Fritinancy

Hi-yo, I-O!

Company names follow trends just as surely as baby names do. For a few years, a misguided belief in Google magic led to a spate of double-o names like Thoof, Snooth, and YooGuu. I’ve written more recently about an uptick in names that begin with Q.

Here’s another new trend: i-o suffixes.

Many of the new i-o names are in fact .io names whose domains were purchased through NIC.io, the registry for the British Indian Ocean Territory. (The territory comprises about 1,000 islands in the Indian Ocean, the largest of which is Diego Garcia—“a tropical, footprint-shaped coral atoll”—which is lovely to know but utterly irrelevant to the companies I’m talking about here.) An .io domain is more expensive than a .com or a .net—about $96 a year—but may be worth the extra expense if the domain you’re burning to own is otherwise unobtainable.

An .io suffix can open up an ocean of real-word names. Someone in Germany has registered Ontar.io (and may be selling it). A gentleman in Ann Arbor, Michigan, owns Stud.io (but it redirects to Shutterver.se, which uses the Swedish country domain). Pat.io is, naturally, taken. So are Adag.io and Arpegg.io.

Increasingly, though, .io is being used to create coined names. Here I-O may represent input/output, a term beloved of IT types. (i/o Ventures, in San Francisco, invests in early-stage technology companies; its domain is Ventures.io.)

Not all of the new eye-ohs depend on .io; some use the “traditional” .com domain. These names often sound like playfully retro slang, such as daddy-o (dadd.io is taken) or cheerio (cheer.io is taken).

My favorite I-O isn’t a tech company; it’s an Oregon winery, EIEIO & Company, that has an elegant logo and a domain worthy of Old MacDonald himself: onhisfarm.com.

 

Here are some other I-O names I’ve come across:

Possessed

Yesterday, the daily deal site Living Social sent me a half-price offer for a San Francisco restaurant with a wondrously possessive approach to naming: Two Jack’s Nik’s Place.

 

Imagine having to say that name on the phone 50 times a day.

Not just “Jack’s Nik’s” but “Two Jack’s Nik’s”? What could it mean? The website’s vagueness is compounded by sloppy editing, but the site does indicate that this restaurant, at 401 Haight Street, is a second-generation eatery. Its predecessors, both called simply Two Jack’s, are still open for business in San Francisco’s Bayview and Visitacion Valley neighborhoods. But neither of the founders was named Jack. Here’s what the home page says; I’ve done no editing except to spare you the all-caps text:

Two Jack’s Nik’s Place is a fresh twist on a 30
year San Franciscan tradition. Two Jack’s on
Haight Street first opened it’s doors in 1977
and the owners, Almeta and Stephen Perry,
introduced a unique style and unmistakable
quality of southern fried fish to the San
Francisco Bay Area.  Now 30 years later their
daughter Erica aka “Nikki”, along with her
family are continuing the family tradition by
providing the great quality with a few new
touches.  Join us and enjoy!

Speaking of “enjoy,” the proofreaders among you will relish correcting all the errors in that passage.*

“Two Jack’s Nik’s” is a tongue-twister and a head-scratcher. If there were two Jacks—maybe two jacks, as in cards or car-repair equipment?—why does the apostrophe appear before and not after the “s”? Why an apostrophe at all? Was there once someone nicknamed “Two Jack”? That might be a tale worth telling.

By now I think I can see several of you waving your arms and shouting another sibilantly possessive restaurant name. And yes, I too made the association with Ruth’s Chris Steak House, a national chain with more than 100 restaurants, including one in San Francisco. At least Ruth’s Chris has a story worth telling. Here’s my summary of the Funding Universe account:

The original Chris Steak House had been opened by Chris Matulich in New Orleans; after the place went bankrupt, Ruth Fertel—a native of  Happy Jack (!), Louisiana—scraped up the money to buy it in May 1965. Against formidable odds (including Hurricane Betsy, which devastated New Orleans later that year), the restaurant thrived. When Fertel decided to open a second New Orleans location, Chris Matulich sued to prevent her from using the name he’d established. So Fertel simply added her own first name.

Me, I’d have proposed a complete renaming. Happy Jack Steak House, anyone? The humor magazine McSweeney’s has a few other ideas, including “Kate’s Keith Steak House.”

As for Two Jack’s Nik’s Place—well, it has a respectable number of four- and five-star reviews on Yelp. And with a single exception, every reviewer spells it “Two Jacks,” without the apostrophe. Listen to your customers, TJNP!

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* I counted eight mistakes, a 10 percent error rate that does not attest to “great quality.” The rest of the website could also benefit from a red pen: I caught “avacado,” “Bellini’s” (as a plural), and “Visitation” Valley. (The neighborhood retains the Spanish spelling.) Sometimes there’s an apostrophe in “Nik’s” and sometimes it disappears. Oh, and I’d advise against naming a burger “Anais.” It’s just not worth the rump-roast jokes.

Word of the Week: Oubliette

Oubliette: A dungeon whose only entrance or exit is a trapdoor in its ceiling. Pronounced bl-t. From French oublier, to forget. Oubliette’s acceptance in English is generally credited to Sir Walter Scott, who used it in Ivanhoe (1819): “The place was utterly dark—the oubliette, as I suppose, of their accursed convent.”

Fans of suspense literature and cinema will no doubt have vivid recollections of the oubliette scene in The Silence of the Lambs.

Oubliette makes a more recent appearance in a feature story in the Summer 2011 issue of California Magazine, the publication of the University of California Alumni Association. Here’s how Vicki Haddock begins her profile of a Cal alumna:

Wendy Northcutt ’91 has made a host of obscure people famous, and although very few lived to savor their notoriety, she anticipates one day sharing their dubious honor. It almost happened when a recent heat wave gave her the idea to “air-condition” her sweltering home: She pried up an oubliette floor grate in her hallway, intending to install a fan to suck up the basement’s cooler air. But she left to answer the phone, and hours later she strode back down the hall and obliviously stepped into the gaping hole. In the milliseconds as her body swooshed down, she thought “Oh nooooooooooo! I’m gonna win my own Darwin Award ….”

Haddock notes, a couple of paragraphs down, that Northcutt “managed to wriggle out of the grate hole and summon help, escaping with a broken leg, but life and reproductive ability intact.”

Northcutt, who majored in molecular biology at Berkeley, launched the Darwin Awards during a postgraduate stint in a Stanford laboratory while she waited for experiments to run their course. To pass the time, she began cataloguing “imbecilic demises” and secured the darwinawards.com domain in 1993. Haddock clarifies: “Though she didn’t coin the term—the Usenet archives list a 1985 use of the term about a man who shook a vending machine until it toppled over on him—it was Northcutt who shaped the Darwin Awards into a pop culture sensation.” The Darwin Awards website, in case you’ve somehow not noticed, is a “chronicle of entertaining demises” that commemorates “those who assist natural selection by removing themselves from the gene pool.”

Do read the rest of Haddock’s lively profile of “self-proclaimed klutz” Wendy Northcutt, and also visit the Darwin Awards website, where, as of this writing, planking—last week’s Fritinancy word of the week—is prominently featured on the home page.

Man Up, Transitively

The J. Crew July catalog arrived this week. It features a lot of lightweight clothing that I’m sure is delightfully wearable if you live somewhere other than San Francisco, with our blustery, foggy, 60-degrees-if-we’re-lucky “summers.”*

One such item, the Military Tunic, caught my attention not for its wardrobe potential** but for the accompanying copy. (Photo and copy shown here are from the online catalog; the print version of the copy is shorter but very similar.)

 

“Our designers took an easy cotton silhouette and manned it up with military details like camp pockets and shoulder epaulets. Pair it with skinny jeans and go-for-broke heels for a look that commands attention.”

 

Sure, “go-for-broke heels” evokes entertaining images of splints and full leg casts. But I’m more curious about manned it up.

Just Something It

I noticed this sign during my recent trip to Ashland, Oregon, but I didn’t go inside the shop.

 

The saddest tagline in retail-dom, cruelly paired with a kree8tively spelled, breakfast-cereal-evoking name.

The placeholder-ish quality of “something to wear” is compounded by that tentative ellipsis. I can picture a customer nervously approaching a salesperson and venturing, “Um, a skirt? Made of fabric?” And then rushing out, clutching her generic purchase, searching for a restaurant that diffidently advertised “something to eat.”

Names in the News: Akashic Books

You may not be familiar with Akashic Books, a small Brooklyn-based publisher dedicated—according its website’s home page—to the “reverse-gentrification of the literary world.” However, if you follow publishing news even a little, you’ve probably heard of Akashic’s newest release, a little succès de scandale called Go the Fuck to Sleep. The book’s official publication date was June 14.

 

 

It is, as you can see, a children’s picture book that includes what the movie industry calls “adult language.”

From the book’s Wikipedia entry:

When Adam Mansbach’s daughter Vivien was two, she would take up to two hours to fall asleep. Exhausted and exasperated, one night Mansbach posted a note on Facebook, “Look out for my forthcoming children’s book, Go the — to Sleep”. Following his post, friends of Mansbach responded enthusiastically, so that Mansbach began writing what was then only a hypothetical book. Mansbach had the illustrations for the picture book done by a friend, illustrator Ricardo Cortés (a contributor to The New York Times), and approached Akashic Books, a book publisher from New York.

That explains the book’s title. What about “Akashic”?

Akashic is an adjectivization of akasha, a Sanskrit word meaning “sky,” “space,” or “ether”—in Hindu philosophy, it’s one of the five elements. Akashic records is used in various metaphysical philosophies to refer to “a compendium of mystical knowledge encoded in a non-physical plane of existence” (Wikipedia). Search online for “akashic records” and you’ll discover references to “Life Lesson,” “the soul’s journey over time,” and “a great Universal Library.”

Interestingly, the Akashic Books catalog does not include any books about metaphysics or mystical knowledge or indeed religion of any description. (Maybe it did at one time, but I couldn’t find any examples now.) Rather, the publisher’s categories include literary fiction, mysteries and crime fiction, a noir series, general nonfiction (a category that includes Born on the Fourth of July and The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq), African-American interest, gay and lesbian interest, and a separate Punk Planet imprint. 

So why “Akashic”? I’m stumped. It’s possible that the word is used here ironically—you just never know with those Brooklyn hipsters. I can tell you that Go the Fuck to Sleep is not Akashic’s first foray into F-bomb-iana: indeed, the publisher’s very first release, in 1996, was The Fuck Up, by Arthur Neresian.

For your listening pleasure, two famous film folk have recorded their readings of Go the Fuck to Sleep. Here, in a free download from Audible, is actor Samuel L. Jackson’s rendition. [UPDATE: I’ve been informed that the Audible version has been bowdlerized. WTF?! Listen to the uncensored SLJ narration at Nerve.]

And here, even more unsettlingly (to this listener, anyway), is director Werner Herzog’s narration.

Probably best to listen to those recordings in a private space, far from toddlers and bluenoses.

Nicely Named: AlterGeo

Here’s a name that stands out for all the right reasons: it’s distinctive, it’s appropriate, it’s memorable, and it’s elegant.

 

 

AlterGeo reverses two letters in “alter ego” to create an ingenious name for a geolocation service that TechCrunch described as “the Foursquare of Russia.”

That’s right—Russia. Embarrassingly named North American startups, please note: The bar has officially been raised. This could represent a Sputnik moment for corporate nomenclature.

Complementing the AlterGeo name is an equally clever logo in which an upside-down “A” niftily reinforces the “alter” part of the name.

TechCrunch reported earlier this month that AlterGeo had recently raised $10 million from sources that included Esther Dyson, the very savvy angel investor and founding chairman of ICANN, which oversees Internet domains. I’ll have what she’s having.

Word of the Week: Planking

Planking: The activity of lying face down, arms to the side, “in an unusual or incongruous location” (Wikipedia).

Planking is the name given by Australian practitioners to the “lying-down game,” which originated in North East England in 1997 and took more than a decade to gather momentum. By 2009 it had been tagged by the British media as an “internet craze,” even though the activity is decidedly non-virtual. In September of that year, according to a report in the Sunday Times, seven doctors and nurses in Swindon were suspended from their jobs for playing the game. (Or, more to the point, for being photographed while lying prone “on resuscitation trolleys, ward floors and the building’s helipad.” As others have discovered to their rue, it’s not necessarily the doing that leads to downfall, it’s the documenting.)

The game acquired its shorter, more vivid name when it became popular in Australia in the spring of 2011. A May 11 article in the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the word planking was “so new it doesn’t have its own Wikipedia page.” Richard Litonjua, a Brisbane electrician who started a Facebook page for his fellow plankers, offered several rules, including “Be creative,” “Do it overseas,” and “Be a proper plank” (“'You've got to be a good straight plank, head straight, arms straight, legs down”).

Four days later, another Brisbane man, Acton Beale, became planking’s first known casualty when he plunged to his death from a seventh-story apartment balcony railing. The tragedy prompted Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard to call for an end to planking.

That, however, did not prevent Sigmar Guðmundsson, host of the Icelandic news-magazine show Kastljós, from delivering a live introduction while planking on his desk on June 10, 2011.

 

Planking goes by several other names in countries where it’s popular: “à plat ventre” (France), “extreme lying down” (Australasia), “facedowns” (US and Ireland). In Taiwan, where the activity is popular among young women, practitioners call themselves Pujie Girls and use their public performances to promote various causes. According to a Pujie Girls Facebook page, “pujie” literally translates to “falling on the street” in Mandarin. The word is also a pun on the Cantonese curse “Puk Gai”: “may you drop dead.”

Meanwhile, in the United States, the Mad Magazine blog, The Idiotical, last week posted a series of doctored photos headlined “Planking Gone Too Far,” including this one:

June Linkfest

The job of a lexicographer may often be sedentary, but it’s hardly lazy, what with words being invented, repurposed, and upcycled on a daily basis. For proof, see Oxford Dictionaries Online, which recently announced some of the most recent additions to the venerable word-hoard, including baby bump, man cave, unfollow, and ZOMG. Completely new to me: schmick, an Australian slang term, dating back to the 1980s, that means “stylish.”

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Speaking of the OED, and speaking of venerable, Wordorigins.org has been posting weekly lists of  words that first appeared in a particular year. The first list, of words whose  first appearance was in 1911, includes allergen, floozy, ivory tower, and taupe, and quite a few surprises. Go to the home page to search for additional entries in the series.

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There are new words, and there are newsy words. Newswordy, a newish blog, is a collection of buzzwords in the news. One word is presented (handsomely) each day, along with a quote, a definition, and news and Twitter feeds on the subject. Yesterday’s word was pernicious: “having a harmful effect, esp. in a gradual or subtle way.”

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Over at Ironic Sans, a source of excellent why-didn’t-I-think-of-that ideas, David Friedman (no relation) proposes a new top-level Internet domain, .ugh, “for websites that can only be parody, complainy, or snarky.”

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And speaking of complainy and snarky, Paul McFedries, writing for IEEE Spectrum, presents a roster of insults for the technological age: pajamahadeen, slacktivist, meh-sayer, and more. (McFedries also runs the very enjoyable and informative Word Spy website.)

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Remember Sylvia Trench? Kissy Suzuki? Xenia Onatopp? Drew Mackie, of the Back of the Cereal Box blog, certainly does. For your edification, he provides “a list of Bond girls whose names serve as a pun, a sexual reference or something else with meaning beyond what a ‘straight’ character name does.”

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Something serious now: Pollywog, a naming and branding agency in Minneapolis, reminds us that nonprofit organizations aren’t exempt from trademark challenges. Case in point: a feud between the Susan G. Komen “Race for the Cure” and a smaller, Minnesota-based group that was using “Mush for the Cure” for a sled-dog race.

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More serious stuff: “Before you start trying to come up with a name, you have to get real,” writes The Name Inspector. Here are his five hard truths of naming—essential reading for all entrepreneurs.

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Linguist Arnold Zwicky takes a semi-playful look at how foods with a “yuck factor”—such as lab-grown meat—get rebranded. By the way, if you love language—and if you’re reading this blog, I gather you have at least a passing interest in the subject—you’ll want to check out Zwicky’s great big list of language blogs and resources.

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And because I can’t allow this month to pass without linking to something Weineriffic, please enjoy Fragments from “Weiner! The Musical,” brought to you by the impresarios at McSweeney’s.

Selz Sells

I spotted this beautiful wooden bench—harmoniously accessorized by Athos, the shop cat—in Lithia Park Shoes during my recent sojourn in Ashland, Oregon.

 

Love that typography. Thanks to RA for the photo.

 

When I commented on it, the store owner told me that long-defunct Selz Shoes used to give the benches to retailers as promotional items. He added that Selz had at some point been acquired by Cole Haan (which itself was bought by Nike in 1988).

I couldn’t confirm the Selz-Cole Haan connection—all of the sources I found said Selz simply went out of business in 1929, at the beginning of the Great Depression—but I did learn that both companies originated in Chicago. Morris Selz, an immigrant from Germany, founded M. Selz & Co. in 1871; the company became Selz, Schwab, & Co. in 1878, when Charles H. Schwab joined the firm. By the beginning of the 20th century, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago, the company was making about 12,000 pairs of boots and shoes a day, which made it one of the leading footwear manufacturers in the United States.

The company employed some cheeky advertising tactics, as this replica tin sign (sold on Amazon and elsewhere) demonstrates.

Happy (or chatty?) feet. The ad probably predates 1919, the year of the Black Sox scandal; Shoeless Joe was banned from baseball in 1921 because of his alleged involvement in it.

 

At some point in the company’s history, “Royal Blue” became attached to the brand name. Some ads used “The Sole of ___” as a substitute slogan for “Make Your Feet Glad.” 

When your name is Selz, you may feel a magnetic pull toward puns. J. Harry Selz (son of the founder? nephew?) embraced the double meaning when he contributed a chapter to a 1905 book, Selling. His chapter was titled “The Advantages and Importance of System in Selling.”

And Cole Haan? It was founded in Chicago in 1928 by Trafton Cole and Eddie Haan and sold in 1957 to E.E. Taylor, a shoe firm in Maine. In 1975 a former leather-cutter, George Denney, bought the company. Earlier this year Cole Haan announced that it would move its headquarters from Yarmouth to Scarborough, Maine. The company also has offices in New York City, but all of its manufacturing is done outside the United States.

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Other posts about old American brands: MJB Why, Gargoyle Coffee, The Friedman Museum of Vintage Products, The 40-Year-Old Quotation Mark. Many posts about shoes here.