Fritinancy

Names in the News

Four new names that caught my attention:

Mansion is the unapologetically 1 percent-ish name of the Wall Street Journal’s new weekly section devoted to “high-end property.” In a letter to WSJ subscribers, managing editor Robert Thomson said Mansion would be “the home of both aspiration and real-estate realization.” I look forward to the quarterly spin-off, Car Elevator.

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What the fut was Alaska Telecom thinking when it renamed itself Futaris? This, apparently: “Based on the word future, Futaris represents limitless possibilities and progress.” Funny, because when I look at this sad excuse for a logo, I see “futility.”

(Hat tip: @IgorNaming.)

UPDATE: Reader Dan Freiberg suggests that “this variation helps with pronunciation, and works better with the symbol.”

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Juniper is a new subscription service for women who don’t own calendars. Oh, sorry: it’s “a monthly care package” consisting of tampons (five brands are offered) and a collection of “gourmet sweets and artisan savory treats.” (Yes, it’s that word!) “Never panic shop again,” says the home-page copy. The price, however, may cause cramping: $28 a month. I couldn’t find a story behind the name—which is lovely in its nondescriptive way—but I’m wondering whether founder Lynn Tao, young as she appears to be, is a Donovan fan. Remember “Jennifer Juniper,” who “longs for what she lacks”?

UPDATE: Mystery solved (although I’m still fond of my own theory):

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I’m even more mystified by Tassafaronga Village, a mixed-income residential development in East Oakland that I learned about this week via a New York Times story. There’s no explanation of the name in the story or on the website of the architect, David Baker, so I tried to dig deeper. I learned that Tassafaronga Point, on Guadalcanal (Solomon Islands), was the site of several naval engagements between US and Japanese forces during World War II. But that wasn’t very helpful: the housing project is meant to heal a troubled neighborhood, so why name it after a bloody, 70-year-old series of battles? And why the Melanesian reference in Oakland, where Pacific Islanders make up less than 1 percent of the population?

It’s certainly a distinctive name, fun to say if a little challenging to spell. Here’s hoping someone who knows the whole story reads this post and leaves a comment that clears up the mystery.

UPDATE: It took less than half an hour to get an answer to my question about Tassafaronga. See comments below from Gene, proprietor of the excellent Our Oakland blog.

X-toberfest

Few German words are as popular or linguistically productive in the US as “Oktoberfest.” Here are some local variations on the theme, along with several out-of-town sightings.

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Oakland’s fifth annual Oaktoberfest will be held on Saturday, October 6.

“Oaktoberfest” works very well orthographically—just add A. “Oakland” has also been rejiggered into Oaklandish (an apparel brand that “supports and represents” Oakland) and Oaksterdam University (“Quality Training for the Cannabis Industry”), named in honor of Amsterdam, where marijuana use is legal.

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Sharktoberfest is an annual tradition at  the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The event celebrates “two perennial favorites—sharks and beer!”

I love the Academy but can’t help wishing Sharktoberfest were taking place in Boston, where the native nonrhotic rendering of the word would create a better rhyme with “Oktoberfest.”

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Book’toberfest is the first annual (their presumption, not mine) book fair and local-beer tasting at San Francisco’s Mechanics’ Institute Library. It’s scheduled for October 5 and promises to “put the ‘pub’ back into ‘publishing’!”

And also the apostrophe into “Book’toberfest,” for reasons unclear to me. It interrupts the otherwise perfect Oktoberfest portmanteau.

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Moving away from the bay, Buffalo’s Booktoberfest—no punctuation, thank you very much—was held September 13. The event was “an evening of bratwurst and brews, all in the name of literacy.”

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Watchismo—nice name, by the way—is celebrating Clocktoberfest with 25 percent discounts on most German-made watches.

 

Note the German-flag colors and the echt Fraktur type, or something close to it.

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Baracktoberfest is a Kickstarter project that celebrates the brewing of beer at the White House; the money goes to creating T-shirts, pint glasses, recipe cards, and postcards. (For more about the beer, see the last item in this August post.) The $300 goal was met in two and a half hours, and the project ultimately raised almost $3,000.

“Est. 2008” apparently refers to the year Obama was elected, not the year the project began.

The project’s creator, Matthew Potter, wrote a nice statement of purpose that begins:

First and foremost: This isn’t about politics. This is about portmanteaus and alcohol. If that’s not enough to get you excited, then I don’t know how you get out of bed in the morning.

 

During the 2008 presidential campaign Schlafly Beer in St. Louis produced a Baracktoberfest brew (and a Palin ale). This year, with one of the candidates a teetotaler, Schlafly appears to be abstaining.

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I can’t resist including SocktoberFest, coming up this weekend in Osage, Iowa. It’s sponsored by a local company, Fox River, “maker of the famous Original Rockford Red Heel Monkey Sock”—de rigueur for all your sock-monkey needs—and the press release has this adorable lede: “Thousands of bargain shoppers will get to experience that new-sock feeling after SocktoberFest…”

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UPDATE: The Pr*tty Sh*tty blog, which reviews examples of good and bad design, is observing Ktoberfest, “a weeklong celebration of the letter K” in logos.

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UPDATE 2: Via a tweet from Our Bold Hero, Spocktoberfest, #1 on Cracked’s list of  “holidays they need to invent.” 

For additional X-toberfest affixoids (that’s the technical name), see this October 2008 post at the Mr. Verb blog, which includes mentions of Trucktoberfest, Rocktoberfest, Shocktoberfest, Lawtoberfest, Barktoberfest, Drunktoberfest, Puketoberfest, and many more.

Traditional Oktoberfest—the one in Munich—takes place from late September to early October. In the US, such calendrical strictures are often flouted: see Maytoberfest, Novemberfest, and Augtoberfest. Wondering how the original Oktoberfest came to be? Here you go.

And check out the comments below for additional -toberfests.

Oh Em Gee

It’s officially an old-people acronym now.

Exhibit A: Cablevision is helping to market OMGFAST fixed wireless broadband Internet and telephone service in Florida. OMGFAST was formerly known as Clearband.

Image from Fierce Cable.

From the Fierce Cable report:

Earlier this month, the company changed its name to OMGFAST, incorporating the slang abbreviation for “oh my god” that is often used in text messages. On July 3, Cablevision subsidiary Rainbow MVDDS Company filed a trademark application for the brand “OMGFAST,” which the company said would be used to provide “Internet access via wireless broadband,” according to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. RMVDDS listed the address of Cablevision’s corporate headquarters in Bethpage, N.Y., in the filing.

(Hat tip: MJF.)

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Exhibit B: The controversial diet book Six Weeks to OMG, was published in the US earlier this month. The author is Venice A. Fulton—the nom d’OMG of Paul Khanna—who, according to the blurb, is “a nutrition expert and personal trainer” who designed the regimen for “his A-list clients.” Fulton/Khanna originally self-published Six Weeks in the UK.

Bus-shelter ad, New York City. Tweeted by Grand Central Publishing, the book’s US publisher.

An excerpt from the hilarious review by John Crace in the Guardian (UK):

Let’s go. But before we do, I should just mention the A and B words. And now I have mentioned anorexia and bulimia, let’s forget about them. Because the first thing you are going to do is skip breakfast, do an hour of exercise – just thinking will probably be exhausting enough for some of you – and drink five double espressos. Can’t you just feel all that fat being purged? Nice feeling! Now I want you to have an ice-cold bath. Stay in as long as you can manage. Those doing the Quake [the most challenging version of the diet] should aim for two hours. That way your legs will get frostbite and have to be amputated. OMG. No more cellulite dimples for you, babykins!

 

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Exhibit C: Venice/Paul had better watch out: “Celebrity doctor” Marc Lawrence, in Southern California, is promising OMG Fat Loss in four minutes.

 

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Exhibit D: A sign in one of the front windows of Euromix, an international food shop in my Oakland neighborhood. I wrote about Euromix in 2008.

 

I think they mean “toothsome,” but I still want to turn it into an imperative: “Eat our beans and toot home!”

I can’t resist sharing a photo of the sign on the other side of the door:

Russian Mafioso says: “We don’t F… around! We SELL FOOD! GR82CU!”

To which we reply:

LOL Café, Geary Boulevard at 25th Avenue, San Francisco.

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The US Patent and Trademark Office lists 85 live trademarks with “OMG,” including OMG Tax; OMG! Onion Made Goodness (chip dip); OMG lubricant (“Make it an explosive night”); OMG! Oatmeal Made Great; OMG I So Need a Glass of Wine or I’m Going to Sell My Kids (“an exclusive virtual gathering of Domestic Goddesses”); OMG … It’s Gluten Free; OMG Object Management Group (registration filed in 1991, several years before the txting abbreviation took off); and OMG OJ. My favorite so far is OMG Old Man’s Garage in Rainbow City, Alabama.

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P.S. Does anyone remember erstwhile Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain’s slogan, “OMG – Obama Must Go”? Nah, I didn’t think so.

Transported

I spotted these beautiful, slightly surreal posters at Oakland’s MacArthur BART platform last week amid the ads for Wingstop, Ben & Jerry’s, and the new Spider-Man movie:

 

The Call of the Wild (Jack London).

 

_{The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett). John’s Grill, in the background, was a setting in the book; it’s been in business since 1908.}

 

 

The artist is Owen Smith, who is nationally known for his New Yorker cover illustrations in pulp-fiction style. Smith, who lives in Alameda, said in an interview with BART’s Melissa Jordan that he remembered taking BART from his childhood home in Fremont to “adventures exploring the big city of San Francisco.”

The posters are part of BART’s “Literary Journeys” series, which places art in unused advertising spaces along the train platforms. All three of the authors in Smith’s paintings have (or had) Bay Area connections. The third poster, displayed at other stations, depicts scenes from Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.

Image from BART.gov.

From the BART.gov story:

Together the posters are evocative, mysterious, eye-catching.  Smith liked the idea that they conveyed a key benefit of public transportation – that a person can use time in transit to travel throughout space and time through the world of literature.

“You can spend your time reading on BART, whether it’s a book or on your Kindle or iPad,” Smith says.

You’ll note, however, that the readers in the illustrations are immersed in traditional books, which unlike their electronic counterparts have book jackets. If it weren’t for those jackets we wouldn’t see the titles of the books.

As a transit user, I’m happy to see my taxes and fare money being used to support artists and inspire readers. Looking at Smith’s posters, I couldn’t help thinking of all the beautiful and enduring WPA projects here in the Bay Area—from the elementary school down the street to the Coit Tower muralsand Maritime Museum in San Francisco—and wishing our current leaders had the courage and will to launch a new WPA. Maybe the BART posters are the first step in that direction.

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P.S. Attention out-of-towners: It’s “BART,” not “the BART.”

 

Names in the Wild: The Little Shop of Hoarders

Yes, I do love a good pun.

The Little Shop of Hoarders, 6397 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland.

 

Window display.

I don’t care that it isn’t a wholly original name* or that the sign is hand-lettered. I love the pun and I love the merchandise. And I am thrilled that the owner spelled “sneak peek” correctly on her blog.

Not to mention that I couldn’t have been happier for the excuse to troll YouTube for clips from Little Shop of Horrors, one of my all-time-favorite movie musicals. Frank Oz directed; Alan Menken wrote the great songs. And that cast! Steve Martin, Rick Moranis, Ellen Greene, Bill Murray, Christopher Guest, John Candy, John Belushi.

Here’s one of my favorite songs, “Skid Row” (“where depression’s jus’ status quo”):

 

And you know you want to hear Steve Martin do the dentist song again, amirite? Knock yourself out.

*UPDATE: Alas, it appears that the Oakland shop is stepping on the toes of another Little Shop of Hoarders (see comment). Defending a trademark is a full-time job.

Naughty Names

There are names that push the envelope and names that push buttons. Here are three names that do both—one of them deliberately, one of them wrongheadedly, and one of them seemingly without a clue.

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On one level, Bootie Babe, a nail polish and fragrance brand, is a playful pun on “beauty.” On another, it’s one more example of the assification of American branding. (See my previous posts on this subject: “Booty Pageant,” “Bottoms Up,” and “Cheeky!”) You could say the callipygian packaging is cute … or lewd.

 

Image from Pinkii.

The company, which is based in San Francisco, was founded in 2011 by Mark O’Hara, whose previous experience had included forming a 15-piece funk band called SuperBooty. According to the website, O’Hara launched Bootie Babes singlehandedly, designing the logo and website, applying for trademarks and patents, and overseeing product development. He clearly had fun with color names, which aim to appeal to tweens and teens. The purple on the left, above, is called Purp Slurp, and the blue is Hella Baloo. (Whether the overt sexuality is appropriate for this demographic is a subject I’ll leave to other critics.)

Unfortunately, O’Hara also seems to have taken the DIY approach to the rest of the brand language, which is an amateurish, trust-deflating mess. Here’s a line from the “Info” page:

SuperBooty President and CEO Mark O’Hara wanted to create a humorous, bold and truely [sic] unique beauty product that would literally “stand out” from the competition.

And the product name is misleading. This is a bootie—i.e., a short boot:

Gentle Souls “Barne Voyage,” via 6pm.com

And this is a booty:

Beyoncé, via Viennie V. (The headline on the story is “Beyoncé’s Booty Is Inspiration for Rare House Fly’s Name.”)

Yes, they’re pronounced identically. But their different suffixes are clues to their different meanings. And wouldn’t “Booty Babe” make a clearer reference to “beauty”?

Then again, maybe not.

(Hat tip: The Beheld.)

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Erin McKean tweeted me a photo of Sloshee margarita ice pops and wrote: “Saw this at the grocery store and thought you’d enjoy the name.”

 

Well. The name is an obvious pun on “slushy/slushee/slushie,” a generic term for a syrupy-sweet crushed-ice beverage. Unfortunately, Sloshee also evokes “sloshed,” a synonym for “intoxicated.” Alcoholic beverages can promise romance, adventure, and sex, but getting wasted? That’s a no-no.

But that may be the least of Sloshee’s troubles. For one thing, the company (based here in Oakland, I regret to say) can’t decide whether its name is “Sloshee” or “Sloshees.” (I couldn’t find a trademark application, so maybe the founders are still making up their minds. Or they may be lost in a product-testing haze.) The website admits to “a year of business and legal hurdles” before the 2009 launch. The copywriting hurdles still haven’t been surmounted. From the About page:

Sloshees started in July of 2004 after observing how fun and refreshing popsicles can be after a hot summer day. We thought to ourselves, wouldn't it be awesome if popsicles had alcohol in them? The idea was formed over a few beers but it took almost 5 years to solidify into a business.

“A few beers”? Next time, try coffee.

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And speaking of stumbling over hurdles, reader Stacey Kimmel-Smith, an equestrian who blogs at Behind the Bit, sent me an email about a clothing brand she’d seen at a tack shop in New Jersey.

 

 

“The company is European,” Stacey wrote, “and I wonder if maybe they selected the name without knowing that it sounds like a ‘bad word’ in English.”

When I finally stopped laughing, I checked out the Horze website. It’s replete with unintentional humor:

Who is Horze? Click here to see a movie. [Safe for work!]

Team Horze. [Cheaper by the dozen?]

This is the nature of Horze. [They’re born that way.]

Try it out yourself: Imagine strolling into a tack shop and saying, “Show me your Horze.”

There may be a cultural excuse here: Horze is a Finnish brand, launched in 2003 as an offshoot of Finn-Tack. Surely, though, there must have been at least one English-speaking person around to warn the founders that changing the S in “horse” to a Z results in “whores,” not Equine Zorro.

When I shared the Horze link on Twitter, Jonathon Owen (@ArrantPedantry) reminded me of this much-shared writing exercise posted on eBaum’s World:

 

Past Due

Signs of the (past) times:

 

Oakland, California, April 17, 2012.

 

That’s an original BankAmericard sign, probably about 40 years old. And that’s Master Charge, the predecessor of MasterCard. According to a nice fellow named Paul, who answered the phone at Lee Myles when I called, the signs have been hanging there since they were new. (Lee Myles Transmissions opened in Oakland in 1957.)

 

“Think of it as money”: 1972 BankAmericard ad from eBay. Would a copywriter today use “like” instead of “as”?

 

Bank of America—which had been founded in San Francisco in 1904 as the Bank of Italy—introduced BankAmericard in 1958, mailing it to 60,000 households in Fresno, California. It was the world’s first all-purpose credit card and the first successful credit-card “drop” (unsolicited mailing). Until 1965, the card was offered only in California.

 

1972 metal BankAmericard sign similar to the one I photographed. This one’s for sale on eBay.

 

An early BankAmericard TV commercial, which I tried unsuccessfully to locate online, featured a cartoon orchestra conductor and a catchy symphonic jingle. According to Lawrence R. Samuel, author of Brought to You By, it was one of the first uses of animation to promote a “serious” product such as a credit card.

Bank of America gave up the BankAmericard program in 1970, when issuer banks took control. In 1975 BankAmericard united with three other credit cards to become Visa, a name conceived by Visa International founder Dee Hock.  (This is an abbreviated version of the Wikipedia history, much of which is based on Joseph Nocera’s 1995 book A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class.) Hock said the name was “instantly recognizable in many languages in many countries, and that it also denoted universal acceptance.” (Wikipedia)

Master Charge, born in 1969, was the successor to the Interbank Card Association, which had been formed in 1965 by several California banks to compete with BankAmericard. The name was changed to MasterCard in 1979. (Source: Credit Card Forum.)

 

Before there was Klout, there was clout. 1977 Master Charge ad from eBay.

 

In 2007 Bank of America—now headquartered in North Carolina, alas—brought back the BankAmericard name as “BankAmericard Rewards Visa.”

Read my 2010 post about another ghost sign in Oakland.

Tagline of the Week

“He got the grill … but I kept the oven!”

 

 

Thanks to Nancy Davis Kho of Midlife Mixtape for snapping and tweeting this shot from Farmer Joe’s here in Oakland. Yep, that’s George Foreman’s ex, Cynthia, on the label.

I couldn’t find a website for Sweetie Pies, but I did learn that in 2004 Cynthia Foreman performed a one-woman show about her five-year marriage to the heavyweight champion-turned-grillmeister. At the time, she had residences in Oakland and in Houston, her hometown.

The pie in the photo is sweet potato, which makes Cynthia’s revenge a dish best served with a large dollop of lightly sweetened whipped cream. Alas, Ms. Foreman failed to complete the trademark process for that sassy slogan, and it is now classified as “abandoned.”

Name in the News: Oikos

Seven people were killed and three injured yesterday when a man opened fire in a classroom at Oikos University, a small Christian college in Oakland. The shooter, who was arrested a short time later in nearby Alameda, is reported to be a 43-year-old former nursing student at the college who was “upset” over his recent expulsion from the school. (Local news report here.)

The story was appalling enough—and yet also, of course, familiar enough here in the gun-totin’ US of A—to make national headlines. My own first reflex was to wonder why I, an Oakland resident, had never heard of Oikos. And then I wondered about the name.

Oikos University was founded in 2004 by a Korean minister, Jongin Kim, who continues to serve as the university’s president. It is affiliated with a Korean-American church, the Praise to God Korean Church; its website is published in English and Korean. Its sole campus is in West Oakland, across the 880 freeway from the Oakland Coliseum complex. On the “welcome” page of the school’s website, Dr. Kim writes that the school’s main goal “is to foster spiritual Christian leaders who abide by God’s intentions and to expand God’s nation through them.” The school offers degrees in biblical studies, nursing, ministry, music, and Asian medicine.

“Oikos” is neither English nor Korean; it’s a Greek word that translates to “home” or “domain.” Oikos is one of the roots of economy (literally “home management”) and ecology (“study of habitats”). But in Christian doctrine it has a different specific meaning. Dr. David Jeremiah explains it on Christianity.com:

Every Christian has a web (an oikos) of familial and social relationships. And by following its twists and turns, every Christian will encounter those who do not know the Gospel—but who need to.

Who is in your Oikos? A Greek oikos, or household, was not only a nuclear family but also relatives, close friends, and nearby servants’ families. Our oikos includes those with whom we share kinship (blood or marital ties), interests (work, recreation, community), and proximity (neighbors, coworkers). Every Christian shares some space with people who have not heard the Gospel or seen it lived out in an authentic way.

Since I’m a secular Jewish verbal-branding person, the only Oikos I knew about until yesterday was the Greek yogurt, whose website explains the name thus:

We think it’s a great name for our Greek yogurt because it reminds us of a time when people’s homes were intimately connected with nature and most foods came from household gardens and family herds.

I do know just enough about Christianity, however, to recognize that the shooting of ten students on a Christian university campus—“a slaughter,” according to the Oakland Tribune—is a sad and grisly way to begin Holy Week.

Guest Post at Duets Blog: Who Owns “White Elephant”?

My guest post about confusing iconography, “A Tale of Two Elephants,” was published this morning at Duets Blog (“Collaborations in Creativity and the Law”). The elephants in question are idiomatic ones used as brands: one belongs to the Oakland Museum of California’s annual White Elephant Sale; the other was used by Goodwill in its holiday promotion, “I’m Dreaming of a White Elephant.” Which institution owns the elephant? And just what is a “white elephant,” anyway. Your elephantine questions answered here.

P.S. I wrote about an elephant of another color in a 2009 post, “The Pink Elephant in the Living Room.”