Fritinancy

How Twinkies Got Its Name

Hostess Brands Inc., the 82-year-old snack-foods company based in Irving, Texas, announced today that it will close its plants and fire all 18,000 of its workers. The company had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January. The corporate website says the company “was forced by a Bakers Union strike” to shut down. The union says the claim is false.

Hostess—founded in Missouri in 1930 as Interstate Bakeries Corporation—had been the largest wholesale baker and distributor of baked goods in the United States. Its many brands included Wonder Bread, Dolly Madison, Ho Hos, Sno Balls, Ding Dongs, and Colombo, but the company’s most famous product name may have been Twinkies, the “golden sponge cake with creamy filling” with a seemingly limitless shelf life.

Why was it called “Twinkies”? Serendipity.

 

Via Chicago Tribune.

According to a Chicago Tribune story, the first Twinkies “bounced out of the ovens at Continental Baking Co.” in River Forest, Illinois, in 1930:

Plant manager James Dewar was looking to create a cheap, two-for-a nickel snack. So he grabbed some shortcake pans and got cookin’. Dewar got the name from a billboard for Twinkle Toe Shoes. He shortened it to Twinkies, and the rest is snack food history.

That history took a grim turn during the 1979 trial of Dan White, the San Francisco supervisor who assassinated Mayor George Moscone and a fellow supervisor, Harvey Milk. White’s defense lawyers argued that their client’s mental capacity had been damaged by his excessive consumption of junk food. No specific food product was ever mentioned in the courtroom, but reporters coined “Twinkie defense” as shorthand for the argument. The term survives “as a derisive term for an improbable legal defense” (Wikipedia).

The sausage-shaped character on the Twinkies package has a name: Twinkie the Kid. A registered trademark since 1971, it was used in commercials and in collectible products, which are probably going to become a little more collectible.

Today’s Chicago Tribune has a slide show of 15 “iconic” Hostess products, including Holsum bread, which at one point used this dandy slogan:

“If you had a million dollars you couldn’t buy better bread.”

According to a Wikipedia entry, “Holsum” was used by many retail bakeries in the early 20th century, when whimsical phonetic brand spellings were all the rage. (See my August 2011 Visual Thesaurus column, “Phood for Thought,” for more examples.) In 1908, the W.E. Long Company of Chicago acquired exclusive rights to the name. Holsum bread is still sold; its mascot, Mr. Slice, was created in 1976.

UPDATE: At Duets Blog, trademark lawyer Dan Kelly considers the post-dissolution fate of Hostess Brand’s many marks.

How Zara Got Its Name

If you’re in North America and have never heard of Zara, it’s probably because you don’t live in one of a handful of cities (Toronto, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, et al.) where there’s a Zara store. In much of the rest of the world, however, the Zara brand is ubiquitous; in fact, Zara is the world’s biggest retailer. It earned that title by specializing in “fast fashion”: quickly produced, quickly distributed, and quickly replaced imitations of current trends. In an article for the November 11 New York Times Magazine, reporter Suzy Hansen tours the corporate headquarters of Inditex, the parent company of Zara and several other retail brands that collectively make about 840 million garments a year and have about 5,900 stores in 85 countries, “though that number is always changing because Inditex has in recent years opened more than a store a day, or about 500 stores a year.”

So where did the Zara name come from?

 

Zara store in Dundee, UK. Photo: Wikipedia.

 

The first Zara store opened in 1975 in La Coruña, a small city in Galicia, in the northwest corner of Spain. Founder Amancio Ortega Gaona, who is now 76 and ranked the third-richest man in the world, wanted to call the store Zorba, after the 1964 film Zorba the Greek:

“I don’t think they were thinking of making history, just that it was a nice name,” [Inditex communications director Jesus] Echevarría said. “But apparently there was a bar that was called the same, Zorba, like two blocks away, and the owner of the bar came and said, ‘This is going to confuse things to have two Zorbas.’ They had already made the molds for the letters in the sign, so they just rearranged them to see what they could find. They found Zara.”

Scrabble writ large, you might say.

A few other tidbits of interest from the story:

• Inditex doesn’t advertise and “hardly has a marketing department.” What marketing it does do, Hansen writes, “is all about real estate. The company invests heavily in the beauty, historical appeal and location of its shops.” In Spain, there are Zara stores in an 18th-century convent in Salamanca and in a historic movie theater in Elche.

• In addition to Zara, Inditex brands include Zara Home, Bershka, Massimo Dutti, Oysho, Stradivarius, Pull&Bear, and Uterqüe. (See below for my naming notes.)

• The Spanish economy is in terrible shape, but Inditex is thriving. One reason, Hansen writes: “Every piece of clothing the company makes has, in a way, been requested. A business model that is so closely attuned to the customer does not share the cycle of a financial crisis.”

• “[T’he Inditex effect is not confined to cheap, fast fashion. It has forced — or inspired, depending on how you look at it — people to spend their money in a different manner. In Zara, every purchase is an impulse buy; there’s no longer any saving up for that gorgeous leather jacket in the window. … It’s a way of consumption that has conditioned buyers to expect this up-to-the-minute trendiness and variety in higher-end labels as well.” In fact, designer brands like Prada and Louis Vuitton, which used to produce just two lines a year – spring/summer and autumn/winter – now make four to six collections. “That’s absolutely because of Zara,” says Masoud Golsorkhi, the editor of the London fashion magazine Tank.

My own naming notes:

• Inditex is a shortening of Industria de Diseño Textil, S.A. (Textile Design Industries).

• Pull&Bear sells “casual, laid-back clothing and accessories for young people with a very urban style, at accessible prices.”* (Wikipedia) I have no idea where the name comes from, but it’s right in step with the X & Y retail naming trend.

• Uterqüe’s name comes from Latin uterque, meaning “each of both.” It’s pronounced oo-ter-kway; the dieresis over the U gives Spanish speakers a pronunciation cue. (Without it, the Spanish pronunciation would be oo-ter-kay.) Uterqüe – the newest addition to the Inditex stable – sells women’s ready-to-wear and accessories at slightly higher prices than Zara’s.

• Oysho sells lingerie and sleepwear. I haven’t been able to find out what, if anything, “Oysho” means. 

• Bershka’s customer is youthful but not as “urban” as Pull&Bear’s. Again: no idea where the name comes from. UPDATE: See Licia’s comment on Oysho and Bershka, below.

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* Isn’t every price “accessible” (or “affordable”) if you have enough money?

Argo

I saw Argo over the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. Directed by and starring Ben Affleck, it’s the smart, suspenseful, mostly true story of how six Americans were brought out of Tehran – “exfiltration,” often abbreviated to “exfil,” is the term of art – in 1980, in the middle of Iran’s Islamic revolution. (Fifty-two other US Embassy employees weren’t so lucky: They spent 444 days as protagonists in what became known as the Iran hostage crisis.)

I say Argo is mostly true because, like most narrative art, it takes some liberties with historical fact, telescoping and condensing and even inventing when it serves the story. For a more literal account of the real-life drama, whose details were declassified in 1997, you may want to read the memoir of Antonio Mendez, the CIA agent who masterminded the escape. (He’s played by Affleck in the film.)

Genuine publicity for a fake movie. Via Foreign Policy.

 

Or you can read “How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans From Tehran,” Joshuah Bearman’s 2007 article for Wired that’s getting a lot of new eyeballs this season. It’s a terrific read that fills in many of the blanks (such as the roles of some unsung or undersung Canadians). For my part, I was amused by one passage toward the end that’s omitted from the movie but appealed to my love of names, puns, and coincidences.

A little background: Argo was the actual title of the fake sci-fi flick that formed the cover for the exfiltration. And Anders is Bob Anders, a senior embassy officer who was one of the six Americans being exfiltrated.

Here’s the passage from Bearman’s story:

As they boarded the plane from the windy tarmac, Anders noticed the word AARGAU was printed across the fuselage — the name of the Swiss region where the plane originated was strangely similar to that of their cover story. He punched Mendez’s arm and said, “You guys arrange everything, don’t you?”

In Affleck’s movie, the Argo title is never fully explained. A minor character asks whether it’s a reference to the ship of Jason and his Argonauts. “Ar … go fuck yourself,” replies Lester Siegel, the (fictional) Hollywood producer played by Alan Arkin. And, according to an account in Foreign Policy of the actual events, that “profane ‘knock-knock’ joke” is in fact how Argo got its name.

An additional tidbit from Foreign Policy:

One “ironic coda” from the CIA account: “By the time Studio Six folded several weeks after the rescue, we had received 26 scripts.… One was from Steven Spielberg.”

In Canada, by the way, l’affaire Argo is known as “the Canadian Caper.”

On the Visual Thesaurus: Brand Name Stories

My new column for the Visual Thesaurus tells the stories behind eight brand names, from Aspirin—yes, it used to be a trademark—to Twitter. Full access requires a subscription (still less than $20 a year!); here’s an excerpt.

IKEA. The global home-furnishings company reveals its humble roots in its name, which is an acronym. I and K are the initials of Ingvar Kamprad, the company's founder; the E stands for Elmtaryd, the farm where Kamprad grew up; and the A is for Agunnaryd, Kamprad's home village. As for the names of IKEA's products — Bestå, Poäng, Ektorp, and all the rest — there's a method to their seeming madness.

Read the rest of “From Aspirin to Twitter: Stories Behind the Brand Names.”

Electable Collectibles

The first presidential debate will be held tonight, in Denver; the general election is less than five weeks away. So it’s time to ask a serious question: How are the campaigns shaping up tchotchke-wise?

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At 7-Eleven stores in 34 states, you can let the caffeine do the talking – and the predicting. And you get to keep your cup as a souvenir. Last Friday, you didn’t even have to pay for the coffee.

 

 

According to 7-Eleven’s 7-Election website, President Obama cups have a substantial lead over Mitt Romney cups everywhere except Idaho and West Virginia.

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Berkeley’s family-owned Virginia Bakery is holding its own consumption contest. To cast your vote, buy a photo-decorated sugar cookie.

Guess who’s winning?

According to a report on the Berkeleyside news site, the bakery has sold presidential cookies in previous elections, but this is the first time it’s tracking the results. As one commenter observed, “Finally … a chance to eat the rich.”

*

From tasty to tasteless:

 

 

This “Obama reusable cloth pantyliner pad,” sold by Mimi’s Dreams on Etsy, is “the perfect size for teenagers and petite women.” Ladies, don’t you want a muumuu made of that fabric? (Via Buzzfeed.)

*

Speaking of the curse, here’s SNL’s ad for g.o.b. tampons—made for women by the men of the GOP. (“Now with wings!”)

The brand name is a parody of o.b. tampons, which were developed in the early 1960s by a German gynecologist, Judith Esser. “o.b.” name is an abbreviation of “ohne binde,” German for “without napkins.”

*

And staying in the nether regions, Say It With a Condom is back with the 2012 edition of candidate condoms.

 

Obama condoms: “Intended to get the general public laid, not laid off.”

Romney condoms: “For the elitist penis.” Four years ago, according to my notes, it was the Obama condoms that made that “elitist” claim.

*

A concept only, but what a great concept: Barack Obama, the Blue Note years, from the British pop-culture blog Voices of East Anglia.

Lots more album covers at the link. (Via Girls of a Certain Age.)

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The Sassy Gator, another Etsy seller, is offering this embroidered T-shirt in babies’ and children’s sizes for $20.

 

“Mitt Romney Is My Homeboy”

“Homeboy”? Really? A tip for Sassy Gator: Mitt Romney ain’t your homeboy unless your home has a car elevator.

*

This Obama Birther Certificate Tray from Fishs Eddy* proved so popular that it’s now backordered until December. 

Perfect for serving pupu to your Democratic friends … or crow to the Republicans.

Fishs Eddy is also selling this 10-ounce Barack Obama mug  and a companion Michelle Obama mug. Nothing for the competition except a Republican elephant puzzle.

*

Wish it would all just stop already? I feel your pain. And I have just the remedy: this political ice pack, available at Uncommon Goods.

Freeze, use,  repeat until Election Day.

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* The story behind the Fishs Eddy name: “It was 1986 and we were driving around the back roads upstate New York (code for lost). We stumbled upon a small hamlet called Fishs Eddy. It was a perfectly odd name so we borrowed it for our just-opened shop near Gramercy Park.”

A Nice Mention on "A Way With Words"

Many thanks to Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette, co-hosts of public radio’s “A Way With Words,” for mentioning my blog in their September 21 program! The segment is called “How Products Got Their Names,” and if you missed the broadcast you can listen online.

The rest of the episode—“Good Juju”—is entertaining and informative, too. It includes segments on M&Ms, Hallmark Cards, restaurant lingo, aspirin (the name), and, of course, juju. 

I wrote about how aspirin got its name about a year ago. You can read all of my “How They Got That Name” posts here.

Sketchy?

Here’s a business name that takes a big semantic risk. Does it succeed? You decide.

The name is Sketch Ice Cream, which—as reported by the independent news site Berkeleyside—reopened last week in a new West Berkeley location after a three-year hiatus.

The owners explain the origin of “Sketch” on their FAQ page:

How did you come up with the name Sketch? In the same way our ice cream is made with the purest ingredients, similarly a sketch is the purest form of ideas.

OK, so they didn’t hire a professional writer. What’s evident, though, is that they define sketch the old-fashioned way: a drawing. The problem? There’s a competing, slangy, adjectival sense of sketch and sketchy: “unsafe,” “creepy,” “iffy,” “of dubious character.” And that connotation is exactly what a food-service establishment should strive to avoid.

I wrote last year about the dual meanings of sketch and sketchy here on the blog and, in more extended form, in my column for the Visual Thesaurus. (The paywall should be down now.) The “unsafe” sense has been in circulation, especially among teens and young adults, since at least 2008, when linguist Connie Eble documented it among students at North Carolina University the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is sometimes said to have originated among methampetamine users, for whom “sketch” has been slang for “meth” for at least 20 years. However, Ben Zimmer has traced the “unsavory” meaning of “sketch” back even further, to as early as 1971.

As long as I’m quibbling, I challenge Sketch’s assertion that “a sketch is the purest form of ideas.” Rather, it’s the roughest form of an idea—hasty, incomplete, and lacking in details. That’s not a positive association for a pricey ice-cream parlor, either.

I do give Sketch credit for a cute, childlike wordmark, which I’d reproduce here if it weren’t rendered in such faint gray type as to be practically indistinguishable from the website’s white background. In fact, the entire site is a pain to read. Please fix that, Sketch! And if you decide to refine your name into something less shady and unfinished, give me a call.

One X at a Time … Again

This formula has proved to be a persistent and productive snowclone (or sloganclone, when it’s used in marketing). Here are two grocery-store variations I spotted within the last week.

 

“Help the world one banana at a time” is Whole Foods’ slogan for Whole Trade bananas, the first product to carry the Whole Trade guarantee. According to the corporate blog, the Whole Trade guarantee “is our commitment to quality, the environment and ethical trade with partners in developing countries.” The “one X at a time” sloganclone is frequently preceded by some variation of “Help[ing] the world” or “Saving the planet.”

 

Eat Your Vegetables is the product name; “…One Chip at a Time” is the slogan. The parent company’s name, barely visible up in the right-hand corner, is the cutesy Snikiddy. The name-origin story is cute, too (if in need of some tough-love editing):

Where did the name come from? Snikiddy® is a shortened (and let’s face it, easier to say) form of the word persnickety, which means choosy or picky. Growing up, Janet (Mary’s mom) and her siblings were known around school as the Snikiddy kids (a badge they wore proudly) because they always ate healthy lunches. Their mom (Grandma), ahead of her time with her passion for good health, would pack their lunch boxes full of locally grown produce and very simple foods. A teacher once referred to them as being persnickety and the kids’ version of the word (snikiddy) stuck.

It doesn’t hurt that the “snik” in Snikiddy suggests “snack.”

See more of my “One X at a Time” posts here and here.

How Livemocha Got Its Name

I’ve been researching the rise of online education for a project I’m working on. One of the companies in this growing field has a name that fits nicely into this week’s Life-or-Death theme: Livemocha.

 

 

Livemocha was founded in 2007 to bring language learning to a global audience. It currently offers courses in 38 languages, including Arabic, Japanese, Hindi, Urdu, Indonesian, Hebrew, and Turkish. Fees start at about $10 per course; students come from “every country in the world.” The website is elegantly designed, informative, and welcoming.

I originally encountered the Livemocha name out of context, and nothing about it suggested “education” or “language learning” to me. I was uncertain about the pronunciation: did “live” have a short vowel (suggesting an imperative verb) or a long one (suggesting “alive”)? Was “mocha” pronounced with a /k/ in the middle, like the color/coffee drink/city in Yemen; or phonetically, as in “cha-cha-cha”?

So I emailed the company to get the name story. The gracious reply came from Kira Fickensher, Livemocha’s community manager:

Livemocha is 2 parts: Live and Mocha. Live is pronounced lahyv as in “live broadcast” (the adverb/adjective form of the word). It represents live learning, live conversation, live practice - everything language learning should be. Self-study and online learning are such an essential evolution for language learning, because they are far more accessible and practical than traditional methods. But these need not exclude human interaction and immersion. Our approach of using social networking to reduce the barriers of distance actually bring [sic] live practice and immediate feedback into the act of self-study.

The second part of Livemocha is mocha, pronounced like the coffee drink. This is both a nod to our hometown of Seattle, which is known for its coffee culture, and a way of incorporating the ambience and sentiment of a coffee shop, where you can both study by yourself with a laptop or chat with a friend.

I’m glad the company gave this much thought to the name story; too many businesses with puzzling names default to “It’s just a name” or “It’s something our PR agency dreamed up.” And I’m happy to see those positive associations: “live learning” plus “sociable setting.”

But I’m a native English speaker. I wonder how well those meanings translate to a native speaker of, say, Mandarin Chinese (one of the top 10 languages spoken by Livemocha members). The pronunciation isn’t transparent, either: The short I, the ambiguous CH, and the V—pronounced B or W in various languages—could be confounding. Would a native Spanish speaker with no knowledge of English pronunciation be tempted to pronounce the name Lee-bay-MO-tcha?

Then there’s the leap required to get from “Livemocha” to “language learning.” The tagline—“Creating a World without Barriers”—is of only limited help: It could apply to a concert (think Live Aid or LiveNation), an international philanthropy (think Doctors without Borders), or a campaign for wheelchair access. I’m not saying the name and tagline need to be descriptive or pedestrian, but they should provide a clue about what’s being offered here.

My grade for the Livemocha name: B-minus. It’s distinctive and evocative if you speak English, and easy enough to pronounce once you see the word split. (The cursive treatment of the logo makes it a little clearer; an intercap M or a space between the words would be even better.) But it’s an oddly challenging choice for a global brand that focuses on cross-border fluency. It makes me wonder about the thoroughness of the pre-launch linguistic screening.

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

 

How General Tso's Chicken Got Its Name

In 2007 the New York Times called General Tso’s chicken the most famous Hunanese dish in the world. But the sweet-spicy deep-fried recipe didn’t originate with chefs in China’s Hunan Province, “who apparently had never heard of it until the opening of China to the West in recent decades.” So say Jerry Adler and Andrew Lawler, whose comprehensive “How the Chicken Conquered the World” appears in the May issue of Smithsonian Magazine. Here’s their General Tso story:

The man generally credited with the idea of putting deep-fried chicken pieces in a hot chili sauce was the Hunan-born chef Peng Chang-kuei, who fled to Taiwan after the Communist revolution in 1949. He named the dish for a 19th-century military commander who led the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion, a largely forgotten conflict that claimed upwards of 20 million lives. Peng moved to New York in 1973 to open a restaurant that became a favorite of diplomats and began cooking his signature dish. Over the years it has evolved in response to American tastes to become sweeter, and in a kind of reverse cultural migration has now been adopted as a “traditional” dish by chefs and food writers in Hunan.

You won’t find General Tso’s chicken at the 3,000 KFC outlets in China, write Adler and Lawler. The chain—which is more profitable in China than in the United States—“has thrived by offering the Chinese customers food they were already familiar with, including (depending on the region) noodles, rice and dumplings, along with chicken wraps, chicken patties and chicken wings, which are so popular … that the company periodically has to deny rumors it has a farm somewhere that raises six-winged chickens.”

Read the rest of the article, and don’t miss the slideshow of raw chickens dressed as Napoleon, Einstein, and other historical figures.