Fritinancy

Name, Shmame

Remember Shpock (“Your mobile yard sale for beautiful things”) and Shpoonkle (“Justice you can afford!”)? This farshtinkener naming trend is still trending. I recently learned about Schmap, which calls its product “the world’s first Twitter-powered city guides.” (The official spelling includes two shoe-print exclamation marks, but I refuse to play that game.)

 

 

Schmap isn’t new: the company was founded in 2004 in Carrboro, North Carolina, and published its first guides in 2006. A TechCrunch article about Schmap’s new Demographics Pro service, which provides detailed reports on Twitter followers, brought it to my attention.

Here’s the thing about these Sh- and Sch- names: they aren’t neutral. For starters, Sh- and especially Shm- suggest “Yiddish.” Those phonemes show up at the beginning of dozens of Yiddish words; my copy of Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish has 42 pages of sh- words, from shabbes to shvitzer. (The sch- spelling, Rosten noted elsewhere, is German rather than Yiddish.)

I’m sure Carrboro, North Carolina – “the Paris of the Piedmont” – is a lovely place, but I somehow doubt that you’ll hear a lot of Yiddish along its leafy boulevards.

It gets worse, because sh- and shm- carry a stigma: They’re “prefatory sounds, of mockery or dismissal, that ‘pooh-pooh’ the word they prefix,” writes Rosten:

A great many words of mockery and aspersion, words that jeer, sneer and scorn…begin with sh-: shlemiel, shlimazl, shloomp, shmegegge, shmo, shmuck, shnorrer.

Shm- words show up so frequently in snarky, Yiddish-inflected rhymes that linguists have a name for the category: shm- reduplication, “a form of reduplication in which the original word or its first syllable (the base) is repeated with the copy (the reduplicant) beginning with shm- (sometimes schm-), pronounced /ʃm/.” As the old punchline has it, “Oedipus-Shmoedipus – as long as he loves his mother!” (See also Libros Schmibros and Burglar Schmurglar. )

So nu? What’s with this fad-shmad? Here’s my guess: A generation of entrepreneurs has been influenced by schwag and schwing, two made-up words that caught on about 20 years ago. I wrote about this effect in a 2011 post, “Swag and Schwag”:

Sometime in the early 1990s swag became schwag, “perhaps after words of Yiddish origin” such as shmuck, says the OED—although Yinglish schlock (something of inferior quality) seems an equally likely influence. (Of course, one must never underestimate the influence of Wayne’s World [1988-1994] and schwing.) Besides being a synonym for bad marijuana, schwag can also be a modifier meaning simply “inferior.”

I appreciated a well-crafted playful name as much as the next wordslinger. But if you want your brand to be taken seriously, be careful with those fancy-shmancy coinages.

Manifesto Destiny

Manifesto: from the Italian, “a public declaration.” Earliest English citation 1620.

Karl Marx published one about communism in 1848. Tristan Tzara issued one about Dada in 1918. Richard Stallman wrote one about GNU in 1985. British political parties have had them since 1900 (or 1834, if you count Sir Robert Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto).

The Unabomber had one. Chris Dorner had one. Anders Breivik had one.

During last year’s presidential campaign, business owner and “job creator” Steven Pearlstein wrote one that appeared in the Washington Post.

Sheryl Sandberg “sort of” has one.

Acumen (formerly the Acumen Fund) has one that’s incorporated into its new logo. It “serves as a moral compass to ground us in the kinds of leaders we hope to be and to reflect the values of leadership required in an interconnected world.”

Logos via Brand New blog.

 

People who want a break from e-gadgets have a manifesto.

The Sabbath Manifesto, “slowing down lives since 2010.”

 

Yoga-wear retailer Lululemon has a manifesto.

“Life is full of setbacks.”

 

 

Housewares/furniture designer Jonathan Adler has a manifesto. This is only part of it.

“WE BELIEVE tassels are the earrings of the home.”

 

 Actress Jessica Chastain is the face of Manifesto, the new fragrance from Yves Saint Laurent. The collaboration “seemed like an incredible fit,” Chastain told the New York Times in February.

Her hands are gloved in purple paint because purple was “the color of absolute seduction for Mr. Saint Laurent.” The fragrance’s tagline is “Daring Is an Art.”

 

The last word (for now) on manifestos goes to copywriter-turned-novelist John Kenney. This is from his new novel, Truth in Advertising (Touchstone, New York, 2013):

And what is a manifesto, you might ask?

You may have a vague notion from history class that a manifesto once referred to the soul of a revolution: blood, sweat, and tears on paper, codifying women’s rights, civil rights, human rights, economic justice, religious freedom. Today, it’s about diapers. Or cars. Or refrigerators. Or gas grills. Or dental floss. In advertising, a manifesto is something that sums up a brand, one page, maybe two hundred words. Name the product and my people will write the manifesto for it. Superlative claims, a badly skewed world view, sentences like, “Because let’s be honest—what’s more important at the end of your day than your family … and their enjoyment of grilled meats?”

UPDATE: The last last word comes by way of commenter Marcelo, who provided a link to “The Manifesto Manifesto,” created by writer/creative director Kim Mok and published in Fast Company in 2011.

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.

Word of the Week: Zajonc Effect

Zajonc effect: The tendency of people, after repeated exposure to an unfamiliar thing, to reverse their initial feelings of dislike or distaste and like the thing more over time. Also called the Mere Exposure effect or the Mere Zajonc effect.

The Zajonc effect is named for Robert Boleslaw Zajonc (1923-2008), a Polish-born American social psychologist who taught at the University of Michigan and Stanford University. (His last name rhymes with “science.”) His obituary in the New York Times singled out his work with “mere exposure”:

In a seminal experiment, published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1968, he showed subjects a series of random shapes in rapid succession. The shapes appeared and disappeared so quickly that it was impossible to discern that some of them were actually repeated. Nevertheless, when subjects were later asked which shapes they found most pleasing, they reliably chose the ones to which they had been exposed the most often, though they had no conscious awareness of the fact.

Familiarity, in other words, breeds a kind of affection, Professor Zajonc found. Even before he defined and named it, the effect was dear to the hearts of advertisers and other shapers of culture.

The Zajonc effect has implications for branding and naming. Bruce Tait of the Minneapolis brand consultancy Tait Subler wrote about the connection in a 2012 blog post:

Let’s say you have five potential brand positioning strategies. In an effort to make the best decision, you quantitatively test the alternative strategies. People being people, they respond most negatively to the most unfamiliar — and differentiating — concept. They respond best to the strategy they’ve seen before. The one your competitor is using already. That’s the strategy you run with because it “won” in research… and another undifferentiated brand strategy is born.

Look around at famous marketing failures and they are often the ideas that tested the best. Some of the greatest successes tested terribly because they were different. It is a frustrating  fact of marketing that the key ingredient to long-term brand success is differentiation but people are wired to respond negatively to a truly differentiating idea upon initial exposure.

(Hat tip: Anthony Shore.)

See also  “Forget About Love,” my 2010 post comparing a successful corporate name to an arranged marriage.

Other eponymous effects discussed here in previous posts: Dunning-Kruger, Streisand, Bradley, Coolidge, Martha Mitchell, Droste, Forer, Fujiwhara, McGurk, Meisner.

Those Adimab Ads

I originally wrote about the Adimab cable-car ads in January 2011, when the company – which is in the antibody-discovery business – was one of several advertisers using the colloquial tag “not so much.”

 

 

At the time there was a reason for a small biotech company based in Lebanon, New Hampshire, to advertise on San Francisco cable cars: there was a health-care conference in town. According to the In Vivo blog, Adimab bought every ad on the Powell Street cable cars for a week.

Two years later, though, the ads keep chugging along, halfway to the stars, and I continue to puzzle over them. Lately I’ve been seeing the ads on the Hyde Street cable cars, which tend to be used almost exclusively by tourists, few of whom appear to be in a big hurry about anything, let alone antibody discovery.

For a company that boasts that its “integrated antibody discovery and optimization platform provides unprecedented speed from antigen to purified, full-length human IgGs,” the ads are positively whimsical.

 

“Antibody discovery. More. Better. Faster. Pick any three.”

 

“Think you’re set with antibody discovery? You were set with dial-up once too.” (Oh, snap!)

 

“Why did the antibody cross the road? Because it didn’t die in development.” (Scientist humor!)

 

One of the ads is in Chinese Japanese (thanks, Erin!). Translation, anyone?

 

The ads must be working (as recruiting ploys, maybe?), but I have no idea why.

Also a mystery: what “Adimab” means.* I tried to find out (email, voicemail), but no one at the company responded. I did learn from the website that one of the founders, a gentleman named Tillman U. Gerngross, is “one of world’s leading yeast biotechnologists” and a professor of bioengineering at Dartmouth. Originally from Austria, he previously co-founded GlycoFi, Inc., which was acquired by Merck. I cannot tell you what the U in his name stands for.

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* Commenter Alex did a Google search and learned that Adimab stands for Antibody Discovery Maturation Biomanufacturing. (Quite the mouthful.) Although I've now received a friendly email from a company spokesman, he did not confirm this name-origin story.

On the Visual Thesaurus: Shall We Plus?

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, “Shall We Plus?”, looks at the evolution of “plus” from preposition, adjective, and noun into a verb. Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers; here’s a sample:

Enterprise Rent-A-Car is also positive about plussing — although “Plus Your Life,” the slogan for the “enhanced Enterprise Plus loyalty program,” is ambiguous.

The phrase makes marketing sense only if we understand “plus” to be a verb meaning “improve.” At first glance, though, it's easy to think it means “And your life.” That was Washington Post copy editor and usage-guide author Bill Walsh's mocking interpretation: he tweeted a photo of one of the “Plus Your Life” ads and commented, “If you're willing to die for Enterprise Rent-A-Car.”

Read the rest of the article, which includes more examples of verbified “plus” from marketing and – a surprise to me – government.

And also see my March 2013 post on the Sutter Health slogan “We Plus You.”

April Linkfest

As recently as a few decades ago, most parents gave their children names that would help them fit in: to a family, a clan, or the culture at large. Now a lot of parents want exactly the opposite: names that stand out, as though children were boxes of cereal competing for shelf space. Standing out is the new fitting in. Three recent articles examine the trend:

• “What Baby Names Say About Everything,” in the Boston Globe, looks at how researchers are using the trove of online data about baby names.
   
• “How Much Does Your Name Matter?” is a Freakonomics Radio podcast about the effect of a personal name on school performance, career success, and other outcomes. It opens with a story about a sociologist who named his children E and Yo.
   
• “What Is a Popular Baby Name?” is Laura Wattenberg’s objective and surprising analysis of name popularity. “Even the most popular name in America is given to just one out of every 177 babies,” writes Wattenberg, the author of the respected – and, yes, popular – Baby Name Wizard blog.

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More personal-name news: Nancy’s Baby Names recommends 11 interesting links, including an article about popes’ names, a story in Kashmir Life about Kashmiri naming practices, and posts about sharing and “stealing” baby names.

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I nodded enthusiastically while reading this post on the Lexicon Branding blog on why client-written creative briefs are usually inadequate. (Read my own take on creative briefs for naming projects.)

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NPR has launched an excellent new blog called Code Switch that covers “the frontiers of race, culture, and ethnicity.” Code switching is a term from linguistics, and many of the posts are about language. Start here, with the introductory post “How Code Switching Explains the World.”

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Mexagon? Crunchwich? Origami Tostada? How Taco Bell names its new products. (Hat tip: Karen.)

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Nine red flags before naming your startup – a rare sensible article about name development and trademark.

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Word aversion, word hatred, word peeves:

Why do tech neologisms make people angry? by Tom Chatfield, author of Netymology: A Linguistic Celebration of the Digital World. (Via Wordnik.)

Those irritating verbs-as-nouns (a solve, an ask, the reveal), by Henry Hitchings, author of The Language Wars and impartial observer of language change.

In praise of sensible peeving, on The Economist’s language blog, Johnson, applauds Chatfield and Hitchings for their “sensible contributions to an all-too-often senseless debate.”

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Nine things you probably didn’t know about swear words. And speaking of swearing, don’t even think about using “tabernacle” in  a French-language children’s book that might be read in Quebec. (Via Sesquiotic.)

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“Should I rename my business?” A handy flow chart from brand consultancy A Hundred Monkeys.

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The rather surprising etymology of “dismal.” It’s completely unrelated to “dismay,” by the way.  (Via Language Hat.)

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The New York Times creates haiku from news articles:

How does our algorithm work? It periodically checks the New York Times home page for newly published articles. Then it scans each sentence looking for potential haikus by using an electronic dictionary containing syllable counts. We started with a basic rhyming lexicon, but over time we've added syllable counts for words like “Rihanna” or “terroir” to keep pace with the broad vocabulary of The Times.

A sample:

The air was sticky,
and guerrillas carrying
rifles served him tea

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Instead of awesome, you could say … well, lots of things. (Via Nancy Nall.) 

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The call for entries for the Clio Awards, the Oscars of the advertising agency, used a series of “sliced” images to make industry statistics memorable. They’re striking and clever, except for the last one, “What Creatives Wear to the Clio Awards Ceremony.” Here’s a detail:

 

“Hideous jacket designed by hot but untalented girlfriend.”

Last I heard, there were also a fair number of women creatives in the ad industry. But you won’t see them represented here. Read Ms. magazine’s take, “Mad Men and the Clio Awards: How Much Has Really Changed Since 1965?”

Word of the Week: Swatting

Swatting: Calling 9-1-1 and faking an emergency that draws a response from law enforcement. The gerund, which is relatively new, is derived from the acronym SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics), which was first used by big-city police departments in the mid-1960s.

Last week six Los Angeles-area celebrities were the targets of swatting, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. On April 8, L.A. police responded to a swatting call at the home of comedian Russell Brand, who was away from home at the time. Two days later, the Beverly Hills Police Department responded to a similar call at Ryan Seacrest’s home. Justin Timberlake, Rihanna, Selena Gomez, and Sean Combs have also been targeted. According to the New York Times:

What once was merely a police annoyance in Southern California — thrill-seeking pranksters filing a false report of a breaking horrific crime at celebrity’s home, designed to provoke the dispatch of SWAT teams — has turned in recent weeks into a full-blown “swatting” epidemic, drawing expressions of concerns from police officials and victims alike, and the promise of a crackdown by lawmakers in Sacramento and at Los Angeles City Hall.

The earliest references I found for “swatting” are from 2007 and do not involve famous names. In March of that year, SWAT teams in Orange County, California, showed up with assault rifles, dogs, and a helicopter at what a caller had described as the scene of a murderous rampage. A 19-year-old Washington State man was arrested seven months later on felony charges of endangering the homeowners’ lives. According to police, the man had hacked into the county’s 9-1-1 system from his home hundreds of miles away and placed a call that appeared to come from the scene of the crime.

Similar crimes were reported in Texas around the same time.

In February 2008 the FBI posted a warning on its website:

Needless to say, these calls are dangerous to first responders and to the victims. The callers often tell tales of hostages about to be executed or bombs about to go off. The community is placed in danger as responders rush to the scene, taking them away from real emergencies. And the officers are placed in danger as unsuspecting residents may try to defend themselves.

In Los Angeles last Thursday, the L.A.P.D. announced “that it would take the unusual step of no longer issuing press releases or immediately confirming instances of celebrity ‘swatting,’ saying intense media coverage seems to be fueling more incidents.”

Taking the Piss

Who’s minding the store at Target? A week ago Consumerist reported that the retailer was selling a plus-size dress in a color unflatteringly called Manatee Gray. (A manatee is also known as a sea cow.) This week there’s been a cross-lingual dustup over a sandal style called “Orina,” which means “urine” in Spanish.

 

Image from Yahoo Shine. Target quickly removed the product page and is said to be renaming the style.

 

“Does no one speak Spanish at Target HQ or have access to this thing we call Google?” asked Consumerist reporter Mary Beth Quirk. No and no, apparently. Target’s initial defense was that “orina” means “peaceful” in Russian. As though Russian rather than Spanish were the second-most-spoken language in the United States, after English.

I learned about Target’s number-one problem via a tweet from Mighty Red Pen, who also sent me a link to Yahoo Shine’s coverage of the story. Full marks to senior editor Lylah M. Alphonse, whose recounting of other notable naming gaffes sets the record straight on the Chevy Nova “no-go” myth.

Target isn’t the only business with Orina issues. A similar etymological fallacy led to the naming of Café Orina in the Bay Area city of Concord, California.

 

When Maura Storace sent me the photo, she commented, “I wonder if the coffee they serve is amber-colored?”

The café’s About Us page includes this earnest explanation:

Meaning of Orina
Its source is Eirene, a Greek name meaning “Peace.”

Narrative: This was the name of the Greek goddess of peace. Until the 20th century, it was commonly pronounced in three syllables (i-REE-nee).

Very nice, but there are almost 700,000 native Spanish speakers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and only a relative handful of Greek speakers.

Moral: Check several bilingual dictionaries before committing to a lovely-sounding exotic name. And know your market.

And as long as this post is already in the toilet, here’s Kmart’s new TV spot, which – incongruously for a retailer not known for creative marketing – takes positive glee in its potty humor. The much-repeated tagline is “Ship my pants.”

 

 

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For more on the British idiom “taking the piss” – not to be confused with “taking a piss” – read this.

Language-ier!

Thanks to reader Steve Hall for bringing to my attention another advertiser playing the faux-comparative/superlative game: the golf-club maker TaylorMade. A new spot, Steve writes, has been in heavy rotation during ESPN’s coverage of the 2013 Masters Golf Tournament.

 

 

I admit I don’t understand why a golf club would be called RocketBallz. (The name of another TaylorMade club, RocketBladez, makes more sense.) But that’s just one of the many, many things about golf I shall never understand. For example, who are the guys in the ad? Advertising logic tells us they are famous golfers who are instantly recognizable to fans; to this viewer, however, they’re just a bunch of bad actors in dorky outfits.

I am somewhat more clueful about the ad’s language, which riffs on the comparative suffix “-ier.” In the space of 30 seconds we’re treated to huge-ier, smash-ier, long-ier, so-sweet-ier, money-ier (that’s “money” as in “so money,” as in Swingers), nothing-on-that-ier, way-better-ier, quieter-ier, good-to-be-you-ier, and, of course, RocketBallz-ier, a play on “ballsy.”

It gets suffix-ier: TaylorMade is using the #ier hashtag to identify and, um, “socialize” the campaign. From the TaylorMade Tour blog:

To help celebrate the official Tour launch of the RBZ [RocketBallz] Stage 2 fairway woods and Rescues, every TaylorMade pro competing in this week’s WGC Cadillac Championship will be using a new special edition staff bag featuring an “IER” panel – their names, plus IER – as well as wearing hats and visors with the hashtag #IER on the front of the hats.

I’m aware of at least two other brands that have created ad campaigns built around the “-ier” suffix: Perrier and Napier. In both of those cases, the connection between the brand names and the ad copy – which used real adjectives like “riskier” and “snakier,” not invented ones – felt authentic and boosted the brands’ memorability. It’s harder to make a connection between “good-to-be-you-ier” and RocketBallz. (Commenter Steve Hall remembered the advertiser as Callaway, a TaylorMade competitor!)

Other observations:

• TaylorMade uses a clumsy “X Just Got Y” sloganclone toward the end of the spot: “Our longest just got longest-ier.” (More “X Just Got Y” examples here, here, and here.)
• The hip-hop-inspired Z-plural of RocketBallz and RocketBladez was already old news when I first wrote about it in 2006. Which means it probably still sounds edgy and “urban” to the golf crowd.

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Read my previous golf posts: “The Smaller the Ball” and “How to Name a Golf Course.”