Fritinancy

Repetitiously

I haven’t blogged for a while about startup names that end in -ly, but that doesn’t mean the trend is ebbing. On the contrary, I’m up to 153 – one hundred fifty-three! – pins on my “Names That End in -ly” Pinterest board.* The most recent additions: Fastly (“real-time caching”), Warmly (an alarm-clock app), and Scopely (a mobile gaming platform).

Also on Pinterest:

Shop at X & Y! (two-part retail names joined by an ampersand or plus sign)

Brand Names with Gratuitous Umlauts (and other needless diacritical marks)

Death Brands (and near-death brands, like Food Coma)

Square Brands (Foursquare, Squarespace, et al.)

Boxy Brands (Birchbox, Dropbox, Parabox, et al.)

The Zen of Brand Naming (Zenify, Zendesk, et al.)

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Make that 154: I just pinned Feastly, “homemade meals prepared and served in a cook’s home.” Thanks for the tip, Moira!

Vowel Obstruction

It’s been two years since I first reported on the all-consonant naming trend. Since then we’ve seen a persistent consonantal drift in the names of fashion brands, restaurants, and retailers, often shouted out in ALL CAPS. Here are four additions to the list.

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BNJMN is “a paintbrush-wielding bot created by two students at the Basel Academy of Art and Design,” according to a story in Co.Design. The name is pronounced “Benjamin,” and I was surprised to learn it had no relation to the paint company Benjamin Moore (which does sell a product called ben—all lower case). I emailed the creators of BNJMN and asked them about the name; here’s Travis Purrington’s reply in full (the ellipses are his):

BNJMN’s name evolved with his construction and development...

During the beginning of the naming process we originally were brainstorming far and wide for clever acronyms (like everyone) or heavy tech names (THX 1138, etc).

But in the end BNJMN was a warm/inviting sounding name that seemed a nice contrast to his sleek hard-edged body

(plus it looked good on paper and was easy to pronounce without vowels)

It seemed like a good match to the personality of his programming once we got him up and running...so it stuck.

Simple, non-threatening, easy going, expressive...that's BNJMN.

Purrington did not say how many Benjamins BNJMN will set you back.

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Perfume is a distillation of essences, so I suppose it’s logical for a perfume name to eliminate a few letters. And HYLNDS (“Aromatic Epics”) does have a vocalized Y, so it isn’t a complete consonant brick.

Refinery29, a design/lifestyle site, reports that HYLNDS was inspired by “the rolling hills and dramatic history of ancient medieval cultures.” And yet the aromas of peat, goat, and sweat are strangely absent from the three HYLNDS fragrances, which go for $180 per 50ml bottle: they’re called Bitter Rose, Broken Spear (which smells of “smelted iron, bitter rose,” and “melancholy thistle”); Isle Ryder (“resinous Norway spruce and fir cones with narcotic jasmine, island wildflowers, honeyed mead and bulrush straw”); and Pale Grey Mountain, Small Black Lake, (“a chilling air of wood, water, stone, and shrubs”). Each fragrance has HYLNDS, MDLNDS, and LWLNDS notes. Do I need to tell you that the company behind HYLNDS is “an indie Brooklyn perfumer” and that the product can be found at “stockists,” that Britishism beloved of pretentious Yank hipsters? No, probably not.

Melancholy thistle, indeed.

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How to pronounce frrry? “Fry” with a lavishly trilled r? “Furry”?

No and no, according to the New York-based accessories e-tailer Roztayger:

The Frrry collection (pronounced ferry) is all about construction. Designed and made in The Netherlands using vegetable tanned Italian leather, creator Ferry Cornelis Gerardus Meewisse founded the line in 2002 after passing exams for 3D design at the Arnhem Academy of Arts.

Yes, that dangling phrase made me wince a little—Mr. Meewisse isn’t made of vegetable-tanned leather, as far as we know—but my bigger point is: ferry? Why not just spell it that way? “Ferry” would be an excellent name for handbags that ferry your stuff around. (In gorgeous style, I must add: this style is fabulous, and not too exorbitant, either.)

It only stands to reason that you can find frrry products at UNDSCVRD.

Via Girls of a Certain Age.

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Finally: PYMNTS. It’s “what’s next in payments,” especially if you are Eliza Doolittle.

Word of the Week: Slow TV

Slow TV: Television dramas whose gradual, deliberate pacing and literary structure – “unrushed, atmospheric narratives,” as Salon’s Matt Zoller Seitz described them – demand patience and engagement on the part of the viewer. Current or recent examples include the Danish series “The Killing”; the BBC’s “The Hour”; and the American shows “Mad Men,” “Game of Thrones,” and “The Wire.”

Critic-turned-opinion-writer Frank Bruni, of the New York Times, observed in early April:

Slow TV pushes back at the instant gratification and empty calories of too many elimination contests, too many reality shows, too many efficient, literal-minded forensic dramas that perhaps keep certain plot threads dangling but tie up the episode’s main mystery by the hour’s end.

The descriptor “Slow TV” began appearing in the U.S. press around 2010. In a June 2010 review of “Memphis Beat,” Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley placed Slow TV in context:

Slow Food, a movement that began in Italy in the 1980s as a protest against agribusiness and fast food, promotes organic farming and regional cooking. That cult of less-is-more parochialism spread to other fields, including tourism (Slow Travel) and investment (Slow Money).

Now there is Slow Television.

In November 2010, the Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Goodman included “Rubicon” and “In Treatment” in the category:

These shows are the ultimate examples of what can best be described as Slow TV. It’s not quite a fad or a revolution — and given the dismal ratings, no one involved should feel comfortable about their futures — but you can’t give HBO and AMC enough credit for making shows like this in the first place.

Earlier citations for “slow television” come from Scandinavia, where the term referred to marathon, non-narrative coverage of an ordinary event. In 2009, for example, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) aired the complete seven-hour train trip from Bergen to Oslo – and then topped that feat with live coverage of a 134-hour voyage by ship from Bergen to Kirkenes. Both programs were popular successes. In February 2013 NRK aired a 12-hour broadcast about firewood, described as “slow but noble television.”

But the earliest citations I found are from Australia. David Dale, writing in February 2005 for the Sydney Morning Herald, presaged the current meaning of “slow TV” in a column about the slow-paced “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” and “Desperate Housewives”:

It was reminiscent of the marketing campaign for the new Orient Express train in the 1980s: “In a world where everything is fast and cheap, we are very slow and very expensive.” Then in the ’90s came the slow food movement, which argues that human beings are healthier and happier if they take time to appreciate what they are eating. Perhaps we are about to see a “slow television” movement.

(SlowTV is also the name of an Australian Internet channel that delivers “interviews, debates, conversations and public lectures about Australia’s key political, social and cultural issues.”)

In a November 2011 article for the BBC News Magazine, reporter Jon Kelly looked into the rise of slow TV. The growing popularity of the boxed set, which allows viewers to watch long-running programs on their own schedule, accounts for part of it. In addition:

[T]he pace of slow TV invites viewers to actively engage with the programme, rather than their normal treatment as passive, argues Dr Amy Holdsworth, lecturer in film and television studies at the University of Glasgow and an expert in small-screen history.

“Part of the appeal is working things out for yourself,” Dr Holdsworth adds. “They allow the space for viewers to invest in them and make connections for themselves.

“These days there is definitely more of an appreciation of what you can do with TV as a form - you can have so much more character depth in 80 hours than you can in a two-hour film.”

Name, Shmame

Remember Shpock (“Your mobile yard sale for beautiful things”) and Shpoonkle (“Justice you can afford!”)? This farshtinkener naming trend is still trending. I recently learned about Schmap, which calls its product “the world’s first Twitter-powered city guides.” (The official spelling includes two shoe-print exclamation marks, but I refuse to play that game.)

 

 

Schmap isn’t new: the company was founded in 2004 in Carrboro, North Carolina, and published its first guides in 2006. A TechCrunch article about Schmap’s new Demographics Pro service, which provides detailed reports on Twitter followers, brought it to my attention.

Here’s the thing about these Sh- and Sch- names: they aren’t neutral. For starters, Sh- and especially Shm- suggest “Yiddish.” Those phonemes show up at the beginning of dozens of Yiddish words; my copy of Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish has 42 pages of sh- words, from shabbes to shvitzer. (The sch- spelling, Rosten noted elsewhere, is German rather than Yiddish.)

I’m sure Carrboro, North Carolina – “the Paris of the Piedmont” – is a lovely place, but I somehow doubt that you’ll hear a lot of Yiddish along its leafy boulevards.

It gets worse, because sh- and shm- carry a stigma: They’re “prefatory sounds, of mockery or dismissal, that ‘pooh-pooh’ the word they prefix,” writes Rosten:

A great many words of mockery and aspersion, words that jeer, sneer and scorn…begin with sh-: shlemiel, shlimazl, shloomp, shmegegge, shmo, shmuck, shnorrer.

Shm- words show up so frequently in snarky, Yiddish-inflected rhymes that linguists have a name for the category: shm- reduplication, “a form of reduplication in which the original word or its first syllable (the base) is repeated with the copy (the reduplicant) beginning with shm- (sometimes schm-), pronounced /ʃm/.” As the old punchline has it, “Oedipus-Shmoedipus – as long as he loves his mother!” (See also Libros Schmibros and Burglar Schmurglar. )

So nu? What’s with this fad-shmad? Here’s my guess: A generation of entrepreneurs has been influenced by schwag and schwing, two made-up words that caught on about 20 years ago. I wrote about this effect in a 2011 post, “Swag and Schwag”:

Sometime in the early 1990s swag became schwag, “perhaps after words of Yiddish origin” such as shmuck, says the OED—although Yinglish schlock (something of inferior quality) seems an equally likely influence. (Of course, one must never underestimate the influence of Wayne’s World [1988-1994] and schwing.) Besides being a synonym for bad marijuana, schwag can also be a modifier meaning simply “inferior.”

I appreciated a well-crafted playful name as much as the next wordslinger. But if you want your brand to be taken seriously, be careful with those fancy-shmancy coinages.

Manifesto Destiny

Manifesto: from the Italian, “a public declaration.” Earliest English citation 1620.

Karl Marx published one about communism in 1848. Tristan Tzara issued one about Dada in 1918. Richard Stallman wrote one about GNU in 1985. British political parties have had them since 1900 (or 1834, if you count Sir Robert Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto).

The Unabomber had one. Chris Dorner had one. Anders Breivik had one.

During last year’s presidential campaign, business owner and “job creator” Steven Pearlstein wrote one that appeared in the Washington Post.

Sheryl Sandberg “sort of” has one.

Acumen (formerly the Acumen Fund) has one that’s incorporated into its new logo. It “serves as a moral compass to ground us in the kinds of leaders we hope to be and to reflect the values of leadership required in an interconnected world.”

Logos via Brand New blog.

 

People who want a break from e-gadgets have a manifesto.

The Sabbath Manifesto, “slowing down lives since 2010.”

 

Yoga-wear retailer Lululemon has a manifesto.

“Life is full of setbacks.”

 

 

Housewares/furniture designer Jonathan Adler has a manifesto. This is only part of it.

“WE BELIEVE tassels are the earrings of the home.”

 

 Actress Jessica Chastain is the face of Manifesto, the new fragrance from Yves Saint Laurent. The collaboration “seemed like an incredible fit,” Chastain told the New York Times in February.

Her hands are gloved in purple paint because purple was “the color of absolute seduction for Mr. Saint Laurent.” The fragrance’s tagline is “Daring Is an Art.”

 

The last word (for now) on manifestos goes to copywriter-turned-novelist John Kenney. This is from his new novel, Truth in Advertising (Touchstone, New York, 2013):

And what is a manifesto, you might ask?

You may have a vague notion from history class that a manifesto once referred to the soul of a revolution: blood, sweat, and tears on paper, codifying women’s rights, civil rights, human rights, economic justice, religious freedom. Today, it’s about diapers. Or cars. Or refrigerators. Or gas grills. Or dental floss. In advertising, a manifesto is something that sums up a brand, one page, maybe two hundred words. Name the product and my people will write the manifesto for it. Superlative claims, a badly skewed world view, sentences like, “Because let’s be honest—what’s more important at the end of your day than your family … and their enjoyment of grilled meats?”

UPDATE: The last last word comes by way of commenter Marcelo, who provided a link to “The Manifesto Manifesto,” created by writer/creative director Kim Mok and published in Fast Company in 2011.

Word of the Week: Swatting

Swatting: Calling 9-1-1 and faking an emergency that draws a response from law enforcement. The gerund, which is relatively new, is derived from the acronym SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics), which was first used by big-city police departments in the mid-1960s.

Last week six Los Angeles-area celebrities were the targets of swatting, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. On April 8, L.A. police responded to a swatting call at the home of comedian Russell Brand, who was away from home at the time. Two days later, the Beverly Hills Police Department responded to a similar call at Ryan Seacrest’s home. Justin Timberlake, Rihanna, Selena Gomez, and Sean Combs have also been targeted. According to the New York Times:

What once was merely a police annoyance in Southern California — thrill-seeking pranksters filing a false report of a breaking horrific crime at celebrity’s home, designed to provoke the dispatch of SWAT teams — has turned in recent weeks into a full-blown “swatting” epidemic, drawing expressions of concerns from police officials and victims alike, and the promise of a crackdown by lawmakers in Sacramento and at Los Angeles City Hall.

The earliest references I found for “swatting” are from 2007 and do not involve famous names. In March of that year, SWAT teams in Orange County, California, showed up with assault rifles, dogs, and a helicopter at what a caller had described as the scene of a murderous rampage. A 19-year-old Washington State man was arrested seven months later on felony charges of endangering the homeowners’ lives. According to police, the man had hacked into the county’s 9-1-1 system from his home hundreds of miles away and placed a call that appeared to come from the scene of the crime.

Similar crimes were reported in Texas around the same time.

In February 2008 the FBI posted a warning on its website:

Needless to say, these calls are dangerous to first responders and to the victims. The callers often tell tales of hostages about to be executed or bombs about to go off. The community is placed in danger as responders rush to the scene, taking them away from real emergencies. And the officers are placed in danger as unsuspecting residents may try to defend themselves.

In Los Angeles last Thursday, the L.A.P.D. announced “that it would take the unusual step of no longer issuing press releases or immediately confirming instances of celebrity ‘swatting,’ saying intense media coverage seems to be fueling more incidents.”

Invented Superlative Watch: Mobiler

No, not someone who lives in Mobile, Alabama. It’s another spin of the faux-superlative-maker machine.

 

“The Mobile Phone Just Got Mobiler.” Ad for Delta mobile app, back cover, The Atlantic, April 2013.

 

This particular ad is the only one I’ve seen that uses word play; other ads for the mobile app use a straightforward benefit approach (and depict the QR code that’s the whole point of the pitch). It’s always a little unsettling when an advertiser code-switches within a campaign.

 

Via Mobile Marketer.

Previously in Invented Superlative Watch: worldwider, Maker’s-er, deliciouser, funner-er.

Because

Advertisers are “speaking the language of social media,” writes New York Times ad columnist Stuart Elliott:

The language of social media — “fans,” “friend request,” “like,” “social network” and, yes, “status update” — is increasingly appearing in advertising, whether or not those ads are running in social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Here’s one of Elliott’s examples: a print ad from paper company Domtar.

If Domtar had really wanted to sound current, the headline might have borrowed a popular meme and inverted the headline: “Because PAPER.”

 

For students of marketing history, “Paper Because” evokes a famous and long-running campaign for “feminine-hygiene” products – a subject once so taboo that it could be referred to only elliptically. And, as it turned out, beautifully.

 

Suzy Parker in a 1958 Modess ad. Via Museum of Menstruation.

The Modess campaign, which ran from 1948 to the early 1970s, featured “probably the most elegant ads ever made for menstrual products,” according to the Museum of Menstruation, which displays a gallery of the ads. Read more about the “Modess … Because” campaign in a 1986 history of Modess parent company Johnson & Johnson.

Hhhey Thhhere

Jen Doll, who works the language beat for The Atlantic, has a column in the March issue about a trend she’s been noticing:

Evvvvverywherrrre, from instant messages to texts to tweets and even e‑mails, I see examples of what language watchers call “word lengthening.” The habit began among teens and 20-somethings, but it is no longer limited to them. Adults are adding o’s to their no’s, s’s to their yes’es, and i’s to their hi’s, to say nothing of a glut of exclamation points. In response to some recent news, my 60-something mom wrote, “LOVE IT AND YOU TOO!!!!” What is going on?

Doll got answers from linguists: Elongation is an attempt to convey emotional nuance in short messages. It occurs frequently in instant messaging and texting, less so in email. It’s a way to foster a sense of shared identity.

Fair enough. But how to explain word-lengthening in business names, like the two I spotted recently?

Pizzahhh!, in Berkeley’s Hearst Food Court, caters to the university crowd.

Pizzahhh! is the new incarnation of sausagemonger Top Dog (good name!), which had occupied the space for almost 40 years.

 

PHHHOTO transforms photo-booth photos into animated GIFs for party souvenirs.

Warning: website may induce seizures.

 

The creators of these names may think they’re being clever. Or they may have just futzed around, adding letters until they found available domain names.

I have two cautionary comments for them:

1. How many H’s did you say there were? Three? Four? (I forgot numerous times as I was writing this post.) Do you expect your customers to say “I’ll meet you at Pizza with some extra H’s on the end, no, not Pizza Hut, more like what you say at the doctor’s, only with an exclamation mark”? Do you want them to say “It’s that photo-GIF thing with the funny spelling”?

2. If it’s a generic name it remains generic no matter how many times you repeat a letter. And generic means “not legally protectable.”

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Also see my February 2011 post, “The Fffff Words.”

Now with Even More Good!

“This nouning of adjectives thing is really getting out of control,” Ben Yagoda tweeted earlier this month. As evidence, he attached this photo:

 

I did a little sleuthing and discovered the perpetrator of “Just Add Good”: Chobani Greek yogurt, which was using the slogan throughout its website.

 

 

 

By the way, although Chobani calls its product “Greek yogurt,” the company was founded by a Turk, Hamdi Ulukaya, who lives in upstate New York near one of the company’s plants. According to the Wikipedia entry, Chobani comes from the Turkish-via-Persian word for “shepherd,” chob-ban (literally, “he who carries a stick”). An archived Chobani FAQ claims chobani is a Greek word. I don’t know any of those languages well enough to weigh in.

About a week ago Chobani switched from “Just Add Good” to a new slogan that uses “real” as a noun:

 

But there’s still plenty of nounish good to go around. Not to mention nounish awesome. Naked Juice billboards all over the Bay Area proclaim that the product has “1 lb. of awesome in every bottle,” which makes it “worth its weight in good.”

The slogan plays on the familiar idiom “worth its weight in gold.” 

 

Naked Juice is based in Monrovia (Los Angeles County). The company was founded in 1983; the juice was originally sold “towel to towel on the beaches of Santa Monica, Calif.”

During Sunday’s Oscars broadcast I saw back-to-back ads with nounified good. In both of them, good is something that goes. Here’s “Get Your Good Going” from Blue Diamond Almonds:

 

The voiceover says:

Good is in every Blue Diamond Almond.
From Whole Natural to Wasabi and Soy Sauce.
Good is a catalyst. Good is contagious.
It’s a wonderful feeling. A magical feeling.
And once it gets going, there’s no stopping what you can do.

New York Life, the biggest life-insurance company in the U.S., wants us to “Keep Good Going”:

 

“It takes all kinds of good to make a family.”

Good is, of course, a legitimate noun as well as an adjective: “the greater good”; “packaged goods”; “the good, the bad, and the ugly.” But Chobani, Naked Juice, Blue Diamond, and New York Life want us to think of good as a nounified adjective, the better to force an association with originality and playfulness – or simply to make us stop and pay attention.

This part-of-speech switching, also known as anthimeria, has become an established feature of contemporary advertising. If the trend continues, it’s possible to envision a future in which all adjectives have become nouns, all nouns have become verbs, and every adverb has been pressed into service as the name of a startup.