Fritinancy

O Beautiful for Magazines

An Independence Day appreciation:

 

Window #1, Issues magazine shop, Oakland (my favorite neighborhood store)

Terrible photo; glorious tapestry of titles. Of course they all have websites, but it's so much more enthralling to gaze at all their covers this way. Some of my favorites:

Yaldah, A Magazine for Jewish Girls, by Jewish Girls. (Yaldah is Hebrew for "girl.")
Women & Guns, The World's First Firearms Publication for Women.
Skirmish, "the world's leading multi-period historical re-enactment and living history magazine."*
American Cheerleader (is there any other kind?). Note: You may want to put on sunglasses before viewing the website.
Nuts and Volts, "the magazine for the electronics hobbyist."

On the other side of the doorway:

Window #2, Issues

Highlights:

Primitive Archer (from the August/September issue: "Why I Hunt Primitve," by Billy Berger).
Buddhism Today ("Boundless Joy and Freedom").
Boar Hunter (online, check out the Tusker Tally Wild Boar Registry).
Cemetery Dance ("the World Fantasy Award-winning magazine of horror, dark mystery, and suspense").
Gastronomica, The Journal of Food and Culture.

What a great country, huh?

By the way, specialty magazines like these are at the heart of Charlie Haas's terrific new novel, The Enthusiast, which I highly recommend for your holiday-weekend reading.

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* I love the word "skirmish." It comes from Old French "escaramouche" and is etymologically related to "scrimmage."

The Shady Side of the Tweet

TechCrunch reported this morning about an email conversation between Twitter and a third-party developer that had created a service very similar to Twitter's. One phrase raised TC's eyebrows—and mine:

Twitter, Inc is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) [...]

I wasn't the only one who hadn't known that Twitter had trademarked "Tweet," but sure enough, a visit to the USPTO website reveals that Twitter, Inc., filed for protection of "Tweet" on April 16, 2009. (I can't link because the search will have expired; if you care to check, this "Tweet" is the ninth record in a list of 31.)

A few questions:

• Twitter, Inc., was founded in March 2006 and launched its service in July of that year. But it didn't file for trademark protection of "Twitter" until April 24, 2009. Why the long delay?

• Trademark protection of "Tweet" will not affect informal use of the term as a noun or verb (e.g., "Did you read Joe's tweet about that?"). But will it affect businesses that use "Tweet" in their names (e.g., Tweetdeck, Tweetie)?


• Twitter owes its phenomenal growth to third-party developers—to whom, it should be noted, Twitter has given open access to its API. Is this recent move a matter of biting the hand that feeds them, as trademark lawyer Jessica Stone Levy writes in a blog post?

(In an update to the TechCrunch post, Twitter founder Biz Stone explained, not unreasonably: "[W]e encourage developers of new applications and services built using Twitter APIs to invent original branding for their projects rather than use our marks, logos, or look and feel. This approach leaves room for applications to evolve as they grow and it avoids potential confusion down the line")

By the way, the comments on the TechCrunch post reveal several common misunderstandings about trademark:

• "Can they trademark 'tweet'? Looks like an ordinary word to me." "Ordinary words" get trademark protection all the time: consider apple, dove, and twine. To be strong trademarks, they can't be used descriptively—you can't have Twine brand twine or Apple brand apples. But as metaphors or arbitrary marks, they're one of the pillars of brand naming.

• "Put a copyright on a dictionary word? Yeh." I think this commenter was saying something similar to the previous commenter, with a sarcastic twist. Two objections: "dictionary words" are turned into brands all the time; and the legal term is trademark, not copyright. Trademark protects goods or services; copyright protects a form of expression such as a musical or literary work. And patents protect inventions. (Here's a good summary from the USPTO.) By the way, the past tense of copyright is copyrighted, not "copywritten."

• "I’ve reserved around 100 domains with the term tweet in them ... although I didn't do a trademark search." You can't "reserve" domains; you either buy them (more accurately, rent them) or wish you'd bought them. And if you're starting a business—and from his subsequent comments, it's clear this person is—it's ill advised to stake a claim on a name without checking its trademark status. And yet I see it all the time. At the very least check the online trademark database; to be really safe (and well informed), have a trademark lawyer do a comprehensive review. Domains are cheap (and not as hard to find as some people think); trademark litigation is expensive. An ounce of prevention, etc.

UPDATE: Thanks, Karen, for leaving the comment about the Twitter blog post, which I hadn't yet read. As Twitter founder Biz Stone writes, it all comes down to likelihood of confusion. 

Don't Bogart the Dip

Got munchies?

Full of crunchy hempen goodness and ... uhhh ... I forget.

Hippie Chips are manufactured by Rock-n-Roll Gourmet ("For the Rocker in You!"), which was started by musicians Dean and Jan Ehrlich. Besides Sea of Love Salt, they're available in Haight AshBerry Jalapeño, Memphis Blue Barbeque, Lime Is on My Side Cracked Pepper, White Room Cheddar, Woodstock Ranch, and Chive-Talkin' Sour Cream.

Spotted at Berkeley Bowl Marketplace.

Guest Post at Duets Blog

I'm the guest blogger today at Duets Blog, a very fine collaborative blog that bridges the gap between brands and trademark, creativity and the law. Naturally, my subject is naming—specifically, the role a name plays as the title of a brand's story. Check out my post, and while you're there spend some time reading the many other interesting posts on topics as wide ranging as Michael Jackson ("The King of Pop's Most Recognizable Trademark?") and the trend toward single-letter naming in the hotel industry.

Thanks, Duets Blog, for the opportunity to share my thoughts on naming with your readers!

Gazprom's N-Word

From the BBC this morning, news of a lucrative merger that has yielded the year's most unfortunate name:

Russia's energy giant Gazprom has signed a $2.5bn (£1.53bn) deal with Nigeria's state operated NNPC, to invest in a new joint venture.

The new firm, to be called Nigaz, is set to build refineries, pipelines and gas power stations in Nigeria.

That is correct: Nigaz.

Gazprom probably pronounces it NIGH-gahz. As if sounding pretentious when you're being offensive makes everything cool.

Do I have to repeat myself? Step away from the portmanteaus, people. Nine times out of ten, they'll just embarrass you. At the very least, peel off a few Benjamins from that stack of billions and hire a consultant familiar with Urban Dictionary.

Thanks to PopeHat for the tip. And kudos to CatchThis, the naming blog (right here in O-town), for its apt response:

YO! Gazprom! I don’t mean to be dissin’ ya’ll, but Shizzle! What the hizzle??? Nigaz??? I might just have to shoot the five witcha, or at least sick [sic] the naming po-pos on ya. Again: Nigaz???? Have you NO skrilla to do some of that linguistic or cultural screenin’??

Word.

Simpsons Brand-o-Rama 3

Honestly, I didn't intend to renew the lease on this Simpsonian extravamaganza. But then I stumbled upon a new! improved! interactive! map of Springfield with a bunch of brand names I hadn't known about, so here I am again with a new slew of fictitious brands from the longest-running prime-time show on American TV.

If you're just joining us (an example of the relevance conditional, I've learned from Language Log), the original inspiration for this series came from linguist Heidi Harley, who has published an annual Simpsons linguistic joke collection since 2005. If you crave more Simpsons brand nonsense, please to check out Brand-o-Rama 2007 and Brand-o-Rama 2008. And if you still haven't spotted your own favorite Simpsons brand, won't you leave a comment and let us know about it?

The basics: Dates, when provided, refer to original broadcasts. I've watched most but not all of the episodes, including most of the current (20th) season, but couldn't confirm all references because there's a significant lag between air dates and DVD releases: the most recent DVD (2008) covers the eleventh season, and the twelfth-season DVD won't be released until August 2009.

However You Slice It

Pizza Hut has introduced a new sub-brand, or at least a new logo, along with new red pizza-delivery boxes:

                                              

Original                                                                             New

The company's chief marketing officer, Brian Niccol, told Brandweek in March that the red box "is a game changer in packaging and design." That's how CMOs talk, you know. Niccol also said:

And yes, we're also introducing another vocabulary word with Pizza Hut, which is 'The Hut.' That ties in nicely with [today's] texting generation. We wanted to make sure that Pizza Hut and 'The Hut' become common vernacular for our brand. Red is our mark and when you see that red roof, people will refer to it as 'The Hut' or 'Pizza Hut.' As we expand our online and mobile businesses, 'The Hut' is the perfect icon for our mobile generation.

"Introducing another vocabulary word"? Which word would that be, Mr. Niccol: The? Or hut? Because I'm pretty sure hut has been around since, oh, the seventeenth century, and the even longer.

Then there's the obligatory kowtowing to "[today's] texting generation," a k a young whippersnappers. "Again with the texting!" Ben Zimmer, executive producer of Visual Thesaurus, wrote in an e-mail to me. "That's the same rationale they used for Syfy"—the recent renaming of the SciFi Channel. 

PizzaHut, however, is taking pains to let us know that this doesn't represent a name change. PizzaHut.com says on its home page: "Pizza Hut is not changing its name. We are proud of our name and heritage and will continue to be Pizza Hut. We do use 'The Hut' in some of our marketing efforts."

As Econsultancy observed on Monday:

A red box and a "vocabulary word" are not going to change the fact that consumers are not consuming as much pizza. Same-store sales were down for Pizza Hut in the fourth quarter of last year. And while the company has started using "The Hut" phrase on its printed materials and storefronts, a quick name change isn't going to fix that problem.

And the consumer-advocacy site WalletPop, which fielded "scores" of comments from "disgruntled Pizza Hut patrons" after reporting the development, quoted Pizza Hut spokesman Christopher Fuller:

"We think that 'The Hut' is to Pizza Hut as Coke is to Coca-Cola," Fuller said. "We have begun using the term in conjunction with Pizza Hut in our advertising, pizza boxes and some restaurants."

To my surprise, Armin Vit of Brand New, an authoritative identity-design blog, said he doesn't "mind" the new design direction. I'm not a graphic designer, but I find the font ugly, the underscore awkward, and the shadow-lines (do they have a technical name?) distracting. And the dumb Borsalino-fedora icon remains as dopey as ever. Do they want people to refer to the chain as The Hat?

Or are they thinking about something else altogether? In that case, you might want to brush up on your Huttese.

Rude Awakening

This may be the saddest brand name in the world.

 

Obviously owes a debt to Langston Hughes.

Manufactured sometime in the 1950s, from the looks of it.* Spotted on the shelf at Jacob's Clock and Watch Piedmont Avenue, Oakland.

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* Except for the digital clock, as several of my Twitter followers pointed out. My attempts at online research were fruitless; anyone have the scoop on this radio's provenance (Italian?) and age?

But Wait—There's More!

Some late-breaking news about two items I wrote about recently:

Yesterday I linked to the Simpsons neologisms on the Walk in the WoRds blog. Turns out there's a much more comprehensive glossary on the Simpsons wiki, whose existence I knew nothing about until yesterday. Yes, I am hanging my head in chagrin. At the same time, I am chortling gleefully as I reacquaint myself with terms such as America Junior (what Homer calls Canada), crisitunity (a portmanteau of "crisis" and "opportunity"), and Faxtrola (what Mr. Burns calls a fax machine). I love the "hole" compounds, too: car hole (garage), word hole (mouth), throughhole (possibly a throughway or a tunnel). And there's a long, almost scholarly entry for cromulent. (Via Bebamanno on Delicious.) Check back here next week for Part 3 of my own Simpsons obsession, Simpsons Brand-o-Rama.)

I've written here and in my Visual Thesaurus column (subscription required) about the naming of Microsoft's new search engine, Bing. Visual Thesaurus commenter Don H. (Donald Huntington) brought up an association that hadn't occurred to me: Monty Python's "Machine That Goes BING."  Watch the scene (from The Meaning of Life, 1983) and see for yourself.

June Linkfest

It's been cold and gray for weeks in the Bay Area: bad for Seasonal Affective Disorder, good for hunching over a warm computer and foraging for links. Such as these:

Remember those adverbial puns known as Tom Swifties? ("I'm losing my hair," Tom bawled.) They're (almost) all here, helpfully organized in alphabetical order.

Edmunds Daily picks the top 10 categories of stupid car names, including the oxymoronic Dodge Sprinter and the sounds-like-you're-from Boston Ford Kuga and Ford Ka. (Not on the list: my favorite Bad Car Name.)

Fork in the Road, a Village Voice food blog, lists words "that are so overused in food writing, they make our skin crawl."

Golden Gaytime ice cream bars? Yes, and 11 other Unfortunate Product Names, including Vergina beer, which I wrote about here. (Hat tip: Cooking with Amy on Twitter.) For a daily delivery of bad nomenclature, check out the Unfortunate Names Blog.

A Walk in the WoRds presents a short glossary of Simpsons neologisms, including "craptacular," "pointy kitty" (a rat), and my favorite, "knowitallism."

"It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news." Read about what happened. (Via Snarkmarket.)

I'm fascinated by this glossary of jewelry terms from Ideal Brilliance, a jewelry retailer. A torsade is "any strand of jewelry that can be worn twisted"; a YAG is an yttrium aluminum garnet, a synthetic substitute for a diamond.

One more: Just about everyone has blogged about it already, but in case you missed it, Pride and Twitterverse is a marvelous send-up of both Jane Austen and social media. Best if you've dabbled in Twitter yourself; certainly enhanced by familiarity with Austen's fiction.

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Photo swiped from CHUD, where it accompanies an interesting post about a Tom Swift movie that's in the works. Incredibly, it's the first Tom Swift movie in the character's history, which goes back to 1910, when the first Tom Swift novel was published.