It’s quite a business coup, and no surprise that the story made the front page of the New York Times.
Alas, the “Summly” name breaks no new ground at all. It may have been coined to suggest “summarize,” but it has an ambiguous sound (some? sum?) and a trite construction. Summly is the 147th pseudo-adverbial -ly name I’ve pinned on my Names That End in -ly Pinterest board.
Have you heard? Nokia has rebranded all of its navigation products with a single name: HERE.
The official story, in flawless brandbabble:
“HERE is a name that I think signifies what I call an ethos in cartography. HERE is about a sense of location,” said Michael Halbherr, the Nokia executive who oversees the company’s location and commerce unit, in an interview at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week. (Via TechCrunch, March 2)
I can’t explain why the name is in spelled in ALL CAPS everywhere on the website except in the logo.
And here’s more news: PayPal has introduced a new credit-card reader for mobile devices. It, too, is called Here.
“Here” focuses on the target audience and freshly, yet familiarly conveys its benefit: the ability to do business here and now, here and again, here there and everywhere.
However, if you happen to forget, as I did, which company makes the mapping Here and which one makes the payment Here, and you attempt to do a web search simply for “here” … well, you’ll learn some moderately interesting things about here documents and deixis and the Here Lounge in West Hollywood.
I’ve written dozens of taglines for clients and seen them on lots of websites, brochures, and business cards. But until last week I’d never seen one of my taglines on a 16-by-20-foot wall at a conference.
RSA Conference, Moscone Center. Naturally, I zoomed in on the tagline. That wall is tall.
Or on a car wrap.
The Narus Audi A6. Ethan was the designated driver during the conference.
Narus, an independent subsidiary of The Boeing Company, is a cybersecurity company whose clients include governments, carriers, and enterprises. The recently hired president, John Trobough, wanted to relaunch the company in time for the RSA information-security conference in San Francisco. Our branding team had just over three months to do all the pre-launch work: new visual identity, new web content, new print materials, and – here’s where I came in – a new tagline and product nomenclature. (The Narus name, which is derived from Latin gnarus, meaning “skillful,” did not change.)
Many of Narus’s competitors use “secure” or “security” in their taglines. Rather than imitate them, I focused on Narus’s distinctive strengths: its brilliant staff (collectively, they hold 32 patents), its close ties with academia, and its advanced machine-learning algorithms. I worked with concepts like penetrating, insightful, and sophisticated, and I looked for ways to shed light on the Narus name (which probably doesn’t have a lot of meaning for non-Latin scholars). The result: Incisive Intelligence.
Everyone on the client team responded positively to incisive, an underused word whose literal meaning is “cutting-edge.” Also positive: the way intelligence communicates both “information” and “intellect” while supporting the original meaning of Narus. The in-in alliteration is a memory aid, and it carries echoes of the N in Narus. We continued the N mnemonic with the simple yet effective (and flexible) nSystem and N10 product names.
Mark Landkamer of Landkamer Partners created the visual identity and web design. (Fun fact: the green-and-orange symbol next to the Narus name was abstracted from a graph of a mathematical formula for equilibrium. It also resembles a stylized N.) Stacey King Gordon and her team at Suite Seven developed the content strategy and wrote all the content. Jay Cornell and James Foreman did the HTML and Joomla programming, respectively. Special thanks to trademark lawyer Jessica Stone Levy for assistance with legal questions.
Doxing: “The practice of investigating and revealing a target subject’s personally identifiable information, such as home address, workplace information and credit card numbers, without consent.” (Source: Know Your Meme.) From docs (short for documents). Sometimes spelled doxxing.
So — Reddit’s culture is strongly against doxxing. Right?
Well — sort of.
Doxing was also in the news this month in connection with security breaches at the Federal Reserve and Department of Energy in which personal details about employees and contractors were grabbed. “Such an information leak, known as doxing, is a popular way among hacktivists to embarrass a target,” reported the information-technology publication EWeek.
According to the Know Your Meme entry, “doxing” was originally used in the early 2000s by computer hackers involved with the distribution of pirated software. (Urban Dictionary’s earliest entry is dated October 6, 2003.) In the late 2000s, “it grew into a harassment tactic used by members of Anonymous” – a loosely organized hacktivist group – during operations against the white nationalist Hal Turner, the Church of Scientology, and other targets.
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.
Earlier this month, the American Dialect Society votedphablet – 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!
“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.
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.
I don’t get the appeal of My Little Pony even on a meta-meta-ironic level, but I am not you, and you, for all I know, may be a brony. In that case, knock yourself out with Ponify, a browser extension “which uses intelligent case-adaptive technologies to replace non-pony related words with ones that are pony-related” – hand into hoof, for example.
Then there’s Nüdifier, which is a twofer name: nominalized -ify suffix andgratuitous umlaut! The app lets you select an area of a photo for pixelated fake-nudity censorship.
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.
As we all know, verbing weirds language. And, like it or not, it’s everywhere. (See showrooming, subtexting, “Let’s Tonic,” et al.) But nouning – turning a modifier into a noun – is also increasingly popular in commerce, and it’s also changing our perceptions about what language “should” be.
Take “funness,” which Apple has been using for several months in its iPod Touch marketing. As Ben Zimmer has noted in columns for the Boston Globe and Word Routes, now that “fun” has successfully shifted from noun to adjective, you have to add “-ness” to turn it back into a noun.
But other brands aren’t even bothering with nounifying suffixes. Instead, they’re simply putting adjectives to work as nouns.
Here are nine recent examples of nouning in brand slogans. In each case, the advertiser could have made a conventionally nounish choice (“Welcome to possibility,” “The future of awesomeness”) but instead grabbed our attention, for better or worse, with a functional shift, also known as anthimeria.
In my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, I consider disruption: the negative kind caused by natural disasters like last week’s Hurricane Sandy and the positive kind embraced by the business world, technology companies in particular.
Good news: Access to this column is unrestricted (but of course you’ll still want to subscribe – just $19.95 a year!). Here’s an excerpt:
Historically, “disruption” has been a pejorative term: a disruptive pupil would be sent to the principal’s office; stock-market disruptions may cause widespread panic. The word, which comes from Latin disrumpere, literally means “breaking apart”; dictionary synonyms include “disorder,” “confusion,” and “tumult.”
Then, in 1995, a Harvard Business School professor, Clayton M. Christensen, published an article in the Harvard Business Review called “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave.” A disruptive technology, Christensen wrote, was cheap, simple, and convenient; it threatened established (“sustaining”) companies that were focused on creating high-quality products. That article, and Christensen’s 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma, caught the attention of executives like Intel’s Andy Grove and Apple’s Steve Jobs, who saw in “disruptive innovation” both a threat and an opportunity to create new markets at the low end. “Everyone talks about disruption now,” the technology writer George Gilder told Larissa MacFarquhar for a May 2012 profile of Christensen in the New Yorker. “Clayton inserted that word in the mind of every C.E.O. in technology.”
