Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Fondleslab

Fondleslab: “A touchscreen device, particularly a tablet computer, to which its owner appears unnaturally attached.” – Dictionary of Intellectual Property Law. Coined from fondle (to caress) and slab (a generic, somewhat disparaging term for any rectangular technology device).

Baby with fondleslab, via The Celebrity Stone.

 

I first encountered fondleslab in Mike Pope’s Evolving English II blog, which last week devoted a post to the term. Mike noted that The Register, which has offices in London and San Francisco and which calls itself “a leading global online tech publication,” may be “the most avid user of the term,” and indeed the earliest citation I could find—October 13, 2010—appeared there. “Jobsian fondle-slab in SEXY FILTHGRAM CRACKDOWN,” reads the headline. Here’s the lede:

Famous fruitbrand fondle-slabbery firm Apple is moving to further bolster family values and hierarchical, authoritarian control - not to mention other rightwing American values such as abstinence from youthful or otherwise unapproved sexy sexuality - by the use of a traditional instrument of The Man's dominance: the US Patent and Trademark Office.

It goes on but does not cool down.

Mike Pope cites a Technopedia definition of fondleslab:

[A] highly idiomatic slang term for a device that holds a powerful attraction for a user or set of users. Here, the word “slab” refers to devices that are often wide and rectangular in form, such as tablet computers.

Mike’s comment:

The, um, informal nature of the term pertains, of course, to fondle. This is technically a neutral term (“touch or stroke tenderly”), but it’s used so often in sexual contexts that it seems to lends a certain impropriety to the term’s use elsewhere.

Fondle came into English in the 1690s, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary; it originally meant “to treat indulgently or with affection,” and acquired the sense of “to caress” in the late 18th century. Fondle was the frequentative of fond, which had been around since the mid-1400s; if you’ve read any Chaucer, you’ll recall that fond originally meant “foolish” or “silly,” a sense that fondleslab may succeed in reviving.

Slab is an even older word: late 13th century (unknown origin), says the Online Etymology Dictionary. A tablet was originally “a slab for inscription.”

Names in the News

Sunnyvale-based HP, which bought smartphone company Palm two years ago, is creating a new subsidiary that will incorporate the remnants of Palm, according to a leaked memo reproduced in All Things D and elsewhere. The new unit’s name is Gram, and its logo is … interesting.

The typography does suggest lightness. (Is the G a demi-butterfly?) It’s unclear whether the name is meant to evoke “grandmother,” “telegram,” “grammar,” or “Grammy award,” but I can think of a ready-made tagline, modified only slightly from Aldous Huxley’s original: “Gram is better than a damn.”

My 2009 post about the puzzling persistence of the Palm Pilot name is here.

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Alameda County’s first indoor miniature-golf course opens tomorrow. Its name will cause some double-takes:

It’s ironic, doncha know. From the Subpar FAQ:

We are aware that subpar usually implies something that is not quite up to snuff. This is us not taking ourselves too seriously. Being below par in golf is a positive thing, so the silly name works in our case. And only our case.

Hipster humor: sub-whelming.

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In Chicago, the Morse Avenue “L” station opened a couple of weeks ago after a six-week rehab. Best part of the coverage in Chicago Now is the news that a restaurant be opening near the station entrance. Its name is perfection itself: morseL.

(Photo via Chicago Now. Hat tip: Amy “Crossword Fiend” Reynaldo.)

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UK-based Shutl, which calls itself “the world’s fastest delivery service,” has offered the world’s fastest man, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, 1 percent of the company if he can help set a delivery record. Sweet deal, but isn’t “Shutl” the name of Tevye’s youngest daughter in Fiddler on the Roof? Shutl from the shtetl, they called her. Such a lovely girl.

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Three things you may not have known: 1) The Obama White House is the first in history to brew its own beer. It’s “unbelievably good,” according to White House assistant chef Sam Kass. 2) A petition at Whitehouse.gov calls on the administration to release the recipe “so that it may be enjoyed by all.” 3) My source for the story is the “blog of record about White House food initiatives, from policy to pie.” The blog has a delicious name: Obama Foodorama.

Hello, NewME. Haven't We Met Before?

I published a couple of posts in February—here and here—about a bunch of “new me” names: Numi tea, nu.me domains, Numi toilets, the Noomii “centralized online coach directory,” NuMe beauty products, and the NUMMI auto plant (R.I.P.).

Now, via TechCrunch, I’ve learned of yet another soundalike: NewME Accelerator.

 

It’s all lower case in the logo, but “NewME” in the content.

 

NewME Accelerator, which is based in San Francisco, was (ahem) new to me. I’ve since learned more about it from a couple of NPR Morning Edition reports (here and here). The venture sounds like a worthy idea: “a residential technology start-up accelerator/incubator for businesses that are led by under-represented minorities in the technology industry.” The founders of the fledgling companies move into one house and “eat, sleep, and breath [sic] startups.” During the 12-week program, the startups’ founders learn at the feet of venture capitalists and successful, experienced executives.

So far, so good.

Not so good: the NewME name. According to Monday’s NPR report—I couldn’t find this information on the NewME website—“NewME” stands for “new media entrepreneurship.” Unfortunately, though, the name doesn’t communicate that meaning: it sounds like a personal-growth/self-discovery course rather than a boot camp for tech startups.

And then there’s the problem of sounding “new” when there are so many other companies that sound exactly the same.

I was interested, too, in the names the startups have chosen for themselves. I hope part of the residency is devoted to rethinking them.

Especially these:

Whoorli wants to be “an easy way to promote your personal brand through video, picture, file sharing, and search digital content.” I’m not quite sure what that means, and I’m also not convinced anyone ever said “Whoorli” aloud. Because it’s thisclose to “whorely.”

Plisten is “a Social Site that Changes how You Interact with Corporate and Political Brands and Personalities”—and yes, all of the content is randomly capitalized and poorly punctuated. The name? It’s a lame portmanteau (I think the P stands for “political”) that conveys neither story nor benefit.

Dwllr “helps homebuyers, sellers and real estate professionals buy and sell real estate faster and completely online.” Here we have yet another name that sacrifices vowels (and good sense) in the interest of grabbing a cheap domain. Not to mention that it’s uncomfortably close to the established brand Dwell.

Of the 33 speakers and mentors identified on the NewME site, not a single one is a branding expert. That’s an oversight: there’s a lot more to starting a business than polishing your pitch and calculating projected sales. How about a half-day Naming 101 workshop, NewME? We’d focus on techniques for creating a name, strategies for securing a domain, and ways to develop a verbal brand. It’s not too late to fix those startups’ names.

Names in the News: Surface

On Monday, at a shrouded-in-mystery press event in Los Angeles, Microsoft introduced a new tablet device called Surface. The device will run a version of Windows 8, the new Microsoft operating system due out this fall. It’s clearly positioned to compete with (or even prevail over) Apple’s iPad.

Image from Bloomberg Businessweek. Other colors will also be available.

The Surface has a touchscreen, but it also has a thin, detachable cover that flips down and doubles as a keyboard. And there’s a kickstand to allow easy viewing of videos. Those features alone would make me a fan.*

And the name? I like it.

I don’t loooove it, but that’s not important. Remember: a successful name is an arranged marriage, not a love match. Besides, this is Microsoft, not some perky, quirky startup. A touch of gravitas is welcome here, especially when you remember what happened when the company tried to get cute. 

Microsoft Bob, introduced in 1995 as a user-friendly interface for Windows 95 (aka Worst Windows Version Ever). Dumb name, bad product. “Imagine a whole operating system designed around Clippy, and you get the crux of Microsoft Bob,” wrote Time in a 2010 roundup of “50 Worst Inventions.”

 

“Surface” sounds smooth, elegant, and well designed. Its French roots serve it well: It could be the name of an architectural firm or a day spa. (The word literally means “above the form.”) As a noun, “Surface” draws attention to the device’s near-two-dimensionality and its glossy exterior; as a verb it suggests ascent: to surface is to come up for air. “Surface” also subtly reinforces the Windows brand: windows are all surface, all transparency.

“Surface” even incorporates “surf,” although I’m unsure whether anyone still says “surf the Internet.”**

Best of all, the name is distinctive. It doesn’t attempt to ape the Apple nomenclature (which by now is nothing if not predictable), and it sounds like a fresh beginning.

Except that it isn’t … not quite. Microsoft originally registered the Surface trademark in 2007 and used it for an LED “smart table” it developed with Samsung. The table is still around; it’s now called PixelSense.

Now, that is an uninspired name. Give me a ring, Microsoft. We’ll talk.

The Surface announcement raises another interesting question: what will be the generic term for all the new category-spanning hybrid devices in our future? In its rave review of the Surface, Buzzfeed wondered, facetiously, whether the professional version would be called a laptablet, a laptoplet, or a tabltop. (How about a tabloid?) We already have non-facetious usages of “phablet,” from “phone” and “tablet”; ABI Research defines the phablet as “larger than a smartphone but bigger than a tablet.”

Mike Pope considers the issue in a post about Surface at his Evolving English II blog:

We can reflect on the fact that while iPod has some small traction as a generic term for a digital-music player, Apple has not succeeded in making iPad, or even just pad, the generic term for this class of computer.

Related: My June 2009 post on the Microsoft search engine Bing.

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* I know I’m on the wrong side of history, but I detest those smeary touchscreens and the jabbing gestures they require. And I’ve never figured out how to hold an iPad without getting shoulder/neck/arm/wrist cramps.

** As Twitter friend Ian Preston reminded me, it’s not just surf, it’s surf ace, “suggesting browsing excellence.”

 

June Linkfest

Each week, the New Yorker’s Culture Desk blog posts a Twitter contest with the hashtag #tnyquestion. The June 1 contest asked readers to contribute a new word to the English language; the results have been compiled in a handsome PDF dictionary. The June 8 contest—invent a corporate-literary mashup—resulted in more than a thousand responses, including “Of Mice and Mennen,” “A Tale of Two Citis,” and (from yours truly) “50 Shades of Grey Poupon.” Winners revealed here. (Note: I cannot claim credit for “Pninterest”; I only retweeted it.)

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It’s Silicon Valley’s next hot IPO. It’s called Ponzify. What could possibly go wrong? (Satire alert.)

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The ass-fication of American branding continues apace: “Six print ads that use ass imagery (not actual asses, sorry) to sell stuff.” Safe for work, but may provoke loud groans.

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Steve Jobs really, really liked the name “MacMan.” He lost the battle; Apple won the war.

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Go ahead and say “the Internets,” you irony-overloaded hipster, but never, ever say “vinyls.”

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You don’t need a designer when the copy’s this good: a Flickr set of copywriter Joe D’Allegro’s signs for Synergy Fitness in Jersey City. (Via AdFreak.)

 

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Glossed Over saves you the annoyance of reading the July issue of Glamour. “Less than zero: Likelihood that I will ever use Glamour’s Word of the Month, ‘frizzle’.” 

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What not to name your spaceship. (By the way, did you know that Greece’s Olympic Airlines was originally called Icarus? What were they thinking?)

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Derek Lowe, who blogs about science and the pharmaceutical industry for In the Pipeline, asks: “What’s the biotech/pharma company out there with the worst name” (other than Abbott Labs’ new AbbVie)? His commenters gleefully ante up.

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David Crystal’s long list of words first used by Charles Dickens includes kibosh, unyielding, dustbin, devil-may-care, flummox, and sawbones.

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More from Crystal: “Dickens worked at his names: he tried out Martin Sweezleden, Sweezleback, Sweezlewag, Chuzzletoe, Chuzzleboy, Chubblewig, and Chuzzlewig, before ending up with Martin Chuzzlewit.”

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The Obama 2012 campaign slogan is “Forward,” but Americans would rather go in the opposite direction, argues advertising creative director Judith Grey.

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“My great-grandfather started this business with one simple mission that we abandoned decades ago.”

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A defense of undictionaried (aka madeupical) words by lexicographer and Wordnik founder Erin McKean.

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Why is it the United States and the Netherlands … but just plain Ukraine? Etymologist Anatoly Liberman explains to the BBC.

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“Logic is the enemy of a successful brand name,” writes veteran marketing strategist Al Ries. Example: “Search.com is shorter (one syllable instead of two), more memorable and a lot more credible than Google.com. Should Google.com change its name to Search.com?” (Hat tip: @IgorNaming.)

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An evil spelling test, courtesy of Teresa Nielsen Hayden.

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Naming your company is just the first step. Catchword Branding lists five factors to consider when launching a company name.

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Grexit, Geuro, neuro, and other words spawned by the Greek debt crisis. (And yes, that is the 84,573rd sighting of a “What’s in a Name?” headline.) (Via @WordLo.)

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Prosign, rag-chewing, umpty, and other telegraph lingo. (And check out the link to more telegraph and radio slang.)

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Twitter’s Fail Whale has spawned a menagerie of social-media fail pets. Mike Pope provides a taxonomy.

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And as long as we’re on the subject, I’m loving these social media propaganda posters by Etsy vendor Aaron Wood. Available individually or as a compilation. Via @mightyredpen.

Introducing Linea

I’m pleased to announce the official launch of Linea, a photo-sharing app for iOS and Android devices and (soon) for the Web. Working closely with Post+Beam, the innovation and communication firm, I developed the Linea name and tagline—Your Stories. Your Pictures. Yours to Share—along with much of the brand vocabulary for the product.

The primary naming challenge with this project was making the product stand out in a crowded namescape. Most of the competitive names refer directly to cameras and picture-taking: Flickr, Photobucket, Shutterfly, Instagram, and so on. We wanted our name to suggest seamless, secure photo organizing and sharing rather than the photographic act. The name also needed to appeal to adult women with concerns about online privacy; a second market consists of professional photo organizers who could use the app with their customers.

In the naming brief, I identified several key objectives and criteria for the name, including:

• No overtly descriptive words. Metaphors are preferred.
• Should sound cool and modern … yet warm and human.
• Should sound effortless … just like the app itself.
• Should sound sophisticated.
• Should suggest “special moments, special people.”

Then there was the app’s most distinctive design feature: a horizontal timeline that allowed easy identification and sorting of photos. The “line” concept had already given rise to the app’s code name, Ziplyne. That name didn’t sound feminine enough (and it wasn’t available legally), but Linea soon emerged as an appealing alternative. The vowel ending gave it a feminine personality, and the name sounds both swift and elegant—desirable attributes for our market.

To reinforce the desired pronunciation—LIN-ee-ah—among the internal audience (design team and photo organizers), I wrote a spoof of the Groucho Marx song “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady, in which “Linea” replaces “Lydia.”

Next came the tagline: Your Stories. Your Pictures. Yours to Share. It reinforces the idea that photographs are more than digital files or prints: they’re memories. The repeated use of your reinforces the security theme. (No one sees these photos unless you choose to share them.)

Linea.com was not available (the owner hadn’t developed the domain, but wasn’t interested in selling), so we went with a call-to-action URL: getlinea.com.

The Linea app is available through the iTunes App Store and on the Web. An Android version will be released soon.

Read about the making of Linea on the Post+Beam blog, Introduce the New.

Names in the News

Items that caught my attention in the last couple of weeks:

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HotelChatter spots a recent trend in hotel naming: single-word brands “that hardly even communicate that these are hotels where you can spend the night.” The newest example they cite is Even (which does, actually, suggest evening activity); others include Public, Edition, and Commune. “Commune”? As in, “Tonight it’s your turn to make the lentil-millet stew”? (Via Name Wire.)

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I can’t pass up another opportunity to write about Fifth Third Bancorp, the Cincinnati-based bank whose name is legendary in verbal-branding circles. (It’s the result of a long-ago merger, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still make jokes about it.) This week the bank revealed its new tagline, which exhibits a refreshing element of wit rarely seen in financial marketing: “The Curious Bank.” The bank’s chief marketing officer claimed the tagline had something to with “our DNA” (yes, it’s that old biological determinism again!), but he isn’t fooling me. “Fifth Third” is a curious name in the funny-peculiar sense, and if the people who work there are curious in the asking-better-questions sense, so much the better. In taglines, unlike in other corporate communications, a little ambiguity is a good thing.

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MATTER is a new online magazine with an unusual focus: each week it will publish a single piece of long-form journalism about science or technology. If that sounds to you like an iffy proposition in an era of tweets and sound bites, consider this: the magazine was fully funded on Kickstarter, to the tune of $75,000, in just 38 hours. As a lapsed journalist myself, I’m eager to see what the editorial team (based here in the Bay Area) will produce. I’m also enthusiastic about the name, which works—like most good names—on multiple levels: it simultaneously suggests reading material, the physical sciences, and “to be of importance.”

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Speaking of good names—and of focus—the ambitious new camera called Lytro began shipping this week. Lytro looks like no camera you’ve ever seen, and its technology is equally innovative: it allows you to focus after you’ve captured the image. (Read a New York Times Gadgetwise post that called the camera “astonishing”; see a diagram of how it works.) The name is brilliant—far better than the drearily descriptive original name, Refocus Imaging. “Lytro” suggests “light” and “nitro”—as in exploding old ideas—and the slightly tweaked spelling makes it feel revolutionary but not difficult. Even the letterforms contribute to the name’s effect: the sharp angles of the L, Y, and T are balanced by the lenslike O (subtly emphasized in the logo). Great work by Anthony Shore of Operative Words, who was hired by Sequence Branding of San Francisco to do the naming.

Crank Up the Symphraxometer!

Here’s a fascinating artifact, courtesy of Lists of Note: a handwritten list of names created by Thomas Edison and his colleagues in 1877, the year the Edison phonograph was introduced. Most of the names are compounded from Greek or Latin roots; the list includes helpful translations (“Atmophone = vapor or steam sound”).

The list affords a rare peek into a long-ago naming process and into the concepts Edison was struggling to define. You can see how the team would fix on a word part—graph or phone—and build on it. Name development still relies on this very basic skill.

From a 21st-century name developer’s perspective, the list is revealing in other ways, too.

• It’s a surprisingly short list: only 55 names if you count all the variations (e.g., Electrophemist electrophemy electropheme). By comparison, I came up with 200 names for a recent project; my naming partner developed about the same number. That’s about par for the course. I couldn’t help remembering that Edison famously made hundreds (or thousands) of attempts at a working light bulb; when asked about his failures, he is said to have replied: “I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully found 1,000 ways not to make a light bulb.” (Some versions of the story make it 10,000 failures and 10,000 ways.) Clearly, Edison had more patience with filaments than with prefixes and suffixes.
  
  
• The names are almost identical in style: all Greek and Latin (these gentlemen knew the classics!), all descriptive, all three or more syllables. A more comprehensive list would include shorter words (e.g., Pronto), English words (Hark), and metaphors (how about Euterpe, named for the Greek muse of song?). We would also see different types of word parts, such as the -ola that appeared a couple of decades later in the Victor-Victrola.
  
  
• Edison must have stipulated that his own surname was not to be used in forming the name. That’s selfless, but it was also a missed opportunity, given that the last syllable of Edison’s name, son, means “sound.” In fact, son, sonic, and their variants don’t appear on the list at all. But there’s also no Ediphone or Edigraph.
  
  
• The ultimate choice, phonograph, does not appear on the list. In fact, phone appears only as a suffix. I’d love to know how and when someone got the brilliant idea to move that word part to the beginning of a word.

Or maybe simply to “borrow” the whole word. Phonograph had been invented more than 40 years earlier, in 1835. It originally meant “a character [graph] representing a sound [phono],” and referred to shorthand writing. Edison must have known about the word and decided to appropriate it for his device. (By the way, he called his sound recordings phonograms.)

One last comment: in a million years, I’d never have come up with “Symphraxometer.” The handwritten note gives the word’s meaning as “pressure meter,” but I can’t help hearing a symphony.

Thanks to HangingNoodles for the link to Lists of Note.

Naming the Wi-Fi Network

“Alexandra Janelli is a Wi-Fi detective,” writes Christopher Borelli in “The Weird World of Wi-Fi Router Names,” published in today’s Chicago Tribune. Specifically, Janelli hunts for colorful (or creepy) Wi-Fi names—names like Dain Bramage, Isthisthingon, and Stop Cooking Indian!!!—and posts them on her website, WTFwifi.com. Janelli explains on her About Us page:

The idea for WTFwifi was hatched at a bar on the Lower East Side back in early 2009 when my iPhone cordially invited me to join the wireless network ‘Alcoholics Shut In’. The irony was not lost. From that day on it became our mission to uncover the most exemplary shout out to the queerest, funniest, most bizarre, and quirky WiFi names in NYC!

Janelli—who used to be an environmental consultant and now has a day job as a hypnotherapist—was the subject of a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece, “The Tao of WiFi,” in December 2011. Writer Lauren Collins noted that Wi-Fi* names follow trends: “For a few months last year, Janelli kept seeing Pretty Fly for a WiFi; then it was FBI Surveillance Van.”

Janelli moved to Evanston, Illinois, in August 2010, and she continues her amateur research in the Chicago area. Reporter Borelli followed her around for his article:

On Monday morning, we walked west on Davis Street in Evanston, Wi-Fi sleuthing. Janelli, who has long, chestnut-colored hair and big, dark eyes, wore a turquoise scarf and held her iPhone before her, watching router names appear on the screen then vanish a second later, replaced by different names. She carried the phone like a divining rod, pulling in fragments of thoughts and nicknames and factory codings.

“‘WeltMeister,’” Janelli read off her phone. She considered that a moment. There were other names on her screen. Names like “2Wire808” and “Home 3.” But these didn't concern her — these said nothing. So we continued walking, then stopped at Ridge Avenue. “Ah,” she said, reading from the list of router names that had popped up on her phone: “Here we got ‘Daddy's Boat’ and ‘Sex Town.’” We took a few steps to the south. The names vanished and a new wireless name appeared:

“Sis Seduced the Family.”

She read it and made a face. “Ew,” she said finally.

Hat tip to Dennis McClendon of the American Name Society for the link to the Tribune story.

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* Janelli and the New Yorker spell it WiFi, but the term is a trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance and is correctly spelled Wi-Fi. I wrote about the Wi-Fi trademark in an October 2010 post.

Word of the Week: Emoji

Emoji: Cartoonish icons used to communicate emotion in email and texting. From the Japanese; a blend of “e” (Japanese for “picture”) + “moji” (“letter”).

Some of the emoji icons available on Apple devices.

Think of emoji as the lazy person’s emoticons: no careful combinations of parentheses, semicolons, and carats; no tilting your head to puzzle them out. Or think of them as hieroglyphics for the global postliterate era. 

In an article about emoji published last month in the New York Times, reporter Jenna Wortham provided some background:

Emoji have long been popular among cellphone users in Asia. They first emerged in Japan in the 1990s, said Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how young people use digital media in Japan and the United States. Cellphone carriers first added the images to differentiate their phones from those of rivals, and they caught on as an efficient way to quickly convey a specific thought, mood or joke.

Since so many of our daily interactions are happening over mobile phones, it makes sense that people would crave new ways to convey meaning other than plain text, said S. Shyam Sundar, co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University.

“Text as a medium is particularly dull when it comes to expressing emotions,” Professor Sundar said. “Emoticons open the door a little, but emoji opens it even further. They play the role that nonverbal communication, like hand gestures, does in conversation but on a cellphone.”

Emoji are now standard on Apple devices running iOS 5. For the iPhone-deprived (or resistant), Gmail also offers an emoji keyboard in which some of the characters are animated. I’m still trying to figure out the context in which a pincer-wiggling lobster would express le mot juste.

I may need to enroll in Intro to Narratives in Emoji, a Tumblr of stories and movie plots distilled into emoji. Here, in its entirety, is Taxi Driver: