Fritinancy

Nonplussed

A few observations about the new marketing campaign for the Bay Area’s Sutter Health medical group.

 

Outdoor ad, Van Ness Avenue at Filbert Street, San Francisco.

First, who says “with child” in 2013? Even on Downton Abbey, set between 1912 and 1922, characters were constantly saying that so-and-so was “pregnant.” (The casual use of the word was almost certainly anachronistic: the Online Etymology Dictionary tells us “pregnant” was a taboo word until the mid-1950s. “Expecting” and “in the family way” were far more common.)

“When you’re with child, we’re with you” is earnest but clunky: “with child” and “with you” aren’t really parallel here.

But what will puzzle most people about the ad is the slogan: “We Plus You.”

Here it is on the website:

The logo? Your guess is as good as mine.

 

It isn’t intended as a mathematical statement, with plus as a conjunction: “We plus you equals good health,” or something like that. No, plus is clearly a verb here: “It’s how you plus us, and we plus you.”

 

“Because you plus us … and we plus you.”

 

I remember some talk about to plus a couple of years ago, when Google launched its social-media service Google Plus. To give a stamp of approval to something on Google Plus, you click a “+1” icon. Users started referring to the action as “plussing.”

But it turns out Walt Disney had Google beat by almost 70 years. According to How to Be Like Walt: Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life, a chatty/motivational 2004 biography that refers to its subject by his first name, Walt Disney emphasized “the plus factor” to his artists and designers:

Sometime during the 1940s, Walt coined the term “plussing.” Normally, the word “plus” is a conjunction, as in “two plus two equals four.” But Walt used the word as a verb—an action word. To “plus” something is to improve it. “Plussing” means giving your customers more than they paid for, more than they expect, more than you have to give them. … He began by plussing Mickey Mouse with sound, then plussing the Silly Symphonies with color. Walt plussed the skills of his artists by sending them to art school at his own expense. Walt’s relentless quest for excellence kept him at the leading edge of his industry—and left his competitors, well, nonplussed.

Sutter Health may be using “plus” in this “improvement” sense. Or maybe it’s saying “You complete me.”

“We Plus You” isn’t the only bit of peculiar wordplay in the Sutter Health campaign. Here’s a full-page print ad in the March issue of San Francisco magazine:

 

 

“We specialize in You-ology.”

You-ology? Right down the hall from Your-ology, where you can get that prostate exam.

 

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Re the title of this post: nonplussed does not mean nonchalant, although a lot of people think it does.

The Names of Drugs

“The simple names favored by the alternative medicine community provide an illusion of safety and comprehensibility that the chemical names can’t match. Another common chemical name for methotrexate is amethopterin, which comes from the roots meth, Greek for wine, which I might stretch to spirits, and pterin, Greek for feathers. And naproxen is a chemical analog of salicylic acid, which can be extracted from willow bark. I strongly suspect that if Shepherd’s rheumatologist had called what he prescribed spirits of feathers and an extract of willow, rather than methotrexate and naproxen, Meadows would have been happier.”

-- From “Don’t Take Medical Advice from the New York Times Magazine,” by Michelle M. Francl, a chemistry professor at Bryn Mawr University. Francl is responding to an article in the Times by Susannah Meadows about Meadows’s son, Shepherd, who had juvenile idiopathic  arthritis; Francl calls Meadows’s preference for “alternative” medicines “molecular paranoia” and “chemophobia.”

Names in the News

Officials in Incheon, the city in South Korea, announced plans this week to transform a small fishing island off the country’s west coast into a gambling and tourism center. According to a report in the Washington Post, the project will be called EIGHTCITY – Bloomberg News reported a different spelling, “8-City” – and will be built in the shape of the number 8, which has connotations of good fortune in several Asian cultures.

Read my previous post about the significance of the number eight.

(Hat tip: Benjamin Lukoff on ANS-L.)

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California’s new health-insurance exchange, formed in compliance with the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), won’t be called Avocado after all. Instead, the five-member exchange picked a safe choice, Covered California, the Los Angeles Times reported this week. (The tentative tagline is equally bland: “Your destination for affordable healthcare.”) The stated rationale for the name is on shaky grammatical ground: “Covered is an action verb, and if we do our job, that’s what we want to happen,” exchange-board member Robert Ross told the Times. Actually, in this construction “covered” is an adjective.

Other rejected names included Eureka (the state motto) and Ursa (a Latin word for bear, in honor of the state animal).

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The cable company Comcast, which already owns faster, has applied for trademark protection for UPWARE. According to the industry publication Fierce Cable, the name would be used to market software as a service (SaaS). I suspect many Comcast customers are already using UPYOURS.

(Hat tip: MJF.)

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Two things I learned from a Daily Candy email this week: that there is a salon in San Francisco called Lonni’s Punani, and that the salon employs “body hair stylists,” a job title that was new to me. Lonni is the first name of the salon’s owner; she’s originally from New Jersey. And “Punani”? “Not Lonni’s last name,” Daily Candy said coyly. Further research revealed that punani is a Hawaiian word meaning “heavenly flower” and a Pacific Islander slang term for “vagina” or “vulva.” 

You gotta admit that “Lonni’s Punani” sounds classier – and rhymier – than “Virginia’s Va-jay-jay.”

¡Ay, Ay, Ay!

It’s bad enough that an optometric office is using a wretched bilingual pun as its name.

Eye Carumba, 4 Embarcadero Center, San Francisco

 

What’s worse is that, having opted to go with a wretched bilingual pun, the optometrists didn’t get their vision checked before ordering the sign. The second word of that Spanish interjection is spelled caramba, not carumba.

Even that proud underachiever Bart Simpson—whose first words, after all, were “¡Ay, caramba!”—knows better.

(By the way, caramba is a minced oath, the sort of thing you get when you substitute goshdarnit for goddammit. In this case, the word being minced is carajo, a vulgarism for “penis”; idiomatically, “¡Ay, carajo” means “Oh, fuck!”)

I might accept “Eye Caramba” (not “Carumba”) as the name of a hip, whimsical retailer of eyeglass frames à la Warby Parker. Or, even better, a hip, whimsical retailer of children’s eyeglass frames. But the name is out of focus for an optometrist’s office: a silly, misspelled pun just doesn’t say “skilled and experienced medical professionals dedicated to the improvement of my vision.”

Word of the Week: Grandiosity

Grandiosity: Greatness of scope or intent; feigned or affective grandeur or pomposity; excessive use of verbal ornamentation.

In the mental-health disciplines, grandiosity is a disorder: “an unrealistic sense of superiority, a sustained view of oneself as better than others that causes the narcissist to view others with disdain or as inferior. It also refers to a sense of uniqueness, the belief that few others have anything in common with oneself and that one can only be understood by a few or very special people.” (Source: the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, 2000.)

In last Thursday’s Republican presidential primary debate, held in Charleston, South Carolina, former US Senator Rick Santorum sniped at fellow candidate Newt Gingrich:

“Grandiosity has never been a problem with Newt Gingrich,” Santorum said of his opponent’s shameless self-promotion. “A month ago, he was saying, ‘Oh, I’m inevitable.’ It was, ‘I’m destined to do it.’”

Gingrich’s smiling response seemed to suggest that he approved this message and perhaps thought “grandiosity” was a favorable assessment.

Santorum: Grandiosity Never a Problem For Gingrich

 

Gingrich went on to win the primary on Saturday. Santorum finished third.

When grandiosity and grandiose entered English dictionaries, around 1840, the words already had both positive and negative connotations. As time went on, the disparaging meanings prevailed. George Eliot wrote in Daniel Deronda (1876) of a character’s “grandiose air” that “was making Mab feel herself a ridiculous toy to match the cottage piano.” In 1892, Augustine Birrell compared Gibbon and Milton: “as one is our grandest author, so the other is our most grandiose.” And in a 2011 column in the Wall Street Journal, Al Lewis said of Ayn Rand, a darling of the antigovernment crowd:

She crafted philosophical arguments and wrote bizarre works of fiction to prove their premises. Then, in the delusional grandiosity that only chemicals can inspire, she declared herself, “the most creative thinker alive.”

Newt Gingrich has also declared himself to be a creative thinker. Some of his publicly shared ideas include establishing a moon colony to extract minerals, firing federal judges with whom he disagrees, and changing the labor laws to allow children to work (as school janitors, for example).

Predictably, there's a parody Twitter account.

January Linkfest

Balloting has begun in the Name of the Year contest, now in its 29th year of providing merriment at others’ expense. The ground rules, in case you’ve forgotten: all names are real, many are from the world of sports, all comments are welcome, reporting of results may take a while. In the first round, I’m quite smitten with Courvoisier Winetavius Richardson, “armed robbery suspect.”

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From A Walk in the Words, links to four very interesting articles about language and sports, including a 2006 American Speech paper about Homeric and hypocoristic nicknames in professional baseball and hockey. Seriously. You’ll love it.

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People “get very worked up about” the naming of neighborhoods, observes University of Chicago sociologist Gordon Douglas. The Atlantic surveys the neighborhood namescapes of several cities, including Indianapolis, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. (Via Dustbury.) Related: check out this wonderfully detailed neighborhood map of my own city, Oakland. Be sure to embiggen it for the full effect. (Via Our Oakland.)

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Eavesdrop as some New York City building developers brainstorm names for their new properties. Some of the coinages, writes the New York Times’s Joanne Kaufman, “are as whimsical as those of movie stars’ children.”

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Why wait and worry about whether your thesis will be published? Submit it to The Journal of Universal Rejection and know for sure!

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Your own surname is usually a safe choice for your company or product name, but not when, for example, your name is Mustee and you make shower stalls. Susan Perera talks eponyms and perceptions on the trademark-and-marketing blog Duets Blog.

 

They’re not real pros, just “pros.”

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How potato-chip brands use language to position their products: a scholarly yet appetizing essay by linguist Dan Jurafsky in his blog, The Language of Food.

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Wrong pronoun choice, lack of the subjunctive, lay/lie errors: Erin McKean bravely reveals the horror of ungrammatical song lyrics.

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Speaking of errors, did you screw up and write “sneak peak” instead of “sneak peek” in a tweet? There’s a bot for that, the excellently named Stealth Mountain. (Yes, a sneaky peak.) Misspell the phrase and Stealth Mountain will tweet back a mild-mannered correction: “I think you mean sneak peek.” Check out the favorites page, which reveals that people do not always appreciate being led onto the path of knowledge. Shocking, I know. (Via Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic.)

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A staggeringly comprehensive lexicon of slang terms and acronyms used by doctors and veterinarians. Or: why a HOPEFUL does not inspire hope. (Via Language Hat.)

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At last, the beauty product we’ve all been waiting for: Fotoshop by Adobé (a-doe-BAY). With pro-pixel intensifying hydro-jargon microbead extract!

 

By Jesse Rosten.

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!

Word of the Week: Semmelweis Reflex

Semmelweis reflex: The tendency to reject new evidence because it contradicts established norms or practices. Named for the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865), now considered a pioneer of antiseptic procedures. His observation that hand-washing greatly reduced childbirth mortality was dismissed by most of his fellow physicians, who took offense at being told to wash their hands.

In a paradoxical twist, the Semmelweis reflex has been invoked in recent years by people who oppose a medical advance—namely, childhood vaccination. “Today’s vaccine injury denialism is a modern-day Semmelweis reflex,” wrote Ginger Taylor in “The Role of Government and Media,” a chapter in the anti-vaccine book Vaccine Epidemic (2011). (Taylor is not a physician.) The Semmelweis Society International, whose stated mission is “to expose the ‘sham peer review’ of medical professionals, nurses, and physicians when they are wrongfully accused of acts that can result in the loss of their clinical privileges,” has defended Andrew Wakefield, the British gastroenterologist whose study connecting childhood vaccines with a variety of ailments, including autism, has been definitively debunked. (For a thorough recap of the Wakefield story, read the Skeptic’s Dictionary entry.)

In The Panic Virus: A True Story of Science, Medicine, and Fear (2011), his excellent account of the history of vaccination and anti-vaccination, science reporter Seth Mnookin writes:

Semmelweis is frequently invoked by anti-vaccinationists. While explaining to me why the “mainstream” ignored Andrew Wakefield, one of his supporters and financial backers said, “We know there’s never been a time in history when people, in a short period of time, have looked at the data and thought, ‘Oh, we have a problem here,’ or even, ‘We might have a problem here—maybe you should wash your hands after you dissect bodies and before you go deliver babies.’ God forbid you should wash your hands!”

The Semmelweis reflex, Mnookin writes, is “a variation on the Galileo Gambit, whereby someone whose work is debunked argues that the fact that Galileo’s work was also debunked proves he is actually correct.”

In a Republican presidential-primary debate held in early September, candidate Rick Perry strode (or swaggered) into the Galileo controversy when he asserted that the issue of climate change remains “unsettled.” “Galileo got outvoted for a spell,” Perry said.

The Texas governor got it exactly wrong, explains The Atlantic Wire:

[W]hat Perry fails to realize is the fact that the scientific community actually agreed with Galileo. It was the clergy who outvoted him, accusing him of being a heretic. “By the time Galileo was publishing on heliocentrism, the idea was already circulating and widely accepted in scientific circles, including Jesuits,” explains Joshua Rosneau from the National Center for Science Education. “He wasn’t outvoted by scientists, he was outvoted by the political and religious leadership of his country.” [Emphasis in original.]

Above: Portrait of Ignaz Semmelweis at age 42, from Wikipedia.

Big Pink

“Pink” isn’t just a color, reports Natasha Singer in the New York Times; it’s a marketing strategy to raise money for breast-cancer prevention and research. And it’s a verb:

 

 

In marketing circles, “to pink” means to link a brand or a product or even the entire National Football League to one of the most successful charity campaigns of all time. Like it or not — and some people don’t like it at all — the pinking of America has become a multibillion-dollar business, a marketing, merchandising and fund-raising opportunity that is almost unrivaled in scope. There are pink-ribbon car tires, pink-ribbon clogs, pink eyelash curlers — the list goes on.

Call it Big Pink:

Like Big Oil, Big Food and Big Pharma, Big Pink has its share of critics. Some patient advocates complain that Komen and other pink-ribbon charities sugarcoat breast cancer, which kills about 40,000 American women and 450 men annually. Others complain that pink marketing, despite the many millions it raises for charities, is just another way to move merchandise and that it exploits cancer by turning it into an excuse to go shopping. And some pink-theme products have no relationship with any charities at all. (Consumers should check before buying.)

For a decidedly jaundiced take on pink-ribbon marketing, read Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 essay, “Welcome to Cancerland.”

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Image: Pink Ribbon Sparkle Centerpiece. See Google Shopping for more pink-themed tchotchkes.

I Feel Your Pain

It’s a worthy cause, I’m sure.

But a jogging, sunglasses-wearing, pain-arrow-emanating brain for a mascot? Ouch.

 

Those colors! I'm seeing an aura ...

Besides, the whole concept of sponsoring a running race to raise money for headache research strikes me as inappropriate. Wouldn’t pounding through Golden Gate Park with hundreds of sweaty fellow-joggers be an automatic migraine trigger? For next year’s event, I propose an alternative to Miles for Migraine—say, Several Hours Lying Absolutely Still in a Quiet, Darkened Room (with Plenty of Strong Drugs) for Migraine.