Fritinancy

Names in the Wild: Qdoba

There are Qdoba Mexican Grills in Baton Rouge, Bryn Mawr, Boston, and Bloomington, but there’s not a single one in coastal California north of Los Angeles County, which may explain why I first encountered the restaurant, and the name, away from home—in Portland, Oregon, to be precise.

 

 

My first reaction: Yet another qrazy Q-name! My second: How is it pronounced—K’doba? (Nope: It’s Kyü-do-bə, according to the website.) And finally: What the heck is it supposed to mean?

The website offers no clues. So I ran through a list of possibilities:

1. Something to do with Córdoba, the city in Spain. Which might make sense if this were a chain of Spanish restaurants.

2. Barbeque (’que) meets (misspelled) adobe!

3. It’s inspired by adobo, a peppery marinade or seasoning mix used in the Southwest United States—or a cooking process popular in the Philippines. Only with a feminine ending. And a Q because . . . ¿quién sabe?

4. It means nothing. Qdoba.com happened to be available when the chain launched its website.

5. Your suggestion here.

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UPDATE: On Twitter, nancycc (of the excellent Nancy’s Baby Names blog) forwarded an article published in QSR magazine about Qdoba, which was originally called Z-Teca. The name change was effected by Terry Heckler of Heckler & Associates, a Seattle ad agency; according to the article, Heckler is also responsible for naming Starbucks (in 1971) and the Panera Bread chain (originally the St. Louis Bread Company). According to Heckler, Qdoba means nothing . . . and that’s its virtue. (BTW, QSR stands for quick-serve restaurant, the industry term for fast food.)

 

OK Soda

I’ve been enjoying Allan Metcalf’s new book OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word, newly published by Oxford University Press.* Metcalf is the executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, and he’s the author of another frequently-reached-for volume on my bookshelf, Predicting New Words. (I cited PNW in a recent post about failed portmanteau names.)

“OK,” Metcalf writes in an introduction, “is said to be the most frequently spoken (or typed) word on the planet, bigger even than an infant’s first word ma or the ubiquitous Coke. … It’s America’s answer to Shakespeare. It’s an entire philosophy expressed in two letters.”

Metcalf devotes almost half of OK to the word’s curious history. The late Allen Walker Read (1906-2002), whom Metcalf calls a “scholar without equal of American English,” discovered the first recorded use of OK in the March 23, 1839, edition of the Boston Morning Post, where it appeared as “o.k.,” with a clarifying “all correct” immediately following. Actually, “o.k.” stood for “oll korrect”: There was a craze in the late 1830s not just for abbreviations but for abbreviations of mangled spellings. Of these faddish coinages, only OK and “the three R’s” (reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic) survive.

All very interesting, but for me, the book’s most fascinating chapter is “The Business of OK,” which traces the paradoxical uses of OK in commerce. Why paradoxical? Because, writes Metcalf:

OK is just … OK. It is affirmative but value neutral. It affirms that something is satisfactory, but not that it stands out in any way from its peers. Would Satisfactory Soup sell? Would customers flock to a Satisfactory Coffee Shop? Would they book with a Satisfactory Travel Agency? Neither would they be stirred to patronize OK Soup, OK Coffee, or OK Travel.

On the other hand, consider the curious case of OK Soda—or, as Metcalf calls it, “Not So OK Soda.” His brief summary of the soda’s very brief history sent me rummaging through the Interwebs to learn more.

OK Soda can designed by cartoonist Daniel Clowes

OK Soda (styled as OK. Soda) was introduced by Coca-Cola in early 1993 into about 18 North American test markets—mostly mid-size cities like Austin and Denver. Coca-Cola’s CEO at the time was Roberto Goizueta, the man who had overseen the New Coke fiasco just a few years earlier; to launch OK Soda, Goizueta rehired the marketing executive directly responsible for New Coke. Ah, the mysterious ways of the Fortune 500!

OK Soda’s flavor (fruit-enhanced cola) was secondary to its attitude (affectless Gen X) and passive-aggressive marketing (the ad agency was Wieden + Kennedy, already famous for its work for Nike). The cans and the print ads featured blank-eyed portraits by alt-cartoonists Daniel Clowes (Ghost World) and Charles Burns (Black Hole). The product itself was called a carbonated “beverage” (you can detect the ironic-hipster quotes in the photo above); customers were invited to call 1-800-I-FEEL-OK and leave comments that “may be used in advertising or exploited in some other way we haven't figured out yet”; a ten-point “OK Manifesto” promulgated tepid maxims such as “There is no real secret to feeling OK” and “OK Soda may be the preferred drink of other people such as yourself.” (Source for this paragraph: the OK Soda Wikipedia entry.)

Metcalf writes about Coca-Cola’s efforts:

The company’s marketing department supposedly determined that OK was the best-known expression among all the world’s languages, and Coke was second best. They even go together: OK is Coke’s middle name (or letters). It’s possible that the worldwide success of Coke, like that of OK, involved the distinctive letters O and K and their sounds. But recognition does not necessarily mean enthusiasm.

And that information turned out to be irrelevant, anyhow. The company decided to name its product OK Soda, not OK Coke, and it was tested not all over the world but just in various locations in the United States. …

Coca-Cola even tried to get its term OK-ness added to the dictionary, with this definition: “An optimistic feeling that in spite of the complications of day-to-day life, things always work themselves out.” But you can’t change the meaning of a word by fiat, even the fiat of the world’s largest soft drink company.

OK Soda was an expensive flop; Coca-Cola aborted the product just seven months after its launch. It was never distributed nationally. Yet it enjoys an afterlife on the web (which, had it existed in 1993, might have saved the soda’s first life). There’s an “I Feel OK” page on Tribe.net, “a place for those who remember OK Soda to wax nostalgic, swap stories, and maybe even organize a petition to get it back on the market.” (That “maybe” is perfectly in keeping with OK Soda’s listless ethos.) Numerous bloggers have memorialized the product, and an OK Soda Facebook page attracted 731 followers before (fittingly) fizzling out shortly after it started.

I’m happy to report, however, that Allan Metcalf’s OK does not fizzle out. Instead, it concludes with an excellent chapter on I’m OK, You’re OK (30 years old; more than 7 million copies sold) and other exemplars of “the psychological OK,” which Metcalf calls “the self-empowering OK, a mantra of tolerance and acceptance unprecedented in our history.” He continues:

OK-ism (as we may term it) has developed without any assistance from philosophers, without any discussion among the literati or cognoscenti, without even an entry in Wikipedia. But it exerts a strong influence on us and our twenty-first-century world. OK has made tolerance more tolerable.

One can only hope.

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* I received a review copy of the book from the publisher.

On the Brand Trail: Portland, Oregon

When I travel, I turn into a brand anthropologist: I gawk at, and photograph, names and signs that locals take in stride. Last week’s brief trip to Portland via Coast Starlight was no exception.

1.

TheStandard (yes, one word), a division of StanCorp Financial Group (of course), is an insurance company that may or may not be based in New York—the website is maddeningly vague. I’d never heard of it before last week.

What caught my attention was the tagline: “Positively different.” The blue flag emblem suggests the “banner, pennant” definition of standard, but the word has multiple meanings, and I couldn’t help being slightly puzzled: Isn’t the whole point of a standard that it’s positively the same at all times?

2.

Food carts are at least as big a phenomenon in Portland as they are here in the Bay Area, with one major difference: Here the carts are nomadic; you need to follow them on Twitter to figure out where they’ll be heading next. In Portland, the carts are permanently parked along a couple of busy downtown sidewalks.

A small sampling of the dozens of food carts on Alder Street.

This takes a lot of the serendipitous fun out of the whole affair; but, on the other hand, it’s in keeping with Portland’s polite, orderly vibe. (Such courteous drivers!)

One cart’s name reminded me that I haven’t written about “Mr.” businesses in a while. (See my May 2008 post, “Mr.-y Spot.”)

As the Food Carts Portland blog notes, “Shouldn’t it be Senor Taco?” Good question.

3.

I saw a second Mr. in Southeast Portland; a friend was driving so I couldn’t shoot the sign, but I later found it online.

I’m sure top hats are a big hit with today’s prom-goers.  

Mr. Formal operates stores in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Arizona; its slogan is “Tuxedos for All Generations.” Isn’t it cute the way the cross-bar on the F resembles a bow tie?

4.

Finally, at the Portland Art Museum—the oldest art museum in the Pacific Northwest—I spotted this sign.

Photography is verboten, but the very nice security guard made an exception for me.

It seems to me that if you go to the effort and expense of building a center of modern & contemporary art, you could at the very least spell contemporary with all its syllables. And maybe spell out “and.”

I do, however, like the way the museum’s logo highlights “art”:

Yes, it’s another cartouche museum logo!

Read my March 2010 post about brand sightings in another very polite American city, Minneapolis.

Word of the Week: Consist

Consist (noun): “A lineup or sequence of railroad carriages or cars, with or without a locomotive, that form a unit.” (Source: Wiktionary.) The emphasis is on the first syllable: 'kän-sist.

Until last week, when I took the Coast Starlight up to Portland, I’d never encountered the nominative form of consist. But there it was, toward the back of the “Welcome Aboard” brochure.

 

That page opens up into a gatefold that depicts linear and overhead views of the cars. For the readers among us, there’s a page of descriptive text.

It wasn’t that I didn’t get the gist of train consist, but I was puzzled at the casual usage of what seemed to be specialized anthimeric jargon. And I was even more puzzled, after I returned home, not to find it in any of the usual reliable sources: the Oxford English Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary. I finally found it in Merriam-Webster online, which gives this definition for consist (noun):

makeup or composition (as of coal sizes or a railroad train) by classes, types, or grades and arrangement

The first known use of this sense of consist, says Merriam, was in 1898, at the height of the railroad era. But M-W declines to provide the citation.

Train consist is also familiar to model-railroad hobbyists. This dictionary of model-railroad terms defines consist as “the list and/or order in which multiple engines or train cars are lined up.” That glossary yields some other interesting terms, such as homosote—“pressed paperboard often used as a subbroadbed”—and givens and druthers, “A phrase originated by the late John Allen relating to how a model railroader should balance the list of things that can't be changed (like room size, budget, etc.) with the wants and desires of what s/he would like to be included in the railroad during the layout planning process.”

And is it possible that nominative consist has jumped the tracks? When I tweeted about train consist, I received this reply:

In a follow-up tweet, Drew clarified that the pronunciation he’d heard was “KON-sist” (with the same first-syllable emphasis as in “train consist”). He added: “I had never heard it before and assumed it was businesspeople jargon.”

Here’s something else I learned on my 18-hour rail journey: Wi-Fi is a registered trademark.

You can just barely make out the TM symbol in the headline. The tiny type at the bottom of the page says, “The term Wi-Fi® is a registered mark of the Wi-Fi Alliance®.”

The trademark registration for “Wi-Fi” was filed back in 1999, which really surprised me. I do believe, however, that the Amtrak brochure represented the first and only time I’ve seen full trademark props given to what’s become a genericized term. (Read more about the Wi-Fi Alliance here.)

I did test the Coast Starlight’s Wi-Fi, and it worked pretty well, but it was thoroughly trumped by the rest of the train experience. We curled at least three times around Mount Shasta, which was blanketed in snow (yes, in October). My fellow passengers included some genuine trainiacs with impressive tales of journeys domestic and exotic. The pace was ideal for daydreaming, and I didn’t even mind the minor delays. And here’s how perfect the Coast Starlight name is: when I awoke just before dawn and parted the curtains of my roomette, I saw the blazing Orion constellation framed in my window.

I’ll report on some of my Portland brand/language sightings later this week.

Shelf Life

 

I know Costco is all about low prices, but can’t they afford the fresh stuff?

In related antiquity news, The Name Inspector reports on a Seattle coffee shop called Ancient Grounds.

Mythfire

There’s something supernatural about the fourth-generation Honda Odyssey van.

It’s a myth and a legend! Can you prove that it exists?

 

I noticed this billboard here in Oakland, then happened to catch one of the new 30-second national TV spots for the Odyssey. The ads’ tagline—“The Van Beckons”—avoids the myth/legend theme altogether, although there’s the usual mythmaking in the storylines, which are crafted to dispel the, uh, myth that vans aren’t sexy.

The ads are cleverly and expensively produced, but this one set off my internal alarm system.

 

That’s the Platters on the soundtrack. Note that the lyric cuts off right before “… smoke gets in your eyes.” Still, I found it impossible not to think about engine fires, which probably is not what Honda intended.

Watch the other spots (“Vanquility” and “Rock Van”) on Honda’s U.S. website. Agency is RPA, based in Santa Monica.

Portmant-uh-oh

Among English speakers, there seems to be an irresistible, universal urge to coin words through blending word parts—to create what Lewis Carroll called portmanteau words. (Chortle, frabjous, and galumph are a few of Carroll’s famous portmanteaus.) But popular as they are, portmanteaus fail much more frequently than they succeed. In his book Predicting New Words, Allan Metcalf—the executive director of the American Dialect Society—estimates that only 5 percent of successful new words are blends. For every winner like brunch or smog there are countless losers like linner (coined from lunch plus dinner) and plerk (play plus work).

Those daunting odds don’t seem to be much of a deterrent, though, especially among novice name developers. Perhaps that’s because effective portmanteaus pack such a wallop. Consider Freakonomics, Edutopia, or Gymini. Each name clearly communicates two meanings while being easy to pronounce and fun to say.

Beware, though: hitting the target requires a practiced ear and semantic savvy. Without those abilities, you’re likely to miss by a mile—as do these less-than-effective portmanteau names that I’ve noticed recently.

Word of the Week: Range Anxiety

Range anxiety: “The fear of being stranded in an electric car because of insufficient battery performance – said to be a barrier to sales of electric vehicles.” (Schott’s Vocab, January 15, 2009.)

Reporter Andrea Kissack looked into the electric-car industry in a three-part series that aired on NPR earlier this month. She introduced one segment this way:

Every year, buzzwords enter the American lexicon, like “octomom” or “crowdsourcing.” Next year, “range anxiety” may top the list. It’s the fear of being stranded in an electric car because the battery has run out.

Range anxiety has been in the headlines recently because of the imminent introduction of three all-electric cars, the Nissan Leaf, the Chevy Volt, and the Coda. But the term predates those models by more than a decade, first appearing in connection with the EV1, the electric car manufactured by General Motors between 1996 and 1999. (See the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?) According to Word Spy, “the word lover’s guide to new words,” the earliest citation for range anxiety was in a September 1, 1997, article published in the San Diego Business Journal.

On August 31, 2010, the automotive blog Jalopnik broke the story that GM had filed a U.S. trademark application for range anxiety:

The application filed with the U.S. trademark office in July suggests GM wants every marketing weapon it can find when it finally starts selling the Jesus Car Chevrolet Volt — GM's Extended Range Electric Vehicle (EREV), basically a plug-in electric with a gas engine to charge the battery when needed — in a couple of months. That includes range anxiety — a fear of driving too far from your power plug.

Responding to the trademark news, a spokeswoman for Tesla, the Silicon Valley manufacturer of the $109,000 all-electric Roadster, told the Wall Street Journal:

“By all means, GM can have ‘range anxiety’ . . . To Roadster owners, the term is as irrelevant as ‘gas stop’ or ‘smog check.’ We are, however, looking into trademarking ‘Tesla grin.’”

In other electrifying trademark news, Nissan has filed for protection of the phrase “the new car.” 

October Linkfest

Or should it be Oktoberlinkfest?

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In case you didn’t notice the embedded link in my post about the Gap logo flap, allow me to formally introduce you to Your Logo Makes Me Barf, a blog with a clearly stated beat: “Bad logos, awful logos, and logos that are even worse than that.” Occasionally, YLMMB critiques barfy names, too; check out the series on “X By Design” names.

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Speaking of barfy names, Johnson, the language blog of The Economist, has compiled a little list of “novelty names that contain unnecessary punctuation, bogus foreign accents and diacriticals, random use of capitals or lower-case letters, and so on.” Commenters have been gleefully adding their own nominations. I’ve griped here about Co. and Co:, two gratuitously punctuated design/brand agencies. (Hat tip: Hanging Noodles.)

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Ever wondered who would live in the rooms pictured in “lifestyle” catalogs like Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware? Catalog Living—the creation of Los Angeles actor/writer/comedian Molly Erdman—reveals the secret, stylish lives of “Gary” and “Elaine,” using actual catalog photos and invented storylines. Here’s one of my recent favorites:

  “On a cold winter night, nothing pleases Gary and Elaine more than snuggling up in their comfy metal chairs and tossing around the decorative polyhedron.”

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Up against a writing deadline? Write or Die—“putting the ‘prod’ in productivity”—lets you set your word goal, your time goal, the grace period, and the consequences of failure (beware the Electric Shock Mode!). Via Swiss Miss.

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As regular readers know, I have a bit of a mania for man-words like mansplain and mancession. So does language maven Mark Peters, whose recent column for Good magazine explores man-caves, manssieres, Man Laws, and other hypermasculine lingo. (Oh, and he quotes me, so naturally I’m pleased.)

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The blog of British retailer Debenhams has compiled a dictionary of fashion portmanteaus to help customers decipher the meanings of neologisms like jardigan (“a thick, jacket-like cardigan”) and meggings (“male leggings”). But really: whorts? (Via Lori Burwash.)

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More fashion: Mighty Red Pen ponders the proliferation of “Sherpa-lined” garments this season, and concludes: “A Sherpa is a person. . . . So, a jacket lined with Sherpa? Ew.”

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Trademark/branding expert Kevin Houchin lays down the law—well, he’s a lawyer—on how to avoid lame names. His posts add up to a clear, concise primer on name categories, trademark strength, and brainstorming tips. I especially like this tip: “Force something unfamiliar into the mix.”

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John Gruber compares Microsoft’s press releases with Apple’s and concludes, “You can accuse Apple of hyperbole, but not opaqueness.” (Hat tip: Lance Knobel.)

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I would probably love maps even if I didn’t depend on them so pathetically. (I have a terrible sense of direction.) I especially love fanciful or imaginary maps, so I’m especially pleased to see xkcd’s Updated Map of Online Communities, a recent revision of the 2007 original. (The updated map will soon be available as a poster; you can place an order now.) Ethan Bloch of Flowtown has created his own 2010 Social Networking Map, which differs pretty significantly from xkcd’s. Meanwhile, Ian Huebert’s lovely Literary City map, which first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2009, is finally available as a poster from Electric Works in San Francisco.

Unaccountable

Capital One Bank has taken over the Montgomery St. BART station with its campaign for “new-school” banking, which involves some infinitesimal interest rate paid on savings accounts. I almost missed my train while I pondered a couple of the ads.

For the life of me, I couldn’t remember (or imagine) how Babylonians did their banking. Did the Code of Hammurabi cover direct deposits? Did the whole system collapse under the weight of all those gold shekels? And how do Iraqis—modern-day Babylonians, more or less—feel about this slur against their ancient homeland?

(On Twitter, Trochee—linguist Jeremy Kahn—suggested that the ad made sense “because cuneiform banking is so 1500 B.C.” And Chrys—another linguist—wrote, “Maybe they want you to walk like an Egyptian?” Hmm. I’ve always liked that song.)

Then there was this:

Stumped again! Is Capital One dissing the First Thanksgiving Pilgrims, with their white collars and buckled shoes and muskets? Did they even have banks? (Trochee again: “The Pilgrims were notorious for their proscription of usury. No wonder C1 doesn’t like them.”)

But maybe Capital One was thinking of different pilgrims—from the Canterbury Tales, perhaps? The Summoner’s Tale had something to do with charitable gifts, if memory serves. No? Then how about pilgrims to Mecca? Nope: Islam prohibits interest on loans. Well then, do you suppose CapOne is gunning for Pilgrim Bank?

(On Twitter, Hubbit wrote: “Imagine John Wayne pitching that . . . ‘Quit banking like a pilgrim, pilgrim!’”)

In the TV version of the “pilgrim” ad, actor Jerry Stiller (who played George Costanza’s father on Seinfeld) harangues a crowd. I couldn’t find this ad online, but I did find older Capital One TV spots featuring Visigoths and Vikings. What any of these folks have to do with Capital One’s tagline—“What’s in Your Wallet?”—is a mystery to me.

So I’m still clueless. And I have another question: Just how do you write a capital one, anyway?