Fritinancy

August Linkfest

Crowdsourcing a name for a new apple-flavored Mountain Dew beverage seemed like such a good idea. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, plenty. “Suddenly, its gallery of suggestions featured such winners as ‘Gushing Granny,’ ‘Diabeetus,’ and my personal favorite, ‘Fapple’.” Mountain Dew now says the campaign was created by a local customer, not the company; the “offensive content”—created by unknown pranksters—has been scrubbed from the “Dub the Dew” website.

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My two posts about the origins of the expression “the whole nine yards” (here and here) continue to be among the most-searched entries on this blog. But the story isn’t finished: New research has unearthed a couple of citations that go back to the 1950s, a full decade earlier than previously assumed. Read Ben Zimmer’s Word Routes column about the new findings, “Stretching Out ‘The Whole Nine Yards’.”

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Speaking of idioms: Absolutely nobody knows where the phrase “round robin” comes from.

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The most-loathed words in the English language, according to readers of The Atlantic, include moist (of course!), curate, slacks, and artisanal.

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Love logos? Love data? Check out Emblemetric, a new blog by James I. Bowie about trends in logo design. No seat-of-the-pants stuff, this: Bowie bases his reports on more than 1.2 million logos in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database. Sample finding: “The use of two stars as a design element in US logos increased by 170 percent in 2011 over the preceding five-year period. Looking back over time, we can see that, following a pronounced dip in the 1970s, logos with two stars have been claiming an increasing share of new trademark filings for the last three decades.” Be still, my geekish heart.

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Set aside several hours to wander happily through the History of Advertising Trust, “the largest archive of British advertising in the world.” There’s also a lovely gallery of ghost signs. (Via @boswellaffleck.)

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At Union Square Café, a “K1” is a diner who will be proposing to his date. At Michael’s New York, “Lawn” is a chopped salad chopped extra fine. Ben Schott deciphers these and other secret codes used in the dining rooms and kitchens of some well-known New York City restaurants, .

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Eleven wonderful words with no precise equivalent in English. Quite a few are new to me, including bilita mpash (Bantu for “the opposite of a nightmare”) and ya-arburnee (Arabic for “may you bury me,” i.e., the expressed hope that you die before your beloved does). (Hat tip: @ourboldhero).

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What’s the nerdiest preposition of them all? Nope, not “notwithstanding.” Not even close.

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Lexicographer Kory Stamper on color definitions in Webster’s Third International Dictionary: “You could spend an hour alone getting lost in ‘cerise’ (‘a moderate red that is slightly darker than claret (sense 3a), slightly lighter than Harvard crimson (sense 1), very slightly bluer and duller than average strawberry (sense 2a), and bluer and very slightly lighter than Turkey red’). No doubt people did. That may explain why we don’t define colors this way anymore.”

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I want a wall-size poster of this Is the New diagram, which documents “every instance of the phrase ‘is the new’ encountered from various sources in 2005.” Samples: “October is the new December,” “staying in is the new going out,” and “flat is the new round.” (Via Diane Fischler.)

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“Ms. and Mrs.,” a small personal-care-products company, was constantly being misidentified, usually as “Mr. and Mrs.” So the founders hired professionals to come up with a new name. Smart move. (Via @alanbrew.)

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A wonderful list of paradoxes from virtually every discipline. I’m still pondering the Service Recovery Paradox: “Successfully fixing a problem with a defective product may lead to higher consumer satisfaction than in the case where no problem occurred at all.” (Via @operativewords.)

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I’m sure you’ll have quibbles and additions, but this Digital Trends list of “The top 10 worst car names of all times” includes some incontestable champions, like the Studebaker Dictator and Isuzu’s Mysterious Utility Wizard. (Via @lexiconbranding.)

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From the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog, Mary Norris on “Semicolons; So Tricky”: “I thought semicolons were just inflated commas, and I realized that I had no idea how to use them, and was afraid it was too late to learn, so I decided to do without them. I stuck with what I knew: the common comma, the ignorant question mark, the occasional colon, the proletarian period.”

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From the New York Times’s Opinionator blog, Ben Yagoda on “The Point of Exclamation”: “A friend’s 12-year-old daughter once said that in her view, a single exclamation point is fine, as is three, but never two. My friend asked her where this rule came from and the girl said, ‘Nowhere. It’s just something you learn.’”

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Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl and transformative editor of Cosmopolitan, died Monday. From the New York Times front-page obit: “She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger.” Ouch. It’s easy to mock Brown, and Cosmo, but let’s not forget that in the early years of Brown’s editorship the magazine published work by Patricia Highsmith, John Fowles, and Tom Wolfe, as these covers from the 1960s attest. And brava to Brown for saying this in 1964:

I personally don’t feel that the world is going to the dogs or that young people are inferior to their counterparts of a previous generation. Our moral codes have changed slightly, but what we have now is a lot better than the days of stricter moral codes when there was child labor, no equality for women, no federal aid for destitute people, plenty of robber barons and lynching.

Source: Bad Girls Go Everywhere, Jennifer Scanlon’s 2009 biography of Brown. (Hat tip: The Hairpin.)

One Name, Three Ways

San Francisco’s Would You Believe? bar, at Geary Boulevard and 11th Avenue, has a name wrapped in a question wrapped in three typefaces, none of which I could identify.

The 11th Avenue side of the bar. I’ve decided to call this typeface “Adventureland Bold.”

 

The awning on Geary gets a second question mark. This looks like Aladdin or a similar Middle-East-y font.

 

Fancy script—let’s call it “Sugar Plum Princess Birthday”—paired with an austere, vaguely Deco sans-serif face. I’m picturing a tipsy tootsie on the arm of a pinstriped stockbroker. The sign is mounted above the awning on Geary.

I searched in vain for clues about the origin of this Richmond District bar’s rhetorically questioning name. Something to do with Get Smart, the TV spy spoof of the 1960s, maybe? “Would you believe…” was Maxwell Smart’s catchphrase on the show, and it’s also the name of a Get Smart fan site.

Here’s what learned about the bar from Yelp:

• The clientele is predominantly male and Asian.
• The bar serves $1 shots on Thursdays.
• It has “outlandish names for equally outlandish drinks.”

Clearly, follow-up research is required.

I appreciated Chris J.’s four-star Yelp review:

I love this bar if for no other reason than when we drive by it on our way to places far more interesting, I get to spin my wrists like propellers and declare in a loud, fey voice, “Would you believe?!!” Sometimes, I just holler that out there – “Would you believe?!!” I guess I have to make my own fun.

Because They Say So

The San Francisco magazine 7x7* brought to my attention a pop-up juice bar that opened in the city over Memorial Day weekend. It’s called Sow.

This is what I pictured:

Sow and juice-imbibing piglets. Image from JustMommies.

No, no, not /sau/, insists the Sow website.

 

See? It’s Sōw, with a macron over the O to tell you to pronounce it as a “long” vowel. Or to confuse you further.

And because most city folks won’t know a sow from a sōw from a hole in the ground, there’s a dictionary definition:

verb /sō/ plant (seed) by scattering it on or in the earth

That’s mildly interesting, but so what? A dictionary definition doesn’t make me want to patronize the shop. Besides, while the “planting” concept might make “Sow” an apt name for a nursery or a community garden, the connection between “scattering seed” and “drinking fresh juice” is fairly remote. (From what I’ve read—on the Kickstarter page, for example—Sow doesn’t grow its own fruits and vegetables.)

Another quibble: Nowadays, if a non-farming person is at all familiar with the verb form of “sow,” it’s probably as part of an idiom. And that idiom is a shady one: sow discord, sow rancor, sow rumors, sow one’s wild oats. 

As for the macron, here’s something I wrote in 2008 about Grāpple, a brand of grape-flavored apples:

Basic naming rule: If you have to rely on diacritical marks like the macron over the a to clarify pronunciation, your brand name isn't working. Additional hints (“Say Grape-L”) only make you seem more desperate.

That observation applies to Sōw, too.

We recently saw some fancy macronizing with Mondelēz, the new name of Kraft Food Inc.’s global snacks business. The macron over the second E is there to tell you—force you—to pronounce the name “moan-de-LEEZ.” But even the company’s original press release dropped the macron after the headline, and a more recent press release dispensed with it altogether. So go right ahead and say “MAHN-de-lezz” if you please. Or mahn-de-LAY. I won’t turn you in to the brand police.

(As Tate Linden of Stokefire, a branding agency, said in a tweet about Mondelez: “Any name that requires the Latin Extended character set gets a FAIL in my book. How many people can type an ē?”)

Let’s extract the juice from this critique:

How General Tso's Chicken Got Its Name

In 2007 the New York Times called General Tso’s chicken the most famous Hunanese dish in the world. But the sweet-spicy deep-fried recipe didn’t originate with chefs in China’s Hunan Province, “who apparently had never heard of it until the opening of China to the West in recent decades.” So say Jerry Adler and Andrew Lawler, whose comprehensive “How the Chicken Conquered the World” appears in the May issue of Smithsonian Magazine. Here’s their General Tso story:

The man generally credited with the idea of putting deep-fried chicken pieces in a hot chili sauce was the Hunan-born chef Peng Chang-kuei, who fled to Taiwan after the Communist revolution in 1949. He named the dish for a 19th-century military commander who led the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion, a largely forgotten conflict that claimed upwards of 20 million lives. Peng moved to New York in 1973 to open a restaurant that became a favorite of diplomats and began cooking his signature dish. Over the years it has evolved in response to American tastes to become sweeter, and in a kind of reverse cultural migration has now been adopted as a “traditional” dish by chefs and food writers in Hunan.

You won’t find General Tso’s chicken at the 3,000 KFC outlets in China, write Adler and Lawler. The chain—which is more profitable in China than in the United States—“has thrived by offering the Chinese customers food they were already familiar with, including (depending on the region) noodles, rice and dumplings, along with chicken wraps, chicken patties and chicken wings, which are so popular … that the company periodically has to deny rumors it has a farm somewhere that raises six-winged chickens.”

Read the rest of the article, and don’t miss the slideshow of raw chickens dressed as Napoleon, Einstein, and other historical figures.

Names in the News

In their annual meeting last week, Kraft Foods shareholders approved Mondelez as the corporate name for the company’s business. The new name, which is pronounced moan-dah-LEEZ and signifies “world of deliciousness” (or something like that), was chosen through an employee contest.

Armin Vit reviewed the logo for his Brand New blog:

It’s no secret that I don’t like hate the Kraft Foods logo — see spots 6 and 5 in 2009’s Worst list — so I was very skeptical about anything good coming out of the same company. Even more so with a weird name like Mondelez and its, like, totes ridics pronunciation. I have to say: I’m extremely surprised by how nice the new logo is. It’s bouncy, it’s flowy, it’s perfectly kerned, and it even manages to tie in to the Kraft Foods logo with those two teardrop shapes.

Teardrops … or ketchup splotches? Or the bleeding edge?

Read my original post about the Mondelez announcement.

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Microsoft has figured out what the world needs now: a new social network. Its entry into the market, So.cl, launched on May 20, while business and tech reporters were still distracted by Facebook’s IPO. The name is pronounced “social,” says Microsoft, but I can’t help reading it as “SoCal.” (The .cl domain is Chile’s country code.)

 

Microsoft makes us smile!

Anyone can join So.cl, but according to a ZDNet story the target market is students and academics. The So.cl FAQ says the network “helps you create rich stories (posts) by making it easy to assemble and share collages of web content.” The site is powered by Microsoft’s search engine, Bing. (Via Duets Blog.)

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AdFreak, the AdWeek blog, reports that a Texas-based chain, Pizza Patrón, is giving away a free large pepperoni pizza to anyone who orders in Spanish on June 5. Predictably, that got the English-was-good-enough-for-Jesus crowd all riled up. Well, let them eat Domino’s. Anyway, I was more interested in the respelling, ransom-note style, of “pizza” as “picza” in the promotion.

Yes, I know there are only four days left.

 

“Picza” is in fact how “pizza” is pronounced by many native speakers of Spanish, because it’s a more natural consonant blend in that language. And “pizza” isn’t the only example of that pre-sibilant pronunciation shift: In 2009 I wrote about a Pepsi-Cola campaign in Argentina in which “Pepsi” was changed to “Pecsi” in advertising and signage.

As for Pizza Patrón, for more than 25 years the chain has catered to the Hispanic community. The company’s slogan is “Más Pizza. Menos Dinero”—more pizza, less money—and its web content is 100 percent bilingual.

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Via the KidCrave blog, here’s a follow-up to my postlet in the May Linkfest about the latest baby-name data in the U.S.: 102 of the most unusual baby names of 2011. And by “unusual” I do mean “insane.” Five babies named “Aunesty”? Another five named “Honestii”? And six named “Onesty”? Six named “Dearria”? Five named “Peniel”? I rest my case. (Via @eponymia.)

Let Them Eat Consonants

The all-caps, all-consonants naming trend continues unabated. I originally spotted unbevoweled names like BHLDN and BLK DNM in the fashion pages*, and now I see the fad is spreading to restaurants.

STK is a “new-style steakhouse” that’s set up shop in Los Angeles, Miami, Las Vegas, and New York. The website has video but no voiceover, so I can’t tell you whether the name is pronounced Ess-Tee-Kay, “Steak,” or something else. (Stock? Stick? Stack? Stoke? Stuck?) The establishment’s target market appears to be angry young women in extremely high heels and the men who photograph them. A restaurant blogger for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution liked what he saw and ate at the local outpost; he called STK “a cannily updated supper club with a good-natured sense of glamour” whose menu “has a kind of corporate-honed contemporary edge that slices into the he-man ethos of most other steak houses.”

In other news, the New York Times reports that KTCHN will open in June on West 42nd Street. “It is in Out NYC, a new ‘urban resort’ complex whose owners have called it both the first gay hotel in New York and ‘straight friendly’,” notes reporter Florence Fabricant.

 

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* And they continue to appear there. Latest example to catch my attention: the all-caps, vowel-deficient RUBR, maker of colorful, inexpensive rubber watches. Slogan: “What Color Is Your RUBR?”

Friends with Benefits

Freshii, Embarcadero Center, San Francisco. The website claims that tomato is also your friend with benefits. Vegetables are such sluts.

 

Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. With benefits.

 

Friends with Benefits (2011), via The Works.

Restaurant Names in the News

Noted recently:

Food Coma, a bánh mì and crêpe café, opened this month in Oakland’s Uptown neighborhood. Its tagline is “Eat. Drink. Eat. Pass out. Repeat”; the logo emphasizes the “pass out” part of the instructions. Death and near-death are surprisingly popular themes in gastronomic naming right now: see Dead Letter wine, Dead Fish restaurant, and Death’s Door spirits. (Via SFEater.com.)

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Wales Today reports that a Welsh prison, HMP Cardiff, will open “a fine dining restaurant” called Clink. It’s a nice play on words: Besides being a slang term meaning prison, “clink” is the sound of two beverage glasses saluting each other. For some reason I’d assumed that “clink” for “prison” was a relatively recent Americanism. Wrong: the OED says it surfaced in mid-16th century England. Clink was the name “of a noted prison in Southwark” (a district in London) and was “later used elsewhere (esp. in Devon or Cornwall) for a small and dismal prison or prison-cell, a lock-up.” Now you know. (Via @brandstrat.)

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CLINK. is also the name of a restaurant in Boston that occupies the site of “the storied Charles Street jail.” Yes, the name is in all caps, and yes, that’s a period. As in “sentence,” perhaps? (Via @wisekaren.)

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And from the Department of What Did You Expect, a diner in his 40s suffered a heart attack last Saturday while eating the Triple Bypass Burger at the Heart Attack Grill (tagline: “Taste Worth Dying For!”) in Las Vegas. He survived. Other patrons were unfazed. “It says right on the door, it's hazardous to your health,” diner CJ Beeman told the local Fox channel. I wish the gentleman a speedy recovery, and I certainly hope that if he ever visits Oakland he isn’t tempted to eat at Food Coma. (Via @dustbury.)

Slutty in a Good Way

An enthusiastic tweet by food maven Ruth Reichl sent me searching for information about Eggslut, which Reichl called “an insanely good breakfast truck, parked on Fairfax in L.A.” Sure enough, Eggslut’s the name, and the proprietors aren’t ashamed about it.

Eggslut truck, via Yelp.

Slut has been getting around in brand names. I’d already known about Bookslut, an online literary magazine that’s been publishing since 2002. A little research turned up a dormant blog called Adventures of a Food Slut, whose curator explains: “I was initially going to go with ‘food whore’ until Brad pointed out that ‘whores do it for the money, but sluts do it because they like it’. Awesome.”

Then there’s SlutWalk, a protest march that originated in Toronto in April 2011 and spread to other North American cities. A sample manifesto:

SlutWalk NYC is part of a worldwide grassroots movement challenging rape culture, victim-blaming and slut-shaming, and working to end sexual and domestic violence.

Button from SlutWalk Denver.

And in the world of lower-case sluts, Word Spy devotes an entry to brand slut: “a customer with no loyalty to a particular brand.” The earliest citation, in the Sunday Telegraph (UK), is dated November 20, 2005.

There’s a large dose of shocking-the-bourgeoisie in all these examples. The generally accepted definition of slut—even in Urban Dictionary—is “a promiscuous woman” or even (sorry, Food Slut) a prostitute. The word’s origin is uncertain—it has cognates in several Germanic languages—but when it entered English around 1400 it meant “a dirty, slovenly, or untidy woman,” and that meaning has hung on. Since the mid-1500s, it’s also meant “a bold hussy” and “a woman of loose morals.”

I’m obliged to mention that slut has enjoyed an alternate history: One definition, according to the OED, is “playful … or without serious imputation of bad qualities.” Samuel Pepys used slut in this way in a 1664 diary entry: “Our little girl Susan is a most admirable slut and pleases us mightily.” The OED has several other “playful” citations dating into the mid-19th century.

This kinder, gentler slut is not what the slut-brands are about, though. The Eggslut and Bookslut names say: “We don’t just love eggs/books, we lust them!” And SlutWalk reclaims and brandishes the word, following the example of gays and lesbians who reclaimed queer and technophiles who embraced geek (which originally meant “fool” and later “a circus freak”). All these brands also use slut as a litmus test: if you’re appalled by our name, you can eat/read/march somewhere else, because you’re not One of Us.

It may not be a stretch to trace the normalization of slut to original-cast Saturday Night Live and the Point/Counterpoint feature of late-1970s Weekend Update, in which Dan Aykroyd’s bombastic replies to Jane Curtin would routinely begin “Jane, you ignorant slut.” A 2008 episode of The Office assumed that viewers knew the reference.

 

“Ignorant,” however, doesn’t apply to the new generation of brazen, brand-savvy sluts. They may be wild and crazy—to borrow another SNL-ism—but they’re smart, and even virtuous, about marketing.

UPDATE: In a comment, linguist Arnold Zwicky pointed me to his own post on slut, published in November 2011. A nice excerpt: “Scrabble slut isn’t a slur, because it’s non-subsective; a Scrabble slut isn’t a slut who plays Scrabble, but someone who’s a slut for (wildly enthusiastic about) Scrabble-playing.”

Yummy Smiley Umlauts

Less than 24 hours after I published a post about güd products from Burt’s Bees, I spotted two more brand names with umlaut-spangled, smiley-face U’s.

Füd—it’s pronounced “fōōd,” the website helpfully offers—is a vegan restaurant in that cradle of carnivorism, Kansas City. “The mentality of the Midwest is, green is garnish,” owner Heidi Van Pelt-Belle told A.G. Sulzberger of the New York Times.

The umlaut is garnish, too.

Then there’s Yogen Früz, which opened in Toronto in 1986 and now has 1,200 fro-yo “retail concepts” around the world.

In the AMC Metreon 15, San Francisco.

If you see an echo in Yogen Früz of fellow frozen-dessert purveyors Häagen-Dazs and Frusen Glädjé, it’s probably not coincidental. All three brands employ gratuitous accent marks; in the case of Frusen Glädjé (which has been defunct for almost 20 years), the superfluous mark is the acute accent.

Yogen Früz takes that smiley U very seriously: it’s always depicted in a contrasting color, and it often stands in for “you.”

 

 

The company has created a “ucard,” possibly for frequent fro-yoers. Hard to say exactly.

The “Yületide” promotions were cute-bordering-on-cloying.

 

The latest twist: “Ü Serve” locations that let you “explore your inner ‘Yogurtista’.”

Enough already! I’m füll.