Fritinancy

The New Yorker on Brand Names

Here’s how New Yorker staff writer John Colapinto begins “Famous Names,” in the magazine’s October 3 issue: with an edge-of-your-seat account of the naming process that resulted in … the BlackBerry! In 1998! Stop the presses!

That story was already well known to those of us in the branding business, and to many civilians as well, when Alex Frankel related it in greater detail in his book Wordcraft, which was published in 2004. It was repeated in newspapers and magazines. But maybe you haven’t heard it. In that case, read the New Yorker article. Yes, it’s behind a paywall. Sorry about that.

You should also read Colapinto’s article if you’ve never heard the story of Ford Motor Company and the branding of the Edsel. It occurred in 1957, and it’s been told in print about a zillion times. But maybe it was new to John Colapinto and his editors.

I wonder about those editors, though—or, more specifically, about the magazine’s vaunted fact-checkers. Maybe they were on vacation, or replaced by interns, when this quote from the story’s protagonist, David Placek, made it into print: “You want to name it something that the big guys—A.T.&T., Southwestern Bell, California Bell—would never think of.”

Memo from the Left Coast: there never was a “California Bell,”* only Pacific Bell. Oh, and while I’m being picky: New Yorker, may I introduce you to Snopes.com? I don’t believe you’ve met, because you clearly never read the authoritative debunking of the Chevy Nova myth. Nova does not mean “no go” in Spanish; that's no va, which has a stress on the second syllable rather than the first. As a matter of fact, the Chevy Nova sold quite briskly in Spanish-speaking markets.

September Linkfest

Case study: The rebranding of Hell. Logo, tagline, the works. From Chris Herron Design.

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What’s a pump? A ballet shoe? A trainer? Depends which side of the Atlantic you’re on. Linguist Lynne Murphy at Separated by a Common Language offers some British-to-American translation tips for shoe buyers; her commenters provide even more.

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Brave New Malden, “freelance copywriter with over a million years’ experience,” spots a trend in ad copy: “At A, we know how important B is. That’s why we C, which gives you D.” The two key words: “That’s why.”

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That’s why you’re sad: You’re suffering from jalopia, “fatigue with the laborious maintenance of having a body, a piñata of meat that’s incompatible with the Legoland rationality of the modern world, which was built for beings whose indestructible parts lock onto the Earth with a satisfying ‘click,’ whose emotions are standardized, whose mistakes are best measured in parts per million.” More flavors of melancholy—all invented, all invaluable—at the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. (Via @Wordnik and @Bookbench.)

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The reviewer calls the book “edgy,” “unflinching,” and “long-awaited.” What he means: “contains no adult voices of reason,” “has a lot of bad words,” and “late.” A helpful lexicon of publishing buzzwords from Janice Harayda and friends at One-Minute Book Reviews. (A few years ago I attempted a similar decoder for film-festival buzzwords like “haunting” and “bleakly beautiful.”)

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Linguist Geoffrey Pullum, the author of The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, responds in Lingua Franca to the latest nonsensical rant about the (mythical) decline of the English language:

What on earth comes over people when they write about language? It’s not just their ability to use dictionaries that disappears, it’s their acumen, their numeracy, their common sense. Show some people a single unfamiliar word and they’ll whip themselves into a paroxysm of fury, shaking their fist at what they see as a tsunami of black lexical filth sweeping in to destroy the whole of their native tongue.

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The entire Facebook terms of service in bro-speak. (“This is the Internet, bro; it’s like the fucking Wild West out there.”)

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This one’s for real: In 1986, Disney’s executives changed the title of the studio’s next animated feature from Basil of Baker Street to The Great Mouse Detective. In pissed-off response, reports Letters of Note, the film’s animators issued a fake memo announcing “the retroactive renaming of the entire Disney back catalogue, bar The Aristocats, in a similarly bland style.” Guess which title became The Girl with the See-Through Shoes? Via The Hairpin.

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Mashable reveals how Hipmunk, Zynga, and seven other tech businesses got their names. Most startups flop in this department, reports tech analyst Jeremiah Owyang, who attended TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco earlier this week and brought back dispiriting news from the branding front: “I strolled down the aisle with one VC friend of the 200 startups, we noticed they had ridiculous company names missing vowels and cutesy logos. The biggest set back, is the lack of positioning or even tag lines. A majority of the banners lacked a descriptor of what the company did. This is a big opportunity for PR firms to assist this early market.” (Spelling and grammar errors are Mr. Owyang’s. And by “PR firms,” he mostly means “name developers and design agencies.”)

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Finally, a name game to carry you through the weekend: Name That Thing, a visual vocabulary  test from Merriam-Webster. Each time you play, you get a new set of questions. “Addiction counseling not included,” warns M-W lexicographer Peter Sokolowski.

July Linkfest

So, what do you think of Google Plus (G+ to the cool kids)? More to the point, what are you doing about “+1,” G+’s version of Facebook’s “Like” button? Google devotes a page to explaining the spelling conventions of +1 (summary: use an apostrophe). Motivated Grammar delves more deeply into the history of apostrophe’d verb forms: “Apostrophe-d used to be a more general suffix, up until around the middle of the 19th century.” And The Next Web offers the Google+ guide for punctuation pedants. (Hat tip: Ben Zimmer.)

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Speaking of conjugated modern media, why is texted the past tense of text? As David Crystal reveals, the answer isn’t as simple as you may think.

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Here’s a lovely thing from the University of Nottingham’s School of Modern Languages and Cultures: Words of the World, a series of short videos in which language experts tell the stories of words adopted into English, from aficionado to zeitgeist. Click on a word in the crossword-like grid to learn its story. (Via Language Hat.)

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But wait, there’s more! The History of English in 10 Minutes is a lively canter from Anglo-Saxon through Global English. Here’s the first chapter, and here’s a page with links to all 10 videos. (Via Mr. Verb.)

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And speaking of the history of English, whatever happened to the passival tense? Jane Austen used it in 1807 when she wrote in a letter: “The garden is putting in order.” But by the end of the 19th century that construction had been replaced by the progressive passive we use today (“The garden is being put in order”). Not without a lot of sturm und drang, though. I learned about it from Mike Vuolo, until recently the producer of NPR’s On the Media; he’s developing a podcast called Lexicon Alley to explore the byways of language and devotes an installment to the passival—much more fascinating than you’d guess. And here’s an older Language Log post about 19th-century outrage over the newfangled progressive passive. It was ever thus: language always changes, and people always hate change.

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Back in the world of commerce, the Olive Garden restaurant chain tried to introduce new dishes with Italian-sounding names—soffatelli and pastachetti—that turned out not to be Italian at all, just “rooted in Italian inspiration,” according to a spokeswoman. The fake names (falsetti?) flopped. Linguist Arnold Zwicky twirls a fork around the issue, and for good measure investigates pepperoni (another American invention) and diavolini.

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Cloth diaper brands: real or fake? Take the quiz at The Hairpin. (Footnote: For several years I wrote copy for a diaper-cover company called Biobottoms. I see the brand still exists, although under new ownership. Good product. And yes, we got endless grief over the Biobottoms name, for which I was not responsible.)

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And from A Hundred Monkeys, a brief essay on why names matter more than you think. Here’s one reason:

Imagine the silver panorama of an Apple storefront bearing, not that infamous pome,  but a name like “Quantum Technical Solutions.” No mystery, no style, no cult following. No story to draw people in.

Word of the Week: Buxom

Buxom: Healthily plump and ample of figure; full-bosomed.

From an AP story dated May 25, 2011, and headlined “Lawyer Objects to Buxom Woman at Trial”:

A Chicago lawyer says his opponent in a small claims case is using an unfair tactic by sitting a buxom woman next to him at counsel’s table.

Attorney Thomas Gooch says the woman’s sole purpose “is to draw the attention of the jury away from the relevant proceedings” — a dispute over a used car. He asks Cook County Circuit Judge Anita Rivkin-Carothers to order the woman to sit in the gallery with other spectators.

The legal blog Lowering the Bar points out that buxom here is a family-friendly-ish euphemism for “large-breasted.” The connection is clarified a couple of paragraphs down in the AP story, where Mr. Gooch is quoted as saying, “Personally, I like large breasts.”

Fruit-crate label (c. 1940s) from Etsy.

Courtroom etiquette aside, what about buxom? Today, the word is used only in reference to women, and specifically to their chestal areas. You might deduce, therefore, that buxom was originally something like buck-some (was buck an archaic term meaning “breast,” perhaps?) or even bust-some.

Well, it was once spelled bucksome. As for the rest, guess again.

April Linkfest

I’ve added Ruth Wajnryb’s blog, Words Woman, to my blogroll, and I recommend that you bookmark it, too. Ms. Wajnryb is an Australian linguist who writes in an approachable and open-minded manner about new words, new meanings for old words, word play, and, yes, the addition of heart (v., tr.) to the OED. I first cited Ms. Wajnryb several years ago in a post about the migrating meaning of “erstwhile.”

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Speaking of migrating meanings, Ben Yagoda, writing for Slate, considers the “nonplussed” problem, along with “momentarily,” “disinterested,” and “presently.”

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More multiple meanings: Take the Language Log polysemy quiz. And read the rest of the post, in which author Geoffrey K. Pullum asserts, using boldface for emphasis: “Languages love multiple meanings. They lust after them. They roll around in them like a dog in fresh grass.”

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What are blancmange, fish slice, pong, and skivers—all words from the British English lexicon—doing in So Much for That, a novel written by the American Lionel Shriver and set in the US? Jan Freeman explains. (P.S. So Much for That is one of the best novels I’ve read in the last five years.)

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“[W]hichever speechwriter came up with ‘win the future’ should be sent to count yurts in Outer Mongolia.” – Paul Krugman on President Obama’s budget speech.

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OK, we know that “Eskimos have a hundred words for snow” is a fallacy. But it turns out that English speakers have dozens of words for rain, from “ablaqueate” to “whisp.” Read them all in Ben Schott’s pluviovocabulary.

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Got 10 minutes? Watch an episode of “The Beauty of Maps,” a BBC documentary that originally aired last year. The series is a guided tour through the British Library’s collection of 4 million (!) maps. (Via Swiss Miss.)

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Speaking of maps, Muckety uses fascinating interactive maps to chart “the relationships of muckety-mucks”—i.e., people with power and influence, including Martha Stewart, LeBron James, and former Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter. Register at the site to create your own Muckety. Vocabulary bonus: “muckety” derives from “high-muck-a-muck,” a corruption of Chinook jargon “hayo makamak” (literally “plenty to eat”—by extension an important person). Chinook jargon was a Pacific Northwest trade language that was used well into the twentieth century.

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“Can I legally get myself tattooed with a sports team’s logo?” Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope tackles the intellectual-property implications and concludes: it depends.

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How would a linguist translate “Dumber than a box of rocks” from the original Texan? Easy: “Dumber than a department of Sapir-Whorfians.” There’s a whole mess of useful conversions in “Texan for Linguists,” a possibly non-peer-reviewed article in Speculative Grammarian, “the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics.”

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And speaking of flavorful Texas expressions, I’m partial to “Don’t just sit there looking like a tree full of owls,” from Maud Newton’s “Like We Say Back Home.” (Via Stan Carey.)

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Battle is for boys, love is for girls: the unsurprising-yet-still-discouraging sex-stereotyped vocabulary of toy ads, depicted in word clouds. (Via Arnold Zwicky.)

Word of the Week: Declinism

Declinism: “The belief that something, particularly a country or a political or economic system, is undergoing a significant and possibly irreversible decline.” (Word Spy)

“Declinism” also describes an outlook on language, as Robert Lane Greene explains in his new book You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the politics of Identity. Writing about the punctuation grouch Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves)*, Greene says:

[N]ear the beginning of her furious little volume, she says that grammar and punctuation are “simply not taught in the majority of English schools.” if that was true wed expect that nearly everything written by people educated in england in the last few decades too look like this but it doesnt seem to be so Mistakes may be more common than Truss would like, but to say that grammar and punctuation are “simply not taught” in most schools beggars belief.

Language grouches have been singing that song for centuries, writes Greene, and it’s just as unwarranted as it was “when Swift said the same thing in 1712”:

Not only is declinism not new, as hundreds of years of examples show. It is not particular to the Anglophone world, either. Not only have English and American schoolmarms worried about “kids these days” for centuries. Similar concerns have nagged speakers of languages around the world throughout recorded history.

Cicero, for example, griped that standards of knowledge of Latin were “disgraceful.” And in the 19th century Jacob Grimm—one half of the Brothers Grimm, and a philologist as well as a fairy-tale collector—complained that “six hundred years ago every rustic knew, that is to say practiced daily, perfections and niceties in the German language of which the best grammarians nowadays do not even dream.”

 

 

According to Paul McFedries of Word Spy, “declinism” was coined in 1988 by the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington for an essay in Foreign Affairs. Huntington wrote:

In 1988 the United States reached the zenith of its fifth wave of declinism since the 1950s. The roots of this phenomenon lie in the political economy literature of the early 1980s that analyzed the fading American economic hegemony and attempted to identify the consequences of its disappearance.

McFedries calls declinism “the ‘apocalypse soon’ school of international relations”; its opposite is “triumphalism,” coined in 1964. “Declinism” appears to be a back-formation from the much earlier “declinist.” An 1831 citation for “declinist” appears in the Oxford English Dictionary, which (says McFedries) “mentions the ‘doctrine of the decline of science’ and labels one of its proponents as ‘the leader of the Declinists.’”

“Declinism” is used much less frequently in connection with language. Robert Lane Greene may have imported it from the language of political science; he is, after all, not a linguist but rather a journalist and expert in international affairs. He’s also a contributor to The Economist’s excellent language blog, Johnson.

Elsewhere in the world of isms: presentism, quotationalism, completism, and endism,

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* From Geoffrey Nunberg’s review of You Are What You Speak in the New York Times Book Review: “We’ve passed from the thoughtful homilies of Fowler to the pithy dictums of Strunk and White to the operatic curmudgeonry of modern sticklers like Lynne Truss, whose gasps of horror at the sight of a misplaced apostrophe are a campy cover for self-congratulation.”

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LOLcats image from Master Marf.

March Linkfest

Stokefire, a branding agency in Alexandria, Virginia, installed a new office server and had to give it a name. You’d think that would be an easy task for professional namers. Think again.

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In English, we say we’re “green with envy,” but in German the expression is “yellow with envy” (gelb vor neid). A Swedish-speaker calls a less-than-desirable situation “beigt” (beige). A “kara gün dostu” (black-day friend) is Turkish for a true friend, and in French, a quack is a “médecin marron” (a brown doctor). Discover these and many other color idioms in Alan Kennedy’s multilingual color idiom chart; learn more from Kennedy’s linguistic facts about color. (Via Language Hat.)

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Here’s a Straight Dope discussion board dedicated to unusual names of sports teams. A few I didn’t see in the discussion, all from California: the UC Irvine Anteaters, the Pomona College Sagehens, and the Scripps College Athenas. (Scripps is a women’s college.) During the two years I attended Pitzer College the intramural teams were called the Armpitzies, but that tradition appears to have lapsed, alas.

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Ladies, are you tired of hearing that your body’s shaped like an apple or a pear? In Australia, the underwear brand Triumph wants a new nomenclature based on Renaissance artists’ preferred body types. And not just “Rubenesque,” either. (Via The Hairpin.)

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I love this word-puzzle wrapping paper, created by a designer with offices in Italy and the UK. The paper will be sold “soon”—in the US, too, I hope. (Via Swiss Miss.)

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Gene Weingarten is not the first American to advocate jettisoning the famously unsingable “Star-Spangled Banner” as the national anthem. But his proposed replacement—the Bill of Rights, set to “The William Tell Overture”—is the most brilliant remedy (and most potent earworm) I’ve ever heard. (Via Dustbury.)

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What does “up to X or more” mean in adspeak? Language Log’s Mark Liberman attempts an analysis.

Cartoon by xkcd.

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Over at Literal-Minded, Neal Whitman reviews You Are What You Speak, by Robert Lane Greene:

For someone who hasn’t discovered linguistics yet, Greene’s introduction will be fascinating and entertaining; for those who have, it will be like watching a rerun of a show that you liked enough to watch again. And when you get to the stuff that’s not old hat, the book really takes off.

Greene is the author of Johnson, the language blog of The Economist—well worth a few minutes of your reading time each week.

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Before Facebook was Facebook, it was The Facebook. Now Jeff Lapatine, who’s in charge of naming and brand architecture at Siegel+Gale, wonders: Does adding “the” to a name increase its prestige?

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And speaking of “the”…

 

Link. (Hat tip: MJF).

February Linkfest

The Name Inspector has detectified a disturbifying trend in namifying. Can you guessify what it is?

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Teachers take note: name development is an excellent way to engage kids with the mechanics of language. For evidence, read this post by Catchword name developer Aaron Hall about his very educational visit to a fourth-grade classroom.

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Inc. magazine asked seven advertising and branding pros their advice for writing memorable taglines. The answers include “Don’t be afraid of going long” and “Negative is not always a bad thing.” (Via Irene Nelson.)

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Speaking of ad agencies, why are so many of them now calling themselves “brand innovation companies,” “consumer engagement agencies,” “idea manufacturers,” and other euphemisms? Analysis from a chief creative officer (itself a title that didn’t exist in the Mad Men era). (Via Catchword.)

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It’s been a big week for gamers and linguists following the Jeopardy matchup between humans and IBM’s “Watson” (aka the Nerd Super Bowl). The conclusion airs tonight; meanwhile, read Greg Lindsay’s account in Fast Company of how he beat Watson three times in “top-secret sparring rounds.” If you missed the broadcasts, you can see the questions and answers on the Jeopardy archive, an almost-comprehensive 25-year database. Here’s Monday’s show; here’s Tuesday’s. Here’s contestant Ken Jennings in yesterday’s live Q&A about the contest on the Washington Post website. And here’s computational linguist Philip Resnick’s Feb. 14 post on Language Log, “Jeopardizing Valentine’s Day,” about what goes into Watson’s question-answering technology.

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You too can write a bestseller! Just fire up the Malcolm Gladwell book-title generator to create boffo titles and subtitles like Wink: The Power of Thinking While Simultaneously Flirting. (Via AWSamuel.)

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If you use a computer keyboard—and not, say, an IBM Selectric—here’s why you should never, ever insert two spaces after a period.

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Finally, à propos of not much: Craigslisp.

November Linkfest

The New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year, announced yesterday, is refudiate. Runners-up included vuvuzela, bankster, and nom nom. Read all about it. For the curious: my archived posts about NOAD’s words of the year for 2007, 2008, and 2009.

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If you, like me, see red when you find misspellings, errors of fact, and grammatical mistakes in published books, help is at hand. Typoze allows you to report typos online, thereby contributing to “improving the overall quality of published material.” I’ve done it; it’s easy and satisfying. My only question: Where do I report the typos in Typoze’s own web and blog content?

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After 94 years, beloved spokeslegume Mr. Peanut finally, um, speaks. And he sounds a lot like Robert Downey, Jr. (Ad Broad.)

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Rob Beschizza was struck by how the New York Times’s stories about the Iraq War Wikileaks material “could get through such gruesome descriptions — fingers chopped off, chemicals splashed on prisoners — without using the word ‘torture.’” So he created a torture euphemism generator. Why should Times reporters have all the fun? (Via Mark Peters.)

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If you’d lived in Chaucer’s time, you’d have known what sort of work a cautioner, a pannarius, and a tapley did. Find definitions for those and other trade names on this fascinating list. Despite the list’s title, the names are not “Old English”; they’re old, and they’re from the British Isles, but their etymologies are variously French, Latin, German, and Middle English. (Via Kevin Smokler, aka Weegee.)

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The New York Times blog Schott’s Vocab has been performing an invaluable service by reprinting archived entries from American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society. Here, from 1934, is one of my favorities: a glossary of shoe-salesman lingo. A brief excerpt: “The widths of the shoe, A, B, C, D, and E, are called Al, Benny, Charley, Dave, and Eddie. These names are used to conceal the size from the customer.”

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The Gobbledygook Grader reveals how much of your writing (or a colleague’s) is ridden with “gobbledygook, jargon, clichés and over-used, hype-filled words.” Just copy and paste a passage into the window to receive your grade—and tips for improving it.

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“Wants pawn term, dare worsted ladle gull . . .” Surely you know the rest of the “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut” tale, right? Hint: read it aloud, slowly. (Or listen to the recording.) From San Francisco’s wonderful, one-of-a-kind Exploratorium. (Hat tip: Mighty Red Pen and Trochee.)

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How do you pronounce Cthulhu? Linux? Mister Mxyzptlk? To the rescue, from Geekosystem, comes the ultimate geek pronunciation guide. Mister Mxyzptlk, by the way, is not to be confused with the hip New York store Mxyplyzyk, named for the same Superman character but spelled differently and pronounced “mix-ee-pliz-ik.” (Hat tip: Karen.)

Friday Quizzes

A quartet of challenges as we head into the weekend:

1. How well do you know the U.S. Constitution? Twenty-four questions, no time limit. After you get your score, go to Figaro Speech for analysis and comments. And don’t feel too bad: Figaro tells us that most people who take the test fail it.

2. Which baby names were most popular in the United States in 1970 and 2009? It’s an alphabetical quiz, so you need to know only the most popular “A” names (for boys and girls), “B” names, and so on. You get 12 minutes to fill in the blanks.

3. How much do you know about the English language’s “origins, evolution, and oddities”? This quiz is from the British Library, so there’s a UK bias, but most North Americans should ace the “Easy Peasy”* level. (Via Jesse Sheidlower)

4. Can you match the brand number with the brand name? There are no logos, just numbers, which makes this quiz tougher than you might think. (Via Irene Nelson.)

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* Having seen In the Loop, I automatically add “. . . lemon squeezy” to that phrase.