Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Shmeat

Shmeat: Meat grown in a laboratory from animal cells; the objectives include reducing animal cruelty and increasing the global supply of affordable protein. “Shmeat” is a portmanteau of “sheet” and “meat.”

An undated article on a website called Shmeat.com (apparently operated by SavingAdvice.com) explains the process:

Cells are harvested from a live animal, such as a chicken, pig or cow. The cells are then placed in a special solution of nutrients which mimics the qualities of blood. This nutrient solution will help the cells to multiply where they can then be secured to a spongy sheet which has been soaked with nutrient solution. The sheet is then stretched to increase cell size and protein content. It’s from the combination of this “sheet meat” that shmeat derives its name.

Shmeat was the subject of “Building a $325,000 Burger,”a May 14, 2013, story in the New York Times. Reporting from the Netherlands, where researcher Mark Post has created a proof-of-concept shmeat patty, science writer Henry Fountain noted that the burger “was created at phenomenal cost — 250,000 euros, or about $325,000, provided by a donor who so far has remained anonymous.” Fountain went on:

“This is still an early-stage technology,” said Neil Stephens, a social scientist at Cardiff University in Wales who has long studied the development of what is also sometimes referred to as “shmeat.” “There’s still a huge number of things they need to learn.”

The origins of “shmeat” are uncertain. The earliest citation I could find is in a December 5, 2008, column by Lou Bendrick (“Meet Shmeat”) in the online environmental magazine Grist:

Test-tube meat is also known as in vitro meat, cultured meat, victimless meat, vat-grown meat, hydroponic meat, and, finally, shmeat. (Note to self: Be sure to apply for inevitable X Prize to rename this stuff.)

For now, let’s call it shmeat.

Shmeat is grown from a cell culture (hence the in vitro or cultured prefixes), not from a live animal. These harvested cells are taken from an animal, such as a pig, and placed in a “nutrient-rich medium” that mimics blood. Once the cells multiply they are attached to a spongy scaffold or sheet (sheet + meat = shmeat) that has been soaked with nutrients and stretched to increase cell size and protein content.

“Also known as” suggests that “shmeat” had already entered the vocabulary, but I couldn’t find an earlier citation.

As Bendrick jokingly points out, and as the title of his column underscores, “shmeat” is not a felicitous name for a serious product. (Shortly after the Grist column appeared, a commenter on the Offalgood website said “shmeat” was “a horrible name, it sounds like what you get when you cross shit and meat.”)

Words beginning with shm- indicate mockery or derision in Yiddish (see shmo, shmendrick, shmegegge, shmuck, etc.), and the pattern has been adopted in dismissive English reduplications like fancy-shmancy. (See my recent post, “Name, Shmame,” and related links.)

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Obligatory Urban Dictionary addendum: “Shmeat: Small penis or dick, also reffering [sic] to any person or anything. It can be used for anything anyone and anything can be a shmeat.” Posted November 27, 2006, a full two years before the Grist column.

Word of the Week: Fiberhood

Fiberhood: A neighborhood that has Internet access via fiber-optic cable. A blend of fiber and neighborhood.

Word Spy gives credit for the coinage of fiberhood to Google, which in July 2012 announced in its official blog that the company was introducing Google Fiber “to bring ultra-high [Internet] speeds to Kansas City, Kan. and Kansas City, Mo.” Milo Medin, Google’s vice president of access services, wrote:

When we asked people what they value in their Internet service, the majority of them simply said, “choice.” So we listened. Kansas Citians will choose where we install and when. We’ve divided Kansas City into small communities we call “fiberhoods.” To get service, each fiberhood needs a critical mass of their residents to pre-register. The fiberhoods with the highest pre-registration percentage will get Google Fiber first. Households in Kansas City can pre-register for the next six weeks, and they can rally their neighbors to pre-register, too. Once the pre-registration period is over, residents of the qualified fiberhoods will be able to choose between three different packages (including TV).

Although Word Spy is usually the definitive source for such things, I found a much earlier antedating: a May 12, 2005, post by Om Malik in his blog, GigaOM:

Now this might come as a surprise to many, but the number of communities with fiber-to-the-home has gone up sharply in past 15 months or so, according to a study by TIA.* I am going call these fiberhoods.

Google’s blog post didn’t mention costs for Google Fiber: a $10 “expression-of-interest” fee, $70 a month for Gigabit Internet, and $120 a month for Gigabit Internet plus TV service. The “free” tier requires a $300 construction fee.

In the April 2013 issue of Harper’s magazine (access restricted to subscribers), Whitney Terrell and Shannon Jackson take a closer look at Google Fiber. To qualify, Kansas City had to give Google access to “underground conduits, fiber, poles, rack space, nodes, buildings, facilities, and available land.” It provided Google with free offices, meeting spaces, and a showroom, and it paid the company’s electric bill. Kansas City had no say in Google’s pricing and no guarantee that Google would deliver the service to all residents. “The mayor, moreover, is barred from commenting on Google’s activities without the express permission of Google,” Terrell and Jackson write.

From their article, “Only Connect”:

…Google’s fiberhood map bisected the city at Troost Avenue, a historical racial divide. It soon became clear that most lower-income black areas would fail to meet the preregistration quotas. Local teachers and librarians began canvassing door-to-door with Google employees, urging residents to sign up, and charitable groups raised money for registration fees. A majority of these fiberhoods ultimately qualified for service. But the frenzied volunteer push revealed an uncomfortable truth behind the city’s “real partnership” with Google: Kansas City had left itself powerless to guarantee service for its most vulnerable constituents. And it could not compel Google to redraw its maps in a less discriminatory way. (Of course, the vegan bakery, Pilates studio, and Italian deli next door to Google’s subsidized offices received their fiber service for free.)

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* The TIA (Telecommunications Industry Association) link is broken and I haven’t been able to find a working substitute.

Uphill Climb

Here’s a an interesting-looking niche product: goggles that allow climbers to look straight ahead yet see the crag or pin above them.

Source

 

I wish an equivalent amount of imagination and research had gone into creating the product’s belabored name: Belāggles.

The macron over the A is telling us that the name is pronounced “belay-gles,” as in belay plus goggles. But the macron-ized word appears only in the logo: everywhere else – in the web content, in media reports, on Twitter and Facebook – it’s plain old Belaggles. And my brain does not interpret “Belaggles” as “Belay-gles.”

English may be a “shifty whore,” as lexicographer Kori Stamper has so delicately put it, but our written language does have some commonly acknowledged rules that most of us have internalized. One of those rules says that when a vowel precedes a doubled consonant, it takes a short sound: waggle, gaggle, bedraggle, straggle, haggle. Slapping a diacritical mark over that vowel doesn’t change the rule; in fact, I bet most of the population doesn’t see the little horizontal line as anything more than an embellishment.

(Besides, even when I pronounce it right, the name sounds comically wrong. Want some shmear with those belāggles? Stop belāggling me! My new puppy is a Labrador-beagle mix – a belāggle!)

The pronunciation isn’t the only thing that feels forced about the name. I found myself working altogether too hard to decipher the peculiar Gs in the logo: they look like a hybrid of a 4 and a 9, but they may be mountain peaks on sled runners. Or sailboats.

Mostly, though, the problem with Belāggles is a familiar one: the Awkward Portmanteau, aka the strenuous mashing-up of words to create a descriptive name. The strategy is misguided – your name should suggest, not describe – and the tactic is amateurish. Instead of jamming “belay” and “goggles” together, I’d have aimed for a name that communicates a benefit: reaching the top, seeing vertically, saving your neck.

See more names with gratuitous macrons, umlauts, and other diacritical marks on my Pinterest board. More bad portmanteaus here, here, and here, for starters.

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(Hat tip: Vic Mitnick.)

Let's Grammar!

Another adjective-turned-noun in an ad campaign! This one, Hooters’ “Step into Awesome,” was featured yesterday on AdFreak:

Hooters and its ilk are known as “breastaurants.” You’re welcome.

In response, and in honor of National Grammar Day – next Monday, March 4* – I submitted this haiku to Editor Mark’s Tweeted Haiku Contest:

“Step into awesome,”
says Hooters: just more proof
that nounifying’s hot.

So far, mine looks to be the only grammar haiku about a brand. True to my school, I am.

You can play, too: Tweet your haiku before 10 p.m. EST Saturday with the hashtag #grammarday. Complete rules here. Yes, there are prizes!

Here are some other tweeted submissions to this year’s contest:

He said that English / doesn’t have the subjunctive. / Would that it were so.... #grammarday

— ときどきぜんぜん (@tokidokizenzen) February 27, 2013

“I before e” rule / and a warm wind in winter: / lies, all goddamned lies. #grammarday

— Kory Stamper (@KoryStamper) February 27, 2013

The ‘he-him’ method / will defeat your confusion / regarding ‘who-whom.’ #grammarday

— Mike McFarland (@mcfarland_mike) February 27, 2013

I am an error/And I will reveal myself/After you press send #grammarday

— Arika Okrent (@arikaokrent) February 27, 2013

That last tweet was promptly followed by:

Make that “send” #grammarday

— Arika Okrent (@arikaokrent) February 27, 2013

One more from me:

Dear yoga teacher: / If you say “lay down” once more, / I’ll hurt you. No lie. #grammarday

— Nancy Friedman (@Fritinancy) February 27, 2013

UPDATE, March 4: I’m pleased to announce that Arika Okrent’s tweet (above) took top honors in the haiku contest. And I’m surprised and very pleased to report that my yoga-teacher rant placed third. Read all about it.

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* March forth!

What’s a Cestro?

And what’s in it for me?

That’s what I asked when I encountered Mycestro. I saw it as a three-syllable name, because my brain picked out “my” before it performed any further analysis. I was stumped by “cestro,” though. Ancestor? Incest?

Even reading in TechCrunch that Mycestro is a “3D mouse for your fingertips that you’ll look funny using” didn’t help. Not until I listened to the inventor, Nick Mastandrea, narrate a Kickstarter video did I realize that Mycestro is a misspelled portmanteau of mice and maestro. It’s meant to be parsed myce-stro and pronounced maestro. The reasoning, TechCrunch says, is that when you use the device “it looks like you’re conducting your own private orchestra.”

An intriguing image, and I wish Mr. Mastandrea had explored it further instead of falling in love with that misleading, wince-inducing portmanteau.

As I’ve said many times, portmanteau names rarely succeed (see Infegy, Blellow, Shpock, Rapiscan, InnoCentive, Smorn, and others). Mycestro joins the Hall of Failed Portmanteaus – the Halfaport – with several strikes against it: We rarely speak of computer mice in the plural, the weird myce spelling suggests something mushroomy, and the ce-st combination in the middle of the word confounds the tongue. And, as I’ve already noted, it’s very difficult to un-see the first-person possessive pronoun in the first syllable.

Man-Word Watch: Dudeoir

The last sentence of the lede in a San Francisco Chronicle “Style” feature caught my attention:

When you think of boudoir photography, the picture that probably comes to mind is women striking pinup poses in classic Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie. But what if, instead of a woman, it’s a man seducing the camera in his skivvies? Then it’s dudeoir, of course.

Sure enough, the subject of the story, Oakland photographer Mariah Carle, devotes a section of her website to “Men Dudeoir” (sic; content reproduced verbatim):

Boudoir is for men too, Call it Dudeoir, call it nude photos, call it anything you like. You and your partner will love seeing professional high quality photos of you in your best-dressed or undressed look.

That capital D notwithstanding, “dudeoir” isn’t a trademark, and it isn’t unique to Mariah Carle. A Google search turned up more than 1,900 matches for “dudeoir,” including Dudeoir by Rouge in Hong Kong (“Portraits for real men”); Dudeoir Scotland (“Bespoke portrait and boudoir photography for blokes”); and Dudeoir Photography in Derby, England. I also found “dudeoir” used as a noun denoting “a guy’s private bedroom, dressing, and sitting room.”

Why dudeoir and not, say, boydoir? Your guess is as good as mine; maybe the rhyme with boudoir makes dudeoir irresistible. The French word boudoir—“a lady’s private sitting room or bedroom”—comes from an Old French verb, bouder, that means “to sulk,” so it’s literally “a room for sulking.” “Boudoir photography”—in which the (female) subject is scantily clothed, softly lit, and posed (sulking?) amid bedroom trappings—is as old as photography itself, but the term seems to have been created in recent decades. According to a thinly researched Wikipedia entry, a California studio, Motherlode Photography, coined “boudoir photography” in 1980. No link is provided, but there’s a Motherlode Photography in California Gold Country—which explains but doesn’t excuse the name—that was established in 1976 and still lists “boudoir photography” among its services.

What Were They Thinking?

Four company names that are not as amusing, meaningful, or intelligible as their creators assume.

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Congratulations to Smorn on exceeding its Kickstarter goal before the deadline. Maybe the founders will set aside some of the excess cash for a new name, because the current one—a regrettable portmanteau of smart and horn—is doing them no favors. I guarantee you that no one will decipher “smart” from “sm-”or “horn” from “-orn.” When even TechCrunch says your product “is cooler than it sounds,” you know the name’s a problem. The product seems terrific; it deserves a smart name, not two unhelpful letters from the word smart. P.S. “Glorp”—for the glow-in-the-dark version—is no better. (For more on bad names that start with sm-, see this post about Smeg and this one about Smencils.)

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If I gave you four chances to guess what Ecwid is, I bet you’d lose—even if I showed you the logo.

European Community Wealth Information Department? Something about equitable? Something in Welsh? Ecological baby buggies for widdle tiny sextuplets?

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. This terrible name (for a maker of online shopping-cart software) turns out to be another regrettable portmanteau: a blend of “e-commerce” and “widgets.”

Let’s review: 1) “ec” does not connote “e-commerce” to anyone, 2) “wid” does not connote “widget” to anyone, and 3) “widgets” is very 2005.

Maybe “Ecwid” seemed brilliant in Russia, where the company was founded, but it’s unfathomable, not to mention icky-sounding, in the US. Now that the company has offices in Southern California, it’s time for a deep rethink.

By the way, when I tweeted about the Ecwid name last month, the company responded defensively:

@fritinancy good or bad, it’s unique, and we reap lots of benefits from that. And so do our customers too.

— Ecwid Team (@ecwid) January 30, 2013

Good or bad?

P.S. “Unique” does not translate to “effective.”

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μBiome uses the Greek letter μ—the symbol for “micro”—in its logo, but the English letter “u” everywhere else (ubiome.com; “uBiome is the world’s first effort to map the human microbiome with citizen science”).

So is the company name pronounced “microbiome” or “you-biome”? Or “mee-biome” (μ in modern Greek)? Or “myoo-biome” (μ in English)? It looks as though μBiome has learned nothing from the confusing example of μTorrent (scroll down to #4).

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When your company is called White Dental Supply and you don’t sell dental supplies, people naturally get confused. No matter how many times you say “We’re an Internet marketing company!” they still ask for floss samples. So you change the name. To Pitooey! With an exclamation mark. Because it sounds like what you do after you brush and rinse? No, because it’s “the language of penguins.”

Of course.

Unfortunately, the CEO speaks the language of buzzword bingo:

The name Pitooey! promotes the strong social media and mobile marketing background of our company. In 2013 we will be pivoting into a new industry with a suite of exciting products and services, and this name change reflects this exciting transformation.

Pfooey.

Word of the Week: Tannoy

Tannoy: (UK) A loudspeaker or public-address system. From Tannoy, the trademark of a speaker manufacturer founded in London in 1926 and based in Scotland since the 1970s; genericized since the 1940s. Also used as a generic verb, “to call someone over a public-address system.”

Tannoy is a blend of tantalum alloy, the material used in an electrolytic rectifier developed by the company. The chemical element tantalum (symbol Ta) was discovered in 1802 and named for Tantalus, the character from Greek mythology who was forced to stand for eternity beneath a tree whose fruit was just out of his grasp. As you may have guessed, “Tantalus” is also the source of the English verb tantalize.

I knew about Tantalus and tantalize but had never encountered tannoy until I read a story by the actor John Lithgow published in the New York Times earlier this month. Lithgow is the only American in the cast of a current National Theatre production, The Magistrate; his essay is about the differences between US and UK theater customs. Here’s the lede:

The language of theater here is slightly different from ours in New York. The crackly speaker in a London dressing room is called the “tannoy.” The opening night of a London show is called its “Press Night.” When a stage manager announces the start of a performance, London actors don’t hear the word “places.” They hear “beginners.”

If you aren’t in London, you may be able to see Lithgow in The Magistrate in your own city through the magic of National Theatre Live, which broadcasts productions live (or almost live) to cinemas around the world. I caught The Magistrate in Berkeley last week and enjoyed it: it’s a late-Victorian farce, so expect plenty of groan-worthy plot contrivances along with well-earned laughs. The staging and acting—Lithgow’s included—are first rate. Check the site for broadcast dates.

January Linkfest

I’ve always wanted to name a perfume. Maybe I should just invent my own, as Sarah Marshall of The Hairpin did with her Unreleased Celebrity Fragrances: Acedia by Louis CK, Sherlocked by Benedict Cumberbatch, and a bunch of others, each with a pungent description.

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Continuing with the made-up names theme, here’s a crayon collection with grown-up color names:

 

I’m digging “Void of Existential Anguish Black.”

Via Arnold Zwicky, who adds a story about the Eagle Shirtmakers color-naming contest of 1961, which yielded submissions like Roe Cocoa, Unforeseeable Fuchsia, and Noblesso Beige.

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Also from Arnold Zwicky: How the dobro got its name. Dobro is a registered trademark of the Gibson Guitar Corporation, which means we all should be capitalizing it; it’s also an eponym, a portmanteau, and a word meaning “goodness” in most Slavic languages.

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“We gave you way too big an advance to call this book Freakonomics,” said the publisher of the book that gave rise to an entire freakin’ industry. Briefly considered as substitutes: Economics Gone Wild, Bend It Like Veblen, and Dude, Where’s My Rational Expectation?

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Earlier this month, the American Dialect Society voted phablet – the coinage that describes a smartphone-tablet hybrid – the word Least Likely to Succeed. (Phablet shared the dubious distinction with YOLO.) In a Word Routes column, Ben Zimmer traces the origins of phablet and ponders why nobody loves the word. (For the record, I’d revive an old word, tabloid, to replace phablet. Here’s my 2009 post about tabloid’s fascinating history.)

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Let’s squeeze in one more Word of the Year 2012 story. This one’s by linguist Arika Okrent, who rounds up eight countries’ words of the year, from entroikado (Portugal) to watture (France). J’aime beaucoup watture!

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“Focus more on connotations and less on definitions” – Lexicon Branding’s advice for choosing a name.

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“The next time someone tells you that they can’t accept a name with risk, consider asking them if pouring money into a brand that no one notices and no one cares about is more or less risky than investing in one that just might have a shot.” – Tate Linden, founder of the branding agency Stokefire, in a Q&A with the Wordnik blog.

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Whoever named the top 10 cannabis strains of 2012 was having way too much fun. (Via a tweet from Whatever It Is, I’m Against It.)

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What can the online dating site OKCupid teach us about naming? It’s all about standing out from the crowd, says Beth Gerber of Catchword Branding.

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Ever remember hearing that HAL, the computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, was meant to represent big bad IBM? (Just move the letters H-A-L forward one space in the alphabet.) A new video sets out to prove that the theory isn’t so farfetched after all.

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Ben Schmidt, who’s written about anachronisms (or prochronisms) in Mad Men and Downton Abbey, listens for anachronisms in Lincoln, the Stephen Spielberg movie written by Tony Kushner. Examples: “barrage” (of artillery) didn’t enter the lexicon until 1900, and “peace talks” wasn’t coined until the Vietnam War. Bonus for Lincoln-lingo nerds willing to pay for the privilege: Ben Zimmer’s Boston Globe interview with Kushner. There’s a related (free) article at Word Routes.

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How did Lockheed Martin’s famous Skunk Works get its name and mascot? The Zinzin blog follows the scent and tracks down the story.

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What’s your favorite legal word? The ABA Journal’s readers testify. (Via a tweet from Beauty Marks.)

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Two from Ad Freak: The ad agency pronunciation guide…

 

.. and a taxonomy of ad-agency names.

 

(Click to embiggen.)

Where No Name Has Gone Before

Let’s say you’ve developed an app that you describe as “your mobile yard sale for beautiful things.” Where do you go in your search for names?

To the final frontier, by way of the Borscht Belt.