My June column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at the brand names and specialized vocabulary of electric vehicles (EVs, BEVs, ZEVs, and their kin). As you may recall, I’ve become a little obsessed with this subject ever since I researched and (finally) bought a PHEV—that’s a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.
Full access to the column is paywalled for three months; here’s an excerpt:
Continue reading "On the Visual Thesaurus: Electric-vehicle lingo" »
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I thought I knew quite a bit about Amazon. I have, after all, been a customer since September 1997. (My first order: The Cynic’s Dictionary and Idiom Savant: Slang as It Is Slung.) I’ve written about the company and its brands (see here and here, for example). I’ve read two books about the company: Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America (2021) and Brad Stone’s The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2014)*.
But I’ve never worked for Amazon, which may explain my not knowing that the company had a mascot called Peccy.
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A new birth-control product, Phexxi, was the subject of a long story in the New York Times Styles section on June 10. “The pill helped start the sexual revolution,” reads the headline. “What will Phexxi do?”
What is Phexxi? According to the product website, Phexxi is a nonhormonal vaginal gel that “works to prevent pregnancy by altering the pH of your vagina, which is different from hormonal birth control.” Its primary ingredients are lactic acid, citric acid, and potassium bitartrate (the last ingredient is better known, at least to cooks, as “cream of tartar”). In May 2020, Phexxi filed for trademark protection and received FDA approval; the product went on sale in the US in September 2020. An ad campaign—notably a 60-second video that urges women to “get past your compromises and get Phexxi”—launched in early February 2021.
Screen grab from the 60-second ad
Does Phexxi work? Its parent company, Evofem Biosciences (“Science with a Soul”), says that in clinical trials “with perfect use,” the gel is 93 percent effective in preventing pregnancy. As for the Phexxi name—well, let’s talk about it.
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¡Feliz cumpleaños a mí! OK, not a mí, exactly, but a mi blog, which was born 15 years ago, on June 8, 2006. Which means I’ve outlasted The Former Guy by many, many Scaramuccis.
“Trump ends blog after 29 days, infuriated by measly readership”: Washington Post, June 3, 2021
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I’m researching a longer piece on “plus” in branding, from plus size to Nic+Zoe to all those +-suffixed streaming services. Along the way I stumbled on a couple of new plussed-up brands with unusual naming stories.
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