Fritinancy

What Would Lenovo Do?

According to a survey conducted by PC maker Lenovo, only three out of ten people recognize the Lenovo name. So how does Lenovo plan to fix that?

 

 

 

By miniaturizing a doctor of osteopathy?

 

 

No. D’oh!

 

“For those who do” (that voodoo that they do so well).

 

Accelerated Marketing Strategies explains the thinking behind the slogan:

What Saatchi [&] Saatchi/Lenovo came up with is the “For those who do!” campaign, which will come in three phases starting this May. The first phase of the “For those who do!” campaign will be a declaration of what Lenovo is. Phase two will be product proof showcasing Lenovo technology. The last phase is called people proof, showing what people can do with Lenovo technology.

“People proof”! I ask you, what could possibly go wrong with a themeline like that?

But back to “The Do Inside.” This nounification of “do” represents the latest development in a language-twisting trend in advertising. We’ve seen Charmin’s “Enjoy the Go,” Comcast’s “We Own Faster,” and Crystal’s “Full of Wow.” 

Do, of course, already has noun meanings: it’s short for hairdo and an informal term for a party. And do’s (or dos) and don’ts are lists of preferred and prohibited actions.

As a verb, do also has scatological and sexual meanings that add (unwanted) ambiguity to a phrase like “For Those Who Do.” (Don’t count on Lenovo’s next tagline being “Full of Do.”)

On the Lenovo website, do is both more innocent and more professional. “Whatever You Do, We Can Help You Do It Better, Smarter, Faster” reads one headline. Another declares, “Do Apps Like You’ve Never Done Before.” (Yes, done before, not done them before.) 

I can’t help thinking, though, that Lenovo missed an obvious opportunity. If they’d consulted me, I’d have teamed them up with Lexus, which as we know is all about forward-doing. Or, even better, with Droid, which had so much success with its bare-knuckled bucket of does a couple of years ago. After all, do, a deer, a female deer...

UPDATE, Oct. 7: I just discovered this post from Cranky Creative, the agency responsible for implementing the campaign on the Lenovo sales floor. Here’s a badly proofread kiosk poster:

That should be DOERS, not DOER’S. With only a handful of exceptions, plurals don’t take apostrophes. This is not one of the exceptions.

Names in the Wild: Melōränge

Yes, a macron and an umlaut. It’s a diacritic-gasm!

Melōränge display at Berkeley Bowl Marketplace. The white spot is my flash.

According to the USPTO database, the Melorange (no diacritics) trademark was registered in October 2007 to a Dutch company, De Ruiter Seeds. I couldn’t find an explanation for the diacritical marks: They’re not Dutch, and they couldn’t possibly influence the pronunciation, which I take to be similar to that of Mel Orange, associate band director of the Pitt Panthers. The marks seem to be tacked on like glitter, simply to make the name look a little festive (and exotic).

The mel- prefix suggests a truncation of melon, which was originally a Greek word meaning “apple” and, by extension, any foreign fruit. It also suggests Latin mel, “honey.” (Compare mellifluous and Melissa.) The -orange part refers not to citrus but to the color of the flesh. The word is easy and fun to say—or would be if one weren’t momentarily stumped by the diacritical marks.

According to The Packer, a produce-industry publication, the  melons in US markets were developed by the global seed company Monsanto (ugh, but I didn’t know the connection till I’d already bought a melon). The ones I saw this week were probably grown in California or Arizona.

Here’s a Melōränge in captivity (i.e., my melon-colored kitchen):

 

Small melons like the Melōränge—the one in the photo is only about 4 inches in diameter—are part of a “personal-size” trend. Watermelons are shrinking, too, Kim Severson wrote last year in the New York Times: “These days, a good watermelon … has to be small enough so people pushing grocery carts in big-city stores will buy it.”

The Packer article noted several other new named varieties of melons that will come to market soon: Avatar, Fascination, SweetPeak, SummerSlice, Sugar Heart, and Sugar Coat (love that one).

Those names reminded me of a verbal-branding project I worked on a few years ago for a growers’ cooperative in Minnesota that had developed a new apple varietal. Those growers were just about the nicest people I’ve ever worked with, and from a creative standpoint, it was a wonderfully satisfying project. So even though in the end the client (nicely) rejected all of my names—many of which were pretty fabulous, if I say so myself—and went with the inappropriate, hard-to-spell, internally generated name they’d unfathomably favored all along, I can’t complain. They did pay me promptly, and generously. And they were awfully nice.

And now I have a long list of swell names for fruit varietals, ready for picking. Not one of them involves diacritical marks. Call me!

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More odd umlauts: shoes, yoga, body cream.

Swag and Schwag

Now that we’ve taken a swig of swagger, the current word of the week, let’s look at swagger’s siblings, swag and schwag.

First, we’ll dispense with a bit of etymythology: swag is not an acronym for “stuff we all get,” no matter what the New York Times Sunday Styles section tells you. (Indeed, a correction to that effect was published Sept. 26.) It can, however, be an air force acronym (U.S. or Canadian) for Scientific, Wild-Assed Guess (distinguished from the layperson’s WAG, your basic wild-assed guess).

He or She

I am loath to criticize anyone holding his ground against the forces of singular they/their. However, I do concede that it’s possible to take things a little too far.

CitiBank, Lakeshore Avenue, Oakland.

I follow the Associated Press Stylebook* in matters of animals and pronouns: “Do not apply a personal pronoun to any animal unless its sex has been established or the animal has a name. The dog was scared; it barked. Rover was scared; he barked.”

Given the fastidiousness with which the CitiBank sign is worded (“Please ask…”), I was surprised to see “a assistant.” And as long as we’re talking about correctness, why “pet” instead of the PETA-approved alternative, “animal companion”? Come to think, why not just “dog”? Perhaps some disabled persons now use chickens to cross the road.

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* The AP would have some stern words about CitiBank’s erratic capitalization, too.

Word of the Week: Swagger

Swagger: “To behave with an air of superiority, in a blustering, insolent, or defiant manner; now esp. to walk or carry oneself as if among inferiors, with an obtrusively superior or insolent air” (OED). Also a noun: a swaggering movement or gait; boastfulness; braggadocio (American Heritage Dictionary). 

Shakespeare may have been the first to use the verb in print, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600):

What hempen homespunnes haue we swaggring here, So neere the Cradle of the Fairy Queene?

Jonathan Swift turned swagger into a noun in his 1725 poem, “A New Song on Wood's Halfpence”:

The butcher is stout, and he values no swagger;
A cleaver’s a match any time for a dagger...

Swagger may derive from the much earlier swag, which also was a verb before it was a noun. In the early 1520s swag meant “to move with an unsteady gait”; it probably came from Old Norse sveggja, to swing or sway. I’ll have more to say about swag (and also schwag) in another post later this week. Meanwhile, let’s take a look at swagger in the news and in the ads.

Does creative spelling make a name more protectable?

Short answer: No.

Slightly longer answer: Sometimes there are good reasons to alter the spelling of a name, but trademark protection is never one of them.

This persistent myth—“If we misspell the name we can get the trademark”—resurfaced this week amid the fuss over Netflix’s newly announced movies-by-mail service, Qwikster. (If you managed to miss the kerfuffle, read my post about it.) An MBA student tweeted that the kree8tive spelling of Qwikster made the name “trademarkable.” (I hope she wasn’t taught this in a marketing class.) And yesterday Brand New, the influential corporate-design blog, had this to say about Qwikster:

A silly name with such a ridiculous spelling that it makes Syfy and Cloo look like the authors of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Sure, it’s probably a breeze to trademark it but so would be Peenoz, that doesn’t mean it should be chosen.

(Emphasis added.)

Sorry, they’re both wrong.

 

Names on the Map

Ken Jennings, best known for his record-setting 2004 appearance on Jeopardy!—74 consecutive wins—has  published a new book, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks. Jennings ranges over treasure maps, Google Maps, map collecting, highway numbering, and geocaching, and devotes a section of one chapter to toponyms—the names of places. Here’s an excerpt: 

Names aren’t neutral; they come with agendas. In 1614, John Smith coined the name “New England” for the North American coast he was exploring; his map of the area pointedly left off any Native American settlements or place-names. Instead, every place got a cozy—and completely arbitrary—British name: Ipswich, Southampton, Cape Elizabeth. Most of Smith’s names never caught on, but one of his choices was adopted by the Mayflower pilgrims when they founded their colony there six years later: Plymouth, a spot that the Wampanoag Indians, then as now, actually called “Patuxet.” As late as 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry steamed into Tokyo Bay and returned to Washington bearing a map of Edo, with all the parts of the harbor given suspiciously un-Japanese names like “Mississippi Bay” and “Susquehanna Bay.” On the map, some islets in the Uraga Channel have even been labeled “Plymouth Rocks.” “Look!” the maps say, all wide-eyed and innocent-like. “These places must be ours! Why else would they have our names on them?”

Jennings’s own love of names and word play is evident in Maphead’s chapter titles, each of which carries multiple meanings: Eccentricity, Bearing, Fault, Benchmarks, Elevation, Legend, Reckoning, Meander, Transit, Overedge, Frontier, and Relief.

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Image: Crumpled Paris city map, in polyethylene, from Uncommon Goods. Also available in San Francisco, Berlin, Tokyo, London, New York, Amsterdam, Chicago, and Barcelona.

Thinking, Doing, Engineering, Amazing

Every time I drive past this Lexus billboard I do a semantic double-take. 

Headline-speaking, it’s also topward-slicing.

I get the “forward-thinking” part, although “forward-looking” (“ahead of the times”) might sound more natural. And I get the contrast between “thinking” and “doing.” But I’m stuck in low gear on “forward-doing.” How do you “do forward”? Bow deeply from the waist? Make an inappropriately sexual move?

Names in the News: Qwikster

Early Monday morning Netflix announced a new service, Qwikster, that will do what the original Netflix did: deliver movies to mailboxes. The entity known as Netflix will limit itself to streaming movies and other content (notably games) to customers’ computers and TV sets.

The bifurcation follows Netflix’s loudly protested repricing of DVD and streaming services, announced in July. In an email and blog post published Sunday night, Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings issued an apology to customers (or “members,” in Netflix-speak):

I see that given the huge changes we have been recently making, I should have personally given a full justification to our members of why we are separating DVD and streaming, and charging for both. It wouldn’t have changed the price increase, but it would have been the right thing to do.

His explanation of the new name? Terse, to put it generously:

We chose the name Qwikster because it refers to quick delivery. We will keep the name “Netflix” for streaming.

The outcry was immediate and abundant. Mashable speculated whether Qwikster was “the worst product launch since New Coke.” Last time I checked, there were more than 17,000 comments on Hastings’s post. One of the more temperate ones came from Benjamin Hutchins:

The name itself, to me, shows a lack of thought. You say it was to represent the quickness of the service, but to me that was a bad attempt at trying to find an available.com domain when there are so few good ones left. I bet there were lengthy discussions over a good name, probably taking weeks, and yet to me, it truly sounds like a half-witted idea cocked up from someone in front of an investor and needed to keep things rolling.

Here’s my own disclaimer: I have never been a Netflix customer/member. I rarely watch movies at home. So I’m an impartial observer here—except where the name and branding strategy are concerned.

My take on the name: so bad it’s laughable. The branding strategy: mystifying.

Crazy, right? Like a fox.

Hang on for my explanation. First, though, a little background.

 

Word of the Week: Resistentialism

Resistentialism: “The theory that inanimate objects demonstrate hostile behavior toward us.” – Anu Garg, The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two: The Hidden Lives and Strange Origins of Common and Not-So-Common Words. 

Photo source: You’ll Eat It & Like It!

From Garg’s entry in the book:

If you ever get a feeling that the photocopy machine can sense when you’re tense, short of time, need a document copied before an important meeting, and then it breaks down on purpose, you’re not alone. Now you know the word for it. As if to prove the point, my normally robust DSL Internet connection went down for two hours just as I was writing this. I’m not making this up!

I was surprised that resistentialism had never been a Word of the Week, because it’s a word I have found invaluable ever since I first heard it, some 15 years ago. Just last week I encountered it again in an enlightening and often amusing book I’ve been reading, Bozo Sapiens: Why to Err Is Human, by Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan*. The Kaplans write at the beginning of Chapter IV:

Life calls us out of the private fastnesses of our heads into a world of things, things we valiantly attempt to steer, start, or stop—and this opens a whole new playground for error. The English humorist Paul Jennings once proposed an alternative to the existentialist nausee that was then washing across from Paris: resistentialism. This “somber, post-atomic philosophy of pagan, despairing nobility” held that “things are against us.” And it seems they still are: rather than the masters of the physical world, we remain mere “no-things,” doomed to be pushed around by scornful and uncooperative objects—pianos that mock our sausage fingers; computers that develop transient but alarming hypochondria; keys, socks, and teaspoons that scurry off to their secret covens and never return.

Word Spy (Paul McFedries) tells us that resistentialism first appeared in print in 1963 “[o]r possibly earlier; I saw conflicting dates, which were probably just resistential computer errors.” The passage in question appeared in “Report on Resistentialism,” which was published in The Jenguin Pennings:

Go into any of the little cafés or horlogeries on Paris’s Left Bank (make sure the Seine is flowing away from you, otherwise you’ll be on the Right Bank, where no one is ever seen) and sooner or later you will hear someone say, ‘Les choses sont contre nous.’ ‘Things are against us.’

McFedries offers a corollary:

A related term that makes the occasional appearance is FOBIO —- Frequently Outwitted By Inanimate Objects. I hereby propose what I humbly suggest is a better term: FOILED — Frequently Outwitted by Inanimate, Lame Electronic Devices.

For examples of resistentialism in action, see the blog Things Are Against Us. See also The Case of the Disappearing Teaspoons, a summary of a study by two Australian scientists, published in 2005, that concludes:

People have no control over teaspoon migration; escape to a spoonoid planet and resistentialism are equally plausible explanations.

More isms (austerianism, declinism, endism, et al.) here.

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* The Kaplans are mother and son; she’s a historian who has also co-authored two books about mathematics; he’s a writer and filmmaker. Michael Kaplan also writes a blog called Bozo Sapiens.