Fritinancy

Name in the wild: Blunts+Moore

Now that the sale, possession, and use of recreational cannabis have been legal in California for a full year, what’s happening with weed branding? Well, cannabis ads are still outlawed on San Francisco’s Muni buses, streetcars, and cable cars. On the other hand, I’ve been noticing a lot of outdoor advertising in strategic locations around the Bay Area: big, bold billboards near freeway on-ramps and bridges. Some are for companies that were founded before full legalization took effect on January 1, 2018, like Eaze (a delivery service) and Weedmaps (“a community where businesses and consumers can search and discover cannabis products, become educated on all things cannabis, review cannabis businesses and connect with other like-minded users”).

But one new brand caught my attention when I saw it on a billboard on the Oakland side of the Bay Bridge: Blunts+Moore. Merely descriptive was my first thought. After all, blunt has been a slang term for “marijuana cigarette” for at least 30 years; the Random House Dictionary of Historical Slang connects it to Phillies Blunt*, a trademark in use since 1958 for a brand of inexpensive cigars.

But wait: there’s more. And also Moore.

Word of the week: Furlough

The longest government shutdown in U.S. history began on December 22, 2018, when Congress and the White House failed to break an impasse over a spending bill. It is now in its fourth week. An estimated 800,000 federal employees are either working without pay – as in the case of thousands of TSA workers at the nation’s airports – or furloughed: sent home, deprived of paychecks, and forbidden to do any kind of work on behalf of the government. “Furloughed employees have no automatic right to payment,” Eric Reed wrote in The Street on January 14; “however, historically Congress has paid all federal workers for the time they lost during a shutdown.”

This use of furlough to describe an involuntary, uncertain work suspension isn’t new – the OED’s earliest citation is from 1867, in the Bangor (Maine) Daily Whig & Courier – but it isn’t the original sense of the word. And it’s distinctly American.

Word of the week: Yeet

At the American Dialect Society’s annual Word of the Year vote, held Friday, January 4 in New York City, the overall winner was tender-age shelter. (Here’s my column about tender-age shelter for the Visual Thesaurus; subscription required for full access.) The runner-up word, yeet, was less topical and less transparent, especially if you’re older than, say, 19. I keep a running list of potential words of the year, and yeet — which was voted the Slang/Informal Word of the Year for 2018, and which won the first-round vote for overall WOTY — had completely escaped my attention. So I looked into it.  

 

Via @frozenpandaman. According to the American Dialect Society’s live Twitter feed, “voting occurred to many shouts of ‘yeet!’ in the room.”

New year, new name? Ten tips.

If one of your New Year’s resolutions is naming – or renaming – a company, a product, an organization, or a process, I’m here to help. Yes, you could hire me to do the job. Or you could do it yourself by following these guidelines.

Names of the year 2018

It’s my final list of the year*, and possibly my last blog post of 2018, unless something unavoidable crops up. For Names of the Year, I do my best to follow the categories established by the American Name Society – personal, place, trade, artistic and literary, miscellaneous. I also take some guidance from the Baby Name Wizard blog’s name of the year contest, which is not limited to baby names.

In categorical order, then: