Fritinancy

Name in the News: Ecovative

Gavin McIntyre and Eben Bayer, two recent graduates of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute* in Troy, New York, have invented “a process that grows all-natural substitutes for plastic from the tissue of mushrooms,” writes Ian Frazier in the May 20 issue of The New Yorker (paywall). Bayer is the CEO of the company they founded; McIntyre is its chief scientist. They originally called the company Greensulate, because they were working on insulation panels. Now it’s called Ecovative Design, L.L.C.; its 32,000-square-foot factory is in a town that couldn’t be more aptly named: Green Island, New York.

Frazier writes:

Ecovative is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, like “innovative,” and the first “e” is long. I found it hard to get the hang of pronouncing the name, and for a while I thought that Bayer and McIntyre should look for a simpler one. But after talking a lot about the company with its principals and employees, almost all of whom are under thirty, I got to like “Ecovative” because of the way they said it.

Frazier’s change of heart – or head – illustrates a couple of interesting points about “difficult” names.

The first lesson is about “pronounceabity,” which is generally regarded as one of the three givens for an effective name. (The others are memorability and legal availability.) But as with any rule, there are successful exceptions. Will Leben, a linguist with Lexicon, the branding agency that named Febreze, Swiffer, and BlackBerry, writes in his company blog that “some brands succeed despite tricky phonetics–so tricky that pronunciations can still vary long after the brands have become established”:

Zagat’s intended pronunciation is “ZAG-it,” yet many of us go for the more exotic sounding “za-GAT.” … At the outset, Acura, Honda’s premium brand in the U.S., was accented like bravura and Futura by some people. Yet, thanks to early advertising that spread virally, and also thanks to the (intentional) resemblance to accurate, an unambiguous pronunciation was quickly established, and the brand, which now has been around for three decades, is still going strong.

Then there’s Moleskine, the Italian company that makes those improbably popular notebooks, datebooks, sketchbooks, and other “nomadic objects.” Not only is there no single correct way to pronounce the company name, Moleskine’s official position is that  “everyone should feel free to pronounce it as he/she prefers.”

The other lesson to be inferred from Frazier’s experience with the Ecovative name is the power of the 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.

In other words, the more you hear a name, the more you like it, or at least don’t dislike it.

Like Frazier, I stumbled over “Ecovative” at first. I was reading the name, not hearing it, and I kept transposing the consonants and seeing the word as “evocative.” (That may or may not be the founders’ intention.) But we’re much more likely to “get” a name if we hear it, because humans have been listening to words for many millennia longer than we’ve been reading them. Walking around the Ecovative offices, Frazier kept hearing employees saying EE-co-vay-tive. Soon enough and sure enough, the pronunciation stuck with him.

Moral: Don’t let your brand name linger on the page or screen. If you want people to remember it, make sure it’s spoken aloud – frequently.

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* Motto: “Why not change the world?”

Oaklavia

Sunday, June 9, is Love Our Lake Day here in Oakland, and there’s no denying there’s a lot to love about Lake Merritt. (Bird sanctuary! Gondolas! Children’s Fairyland! The Ladies of the Lake!)

What I’m not so crazy about is the event’s alternate name: Oaklavia.

 

 

As you can see, the official spelling is Oaklavía, with an acute accent over the i, so I know it’s meant to be pronounced oak-la-VEE-ya. But where I’ve most often seen it – in the #oaklavia hashtag, the oaklavia.org URL, and sundry blog posts – the accent doesn’t show up. And every time I see it, I read it as oak-LAY-vee-ya, to rhyme with “Octavia” or “Batavia.” And it’s a short slide from oak-LAY-vee-ya to oak-labia, and let’s try to be grownups here, shall we?

Oaklavía has been an annual event since 2010; the name and the activity are modeled after Ciclovía – “bike path” in Spanish – an open-streets event that originated in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1976 and has been a weekly occurrence in many Colombian cities ever since. Ciclovía has inspired many similar events around the world: San Francisco’s, which takes place from spring through fall, is called Sunday Streets; Los Angeles has a semiannual CicLAvia, which may be pronounced with a stressed vee, but you’d never guess it from the capitalized LA. CicLAvia always makes me think about cicadas, which is ridiculous, because there are no cicadas in L.A.

There’s some precedent for successful Oak- portmanteaus in Oakland: Oaksterdam University (“quality training for the cannabis industry”), Oaklandish (“local love” apparel and other products), and probably a few others I’ve forgotten. But Oaklavía – where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain? – just seems to be trying too hard. Remember: If you have to depend on fussy punctuation or accents to make the name intelligible, the name isn’t as strong as it could be. (See my 2011 post “Six Naming Questions You May Have Overlooked.”)

“Oakland Streets,” anyone?

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.

Kinfolk

Two new names—Kinnek and Kngine—are bringing back old memories.

The names are more similar than they appear. That’s because – surprise! – Kngine is meant to be pronounced “kin-gin.” Yes, “kin-gin,” despite the fact that (1) Kngine is meant to be a compression of “knowledge engine” and (2) in English, K before N is always, always, always silent.*

But language appears not to be the strong suit of the Kngine team—which is odd, since Kngine is billed as a natural-language app.

 

“Links are not answer”?

Copy is not answer, either. This line appears in large type and unpunctuated:

With its simple interface and brilliant engine your life will be smarter

My life has a rather complicated interface, actually. But I digress.

So what we have are two more names that begin with kin, just like—here comes the nostalgia—Kindle (Amazon’s e-book reader), KIN (Microsoft’s ill-starred mobile phone), and Kinect (Microsoft’s Xbox 360 peripheral).

Some of you may also remember Kinetic, a fitness game made by Nike for the Sony EyeToy.

New York-based Kinnek calls itself “a better way to manage your business purchases”; Silicon Valley-based Kngine says it’s “changing the way people create, acquire and consume Knowledge [capital K sic].”

The companies may be brilliantly innovative—it’s too early to tell—but they haven’t signaled it with their names, which are derivative (Kinnek) and forced (Kngine).

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* In Yiddish you’d pronounce the K. Compare knaidlach (matzoh balls), pronounced with a kuh and a nay.

November Linkfest

The leaves are falling, the turkey’s defrosting: It must be time for the first Word of the Year 2012 announcement! Oxford Dictionaries, the traditional early bird, picked one WOTY for the US, GIF (the verb), and one for the UK, omnishambles. For background on omnishambles—which made a brief appearance in the US this year as well—see my post on “wazzock.” And for background on how Oxford chose GIF, see this hilariously be-GIFed blog post. 

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Turducken: chicken stuffed inside duck stuffed inside turkey. Cherpumple: cherry, pumpkin, and apple pies stuffed inside cake. Now online dictionary Wordnik invites readers to invent a new Thanksgiving-related Franken-word (portmanteau). “It could be a (horrific) new food, a feeling, or a phenomenon. The only rules are that they combine two or more words, and that they have to do with turkey-day.” Tweet your nominations with the hashtag #turkeyword.

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This one goes out to all you graphic designers and creative directors: horrible client feedback turned into hilarious works of art. (Full gallery at SharpSuits.net.)

“I’ll know what I want when I see it.” – Clients everywhere

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Astronomy and space startup Uwingu – that’s oo-WING-oo, the Swahili word for “sky” – is building “a baby book of names” for newly discovered planets. For 99 cents per nomination, you can submit a name to the database; for another 99 cents, you can vote for your favorite name on the list. The money goes to a good cause, of course. According to the Bad Astronomy blog, “The folks in charge are professional astronomers and space scientists at the tops of their fields, people like Alan Stern and Pamela Gay.”

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Cast your vote for the name of the year at Baby Name Wizard. The NOTY “isn't necessarily the most popular baby name,” writes BNW’s Laura Wattenberg. “It’s a name that changed during the course of the year, and points to more changes around us. It’s a one-name time capsule that reminds us of how names are woven into our lives, connecting to and reflecting everything that goes on in our culture.” The 2011 winner was Siri.

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Do we need a new name for the fiscal cliff? The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein proposes “austerity crisis”; his readers have their own suggestions, including Policy Meltdown, Lemmings Moment, Fiscal Spliff, and Mole Hill. (What’s the fiscal cliff, you ask? Here you go.)

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Corporate tagline or university motto? Take the quiz (it’s tougher than you’d think).

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Minor hockey (not to be confused with minor-league hockey) is divided into narrow age ranges, and the names for those ranges vary wildly and whimsically around the world. In Canada the 9-10 age group is called “Atom”; in France the 10-11 group is called Poussins (“young chickens”). More minor hockey lore at (where else?) Wikipedia. Hat tip: Bruce Fulton.

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Remember Cuil, the search engine that was supposed to be a Google-killer? It died in 2011, possibly of pronunciation failure. “You might think that making a pronounceable name is a no brainer,” writes Andrew Hennigan on his blog about communications, “but there are actually several separate issues you need to think about, and Cuil got all three wrong.” (Hat tip: FussFactory.)

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Green-suiter, Yuk, 2% Club and other West Point slang: a lexicon.

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What does the “signature” mean in “signature burrito”? Lexicographer Orin Hargraves, writing for the Macmillan Dictionary blog, says “signature” has been “so diluted by modern usage as to become meaningless.”

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Speaking of meaningless, William Germano has had it with passion. He writes in Lingua Franca: “In its new, overexposed phase, passion has come to mean something else. I’d hazard the definition ‘an outsized, all-consuming enthusiasm that leads to achievement.’ That seems to be where passion is drifting in our outcome-driven society: It’s become a word signifying the precondition of success.” I’ve written about passion overload a number of times myself, starting with a 2006 post, “Our Passion Is Your Problem.”

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The Romney campaign named its (badly botched) get-out-the-vote program Project ORCA, but why? Language Log’s Mark Liberman goes fishing: “It would be a little weird, in my opinion, to name a GOTV program after a boat used to hunt a fictional monster shark. Clearly the shark would be Obama, or perhaps Obama’s appeal — but in that metaphor, where are the Romney voters?”

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After Hurricane Sandy struck, New York City gained a new neighborhood: SoPo, for “South of Power.” As The Atlantic Wire’s Jen Doll tells it, “New York City has a history with this sort of name.” (Hat tip: @nextmoon.)

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From the public-radio show A Way With Words, hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette, here’s an excellent list of reference resources for writers and word lovers. A good place to start your holiday shopping!

Way, Way Bad

Surely the people at Segueway Solutions know that “segue” is pronounced “seg-way.”

 

 

So I’m assuming they pronounce the name of their company “Seg-Way-Way.”

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P.S. To find out how the name is actually pronounced, I called both phone numbers listed on the Contact Us page. I got a recording each time; neither outgoing message included the company name.

Good Idea, Bad Name

Stylish, contemporary clothing for women that isn’t bandage tight and cut up to here and down to there? Definitely a welcome concept. So hurrah for Zahra Aljabri and her new Minneapolis-based business.

But no cheers for the name: Mode-sty.

Yes, it’s hyphenated. Yes, that second syllable means an enclosure for pigs.*

It gets worse.

Names in the News: Recce

Recce is a new iOS app that provides a 3D, animated, aerial view of a city (just London for now; San Francisco and New York soon). The name mystified me at first: When I read the TechCrunch headline—“A Rich, Interactive Map That’s Also a Gaming Platform”—I took in “rich,” applied it to Recce, and concluded it was an Italian word, pronounced, like “bocce,” with a /ch/ in the middle. Retchie? Hmm.

Then I read reporter Ingrid Lunden’s lede, which explains for stoopid Yanks like me that recce is “pronounced ‘wreckie’, British slang for ‘reconnaissance’ (only English people would make slang out of a word like that).”

News flash! Americans also make slang out of “a word like that”: our version is “recon,” pronounced REE-con. Both abbreviations were originally military slang, but American “recon” is older by one whole war: It was first documented in 1918; “recce” surfaced (as “reccy”) in 1941.

One other item in the story caught my attention: Lunden writes that Recce was originally called Mapply “until a French company called Mappy called to say ‘Non!’” That’s one less faux-adverbial -ly name, one more sign that the British are coming, the British are coming.

How Livemocha Got Its Name

I’ve been researching the rise of online education for a project I’m working on. One of the companies in this growing field has a name that fits nicely into this week’s Life-or-Death theme: Livemocha.

 

 

Livemocha was founded in 2007 to bring language learning to a global audience. It currently offers courses in 38 languages, including Arabic, Japanese, Hindi, Urdu, Indonesian, Hebrew, and Turkish. Fees start at about $10 per course; students come from “every country in the world.” The website is elegantly designed, informative, and welcoming.

I originally encountered the Livemocha name out of context, and nothing about it suggested “education” or “language learning” to me. I was uncertain about the pronunciation: did “live” have a short vowel (suggesting an imperative verb) or a long one (suggesting “alive”)? Was “mocha” pronounced with a /k/ in the middle, like the color/coffee drink/city in Yemen; or phonetically, as in “cha-cha-cha”?

So I emailed the company to get the name story. The gracious reply came from Kira Fickensher, Livemocha’s community manager:

Livemocha is 2 parts: Live and Mocha. Live is pronounced lahyv as in “live broadcast” (the adverb/adjective form of the word). It represents live learning, live conversation, live practice - everything language learning should be. Self-study and online learning are such an essential evolution for language learning, because they are far more accessible and practical than traditional methods. But these need not exclude human interaction and immersion. Our approach of using social networking to reduce the barriers of distance actually bring [sic] live practice and immediate feedback into the act of self-study.

The second part of Livemocha is mocha, pronounced like the coffee drink. This is both a nod to our hometown of Seattle, which is known for its coffee culture, and a way of incorporating the ambience and sentiment of a coffee shop, where you can both study by yourself with a laptop or chat with a friend.

I’m glad the company gave this much thought to the name story; too many businesses with puzzling names default to “It’s just a name” or “It’s something our PR agency dreamed up.” And I’m happy to see those positive associations: “live learning” plus “sociable setting.”

But I’m a native English speaker. I wonder how well those meanings translate to a native speaker of, say, Mandarin Chinese (one of the top 10 languages spoken by Livemocha members). The pronunciation isn’t transparent, either: The short I, the ambiguous CH, and the V—pronounced B or W in various languages—could be confounding. Would a native Spanish speaker with no knowledge of English pronunciation be tempted to pronounce the name Lee-bay-MO-tcha?

Then there’s the leap required to get from “Livemocha” to “language learning.” The tagline—“Creating a World without Barriers”—is of only limited help: It could apply to a concert (think Live Aid or LiveNation), an international philanthropy (think Doctors without Borders), or a campaign for wheelchair access. I’m not saying the name and tagline need to be descriptive or pedestrian, but they should provide a clue about what’s being offered here.

My grade for the Livemocha name: B-minus. It’s distinctive and evocative if you speak English, and easy enough to pronounce once you see the word split. (The cursive treatment of the logo makes it a little clearer; an intercap M or a space between the words would be even better.) But it’s an oddly challenging choice for a global brand that focuses on cross-border fluency. It makes me wonder about the thoroughness of the pre-launch linguistic screening.

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Previously on Life-or-Death Week: Thanatourism, Death to Branding, Lifelike, Unleash Deadly.

 

July Linkfest

If you’ve been following the big science news of the month/year/century/millennium, you know that the “Higgs” in “Higgs boson” is British physicist Peter Higgs. But you may not be aware that“boson” was named for an Indian scientist, Satyendranath Bose. (Note: The Higgs boson is not to be confused with the Higgs bos’n or the Herrgs berson.)

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Ten weird rules that control how planets are named.

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Five words with surprising etymologies. I knew the “California” story, but was indeed surprised by “partridge.”

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Guest-blogging at Midlife Mixtape, Alexandra Rosas of Good Day, Regular People teaches us some useful Colombian idioms. I’m partial to ¿Y quién pidió el pollo? which translates literally to “And who ordered the chicken?” but is infinitely more versatile.

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Moving north of the border now: Studio360Redesigns assigned Toronto-based Bruce Mau Design the job of rebranding the Canadian national identity. The Brand New blog reports on Mau’s “Know Canada” redesign.

I think “Know Canada” is a brilliant slogan. Inexplicably, though, Studio360Redesigns conducted a separate contest, open to nonprofessionals, and chose a different slogan. I can’t say I share the judges’ enthusiasm for “Canada: We’re Not Just Colder, We’re Cooler.” Meh.

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“I call them the Liquid Names: they flow smoothly, like water down a glass streambed with no rocks or branches to impede its path.” Baby Name Wizard reports on “a new class of girls’ names” that has “taken hold in the past generation.”

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What if language magazines were sold at supermarket checkouts? Two hypotheticals, one from Mignon (Grammar Girl) Fogarty (pictured below), the other from an opinion piece by John McWhorter in theNew York Times.

I especially like “What to do when he ‘begs the question’.”

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“On Newsroom, every word is expertly crafted by an genuine genius of dialogue. In a newsroom, people alternate between exhaustion and caffeinated hysteria.” And other differences between the HBO seriesThe Newsroom and an actual newsroom.

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Need a rhyme or a near-rhyme? RhymeBrain is one of the better online dictionaries I’ve seen. (Hat tip: John McChesney-Young.)

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Destination weddings, destination birthdays, destination funerals: How did “destination” become a modifier, anyway?

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The Project Twins’ illustrated dictionary of “unusual words,"     from acersecomic to zugzwang. (Via Culture Desk.)

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This is swellacious: The Oxford English Fictionary, “Defining words that aren’t real. Yet.” (Via this tweet from Our Bold Hero.)

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Spin magazine’s list of the 40 greatest band names of all time. (Via@VerbID.)

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How well do you know carny lingo? Trucker lingo? Show-biz lingo?

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Q: What’s the correct pronunciation of “Moleskine”? A: Whatever you like.