Fritinancy

Names in Brief

Speaking of “mister” names—as we were only yesterday—I’ve learned about another one from reader Licia, who’s a translator in Italy. Mister Baby, writes Licia, “has been on the Italian market since 1964 and it is a household name; it now belongs to British multinational Reckitt Benckiser (which, incidentally, also produce Mr Sheen).” Mister Baby sells products for babies (of both sexes, it seems) and for nursing mothers.

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Friends don’t let friends drink and text, but that hasn’t deterred TXT Cellars from creating “a line of wines dedicated to celebrating the ordinary and not so ordinary moments in life when you just need to LOL!!!” (Via @ahundredmonkeys.)

Screwtops, of course. Because it’s RLY HRD to operate a corkscrew while you’re texting, amirite?

 

Just for kicks, click “No, I am not 21” on the opening screen.

Read the Washington Post’s guest columnist Jason Wilson on the wine-drinking habits of millennials. And check out The Hairpin’s list of hypothetical rejected names for TXT wines.

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Take the quiz: Condom or Android phone? (Via Lance Knobel.) Congratulations to The Intercom Blog for sticking with tradition and using “What’s in a Name?” for the title of that post. Fifty thousand other headline writers can’t be wrong!

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Speaking of unoriginality, here’s another startup with an -ly name: Swipely. According to TechCrunch, “The company first launched as a way to share your credit card purchases with your friends, but when that idea (as deployed by Swipely and others) failed to take off, Swipely shifted its focus to helping merchants with their loyalty programs.” By my count, that brings us to 50 -ly startups, and let us say: Enoughly.

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In my February post about the bra-fitting service Brayola, I traced the commercial use of the -ola suffix back to Pianola (1895), Crayola (1903), and Victrola (1905). But it turns out there’s an even earlier example. Granola, now a generic term for a crunchy oat-based breakfast cereal, was originally a trademark. According to “Who Made That Granola?” in last week’s New York Times Magazine, John Harvey Kellogg—whose name lives on in the Kellogg’s brand—came up with “granola” in the late 1870s or early 1880s after he was sued by a rival who made “granula” and objected to Kellogg’s use of that spelling. By 1889, according to the article, Kellogg was selling two tons of Granola a week. (Tangentially, Grano.la is the name of a power-management software product. Dot-la is the country code for Laos.)

"Oui, Oui, Oui" All the Way Home

There’s only one little piggy in this set of combat-ready bendable toys. Monsieur Tofu is a “soy boy.”

 

Front of package.

 

 

Back of package.

 

Naturally, I get a kick out of “Mr. Bacon”: as some of you know, I’m very fond of “mister” names. But why is the tofu dressed as Mr. Peanut? And what’s up with “Monsieur”?

Tofu is Asian, of course, not French, unless you think of tofu as soy cheese—which it is, sort of—and you think of all cheese as French. (Remember Bart Simpson’s “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”?) But does that explain “Monsieur Tofu”? I don’t think so.

Here’s my best guess: Tofu is stigmatized as fancy-pants food for pinky-bending snobs, and “monsieur” is code for “elite” and “effete.” Never mind that you can buy tofu at Walmart, or that a pound of tofu costs less than half of what a pound of bacon costs.

In a different decade, they might have gotten away with calling Mr. Bacon’s opponent “Tofu-San.” Today a Japanese stereotype is unacceptable. Caricaturing the French, though—that’s perfectly kosher. Which is more than you can say about Mr. Bacon.

I found “Mr. Bacon vs. Monsieur Tofu” at Powell’s Sweet Shoppe in Berkeley. You can also buy it from Archie McPhee.

How the Countach Got Its Name

The Lamborghini Countach, produced between 1974 and 1990, was a coupe with a dramatic wedge shape. Only 2,042 cars were manufactured, but the car’s design—executed in trapezoidal panels covered with aluminum—influenced many later models.

 

“Scissor” doors on a Lamborghini Countach. Photo from Classic Cars.

The Countach may be the only automobile in history whose name is a crude word in Piedmontese, which is spoken by about 2 million people in northwestern Italy. The word—pronounced, roughly, coon-tahshe—is usually said to translate to “Wow!” or “Look at that!” (Most of the explanations I read qualified this definition with “in polite terms”; in other words, it’s probably closer, connotatively, to “Holy shit!”) According to one story—citation needed, according to the Wikipedia entry—“Countach!” was what Italian automobile designer Giuseppe “Nuccio” Bertone exclaimed when he saw the prototype in his studio.*

Used Countaches are currently selling for between $100,000 and $200,000, according to one online vendor.

It’s hard to imagine a name like “Countach” surviving a 21st-century focus group: for speakers of English it’s just too uncomfortably close to cunt-ass or coon-ass. In fact, my memory suddenly produced “Countach” while I was researching a recent news snippet about coon-ass. A friend of George Zimmerman, the Neighborhood Watch volunteer who shot and killed teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida on February 26, has publicly defended Zimmerman for calling Martin a “coon.” (Martin was African-American; so is Oliver.) Oliver told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews:

That’s a term I listened to over and over on there and to me, it’s a matter of interpretation of whether he’s saying ‘coon’ or ‘goon.’ There are a lot of parts of this country where people proudly call themselves ‘coon asses,’ in Louisiana in particular.

Coon-ass or coonass is indeed used in Louisiana to refer to Cajuns, but it’s widely regarded as derogatory. One possible etymology of the word is conasse, which is the equivalent of “cunt” and can be an epithet for a prostitute. Another etymology suggests a connection to the racial slur coon. But, as with many offensive or derogatory terms, its meaning varies with the speaker and the context. The Louisiana Cajun who runs CoonAss.com defends his URL thus:

I carry the name CoonAss.com as a reminder of how our culture nearly disappeared and how we as a people have taken the bad traits outsiders associated with being Cajun and have turned them into something good.

See also my 2008 post, “She’s No Lady.”

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* Lamborghini history is full of interesting model names, most of them from the world of bullfighting: Miura, Urraco, Diablo, and Murciélago; the last means “bat” in Spanish but was chosen because it had been the name of a famous fighting bull.

Further Adventures in Namifying Trendily

Oh, those -ify and -ly names. So appealing! So verby (the former) and adverby (the latter)! So overdone!

The latest example arrived in my inbox last week.

Brandify is a new service from Microsoft that’s “designed to deliver—in about 70 seconds—crystal-clear insight and startlingly simple guidance to our users about their businesses’ online and social media reputations.”

I’m guessing Reputationify was on the short list.

In a February 2011 post, “A Disturbifying Trend in Namifying,” The Name Inspector identified (see what I did there?) 16 coined names with the -ify suffix, from Adify to Zensify. I left a comment with eight additional names, including Abilify (the antidepressant/bipolar drug), Brickify (which turns images into Lego statues), and Yotify (no idea what it does). And I later wrote about “freshification,” the theme of an ad campaign from Pier 1 Imports. There’s also snackify and drinkify, unbranded coinages popularized by PepsiCo’s chairman and CEO, Indra Nooyi.

Meanwhile, -ly names continue their relentless redundifying. On Valentine’s Day (fittingly!), TechCrunch published news of Lover.ly, “an inspiration engine and Pinterest-like startup for weddings,” which had recently raised $500,000 from a group of investors. The About Us page defines “lover.ly” as an adjective and adverb: “having those qualities that inspire love, affection, or admiration.” What—no one’s humming along to Julie Andrews in My Fair Lady?

TechCrunch also brought Valentine’s Day news of Snatchly, “a Pinterest for porn.” So you snatch images of … heh.

In a somewhat more high-minded vein we have Fundly, which calls itself “the largest online social fundraising platform in the United States.” Fundly is used by universities, clubs, nonprofit organizations, and politicians—including, in this presidential-campaign season, Rick Santorum.

By my count, that brings us to 48* startups with -ly names. I’d love to bring them together in a small room and force them to listen to my speech about distinctiveness in naming.

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* I’m not counting, or linking to, the vilest example I’ve seen of an -ly name. Instead, I’ll turn over the podium to journalist Steve Silberman.

Word of the Week: Stockist

Stockist: A retailer or distributor that stocks goods for sale.

The American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition (2000), says stockist is “chiefly British,” and the OED concurs: all four of its citations are from British or Irish sources, the earliest from 1922. Recently, though, I’ve noticed that stockist has crept into American retail jargon, replacing the more familiar “store locator” or “where to buy.” A sampling:

Litter, a San Francisco-based wholesaler of “body jewelry.” All but three of Litter’s “stockists” are in the US.

The Hundreds, a Los Angeles-based seller of street wear and skate wear. Its “stockists” include stores in Norman, Oklahoma; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Murray, Utah.

RGB, “a product line dedicated solely to nail color and care.” The company is based in Los Angeles; its “stockists” are mostly in the US.

Mishka, a designer/manufacturer of T-shirts. It’s based in New York City and sells throughout the US (Gretna, Louisiana; Providence, Rhode Island; Chandler, Arizona) as well as in the UK, Europe, and Asia.

Remedy Quarterly, an independent food magazine published in Brooklyn. From the home page: “Want to see Remedy in person? Check out one of our amazing stockists, some of the best community bookstores around.” Those “stockists” are in Maryland, California, Illinois, “Massachusettes.” and other states.

Billykirk, a maker of bags, wallets, and belts for men. The company is based in New York; it does business internationally but most of its “stockists” are in the US.

In January, Ben Yagoda included stockist in his Not One-Off Britishisms blog (NOOB), which tracks British expressions “that have got popular in the U.S.” (“Have got” is itself a Britishism. Americans say “have gotten.”) He cited some examples (crediting me—thanks!), and commented:

I am now convinced that stockist is indeed happening in the U.S. However, it has not yet appeared in the mainstream media, only, apparently, in commercial communication. This puts it in the same category as bespoke: a phony, hype-y word that exists–and one hopes will stay–in the realm of advertising and promotion.

The protest comes too late, I suspect.

I can only speculate about the reasons for the mini-trend toward stockist. Is it an attempt to reach a global audience? Did stockist appear in a cult movie I’ve yet to see? Is the usage influenced by other trendy -ist and -ista words (socialist, completist, gallerist, recessionist, frugalista)? Is there a Hipster Retail Dictionary that I’m unaware of, with stockist on Page 1? Does each of these companies has a resident Brit on its staff who’s paid to contribute (CON-tribute, that Brit might say) across-the-pond lingo to lend a high-toned air to the proceedings? In other words, I didn’t get the original memo, but I’m seeing its effects.

It’s still early days—another NOOB—but I predict that stockist will be on the ballot for the 2012 UK-to-US Word of the Year, a contest held annually by Separated by a Common Language.

DKNY? LOL!

So I’m browsing the accessories section at the Nordstrom Rack in San Francisco and I see a display of handbags with a “DKNY” sign on top. Naturally, I expect the merchandise in the display to be from Donna Karan New York.

 

 

Surprise! Those bags in the foreground? They all had this tag:

 

KDNY by Kelsi Dagger. For the dyslexic fashionista?

 

Yes, it’s the 2012 version of Donna Karan’s nightmare.

The difference between DKNY and KDNY isn’t just the order of the initials. DKNY handbags are leather; KDNY’s are “pleather” (technically PU, short for polyurethane). A DKNY bag retails for $300 to $400; a KDNY bag costs about $100.

There are 42 live trademarks for DKNY in the USPTO database, zero for KDNY.

Of course, there are times when you might prefer an inexpensive plastic bag, as my Twitter friend Kevin pointed out.

 

 

Big Companies, Bad Names

Two global companies, both in the Chicago area, announced the names of spinoff brands yesterday. That’s two opportunities to observe that it isn’t only small, underfunded startups that make bad naming decisions.

Exhibit A: Health-care company Abbott Laboratories will name its new pharmaceutical company AbbVie. According to the Abbott press release, AbbVie “is derived from a combination of Abbott and ‘vie’, which references the Latin root ‘vi’ meaning life.” Richard A. Gonzalez, who will become the chairman and CEO of the new company, explained: “The ‘vie’ calls attention to the vital work the company will continue to advance to improve the lives of people around the world.”

“Vie” and “vital”? So AbbVie must be pronounced with a long I sound in the second syllable, right? Wrong! The first sentence of the press release has a phonetic cue in brackets: “Abb-vee.”

Which leads me to repeat a general rule of naming: When you have to provide a pronunciation guide, you’re acknowledging that your name is confusing. Not a promising start for a business.

AbbVie has another liability: that pile-up of plosives consonants [see comment from @kirinqueen] in the middle of the name. It’s difficult to say “AbbVie” without stuttering—and all that occlusion suggests a slow, sputtering business.

Exhibit B: Kraft Foods, which calls itself a “global snacks powerhouse”—it’s the parent company of Oreo, Cheez Whiz, Jell-O, and many other brands—is splitting into two companies, a North American grocery foods business and a global snack foods business. This week it announced that the snack business will be called Mondelez International.

Perhaps you had this initial response: “World of lesbians?” Or maybe it was just me.

My second inclination was to start humming “On the Road to Mandalay.”

But no. Once again, the press release has to come to the rescue: the name, we’re informed, is to be pronounced “moan-dah-LEEZ.” Indeed, in the headline, there’s a macron—a short horizontal line—over the second E, indicating a long-vowel sound. (There’s no equivalent hint for the O in “Mon-.”) The macron appears nowhere else in the press release, nor does it appear in the many news stories about the name announcement.

Another general rule of naming: If you need diacritical marks to clarify the pronunciation of your name, it isn’t clear enough on its own. A corollary: Print and online media won’t bother to use your fancy accent marks.

I am unsurprised to learn that this name resulted from an employee contest. More than 1,000 employees around the world submitted more than 1,700 names, according to the company. (If Mondelez was the best of the bunch, I don’t want to think about the worst.*) According to Bloomberg Businessweek, the “inspiration” for Mondelez came from two submissions, one from Europe and one from North America.

A third general rule of naming: Employee contests may be good for morale, but they rarely result in effective names—unless your employees are professional name developers.

The Kraft press release provides some background:

“Monde” derives from the Latin word for “world," and “delez” is a fanciful expression of “delicious.”

(I love this comment on WSJ.com: “Mondelez Industries – Isn’t that where George Constanza claimed to work as a latex salesman?”**)

Fortunately for us consumers, “Mondelez” won’t appear on packaging: it’s a corporate name only. The grocery unit will be named Kraft Foods Group.

These aren’t the first instances of Abbott and Kraft making dubious name decisions. I recently wrote about two confusingly named (but not competing) Kraft Foods brands, Velveeta and belVita. And in 2009 I wrote about the Abbott Labs drug Humira, which the company insists is pronounced “hu-MARE-ah.”

Thanks to Deborah Schneider of the Kineo Group in Chicago for tips about both stories. Both Deborah and I are quoted in an article about the new names published in today’s Chicago Tribune.

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* UPDATE: According to Alan Brew, who blogs at Name Droppings, one of the also-rans was Tfark. That’s “Kraft” spelled backward.

** It was Vandelay.

Nicely Named: Beeminder

In Monday’s Word of the Week post I briefly mentioned Beeminder, a commitment device to help people overcome akrasia and achieve their goals.

 

 

I like the Beeminder name, I wrote, because it suggests industriousness. But there’s a lot more to say about the name,  and I’m pleased to report that the Beeminder said much of it in a September 2011 blog post.

Co-founder Daniel Reeves wrote that Beeminder was originally called Kibotzer, a blend of kibitzer (Yiddish for someone who gives unasked-for advice—accent on kib, please) and bot (“a machine or program that interacts with you in a vaguely human way”). Thus Kibotzer: “A bot that bugs you about how fat you are.”

That’s cute, but when the founders decided to turn their hobby into a real business, they acknowledged that the name had to go. “Kibotzer” turned out to be hard to pronounce, and not enough people knew what a kibitzer was.

So they cast about for a new name. I hope they started with a naming brief—the blog post doesn’t mention it, and I’m sorry to say that many startups skip this essential step—but at least they “filled pages with candidate names.” That’s good: you need a lot of names, in a lot of styles, before you start narrowing the field. And the also-rans mentioned in the post show a lot of good lateral thinking: Flakeproof, Goalbugger, even Funky Goal Medina.

I wasn’t surprised to learn, however, that Beeminder came from someone outside the core team: founders are often too close to the problem to recognize the most effective solution. Once Beeminder was on the table, its advantages were evident. Here’s how co-founder Reeves spells it out:

1. Beeminder is a “me-binder” — a self-binding tool.
2. “Beeminder” rhymes with “reminder”.
3. It’s about “minding your goals” in the “mind your p’s and q’s” sense. (“Bee-mindful”)
4. Our esteemed co-founder Bethany Soule goes by “Bee”.
5. Bees are just cute (and hard-working!).
6. Beeminder sends reminders with a motivational sting.
7. Beeminder helps you make a beeline for your goal.
8. You use Beeminder because you want to be minded.

It’s not just that Beeminder evokes multiple meanings, it’s that all of the meanings are positive and relevant. Together, they add up to a strong, clear story that’s fun to tell—and to repeat to friends.

By happy coincidence, Ben Yagoda of the Not One-Off Britishisms blog wrote earlier this week that “minder”—a Britishism meaning “a person in charge of something”—is increasingly popular among speakers of American English. He cites four recent “minder” appearances, including one in the TV show “Gossip Girl.”

On the Visual Thesaurus: The Power of Ambiguity

Most of the time, a writer wants to be as clear as possible. But with taglines and slogans, ambiguity can be an asset. In my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus (by subscription), I look at some famous examples of ambiguous taglines and consider what makes them effective. Here’s an excerpt:

One of the longest-running and most famous examples of a semantically ambiguous slogan is “When It Rains It Pours,” created in 1911 for Morton Salt and still used today. According to the company’s website, the first attempt at a tagline was “Even in Rainy Weather It Flows Freely,” which was vetoed because it was too long. The next efforts—“Flows Freely,” “Runs Freely,” and simply “Pours”—were short but pedestrian. The winning slogan came from putting a positive spin on the old proverb “It never rains but it pours.” Instead of “never” and “but” we now have the repeated “it” with its double meaning: the first time, it refers to weather; the second time, it refers to the salt inside the box. Rhythm, repetition, and a sprinkling of ambiguity have given this slogan a century-long lifespan.

Read the rest of “The Power of Ambiguity.” And don’t forget to rate!

Word of the Week: Akrasia

Akrasia: A lack of command over oneself; a weakness of will. Akrasia encompasses  procrastination, lack of self-control, lack of follow-through, and any kind of addictive behavior. (Source: Daniel Reeves, an economist who blogs at Messy Matters.) Pronounced ah-CRAZE-yah.

Akrasia was coined in ancient Greece from words meaning “lack of” and “power”; the word was used by Plato, Aristotle, and other philosophers to describe a paradoxical inability to act in one’s own interests. Research scientist Daniel Reeves explains the concept:

It’s not like “Gee, I thought I wanted to get in shape but it turned out there was always something really good on TV!” No, even in hindsight, you regret not doing what you said you wanted to do. It’s not even that you’re merely conflicted about what you want. The trade-off you made—more TV watched, still not in shape—was patently ridiculous. You somehow don’t do what you genuinely want to do.

For millennia, humans have attempted to avert akrasia by employing some form of commitment device, defined by Freakonomics co-authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt as “a means with which to lock yourself into a course of action that you might not otherwise choose but that produces a desired result.” The classic commitment device was the one used 2,000 years ago by the Chinese general Han Xin, who assembled his soldiers with their backs to a river so that retreat was not an option. The contemporary version of Han Xin’s drastic tactic is an online program like StickK (yes, that’s how they spell it) or Beeminder. Both programs involve creating “commitment contracts” and tracking your progress. And both programs have serious pedigrees: StickK’s founders include Yale University economist Dean Karlan, author of a study of commitment devices; Beeminder was cofounded by the aforementioned Daniel Reeves, who has a PhD in computational game theory. I’ve used neither but admit a bias toward Beeminder because of the clever name, which suggests industriousness, and the nice tagline: “Reminders with a sting.” On the other hand, I applaud Karlan for including a reference (footnote #13, if you’re interested) to “The Simpsons” in his study.

The Freakonomics team has written frequently about commitment devices on the Freakonomics blog and in the New York Times.

Akrasia is also the name of a single-player game developed by the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab. According to the website, “It is based on the abstract concept of addiction, which is expressed metaphorically throughout the game.”