Fritinancy

F Is for Friday

And Friday is for F. The near-profanity trend continues—see Booking.com’s “Look at the Booking View!”; Kmart’s “Ship My Pants” and “Big Gas Savings”; Jell-O’s #FML (Fun My Life); Effen vodka—with more advertisers boarding the (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) Eff Train.

Here’s Peet’s Coffee and Tea with Do You Give a Cup?, “the Internet’s first social sampling experiment.”

If you’re keeping score, that’s two single-cup coffee promotions in one week.

 

Given Peet’s Berkeley origins and normally high-minded, even reverential brand voice, I expected “social” here to mean “socially conscious”: I thought I’d be voting on microloans for women farmers in Ghana or clean water in Bangladesh. But no: the “vote” was yea or nay on zombies. Really, Peet’s? On the other hand, I suppose that when you start punning on “give a fuck,” you’ve left the Cult of Caffeine far behind.*

Then there’s this catchy, tuneful commercial for Fresh & Easy, a grocery-store chain that specializes in underserved (i.e., low-income) neighborhoods. (“You deserve wholesome food that doesn’t cost your whole paycheck,” says the F&E website, taking a little dig at Whole [Paycheck] Foods.)

“It’s about time/ Life was this F’n Easy.”

I’m guessing they tried “fresh and E” and decided it didn’t scan properly. (Hat tip: Infinitely Jeff.)

Rounding out the F trifecta is an announcement this week of CVNDSH, a new brand from British cycling star Mark Cavendish, known professionally by his surname only. He’s also known for his potty mouth, which is reflected in the tagline.

“NEW SITE COMING FST AS FCK.”

Yep, it’s another all-consonants brand name, in this case for bicycles and (maybe, someday) other products. “Removing the vowels from the identity is like removing parts of the bike—streamlining it as much as possible but making sure it still works,” said Sam Hodgson, creative director for the UK agency that did the brand design. “We wanted to create something that looked really pure.”

By the way, “FST AS FCK” may be for Eurozone eyes only: when I checked out CVNDSH.com, the line was the G-rated “New site coming soon.”

(Hat tip: Nombra Naming.)

If you’re looking to point an accusatory finger, index or otherwise, here’s a likely culprit.

French Connection UK’s first use of “FCUK” in advertising, 1997.

From the French Connection website:

FCUK is a short, sharp name to stand for French Connection United Kingdom and was being used on faxes between our offices in the UK and Hong Kong (FCHK) before being introduced across the company as a highly recognisable name and acronym to stand alongside the French Connection logo.

 

Image via Nick Kellet’s blog.

The American Family Association, a conservative Christian group, attempted to stop the US trademark registration of FCUK. The group was particularly exercised over a line of branded fragrances with names like FCUK HIM and FCUK HER.

__

(Not in the F troop but still funny – and boundary-pushing for 1997 – is this “Mr. Dumbass” spot for A&W root beer. Hat tip: Ben Trawick-Smith.)

__

* Here’s what I mean about Cult of Caffeine: Some years ago I did a series of writing projects for Peet’s that required my presence at company headquarters. I thought my hosts would be eager to offer me a cup of House Blend, if not something fancier, but none was forthcoming. When I asked whether coffee was available—the meeting was long; it was mid-afternoon; I was fading—I saw pained looks all around. Sighing heavily and clearly inconvenienced, one of my clients removed himself to the Coffee Shrine and slowly, very slowly made one cup of French-press coffee just for me. It’s not the Peet’s Way to keep coffee sitting around, I was told: every cup is made fresh.

Coffee Talk

Gevalia, the Swedish coffee company that’s owned by Kraft Foods, is promoting its new single-serve coffees with free samples. Here’s the front of the package in which my sample was mailed:

 

“Just because it’s single, doesn’t mean it has to be bitter.”

 

I like that line, but I don’t like the comma after “single.” The rule: “Don't put a comma after the main clause when a dependent (subordinate) clause follows it (except for cases of extreme contrast).”*

“Gevalia,” in case you were wondering, was the Latin name for Gävle (pronounced YAV-leh, roughly), the 500-year-old city on the Baltic Sea where the coffee company was founded, in 1853. Gevalia, the company, is pronounced with a soft G (dʒəˈvɑ : liə); it was family run until 1971, when it was bought by General Foods, a predecessor of Kraft Foods. Gevalia is the largest coffee roastery in Scandinavia, where it’s a supermarket brand; in North America, it was until recently positioned as a premium brand and sold only through home delivery. It’s now sold in major supermarkets.

__

* “I love that line, but not the comma after ‘single’” is an example of “extreme contrast.”

On the Visual Thesaurus: The Ads We Deserve

My new column for the Visual Thesaurus, “The Ads We Deserve,” looks at how “you deserve” and “you’re worth it” have come to dominate advertising language. From cell phones (“You deserve Virgin Mobile”) to Stolichnaya (“The most original people deserve the most original vodka”) to a network game show (“You Deserve It”), advertisers flatter our sense of self-worth – a big shift from decades past, when ads played to fears, anxieties, and desires for self-improvement. The transformation has been taking place for four decades, ever since McDonald’s told families “You Deserve a Break Today” and a L’Oreal spokeswoman said she paid more for hair coloring “Because I’m Worth It.”

Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers, but here’s a taste – hey, you’re worth it!

For centuries after “deserve” entered English from French deservir (to merit or earn) in the 13^th century, to “get what you deserve” often meant to be punished or rebuked. Chaucer wrote in The Legend of Good Women (late 14^th century) of “this woman who has given so little penance to you who have deserved to suffer more sorely”; three centuries later, Shakespeare had Helena ask, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “When at your hands did I deserve this scorn?” The French monarchist Joseph de Maistre’s 1811 observation that “Every nation has the government it deserves” (“Toute nation a la gouvernement qu’elle mérite”) does not bespeak a sunny view of the world.

Even in the 20^th century, “deserve” could be pessimistically shaded, as in the fashion designer Coco Chanel’s famous warning that “at 50, you get the face that you deserve.” (This ambiguous sense of “deserve” was spoofed in the 2008 film The Dark Knight, in which The Joker says, “This town deserves a better class of criminal, and I’m gonna give it to ’em!”)

Read the rest of “The Ads We Deserve.”

Word of the Week: Syzygy

Syzygy: In astronomy, a straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies in a gravitational system – e.g., the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth. When the event occurs during lunar perigee (the point during its orbit when the moon is closest to Earth), it’s sometimes erroneously called a “supermoon.” Syzygy comes from Greek syzygein, “to yoke together,” via Latin; it’s pronounced SIZZ-ih-gee.

A syzygy occurred yesterday, June 23, causing the normal spring tide – the high-high and low-low tides that occur every new and full moon – to be about 5 percent stronger than normal. (Five percent may not seem like much, but those of us who swim and kayak in San Francisco Bay noticed the effect over the weekend, when a 7-foot difference between high and low tide created a significant current.)

Syzygy does not cause “earthquakes, volcanoes, bad weather, halitosis, dust bunnies, and hangnails,” according to Phil Plait, author of Discover magazine’s Bad Astronomy blog¹. Writing just before the March 2011 syzygy, Plait noted acerbically:

We humans love to seek correlations, and will see them even when they aren’t there. That’s why astrologers are still in business, despite having no scientific evidence whatsoever that their predictions are any better than random guessing.²

In fact, this “supermoon” idea was started by an astrologer named Richard Nolle. On his website, he defines the term as a new or full Moon when the Moon is closer to Earth than usual. He goes and gives a more precise definition, but it’s rather arbitrary^*. He says quite bluntly — and quite incorrectly — that lots of seismic events (plus bad weather) can be attributed to the Moon.

(Emphasis added.)

Plait concludes:

But I’ll add that the Moon will actually be a bit closer than usual, and while you might not notice the size or brightness difference by eye, the full Moon is always a lovely and compelling sight in the sky. So I urge everyone to go out and take a look. And while you’re looking think on this: a dozen men have walked on the Moon, dozens of probes have been sent there, and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is still snapping away, mapping our friendly satellite and taking dazzling images of its surface.

That’s real, that’s tangible, and that’s what we humans can do when we stick with science.

Syzygy is a legitimate and potentially high-scoring Scrabble word. Syzygy is also the name of another word game played with letter tiles (but no board).

__

¹ Plait's column has since moved to Slate.com, where he published a column on Sunday about this year’s syzygy. Thanks to commenter Steve Hall for the update.

² That link goes to Plait’s long and worthwhile post on astrology. Here’s his conclusion, which he places at the beginning so you won’t miss it: “Astrology is wrong.”

Name in the News: The 606

In Chicago, an elevated pedestrian walkway and five linked parks known informally and collectively as the Bloomingdale Trail is getting a new identity: The 606. The project is being managed by the Trust for Public Land.

Why “606”?

Name in the News: Ecovative

Gavin McIntyre and Eben Bayer, two recent graduates of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute* in Troy, New York, have invented “a process that grows all-natural substitutes for plastic from the tissue of mushrooms,” writes Ian Frazier in the May 20 issue of The New Yorker (paywall). Bayer is the CEO of the company they founded; McIntyre is its chief scientist. They originally called the company Greensulate, because they were working on insulation panels. Now it’s called Ecovative Design, L.L.C.; its 32,000-square-foot factory is in a town that couldn’t be more aptly named: Green Island, New York.

Frazier writes:

Ecovative is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, like “innovative,” and the first “e” is long. I found it hard to get the hang of pronouncing the name, and for a while I thought that Bayer and McIntyre should look for a simpler one. But after talking a lot about the company with its principals and employees, almost all of whom are under thirty, I got to like “Ecovative” because of the way they said it.

Frazier’s change of heart – or head – illustrates a couple of interesting points about “difficult” names.

The first lesson is about “pronounceabity,” which is generally regarded as one of the three givens for an effective name. (The others are memorability and legal availability.) But as with any rule, there are successful exceptions. Will Leben, a linguist with Lexicon, the branding agency that named Febreze, Swiffer, and BlackBerry, writes in his company blog that “some brands succeed despite tricky phonetics–so tricky that pronunciations can still vary long after the brands have become established”:

Zagat’s intended pronunciation is “ZAG-it,” yet many of us go for the more exotic sounding “za-GAT.” … At the outset, Acura, Honda’s premium brand in the U.S., was accented like bravura and Futura by some people. Yet, thanks to early advertising that spread virally, and also thanks to the (intentional) resemblance to accurate, an unambiguous pronunciation was quickly established, and the brand, which now has been around for three decades, is still going strong.

Then there’s Moleskine, the Italian company that makes those improbably popular notebooks, datebooks, sketchbooks, and other “nomadic objects.” Not only is there no single correct way to pronounce the company name, Moleskine’s official position is that  “everyone should feel free to pronounce it as he/she prefers.”

The other lesson to be inferred from Frazier’s experience with the Ecovative name is the power of the Zajonc Effect: the tendency of people, after repeated exposure to an unfamiliar thing, to reverse their initial feelings of dislike or distaste and like the thing more over time.

In other words, the more you hear a name, the more you like it, or at least don’t dislike it.

Like Frazier, I stumbled over “Ecovative” at first. I was reading the name, not hearing it, and I kept transposing the consonants and seeing the word as “evocative.” (That may or may not be the founders’ intention.) But we’re much more likely to “get” a name if we hear it, because humans have been listening to words for many millennia longer than we’ve been reading them. Walking around the Ecovative offices, Frazier kept hearing employees saying EE-co-vay-tive. Soon enough and sure enough, the pronunciation stuck with him.

Moral: Don’t let your brand name linger on the page or screen. If you want people to remember it, make sure it’s spoken aloud – frequently.

__

* Motto: “Why not change the world?”

June Linkfest

The headline calls them “30 Most Overused Buzzwords in Digital Marketing,” but one of them, “P-commerce” (“participatory commerce” or “Pinterest commerce,” depending, I suppose, on context), is underused in my world: it was new to me. I’ve definitely seen a lot of “gamification,” though.

Full Dilbert comic here.

“I’m sorry to say that gamification (a verbing in -ify from the noun game) is not some twisted invention of Scott Adams’s,” linguist Arnold Zwicky wrote in a May 20 post on his blog. Zwicky devoted most of his post to a discussion of “garbage,” and concluded: “So the pointy-headed boss’s gamification rewards count as garbage, trash, and rubbish, maybe junk as well, and are on their way to becoming waste and refuse.”

One of the words on the “30 most overused” list, “showrooming,” was a Fritinancy word of the week in April 2012.

*

If you live in the United States, there’s an excellent chance you live in Emmaland or Sophialand.

I remember when all women named Sophia were about 90 years old, like Dorothy’s mother on “Golden Girls.” And in a few decades, it shall once again come to pass.

*

Prosecutor, Lariat, Ranger, Roundup: What are all those macho herbicide names telling us?

*

“The Art of the Brick,” Edward Sawaya’s new exhibit at Discovery Times Square, is “a Legoistic survey of art masterpieces,” according to a recent New York Times review that introduced me to the acronym AFOL: Adult Fan of Lego. AFOL and many other Lego terms – but not “Legoistic,” which is wonderful – are defined in the Lego Glossary. (“SNOT: Studs Not On Top. A building technique that places LEGO elements on their sides or even upside down to achieve the shape or structure the builder wants in their creation.”)

“Lego,” in case you didn’t know, is a contraction of Danish leg godt: “play well.” It’s never pluralized. Here’s the Lego Glossary entry for “Legos”:

Oh no you didn’t! Technically, the official plural form for more than one element of LEGO is “LEGO® brand building bricks”. That’s ridiculous, though, so most LEGO fans refer to one or more bricks as “LEGO”, following the grammatical convention of “fish” and “sheep.”

Insisting on all capitals, however, is just silly.

*

Linguist Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages, looks at 12 old words – kith, wend and eke among them -- that have survived by being fossilized in idioms.

*

After 60 years of sanctions, Coca-Cola is back in Myanmar (Burma). How to sell Coke to people who’ve never tasted it? “They had to keep it simple, and they had to find the right message. A message, it turns out, that was hidden more than a hundred years back in the Coca-Cola archives.”

*

“Dear NSA: Those slides are hideous.” Designer Emiland De Cubber suggests a radical remake for that PRISM presentation.

Word of the Week: Chapulling

Chapulling: A term used by Turkey’s anti-government activists to describe their peaceful demonstrations. A transliteration of Turkish çapulcu (“looters,” “marauders,” “bums”) combined with an English verb ending; pronounced with the second syllable stressed. According to Google Fight, the English transliteration is much more common on the Internet than the Turkish original.

Reporting from Istanbul on June 10, the Guardian’s Luke Harding wrote:

When demonstrators first took to the streets to protest against the Turkish prime minister he branded them çapulcu…

But Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s attempt to demean his opponents has backfired. Protesters in Istanbul and other cities have embraced the word as their own, labelling themselves proud çapulcu and even coining an English verb, capuling.

Pronounced chapulling, with the emphasis on the second syllable, it has become synonymous with the alternative, youth-driven anti-Erdoğan movement. Students sleeping under the plane trees in Gezi Park, Istanbul, have dubbed their makeshift camp Capulistan, with many mounting cardboard signs next to their dwellings that read “Capul residence”. Meanwhile, the city’s must-have fashion accessory is a white T-shirt with the slogan: “Every day I'm capuling”.

The slogan apparently plays on the line “Every day I’m shuffling” from the LMFAO song “Party Rock Anthem” (pointed out by Ben Zimmer in a comment on Language Log; see embedded video). “Party Rock Anthem” was in turn influenced by the 2006 Rick Ross song “Everyday I’m Hustling” (noted by Connor Adams Sheets in his International Business Times story about chapulling).

The reclaiming (or reappropriation) of a disparaging term, in this case çapulcu, has a long history: see, for example, queer and slut.  

 At least one additional neologism has gained currency as a result of the Turkish protests, which began in late May: Resistanbul. The blend of “resist” and “Istanbul” has gained acceptance outside Turkey; the photo below (via the Guardian) was taken in Milan.

 

“Resistanbul” is older than the current demonstrations, however: a Resistanbul blog (“Direnistanbul” in Turkish) was launched in 2009 to protest the meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the Turkish capital.

See also my 2012 post on hooliganism.

Mister America

In honor of Fathers’ Day, here’s a roundup of manly brands with respectful names. Dad would be so proud.

*

Mr. Beams makes security spotlights, ceiling lights, closet lights, and – in the “New Upcoming Products” category – a portable lantern, available Fall 2013.

 

*

Mr. Bar-B-Q. Founded in 1972, it’s “the world’s leader in innovative barbecue accessories.” Great news: Mr. Bar-B-Q is “now part of the Blue Rhino team!!!” Yes, three exclamation points.

(Via my brother Michael.)

*

Mr. Noodle, a Thai restaurant in Westwood, California.

 

From the About Us page, clearly unencumbered by professional copywriting:

May God bless Thailand and may god bless the United States , for giving the Henry’s a golden opportunity to establish Mr.Noodle to serve one of the most influential community in California .

(Via Michael, again.)

 

 *

Mr. Tea. No, not that Mr. Tea. 

This Mr. Tea, from Fred and Friends, “is an ideal tea-time companion”:

Just load his little silicone pants, perch him in your cup, relax for a minute as he does the work, and savor your perfect orange pekoe. Molded from food-safe, tasteless, soft silicone rubber, Mr. Tea is packaged in a colorful little giftbox.

*

Mr. Handyman, a franchise service in the U.S. and Canada. They give the toll-free number as 1-877-MRHANDYMAN, but shouldn’t it be 1-877-MRHANDY?

*

More mister names here, here, here, here, and here. And let’s not forget Mr. Bra.

Repetitiously

I haven’t blogged for a while about startup names that end in -ly, but that doesn’t mean the trend is ebbing. On the contrary, I’m up to 153 – one hundred fifty-three! – pins on my “Names That End in -ly” Pinterest board.* The most recent additions: Fastly (“real-time caching”), Warmly (an alarm-clock app), and Scopely (a mobile gaming platform).

Also on Pinterest:

Shop at X & Y! (two-part retail names joined by an ampersand or plus sign)

Brand Names with Gratuitous Umlauts (and other needless diacritical marks)

Death Brands (and near-death brands, like Food Coma)

Square Brands (Foursquare, Squarespace, et al.)

Boxy Brands (Birchbox, Dropbox, Parabox, et al.)

The Zen of Brand Naming (Zenify, Zendesk, et al.)

__

Make that 154: I just pinned Feastly, “homemade meals prepared and served in a cook’s home.” Thanks for the tip, Moira!