Fritinancy

Unearthly

Perhaps you remember Earth Shoes—properly known as Kalsø Earth Shoes—which were invented in the late 1960s by a Danish yoga instructor and never went away, unfortunately. Oh, I’m sure there are people for whom that off-kilter “negative heel technology” has effected miracle cures. Personally, I’m relieved that a podiatrist told me never to wear them—they’re terrible for my particular foot structure—because I’d rather walk barefoot over burning coals than subject myself to that much clownitude.

Earthies Solar Too.

 

However! About a year ago the Earth brand broke free of its orbit, so to speak, and introduced a new brand for women with the cute-if-not-exactly-inspired name Earthies. Unlike their hippie cousins, Earthies have platforms (yes!), heels (yes!), tapered toes (yes! yes!), and a semblance of up-to-dateness.

The Halley. Not bad at all!

I’ve tried on a couple of Earthies styles and found the wearing experience to be surprisingly pleasant. The “Wellness Footbed” inside the shoes has the most aggressive arch support I’ve ever worn, and because my feet have unnaturally high arches, I felt right at home.

However #2: That off-balance Earth Shoe heritage lives on—not in the shoes themselves but in the website copy, which is daffy at its best and deranged at its frequent worst.

Pardon ME

“Gaypon Is the Gay Groupon” reads the title of yesterday’s TechCrunch post about the new “daily deals site catering to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LBGT) and allied communities.”

“Groupon” is already mildly suggestive (get your grope on?). Now we have a copycat that sounds like “gape on.”

Not to mention the inevitable “gay p0rn” mixups. (Or capon.)

And then there’s this: Gaypon’s URL is DailyGaypon.com because—you guessed it—Gaypon.com was already taken. The latter is a peculiar, semi-literate, possibly-not-legit dating site. I’m not going to link to it but I will quote a bit of it, verbatim: “GayPon.com is a membership $30.00 per month, Your love is here sign up now your dreams will come true.”

Meanwhile, at least one person in my virtual circle got a whole ’nuther association from Gaypon:

 

 

Actually, it was “Would you have any Grey Poupon?”

 

Snacks and Violence

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

 

Cheetos Flamin’ Hot: Headbutt Your Mouth’s Face.

 

1. My mouth has a face?

2. Surely facio-mouthal assault with a cheese-flavored snack food qualifies as a misdemeanor somewhere.

3. What would happen if Cheetos Flamin’ Hot challenged Ruffles Double-Fisted to a duel?

4. Answer: Humongous. Dental. Bill.

Double-Fisted

Questions not addressed on the Ruffles Double-Fisted Bacon Cheeseburger Flavor FAQ page (because there isn’t one):

 

 

 1. What exactly is “double-fisted” here—the bacon, the cheeseburger, the flavor, or the Ruffles chips?

2. If you hold a chip with two fists, won’t you end up with two fistfuls of crumbs?

3. Do “fisted” and “Ruffles” really belong together on a food package? Or anywhere?

4. Are double-fisted Ruffles what you get on the side when you order a bare-knuckled bucket of does?

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With thanks to Sukhraj Suki Beasla and Hugh McBride.

The Brooklyn Umlaut

Whether or not you’re a New Yorker, you’ve probably heard of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. It’s been a center of African-American culture for decades. It’s where director Spike Lee has set many of his films. Many famous folks have called it home: Lena Horne, Norah Jones, Jay-Z, Chris Rock, Tracy Morgan, Mos Def. The neighborhood got its name when the Village of Bedford merged with Stuyvesant Heights, named for Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New York. Bedford-Stuyvesant is often shortened to “Bed-Stuy”; the second syllable rhymes with “sky.”

All of which is background to this name:

It’s a shoe company that makes footwear with an intentionally scuffed-up look, just like the logo. And yes, the name—odd umlaut and all—is meant to evoke Bedford-Stuyvesant:

Bed|Stu is lean, fast, and tough like the streets that inspired our shoes from day one and as long as we can make our way, we will make shoes and other products for those who have no use for the beaten path.*

The umlaut appears only in the logo. Elsewhere on the website, the name appears variously as BED|STU, bed|stu, Bed|Stu, and Bed Stu. Nordstrom, which carries the brand, spells it Bed Stu. The spelling inconsistencies—ack!—make me wonder whether the name is actually pronounced “Bed Stew” rather than like the neighborhood’s actual nickname.

FYI, there’s no umlaut in “Stuyvesant” (even in Dutch), and an umlaut does not change the pronunciation of /u/ to /aɪ/.

And here’s the kicker: Bed|Stu (to pick one of the spellings at random) isn’t based in Bed-Stuy. It isn’t even in New York. In fact, it isn’t anywhere in the Eastern time zone.

How’s this for incongruity: The company’s headquarters are in Camarillo, a pleasant bedroom community of about 65,000 in Ventura County, California, that was incorporated in 1964. According to 2010 census figures, about 75 percent of Camarillo’s population is white. The major employer in Camarillo is WellPoint, the big health plan; the major attraction is the Premium Outlets mall. Patagonia, the outdoor-clothing company, is about 11 miles away.

So here we have a company in a sunny, mostly white Southern California hamlet with a Spanish name (pronounced ca-ma-REE-yo), one hour north of Los Angeles. The company names itself, kinda-sorta, after a mostly black Brooklyn neighborhood that’s more than a century old. And to add a little spice or ambiguity or urban je ne sais quoi, it plops a couple of röck döts atop a vowel.

Confused? Me, too. 

Read my posts about the yoga umlaut and the spa umlaut.

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* This is a company with an unhealthy affinity for wordiness and dependent clauses: “Fundamentally based in nature…” “With multiple lines to choose from…” “Capitalizing on a love of…” “After converting…” “Boasting a cult following…” And that’s just the About Us page.)

The Shadow of Hiscox

I don’t know how to put this delicately: I’m being followed by Hiscox.

Whose cox? you may well ask. (Also: plural?)

Allow me to explain.

I first noticed an ad for Hiscox on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago. I’d never heard of the company, so I clicked on the ad to check out the Hiscox website. In no time at all, thanks to the miracle of retargeting, I began seeing Hiscox everywhere. On retail sites. On Slate. On the New York Times home page.

What sort of business is Hiscox in? “Specialist insurance and reinsurance for businesses and individuals with unusual and often complicated insurance needs.” The company is traded on the London Stock Exchange  but incorporated and headquartered in Bermuda. It operates in 11 countries. Big-time, serious stuff.

So why was I giggling?

 

 

Well, wouldn’t you?

I’ll try to keep a straight face just long enough to explain that Hiscox is the surname of the company’s founder, Ralph Hiscox, and of its current president, the splendidly named Robert Ralph Scrymgeour Hiscox. It’s a very old surname, if this genealogy site is to be trusted (and it pays to be skeptical about most online genealogy sites)—as in Norman Conquest old. It’s derived, I learned, from Hitch, “a pet form of the name Richard,” and cock, “a medieval form of endearment” (hmm).

To sum up: a variation on Dick Cocks.

Oh, and “Scrymgeour”? It’s pronounced skrɪm-dʒər, according to this site. Wikipedia says the name is “believed to derive from the Old English word ‘skrymsher’ which means ‘swordsman’.”

Swordsman Hiscox. Ladies and gentlemen, I could not make this stuff up.

And it only gets better, at least if your brain works the way mine does.

That's What She-She Said

After three man-posts in a row—on fratire, the Man Iron, and BRO-llinis—I thought it was time for something girly.

 

She-She Nail Spa, West Portal Ave., San Francisco

Pink awning, two feminine pronouns: definitely girly. So what’s the problem? Just this: I’m almost positive that what the owners were aiming for was chichi, the French word that’s pronounced “she-she.”

Chichi is both a noun (“frills” or “pretentiousness”) and an adjective (“precious,” “over-elaborate”), although you’re more likely to hear English speakers use it as a modifier meaning “fancy”: a chichi nightclub, a chichi boutique. The word has traditionally connoted artifice and affectation, although that may be changing: The online dictionary Wordnik gives “chic and stylish” as one definition. (Wordnik also gives a wonderful usage example from a 1994 Newsweek article: “But a fad New York jewelry line using old bottle caps may be the first to mix P.C. with chichi.”)

It wasn’t only “She-She” that fascinated me. I’m perfectly OK with sentences that end with prepositions—and you should be, too—but “Blow Away Prices Of” is just peculiar. Am I supposed to read it as “Blow Away Prices Of Waxing Packages” and mentally switch “of” to “on”? Well, I didn’t. Instead, I had unsettling thoughts about waxed packages.

Finally, what to say about “50% Off and Up”? Does that phrase indicate that I might sometimes expect a discount greater than 50%, or does it mean some “waxing packages” are half-price and for others the price goes up? Earlier this year, Language Log discussed a similar instance of “mathematically annoying advertising”—the phrase “up to X and more,” where X equals some number—but I searched in vain for guidance on “X% Off and Up.” At She-She, it appears, we’ve departed the realm of mere mathematical annoyance and ventured off and up into quantum confusion.

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Elsewhere in the world of beauty-shop names: Sophistry Skin Care, Polish on Piedmont, Aveida. And if title of this post mystifies you, read this.

Ho-hmm

How would you classify Bridesmaids, the “darkly hilarious comedy” that opens nationwide on Friday? Jessica Grose, an associate editor at Slate, takes a stab:

Because while Bridesmaids does share some core DNA* with bromances, particularly the ones directed, written or produced by Judd Apatow (who was also a producer of this film), it is ultimately a different—and more original—animal: Let’s call it a homance. [Emphasis added.]

Bromance—a friendship between men, or a movie about such a friendship—entered the language around 2007, if Urban Dictionary is to be believed. A rare example of a successful portmanteau word, it seamlessly merges bro (“pal,” short for “brother”) with romance and provides a label for a movie genre that comprises not only the Apatovian oeuvre but also The Hangover, Brokeback Mountain, Good Will Hunting, the Robert Downey version of Sherlock Holmes, and … well, just about every studio-produced American movie in recent memory.

Movies about female friends, however, have been sparse lately**, so I understand the urge to tag Bridesmaids with a category name. But homance? Not only does homance dispense with the R of romance, thus muddying the semantic waters, it also replaces the chummy, G-rated bro with the decidedly less family-friendly ho—which, lest we forget, is a truncation of whore. I haven’t yet seen Bridesmaids, but it’s pretty clear that this isn’t a movie about the misadventures of a gang of streetwalkers.

So why ho? Possibly because bro and ho became linked in the expression “bros before hoes”: the section of the Guy Code that dictates that male friends take precedence over wives and girlfriends. (No, I don’t know why ho is pluralized hoes.)

Comments on the Slate article—which is headlined “Homance”—home in on (sorry) the word choice and are split between “Oh no she didn’t” and “Lighten up!” A sampling:

“womance” didn’t come to mind first? really??? coulda gone with “woman” but went with “ho”? nice. classy.

*

I for one have to give her some props for having enough humor and irreverance [sic] to go with “homance” in the face of the avalanche of dourness below that she must have seen coming. Btw, “womance” just sounds like Elmer Fudd, so it would barely even be a newly coined term.

*

If you think having a sense of humor is defined by whether you find “ho” a hilarious word or not, you have a very, very narrow idea of what it means to have a sense of humor.

*

Loved the article. Laughed at “homance.” Where [sic] everyone’s sense of humor today? Had dismissed the movie based on the previews, but now will actually go to see it!

(The last comment is from a woman.)

Me, I’d reserve homance for movies about the overheated housing market. Topping the list: The Money Pit.

For another angle on movie-genre naming, see my 2007 post about mumblecore. Also see Bechdel Test.

Hat tip: Ben Zimmer.

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* Again with the DNA!

** “Sparse lately” = virtually nonexistent for the last several decades.

Guest Post at Manolo’s Shoe Blog: They Named That Shoe WHAT?!?

I am pleased to be guest-blogging once again at Manolo’s Shoe Blog, the “wildly popular internet site” whose author is a blend—as The Manolo himself puts it—of “two parts high-class shoe fetishist, one part Ricky Ricardo, one part Jacques Barzun, [and] a dash of Ignatius J. Reilly.” My soul mate!

My subject this time—one I’m partial to, as regular readers of Fritinancy well know—is the wackaloon names shoe designers sometimes bestow on their creations. (Flubby? Rimactivity? Weirda?)

As The Manolo himself would say: Go! Read!

And while you’re there, you may also want to read my original guest post, “If the Shoe Name Fits,” about some rare and refreshing instances of shoe-nomenclature sanity.

Naïvely Named: Letter.ly

TechCrunch reported yesterday that Letter.ly, a startup email subscription service presumably based in the US (information is sparse), had lost its domain name “as a direct result of the ongoing unrest and war in Libya.” Effective immediately, the company will be found at Letterly.net.

.ly is the Libyan top-level domain. It’s become popular in recent years among startups looking to create short, active-sounding URLs that sound like adverbs. (See Bit.ly, Card.ly, Smak.ly, Smel.ly, Smile.ly, et al.)

According to an email Letterly sent to its subscribers, the company neglected to renew its domain registration, and the Libyan domain registry, NIC.ly, refused to renew it.

Forgetting to renew a domain is naïve or slipshod or both. But that isn’t what made my jaw drop.

The email continues, without any capital letters for some reason:

sorry for the hassle. it’s amazing that a physical war has affected our service in this way.

Emphasis added.

 

Or maybe “O R.LY?”

 

Yes, it’s amazing! A physical war! Has affected our service!

Why, I’ll bet it’s practically unprecedented.

Memo to Letterly: War is hell. Also, in case you hadn’t heard, the regime led by Colonel Ghadaffi is not exactly renowned for playing fair.

Memo to all startups determined to shun the counsel of professional name developers: You get what you pay for.

Oh, and make sure you renew your domain registrations before they expire.

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P.S. Yes, I did recently recommend the Iceland top-level domain, .is, to a naming client. Yes, that meant taking a bit of a risk. But not the level of risk one assumes when dealing with Libyan institutions now and in the recent past.