Fritinancy

AutoThink

Last year I wrote several posts about the proliferation of brand names and ad campaigns using “Think” and “Rethink”: Think Indian, Think! Shoes, Think Bank, Saks Fifth Avenue’s “Think About It,” and so on.

Now Volkswagen has plunged into the Think tank with a new ad campaign, “Think Blue.”

 

Full-page ad for the MoMA/VW partnership in The New Yorker’s June 6, 2011, issue.

VW’s “Think Blue” website elaborates:

Think Blue is more than just food for thought; it’s a state of mind. It’s a global call to action—sustainable ecological action.

But “Think Blue” is also more than a state of mind; it’s a history lesson.

 

Word of the Week: Duckface

Duckface: “The face made if you push your lips together in a combination of a pout and a pucker, giving the impression you have larger cheekbones and bigger lips” (Urban Dictionary word of the day, June 9, 2010).

From Semaj’s Blog Your Blog. (“You’re not a duck, so knock it off.”)

The duckface-photo phenomenon has inspired a backlash, writes Sarah Henry in the New York Times (“Duck Hunting on the Internet,” May 26, 2011):

“Stop doing it. It isn’t sexy,” proclaims the mission statement of the Web site antiduckface.com, whose content consists of photos of people making a duckface, and thousands of disparaging comments. There’s also an anti-duckface Facebook page, with over 16,000 likes, and a Twitter feed, with over 1,500 followers.

Henry antedates the term to the 1990s:

The 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral” has one of the first known mentions of the term. Duckface is the nickname bestowed by Hugh Grant’s Sloane Ranger posse upon his pouting girlfriend.

However, I found a much earlier reference in a review by Dwight Garner of Alfred Kazin’s Journals that also appeared in the Times on May 26. Kazin’s journals, which cover the years 1933 through 1998, are “packed with deft and often acid portraits” of the literary critic’s contemporaries, Garner writes. Including this one: In 1978, Kazin referred to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the future Supreme Court justice, as “duck face.”

"Comfortable in Its Own Skin"

Here’s half of a two-page ad for the Buick Regal Turbo, which I spotted in the New Yorker last month. I stared at the headline for several minutes.

 

 “Luxury that’s comfortable in its own skin.”

Now, I’ve seen and heard “comfortable in my/your/his/her own skin” plenty of times. (The idiom was imported and translated from the French “bien dans sa peau” and may owe its current popularity to the 2005 best-seller French Women Don’t Get Fat, in which author Mireille Guiliano used bien dans sa peau to express “the weight at which I can say, ‘I feel good and I look good.’”) I think every single episode of What Not to Wear—disclosure: I’m an addict—has included someone marveling aloud at how, thanks to new clothes, hairstyle, and makeup, the makeoveree is “comfortable in my/her own skin.”

Not only that: I’d recently heard the phrase in another ad campaign. In March, Dove Men+Care* (owned by Unilever) introduced “Journey to Comfort,” a series of awww-inspiring commercials in which male athletes talk about their families and their feelings. Each ad concludes with the athlete saying “I’m [his name here], and I’m definitely comfortable in my own skin.” (Watch the ads here.)

But I’m pretty sure the Buick ad was my first encounter with “comfortable in its own skin.” And frankly, it made me uncomfortable. For the rest of the day I asked myself questions like: Does luxury have skin? Do cars have skin? How does luxury get comfortable? Why am I spending time worrying about this?

Universitat Longa, Motto Brevis

In the course of researching classical vocabulary for a naming project, I found myself on the Wikipedia page that lists college and university mottos. There I found plenty of Latin and Greek: more than one “Fiat Lux,” which happens to be the motto of my own alma mater; the guaranteed-inoffensive “Sol Lucet Omnibus” (“The sun shines over everyone”) from Lusiada University in Lisbon; and the admirably concise and stoic “Surgite!” (“Push on!”) from Brock University in St Catherine’s, Ontario. I also found lots of truthy mottos: Harvard’s “Veritas,” Yale’s “Lux et Veritas,” Howard’s “Veritas et Utilitas,” the University of Łódź’s “Veritas et Libertas.” Unsurprisingly, Cardiff University has a Welsh motto (“Gwirionedd Undod A Chytgord,” which translates to “Truth, unity, and harmony”) and the Universidad del Pais Vasco has a Basque motto (the incantatory “Eman ta zabal zazu,” which means “Give and spread it,” and no, I’m not sure what “it” is).

But there were also revelations. Who knew—not I, that’s for sure—that Stanford University had a German motto? It’s “Die Luft der Freiheit weht,” and it means “The wind of freedom blows.” Oh yes, there’s a story behind that motto; Stanford’s former president, Gerhard Casper, told it at some length in a 1995 address.

If you were on Jeopardy and had to name the US university better known for its men’s basketball team than for its Anglo-Norman motto, what would be your guess? OK, I’ll give it to you: It’s Seton Hall, in South Orange, New Jersey, and the motto is “Hazard Zet Forward”—“Despite hazards, move forward.”

Two Canadian colleges have Native (First Nation) mottos: Thompson Rivers University’s is “Quansem Ilep” (“To strive ahead” in Secwepemc) and the University of Northern British Columbia’s is “En Cha Huná” (“Other people have their point of view” in the Dakelh language—and wouldn’t that be a lovely motto for the entire country of Canada?). Two Canadian colleges use Scottish Gaelic mottos—“Mo Shùile Togam Suas” (University of Calgary, “I will lift up my eyes”) and “Theid Dìchioll Air Thoiseach” (Cape Breton University, “Perseverance will triumph”). That appears to be two more Scottish Gaelic college mottos than you’ll find in all of Scotland.

I love that Macquarie University, in Sydney, takes its motto—“And Gladly Teche”—from the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. As far as I can tell, only Gallaudet, the private university in Washington for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, has an Aramaic motto; is it fitting that the motto is the nearly unpronounceable “Ephphata” (“Be opened,” from the New Testament)? I found it curious that five Dutch universities have English mottos. (“For quality of life”? Really, Wageningen University, I think you can do better.) I’m much more taken with Virije Universiteit’s “Gewoon bijzonder,” which means “Simply extraordinary” and seems, even to this Dutch-illiterate, like it would be fun to say.

Hard as it is to pick favorites, I’m going to single out one motto I found particularly charming and plain-spoken. It’s from an institution that was founded in 1894 in Swannanoa, North Carolina, as a high school for poor farm boys. In the 1920s it became a coed vocational school named for Warren H. Wilson, former superintendent of the Presbyterian Church’s Department of Church and Country Life; in 1967 it became a four-year college. In 1952 it earned the distinction of being one of the first colleges in the South to desegregate when college residents voted 54 to 1 to invite Alma Shippy, an African-American woman from Swannanoa, to join their ranks.

And the motto of Warren Wilson College? “We’re not for everyone... but then, maybe you’re not everyone.”

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The title of this post is my Dog Latin variation on Ars longa, vita brevis (“Art lasts, life is brief”). The image is the seal of Thammasat University in Bangkok, whose motto translates to “Be the finest, be fair, be the main engine of the society.” Thammasat also has an unofficial motto: “I love Thammasat because Thammasat teaches me to love the people.”

Peachy

You may already search the Web on an Apple, make a phone call on a BlackBerry, and go shopping with a Plum card. Get ready to refill your fruit basket: Next year you’ll be able to fly on a Peach.

Peach is the name of Japan’s new budget airline, which will begin domestic flights next March from its base at Kansai International Airport. Flights to other Asian destinations are expected to begin in May 2012.

According to a press release, “Peach” was chosen because of the fruit’s association with “youthfulness, energy, generosity, and longevity.” The Japanese word for peach is momo—the name of the well-known Manhattan restaurant group Momofuku means “lucky peach”—but it’s the English word that will appear in all branding materials. The domain is flypeach.com.

 

Peach Aviation CEO Shinichi Inoue with an airplane model.

 

Counterintuitively—to English-speakers, anyway—the official color of Peach isn’t peach: it’s fuchsia.

“Peach” may seem like an original choice for an airline brand, but in fact it’s a recycled name. Peach Air was a UK-based charter airline (part of Caledonian Air) that operated in 1997 and 1998. It’s fondly remembered on some aviation forums.

At least one publication mixed up the two Peaches. The online NewTimesWorld yesterday illustrated a story about the new Japanese airline with a photo of the defunct British carrier:

 The old Peach, not the new Peach.

I detected another echo of the past—indeed, the British past—in the Peach Aviation press materials. According to Peach CEO Shinichi Inoue, “Our airline will also reflect the smart sophistication that has come to represent the words ‘Cool Japan’.” At least the late, unlamented “Cool Britannia” alluded to something recognizable: “Rule, Britannia.”

UPDATE: Fast Company’s design blog reports that the interiors of Peach aircraft were designed by Neil Denari, “the L.A. starchitect behind the futuristic HL23 tower on the High Line.” The verdict: “It’s an aesthetic that falls somewhere between Virgin's sexy, clubby cabins and a box of Pocky sticks, which was roughly the point.”

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Hat tip: Rochelle Kopp (@japanintercult).

Ad-tacular!

There are other ways to coin new words besides smooshing word-parts together, but you’d never know it from reading the ads in the June 2011 Allure (the issue with the waxworks January Jones on the cover).

Here’s what I’m talking about.

 

 

“Staycation” was how we weathered the Recession Summer of 2008. “Selfcation” had its moment in 2010. This year our ambitions are even more modest: we’re just hanging out at the beach with our stubble. I suspect a lot of hipster/Hollywood dudes have been shave-cationing for years, but it’s nice to know we ladies can also “skip a day or two.” (See other examples of this Schick campaign.)

 

Brazilian + brilliant = Braziliant. From Essie, “America’s nail salon expert,” whose palette also includes “Vermillionaire,” “Jamaica Me Crazy,” and “Tart Deco.” Read more about how company founder Essie Weingarten comes up with color names: “I think about a moment, or something that inspires me, like a summer vacation.” Or maybe a shave-cation?

 

Thanks, Chevy Malibu, for spelling out the pronunciation of “fancytastic.” I’d never have guessed. (The male model appears to have been photographed in mid-shave-cation.)

 

 

Plantscription, an “anti-aging serum” from Origins, contains Anogeissus, which I thought was as invented as “Plantscription” but turns out to be the name of a tree species. Anogeissus trees contain large amounts of tannin. So, basically, if you want to treat your face as though it were a slab of cowhide, this is the product for you.

Word of the Week: Spamalytics

Spamalytics: A methodology for measuring the conversion rate of spam. Coined from “spam” and “analytics.”

From a New York Times article by John Markoff (“Study Sees Way to Win Spam Fight”), published May 20, 2011:

For years, a team of computer scientists at two University of California campuses has been looking deeply into the nature of spam, the billions of unwanted e-mail messages generated by networks of zombie computers controlled by the rogue programs called botnets. They even coined a term, “spamalytics,” to describe their work.

That coinage appeared in a 2008 paper, “Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion,” by Chris Kanich, Christian Kreibich, et al. The introduction sets the tone, which is atypically zippy for an academic paper:

Spam-based marketing is a curious beast. We all receive the advertisements—“Excellent hardness is easy!” —but few of us have encountered a person who admits to following through on this offer and making a purchase. And yet, the relentlessness by which such spam continually clogs Internet inboxes, despite years of energetic deployment of anti-spam technology, provides undeniable testament that spammers find their campaigns profitable. Someone is clearly buying. But how many, how often, and how much?

The Freakonomics blog summarized the team’s methodology in a November 2008 post that used “spamonomics” (of course) instead of “spamalytics”:

After taking over part of an existing botnet, the Berkeley team waged its own spam campaign, sending out almost 350 million pieces of junk e-mail over 26 days. By the end of their trial, they had netted a whopping 28 sales. That’s about one response for every 12.5 million e-mails sent, a conversion rate of less than 0.00001 percent.

In a new paper, to be presented tomorrow at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in Oakland, California, the team reveals that “95 percent of the credit card transactions for the spam-advertised drugs and herbal remedies they bought were handled by just three financial companies — one based in Azerbaijan, one in Denmark and one in Nevis, in the West Indies” (Markoff’s summary). The paper itself concludes:

[I]f U.S. issuing banks (i.e., banks that provide credit cards to U.S. consumers) were to refuse to settle certain transactions (e.g., card-not-present transactions for a subset of Merchant Category Codes) with the banks identified as supporting spam-advertised goods, then the underlying enterprise would be dramatically demonetized. Furthermore, it appears plausible that such a “financial blacklist” could be updated very quickly (driven by modest numbers of undercover buys, as in our study) and far more rapidly than the turn-around time to acquire new banking resources—a rare asymmetry favoring the anti-spam community.

“I'm Sorry, I'm a Little Confused. What's the Name of Your Company?”

 

Brushfire Media? Dis Crunk Media? KUM Digital? Devil’s Deuce Interactive? Angel Dump LLC? Christmilk Digital? Cranky Lesbian Digital?

One thing we know for sure: Absolutely no brandcuffs.

Source: College Humor, via @lalorek.

Something for Nothing

Good news for procrastinators and cheapskates: Visual Thesaurus has quietly released all content older than three months from its confinement behind a paywall. That means you can now read almost all my Candlepower columns about names, brands, and the language of commerce—dating back to August 2006—without paying a dime. 

A few examples of my VT oeuvre:

Decoding Fashionspeak (April 5, 2010): The odd abbreviations, the peculiar adjectives, the bossy imperatives.

Bad Science (July 14, 2008): How DNA, exponential, paradigm shift, and other mathematical/scientific terms became appropriated and skewed by corporate wordslingers.

Queuing Up (February 7, 2011): Why are business names that start with Q—like Quid, Quora, Qrank, and Qire—suddenly so ubiquitous?

Read, enjoy, leave a comment!

Naturally, you should still subscribe to Visual Thesaurus. For one thing, it’s just $19.95 a year. For another, who wants to wait three months for good writing about words and language by the likes of Mike Pope, Dennis Baron, Neal Whitman, and Orin Hargraves?

Gold Enough for You?

Chipotle Mexican Grill is “celebrating 18 years of gold ingredients” by wrapping its burritos in gold-colored foil. Big whoop, right? Well, the wall-to-wall ads in San Francisco’s Montgomery Street BART station make it look like a Very Big Whoop indeed. This one wins a gold medal for Best Punning Use of the Periodic Table in a Fast Food Restaurant Advertisement:

 

The other ads run the gamut from informative to moderately clever.

I do like “Unlimited Time Only.”

 

Is it just me, or do those images actually resemble shiny poop?

 

The promotion included a “Wrap What You Love” contest (grand prize: $10,000) that invited customers to submit photos of stuff they’d wrapped in gold foil. You can see the finalists here, and watch comedian/author/Chipotle spokescrafter Amy Sedaris undertake her own wrapping project here.