Fritinancy

Heavenly Soles

Stop reading right now if you’re offended by irreverence. Because Canadian shoe designer/retailer Fluevog has pulled out all the sacrilegious stops with its “Miracles” collection (or “family,” in Fluevog-speak). Each of the four styles is named for a New Testament Christian miracle, and the copy is impishly impious.

“Cana”

 

“Lanciano”

“Fatima”

“Lourdes”

Click on a style name to read about the miracle it honors (or dishonors, depending on how much you revere shoes).

Here’s what I mean about the copy (from the Cana page):

Whether you are turning water into wine, or making shoes from a vision in your head, Miracles happen everyday* (at least they do here at Fluevog).

The shoes are made mostly by hand in a Peruvian factory; an online video depicts “the creation of a Fluevog Miracle.”

I’ve written previously about Fluevog’s whimsical website—in particular the wacky FAQ section. The brand is named for founder and chief designer John Fluevog, who turns his unusual surname into an asset: retired styles are memorialized in an online “Flueseum”; customer reviews are “review-vogs”; and the company motto is “Boring shoes? No ‘Voggin’ way!”

Other themed collections include Operetta (whose style names—Mirella, Bartoli, Flagstad, etc.—honor opera stars past and present); Radio (NPR, PRI, CBC, etc.); and Coffee (Macchiato, Arabica, Kona, etc.).

I’ve never owned a pair of Fluevogs myself, but I’ve heard from satisfied customers that these shoes are as well made and comfortable as they are creative. That’s sort of a miracle in itself.

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* Dear Fluevog: I love this concept, but please change “Miracles happen everyday” to “Miracles happen every day.” Everyday is an adjective.

Word of the Week: Gap-Lash

Gap-lash: The strong negative reaction to Gap’s redesigned logo, which was revealed without fanfare on the retailer’s website October 4. Coined from “Gap” and “backlash.”

 Before

After

In an October 8 post, the media and gossip website Gawker called the new logo one of “Branding’s Greatest Misses.”

The main problem: Gap just stuck the logo on their website without bothering to tell anyone they were rebranding, or why. The secondary problem: the logo is dumb.

The first appearance of Gap-lash may have been in a headline on the Forbes blog MarketShare. In the accompanying story, reporter Ken Bruno wrote:

Online, consumers are buzzing about the change and are posting gripes on Facebook. “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. The original Gap logo is classic and iconic. By changing it.. you’ve completed destroyed what it took 20+ years to build,” one Facebook user says on Gap’s page on the social networking site. One website lets visitors design their own “New Gap” logo. A parody Twitter account has also surfaced – @GapLogo.

Also on Twitter, #Gaplash briefly became a trending topic.

Although many observers complained that the new logo look amateurish, it was in fact designed by Gap’s longtime design agency, Laird + Partners. The logo has drawn criticism from sources as diverse as the Harvard Business Review (“Like most companies, the Gap just doesn’t understand the game-changing power of design”), Fast Company (“a total Gap in understanding what branding is all about”), Your Logo Makes Me Barf (“New Gap Logo Is a Box of Fail”), and the AdWeek blog AdFreak  (“[M]aybe it’s intentionally shitty?”)

That last comment was provoked by a post on Gap’s Facebook page that chirped, “We know this logo created a lot of buzz and we’re thrilled to see passionate debates unfolding! So much so we’re asking you to share your designs. We love our version, but we’d like to see other ideas. Stay tuned for details in the next few days on this crowd sourcing project.”

Commenters swiftly piled on: “Exactly WHO gave input on the new logo? Chimps?” “What do crowds know? theyre [sic] mindless sheep! youre [sic] a brand leader, SO LEAD!” “Good graphic designers don't work for free. They understand the value of what good design can do for your business.”

One of the more eloquent responses came from Mike Monteiro, a principal at Mule Design in San Francisco, in his agency's blog. “Dear Gap, I have your new logo,” the post began.

It’s unbelievably good. Fantastic, even. I’m convinced it’s what you need.

It draws on the deep history of the brand and evokes the simple understated elegance that the world has come to expect from The Gap. But it also reaches forward. It provides hope and just the right amount of desperate desire and anxiety brought on by fear of loneliness that the Twitter demographic wants. (Yes, men in their mid-30’s.) . . .

So as much as I’d like to just show you the greatest logo I’ve ever made for anyone . . . I’d like to be properly compensated for it. Because I put a lot of time and effort into it. And it’s how I earn my living. . . .

And for the sake of full disclosure I should let you know that I’ve also frequently shopped at your stores. You sell good stuff. But never in my experience has any of your employees offered me a free pair of pants because the ones I was wearing looked bad. I wouldn’t expect them to. Their job is to sell me clothes.

My job is to sell design.

I believe we understand each other. I anxiously await your call and look forward to negotiating a fair value for the greatest logo on Earth.

Other terms newly coined to describe the logo controversy have included Gapocalypse and Gapgate. I’ve written previously about the popularity of –alypse as a combining suffix (see Word of the Week: Inaugalypse). As for –gate compounds, they’ve proliferated ever since “Watergate” became a metaphor for “scandal” in the early 1970s. For a long list of –gate scandals (not yet updated to include Gapgate), see this Wikipedia entry.

And for some perspective, see AdFreak’s compilation of 30 other corporate logo redesigns. 

UPDATE: PR and corporate-communications professionals tell Ragan.com what they think about the new logo and Gap’s branding strategy. (Hat tip: Rob Reinalda.)

UPDATE 2: In a Facebook update posted late on the afternoon of October 11, Gap announced that it would be scrapping the new logo, effective immediately. The press release reads in part:

We’ve learned a lot in this process. And we are clear that we did not go about this in the right way. We recognize that we missed the opportunity to engage with the online community.  This wasn’t the right project at the right time for crowd sourcing. 

Co., Meet Co:

A couple of weeks ago I introduced you to Co:, the “brand innovation studio” that recently set up shop in New York. Yes, the colon is part of the name.

Now comes news (to me, anyway) of Co.Design, the design agency launched in June by Fast Company magazine. Yes, the period is part of the name.

Nice logo, but…

 

Editor Noah Robischon explains Co.’s mission:

Every day this Web site will showcase the people, products and projects that bring design and business into direct contact. Controversies will be front and center here, alongside great designers speaking their minds in blog posts and comments, and plenty of eye candy. Design is a big word, but all are welcome here.

(“Design is a big word”? In which dictionary? Perhaps Noah meant “world.”)

Co. is in New York, too. I think its people should get together with Co:’s people for a friendly exchange of controversies and eye candy. Over cocoa, maybe.

Nicely Named: Punny Business

Wordplay isn’t a requirement for a successful name; most of the time, in fact, attempts at punning fall flat or try too hard. So it’s my pleasure to share some names that are both amusing and effective. Coincidentally, all of these names belong to small businesses or blogs.

Les Cent Culottes. The name of this high-end San Francisco boutique, which specializes in French lingerie, is a bilingual pun. It means “the hundred knickers,” but it’s also a homophone of “les sans-culottes”—“those without knee breeches”—the term coined during the French Revolution to describe the rebellious underclass, whose members wore long pantaloons instead of aristocratic knee-length ones. I love the charming tricolor logo . . .

. . . but something bothers me: With their stuff selling for an average of $125 per lacy underthing, couldn’t Les Cent Culottes afford a more attractive web design? And hasn’t someone told them that in the United States, the dollar sign precedes the amount? Zut alors!

Velveteen Rabbi. Rachel Barenblat, a rabbinical student in Lanesboro, Massachusetts, confesses on her About page that she borrowed her blog’s clever name—a play on the title of the classic children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit—from a cartoon by Jennifer Berman. (It’s also the source of Barenblat’s tagline: “When can I run and play with the real rabbis?”) “Over the years since I first found it,” Barenblat writes, “the postcard has become shorthand for how I see myself, at least as far as Judaism is concerned.” Barenblat’s thoughtful, witty writing earned her a spot on Time magazine’s first annual blog index, in 2008. She’ll be ordained in January 2011, but I hope she keeps her blog’s wonderful name even after she becomes “real.”

Male-Pattern Boldness. I’m pretty sure I discovered this blog through Already Pretty, Sally McGraw’s well-written blog about style, body image, and a lot more. (Already Pretty is a very good name, too, but it’s not a pun. Sorry, Sally!) I love the chutzpah of “Male-Pattern Boldness” and I get a big kick out of its subtitle: “Proud to be the world’s most popular men’s sewing blog!” Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that the blogger, Peter Lappin, is a terrific writer. And bald.

Achtuning. So what would you call an auto shop that services German cars? The logo substitutes an exclamation mark for the “i,” but I’m oddly OK with that. The shop’s in Redmond, Washington, which probably means lots of Microsoft business.

Pride and Pedigree. This dog-day-care/grooming business in Oakland’s Uptown neighborhood takes its lofty name from Jane Austen, whose writing may also have inspired the 19th-century capitalization style: “Our Handling and Care philosophy includes the application of Training Methods that complement the life skills and polite behavior you are practicing  at home.” P and P could have been pushed the tongue-in-cheek humor a little further, in this Reader’s considered Opinion, but on the whole, good dog!

Language Lessons for Living with Less

My latest column for Visual Thesaurus looks at new (and not-so-new) terms for belt-tightening, making do, and living the downsized life. To read the article you’ll need to be a paid-up subscriber (just $19.95 a year!), but you frugalistas are in luck: I’m giving away a free sample today.

Sixers. Maybe you’re “sick and tired of consumerism” like Sally Bjornsen, author of The Great American Apparel Diet blog, which challenges participants to abstain from shopping for a year. Maybe you’re obsessed with efficiency like Dean Kakrides, who works for a product-innovation company and who told the New York Times that minimizing his wardrobe “freed a lot of bandwidth in my head.” Or maybe you’re just game for a creative challenge, like the two 30-something ad-agency women who earlier this year launched Six Items or Less, “a global experiment examining the power of what we don’t wear.” The 100 or so people who signed up at Six Items or Less took a vow to wear only six items of clothing (excluding shoes, underwear, and accessories) for a month. Participants called themselves “Sixers,” and sometimes referred to their shared activity as “fashion fasting” or “the shopping diet.” (A book titled The Shopping Diet: Spend Less and Get More was released in August of this year. Its author is Philip Block, a “premiere celebrity stylist,” which is certainly amusing if not strictly ironic.)

 Read the full text of “But Wait—There’s Less!”

Naming Notes

Some of the news I’ve tweeted about lately:

1. Is it my dirty mind or Barnes & Noble’s? Last year they launched the Nook. This week  it’s the PubIt! publishing platform. There’s something about the shape of that T… (And don't get me started on the exclamation mark.)

2. Celebrity Cruises has a new ship, the Celebrity Reflection, whose “uniquely unordinary” (huh?) restaurant is named Qsine. I think that’s supposed to suggest “cuisine,” but all I could think of was a math function. (More misbegotten Q-names here and here.)

3. Google’s new link shortener, goo.gl, is now public. One of its advantages: it will display a list of links you shortened in the past. Wondering what .gl stands for? It’s the Greenland country code. (More about domain hacks here.)

4. “Alexa Chung for Madewell Christian Skinny Jeans.” No Jews need apply? (Read about other offensive jeans names here.)

5. I checked. There really is a Nofing Way in Red Feather Lakes, Colorado. Just in case you don’t trust the photographic evidence. (Hat tip: Diane Fischler.)

Word of the Week: Nevertiree

Nevertiree: A wealthy person who chooses never to retire but rather to pursue a life of nevertirement.

A global survey of 2,000 high-net-worth people, conducted by Barclay’s Wealth, found that 60 percent of rich people in the United Kingdom “want to keep working and will never retire.”

The findings show that the concept of Nevertirement is expected to become more popular over the coming years, with 70% of respondents under the age of 45 saying that they will always be involved in some form of work. Whilst a desire to remain in work might be expected to chime with business owners and entrepreneurs, the findings apply to all wealthy respondents, with 57% of those who inherited their wealth saying they too will continue working in later life.

High net worth was defined as having investable assets of £1 million or the equivalent.

The U.K. leads the way among developed economies in the percentage of nevertirees-to-be, followed by Ireland (59 percent), Monaco (58 percent), United States (54 percent), and Spain (44 percent).

The study made no mention of the other category of nevertirees—people who will keep working forever because they can’t afford to retire.

Nevertiree and nevertirement appear to be very new words, possibly coined by Barclay’s. The earliest citations I found were dated September 26, 2010, and they all refer to the Barclay’s Wealth report. (You can read the complete report, “The Age Illusion: How the Wealthy Are Redefining Their Retirement,” here.)

Nevertiree is included a glossary of recession-era words and phrases posted last week in the Time blog “It’s Your Money.” Other terms include accidentally retired, reluctant breadwinner, and burrito factor (“a means for analyzing an item's value, in which the cost of the item is measured by how many burritos you could buy with the same money”). One of the words on the list, 99er, was a Fritinancy Word of the Week in August.

Hat tip: Schott’s Vocab.

The World in Other Languages

A couple of views from my bookshelf:

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Japanese used to have a color word, ao, that spanned both green and blue. In the modern language, however, ao has come to be restricted mostly to blue shades, and green is usually expressed by the word midori (although even today ao can still refer to the green of freshness or unripeness—green apples, for instance, are called ao ringo). when the first traffic lights were imported from the United States and installed in Japan in the 1930s, they were just as green as anywhere else. Nevertheless, in common parlance the go light was dubbed ao shingoo, perhaps because the three primary colors on Japanese artists’ palettes are traditionally aka (red), kiiro (yellow), and ao. The label ao for a green light did not appear so out of the ordinary at first, because of the remaining associations of the word ao with greenness. But over time, the discrepancy between the green color and the dominant meaning of the word ao began to feel jarring. Nations with a weaker spine might have opted for the feeble solution of simply changing the official name of the go light to midori. Not so the Japanese. Rather than alter the name to fit reality, the Japanese government decreed in 1973 that reality should be altered to fit the name: henceforth, go lights would be a color that corresponded to the dominant meaning of ao. Alas, it was impossible to change to color to real blue, because Japan is party to an international convention that ensures road signs have a measure of uniformity around the globe. The solution was thus to make the ao light as bluish as possible while still being officially green.

--From Through the Looking Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, by Guy Deutscher (Metropolitan Books, 2010).*

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Persian, Dilorom told me, had only one word for crying, whereas Old Uzbek had one hundred. Old Uzbek had words for wanting to cry and not being able to, for being caused to sob by something, for loudly crying like thunder in the clouds, for crying in gasps, for weeping inwardly or secretly, for crying ceaselessly in a high voice, for crying in hiccups, and for crying while uttering the sound hay hay. Old Uzbek had special verbs for being unable to sleep, for speaking while feeding animals for being a hypocrite, for gazing imploringly into a lover’s face, for dispersing a crowd.

It was all just like a Borges story—except that Borges stories are always so short, whereas life in Samarkand kept dragging obscurely on and on.

--From The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, by Elif Batuman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).**

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Note: I received a review copy of Through the Looking Glass from the publisher. I found The Possessed in the Oakland Public Library.

 

Photo from Personal Evolution blog.

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* I haven’t yet finished reading Through the Looking Glass, but I’ve been paying attention to the response to the book among linguists. Here, for example, is The Lousy Linguist’s critique (in a nutshell: “too light weight for me”); and here is Derek Bickerton in the New York Times Sunday Book Review (summary: Deutscher’s writing is “chatty and accessible” … but “he burdens his findings with more theoretical weight than they can bear”).

** I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of linked essays. Not only is Batuman an engaging and literate writer, but the back-cover description is very amusing: “If you’re going to read just one book about conference planning, Isaac Babel, Leo Tostoy, boys’ leg contests, giant apes, Uzbek poetry, the life of the mind, and resignation of the soul—seek no farther: THIS IS THE BOOK FOR YOU!!!” Also, the cover illustration was done by the peerless Roz Chast.