Fritinancy

Nicely Domained: Whisper.sh

Here’s a good example of thinking beyond .com.

Whisper, according to an effusive TechCrunch post, is “the latest social app to capture the attention of a huge — and growing — audience of users, as well as the attention of a group of investors.” Like PostSecret (founded in 2005), the Whisper app encourages users to share secrets anonymously; Whisper’s twist is that users can communicate with each other in public or private. There’s also a do-good angle: Whisper is connected with Your Voice, “a non-profit organization … dedicated to raising awareness of mental health issues on college campuses.”

 

I like the Whisper name, with its suggestion of secrecy and its long etymological history going back to Old English. (I’m less enthusiastic about the tagline, “Your Secret Public.” My public is a secret? Publicize my secret? I’m confused.) Whisper.com was, of course, unavailable – it redirects to the job-search site Monster.com – and so were modified domains like WhisperIt, WhisperNow, and GetWhisper. But that didn’t stop the company’s founders. They skipped over the .com choices and picked .sh, the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) of Saint Helena.

It’s perfect. After all, how better to reinforce “Whisper” and “secrecy” than with a whispered “sh”?

In case you’re wondering, Saint Helena is a speck of land in the South Atlantic Ocean. One of the most isolated islands in the world, it’s part of the British overseas territory of Saint Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha. You may remember it as the island to which Napoleon I was exiled in 1815.

Well played, Whisper.sh. Let this be a reminder to other entrepreneurs that – as I wrote back in 2010 – “there’s a world of alternatives out there” if you’re open to jettisoning dot-com in favor of a creative substitute.

Giving Thanks for Good Names

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, here are three business names I’m grateful to know about.

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After a disaster like Hurricane Sandy, there’s usually no shortage of clothing donations. But donors often forget about one essential item: new underwear. The nonprofit organization Underwearness raises awareness about the problem and delivers new underwear to needy children. The name is a perfect blend, and the logo is strong, playful, and vibrant.

 

One quibble: I wish the slogan were something more original than the “One X at a Time” snowclone, which I’ve written about several times. (Not to mention the ambiguity of “pair” here—pair of children? Pair of underwear?)

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High-low collaborations between couture designers and mass-market retailers are old-hat by now. What’s new about Narciso Rodriguez’s recent partnership with Kohl’s is a name that’s as stylish as the clothing: DesigNation. Not only does it say “design,” “nation,” and “designation,” it visually deconstructs the logo to suggest something fresh and exciting.

 

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Among the cocoa cognoscienti of San Francisco, master chocolate-maker Michael Recchiuti is famous enough that he could have named his new dessert café after himself. Instead, he called it Chocolate Lab. Yes, there’s a whiff of science about the name, nicely supported by the logo and some of the website headings – Experiments, Antidotes, Lab Time.

 

But it gets better. The café’s address is 801 22nd Street – in the neighborhood called Dogpatch.

Very fetching!

Chocolate Lab puppy via DogExplorer.com.

September Linkfest

New York City gangs take their names very, very seriously, according to “Gang ‘Slang’ers,” in the New York Post. “It took us about a month to come up with our name,” said Piff Montana, a member of the Get Touched Boyz of Jamaica, Queens. … We wanted a name that would make an impact.” The full list of 300 or so gang names reveals a preoccupation with numbers and precinctspercentages: there are gangs called 5 Precinct Percent, 10 Precinct Percent, 40 Precinct Percent, and so on up to 122 Precinct Percent. (Hat tip: NameFlash. And thanks to Dave for correcting me on "precinct.")

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New additions to World Wide Words: eastwooding, mirror fasting, underbragging, and gramping. No, gramping is not a misspelling of glamping.

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Looking for a title for your book? You can’t go wrong with “The Elements of ___,” says Poynter.org’s Roy Peter Clark, who lists more than 25 knockoffs of the Strunk and White original. Here’s the one that inspired his post:

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Before she founded the online dictionary Wordnik, Erin McKean worked on the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, a reference that isn’t just for writers but is also by writers—i.e., various writers were invited to contribute notes on words that interested them. One of the writers assigned to McKean was the late David Foster Wallace, who, she writes, approached the copyediting phase as if “someone invited him to an all-day grammar seminar (with celebrity photo signings and vendor's expo hall), combined with a debating society picnic, where the topic was ‘RESOLVED: This Comma Should Be Removed.’ (You're not surprised, are you?)” Read the whole delightful account at “It was wonderful, marvelous, magnificent, superb, glorious, sublime, lovely, delightful ...”

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The Chamomile Tea Party was formed in 2010 as an alternative to “the rancor between the political left and right” in the US. It’s using modified World War II posters to get the point across, and you can view and download the posters on Flickr.

 

By outtacontext.

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In brand naming, many clients panic if a name is more than five letters long. According to Baby Name Wizard, there’s a contrary trend in baby-boy naming, at least in the US: fear of short names. Finn becomes Finnegan, Quinn becomes Quinlan, and—most boggling of all—Levi becomes Leviathan (“the twisted serpent to be killed at the end of time”) or Leviticus (the third book of the Old Testament, notable mostly for its litany of laws about skin diseases, sacrifices, and genital discharges).

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Fellow name developer Chris Johnson (aka The Name Inspector) has created my new favorite Pinterest board: the Wall of Namifying, “logos of companies whose names end with -ify (or, in one case, -efy).” As you probably know, I share his obsession. (And speaking of Pinterest, I’m trying my hand at a similar project: cataloguing the many, many -ly names and logos.)

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Linguist Arnold Zwicky collected some wonderful names of minor-league baseball teams, including the Albuquerque Isotopes, the Colorado Springs Sky Sox, the Fort Wayne Tincaps, and the Lansing Lugnuts. Then he followed up with an imaginary list of his own. I’m rooting for the Baton Rouge Compacts.

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From the Autoextremist blog, a slightly jaundiced guide to the latest auto-industry terms. An “accidental tourist” describes “executives devoid of the qualifications necessary to properly perform the duties assigned to them”; “greenage” is a program’s environmental potential. (Hat tip: Lance Knobel.)

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Speaking of jaundiced, there’s nothing like a Condescending Corporate Brand Page to say “We're a big corporate brand using Facebook. So look out for us asking you to like and share our stuff in a faintly embarrassing and awkward way.” Read more about the CCBP in Fast Company. (Note: the CCBP is British in origin—its URL contains “corporate bollocks”—but the themes are, alas, universal.)

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He is the very model of an amateur grammarian.

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I attended the Brand New Conference last year, when it was held in San Francisco, but couldn’t make it to New York for this year’s conference. Thankfully, organizer Armin Vit has compiled the best quotes and tweets from the event. Here’s a provocative opinion from UK designer Miles Newlin: “Stories have an end, and unless you want to think of your brand as having an end, then forget the storytelling idea, and forget people who talk about brand storytelling.”

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See what happened when New York Magazine sent a reporter to TechCrunch Disrupt SF to ask startup founders about their “chronically misspelled” company names. It’s, uh, Osom. (Thanks, Jessica!)

Names in the News

Sunnyvale-based HP, which bought smartphone company Palm two years ago, is creating a new subsidiary that will incorporate the remnants of Palm, according to a leaked memo reproduced in All Things D and elsewhere. The new unit’s name is Gram, and its logo is … interesting.

The typography does suggest lightness. (Is the G a demi-butterfly?) It’s unclear whether the name is meant to evoke “grandmother,” “telegram,” “grammar,” or “Grammy award,” but I can think of a ready-made tagline, modified only slightly from Aldous Huxley’s original: “Gram is better than a damn.”

My 2009 post about the puzzling persistence of the Palm Pilot name is here.

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Alameda County’s first indoor miniature-golf course opens tomorrow. Its name will cause some double-takes:

It’s ironic, doncha know. From the Subpar FAQ:

We are aware that subpar usually implies something that is not quite up to snuff. This is us not taking ourselves too seriously. Being below par in golf is a positive thing, so the silly name works in our case. And only our case.

Hipster humor: sub-whelming.

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In Chicago, the Morse Avenue “L” station opened a couple of weeks ago after a six-week rehab. Best part of the coverage in Chicago Now is the news that a restaurant be opening near the station entrance. Its name is perfection itself: morseL.

(Photo via Chicago Now. Hat tip: Amy “Crossword Fiend” Reynaldo.)

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UK-based Shutl, which calls itself “the world’s fastest delivery service,” has offered the world’s fastest man, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, 1 percent of the company if he can help set a delivery record. Sweet deal, but isn’t “Shutl” the name of Tevye’s youngest daughter in Fiddler on the Roof? Shutl from the shtetl, they called her. Such a lovely girl.

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Three things you may not have known: 1) The Obama White House is the first in history to brew its own beer. It’s “unbelievably good,” according to White House assistant chef Sam Kass. 2) A petition at Whitehouse.gov calls on the administration to release the recipe “so that it may be enjoyed by all.” 3) My source for the story is the “blog of record about White House food initiatives, from policy to pie.” The blog has a delicious name: Obama Foodorama.

Nicely Named: Weightless Books

I learned about Weightless Books through Brian White, who publishes the new fiction magazine Fireside. (You may recall that I wrote about Fireside when Brian was seeking Kickstarter backing for Issue #1. He’s now raising money for Issue #2 and beyond.) If you didn’t get in on the original Kickstarter frenzy and still want to read Fireside #1, you can order it from Weightless, which sells DRM-free, non-encrypted publications in PDF, epub, mobi, and .lit formats. That means you can read them on any device. Lots of small, independent publishers are in the Weightless e-stacks, and you’re in particular luck if you favor the romance, fantasy, and science-fiction genres, which are well represented. Weightless also carries Fairy Tale Review, a very worthy little journal to which I once subscribed the old-fashioned way.

Weightless Books appears to be based in Massachusetts. (No mailing address is given; for “location,” their Twitter profile gives “The Aether.”) It was launched in 2010 by two self-described enthusiasts, Gavin J. Grant and Michael J. DeLuca. Both men are published fiction writers as well.

I love Weightless’s business model and its support for small presses, and I really like the Weightless name, which of course suggests the bits-and-bytes nature of the product. I also like that it’s a homophone of waitless—a more interesting way of saying “instant download.” I smiled to see the administrivia (About, FAQ, Contact) under a wry heading, “Slightly Weighty.”

My only quibble concerns Weightless’s tagline, (e)Books That Don’t Weigh You Down. That parenthesis at the beginning looks clumsy, and I’d prefer that the tag didn’t repeat “weigh” and “books” from the name. The negative phrasing isn’t ideal, either. I’d have encouraged Gavin and Michael to explore other words—say, “light,” “reader” (referring to both the person and the device),” and “speed.” Good Reads at Light Speed—something like that.

Yes, that’s how much I admire Weightless Books: I’m giving away an idea. It may never happen again!

Nicely Named: Beeminder

In Monday’s Word of the Week post I briefly mentioned Beeminder, a commitment device to help people overcome akrasia and achieve their goals.

 

 

I like the Beeminder name, I wrote, because it suggests industriousness. But there’s a lot more to say about the name,  and I’m pleased to report that the Beeminder said much of it in a September 2011 blog post.

Co-founder Daniel Reeves wrote that Beeminder was originally called Kibotzer, a blend of kibitzer (Yiddish for someone who gives unasked-for advice—accent on kib, please) and bot (“a machine or program that interacts with you in a vaguely human way”). Thus Kibotzer: “A bot that bugs you about how fat you are.”

That’s cute, but when the founders decided to turn their hobby into a real business, they acknowledged that the name had to go. “Kibotzer” turned out to be hard to pronounce, and not enough people knew what a kibitzer was.

So they cast about for a new name. I hope they started with a naming brief—the blog post doesn’t mention it, and I’m sorry to say that many startups skip this essential step—but at least they “filled pages with candidate names.” That’s good: you need a lot of names, in a lot of styles, before you start narrowing the field. And the also-rans mentioned in the post show a lot of good lateral thinking: Flakeproof, Goalbugger, even Funky Goal Medina.

I wasn’t surprised to learn, however, that Beeminder came from someone outside the core team: founders are often too close to the problem to recognize the most effective solution. Once Beeminder was on the table, its advantages were evident. Here’s how co-founder Reeves spells it out:

1. Beeminder is a “me-binder” — a self-binding tool.
2. “Beeminder” rhymes with “reminder”.
3. It’s about “minding your goals” in the “mind your p’s and q’s” sense. (“Bee-mindful”)
4. Our esteemed co-founder Bethany Soule goes by “Bee”.
5. Bees are just cute (and hard-working!).
6. Beeminder sends reminders with a motivational sting.
7. Beeminder helps you make a beeline for your goal.
8. You use Beeminder because you want to be minded.

It’s not just that Beeminder evokes multiple meanings, it’s that all of the meanings are positive and relevant. Together, they add up to a strong, clear story that’s fun to tell—and to repeat to friends.

By happy coincidence, Ben Yagoda of the Not One-Off Britishisms blog wrote earlier this week that “minder”—a Britishism meaning “a person in charge of something”—is increasingly popular among speakers of American English. He cites four recent “minder” appearances, including one in the TV show “Gossip Girl.”

Names in the News

Items that caught my attention in the last couple of weeks:

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HotelChatter spots a recent trend in hotel naming: single-word brands “that hardly even communicate that these are hotels where you can spend the night.” The newest example they cite is Even (which does, actually, suggest evening activity); others include Public, Edition, and Commune. “Commune”? As in, “Tonight it’s your turn to make the lentil-millet stew”? (Via Name Wire.)

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I can’t pass up another opportunity to write about Fifth Third Bancorp, the Cincinnati-based bank whose name is legendary in verbal-branding circles. (It’s the result of a long-ago merger, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still make jokes about it.) This week the bank revealed its new tagline, which exhibits a refreshing element of wit rarely seen in financial marketing: “The Curious Bank.” The bank’s chief marketing officer claimed the tagline had something to with “our DNA” (yes, it’s that old biological determinism again!), but he isn’t fooling me. “Fifth Third” is a curious name in the funny-peculiar sense, and if the people who work there are curious in the asking-better-questions sense, so much the better. In taglines, unlike in other corporate communications, a little ambiguity is a good thing.

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MATTER is a new online magazine with an unusual focus: each week it will publish a single piece of long-form journalism about science or technology. If that sounds to you like an iffy proposition in an era of tweets and sound bites, consider this: the magazine was fully funded on Kickstarter, to the tune of $75,000, in just 38 hours. As a lapsed journalist myself, I’m eager to see what the editorial team (based here in the Bay Area) will produce. I’m also enthusiastic about the name, which works—like most good names—on multiple levels: it simultaneously suggests reading material, the physical sciences, and “to be of importance.”

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Speaking of good names—and of focus—the ambitious new camera called Lytro began shipping this week. Lytro looks like no camera you’ve ever seen, and its technology is equally innovative: it allows you to focus after you’ve captured the image. (Read a New York Times Gadgetwise post that called the camera “astonishing”; see a diagram of how it works.) The name is brilliant—far better than the drearily descriptive original name, Refocus Imaging. “Lytro” suggests “light” and “nitro”—as in exploding old ideas—and the slightly tweaked spelling makes it feel revolutionary but not difficult. Even the letterforms contribute to the name’s effect: the sharp angles of the L, Y, and T are balanced by the lenslike O (subtly emphasized in the logo). Great work by Anthony Shore of Operative Words, who was hired by Sequence Branding of San Francisco to do the naming.

Totes Adorbs Dog Food

From the not-new-but-new-to-me files:

TV food-show host Rachael Ray, known for her bubbly manner, inventive vocabulary, and shortcut recipes, lends her name and image to a brand of dog food called Nutrish. The brand was introduced in mid-2008; all proceeds from its sale go to Rachael’s Rescue, which helps abandoned and mistreated animals.

 

If you think I’m going to mock the “Nutrish” name, think again. It’s just about perfect.

• It’s consistent with the casual, playful Rachael Ray brand vocabulary. On her cooking shows, Ms. Ray sprinkles abbreviations like “delish” and “stoup” (a hybrid of “stew” and “soup”). She refers to herself as “Rach.”
• It conveys a benefit—nutrition—in a lighthearted way that emphasizes the joy (rather than the chore) of dog ownership.
• It’s right in step with the vogue for truncations like totes (totally), adorbs (adorable), skedge (schedule), and obvs (obviously). For more on this trend, see Stan Carey’s “ ‘Ledgebag’ is totes amaze,” and Ben Yagoda’s “Totes cray-cray abbrevs.”

 

I like the simplicity and near-rhyme of this slogan, too.

 

Nicely named, Rachael Ray. Have a biscuit!

(Hat tip: MJF.)

Naming Notes

Items that have caught my attention in recent weeks:

I’ve been enjoying the new HBO series “Enlightened,” starring (and co-created by) Laura Dern, who plays Amy, a volatile, self-destructive, yet somehow sympathetic corporate executive who has a screaming meltdown in the office, submits to mellowing-out therapy, and manages to get herself rehired. The naming tidbit? The company Amy works for is called Abaddon Industries, pronounced in the show with emphasis on the first syllable, something like “Avedon.” The company nameplate is featured prominently on screen, but it didn’t ring any bells with me and it isn’t explained in the episodes I’ve seen. Wall Street Journal culture critic Michael Judge filled me in. Abaddon, he writes, “is the real co-star of ‘Enlightened’”:

The name is taken from Revelation 9:11: “And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon...” Our heroine, it becomes clear, aims to slay this corporate beast.

Possibly relevant: The other co-creator of the series, Mike White, is the son of Mel White, an evangelical pastor who ghostwrote the autobiographies of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Billy Graham—and then came out as gay, switched to a progressive Christian denomination, and eventually married his partner.

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Here’s what a lot of us want to know about Downy UNSTOPABLES, “the in wash [sic] scent booster for clean breeze [sic—why does Downy hate hyphens?] freshness that just won’t quit”: Is the spelling error intentional? Or is it a case of “We know we goofed but the labels were already on the presses so maybe no one will notice,” like Seagate’s “Your On” slogan (reported here in 2007)? Did Procter & Gamble, which owns Downy, spend so much money hiring Amy Sedaris as spokeslaundress that nothing was left in the budget for proofreading?

Don’t believe me? See for yourself. One P.

Hat tip to Grammarsnark, and special thanks to Amy Reynaldo for the nudge.

UPDATE: In a comment, J. Fisher provided a link to a response from Procter & Gamble about the spelling of UNSTOPABLES: 

Downy chose the word "Unstopables" to embody the playful and feisty spirit of the new product's unique form. The name puts a spin on the word "unstoppable" similar to how Unstopables puts a fresh twist on your laundry! However, Downy and Procter and Gamble definitely do not endorse the misspelling of the word "unstoppable" in daily usage.

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TechCrunch brings news of AngelPad, a mentorship program for web-technology startups. The companies selected for the program receive $20,000 in initial funding and another $100,000 from “two mystery VC firms.” A bunch of businesses have been presenting their pitches this week. Most of their names are boring and amateurish (SourceNinja, Prizzm, IDoneThis). One of the names, however, is baffling and amateurish: Vungle. Ditto the company’s self-description (reproduced verbatim):

Previously, mobile apps have had to rely on text and banner advertising, unable to show the user what the app does; and as a result doesn’t result in active users.
Vungle is 15 second mobile video clips, becuase [sic] the users see what the app does, installs acquired via our ad format result in four times as many active users.

The company is based in San Francisco and London, two cities with large populations of fluent English speakers and writers, something you’d never deduce from that copy. (As a result doesn’t result …? Sheesh.)

So I’m guessing the V stands for video and the -ungle has something to do with … jungle? Sorry, but all I’m getting is fungus, fumble, bungle, and linguine alle vongole, with unpleasant overtones of Tungle, a name I still dislike.

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In another TechCrunch story I read about another bad name, Adlibrium Dailies, which distributes daily deals through mobile applications. If this name is meant to evoke ad lib (short for ad libitum, Latin for “at one’s pleasure”), it ain’t working, because it sounds exactly like “add Librium,” a very well-known antianxiety drug. (If you click the latter link, you can watch a “phobias slideshow.” Fun!) Adlibrium is brought to you by Camber Tech, itself a not-bad name: camber means an arched surface or a setting of automobile wheels. But the creativity seems to have run out there. Besides Adlibrium, Camber has also developed Snapify (one of too many -ifys; read “A Disturbifying Trend in Namifying”) and Chatisfying, which is even more disturbifying: I originally read it as Chasti-fying (making people chaste?) or Chasten-fying (scolding people?). Even as it’s meant to be read—chat plus satisfying—it’s terrible. Portmanteau names: so tempting, so challenging.

Nicely Named: Midlife Mixtape

Here’s another example of the power of a small message—of what my colleague Christopher Johnson calls Microstyle. It’s the story of how a blog name has evolved over time.

Nancy Davis Kho is a journalist and blogger whom I got to know on Twitter last year and then—because we discovered that we live near each other in Oakland—in real life, too. At the time, her blog was called Nancy’s Notes—a default name, Nancy acknowledged, because she hadn’t thought of anything better. She’d started the blog in 2007 as “a catchall,” she told me in a recent email, “with posts related to the novel I was writing, my tech reporting, Oakland news ... whatevuh.” “Nancy’s Notes” had alliteration going for it but not much else: it was a blank slate that communicated none of Nancy’s wit, energy, and writing skill.

By the time we first met face to face last year, Nancy had decided to give the blog a single focus: humorous personal essays. She was still stumped for a name, so I sent her a list of 14 brainstorming suggestions. The names of personal blogs can be idiosyncratic, even quirky, and my suggestions took full advantage. A sampling: Repurpose the title of a blog post (“How to Wake Up Early” was one that sounded promising to me). Lift a phrase from one of the search-engine terms that brought someone to your blog. (I offered a search term from my own blog: “Another Word for Nom Nom.” Hey, it could work.) Adopt an “endangered” word from Save The Words. (That’s how Divinipotent Daily got its name.) Play with your surname. (Kho-Conspirator? Bi-Khostal?)

One of my suggestions centered on “normal,” which is how Nancy often described her life, wryly but not inaccurately. She does fit a certain picture of normality: husband, two kids, dog, satisfying work, happy childhood. That’s the suggestion that clicked with Nancy, and she turned it into her new blog name: Normalarkey. As she put it in a September 2010 post (“Normal? Malarkey!”):

[A] single definition of “normal” is just malarkey. Cell phone use in a symphony hall, pitching coaches for 8 year olds, someone getting laid off with no severance after 17 years with his employer…the new normal is the old nutty, to me. Thank goodness for friends who react by saying, “Are you and I the only ones who aren’t crazy?”

“Normalarkey” was playful and inventive, like Nancy herself. It was pronounceable—the portmanteau’s two elements meshed effortlessly—and appropriate. Nancy’s Notes was retired; Normalarkey was installed.

There was just one problem, as Nancy discovered over the months that followed: Normalarkey may have been appropriate and pronounceable, but it wasn’t memorable. Nornalarkey? Nonalarkey? Norma Larky? Malarkey? Nancy found herself doing way too much spelling and explaining.

So a few months ago Nancy did something brave: she changed the blog’s name again. And this time she scored an unequivocal win.

Here’s how Nancy introduced Midlife Mixtape in June:

[T]his blog that I thought would be an ode to the absurd in everyday life (hence the amalgam of “normal” and “malarkey,” in case you wondered) has evolved into something more. It’s become a music blog, a parenting blog, a blog about working, a blog about modern life, a blog about my childhood family. In short, it’s a mixtape of what life looks like for a lot of us here at the midpoint, a blending of the demands of family, marriage, work, memories, with those things for which we’re still got some righteous passion – in my case, music in all its guises.

The meaning is right on target, but the name works for other reasons, too:

• Alliteration. In the name and also in the blog’s subject headings: Motherhood, Music, Making a Living, Modern Life, Memories, and Miscellany.
• Rhythm: “Midlife” and “mixtape” are both trochees (a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable).
• Sonic balance: “Midlife” and “mixtape” both contain short /i/ vowels in their first syllables and long vowels in their second syllables.
• Positive incongruity: Midlife suggests gray hair and backaches. A mixtape is a collection of pop songs. The combination is just quirky enough to make you smile and pay attention. (Mixtape is incongruous for another reason—it’s a slight anachronism, having been replaced by the more digital “playlist.”)

Take a look, too, at the blog’s subtitle, an apt and witty complement to Midlife Mixtape: “The next one is my favorite…”

And here, from Nancy herself, is the best thing about Midlife Mixtape:

Whenever I uttered it at BlogHer last week, everyone got it right away, no further explanation needed.

Nicely named, Nancy!

Read about how my own blog’s name evolved from Away With Words to Fritinancy.

Read about the names of linguistics blogs.