Sketchy?

Here’s a business name that takes a big semantic risk. Does it succeed? You decide.

The name is Sketch Ice Cream, which—as reported by the independent news site Berkeleyside—reopened last week in a new West Berkeley location after a three-year hiatus.

The owners explain the origin of “Sketch” on their FAQ page:

How did you come up with the name Sketch? In the same way our ice cream is made with the purest ingredients, similarly a sketch is the purest form of ideas.

OK, so they didn’t hire a professional writer. What’s evident, though, is that they define sketch the old-fashioned way: a drawing. The problem? There’s a competing, slangy, adjectival sense of sketch and sketchy: “unsafe,” “creepy,” “iffy,” “of dubious character.” And that connotation is exactly what a food-service establishment should strive to avoid.

I wrote last year about the dual meanings of sketch and sketchy here on the blog and, in more extended form, in my column for the Visual Thesaurus. (The paywall should be down now.) The “unsafe” sense has been in circulation, especially among teens and young adults, since at least 2008, when linguist Connie Eble documented it among students at North Carolina University the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is sometimes said to have originated among methampetamine users, for whom “sketch” has been slang for “meth” for at least 20 years. However, Ben Zimmer has traced the “unsavory” meaning of “sketch” back even further, to as early as 1971.

As long as I’m quibbling, I challenge Sketch’s assertion that “a sketch is the purest form of ideas.” Rather, it’s the roughest form of an idea—hasty, incomplete, and lacking in details. That’s not a positive association for a pricey ice-cream parlor, either.

I do give Sketch credit for a cute, childlike wordmark, which I’d reproduce here if it weren’t rendered in such faint gray type as to be practically indistinguishable from the website’s white background. In fact, the entire site is a pain to read. Please fix that, Sketch! And if you decide to refine your name into something less shady and unfinished, give me a call.

Comments

[Jamie]

xkcd recently had a comic based around the word sketchy (well, around the word sex, actually). I didn't get it at the time as I was completely unaware of the new meaning.

http://xkcd.com/1101/

[gibberwacky]

I recall the common use of "sketchy" and "sketch" among American college students on both coasts by at least eight years previous to that documentation. It was the closest equivalent study abroad students could find for the Irish-English "dodgy". (In the situation I recall, the Californian was more likely to say "sketchy", the New Yorker "sketch" but nobody thought of it as particularly new or slangy word.)

[Jan Freeman]

Re history of "sketchy": I wrote a column about sketchy and skeevy in 1999 (having learned them from my teenage daughter), so at least in the Northeast they were already in wide circulation (among non-meth users). I'm surprised the Sketch folks wouldn't have the slang sense as the dominant meaning.

[patricia]

sketchers, anyone?

[Nancy Friedman]

Patricia: Do you mean Skechers brand shoes? I've been unable to verify the origin of that name despite several attempts to do so. See comments on my June 2011 Visual Thesaurus column, "Sketchy Branding": http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/candlepwr/sketchy-branding/