Fritinancy

March Linkfest

When did the Central Intelligence Agency start being called “the Company”? If you have evidence of a published example from before 1966, the OED wants to hear from you. Don’t worry, you won’t lose your security clearance.

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The iPhone could have been called the TriPod, the Mobi, or the TelePod, none of which would have been bad. The ePad Femme, on the other hand – “the world’s first tablet just for women” – suffers from more than a bad name. (Hat tip for both: Catchword.)

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Related: an honest iPad commercial.

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OK, just one more iThing link: the CTA Digital Pedestal Stand for iPad 2/3/4 with Roll Holder. (Via Virginia Postrel.)

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Three common mistakes in company naming, as told by three sadder-but-wiser business owners. (Related: my own post, Seven Ways to Go Wrong with Naming. )

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Another sadder-but-wiser tale: How not to name your restaurant. Author David Lizerbram, a trademark lawyer, leads off the story by observing: “It’s always astonishing to me that businesses will invest countless dollars in every aspect of their operations while relying on a name that will only bring legal issues.” Hear, hear!

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Speaking of trademark strength, this 1950 infographic is a thing of beauty.

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If you’re launching a fashion brand, should you follow the traditional route and name it after yourself (which worked fine for Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, and Betsey Johnson)? Or should you follow the lead of some younger designers and choose a quirky name like Creatures of the Wind? Mark Prus, guest-blogging for Duets Blog, weighs the costs and benefits of “strange” as a naming strategy.

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Glad to see I’m not the only one who’s wondering about the proliferation of gratuitous umlauts in brand names. (Via @TimberlakeLaw.)

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Viewy, yellow-ammer, cooshy, and other words from Parade’s End – not the recent BBC/HBO series but the Ford Madox Ford tetralogy on which Tom Stoppard based his script.

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The Atlas of True Names “reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings, of the familiar terms on today's maps of the World, Europe, the British Isles and the United States. For instance, where you would normally expect to see the Sahara indicated, the Atlas gives you ‘The Tawny One’, derived from Arab. es-sahra “the fawn coloured, desert’.”

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From a glossary of American mountain-man lingo: “Arkansas toothpick” (a large, pointed dagger), “possibles” (a mountain man’s personal property), “terrapin” (dog meat).

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Blinkies, peelies, catalinas, and other words from the world of extreme couponing.

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Another one of those wonderful Wikipedia entries: a list of English-language idioms derived from baseball. (Via The Editor’s Desk.)

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Two takes on the evolution of “LOL” from “laughing out loud” to “just kidding”: from Anne Curzan at Lingua Franca and from Stan Carey at Sentence First. Stan includes a video clip of linguist John McWhorter (“Texting is not the death of writing. Texting is fingered speech”). 

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Finally: what if Seinfeld were still on the air?

 

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.”

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.

Building a Better Tagline: Part 2

In Part 1 of Building a Better Tagline I gave some examples of effective taglines and listed the ways in which a tagline can support your brand. I also analyzed the elements of tagline style, including rhyme, parallel contrast, and positive ambiguity.

Now it’s time to build your better tagline. Here are my guidelines:

FSHN STTMNT

Where does a style-savvy girl have to shop to buy a vowel nowadays? I’m looking at you, BLK DNM, the newish anti-fashion fashion boutique in downtown Manhattan that the New York Times profiled last week. (Reporter Jon Caramanica called BLK DNM “in essence an aggressively priced Uniqlo or Gap for the upper echelon of the invisible.”)

Is BLK DNM texting shorthand for “black denim”? Maybe. Maybe not. Urban Dictionary says “d’n’m” stands for “deep and meaningful.” Perhaps BLK stands for “bulk.” Or “blerk.” Or “bollocks.”

I’d dismiss BLK DNM as a pretentious anomaly if I hadn’t seen evidence that it is in fact part of an annoying trendlet. Let’s take a look:

• BHLDN, which I wrote about a year ago, is Anthropologie’s entry into the wedding-fashion market. As I said in the post, it begs to be backronymed. (“Beware Hardly Literate Dumb Names”?)
  
  
• Asmbly Hall, a new boutique on San Francisco’s Fillmore Street, scrounged up enough cash to buy a couple of A’s, but had to cut the E (and an S) out of the budget.

 

• JNSQ, “the first independent, multimedia style magazine for iPad,” takes its name for French texting shorthand for “je ne sais quoi,” which means “I don’t know what.” How we’re supposed to pronounce the name? Moi, je ne sais pas. The online version of the company, according to a TechCrunch post, is called Jenesqua. Gen-ess-kwa? Donnez-moi un break.
  
  
• The Gap is catching the consonantal drift, too. Its new online catalog, Styld.by, “taps fashion bloggers from popular sites including FabSugar, Lookbook.nu, and Refinery29, to style and showcase pieces of Gap clothing,” according to a post on Co.Create, Fast Company’s branding/entertainment/tech blog. (The “by” in the name looks like a country code, but isn’t: the URL is www.styld-by.com. There is no .by country code … yet.) Styld.by was created by a San Francisco agency called AKQA. AKQA doesn’t stand for anything except a certain JNSQ. 

Of course, the whole thing started several years ago when tech companies like Flickr, Plnnr, and Dlvr.it (RIP) eliminated vowels to obtain short domain names. It sends one message when a scrappy startup cheats on spelling and quite another when the vowelless name belongs to an image-conscious fashion brand. By belatedly jumping on the bndwgn, are retailers trying to sell us austerity? Or are they just moving too fast to vowel up?

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:

How 2 B Kewl

Are you wondering what those dadburn whippersnappers are forever typing into their electronic gizmos? Well, R U? Wonder no longer: there's new hope for old farts. A neat-o translation tool called TransL8IT! helps you make sense of text lingo. Just type in any standard English phrase (e.g., "The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain") and TransL8IT! instantly renders it into something suitable for texting ("d rain n Spain falLz mAnlE n d pln"). Works in reverse (text-to-English), too.

Thanks to Writer's Blog for the tip.

luv & }xx,

Nancy