Fritinancy

In the Wild: Slushify

Spotted at Bed Bath & Beyond: a new -ify coinage.

I believe this design template is called Everything But the Unicorn.

 

The product’s name is Slushy Magic – the package contains “magic cubes” (filled with saline solution or gel, possibly) and a “Slushy Magic Cup” – but the stated benefit is slushification. Can you slushify your Zenify? Why, yes, you can!

But wait, the suffixifying fun has just started! As the Slushy Magic product video says, “It’s slush-a-licious!”

If you think that’s over-the-top, read this loopy Amazon review:

Upon discovering this vast beauty located in a not-so-local WalGreens, my happiness meter jumped from “Oh gawd, I need tampons” to “HULLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO SLUSHIES” (no I did not forget my lady things, I just happened to possibly mistakenly pick up cotton balls and twine). Of course, being the impatient person I am, I immediately ripped open that beautiful cyan blue box, with the happy children on the front, their precious cherub faces, gleaming at me with their cheery smiles as if to say, “Come to my slushy fountain, drink upon the abrosia [sic] of the Gods!”. In my exuberance, I did happen to endure the brutal, stabbing wound of a papercut, and some may or may not have gotten on the cup. It is alright, we all need more iron in our diets. Joyfully, I threw the saline-filled-whatevers into the freezer in wait for my delicious slushy shakin’ morning!

Take it from me: She’s just getting warmed up.

Somewhat related: Robert Lane Greene on the nounification of adjectives.

Bonus vocabulary fun: The OED says slush (“partially melted snow or ice; soft mud; food of a watery consistency; rubbishy discourse or literature”) is of “doubtful” origin. Slush fund (“a fund used to buy luxuries or to bribe”) originated in the 1830s in the U.S. Navy. The drink known as slushy goes by many other names, including Hawaiian ice, shave(d) ice, snow cone, and snowball. And that’s just in the U.S.; see this Wikipedia entry for slushy synonyms around the world.

In the Wild: House Whip

Sometimes I’ll spot a name in the wild and it’ll make me smile all day.

Trader Joe’s House Whip is one of those names.

 

“Whippee!” “Whip-itty-doo-dah!”

 

Makes me feel like dancing.

 

Word of the Week: Shmeat

Shmeat: Meat grown in a laboratory from animal cells; the objectives include reducing animal cruelty and increasing the global supply of affordable protein. “Shmeat” is a portmanteau of “sheet” and “meat.”

An undated article on a website called Shmeat.com (apparently operated by SavingAdvice.com) explains the process:

Cells are harvested from a live animal, such as a chicken, pig or cow. The cells are then placed in a special solution of nutrients which mimics the qualities of blood. This nutrient solution will help the cells to multiply where they can then be secured to a spongy sheet which has been soaked with nutrient solution. The sheet is then stretched to increase cell size and protein content. It’s from the combination of this “sheet meat” that shmeat derives its name.

Shmeat was the subject of “Building a $325,000 Burger,”a May 14, 2013, story in the New York Times. Reporting from the Netherlands, where researcher Mark Post has created a proof-of-concept shmeat patty, science writer Henry Fountain noted that the burger “was created at phenomenal cost — 250,000 euros, or about $325,000, provided by a donor who so far has remained anonymous.” Fountain went on:

“This is still an early-stage technology,” said Neil Stephens, a social scientist at Cardiff University in Wales who has long studied the development of what is also sometimes referred to as “shmeat.” “There’s still a huge number of things they need to learn.”

The origins of “shmeat” are uncertain. The earliest citation I could find is in a December 5, 2008, column by Lou Bendrick (“Meet Shmeat”) in the online environmental magazine Grist:

Test-tube meat is also known as in vitro meat, cultured meat, victimless meat, vat-grown meat, hydroponic meat, and, finally, shmeat. (Note to self: Be sure to apply for inevitable X Prize to rename this stuff.)

For now, let’s call it shmeat.

Shmeat is grown from a cell culture (hence the in vitro or cultured prefixes), not from a live animal. These harvested cells are taken from an animal, such as a pig, and placed in a “nutrient-rich medium” that mimics blood. Once the cells multiply they are attached to a spongy scaffold or sheet (sheet + meat = shmeat) that has been soaked with nutrients and stretched to increase cell size and protein content.

“Also known as” suggests that “shmeat” had already entered the vocabulary, but I couldn’t find an earlier citation.

As Bendrick jokingly points out, and as the title of his column underscores, “shmeat” is not a felicitous name for a serious product. (Shortly after the Grist column appeared, a commenter on the Offalgood website said “shmeat” was “a horrible name, it sounds like what you get when you cross shit and meat.”)

Words beginning with shm- indicate mockery or derision in Yiddish (see shmo, shmendrick, shmegegge, shmuck, etc.), and the pattern has been adopted in dismissive English reduplications like fancy-shmancy. (See my recent post, “Name, Shmame,” and related links.)

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Obligatory Urban Dictionary addendum: “Shmeat: Small penis or dick, also reffering [sic] to any person or anything. It can be used for anything anyone and anything can be a shmeat.” Posted November 27, 2006, a full two years before the Grist column.

Weekend Link Pack

Longtime readers may recall my 2008 post about the British energy-drink brand Pussy (“Bad Brand Names: The New Champion!”). Now the UK’s advertising regulator has ruled on complaints about Pussy ads. The deadpan ruling is worth your time for passages like this one:

We noted that the slogan in ad (a) stated “The drink’s pure, it's your mind that's the problem” and considered that strongly suggested that the term “pussy” had a secondary meaning which was not “pure” and was a “problem”, and considered that slogan reinforced the colloquial meaning of “pussy” to those older children or implied that that secondary, colloquial meaning was in some way impolite or even offensive or sexually explicit.

Hat tip: S. Quinn on the American Name Society listserv.

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On DuetsBlog (where I am an occasional contributor), Mark Prus of NameFlash considers the names of minor-league baseball teams. I learned a thing or three: for example, the Las Vegas 51s are not so called because they’re one card short of a deck.

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You’d think a new debit card with “Visa Paywave” would involve some sort of waving activity, right? Gotcha! “Sometimes a product name can sound really good, but it can send the wrong signals,” sighs Australian linguablogger Superlinguo.

April Linkfest

As recently as a few decades ago, most parents gave their children names that would help them fit in: to a family, a clan, or the culture at large. Now a lot of parents want exactly the opposite: names that stand out, as though children were boxes of cereal competing for shelf space. Standing out is the new fitting in. Three recent articles examine the trend:

• “What Baby Names Say About Everything,” in the Boston Globe, looks at how researchers are using the trove of online data about baby names.
   
• “How Much Does Your Name Matter?” is a Freakonomics Radio podcast about the effect of a personal name on school performance, career success, and other outcomes. It opens with a story about a sociologist who named his children E and Yo.
   
• “What Is a Popular Baby Name?” is Laura Wattenberg’s objective and surprising analysis of name popularity. “Even the most popular name in America is given to just one out of every 177 babies,” writes Wattenberg, the author of the respected – and, yes, popular – Baby Name Wizard blog.

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More personal-name news: Nancy’s Baby Names recommends 11 interesting links, including an article about popes’ names, a story in Kashmir Life about Kashmiri naming practices, and posts about sharing and “stealing” baby names.

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I nodded enthusiastically while reading this post on the Lexicon Branding blog on why client-written creative briefs are usually inadequate. (Read my own take on creative briefs for naming projects.)

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NPR has launched an excellent new blog called Code Switch that covers “the frontiers of race, culture, and ethnicity.” Code switching is a term from linguistics, and many of the posts are about language. Start here, with the introductory post “How Code Switching Explains the World.”

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Mexagon? Crunchwich? Origami Tostada? How Taco Bell names its new products. (Hat tip: Karen.)

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Nine red flags before naming your startup – a rare sensible article about name development and trademark.

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Word aversion, word hatred, word peeves:

Why do tech neologisms make people angry? by Tom Chatfield, author of Netymology: A Linguistic Celebration of the Digital World. (Via Wordnik.)

Those irritating verbs-as-nouns (a solve, an ask, the reveal), by Henry Hitchings, author of The Language Wars and impartial observer of language change.

In praise of sensible peeving, on The Economist’s language blog, Johnson, applauds Chatfield and Hitchings for their “sensible contributions to an all-too-often senseless debate.”

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Nine things you probably didn’t know about swear words. And speaking of swearing, don’t even think about using “tabernacle” in  a French-language children’s book that might be read in Quebec. (Via Sesquiotic.)

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“Should I rename my business?” A handy flow chart from brand consultancy A Hundred Monkeys.

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The rather surprising etymology of “dismal.” It’s completely unrelated to “dismay,” by the way.  (Via Language Hat.)

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The New York Times creates haiku from news articles:

How does our algorithm work? It periodically checks the New York Times home page for newly published articles. Then it scans each sentence looking for potential haikus by using an electronic dictionary containing syllable counts. We started with a basic rhyming lexicon, but over time we've added syllable counts for words like “Rihanna” or “terroir” to keep pace with the broad vocabulary of The Times.

A sample:

The air was sticky,
and guerrillas carrying
rifles served him tea

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Instead of awesome, you could say … well, lots of things. (Via Nancy Nall.) 

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The call for entries for the Clio Awards, the Oscars of the advertising agency, used a series of “sliced” images to make industry statistics memorable. They’re striking and clever, except for the last one, “What Creatives Wear to the Clio Awards Ceremony.” Here’s a detail:

 

“Hideous jacket designed by hot but untalented girlfriend.”

Last I heard, there were also a fair number of women creatives in the ad industry. But you won’t see them represented here. Read Ms. magazine’s take, “Mad Men and the Clio Awards: How Much Has Really Changed Since 1965?”

Names in the Wild: Qookies

Spotted at Costco:

 

Qookies are gluten-free cookies made by TruRoots, “inspired by tradition and using recipes perfected by artisanal bakers.” The ingredients list does mention quinoa, so maybe that explains the Q. But why not Quookies?

True, the U-less spelling lends itself to a kooky pairing of Qookies and Qream.

 

 

It’s not perfume. It’s liqueur.

 

For the full scoop on Qream – that’s “Qream with a Q,” “a truly elegant experience for the modern day queen and her court of friends” that’s “created by” rapper/producer/fashion designer Pharrell Williams – get yourself over to The Hairpin. Also check out this story about the $5 million Qream lawsuit.

More Q names here.

Now with Even More Good!

“This nouning of adjectives thing is really getting out of control,” Ben Yagoda tweeted earlier this month. As evidence, he attached this photo:

 

I did a little sleuthing and discovered the perpetrator of “Just Add Good”: Chobani Greek yogurt, which was using the slogan throughout its website.

 

 

 

By the way, although Chobani calls its product “Greek yogurt,” the company was founded by a Turk, Hamdi Ulukaya, who lives in upstate New York near one of the company’s plants. According to the Wikipedia entry, Chobani comes from the Turkish-via-Persian word for “shepherd,” chob-ban (literally, “he who carries a stick”). An archived Chobani FAQ claims chobani is a Greek word. I don’t know any of those languages well enough to weigh in.

About a week ago Chobani switched from “Just Add Good” to a new slogan that uses “real” as a noun:

 

But there’s still plenty of nounish good to go around. Not to mention nounish awesome. Naked Juice billboards all over the Bay Area proclaim that the product has “1 lb. of awesome in every bottle,” which makes it “worth its weight in good.”

The slogan plays on the familiar idiom “worth its weight in gold.” 

 

Naked Juice is based in Monrovia (Los Angeles County). The company was founded in 1983; the juice was originally sold “towel to towel on the beaches of Santa Monica, Calif.”

During Sunday’s Oscars broadcast I saw back-to-back ads with nounified good. In both of them, good is something that goes. Here’s “Get Your Good Going” from Blue Diamond Almonds:

 

The voiceover says:

Good is in every Blue Diamond Almond.
From Whole Natural to Wasabi and Soy Sauce.
Good is a catalyst. Good is contagious.
It’s a wonderful feeling. A magical feeling.
And once it gets going, there’s no stopping what you can do.

New York Life, the biggest life-insurance company in the U.S., wants us to “Keep Good Going”:

 

“It takes all kinds of good to make a family.”

Good is, of course, a legitimate noun as well as an adjective: “the greater good”; “packaged goods”; “the good, the bad, and the ugly.” But Chobani, Naked Juice, Blue Diamond, and New York Life want us to think of good as a nounified adjective, the better to force an association with originality and playfulness – or simply to make us stop and pay attention.

This part-of-speech switching, also known as anthimeria, has become an established feature of contemporary advertising. If the trend continues, it’s possible to envision a future in which all adjectives have become nouns, all nouns have become verbs, and every adverb has been pressed into service as the name of a startup.

Jacked Again

A scant two days after publishing a post about the “Jacked” naming trend I learned about yet another jacked-up brand name.

Cracker Jack’D image from Gawker.

I’m a little late to this party: the Cracker Jack’D brand extension was announced last November by parent company Frito-Lay and started appearing in stores in December. The jacked ingredient in Cracker Jack’D is caffeine: the equivalent of a cup of coffee in every two-ounce bag, according to The Impulsive Buy. The company says Cracker Jack’D is intended only for adult consumers, and of course that stern warning will be 100 percent effective.

Also jacked up: the calorie count. Each wee bag contains about 450 calories (and 680 milligrams of sodium, if you’re counting). Original Cracker Jack has 120 calories per four-ounce “serving” and 70 mg of sodium.

(Right about now might be a good time for you to take a break and read “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food,” the compelling cover story of the February 24 New York Times Magazine. It’s a long excerpt from Michael Moss’s new book, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, and it contains revelations like this one: a serving of Yoplait brand yogurt contains twice as much sugar as a serving of marshmallow-centric Lucky Charms breakfast cereal.)

I can’t explain the apostrophe or the capitalized D in the Cracker Jack’D name. They may be there to preserve the integrity (so to speak) of the original Cracker Jack name, to look old-timey and folksy (like Amaz’n Asian Chik’n and Chop’t), or because some designer thought they looked cool. Less cool is the official spelling: Cracker Jack®’D.

Cracker Jack is one of the oldest surviving food brands in America; Andrew F. Smith, author of The Encyclopedia of Junk Food and Fast Food, calls it “America’s first junk food.” A version of the caramel-corn-and-peanut mix was introduced at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, and the first batch of branded Cracker Jack was produced in 1896. According to company lore, an enthusiastic sampler gave the brand its name when he exclaimed, “That’s crackerjack!” The “prize in every box” was introduced in 1912; the brand mascots, Sailor Joe and his dog Bingo, first appeared in 1918.

The Cracker Jack company was family owned until 1964, when it was sold to Borden. Borden sold the brand to Frito-Lay in 1997.

There are no prizes inside packages of Cracker Jack’D (get over it; you’re a grownup!). Flavors include Cocoa Java, Vanilla Mocha, Salted Caramel, Cheddar BBQ, and the suspiciously kid-friendly-sounding PB and Chocolate.

By the way, the original brand name is always singular: Cracker Jack. That’s why it rhymes with “…if I never get back.”

Naming Trend: Jacked

 

Doritos Jacked

Available in Enchilada Supreme (pictured) and Smoky Chipotle BBQ.

From a review at The Impulsive Buy:

[W]hat was I to think about Doritos introducing the “JACKED” sub-line (I feel strongly it should be all caps) that boasts of Bigger, Bolder, Thicker chips? Should I be enthused, or worried? Was I like a smoker getting excited because his Camels would now contain triple the nicotine? And why “JACKED,” anyway? Were they going to contain Monterey or Cheddar Jack cheese (no), or was  this just  a doomed marketing attempt to seem appropriately “street” (almost certainly)?

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“Jacked: Auto Theft Task Force”

The logo for this reality show on A&E appears to have been carved into a car jack.

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Jack3d Pre-Workout Supplement

“Death After Using Jack3d Shows Gap in Regulation” – New York Times, February 13, 2013:

Pronounced Jacked, the powder contains a stimulant that marketers say increases strength, speed and endurance. …

Yet, last April, federal health regulators issued a warning that the stimulant — called dimethylamylamine, or DMAA — frequently raises blood pressure and heart rate, and could lead to heart attacks. In December 2011, after the deaths of two soldiers who had used Jack3d, the Defense Department removed all products containing DMAA from stores on military bases, including more than 100 GNC shops.

Now the parents of Michael L. Sparling, one of the soldiers who died, have filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against USPlabs, the developer and marketer of Jack3d, and GNC, the store where he bought it.

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“Jacked” in Urban Dictionary

[Verbatim, it should go without saying.]

1. Verb: Past tense
Origin from ‘hijacked’: as the past-progressive meaning stolen in a violent fashion.
Commonly refers to robbery, theft, misuse, seizure, possesion.
2. Adjective
Well muscled, iron-bound, pumped.

1. “Yo, I got up to go to the bathroom and some jerk jacked my seat”
or
“Yesterday I jacked a pack of gum from the mall.”
2. “That weightlifter sure is jacked. Too bad he’s on steroids.”

Somethin’s Missin’

Picking up on yesterday’s theme of apostrophe’d brand names, here are more examples of squiggles in places you wouldn’t expect to find them.

Exhibit A: Amaz’n Asian Sesame Chik’n.

 

I learned about this frozen product at The Impulsive Buy, which tested it and found it “not amaz’n, but appetiz’n.” The “chik’n” spelling here communicates “just kiddin’ – it’s veggie chicken!” That isn’t a hard-and-fast spelling rule, though. As I wrote in a 2011 post about the names of “further processed foods”: “Chik’n (or chick’n) can be chicken-derived or just chicken-ish. It can come from any of a dozen or so unrelated companies. The only thing the odd spellings guarantee is a certain degree of unnatural-ness.”

As for “amaz’n,” I surmise that it’s there 1) to chime with “Asian” and 2) to mirror the look of “chik’n.”

For what it’s worth, “amazing” topped the list of Lake Superior State University’s 2012 List of Banished Words, and there’s a thread on Yelp’s Portland (Oregon) site titled “I Hate the Word ‘AMAZING’.”

 

Exhibit B: Chop’t.

I’d never heard of Chop’t—the fast-salad chain, not to be confused with “Chopped,” the Food Network program—until I read Matthew Yglesias’s withering comments about it on Slate. (My excuse: there are no Chop’t restaurants outside New York and Washington, DC.) Yglesias is annoyed by Chop’t’s wanton use of “Cobb” to describe any old seasonal salad (see also “Stop the Cobb-sanity”), and I can’t say I disagree. Salad historians tell us that the Cobb salad was invented at the Brown Derby in Hollywood and named for the restaurant’s owner, Robert Cobb; the requisite components are chopped greens, tomato, bacon, boiled or roasted breast of chicken (not chik’n!), hard-boiled egg, chives, Roquefort cheese, and red-wine vinaigrette. Yes, hominy, pepper jack cheese, and pita chips are tasty, but they do not belong in a Cobb salad. (See “Flagstaff Food Truck Cobb” on the current seasonal menu.)

But I digress: my own interest is in “Chop’t,” in which the apostrophe replaces a couple of letters and the T substitutes for D, possibly to approximate the word’s actual pronunciation but more likely because CHOPTSALAD.COM was available for purchase.

The spelling conveys a vague if inaccurate sense of old-timey Britishness. But mostly the apostrophe-t just calls attention to itself, the way gratuitous umlauts in brand names do. (The British do prefer -t suffixes for some past-tense verbs such as leapt, spilt, and learnt. I even came across an argument that dreamt and dreamed have different meanings; this may be true in Commonwealth countries, but not in the US.) 

For an even odder example of -ed changing to apostrophe-t, see my 2008 post about “home bake’t delicious muffin.” And for more about “the most misunderstood and misused piece of punctuation in the language,” see The Dreaded Apostrophe.

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UPDATE: Commenter Clachnit reminded me of the Kia cee'd, which I wrote about in (can it be?) 2006.