Fritinancy

Eat at [Verb]

These Bay Area restaurants don’t just take orders: If their names are any indication, they give them, too.

Melt! (San Francisco)

The exclamation point is part of the name, and melting is the raison d’être, of this fondue café in San Francisco’s North Beach.

 

Build (Berkeley)

One Yelper called it “the Subway of pizzas. You enter a line and the employees make the pizza as you like.” The slogan is “Find Your Inner Pizza,” which does not sound appetizing at all.

 

Toss (Berkeley, just a few doors away from Build)

I love the wordmark, but every time I see the name I want to finish the sentence: “… your cookies.” Maybe this is where all those inner pizzas end up.

 

Gather (Berkeley)

Hip, centrally located – in the greenest building in Berkeley –and designed to please demanding foodies of every persuasion, from gluten-free vegans to whole-animal carnivores. (Are you surprised to learn the idea for restaurant came out of a “vision” during “a retreat in the California desert”? Neither am I.) The name suggests hunter-gatherers as well as gathering around the table.

 

Assemble (Richmond)

Yes, it’s another way to say “gather,” but in this case there’s a historical resonance to the name that makes it a perfect fit for the location, in a former Ford Motor Company assembly plant on the bay in Richmond.

May Linkfest

Newt Gingrich—remember when he ran for president and talked about building bases on the moon?—now appears to be campaigning for Andy Rooney’s old slot on “60 Minutes.” “We’re really puzzled,” he tells his YouTube audience, a look of grave concern furrowing his brow, a familiar-looking device in his hand. “We spent weeks [!] trying to figure out whaddya call this.” This is what you and I call a cell phone or a mobile phone or a smartphone, but that doesn’t satisfy Gingrich. He’s soliciting new, more precise names for the gizmo he used to call “a handheld computer.” Commenters have been gleefully obliging; my favorite nominations are Talkie-Viewie (maybe “TV” for short?), roundcorner-camera-communicati­ons-email-apps-thingy, iMoon, and horseless telephone. (Via TechCrunch.)

Meanwhile, linguist Geoffrey Pullum, posting at Language Log, has “an inkling of what moved Gingrich to embark on his piece of burbling.” It’s all about the naïve lexical global Whorfianism, obviously.

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I caught this a few days too late for Underwear Week but can’t resist sharing it anyway. Triumph, the Swiss bra company, last week introduced its concept bra of the year at a Tokyo press conference. The theme: “branomics,” “a playful take on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ‘three-arrow’ economic revival plan,” according to Reuters. “We hope that as the Japanese economy grows, we can also help bust sizes to get bigger,” said a Triumph spokeswoman. (Via The 3% Conference.)

Image via AdFreak. Note arrows.

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Merriam-Webster, the dictionary company, is having a photography contest for word lovers that looks like a lot of fun. Deadline for submissions: May 26. (Via Emily Brewster.)

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Speaking of photography, here’s a pop song dedicated to stock photo clichés: “groom on phone with angry wife,” “bearded man is looking grave,” “black and white handshake,” and many more. (Via Igor blog.)

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And speaking of photography and contests, GeoGuessr combines street-view photos with a test of your geographical knowledge. Challenging and addictive. (Via PopeHat.)

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Maps! I love ’em. And I especially love maps that combine geography, history, biography, and name lore, like this interactive map of San Francisco place names, developed by Noah Veltman.

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This advice from Baby Name Wizard about overcoming naming remorse works for company and product naming, too.

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Andris Pone of Coin Branding, in Toronto, applauds Frogbox, a “green” moving company in more than one sense. It’s a great brand story, Andris writes: “The Frogbox positioning statement, From one pad to another, exemplifies the message of ease by creating a promise (completely delivered on) that one can move from their old home to their new one with all the difficulty of a hop.”

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Here’s a nifty infographic on how corporate logos evolve.

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Corporate buzzword-wise, “delight” is shaping up to be the new “passion.” (Via MJF.)

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You’ll need to subscribe to Visual Thesaurus to read Mike Pope’s excellent column, “What’s in a -Nym?”, which goes beyond antonyms and synonyms to more obscure and fascinating terms like contranym, retronym, and backronym. But of course you’re already a subscriber.

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From Idibon, a language-data company: how to name a racehorse.

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Finally, in honor of the return of the cicadas to the eastern U.S., here’s a reprise of my plug for Cicada-licious: Cooking and Enjoying Periodical Cicadas, the cicada cookbook produced by the University of Maryland cicadamaniacs (their term). Yes, I have a well-documented fondness for -licious names.

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I also can’t resist an opportunity to combine entomology, etymology, and a plug for Fritinancy. As language maven Ben Zimmer—my editor at Visual Thesaurus—observed in an email to me:

I noticed that the first OED cite for “fritin(i)ancy” is from Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, talking about cicadas. (In this edition, it’s actually “fritinnitus.”) Johnson defined “fritinancy” as “the scream of an insect, as the cricket or cicada” (citing Browne) and subsequent dictionaries used similar definitions. (Johnson didn’t define “cicada,” oddly enough.)

My original post about Fritinancy cited Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), which mentioned crickets but not cicadas. The post was written before I had access to the OED online, a weak defense but the one I’m sticking with.

In other cicada news, linguist Arnold Zwicky has written about “swarmageddon” and “cicadapocalypse,” and science writer Carl Zimmer, brother of Ben, examined the remarkable life cycle of this long-lived insect. Carl Z’s editors at the Times consulted with Ben Z to come up with a pronunciation guide: “cicadas (usually pronounced sih-KAY-duhz).”

But, Ben told me, “there are plenty of people who pronounce it KAH, and many dictionaries give it as an acceptable alternate. I don’t have a good sense of the regional distribution of the two pronunciations, though.”

Perhaps Fritinancy’s readers can help.

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.

Giving Thanks for Good Names

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, here are three business names I’m grateful to know about.

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After a disaster like Hurricane Sandy, there’s usually no shortage of clothing donations. But donors often forget about one essential item: new underwear. The nonprofit organization Underwearness raises awareness about the problem and delivers new underwear to needy children. The name is a perfect blend, and the logo is strong, playful, and vibrant.

 

One quibble: I wish the slogan were something more original than the “One X at a Time” snowclone, which I’ve written about several times. (Not to mention the ambiguity of “pair” here—pair of children? Pair of underwear?)

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High-low collaborations between couture designers and mass-market retailers are old-hat by now. What’s new about Narciso Rodriguez’s recent partnership with Kohl’s is a name that’s as stylish as the clothing: DesigNation. Not only does it say “design,” “nation,” and “designation,” it visually deconstructs the logo to suggest something fresh and exciting.

 

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Among the cocoa cognoscienti of San Francisco, master chocolate-maker Michael Recchiuti is famous enough that he could have named his new dessert café after himself. Instead, he called it Chocolate Lab. Yes, there’s a whiff of science about the name, nicely supported by the logo and some of the website headings – Experiments, Antidotes, Lab Time.

 

But it gets better. The café’s address is 801 22nd Street – in the neighborhood called Dogpatch.

Very fetching!

Chocolate Lab puppy via DogExplorer.com.

X-toberfest

Few German words are as popular or linguistically productive in the US as “Oktoberfest.” Here are some local variations on the theme, along with several out-of-town sightings.

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Oakland’s fifth annual Oaktoberfest will be held on Saturday, October 6.

“Oaktoberfest” works very well orthographically—just add A. “Oakland” has also been rejiggered into Oaklandish (an apparel brand that “supports and represents” Oakland) and Oaksterdam University (“Quality Training for the Cannabis Industry”), named in honor of Amsterdam, where marijuana use is legal.

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Sharktoberfest is an annual tradition at  the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The event celebrates “two perennial favorites—sharks and beer!”

I love the Academy but can’t help wishing Sharktoberfest were taking place in Boston, where the native nonrhotic rendering of the word would create a better rhyme with “Oktoberfest.”

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Book’toberfest is the first annual (their presumption, not mine) book fair and local-beer tasting at San Francisco’s Mechanics’ Institute Library. It’s scheduled for October 5 and promises to “put the ‘pub’ back into ‘publishing’!”

And also the apostrophe into “Book’toberfest,” for reasons unclear to me. It interrupts the otherwise perfect Oktoberfest portmanteau.

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Moving away from the bay, Buffalo’s Booktoberfest—no punctuation, thank you very much—was held September 13. The event was “an evening of bratwurst and brews, all in the name of literacy.”

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Watchismo—nice name, by the way—is celebrating Clocktoberfest with 25 percent discounts on most German-made watches.

 

Note the German-flag colors and the echt Fraktur type, or something close to it.

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Baracktoberfest is a Kickstarter project that celebrates the brewing of beer at the White House; the money goes to creating T-shirts, pint glasses, recipe cards, and postcards. (For more about the beer, see the last item in this August post.) The $300 goal was met in two and a half hours, and the project ultimately raised almost $3,000.

“Est. 2008” apparently refers to the year Obama was elected, not the year the project began.

The project’s creator, Matthew Potter, wrote a nice statement of purpose that begins:

First and foremost: This isn’t about politics. This is about portmanteaus and alcohol. If that’s not enough to get you excited, then I don’t know how you get out of bed in the morning.

 

During the 2008 presidential campaign Schlafly Beer in St. Louis produced a Baracktoberfest brew (and a Palin ale). This year, with one of the candidates a teetotaler, Schlafly appears to be abstaining.

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I can’t resist including SocktoberFest, coming up this weekend in Osage, Iowa. It’s sponsored by a local company, Fox River, “maker of the famous Original Rockford Red Heel Monkey Sock”—de rigueur for all your sock-monkey needs—and the press release has this adorable lede: “Thousands of bargain shoppers will get to experience that new-sock feeling after SocktoberFest…”

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UPDATE: The Pr*tty Sh*tty blog, which reviews examples of good and bad design, is observing Ktoberfest, “a weeklong celebration of the letter K” in logos.

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UPDATE 2: Via a tweet from Our Bold Hero, Spocktoberfest, #1 on Cracked’s list of  “holidays they need to invent.” 

For additional X-toberfest affixoids (that’s the technical name), see this October 2008 post at the Mr. Verb blog, which includes mentions of Trucktoberfest, Rocktoberfest, Shocktoberfest, Lawtoberfest, Barktoberfest, Drunktoberfest, Puketoberfest, and many more.

Traditional Oktoberfest—the one in Munich—takes place from late September to early October. In the US, such calendrical strictures are often flouted: see Maytoberfest, Novemberfest, and Augtoberfest. Wondering how the original Oktoberfest came to be? Here you go.

And check out the comments below for additional -toberfests.

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.

Oh Em Gee

It’s officially an old-people acronym now.

Exhibit A: Cablevision is helping to market OMGFAST fixed wireless broadband Internet and telephone service in Florida. OMGFAST was formerly known as Clearband.

Image from Fierce Cable.

From the Fierce Cable report:

Earlier this month, the company changed its name to OMGFAST, incorporating the slang abbreviation for “oh my god” that is often used in text messages. On July 3, Cablevision subsidiary Rainbow MVDDS Company filed a trademark application for the brand “OMGFAST,” which the company said would be used to provide “Internet access via wireless broadband,” according to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. RMVDDS listed the address of Cablevision’s corporate headquarters in Bethpage, N.Y., in the filing.

(Hat tip: MJF.)

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Exhibit B: The controversial diet book Six Weeks to OMG, was published in the US earlier this month. The author is Venice A. Fulton—the nom d’OMG of Paul Khanna—who, according to the blurb, is “a nutrition expert and personal trainer” who designed the regimen for “his A-list clients.” Fulton/Khanna originally self-published Six Weeks in the UK.

Bus-shelter ad, New York City. Tweeted by Grand Central Publishing, the book’s US publisher.

An excerpt from the hilarious review by John Crace in the Guardian (UK):

Let’s go. But before we do, I should just mention the A and B words. And now I have mentioned anorexia and bulimia, let’s forget about them. Because the first thing you are going to do is skip breakfast, do an hour of exercise – just thinking will probably be exhausting enough for some of you – and drink five double espressos. Can’t you just feel all that fat being purged? Nice feeling! Now I want you to have an ice-cold bath. Stay in as long as you can manage. Those doing the Quake [the most challenging version of the diet] should aim for two hours. That way your legs will get frostbite and have to be amputated. OMG. No more cellulite dimples for you, babykins!

 

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Exhibit C: Venice/Paul had better watch out: “Celebrity doctor” Marc Lawrence, in Southern California, is promising OMG Fat Loss in four minutes.

 

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Exhibit D: A sign in one of the front windows of Euromix, an international food shop in my Oakland neighborhood. I wrote about Euromix in 2008.

 

I think they mean “toothsome,” but I still want to turn it into an imperative: “Eat our beans and toot home!”

I can’t resist sharing a photo of the sign on the other side of the door:

Russian Mafioso says: “We don’t F… around! We SELL FOOD! GR82CU!”

To which we reply:

LOL Café, Geary Boulevard at 25th Avenue, San Francisco.

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The US Patent and Trademark Office lists 85 live trademarks with “OMG,” including OMG Tax; OMG! Onion Made Goodness (chip dip); OMG lubricant (“Make it an explosive night”); OMG! Oatmeal Made Great; OMG I So Need a Glass of Wine or I’m Going to Sell My Kids (“an exclusive virtual gathering of Domestic Goddesses”); OMG … It’s Gluten Free; OMG Object Management Group (registration filed in 1991, several years before the txting abbreviation took off); and OMG OJ. My favorite so far is OMG Old Man’s Garage in Rainbow City, Alabama.

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P.S. Does anyone remember erstwhile Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain’s slogan, “OMG – Obama Must Go”? Nah, I didn’t think so.

What the Puck?

Professional hockey—minor league, but hockey nonetheless—is returning to San Francisco this fall. Which explains the presence of this billboard in North Beach (Columbus at Filbert).

 

But it doesn’t explain everything. And neither does the FAQ section on the SF Bulls website. So I’m going to woman up and do my best to answer your questions.

The Team Name, Part 1.  As far as I know, there’s no history of “Bulls” teams in the Bay Area—Chicago has that particular honor. So I surmised that the name was inspired by the team’s home rink, the Cow Palace, which opened in 1941 as a venue for livestock expositions and the Grand National Rodeo. The Cow Palace is not actually in San Francisco: it’s just south of the city and county limits, in Daly City. (It was originally called the California State Livestock Pavilion; according to one story, while it was still being built, during the Great Depression, one critic sniped that while people were starving, money shouldn’t be spent on “a palace for cows.” The name stuck.) “The San Francisco Cows” was evidently out of the question. But as San Francisco Chronicle reporter Peter Hartlaub wrote in October of last year, “You’ll sooner see a bull in San Francisco than a circumcision ban in Dallas. It’s a poor name, coupled with a logo that looks like a Carly Fiorina attack ad.” Hartlaub suggested seven improvements on “Bulls,” including The Bullitts and The Rock. Nevertheless, I’m sure the headline writers will have loads of fun with “Bulls Hit.”

The Team Name, Part 2: In a follow-up interview, Peter Hartlaub elicited this name story from team owner/general manager/coach Pat Curcio:

We looked into all kinds of names. We looked at The Rock. We looked at a lot of different angles. We really loved The Seals, and we loved The Sea Lions. Unfortunately we couldn’t get those names.

Then when we were downtown [sic] at Pier 39. There was a crowd of people this past spring. It was packed, and the sea lions were playing. We were talking to some people there, and someone says “A male sea lion is called a bull.” And we said “That’s a little tougher.” That’s how the Bulls came up. Then there was the connection with the Cow Palace. That’s how it developed.

The Team Colors. It’s all orange and black—San Francisco Giants colors--on the poster, but according to a Wikipedia entry the official colors are “old gold,” orange, black, and white. Gold and orange have symbolic significance locally: gold for the Gold Rush, which transformed San Francisco from a provincial backwater to a regional capital; and orange for the International Orange paint on the Golden Gate Bridge.

The League. The Bulls will play in the hitherto-unknown-to-me ECHL, which when it was founded in 1988 was called the East Coast Hockey League. In 2002 the West Coast Hockey League went out of business, and the ECHL took in a bunch of teams from Alaska, California, Nevada, and Idaho. There are some not-bad team names in the league, including the Orlando Solar Bears, the Bakersfield Condors, and—my favorite—the Florida Everblades. But all the names pale in comparison to roller-derby team names like the Traverse City Toxic Cherries, the Arkansas Killbillies, and the Taco Kickers.

The Owner/General Manager/Coach’s Nickname. In his blog, Pat Curcio calls himself “Coach Curdog.” Well played, sir.

The Ad Slogan, Part 1. No question that “Act like you got a pair” has the requisite bad-assitude for hockey. For starters, there’s the down-market grammar—like, not as if; you got, not you have or you’ve got. (I’ll get to “a pair” in Part 2.) If you doubt that got can be inflammatory, read Fitch O’Connell’s recent column for the Visual Thesaurus (subscription required): O’Connell was told by a teacher that got “isn’t a word” and by his grandfather that “it’s an Americanism.” (Both had been misinformed.) I’m not sure, though, who’s being addressed in that imperative statement. The fan? The aspiring team member? (Open player tryouts will be held in September.) The city of San Francisco generally?

The Ad Slogan, Part 2. “A pair” has been slang for “testicles” since … well, I can’t tell you. The OED doesn’t include the reference, although it does tell us that “a pair” has meant “women’s breasts” since at least 1919. In hisOfficial Dictionary of Unofficial English—an indispensable resource—Grant Barrett antedate s “grow a pair” to this 1994 Usenet citation: “My only response to diablo is to sack up and grow a pair.” In the Bulls billboard, “a pair” surely refers to the manly fortitude required to play hockey. But I’m not sure about “act like.” Maybe fans just need to pretend to be macho. Or maybe the target audience is women. Or maybe it’s “a pair of tickets,” and as long as you act as though you have them, you can get through the gate.

No, I didn’t think so.

“A pair” was used more effectively in an ad campaign for last year’s 50/50.

 

Here “a pair” has three overlapping meanings: machismo; the two friends portrayed by Gordon-Levitt and Rogen; and the “two-of-a-kind” meaning from cards (reinforced by “…to beat the odds”).

 

Naming Notes

The ready-to-wear division of 50-year-old fashion house Yves Saint Laurent (YSL) has been renamed Saint Laurent Paris (SLP). Hedi Slimane, who became the company’s creative director in March, said through a spokesperson that “he was drawing inspiration from 1966, when the ready-to-wear line was launched as Saint Laurent Rive Gauche.” (Daily Mail / UK)

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Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch told CNBC that he’s considering renaming the Wall Street Journal “WSJ.” (Poynter.) The Guardian(UK) was less equivocal, reporting that a rebranded WSJ will be at the center of Murdoch’s new publishing company. The Journal has been published continuously since July 8, 1889; it is the largest newspaper in the United States by circulation.

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In almost all cases you want a name to be easy to pronounce. But not if you’re targeting wine snobs, who will pay more for a wine whose name is hard to pronounce. (NPR)

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The all-caps, no-vowels naming trend continues with BNDWGN(pronounced “bandwagon”), a social-media aggregator that also permits private conversations. BNDWGN was developed by the free texting serviceHeyWire, whose name is a homophone for “haywire,” which means “mentally confused or erratic; crazy; not functioning properly; broken.” (TechCrunch)

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I learned this week that two well-known culinary creations were named for popular stage plays. Green Goddess salad dressing, invented at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel in the 1920s, takes its name from The Green Goddess, a 1921 play by William Archer that was also made into two films (silent and talkie) and a radio drama directed by Orson Welles. (Via Simply Recipes.) And Lobster Thermidor, invented in Paris in 1894, honorsThermidor, a controversial 1891 play by Victorien Sardou. Thermidor (“summer heat”) was a month in the French Republican calendar, which was used continuously between 1793 and 1805 and for 18 days in 1871. (Via@ennuisansfin.)

 

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: