Fritinancy

From My Twitter Files

I've been using Twitter to post quick links to blogs and articles I find interesting. Here's a roundup of about a week's worth of my tweets about names, brands, and language (okay, and politics, too):

Convivium Brands, a California company specializing in "on-demand private-label wine and spirits brands," has introduced four varietals under a new wine brand: Lipstick on a Pig. Each bottle is available with a red (presumably Republican) and a blue (Democratic) label. According to the website: "Lipstick On A Pig Wines allow consumers to weigh in and voice their opinions with their palates!" (In case you missed it, you can read here about the political flap over the expression "lipstick on a pig.")

I got a kick out of Newsweek columnist Joe Klein's nickname for Alaska Governor Sarah Palin: "Embarracuda." Other nifty words in the column: "nothingburger" and "empretzeled."

Anyone else catch the name of the Treasury Department guy who'll be overseeing the $700 million financial bailout? It's Neel Kashkari. Yeah. Cash and carry. That's going to be everyone's motto pretty soon.

Writer Anne Lamott misses the late, great newspaper columnist Molly Ivins this campaign season. Me too. (Never heard of Ivins? Read my tribute to her.)

John McCain and Sarah Palin are fond of calling themselves mavericks. But a descendant of 19th-century Texas rancher Samuel Maverick--whose unbranded cattle were known as Maverick's--warns them to put a lid on it. Terellita Maverick, 82, a  member emeritus of the San Antonio chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, says McCain "is in no way a maverick, in uppercase or lowercase." "He's a Republican," she said. "He's branded."

Jay Rosen, who's on the journalism faculty at NYU and whom I follow on Twitter, suggests that Gov. Palin's speech patterns were influenced by her brief stint on a television news program, and directs us to Michael Kinsley's 2001 essay for Slate about "what TV news is doing to our precious verbs." Answer: they've been reduced to "universal gerundiciples." Judge for yourself. Here's Kinsley, in full parody mode:

I suspecting the trend of TV news talking in headline-ese traceable to Rupert Murdoch, who buys the New York Post many years ago and founding Fox TV News more recently. The Post famous for its brilliant headlines. Fox News, though hypocritical about denying its brazen right-wing politics, the most creative of the TV news networks.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on Sarah Palin's "pompom patois and sing-songy jingoism."

Language Log's Mark Liberman takes issue with Dowd's assertion that one of Palin's spoken sentences--“It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there"--defies diagramming. He manages to wrangle it into shape. Other Palin sentences don't fare so well.

Two more Language Log posts on Palinesque predilictions: one on the governor's affection for affective demonstratives--the point words "this" and "that"--without referents ("loaning us these dollars," "trying to forge that peace," "craving that straight talk"), and one on her curious use of also as semantic glue, especially at the end of sentences.

And while we're in LanguageLogLand, here's Geoff Nunberg commenting on Steven Pinker commenting on Ms. Palin's pronunciation of nuclear: 

Palin has to be aware that many people consider her pronunciation nonstandard, and she (or her handlers) seems to have made some effort at correction, which is presumably why she pronounced the word as "new clear" when reading off the teleprompter in her convention speech. Since then, though, it's been "nucular" all the way, which may be part of the "let Palin be Palin" strategy. 

I'm learning the most interesting things from fashion blogs. For example, The Thoughtful Dresser (in the UK!) led me to www.270toWin.com, an interactive Electoral College map with current projections and actual results going back to 1789. And Je Ne Sais Quoi posted a nice graphic that compares the presidential candidates' tangible assets.

One more, then back to work: Critic Roger Ebert watched last week's vice-presidential debate and was reminded of Fargo. But he couldn't decide whether Sarah Palin was channeling Marge Gunderson or Jerry Lundegaard.

Carpenters in the Forehead

Some words for hangover, like ours, refer prosaically to the cause: the Egyptians say they are “still drunk,” the Japanese “two days drunk,” the Chinese “drunk overnight.” The Swedes get “smacked from behind.” But it is in languages that describe the effects rather than the cause that we begin to see real poetic power. Salvadorans wake up “made of rubber,” the French with a “wooden mouth” or a “hair ache.” The Germans and the Dutch say they have a “tomcat,” presumably wailing. The Poles, reportedly, experience a “howling of kittens.” My favorites are the Danes, who get “carpenters in the forehead.” In keeping with the saying about the Eskimos’ nine words for snow*, the Ukrainians have several words for hangover. And, in keeping with the Jews-don’t-drink rule, Hebrew didn’t even have one word until recently. Then the experts at the Academy of the Hebrew Language, in Tel Aviv, decided that such a term was needed, so they made one up: hamarmoret, derived from the word for fermentation. (Hamarmoret echoes a usage of Jeremiah’s, in Lamentations 1:20, which the King James Bible translates as “My bowels are troubled.”)

-- From "A Few Too Many," about the causes of, and putative remedies for, hangovers, by Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, May 26, 2008. One over-the-counter "all-natural prevention formula," NoHang, comes in several package sizes, including the Bender (12 tablets), the Party Animal (24 tablets), and the It's Noon Somewhere (48 tablets).

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*The Eskimos' nine words for snow? In the old formulation, it was always "hundreds" or "dozens." Perhaps linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum, tireless debunker of the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax, is finally making inroads.

In English, Not So Good

Names that must have seemed like terrific ideas in their languages of origin:

1. I'm not 100 percent sure, but I'm guessing that in the original Italian, Milldue is a contraction of mille due, which means "one thousand two." The Italian pronunciation of the brand would be meel-DOO-eh. Unfortunately, this manufacturer of expensive bathroom fixtures--I repeat, bathroom fixtures--now sells its wares in English-speaking countries, where the pronunciation is likely to rhyme with "ill poo" and the association with unwelcome greenery (note sponsored links) is not a big image-booster. (Hat tip to Going Like Sixty.)

2. Our Italian comrades have also given us a kitchen-appliance company with the unfortunate name of Smeg. A U.S. distributor helpfully tells us that the name "is an acronym for Smalterie Metallurgiche Emiliane Guastalia"--translated, "an enamelling factory in the village of Guastalia in the province of Emilia in Northern Italy." Smeg's products are stylish: check out these '50s-design refrigerators, which are cute, petite (9.22 cubic feet), and pricey (about $2,000). But oh, that name. There's just no way around the association with genital secretions. In the kitchen. Ick.

3. Apparently Incesoft, a robot manufacturer based in Shanghai, based the first half of its name on the acronym for Infinity Nature Communication Experience. But like The Name Inspector I can't help seeing "inappropriate intrafamilial contact" there. On the other hand, I was charmed by the earnestness of this awkwardly Englished product description: Online Robots Union is trying to be a good robot platform for company's and individual's robots. Company and individual developers can submit their robots here, share your ideas and enjoy funs. Here is also a good marketing platform for your products and services.

4. Anyone up on his or her Black Death lore knows what a bubo is: a swollen inflamed lymph node, especially in the groin or armpit. (From Greek boubon, meaning groin or swollen groin.) The adjectival form is bubonic, as in bubonic plague. In Latin, however, bubo means owl, which is what gave someone in California's wine country the bright idea of naming a winery Bubo Cellars. (I couldn't find a corporate website or an image of the label; sorry.) Jessica Stone Levy, a trademark lawyer who blogs at Beauty Marks, reports that she "happened upon a bottle of Bubo Pinot Grigio today, and recoiled in horror." Jessica writes: "Listen, your product name can have a suggestive and evocative meaning in a dead language, and on that basis make a great trademark, but that's all worth nothing if the mark means something completely disgusting in English."

Nicely Named: Bluecoat Gin

Think of gin and you probably think of English brands like Beefeater, Boodles, and Gordon's. But at least one new bottle on the shelf is very American, right down to its historically relevant name: Bluecoat.

That's "Bluecoat" as in "American solider in the Revolutionary War." The redcoats fought on the other side (and drank those other gins).

The copy cleverly reinforces the point. "Assert your independence," says the home page. On the About page we're told that Bluecoat is "distilled in the birthplace of America"--Philadelphia--and that it's a "revolutionary spirit."

Well, a different spirit, anyway. Bluecoat is distilled in "a custom-built, hand-hammered copper pot still" using organic juniper berries and "a proprietary blend of organic American citrus peels and other organic botanicals."

The word "gin" came into English relatively recently, in 1714. It's a shortening of geneva, which is an alteration of Dutch genever, which means "juniper."

(Via Serious Eats.)

Drinking Problem

"Refreshing's OK, but it's been done to death. Wait a sec--how about death? You think we could get dead in there somehow? Because, hey--alcoholic beverage plus dead equals awesome!"

 

San Francisco Civic Center, Jan. 4, 2008.

Drinking the Undrinkable

Yesterday the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Associated Press all published stories about absinthe, the potent liquor that's been banned in the United States and other countries for nearly a century because it purportedly causes addiction, hallucinations, insanity, and criminal behavior. (Unlike, say, Scotch or vodka, right?) The news hook: the U.S. ban has been lifted, and the first American-made absinthe will go on sale later this month.

For branders and word buffs, there are several interesting things about this development:

• To gain approval by authorities in the U.S., the word "absinthe" must be qualified on the label by a second word such as "supérieure." The new American absinthe, made by St. George Spirits in Alameda, California, will be called Absinthe Verte (green absinthe.)
• Lance Winters, the distiller who created Absinthe Verte after 11 years of experimentation, applied seven times to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, the division of the Treasury Department that approves alcohol packaging. Seven times the agency sent his label back. According to the Times story:

They thought it looked too much like the British pound note. They wondered why it was called Absinthe Verte when their lab analysis said the liquid inside was amber. Mostly, it seemed to him, they didn’t like the monkey.

“I had the image of a spider monkey beating on a skull with femur bones,” Mr. Winters said. But he said that the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau thought the label “implied that there are hallucinogenic, mind-altering or psychotropic qualities” to the product.

“I said, ‘You get all that just from looking at a monkey?’”

• The origin of the word absinthe is as cloudy as a glass of the liquor prepared in the traditional manner: diluted with water that's poured over a sugar cube. In the Times, reporter Pete Wells asserts that absinthe comes from Greek apsinthion, which means "undrinkable." But apsinthion can also mean "wormwood," the violently bitter herb that's the principal flavoring in absinthe. The word may ultimately derive from a Persian word for a different bitter herb.

As for brand names, "Absinthe Verte" can't compete with French-made Lucid, whose formula was created by New Orleans chemist T.A. Breaux and whose name is a clever counter to the old claims of absinthe-induced madness. And neither dares to be as sublimely nutty as Mansinthe, the Swiss-produced "official absinthe of Marilyn Manson." Mansinthe is reportedly 66.6% alcohol (as in 666, the official number of Satan). It's a pretty cool man-word, too.

Image: "The Absinthe Drinker," Pablo Picasso (1901).

Excellent with Steak. Or Stakes.

"I never drink ... wine," Count Dracula famously said. But if he did, he might choose this:

The wine department of my local grocery store is featuring Vampire wines this week in a Halloween display that also includes several other spooky labels: Phantom, Incognito, Dracula, Old Ghost, 7 Deadly Zins, and Gato Negro (black cat). Positioned nearby are some elegant-looking bottles of Vampyre Vodka.

Vampire and Vampyre are the creations of Michael Machat, an entertainment attorney from New York who started Vampire Vineyards without knowing anything about wine except that it's fun to drink.

“I had this idea that it would be cool if somebody had a wine called ‘Vampire’ and they made it in Transylvania," Machat told Brandchannel. "It was so obvious, I thought surely somebody had done it.” He started the company in the mid-'90s while he was living in England; since relocating to Southern California he's found a West Coast source to make his "blood of the vine," as his cheeky website calls it.

I haven't tasted Vampire, but I find the brand story eminently quaffable. "Welcome mortal," says Vampire.com's home page. The media page is called "Press Bites." And Machat is busy creating clever brand extensions: besides Vampire and Vampyre, there's Vamp NRG, a nonalcoholic energy drink like Red Bull; and Dracola, "the unearthly red cola for the children of the night."

And there are tchotchkes: "vampire bite" temporary tattoos, Vampire wine glasses, and--for $199.98--a Vamp NRG skateboard deck. You can even buy thematically appropriate DVDs of movies like Blacula and the original 1931 version of Dracula.

It's enough to give "serious" winemakers and connoisseurs the dry heaves, I'm sure. But it's a triumph of storytelling and branding, and I'll drink to that.

What the Ef?

More news on the vodka front:

Spotted on Sunset Blvd. near La Brea Ave., Los Angeles.

The slogan is yet another snowclone. "X is an N-letter word" occurs frequently in popular culture, e.g.:

Love Is a Four-Letter Word (1970 novel)

Love Is a Five-Letter Word (1975 blues album by Jimmy Witherspoon)

UNIX Is a Four-Letter Word

Friend Is a Four-Letter Word (song by Cake)

"Diet" is a four-letter word (also here and elsewhere)

Peace Is a Four-Letter Word (young adult novel)

Smog Is a Four-Letter Word (title of 1957 L.A. Times column by Paul V. Coates, who noted that smog "is a comparatively new word in the American vocabulary")

And of course there's Bob Dylan's "Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word."

As for "Effen," spelled EFFEN on the product's website, it's Dutch for "smooth," "even," or "balanced." Each bottle is sheathed in a "seamless rubber sleeve" that's "hand-applied, one at a time, in Holland." (A condom for your EFFEN?)

The vodka itself is distilled from wheat, which you'll be relieved to know "contains a very low level of fat and fatty acid."

Snowclones with a Twist

The other day, within a half-mile radius in downtown San Francisco, I spotted four billboards advertising four brands of vodka. The proliferation of vodka brands is an interesting story in itself, but not what I want to talk about here. No, what caught my attention was that three of the four billboards employed snowclones in their slogans.

A snowclone is a formulaic cliché such as "X is the new Y" ("Pink is the new black," "Vodka is the new whiskey"). The term derives from linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum's famous "If Eskimos have N words for snow, then surely X have Y words for Z." Erin O'Connor, also a linguist, has been compiling an ambitious Snowclones Database.

I'd been musing about clones anyway, ever since reading Laura Ries's post on copycat brand strategy. However, I suspect that the creators of advertising sloganclones--as I propose to call them--aren't employing a conscious strategy. More likely they think they're being savvy and original. A little research demonstrates otherwise.

Here are the three sloganclones I spotted. (The fourth billboard, for Russian Standard vodka, simply reads "Pure Russian." Boring and undistinctive, but not a snowclone.)

Svedka--a nicely constructed name for a Swedish vodka, combining three letters from "SvenskeSvenska" (Swedish for "Swedish") and three from "vodka"--is the brand with the buxom "fembot fatale" and the website copy that declares, "It's time to party like its [sic] 2033." The snowclone on Svedka's billboard invites drivers to "Make cocktails not war." (Image via AdRants.)

"Make X Not Y" was popularized as "Make love, not war" by the 1960s counterculture and used by John Lennon in a 1973 song. The phrase is what students of language call a "winged word" that "flies" from its original context into the general culture. It became a snowclone when sloganizers began switching out the nouns to create taglines and headlines such as Make Falafel, Not War (International Herald Tribune), Make Wine, Not War (New York Times,  Café Press, and others), Make Levees Not War, and Make Love Not Spam. (Update: Johnny Cupcakes in Boston sells this Make Cupcakes Not War T-shirt.)

The second sloganclone is attached to the oldest brand in this bunch, Stolichnaya, whose handsomely designed ad proclaims Stoli to be "The Mother of All Vodka from the Motherland of Vodka." I'd seen this ad previously, but not since reading my colleague Tate Linden's commentary on "Mother of All X" over at Thingnamer. Tate notes that "Mother of All X" has been used thousands of times to promote products and services since Americans first heard Saddam Hussein threaten the "mother of all battles" during the first Gulf War. (I'm rather fond of "The Mother of All Search Engines" from Mamma.com.) In English, "Mother of ..." carries additional impact: It suggests a no-longer-shocking interjection ("Mother of God!") and the still-somewhat-shocking "motherfucker." Note the kicker at the bottom of the ad: "Choose Authenticity." Rather amusing when you consider how oft-cloned the slogan is.

For me, the most interesting combination of brand name and advertising slogan is 360 Vodka's "Saving the Planet, One Glass at a Time." This 360 Vodka is not to be confused, by the way, with Three Sixty Vodka: The latter comes from Germany and the former, a division of McCormick Distilling, is made in Weston, Missouri. (Want to be really confused? The brand name is 360 Vodka; the URL is vodka360.com. According to public records, vodka360.com changed hands in 2006 for just $1,000. You too can join the party: There are lots more "360" domains for sale here. Herpes360.com, anyone?)

The "360" part may be imitative, but other features of this brand stand out in a crowded field. 360 Vodka calls itself "the world's first green vodka": The liquor itself is clear, but its greenish bottles are made from 85% recycled glass and the distillery "has improved its eco-footprint measurably over the past 5 years." The website is sprinkled with "eco-factoids" such as "The average person generates 4.5 lbs. of trash every day." Remove the closure from a 360 Vodka bottle, mail it back in a prepaid envelope, and the distillery will donate $1 to "recognized environmental causes" through its "Close the Loop" program.

But back to the slogan. Just how popular is the formula "Saving the X, One Y At a Time"? Very. Take a look (note: some of these examples are title-clones):

Saving the World, One Drink at a Time: Martini Groove, a spirits blog

Saving the Planet, One Socket at a Time: Engadget

Saving the Planet One Atom At a Time: Carbon Reclamation Project

Saving the Planet, One Toilet At a Time: The Plumbing Guys

Saving the World, One Treatment At a Time: subtitle of book by Chemo Girl

Saving the Earth One Onesie At a Time: MyConservationBaby

Saving the Planet, One Seed At a Time: various gardening blogs and forums, including this one

Saving the Planet One Job At a Time: CommonGround

Saving the World One Stitch At a Time: Knitting Medic

Saving the Rainforest, One Morsel At a Time: Worldwatch

... and on and on. I also jotted down variations such as "one car at a time," "one flush at a time," "one square of toilet paper at a time," and--because someone had to do it, I guess--"one thong at a time."

If not original, the 360 Vodka snowclone is at least appropriate to the unusual brand story. You could argue that the Stoli snowclone is, too--it has that socialist-realist ring to it, a fitting counterpart to the visual design. Svedka is attempting something different, fashioning a brand that's all about campy futurism--and all attitude and positioning. The antiquated "Make X Not Y" snowclone does communicate campiness, but it's hard to find any futurism there.

Has anyone else spotted snowclones in advertising? Leave a comment and tell us about them.

Kinda Young, Kinda Now

According to the Springwise newsletter, Heineken is about to soft-launch Charli, a new 5% alcohol sparkling beverage for women. The product will be test-marketed in 17 bars in Amsterdam and Deventer before being introduced throughout the Netherlands next summer.

If Charli ever makes it to the U.S., perhaps Heineken could recycle this jingle from a famous 1976 commercial. Video quality is poor, but yes, that's Bobby Short on the piano. He was virtually unknown until then.

Charli has an apple-juice base, but otherwise sounds a lot like low-alcohol, pear-based Babycham, "the original girlie drink" (their words, not mine) that has been sold in the UK for decades. The website is charming; check out the "classic adverts" page, especially the very funny "I'd Love a Babycham."

The Springwise article also mentions two other new brews targeted at women: a "medicinal" beer, Karla, from Germany's Karlsberg; and Karmi, from the Polish division of Denmark's Carlsberg, not to be confused with Karlsberg. Karla and Karmi make sense as name extensions; Charli less so. And faced with a choice of Karla, Karmi, and Charli, a drinking gal could be forgiven for a moment of confusion, even if she were admonished not to be confused. But I don't suppose Heineken wanted to go with Heinie.