Fritinancy

May Linkfest

Ready for an antidote to Bad Brand Names Week? This month's Linkfest stays on the sunny side of the street.

Wolfram Alpha may be the new kid on the search-engine block, but don't count Google out just yet. A nifty new search option, Wonder Wheel, presents results as a constellation (or mind map); each term in the constellation is clickable, yielding a new constellation. Check out the Wonder Wheel for "wisdom." (Via Joho the Blog.)

Bay Area journalist and blogger Tracey Taylor (of Home Girl and On the Block) forwarded two articles about names, brands, and trademarks. The first is Phil Patton's eulogy for animal-themed car names (Mustang and Impala are the last remnants of the herd). It's full of lore: Did you know that the Ford Taurus was named for the astrological sign of a Ford executive's wife? Or that before World War II, the Jaguar was known as the Swallow Sidecar?

The second article, "Naming a Company: Many Difficulties in Selecting a Name That Can Be Used in the Various States" (PDF), is nearly century-old proof that name development has long been a challenge. Published in 1912, it takes fastidious pains to explain to readers what must have once been a novel predicament. "When the number of States is considered," the reporter cautions, "it is at once apparent that much searching of records is necessary before a name can be adopted. It would have been unfortunate, for instance, if the organizers of the Tobacco Products Corporation had incorporated under that name without preliminary investigation, and had found that there were corporations of the same name in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Massachusetts..." Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

I was delighted to discover (via Twitter) the Unshelved blog, which features the only daily comic strip set in a public library. That's good news right there; even better, the May 17 strip is about my pal Charlie Haas's wonderful new novel, The Enthusiast.

Tributes to and indictments of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style have abounded in this, the book's 50th-anniversary year. Geoffrey Nunberg wrote two of the best pieces: a defense of the passive voice (originally read on NPR's "Fresh Air") and, in Language Log, a virtuoso verse (in perfectly scanning heroic couplets!) that summons the shade of Alexander Pope.

I'm glad to see someone else shares my fascination with brand names beginning with "Mister." Here's Nama Sutra with a new-to-me crop that includes Mister Tapioca, Mr. Zipper, and the gender-bending Mister Lady.

Copyeditor extraordinaire John McIntyre recommends 10 blogs to improve your mastery of language and editing, including a few that were new to me. And Mighty Red Pen suggests 10 blogs word nerds will love, including (ahem) the one you're reading now.

Finally, just for the heck of it: How many folksingers does it take to change a light bulb? (Hat tip: Walter Olson.)

Bad Brand Names: Infegy

I'll say this about Infegy: the language of its website is readable. Most of the punctuation is correct. (We'll ignore the over-capitalization problem for now.) Much of the writing is clear, compelling, even graceful.

The name? Not so much. The opposite, in fact.

Here's the official story (emphasis added):

In late 2006, while working for an interactive advertising agency, Justin Graves, now Infegy's CEO, had a vision to develop a system which could collect as much of this social content as possible and analyze it on-demand to garner a wealth of insight in to consumer thought and opinion. Justin left the agency to begin development work on this concept, and shortly after he partnered with Adam Coomes, Infegy's President, for his expertise in Web and business development. Infegy, a combination of the words Information and Strategy, was officially founded and work on the project now known as Social Radar was well under way to becoming the powerful yet elegant solution it is today.

Yes, it's yet another Bad Portmanteau.

What's the problem? For starters, information doesn't shorten to inf-. The abbreviation is info-. Without that o, we're adrift in ominous linguistic territory, surrounded by the sinister semantic shades of infect, infest, infidel, inferno, infamy, infertile, and inferior.

The in- prefix further confuses matters. It can mean within or interior (as it does in ingenious, inherent, intrinsic). But it can also mean not or without: consider insane, inconsiderate, indecent, inconsistent. With Infegy, we have no clear markers to tell us which in- is in.

Then there's feg in the middle of the name, which suggests a hybrid of feh and fug. Ugh.

Finally, Infegy shares the primary shortcoming of many portmanteau brands: information plus strategy does not equal a distinctive benefit. It (sort of) tells me what you do, not (a) why you're different from other information strategists and (b) why I should care.

It's not too late to turn on that light bulb and come up with a better solution.

April Linkfest

I think one of the criteria for employment at NPR is "must have fabulously radio-worthy name." Think of Sylvia Poggioli ("SEEEL-via PoJOE-li"), Lakshmi Singh, Kai Ryssdal (OK, he's American Public Media, but his show, "Marketplace," is carried by my NPR affiliate), Singdha Prakash, and my all-time favorite, reporting from "Da-KAAAAAAR," as she says it, Ofeibia Quist-Arcton. (Then there are Neda Ulaby, Peter Overby, and Jamie Tarabay, the Killer Bees of public radio.

That's a long introduction to this month's first link: the NPR name game. The rules are simple: insert your middle initial anywhere in your first name. Your last name is the smallest foreign town you've ever visited. I, for example, am Knancy Porlock-Weir (the "K" is silent). The hamlet of Porlock Weir, in Somerset, England, doesn't have a hyphen, but it looks posh in a surname, doesn't it? Porlock Weir is adjacent to the village of Porlock, population 1,300 or so, which is famous for being the place where the poet Samuel Coleridge was rudely awakened from his opium-induced dream of Xanadu. "The person from Porlock" has come to mean "an unwanted visitor."

Onward:

Now in its third season, the NBC series "30 Rock" has already generated its own lexicon of slang. There's blerg or blurg, Liz Lemon's favorite expression of dismay; "I want to go to there," another Lemon-ism; and L.U.N.C.H ("Lego Utilization for Negating Crisis Hierarchies"), from the very, very funny "Retreat to Move Forward" episode.

From a new blog discovery, Stuff Indian People Like, a condom commercial that aired in South India. Catchy refrain: "I am the condom friend ever useful to you." Mostly safe for work, except for ... ummm ... better make it NSFW.

Yearning for a communications analogue to the Slow Food Movement? For $4.70, Telegramstop lets you create your own telegram and mail it—you know, on paper and stuff?—just like back in the day.  (Hat tip: Mxrk.)

Okay, you prefer the Intertubes. You've been using URL shorteners like twurl and bit.ly to avoid breaking links and to squeeze into your 140-character Twitter limit. But you just read an alarming and apparently well-informed article about the perils of link shortening (summary: "A new and potentially unreliable middleman now sits between the link and its destination"). SoCuteURL may not solve the problem, but it sure is an adorable alternative. I mean, how cute is "looloopoo," which is what one of my recent posts shortens to?

Finally, allow me to introduce you to Charlie Haas, beliked American writer (his description). Charlie and I met blerggy years ago at New West magazine, where I slung punctuation and he was the brilliant young writer who wrote about Hello Kitty, the Sex Pistols, an Elvis fan convention in Las Vegas, and other cultural phenomena. New West briefly became California, then folded; Charlie became a screenwriter. (Remember Gremlins 2? That was Charlie. Also Over the Edge and Matinee.) Now Charlie has written his first novel, The Enthusiast, which Harper Collins is publishing on May 26. I read an advance copy, and damn-it's-good.* Funny? Oh yes. Also brilliant. (Sample line: "When your only tool is your ass, every problem looks like a couch.") The first-person narrator is Henry Bay, who works at a succession of "enthusiast" magazines with titles like Kite Buggy, Spelunk, and Cozy: A Magazine of Tea, never quite finding his own enthusiasm until ... Well, that'll have to wait. I'll publish a review in a month or so. In the meantime, you can follow Charlie on Twitter, where he is funny (and brilliant!). You can also read about him, in his own words, on the Harper Collins site, where he's also posting short essays, many of them in his ought-to-be-trademarked style, a cross between S.J. Perelman, Woody Allen, and The Onion. Harper Collins is making it unaccountably hard to find all the essays, so I've done the heavy lifting:

• "It's Not Fitness, It's Life," inspired by the slogan of the Equinox gym. (Sample: "I haven’t pressed anything all week, so I find an empty bench and start pressing my luck.")
• A reminiscence about working for Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing (a real publication, long and lamentably defunct).
• A Hollywood mini-memoir.
• A riff on what music writers listen to, and why.
• A riff on the Visa Black Card, "made with carbon," just like certain life forms.

There's more, and more to come; keep an eye on Charlie's Twitter stream for updates. You won't be sorry. (And order a copy or three of The Enthusiast!)

___

* I'm not the only Enthusiast enthusiast. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review.

Word of the Week: Nom

Nom: Slang term, widely circulated through blogs and Twitter, that simulates the sound of eating enthusiastically. Frequently repeated as an interjection ("Cookies! Nom nom nom"); also used, by extension, as a verb ("I'm nomming on some yummy cookies") and an adjective ("Those cookies are nommy!"). Urban Dictionary identifies other builds on nom, including nomilicious, nomable, nomtastic, nommage ("something good to eat"), and nomability. However, nomosexual has a different etymology; it's defined as someone uninterested in sex ("no mo'").

The gustatory nom is attributed to the Sesame Street character Cookie Monster (1969-present), who says "Om nom nom nom" while eating omnivorously. In the last couple of years nom has been widely disseminated through the medium of LOLcats; it's defined in a LOLcat Dictionary as "to eat fuds."

Here is an unusually sophisticated (and bilingual) use of nom in a LOLcat photo (from I Can Haz Cheeseburger):

Perhaps inevitably, there have also been sightings of Obama noms.

Following the recent legalization of same-sex marriage in Iowa and Vermont, another nom has been audible: NOM, the National Organization for Marriage, which purports to "protect marriage and religious liberty." On Twitter, the organization's handle is nomtweets, which has caused some confusion and annoyance among the nom-as-fuds crowd. "TAKE BACK THE NOM," tweeted Washington reporter Ana Marie Cox on April 10, endorsing another tweet that commented: "It's sad that the Right has appropriated our most adorable netspeak for their hate campaigns." Capital-letter NOM seems to exhibit a tone-deafness similar to that of other right-leaning causes: its newest initiative is called 2M4M, an abbreviation of "Two Million for Marriage." Apparently no one at NOM did the minimal research necessary to discover that M4M is a long-established (pre-Web) gay-personals-ad abbreviation of "Men for Men."

The acronym NOM can also be an acronym for No Offense Meant, Natural Organic Matter, and many other phrases. In French, perhaps needless to say, nom means name.

UPDATE: Watch a spot-on parody (from "RIM") of the National Organization for Marriage's alarmist "Gathering Storm" video.

New Name Beat: Herdict

Here's a case of smart people who came up with a good idea that fills a need and is cleverly executed. The only weakness is the name. (Well, the visual identity is clearly dopey—see image, left—but design isn't my forte, so I'll give it a pass for now.)

I first learned about Herdict on Twitter, where the 140-character limit precluded much context. As I recall, the tweet said nothing more than, "Have you checked out Herdict?" So I played a guessing game with myself. I'm familiar with BlogHer, EngageHer, and HerRoom,¹ so I reasoned that Herdict must be a service or product for her—for women.

As for -dict, my first association—not the most obvious one, granted, but not wholly improbable—was "indict." So I thought the name was pronounced "her-dite," and had something to do with ... women criminals?

Well, no. Right after I saw that tweet, I read a blog post by Dave Weinberger, who was attending a lunch sponsored by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, which turns out to be the brains behind Herdict. (As I said: smart people.) Herdict, Dave wrote, "tries to enlist people at large to answer the question 'What’s going on with the Net?'"

As the Herdict website says (in clear, friendly language; can't find fault there):

Let's say you find a site inaccessible...normally, you might call or e-mail your friends and ask them if they're experiencing the same thing. With Herdict Web, you can see - in real time - if others are reporting the same phenomenon, giving you a better sense of potential reasons of why the site is inaccessible.

And the name?

Herdict is a portmanteau of 'herd' and 'verdict' and seeks to show the verdict of the users (the herd). Herdict Web seeks to gain insight into what users around the world are experiencing in terms of web accessibility; or in other words, determine the herdict.

Uh-oh.

In just a minute, I'll tell you some of the reasons a portmanteau of "herd" and "verdict" is so problematic. But first I want to share the responses I got when I asked my own Twitter followers what "Herdict" suggested to them:

• "Verdicts for women, or it's a misspelling and there's supposed to be a 'k' on the end."
• "I read 'herdict' as 'heretic." (Two votes for that interpretation.)
• "I thought 'her dick.'"
• "Transsexuals?" (Two votes.)
• "A site for female lawyers--'her verdict'?"
• "Something about a herd ... and an addict?"

Interestingly, the only person who got "herd" from "Herdict" is not a native English speaker.

Here's my own analysis. Most of the problems with "Herdict" are liabilities of all portmanteau words. Portmanteaus are fun to construct, and they're usually the first strategy novice namers attempt. Take a word or a word part, smash it into another word or word part, and voilà: a newly coined word that's somewhat likelier than average to have an available domain. But not all words blend as seamlessly as famous portmanteaus like chortle or slithy (both coined by Lewis Carroll). Many word-blends result in what The Name Inspector calls awkwordplay, words in which the stress is ambiguous or syllabic transitions are difficult or unpleasant. Herdict suffers from the latter fault: it's hard to tell where we're supposed to break up the word. Her? Or herd?

But that's just the beginning:

• "Herd," a collective noun used with animals, especially cattle, is an unflattering way to refer to one's audience, public, or users. It suggests unthinking animal instinct, not human judgment.
•  Jonathan Zittrain, Herdict's creator, makes a stumbling attempt to justify his zoology: "To many, the sheep is considered to be an unintelligent species content to simply run with the flock. On the contrary, sheep tend not to follow the herd when no natural predator is present." With all due respect, Dr. Zittrain, I don't think you've spent enough time outdoors.
• The collective noun for sheep isn't "herd," it's "flock."
• "Verdict" suggests judgment; we often associate it with "guilty." But Herdict doesn't pass judgment; it simply reports.
• Then there are the problems with the sound of the name. Is it -dict or -dick? It isn't always easy to hear the difference. (Try saying "I use Herdict" quickly a few times and you'll catch my drift.)
• Speaking of hearing, is it Herd- or Heard-? If you meet a new acquaintance and say you work for Herdict, will the other person hear "heard it"?

Successful names need to pass many tests: sight (what does its spelling suggest?), sound (is it pronounceable and unambiguous?), meaning, and appropriateness, among others. (Trademark is the biggest "other.")

But here's my main complaint: The name conveys no benefit. Nothing about "Herdict" suggests that the program exists to prevent web censorship and enhance web accessibility. The name doesn't communicate openness, fairness, or access. It suggests bovine compliance coupled with judgment. Or genitalia.

I hope Herdict succeeds as a business; I really do. Not only because I think it provides a worthwhile service, but because success may bring an infusion of funds large enough to finance a complete rebranding—verbal and visual. I wouldn't mind being part of it.

___

¹Another good business with a dreadful name. Herroom.com sells lingerie, for Pete's sake, but its name sounds like phlegmy throat-clearing.

Word of the Week: Cyberchondria

Cyberchondria: "The deluded belief you suffer from all the diseases featured on the internet" (Sunday Times, UK, April 2, 2000; cited in Word Spy). 

From a Nov. 25 story by John Markoff in the New York Times:

On Monday, Microsoft researchers published the results of a study of health-related Web searches on popular search engines as well as a survey of the company’s employees.

The study suggests that self-diagnosis by search engine frequently leads Web searchers to conclude the worst about what ails them.

The researchers said they had undertaken the study as part of an effort to add features to Microsoft’s search service that could make it more of an adviser and less of a blind information retrieval tool.

The Microsoft study is "the first systematic look at the anxieties of people doing searches related to health care," Markoff writes.

Although Markoff reports that cyberchondria "emerged in 2000," Word Spy identifies a 1996 usage of cyberchondriac in Business Wire as the first to be published:

But 'Cyberchondriacs' and Those In Need Log On In Ever Bigger Numbers
—"Internet health and medical info gets mixed reviews, study finds," Business Wire, September 12, 1996

In the pre-Internet era, the condition was sometimes self-reported by medical students as “second-year syndrome” or “medical schoolitis.”

 

P.S. In other cyber-compound news, today is Cyber Monday, the first Monday after U.S. Thanksgiving and the supposed kickoff to the online holiday shopping season.

Photo from here.

November Linkfest

In this season of gratitude I'm giving thanks for...

1. Typocalypse, a set of fonts accompanied by the subliminal messages they're communicating. See image, left. (Via monKey Art Awards, which more typically takes aim at the ridiculous redundancy, and the redundant ridiculousness, of movie posters and movie advertising.)

2. The First Unitarian Jihad Name Generator, the perfect complement to Jon Carroll's 2005 column about Unitarian Jihad ("The vote of our God subcommittee is 10-8 in favor of one God, with two abstentions. Brother Flaming Sword of Moderation noted the possibility of there being no God at all, and his objection was noted with love by the secretary"). My Unitarian Jihad name: Sister Joyous Blade of Enlightened Enlightenment. And thank you for asking. (Hat tip: Everything You Know About English Is Wrong.)

3. The Secret Service Code Name Generator, which I learned about from someone on Twitter who I hope doesn't mind being anonymous. In real life, the Secret Serviced get to choose the first letter of their Secret Code Names; the Obamas—Renegade, Renaissance, Rosebud, and Radiance—are brought to you by the letter R.

4. Wordie's nutty compilation of names for mongrels and mutts, from a list "actually published by the American Canine Hybrid Club." Havamalt? Why, thanks; don't mind if I do.

5. Unfortunate Names, a blog devoted to the inadvertent double-entendre, the cringeworthy Engrish, and the creepily sincere. The blog's subtitle says it all: "Revel in the immaturity."

6. The funniest Internet error message ever. Period.

Word of the Week: White Space

White space: An unused portion of the television broadcast spectrum. White spaces occupy the areas between licensed TV channels in the 150MHz to 700MHz spectrum bands.

Last Tuesday, Nov. 4, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission unanimously agreed to open up white space for unlicensed use. The ruling was applauded by technology companies such as Google, Motorola, and Microsoft, which had lobbied the FCC for years to bring the United States into step with other countries' broadband capabilities. Opponents of the ruling included TV broadcasters and wireless microphone companies as well as performers who use wireless technology. (Singer Dolly Parton had warned that white space net gadgets might have "direct negative impact" on Dollywood, the Grand Ole Opry, and Parton's latest project, "9 to 5: The Musical." Rick Warren, wireless-mic-using pastor of the Saddleback mega-church in Southern California, said in a letter to the FCC that the ruling would cause churches "to invest unknown resources to battle the interference from unlicensed mobile wireless devices." )

Shortly after the ruling, Google co-founder Larry Page wrote in his official blog that the decision was "a clear victory for Internet users and anyone who wants good wireless communications." He added:

As an engineer, I was also really gratified to see that the FCC decided to put science over politics. For years the broadcasting lobby and others have tried to spread fear and confusion about this technology, rather than allow the FCC's engineers to simply do their work.

White space has a different meaning in graphic design: it's the area on the page or screen that is not occupied by text or image.

 

Word of the Week: Disemvoweling

Disemvoweling (also disemvowelling): Removing all the vowels from offensive text posted on the internet by a troll, spammer, or other vandal. The reference is to disemboweling, or evisceration.

According to the NationMaster encyclopedia:

The disemvoweled text can still be read, or rather puzzled out; but it is clearly marked as deprecated, and is no longer susceptible to being automatically read by every passer-by who happens to glance at it.

The technique of disemvoweling appears to have been invented in 2002 by Teresa Hayden Nielsen to defuse offensive comments left by Philip Shopshire on her blog, Making Light. She explained her actions at comment #40; at comment #48, Arthur Hlvaty dubbed the practice "disemvoweling."

Disemvoweling also comes up in "The Trolls Among Us," an August 3, 2008, story by Mattathias Schwartz in the New York Times Magazine. From page 6 of the online article:

If we can’t prosecute the trolling out of online anonymity, might there be some way to mitigate it with technology? One solution that has proved effective is “disemvoweling” — having message-board administrators remove the vowels from trollish comments, which gives trolls the visibility they crave while muddying their message.

Other troll-related words used in the Times article: lulz ("a corruption of 'LOL' or 'laugh out loud,' “lulz” means the joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium") and malwebolence, a blend of "malevolence" and "web." According to the article, troll was first used in the late 1980s to describe someone who intentionally disrupts internet communities.

The 411 on 404

The 404 error message, that is. According to linguist and prolific author David Crystal, "404" was the number of the room at CERN, in Switzerland, where the World Wide Web was developed. Update: Or not. See Tomas's comment, below.

I discovered that tidbit and many others in Crystal's Words Words Words, whose chapter titles all start with "word"--Wordsmithery, Wordbuilding, Wordrisks, Wordbirths, Worddeaths, and so on.

Here's a link to some classic 404 error messages as well as some creative variations.

And in news otherwise unrelated except that it involves a three-digit number beginning with "4," perhaps you've heard that California's Compassionate Use Act, passed by the voters in 1996, allows the medical dispensation of marijuana. In 2003, the State Legislature modified the act with a piece of legislation formally known as--wait for it--SB 420. Yes, "420," as in ... 420. Sheer coincidence? Well, the bill's author was former State Senator John Vasconcellos, who represented the Silicon Valley area for eons and whose obituary will almost certainly include his role as the godfather of California's self-esteem movement. High technology, high self-esteem ... I rest my case.

I read about SB 420 in this fascinating New Yorker article by David Samuels about the weird world of medical marijuana in the Golden State. In additional to numerological trivia, the article shares some marijuana nomenclature, e.g.: Sour Diesel, Bubba Kush, AK Mist, Purple Urkel, Jedi, and Gush ("a robust mixture of Goo—a lighter, giddier high—and Kush").