Fritinancy

April Linkfest

This month's menu: Fun, games, made-up names, and pie charts.

The Blog & Website Cuss-o-Meter tells me I'm pretty darned clean, but not as saintly as Mr. Verb, to whom I tip my hat.

Karen at Verbatim pointed me to GraphJam, where users post their own graphs on sundry topics. Here's one of the wordier ones:

And this one appears to have been made especially for me:

Speaking of circular objects, "volvelle" was new to me: it's a Latin word for a type of wheel chart first used in the Middle Ages and still popular today. Eclectica gives a brief review of Reinventing the Wheel, by Jessica Helfand (a contributor to the excellent Design Observer blog), a survey of wheel and slide charts and other pre-computer-age information technology. (Via All This ChittahChattah.) Here's a nice volvelle swiped from Eclectica:

Finally, in honor of Passover, the Four Questions:

Question #1: Can you name 18 made-up drugs from books, movies, and TV? A.V. Club can, from Synthehol (Star Trek) to Mimezine (Wild Palms). The comments are a long, strange trip in themselves.

Question #2, posed by Motivated Grammar: Why won't "willn't" work?

Is it just that modern people are lazy? Or some consequence of the O and I keys abutting on a QWERTY keyboard? Nope. In fact, we’re not even asking the right question.

Question #3: Nancy R. Callahan at Nancy's Baby Names asks, "Have you ever noticed that the names of many oral contraceptives sound a lot like (or really are) female names?" There's Camilla, Portia, Yasmin, and Errin, for starters. (Male contraceptives don't follow this format, unless you consider MAXX a proper name. I once attempted to name a condom Roger, but that's a tale for another day.)

Question #4: Which imaginary animals are kosher? Evil Monkey, at Ecstatic Days, asks an expert:

Mongolian Death Worm - A: “No, because you cannot eat anything that crawls on its belly.” EM: “Does that mean an injured kosher animal that is crawling along isn’t kosher any more?” A: “Yes, because you can’t eat an animal that’s been injured or is sick.” EM: “It’s a wonder you haven’t all starved to death.”

(The fourth question comes via BoingBoing, which last year regretted to inform that marijuana isn't kosher for Passover. Oy. Bummer.)

Take Two As Directed

Jon Carroll--friend, columnist, thinker of Deep Thoughts--has a modest proposal: to take full advantage of the well-documented placebo effect (more accurately, the placebo response, but never mind), let's give placebos the full branding treatment:

What if a placebo were given a fake side effect? A doctor gives a patient a sugar pill but says, "In a few cases, this drug has been known to cause the feet to swell." So would some people experience the placebo side effect as well as - or instead of - the placebo effect? ...

My thought is, if we give the placebo a fake side effect, we could also wrap the placebo in informative small-print literature, which would further add to the theatrical presentation. After all, for the placebo effect to work, the patient has to believe that the pill is real. It needs an official-sounding brand name and an official-sounding generic name, probably a logo and definitely an official list of precautions, warnings and disclaimers.

So he e-mailed me. Read all about it.

(More on pharmaceutical naming here.)

Web Company or Pharmaceutical?

"One thing that Web 2.0 companies and prescription drug makers have in common is their nonsensical product names," says "Andrew" on the user-generated quiz site Quibblo. Take his 40-item quiz to see whether you can identify the correct column for names like Canocal, Hyzaar, and Profilactic. I scored a modest 78 percent, and I do this stuff for a living!

P.S. There's one error in the quiz, but you'll have to complete your answers and read the comments to discover what it is.

(Via New York Times.)

Pre-Tense: The Pill for Imaginary Invalids?

Got those pre-holiday jitters? A company called Indigene Pharmaceuticals ("Smarter Medicine by Design™") has the solution, or something that plays a solution on TV: an "optimized plant-based supplement" called Pre-Tense. I read about it yesterday in a densely worded quarter-page ad in the San Francisco Chronicle (main news section).

You can deduce how they arrived at the name: they want you to take Pre-Tense before you collapse into a quivering heap. (As the website's home page says, "Before you get tense, get Pre-Tense!")

I'm guessing no one on the Indigene team was willing to raise a hand and say, "Uh, guys? There's this word pretense that means 'false appearance' or 'the act of pretending,' and there's this expression 'false pretenses,' and maybe those aren't such good things for nervous people to think about when they're buying our nostrums."

Especially if they're paying attention to the ingredient list. Pre-Tense contains "a proprietary blend" of unspecified quantities of hawthorn, valerian, passionflower, and hops; the last three just might make you sleepy enough to forget your nerves--or to pass out on the podium. It's unclear how the four plant derivatives interact with one another--or with any other medications you may be taking--or whether Pre-Tense contains enough of any of them to have any effect at all. Just because Pre-Tense is "a natural supplement" doesn't mean it's safe. (Arsenic is natural, too.) The standard disclaimer in the ad and the website notes that statements about Pre-Tense "have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration."

Indigene's other "consumer healthcare" products have single-entendre names: Memoryl ("Supports and maintains a healthy memory function"), Relaxane ("Relieves the symptoms of everyday stress"), and LAXelle ("Provides soothing, cramp-free relief for occasional constipation"). Well, maybe entendre-and-a-half, if you consider that LAXelle could be a mini-spa at the Los Angeles International Airport.

Best New Brand Names: The TippingSprung Survey

Want to create a product name that scores with branding professionals? Then make it short, simple, and direct; ignore conventional spelling rules; and make it a real word if you can.

Those are among the conclusions of a naming survey released last month by New York branding agency TippingSprung, which asked 1,331 senior marketing and branding professionals to choose their favorite new brand names in ten categories. (The press release doesn't fully reveal the survey's methodology; it appears that respondents chose from a pre-selected list of names.) Among the marketing mavens' preferences:

• Go! - best new discount airline name. Respondents liked the Hawaiian carrier's "brevity, clarity, and direct call to action."
• Spykes - best new cocktail or spirits name (and an example of the "doctored-spelling" preference). A good name wasn't enough to save this misbegotten Anheuser-Busch malt-beverage: Shortly after the product's launch earlier this year, the company yielded to consumer pressure and issued a recall. Parent groups in particular had objected that the 99-cent bottles--which came in flavors like mango and hot chocolate--were clearly targeted at underage drinkers.
• Enjuvia - most consumer-friendly new drug name. Enjuvia, prescribed for relief of menopause symptoms, was the top pick of 25% of survey respondents; Reconcile, an anti-anxiety drug for dogs (yes, dogs), was a close second with 21.9%.

Only one "worst" showed up in the survey results: Ultraviolet Man Summer Pop, a fragrance from Paco Rabanne enhanced with some of the ripest marketing copy around: "Vitamin-filled colors, matte white, silvery metal… Summer Pop unveils a limited edition of Ultraviolet Man inspired by the energy and colors of the Pop Art movement. Absinthe, deep red, white… a festival of masculine hues."

More interesting than the multiple-choice answers are the marketers' open-ended responses to some timely naming questions:

What would you have called the Apple iPhone? Only 20 percent of respondents thought iPhone was the best solution. The others got creative with suggestions like MacBerry, AppleSeed, Cameo, and (my own favorite) Pi. Apple Pi: yum!

What name would you give the world's first truly green car? How about Jade, Leaf, or Verde? G-Machine, Footprint, or EarthShip? Or Muir, named to honor naturalist and Sierra Club founder John Muir?

Notably absent from the survey: Web 2.0 company names--or indeed any non-consumer brands.

Read the TippingSprung press release.

Prescriptive Humor

Musing on medicine, linguist Michael Covarrubias took a shot at deciphering some fairly familiar drug names (familiar in the U.S., that is).  A few of his funnier hypotheses:

Acarbose: Of course diabetics want to neutralize or decarbify all those sugars. They're not carbs. They're Acarbs.

Actron: Not only will you ease your suffering from osteoarthritis, you'll be strong like a robot!

Flomax: Your enlarged prostate is keeping the flow to a minimum. Well take it to the max. (See this SNL ad for Urigrow. A disgusting parody that's very funny.)

Proscar: Either a racing circuit or a lobby in favor of the cicatrix or a bad name for a medication for an enlarged prostate.

Zanamivir: It's intended to curtail the flu virus. It sounds like the master of the pan flute. Wait. Zanamivir... respiration... flu... playing the flute... pan flute master Zamfir...

A personal footnote: In my entire career I've worked on only one drug-naming project, and when it was finished I myself was in desperate need of medication. Actual meaning tends to have little to do with drug names: By the time the manufacturer, the USPTO, the FDA, and the FTC have had their way with the words, they've been transformed into the lingual equivalent of placebos--all sound, no substance. (Preferably with lots of X's and Z's.)

One Pill Makes You Larger

On the importance of color in marketing, from "Made in the Shade," by Eric Konigsberg, in the January 22 New Yorker (not online):

Indeed, given the intended function of the drug, "that blue"--Viagra is a chalky, medium-tone blue--"is a little bit safe," Lori Heron, a design director who consults for the pharmaceutical industry, told me. "It's a grounded, responsible color, but moving toward an aqua for a pill might be a more forward-thinking choice. That's where we're leaning right now." In 2002, when the manufacturers of Levitra were looking to position their drug to compete with Viagra, they decided (after considerable research) to make the pill orange. According to an article in Fortune, some focus groups found Viagra's blue to be chilly, whereas orange was "vibrant and energetic."

[Color consultant Leslie] Harrington used a research firm to survey several thousand people, in twelve countries, about twenty-seven pill colors. She found that while lighter-value blues tend to be the most calming colors, respondents reported that pills in other hues--dark green in America, Great Britain, and Korea; medium green in Italy and Germany; brown in Japan--had the most calming effect. "So many colors mean different things from country to country," Harrington said. "Red pills in India evoke romance or happiness, but in Korea they mean romance or fear."

The blue of Viagra, meanwhile, was shown to have relatively few strong associations, positive or negative. "This makes me wonder if it isn't something of a blank slate," she said. "Viagra has come along, and they've been making the color their own." By the same reasoning, then, a light-purple pill--which, in every country surveyed, failed to make the top three colors for any attribute--presents a similar opportunity. "A lavender pill brand is very much out there for the taking," Harrington said.

Photo of Viagra-color gelato by Teosylvania.