Fritinancy

Taking the Piss

Who’s minding the store at Target? A week ago Consumerist reported that the retailer was selling a plus-size dress in a color unflatteringly called Manatee Gray. (A manatee is also known as a sea cow.) This week there’s been a cross-lingual dustup over a sandal style called “Orina,” which means “urine” in Spanish.

 

Image from Yahoo Shine. Target quickly removed the product page and is said to be renaming the style.

 

“Does no one speak Spanish at Target HQ or have access to this thing we call Google?” asked Consumerist reporter Mary Beth Quirk. No and no, apparently. Target’s initial defense was that “orina” means “peaceful” in Russian. As though Russian rather than Spanish were the second-most-spoken language in the United States, after English.

I learned about Target’s number-one problem via a tweet from Mighty Red Pen, who also sent me a link to Yahoo Shine’s coverage of the story. Full marks to senior editor Lylah M. Alphonse, whose recounting of other notable naming gaffes sets the record straight on the Chevy Nova “no-go” myth.

Target isn’t the only business with Orina issues. A similar etymological fallacy led to the naming of Café Orina in the Bay Area city of Concord, California.

 

When Maura Storace sent me the photo, she commented, “I wonder if the coffee they serve is amber-colored?”

The café’s About Us page includes this earnest explanation:

Meaning of Orina
Its source is Eirene, a Greek name meaning “Peace.”

Narrative: This was the name of the Greek goddess of peace. Until the 20th century, it was commonly pronounced in three syllables (i-REE-nee).

Very nice, but there are almost 700,000 native Spanish speakers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and only a relative handful of Greek speakers.

Moral: Check several bilingual dictionaries before committing to a lovely-sounding exotic name. And know your market.

And as long as this post is already in the toilet, here’s Kmart’s new TV spot, which – incongruously for a retailer not known for creative marketing – takes positive glee in its potty humor. The much-repeated tagline is “Ship my pants.”

 

 

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For more on the British idiom “taking the piss” – not to be confused with “taking a piss” – read this.

Word of the Week: Cucoloris

Cucoloris: A screen with oddly shaped holes cut through it, placed before a light source to throw diverse shadows on an otherwise uniform surface. (Source: Idiom Savant: Slang As It Is Slung.) Also spelled cucaloris, kookaloris, kukaloris, cookaloris, cucalorus, etc. Shortened to cookie, kook, or cuke. Alternate names: gobo, ulcer, dapple sheet.

 

Wooden cucoloris, B&H Photo and Video, New York.

 

The film critic Roger Ebert, who died last week, included kookalouris in Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary, published in 1994. From his entry:

Popular in the 1930s; back in style again with the movies of Steven Spielberg, who uses a kookalouris with underlighting to show faces that seem to be illuminated by reflections from pots of gold, buckets of diamonds, pools of fire, pirate maps, and radioactive kidneys.

(Read more of Ebert’s movie tropes, including Inevitable Sister, Mid-Wife Crisis, Wunza Movies, and “Fruit Cart!”, in an excerpt published in the Visual Thesaurus. And scroll down for more on Ebert.)

It’s fairly well established that cucoloris, however you spell it, comes from the world of Hollywood cinematographers. Beyond that, however, the word’s origins and etymology are frustratingly unclear. In an episode that aired last year, Grant Barrett, co-host of the radio show “A Way with Words,” told listeners that he’d spent “days” researching a Double-Tongued Dictionary entry for cookie.

“Hollywood is filled with people who like to invent myth,” Barrett said. “I counted seven different origin stories for this term, and they’re fun, but they’re throwaway.” The best story he encountered is from a footnote in a 1954 issue of the Western Folklore journal, which called cucoloris “a coined word of no special philological significance or implication.” The writer did suggest, however, that cucoloris “might be related to the famed director George Cukor.”

Barrett’s etymological note for the cookie entry doesn’t mention Cukor, but it doesn’t reach any other satisfying conclusions, either:

A claimed etymology is that kukaloris is Greek for “breaking of light,” but there seems to be no evidence to support this, nor can the etymological claims in the 2001 cite below* be verified. Another claim is that it is named after its inventor, a Mr. Cucoloris; however, this, too, lacks supporting evidence.

* The word “cucaloris” comes from the Greek for shadow play.» —by Ivan Curry Directing & Producing for Television Nov. 29, 2001.

Nor is there evidence to support the assertion in TV Tropes:

The word cukoloris is Gaelic and means “ghost charm.” How a Gaelic word became a standard term in film production is unknown.

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A note about Roger Ebert: I never met or corresponded with him, but I was among his many admiring readers and Twitter followers—even when I was muttering “WTF?” about his conclusions. In 2010, I attended a program at the San Francisco International Film Festival at which he received an award; cancer had already taken away his ability to talk, but his impish wit and pointed opinions suffered not a bit from the intervention of a speech synthesizer. After answering questions from the stage of the Castro Theater, he introduced Julia, which starred Tilda Swinton – “ Saint Tilda,” Ebert called her – and which Ebert assured us was a great, great film we were privileged to see. (Released in 2009, it had been largely ignored by theaters.) Now, I grant that Swinton is never less than fully committed to a role, but Julia was godawful: violent, amoral, ugly, pointless, and, at 144 minutes, seemingly interminable. About a third of the audience left before it was over. I stuck it out, but – to borrow a phrase Ebert himself made famous – I hated, hated, hated this movie. And yet I loved Ebert for championing it, and for being not just a critic but also an exuberant fan. I will miss him a lot.

What Were They Thinking?

Four company names that are not as amusing, meaningful, or intelligible as their creators assume.

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Congratulations to Smorn on exceeding its Kickstarter goal before the deadline. Maybe the founders will set aside some of the excess cash for a new name, because the current one—a regrettable portmanteau of smart and horn—is doing them no favors. I guarantee you that no one will decipher “smart” from “sm-”or “horn” from “-orn.” When even TechCrunch says your product “is cooler than it sounds,” you know the name’s a problem. The product seems terrific; it deserves a smart name, not two unhelpful letters from the word smart. P.S. “Glorp”—for the glow-in-the-dark version—is no better. (For more on bad names that start with sm-, see this post about Smeg and this one about Smencils.)

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If I gave you four chances to guess what Ecwid is, I bet you’d lose—even if I showed you the logo.

European Community Wealth Information Department? Something about equitable? Something in Welsh? Ecological baby buggies for widdle tiny sextuplets?

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. This terrible name (for a maker of online shopping-cart software) turns out to be another regrettable portmanteau: a blend of “e-commerce” and “widgets.”

Let’s review: 1) “ec” does not connote “e-commerce” to anyone, 2) “wid” does not connote “widget” to anyone, and 3) “widgets” is very 2005.

Maybe “Ecwid” seemed brilliant in Russia, where the company was founded, but it’s unfathomable, not to mention icky-sounding, in the US. Now that the company has offices in Southern California, it’s time for a deep rethink.

By the way, when I tweeted about the Ecwid name last month, the company responded defensively:

@fritinancy good or bad, it’s unique, and we reap lots of benefits from that. And so do our customers too.

— Ecwid Team (@ecwid) January 30, 2013

Good or bad?

P.S. “Unique” does not translate to “effective.”

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μBiome uses the Greek letter μ—the symbol for “micro”—in its logo, but the English letter “u” everywhere else (ubiome.com; “uBiome is the world’s first effort to map the human microbiome with citizen science”).

So is the company name pronounced “microbiome” or “you-biome”? Or “mee-biome” (μ in modern Greek)? Or “myoo-biome” (μ in English)? It looks as though μBiome has learned nothing from the confusing example of μTorrent (scroll down to #4).

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When your company is called White Dental Supply and you don’t sell dental supplies, people naturally get confused. No matter how many times you say “We’re an Internet marketing company!” they still ask for floss samples. So you change the name. To Pitooey! With an exclamation mark. Because it sounds like what you do after you brush and rinse? No, because it’s “the language of penguins.”

Of course.

Unfortunately, the CEO speaks the language of buzzword bingo:

The name Pitooey! promotes the strong social media and mobile marketing background of our company. In 2013 we will be pivoting into a new industry with a suite of exciting products and services, and this name change reflects this exciting transformation.

Pfooey.

Word of the Week: Tannoy

Tannoy: (UK) A loudspeaker or public-address system. From Tannoy, the trademark of a speaker manufacturer founded in London in 1926 and based in Scotland since the 1970s; genericized since the 1940s. Also used as a generic verb, “to call someone over a public-address system.”

Tannoy is a blend of tantalum alloy, the material used in an electrolytic rectifier developed by the company. The chemical element tantalum (symbol Ta) was discovered in 1802 and named for Tantalus, the character from Greek mythology who was forced to stand for eternity beneath a tree whose fruit was just out of his grasp. As you may have guessed, “Tantalus” is also the source of the English verb tantalize.

I knew about Tantalus and tantalize but had never encountered tannoy until I read a story by the actor John Lithgow published in the New York Times earlier this month. Lithgow is the only American in the cast of a current National Theatre production, The Magistrate; his essay is about the differences between US and UK theater customs. Here’s the lede:

The language of theater here is slightly different from ours in New York. The crackly speaker in a London dressing room is called the “tannoy.” The opening night of a London show is called its “Press Night.” When a stage manager announces the start of a performance, London actors don’t hear the word “places.” They hear “beginners.”

If you aren’t in London, you may be able to see Lithgow in The Magistrate in your own city through the magic of National Theatre Live, which broadcasts productions live (or almost live) to cinemas around the world. I caught The Magistrate in Berkeley last week and enjoyed it: it’s a late-Victorian farce, so expect plenty of groan-worthy plot contrivances along with well-earned laughs. The staging and acting—Lithgow’s included—are first rate. Check the site for broadcast dates.

Word of the Week: Arithmetic

Arithmetic: The science of numbers; the art of computation by figures. From Latin arithmetica, originally Greek arithmetike (“the counting art”). In English since early the 14th century, originally as “arsmetrike” because of the false Latin etymology ars metrica, “the art of measuring.” Standardized to arithmetic by mid-17th century. Arithmetic replaced Middle English tælcræft, literally “tell-craft,” in which “tell” meant “to reckon” or “to calculate,” a sense we retain today in “bank teller” and “to tell time.”

Arithmetic was in the news last week after former President Bill Clinton used the word six times in his fact-filled and rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte.

 

MinnPost.com, Sept. 6, 2012

Here’s the first usage (from the transcript of the speech as delivered):

Now, people ask me all the time how we got four surplus budgets in a row. What new ideas did we bring to Washington? I always give a one-word answer: Arithmetic. (Sustained cheers, applause.)

Arithmetic suited Clinton’s rhetorical purposes because—in contrast to, say, math—it suggests “elementary” and “basic.” Arithmetic is what we learn in grade school: it’s times tables, not quadratic equations; long division, not differential calculus. Clinton drove home that point in a later line about his differences with Republican opponents over the national debt:

It was a highly inconvenient thing for them in our debates that I was just a country boy from Arkansas, and I came from a place where people still thought two and two was four. (Laughter, applause.) It’s arithmetic.

(Emphasis added.)

If you missed the speech. here’s video with annotation from New York Times reporters.

Also of interest:

Clinton made so many changes to his written text—ad-libs and deliberate revisions—that the speech ran almost twice as long as scheduled. To see exactly how he altered the text, take a look at The Atlantic’s marked-up version. BuzzFeed offers a slightly different version, which contains a couple of changes sure to please print editors: Clinton’s correct lower-casing of “president” when it doesn’t precede a proper name (“the next president of the United States”) and of “bless” (“God bless America”).

“Fixin’ to Get Folksy,” an analysis of the speech’s homespun rhetorical devices. (Ben Zimmer at Word Routes.)

Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker says Clinton’s speech was “one of the greatest tours de force in convention history”:

In its intensity, in the palpable love between performer and audience, in its passion, in its earnestness, in its straightforwardness—in its politics, even!—this was the rhetorical equivalent of a Bruce Springsteen concert.

James Fallows at The Atlantic on why Clinton’s speeches succeed: “Because he treats listeners as if they are smart.” That’s a lesson for every speaker and speechwriter.

Update: Lucy Ferriss, writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Lingua Franca blog, takes a close look at some of Clinton’s rhetorical devices:

This call to “listen” to what’s “important” is the chief emendation Clinton makes to a text that might otherwise, rhetorically, echo what not only the First Lady but also the other pundits had been saying from the platform. Even more brilliant is the addition of the “some brass” line, which will haunt our impressions of Paul Ryan henceforward.

Etymology Isn’t Enough: The Aegis Problem

One of the underwriters of my local public-radio station is Aegis Living, which operates “residential communities” for old folks in California, Nevada, and Washington. “Aegis”—which should be pronounced with a long E in the first syllable—has an appropriate meaning for this company: protection, sponsorship, guidance. The word comes from Greek aigis, meaning “goatskin”; in Greek myth, the shields of Athena and Zeus were made of goatskin. In contemporary English, we usually encounter “aegis” in a phrase like “under the aegis of.”

Great story, right?

Here’s the problem: Every time the morning radio announcer acknowledges Aegis, he mispronounces the word so that it sounds almost exactly like “ageist.”

Ouch.

That’s not just a mispronunciation; it’s a miscommunication. I’m sure Aegis would no more want to be associated with the negative connotations of ageism than it would choose to name a new residential community “Elder Abuse Lodge.”

I always encourage my clients to choose names with positive etymologies and good stories. But etymology and story aren’t enough: Names also need to be memorable and pronounceable. And a foreign-looking, relatively obscure word like “aegis” is almost guaranteed to confuse some readers and speakers, even well-educated public-radio announcers.

If a common mispronunciation can contradict your brand message, please think beyond etymology and story and choose a name that sounds right.

Six Naming Questions You May Have Overlooked

Let’s say you’ve spent a lot of time and money developing a name that’s distinctive, legally available, and a good match for your naming brief. You can still end up with a less-than-desirable name if you neglect to ask  these important questions.

1. How will it look in lower-case spelling? A name like IfByPhone or PopUpEdu depends for clarity on intercap letters. On Twitter and other applications, however, the name may appear in all lower-case letters—ifbyphone, popupedu—with a potential loss of intelligibility and pronounceability.

2. How will it look in black and white? Color can transform your company or product name into a sharp-looking logo. But for some applications—press kits, white papers, email—you won’t have the benefit of color. If you rely on color to make your point, as the Big Ten athletic conference did in its recent logo redesign, you risk losing your message. (I’m not saying that Big Ten is necessarily confusing anyone, but a smaller organization that attempts a similar strategy may be asking for trouble.)

3. How will it read in the newspaper? Speaking of black-and-white, print journalism isn’t dead yet. No matter how stridently you insist on accent marks or punctuation in your name (Aol. and Yahoo!, I’m talking to you), the business reporter on deadline is unlikely is share your obsession.

4. How does it sound on the telephone? Or in everyday conversation, for that matter? I've written previously about the counterintuitive pronunciation of Virgance. Here’s an even more-boggling example: μTorrent, a popular file-sharing client, is spelled with the Greek letter μ (mu), which is commonly pronounced mee (in modern Greek), myoo (in English), or micro (in scientific measurements). But μTorrent’s URL is utorrent.com. The program’s Swedish creator, Ludvig Strigeus, “usually” pronounces the name as “you torrent” but has also suggested “microtorrent,” “mytorrent” (my, pronounced mee, is Swedish for μ), and “mutorrent” as possible pronunciations. For a consumer-facing company or product, this much word-of-mouth confusion would be catastrophic; it’s not exactly wonderful for μTorrent, either. (See also #3, above.)

5. Do you have a misleading or undesirable acronym? I’m currently talking with a prospective client, a startup, whose working name is a three-word idiom that ends in a word starting with “U.” Reduced to its initials, the company looks like a university. That’s misleading, but it could be much worse: the initials could be a real WTF.

6. Finally, do proceed carefully with those qrazy Q-names. I still don’t know whether QRANK is pronounced “cue-rank” or “crank.”

 

Beware of Greeks

You may have read about the Japanese "space yacht" that will be launched later this month; it's a large sail that will be propelled exclusively by solar energy. Its name? Ikaros, an acronym for Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun. Oh, and also an allusion to another ambitious aviator, Icarus (or Ikaros). In the ancient Greek story, Icarus donned wings of wax, attempted to fly, and plunged to his death when the sun's heat melted the wax. It's meant to be a lesson in the consequences of hubris.

You'd think that "Ikaros" would be an inauspicious name for a spacecraft.* (Writing for the naming blog CatchThis, Aaron Hall called Ikaros "embarrassing and a huge naming mistake.") But Yuichi Tsuda, space systems expert at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, apparently doesn't see it that way. While acknowledging the connection with the doomed flyboy, Tsuba Tsuda assured journalists that "this Ikaros will not fly into the sun."

It's tempting to attribute the misnomer to cultural differences. But "Ikaros" is just one example of imprudent classical borrowings. Here are a few others:

Midas. There's Midas Muffler, of course (which owns midas.com), and more than 300 additional Midas trademarks in the USPTO database, including marks for a chicken sauce, a window film, and a "wealth advisor." King Midas, you may recall, was given the power to turn anything he touched into gold. So far, so good. But when his food and drink turned to inedible gold, he cursed the gift. In some tellings, Midas even transformed his daughter into a golden statue and lost her forever. Inconsolable, he renounced his wealth and abandoned his palace. In a sub-plot, he ended up with donkey's ears. A sad tale all around, but the only part those 300-plus trademark owners seem to have heard is the "turned-to-gold" part.

Pandora. If you listen to music online, you probably know about Pandora.com, the free Internet radio service. But there are more than 30 additional registered trademarks that include "Pandora," including Pandora's Chest ("small pouch made for bras"), Pandora's Unforgettable Moments (jewelry), Pandorapedia (books and stationery products; the mark is registered to 20th Century Fox), and Pandora's Boxxx ("DVDs, adult novelty items, and marital aids"). I once wrote ads for a company called Pandora's Confections that made chocolate eggs that opened to reveal chocolate chicks. It always struck me as slightly bizarre, given that the original Pandora—the first woman, in Greek mythology—was responsible for releasing all of the world's diseases when she opened that fateful box (actually a jar). Sure, she snapped the lid back in time to keep Hope alive, but that's pretty meager comfort.

Cressida. In accounts of the Trojan Wars, including the Iliad, Cressida is a Trojan woman who pledges her love to Troilus, the eldest son of King Priam. Then she's sent to the Greeks in a hostage exchange, forgets about Troilus, and takes up with the Greek warrior Diomedes. Homer, Bocaccio, Chaucer, and Shakespeare called her "faithless Cressida," and used her as "a paragon of female inconstancy" (says Wikipedia). The Japanese auto maker Toyota, however, disregarded the sordid story when it chose "Cressida" as the name of a midsize luxury sedan it sold from 1977 to 1993. The Cressida model was a success, but "faithless" seems an apt epithet for Toyota this year, given the forced recall of thousands of vehicles because of problems with accelerator pedals, traction control, and other defects.

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* Icarus is also the name of the international journal of solar system studies, published by Cornell University.

Image: "The Fall of Icarus," by Peter Paul Rubens, from here.

How the Anthora Got Its Name

The creator of New York City's once-ubiquitous Greek-themed paper coffee cup, Leslie Buck (né Laszlo Büch), has died at 87.

I've sipped from many of them, but until today hadn't known the cups have a name: Anthora.

A fittingly elegiac obituary in the New York Times reveals that Leslie Buck was born in 1922 to a Jewish family in Khust, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine); he survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald and emigrated after the war to New York, where he Americanized his name. He ran an import-export business with one of his brothers, then started a paper-cup company, Premier Cup. In the mid-1960s, he joined a start-up, Sherri Cup Company in Kensington, Connecticut, eventually becoming its director of marketing.

Obituary writer Margalit Fox writes:

Sherri was keen to crack New York’s hot-cup market. Since many of the city’s diners were owned by Greeks, Mr. Buck hit on the idea of a Classical cup in the colors of the Greek flag. Though he had no formal training in art, he executed the design himself.

The cup was blue, Ms. Fox writes, "with a white meander ringing the top and bottom; down each side was a drawing of the Greek vase known as an amphora."

How did it come to be called Anthora? According to Mr. Buck's son, Robert, “Anthora” comes from “amphora,” as filtered through Mr. Buck’s Eastern European accent.

Ms. Fox waxes lyrical in her description of the Anthora:

On front and back, Mr. Buck emblazoned the Anthora with three steaming golden coffee cups. Above them, in lettering that suggests a Classical inscription, was the Anthora’s very soul — the motto. It has appeared in many variant texts since then; Mr. Buck’s original, with its welcome intimations of tenderness, succor and humility, was simply this:

We Are Happy
To Serve You.

The Sherri Cup Company was later bought by the Solo Cup Company. "Mr. Buck made no royalties from the cup," Ms. Fox writes, "but he did so well in sales commissions that it hardly mattered . . . On his retirement from Sherri in 1992, the company presented Mr. Buck with 10,000 specially made Anthoras, printed with a testimonial inscription."

UPDATE: Barry Popik, who maintains the all-things-New York website The Big Apple, recounts a slightly different story about the origin of "Anthora." In his April 10, 2005, entry, Popik says the name came from a misprint in a newspaper article about a sunken Greek ship:

In the story, the urns were called "anthora," rather than "amphora." "I took the name," says Mr. Buck, the cup's creator, who retired from Sherri in 1992. The original engraving of the cup design, unchanged for more than 30 years, hangs in his home office.

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Ten-ounce ceramic Greek cup, $9.48 at Amazon.

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?