Fritinancy

May Linkfest

Newt Gingrich—remember when he ran for president and talked about building bases on the moon?—now appears to be campaigning for Andy Rooney’s old slot on “60 Minutes.” “We’re really puzzled,” he tells his YouTube audience, a look of grave concern furrowing his brow, a familiar-looking device in his hand. “We spent weeks [!] trying to figure out whaddya call this.” This is what you and I call a cell phone or a mobile phone or a smartphone, but that doesn’t satisfy Gingrich. He’s soliciting new, more precise names for the gizmo he used to call “a handheld computer.” Commenters have been gleefully obliging; my favorite nominations are Talkie-Viewie (maybe “TV” for short?), roundcorner-camera-communicati­ons-email-apps-thingy, iMoon, and horseless telephone. (Via TechCrunch.)

Meanwhile, linguist Geoffrey Pullum, posting at Language Log, has “an inkling of what moved Gingrich to embark on his piece of burbling.” It’s all about the naïve lexical global Whorfianism, obviously.

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I caught this a few days too late for Underwear Week but can’t resist sharing it anyway. Triumph, the Swiss bra company, last week introduced its concept bra of the year at a Tokyo press conference. The theme: “branomics,” “a playful take on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ‘three-arrow’ economic revival plan,” according to Reuters. “We hope that as the Japanese economy grows, we can also help bust sizes to get bigger,” said a Triumph spokeswoman. (Via The 3% Conference.)

Image via AdFreak. Note arrows.

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Merriam-Webster, the dictionary company, is having a photography contest for word lovers that looks like a lot of fun. Deadline for submissions: May 26. (Via Emily Brewster.)

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Speaking of photography, here’s a pop song dedicated to stock photo clichés: “groom on phone with angry wife,” “bearded man is looking grave,” “black and white handshake,” and many more. (Via Igor blog.)

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And speaking of photography and contests, GeoGuessr combines street-view photos with a test of your geographical knowledge. Challenging and addictive. (Via PopeHat.)

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Maps! I love ’em. And I especially love maps that combine geography, history, biography, and name lore, like this interactive map of San Francisco place names, developed by Noah Veltman.

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This advice from Baby Name Wizard about overcoming naming remorse works for company and product naming, too.

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Andris Pone of Coin Branding, in Toronto, applauds Frogbox, a “green” moving company in more than one sense. It’s a great brand story, Andris writes: “The Frogbox positioning statement, From one pad to another, exemplifies the message of ease by creating a promise (completely delivered on) that one can move from their old home to their new one with all the difficulty of a hop.”

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Here’s a nifty infographic on how corporate logos evolve.

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Corporate buzzword-wise, “delight” is shaping up to be the new “passion.” (Via MJF.)

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You’ll need to subscribe to Visual Thesaurus to read Mike Pope’s excellent column, “What’s in a -Nym?”, which goes beyond antonyms and synonyms to more obscure and fascinating terms like contranym, retronym, and backronym. But of course you’re already a subscriber.

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From Idibon, a language-data company: how to name a racehorse.

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Finally, in honor of the return of the cicadas to the eastern U.S., here’s a reprise of my plug for Cicada-licious: Cooking and Enjoying Periodical Cicadas, the cicada cookbook produced by the University of Maryland cicadamaniacs (their term). Yes, I have a well-documented fondness for -licious names.

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I also can’t resist an opportunity to combine entomology, etymology, and a plug for Fritinancy. As language maven Ben Zimmer—my editor at Visual Thesaurus—observed in an email to me:

I noticed that the first OED cite for “fritin(i)ancy” is from Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, talking about cicadas. (In this edition, it’s actually “fritinnitus.”) Johnson defined “fritinancy” as “the scream of an insect, as the cricket or cicada” (citing Browne) and subsequent dictionaries used similar definitions. (Johnson didn’t define “cicada,” oddly enough.)

My original post about Fritinancy cited Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), which mentioned crickets but not cicadas. The post was written before I had access to the OED online, a weak defense but the one I’m sticking with.

In other cicada news, linguist Arnold Zwicky has written about “swarmageddon” and “cicadapocalypse,” and science writer Carl Zimmer, brother of Ben, examined the remarkable life cycle of this long-lived insect. Carl Z’s editors at the Times consulted with Ben Z to come up with a pronunciation guide: “cicadas (usually pronounced sih-KAY-duhz).”

But, Ben told me, “there are plenty of people who pronounce it KAH, and many dictionaries give it as an acceptable alternate. I don’t have a good sense of the regional distribution of the two pronunciations, though.”

Perhaps Fritinancy’s readers can help.

There Isn't Any Name That I Can't Rhyme

Let’s play the name game!

Boku! “BOKU enables people across the globe to pay for the things they love using the one device they’re never without.” Phonetic spelling of French beaucoup (much, a lot). Based in San Francisco, with offices in London, Berlin, and Singapore.

Loku!  “At Loku, we have built the first-of-it’s-kind [sic] local analytics technology that gathers and synthesizes local information from the web & social media.” Possibly from “location” plus “you.” Based in Berkeley.

Zoku!  “Zoku is dedicated to providing unique products for the home. We are a collective of creative individuals who create things that will make our lives better through intelligent design and engineering.” No name story provided, but zoku means “tribe,” “clan,” or “family” in Japanese. Based in Hoboken.

Roku!  “Roku launched the first product designed to deliver movies from Netflix instantly on TV, using the power of the Internet.” Based in San Francisco. Roku is the Japanese word for “six”; more about Roku here.

All together now …

 

Word of the Week: Kabuki Dance

Kabuki dance: Political posturing; a performance that’s all style, no substance. Sometimes seen as Kabuki theater. “Kabuki” may be capitalized or lower case.

This sense of kabuki dance is found primarily in the U.S. It’s come up in coverage of the Congressional budget impasse (aka the fiscal cliff); the image of “dancing on a cliff” seems to be irresistible to reporters and pundits:

There will be a Kabuki dance when everyone comes to the White House next week for a meeting on the fiscal cliff. – Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post, November 9, 2012

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“Bloomberg’s Al Hunt discusses the dangerous fiscal-cliff kabuki dance.” (Video, November 14, 2012)

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“We go through this little kabuki dance every time the debt ceiling comes around,” [Bill] Frezza said. – Newsmax, November 30, 2012

 

The Japanese popular-theater form Kabuki literally means “art of song and dance”; the word Kabuki was adopted into English in the late 19th century during a flurry of Western interest in Japanese culture. (See, for example, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado.) It became more widespread in English-speaking countries after World War II, when Japanese theater companies toured the West.

To a culturally aware Japanese audience, traditional Kabuki is anything but empty posturing: every gesture is, on the contrary, packed with significance. “The quintessential Kabuki moment (known as a kata) is colorful and ruthlessly concise, packing meaning into a single gesture,” wrote Jon Lackman in an April 2010 article for Slate, “It’s Time to Retire Kabuki”:

It is synecdoche, synopsis, and metaphor rolled together—as when, in one Kabuki play, a gardener expecting a visit from the emperor cuts down all his chrysanthemums except one, the perfect one. And in contrast with our own shortsighted politics, Kabuki concerns not the present so much as a “dreamlike time shrouded in mist but ever present in the subconscious,” to quote critic Shuichi Kato.

But in American political jargon, the opposite holds true: Kabuki is always derogatory and condescending, connoting a lot of huffing and puffing without results. Lackman traces this meaning back to a 1961 article in the Los Angeles Times about a State Department plan to revise its security measures. “[By] finally dismissing Chester Bowles as undersecretary of state at the moment he did, the President unhitched the plan’s kingpin in this shoddy piece of left-wing kabuki,” wrote Henry J. Taylor.

(Lackman doesn’t mention it, but Taylor had served as US ambassador to Switzerland in the Eisenhower administration; in 1961 he was beginning a 20-year stint as columnist for the United Feature Syndicate.)

“Six months later, Taylor struck again,” Lackman writes. The quote: “Agriculture Secretary Freeman announced he has discussed Billie Sol Estes’ political corruption kabuki with Robert F. Kennedy and ‘had mentioned it informally to the president’.”

(Did you know that Billie Sol Estes is still alive and a free man?)

Lackman notes that kabuki usage increases “whenever Japan is in the news for disingenuous behavior” and “whenever fakery seems particularly rife in American politics.” He cites a July 2009 Wall Street Journal article headlined “The Supreme Court Kabuki Dance.”

Why do reporters and pundits relish kabuki? Lackman suggests it’s because “they and everyone else have only a hazy idea of the word’s true meaning.” Moreover:

1) It sounds funny.
2) It sounds childish.
3) It sounds foreign.
4) It sounds incomprehensible. …
5) It sounds Japanese.

And for a 400-year-old word, it also sounds trendy. As baby-name maven Laura Wattenberg has observed: “If any letter defines modern American name style, K is it."

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Hat tip: MJF

Notes from UN-derground

In retail and design, the un also rises.

Exhibit A: Unemployee.

 

“Eno, 28, non-actor from the U.S.”

 

“Unemployee of the Year” is a worldwide contest open to unemployed people age 18 to 30. The contest is part of Benetton’s #UNHATE campaign, which began last year with photos of world leaders kissing. Read more at AdFreak.

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Exhibit B: Uncrate.

 

Uncrate calls itself “the leading buyer’s guide for men.”

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Exhibit C: Unbeige.

 

Unbeige is a MediaBistro blog “where designers read about design.”

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Exhibit D: Uniqlo.

I’m being mischievous with this one — Uniqlo isn’t really an “un.” The low-price, high-quality Japanese retail chain’s name comes from “unique clothing warehouse” and is pronounced “you-nee-klo” in English and “you-nee-koo-ro” in Japanese.

The company is Japan’s leading retailer in terms of sales and profits. The first Uniqlo store opened in Hiroshima in 1985; the first U.S. stores opened in 2005 in New Jersey, but they performed poorly and were shut down. A year later, Uniqlo came back with a 36,000-square-foot store in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, and the company has grown its U.S. presence steadily ever since. The three-story, 29,000-square-foot San Francisco store, opening October 5, will be the chain’s first West Coast location.

According to a recent company profile in the Wall Street Journal, Uniqlo founder Tadashi Yanai is decidedly un-Japanese in his outspoken emphasis on entrepreneurialism. He has even declared English to be Uniqlo’s official corporate language.

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Read my June 2012 post about the “un” ad campaign for the Smart “un-car.” Also see Ben Zimmer’s 2009 New York Times column about “unfollow,” “unfriend,” “unconference,” and other 21st-century un-isms.

 

 

Car Names in the News

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

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

(Via this tweet by @nameflash.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Word of the Week: Emoji

Emoji: Cartoonish icons used to communicate emotion in email and texting. From the Japanese; a blend of “e” (Japanese for “picture”) + “moji” (“letter”).

Some of the emoji icons available on Apple devices.

Think of emoji as the lazy person’s emoticons: no careful combinations of parentheses, semicolons, and carats; no tilting your head to puzzle them out. Or think of them as hieroglyphics for the global postliterate era. 

In an article about emoji published last month in the New York Times, reporter Jenna Wortham provided some background:

Emoji have long been popular among cellphone users in Asia. They first emerged in Japan in the 1990s, said Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how young people use digital media in Japan and the United States. Cellphone carriers first added the images to differentiate their phones from those of rivals, and they caught on as an efficient way to quickly convey a specific thought, mood or joke.

Since so many of our daily interactions are happening over mobile phones, it makes sense that people would crave new ways to convey meaning other than plain text, said S. Shyam Sundar, co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University.

“Text as a medium is particularly dull when it comes to expressing emotions,” Professor Sundar said. “Emoticons open the door a little, but emoji opens it even further. They play the role that nonverbal communication, like hand gestures, does in conversation but on a cellphone.”

Emoji are now standard on Apple devices running iOS 5. For the iPhone-deprived (or resistant), Gmail also offers an emoji keyboard in which some of the characters are animated. I’m still trying to figure out the context in which a pincer-wiggling lobster would express le mot juste.

I may need to enroll in Intro to Narratives in Emoji, a Tumblr of stories and movie plots distilled into emoji. Here, in its entirety, is Taxi Driver:

Bad Names: The Last Roundup

The last roundup for 2011, that is. 

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Webctor may be the only purportedly English word I’ve ever encountered that contains the consonant sequence B-C-T. That’s because that particular sequence is unpronounceable. Which makes word-of-mouth advertising, or even answering the telephone, rather challenging.

In creating this breathtakingly bad name, someone—or someone’s automated name generator—evidently went no further than “web + doctor.” A similarly shaky command of English is evidenced in the writing. (“WebCTOR.com delivers valuable medical content the needy every day.”) And, in fact, WebCTOR was launched in Poland sometime in 2011.

Any resemblance of the WebCTOR name and logo to an older and better-known medical website is probably entirely intentional.

 

 

Via Amy Reynaldo, who tipped me off to A Little Pregnant’s tweets about WebCTOR (sample).

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You own a flower shop/restaurant/gift “shoppe” in “a sprawling turn-of-the-century home” in Pittsburgh, PA. Naturally, you name your business after a macabre, bestselling 1979 novel (and 1987 movie) about abandoned children and adolescent incest. Welcome to Flowers in the Attic!

 

“The horror begins…”

Hat tip: Coneslayer.

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Rochelle Kopp, who tweets as JapanIntercult, sent me this ad (originally tweeted by Hiroko Tabuchi) for a new brand of milk tea from Kirin, the huge Japanese beverage company.

Let’s pause to admire that gorgeous “g” in the logo. And then let’s collectively drop our jaws at the name. Pungency may sound dandy in Japanese (I honestly have no idea), but its associations in English are less than appetizing. Pungent is a synonym for “biting,” “penetrating,” or “caustic”; its Latin root means “to sting.” Burning rubber is pungent. Milk tea should not be pungent. Indeed, the blogger at Transmissions from Tokyo found the opposite to be the case:

Ironically, the drink is more or less the same as Royal Milk Tea. It's not strong tasting or strong smelling at all. Not in the least! You'd think that someone there at the company would have thought to argue against naming a beverage Pungency for the same reasons I'm mentioning now. Guess not.

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The language barrier is no excuse for Flubit, unless it’s that old separated-by-a-common-language barrier.

FlubIt is a London-based startup that finds discounts “on everything you buy.” The company’s founder apparently thinks “flub” is an invented word, when in fact—sorry to be the bearer of bad news—it’s a synonym for “botch” or “bungle.” Yes, the OED says it’s a US colloquialism, but it’s been around since 1924, for crying out loud. Surely it’s crossed the pond a few times.

But it seems never to have reached the ears of founder Bertie Stephens, who boasted to The Next Web about what a brilliant name he’d picked:

“[T]he name flubit preceded the actual business idea by a couple of years or so,” Stephens said, “and it just stuck with me until I eventually had the right product for it. So rather than putting a name to a product, we put a product to the name. … It was short, people would remember it, and it was a verb which, in my eyes, is hugely important. This meant I could run with the tagline ‘before you buy it, Flubit.’”

And then he said, still on the record:

“Also, it doesn’t have a pre-conceived meaning”, added Stephens. “So we can make it mean what we like – some find it silly, others cool.”

No preconceived meaning for someone who hasn’t consulted a dictionary, that is to say. FlubIt can go stand in the corner with Flubby, the badly named (but beautiful) shoe from Aquatalia. And, Mr. Stephens, the next time your entrepreneurial brain tells you to choose a name because it’s short and “a verb,” please seek professional advice.

Hat tip: Leslie Forman.

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Read all of my Bad Names posts, if you have the stomach for them. Here’s to better names in 2012!

This, That

A few miscellaneous items for the first full day of (Northern Hemisphere) winter. Tomorrow: Festivus! I’ll present my annual Airing of Grievances.

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The Japanese word of the year, announced by the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation on December 12, is kizuna. The word, which means “bonds between people,” was frequently used to express the solidarity and support shown by Japanese people in response to the disastrous earthquake and tsunami in March.

 

(Hat tip: Rochelle Kopp of Japan Intercultural Consulting.)

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Every year since 2006, expatriate American linguist Lynne Murphy, who blogs at Separated by a Common Language, has selected two words of the year: the most useful import from American English into British English and the most useful import from British into American. This year, the most useful UK-to-US word is kettling, which happens to be a word I nominated! (You may recall that it was a Fritinancy word of the week in October.) The most useful US-to-UK word is FTW, an abbreviation of “for the win.” And yes, initialisms are words. Be sure to read Lynne’s thoughtful and well-informed defen{s/c}es  of her selections.

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Speaking of FTW, I’m flattered and delighted that my blog has been nominated for a Macmillan Dictionary “Love English” award in the blog category. I’m in excellent (read: daunting) competition: Separated by a Common Language, Language Hat, Johnson, Sentence First, Throw Grammar from the Train, Language Log—and several language blogs I’d been unaware of, which is always the most interesting thing, in my opinion, about contests like this one. If you’d like to cast a vote for Fritinancy, I’d be most grateful. There’s also a Best Website category; check out all the links, then vote for Visual Thesaurus.

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A little comic relief: You may recognize Christopher McDonald, David Koechner, Maria Bamford (the crazy Target Christmas lady), and Andre Royo (Bubbles from The Wire) in Funny or Die’s spot-on spoof of campaign commercials. Yes, let’s restore the dignity and the tradition of our Founding Santas!

Via AdFreak.

Names in the News: Siri

The day before Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died, his successor, Tim Cook, announced the new iPhone 4S. One feature caused a lot of buzz: a voice-controlled “digital assistant” called Siri.

(Above: Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller introduces Siri for iPhone 4S in Cupertino, October 4, 2011. Source: Slashgear)

Siri isn’t exactly new, and it wasn’t developed by Apple. As an app—also called Siri—it’s been available to iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users for about 18 months. But the technology has evolved since 2010, when Apple acquired the company that created it: Siri, Inc.

Where did the “Siri” name come from? From the place where the technology was originally engineered: SRI International in San Jose, California. (SRI, you may recall, was originally known as Stanford Research Institute.) “Siri” is simply “SRI” with an additional vowel.

Here’s the original logo, which has now been Apple-fied (see photo, above):

 

Siri was born in 2003, when DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the same agency that invented the Internet—awarded a five-year contract to SRI to create an “enduring personalized cognitive assistant.” DARPA eventually invested $150 million in the project, which was intended for military use. The new Apple version of Siri is decidedly more civilian; it answers, in a robotic female voice, questions such as “Will I need an umbrella today?” and “Are there any good Greek restaurants nearby?” It can access a user’s personal information to arrange meetings, make phone calls, send text messages, and retrieve music.

What’s most notable about the Siri name is that Apple chose not to change it. Siri co-founder Norman Winarksy told Mashable that he was “pleased” by the decision. “In fact,” adds Mashable’s Jennifer Van Grove, “pre-announcement speculation pegged the name to be ‘The Assistant’.” That name would have been much more in keeping with Apple’s bland, near-generic nomenclature—and a whole lot less compelling. “Siri” sounds like it could be a trendy restaurant or a contemporary baby name (compare Suri, the name of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s daughter). Also worth noting: Although Apple uses the neuter pronoun “it” to refer to Siri (“It’s smart enough to know what you mean”), many tech writers have taken to calling it “she.” (See TechCrunch, Mashable, CNN, and ExtremeTech.)

For a little while after last week’s announcement, there was some fuss over the connotations of “Siri” in Japanese. The name “sounds a lot like ‘shiri,’ the Japanese term (尻) for ‘bottom’,” wrote Mark Hachman in PCMag.com. Gizmodo put it more crudely: “Siri Sounds Like Ass in Japan. Literally.”

Not so, according to Rochelle Kopp, managing partner of Japan Intercultural Consulting. Rochelle, who is fluent in Japanese, pointed me to a Tumblr post that debunks the spurious translation:

One word for your seat in Japan is “shiri” (しり in hiragana, 尻 in kanji), which, if you are unfamiliar with Japanese, may look just like Siri. However, while Siri is pronounced ‘SI-ri’ with the accent on the first syllable, shiri is pronounced ‘shi-RI’, with the accent on the second syllable. This may not seem like much of a difference to you, but in Japanese there are dozens of words like that. Besides, Siri has a “s” while shiri has an “sh” sound, which are not the same thing either.

There is one potentially confusing thing about the name: SIRI is the stock-ticker symbol for Sirius XM, the satellite radio company.

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See also “My humble personal assistant” in my Word of the Week post about humble.

Peachy

You may already search the Web on an Apple, make a phone call on a BlackBerry, and go shopping with a Plum card. Get ready to refill your fruit basket: Next year you’ll be able to fly on a Peach.

Peach is the name of Japan’s new budget airline, which will begin domestic flights next March from its base at Kansai International Airport. Flights to other Asian destinations are expected to begin in May 2012.

According to a press release, “Peach” was chosen because of the fruit’s association with “youthfulness, energy, generosity, and longevity.” The Japanese word for peach is momo—the name of the well-known Manhattan restaurant group Momofuku means “lucky peach”—but it’s the English word that will appear in all branding materials. The domain is flypeach.com.

 

Peach Aviation CEO Shinichi Inoue with an airplane model.

Peach Aviation logo. Is that a stylized fruit I see in the “p”?

Counterintuitively—to English-speakers, anyway—the official color of Peach isn’t peach: it’s fuchsia.

“Peach” may seem like an original choice for an airline brand, but in fact it’s a recycled name. Peach Air was a UK-based charter airline (part of Caledonian Air) that operated in 1997 and 1998. It’s fondly remembered on some aviation forums.

At least one publication mixed up the two Peaches. The online NewTimesWorld yesterday illustrated a story about the new Japanese airline with a photo of the defunct British carrier:

 The old Peach, not the new Peach.

I detected another echo of the past—indeed, the British past—in the Peach Aviation press materials. According to Peach CEO Shinichi Inoue, “Our airline will also reflect the smart sophistication that has come to represent the words ‘Cool Japan’.” At least the late, unlamented “Cool Britannia” alluded to something recognizable: “Rule, Britannia.”

UPDATE: Fast Company’s design blog reports that the interiors of Peach aircraft were designed by Neil Denari, “the L.A. starchitect behind the futuristic HL23 tower on the High Line.” The verdict: “It’s an aesthetic that falls somewhere between Virgin's sexy, clubby cabins and a box of Pocky sticks, which was roughly the point.”

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Hat tip: Rochelle Kopp (@japanintercult).