academic footing, at least in the UK. The Institute for Dark Tourism Research was founded in 2005 at the University of Central Lancashire as “a centre of excellence for dark tourism research aimed at a global audience of academics, students, industry practitioners, policy-makers, and the media.” The iDTR sponsors research, held a symposium, and manages online discussion forums on Facebook and JISCmail.

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Thanks to C.J. Hirschfield for introducing me to the iDTR.

 

On the Visual Thesaurus: Death to Branding!

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, published today, looks at brand names that break the ultimate naming taboo: death. You’ll have to subscribe (just $19.95 a year!) to read the full text; here’s an excerpt:

At your local liquor store, you can find bottles of Black Death Vodka, Death’s Door gin, Death & Taxes beer, and red wines from Australia named Dead Letter Office and Dead Arm. There’s an upscale New York City boîte called Death + Company, and a popular San Francisco Bay Area restaurant called The Dead Fish.

A cosmetics website sells Dead Sexy No. 6 perfume. A business called Dead Sexy Nails, in Southern California, will give you a manicure (to die for, presumably). You can buy sportswear from companies called Board 2 Death, Death Grip, and Death Nail. (The last name is an eggcorn of “death knell.”)

If you’re in Key West, Florida, you can stop by Baby's Coffee for a bag of Death by Coffee, a proprietary blend of beans. If you’re in Boston and have a baby grand to transport, you can call Death Wish Piano Movers (motto: “We're So Good, It’s Scary!”). Pretty soon, if the trademark record is to be trusted, we’ll be seeing a line of toy cars from Mattel called Dead Fast.

Read the rest of “Death to Branding!”

Click the Death category at the bottom of this post to read my previous posts about “dead” brands. And stay tuned: It’s Life-or-Death Week on Fritinancy, and I’ll have more reports from both sides of branding’s Great Divide.

 

Restaurant Names in the News

Noted recently:

Food Coma, a bánh mì and crêpe café, opened this month in Oakland’s Uptown neighborhood. Its tagline is “Eat. Drink. Eat. Pass out. Repeat”; the logo emphasizes the “pass out” part of the instructions. Death and near-death are surprisingly popular themes in gastronomic naming right now: see Dead Letter wine, Dead Fish restaurant, and Death’s Door spirits. (Via SFEater.com.)

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Wales Today reports that a Welsh prison, HMP Cardiff, will open “a fine dining restaurant” called Clink. It’s a nice play on words: Besides being a slang term meaning prison, “clink” is the sound of two beverage glasses saluting each other. For some reason I’d assumed that “clink” for “prison” was a relatively recent Americanism. Wrong: the OED says it surfaced in mid-16th century England. Clink was the name “of a noted prison in Southwark” (a district in London) and was “later used elsewhere (esp. in Devon or Cornwall) for a small and dismal prison or prison-cell, a lock-up.” Now you know. (Via @brandstrat.)

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CLINK. is also the name of a restaurant in Boston that occupies the site of “the storied Charles Street jail.” Yes, the name is in all caps, and yes, that’s a period. As in “sentence,” perhaps? (Via @wisekaren.)

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And from the Department of What Did You Expect, a diner in his 40s suffered a heart attack last Saturday while eating the Triple Bypass Burger at the Heart Attack Grill (tagline: “Taste Worth Dying For!”) in Las Vegas. He survived. Other patrons were unfazed. “It says right on the door, it's hazardous to your health,” diner CJ Beeman told the local Fox channel. I wish the gentleman a speedy recovery, and I certainly hope that if he ever visits Oakland he isn’t tempted to eat at Food Coma. (Via @dustbury.)

Eat, Drink, and Be Spooky

Piedmont Grocery, a neighborhood institution since 1902, gets into the Halloween spirit early and enthusiastically. Here’s some of what I discovered there on a recent visit.

 

Fear and The Ghost hot sauces are made with Bhut Jolokia, “the ghost pepper of India, officially the hottest in the world.”

 

Sweet Death, Sudden Death, and Original Death hot sauce from Extreme Foods.

 

Also available in Spanish translation. ¡Siéntase vivo!

 

Ceramic miniatures from Kah Tequila.

It says here that “kah” means “life” in the Mayan language; the ceramic vessels are “inspired by traditional Calaveras (skulls made from sugar) which are used in Day of the Dead rituals to symbolize death and rebirth.” Click anywhere on the Kah Tequila text for a surprise.

 

McSteven’s Vampire Brew Blood Red Hot Chocolate.

Also on the shelf from McSteven’s: Spider Cider and Skeleton Brew.

 

PoiZin Sonoma County zinfandel, “the wine to die for.”

I love the PoiZin name, which is extended on the website: PoiZin Pen, PoiZindex, PoiZin Us. The prose on the back of the bottle is suitably purple:

As she stands in the clearing the cold wind dances through the trees, swirling her golden mane over her diaphanous, silken black gown. The full moon melts into the paleness of her skin. As she stirs the cauldron of Zinfandel she chants an other worldly [sic] incantation. From vials as old as the echoes of time she adds minute pinches of her ancestry. Her slender fingers rub together as the grains fall...

If you can tolerate more of that sort of thing—I chose to quit after “minute pinches of her ancestry”—the full text is here, along with a video about how the bottles are etched.

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Previous Halloween posts: “Perish: The Thought” (2006), “Excellent with Steak. Or Stakes” (2007), “Brands to Die For” (2007), “Whistling in the Graveyard” (2007), “Hauntrepreneurs” (2009), “Undeath Takes a Holiday” (2009). It looks like I took a holiday in 2008 and 2010.

Word of the Week: Deather

Deather: A person who doesn’t believe Osama bin Laden was killed in the May 1 raid on his Abbottabad hideout. Deathers fall into two camps: those who believe bin Laden had been dead for some time before the raid; and those who demand photographic “proof” of the killing.

“The Dumbest Deather Theory” is the headline on a May 2 post on New York Magazine’s Intel blog:

Yes, the deathers. They’re folks who contend that Osama bin Laden wasn’t actually killed yesterday, that the whole thing is some kind of government hoax. … Cindy Sheehan, the well-known Iraq War protester, says “you’re stupid” if you believe that bin Laden is dead. She, like some commenters we’ve seen around the Internet, think the “alleged” ocean burial of bin Laden is merely a convenient excuse for not having to produce a body. Maybe, over time, she’ll be convinced by bin Laden’s failure to refute his demise with a new audiotape.

Deather was coined in imitation of two earlier conspiracist neologisms: truther (a person who disputes the official account of the 9/11 attacks, preferring to regard them as an “inside job”) and birther (a person who claims that President Barack Obama is not a US citizen). All three terms, and the perspectives they describe, are aspects of denialism, says research scientist Jamie L. Varon, writing in a Discover magazine blog:

One would expect that there are at least two competing interests in the minds of the deathers. The first could be a desire to believe that an existing threat, that of a terrorist mastermind, has been eliminated. The second interest appears to be a desire to find fault with President Obama, regardless of the benefits that might come from his service. According to Dan Kahan, one of the thought leaders in this field, this all happens subconsciously. Therefore, the deather must undergo a series of mental operations that lead him to choose the latter in order to satisfy a desired endpoint.

Deather had a life, so to speak, before May 1. In July 2009, while the US Congress was debating health-care reform, some panicked “observers”* seized on a provision in the legislation that would cover end-of-life consultations, deeming it “the legislative equivalent of euthanasia,” according to Christopher Beam, a reporter for Slate. In a July 28 article, Beam coined “deathers” to describe such people, and MSNBC news anchor Rachel Maddow credited Beam for the coinage (which she called “kind of brilliant”) on her show two days later. By November, Maddow seemed to think she’d coined the term herself. Leslie Savan, a guest contributor for the New York Times Sunday Magazine’s “On Language” feature, quoted Maddow in a column about “the recent spate of -ers”:

“It is possible I coined deather,” Rachel Maddow of MSNBC told me recently, citing her show’s coverage of “scare tactics used in the fight against health care reform.” Maddow said: “I thought I’d shorten it, because ‘people who believe health care reform is a secret plot to kill old people’ wouldn’t work. Deather seemed like an ironically self-referential term to ostentatiously bestow.”

Savan went on to parse the meaning of the -er suffix.

Today’s -er groups are not -ists; their beliefs are not -isms or -ologies, theories of social organization like communism or fields of study like sociology. Nor are they -ites, devout followers of a domineering visionary figure, like Trotskyites, Benthamites or Thatcherites. The -ers, the caricature asserts, are not sophisticated enough for that. That is perhaps why -er words, long before truther, have been used to deride political opponents, as in tree hugger, bra burner and evildoer — not to mention the catch-alls for extremists, wingers and nutters (from wing nut).

Since the truther phenomenon, we’ve had other -ers, including the tenthers (those who believe the 10th Amendment gives states the right to nullify federal laws) and the teabaggers (followers of the conservative tea party movement). Sarah Palin’s defenders have even labeled as Trig truthers those who suspect subterfuge surrounding her last pregnancy.

Ben Zimmer also covered this earlier meaning of deather in an August 2009 Visual Thesaurus column about the lexicon of the health-care debate.

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In related news, Domain Name Wire reported last week that the deathers.com domain recently changed hands (WhoIs gives the transaction date as May 3) and now is the property of “Domain King” Rick Schwartz.

Also related: An Osama bin Laden lexicon.

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* Why are they called “observers” when they’re anything but passive onlookers? I prefer “squawkers.”