Fritinancy

How D-Fuzz-It Got Its Name

Now in his 80s (he doesn’t like to reveal his age, but Wikipedia tells all), Maurice Kanbar is the brains and drive behind Quad Cinemas (the first multiplex on the East Coast), Tangoes (a puzzle game based on tangrams), SKYY vodka (which Kanbar loaded on his scooter and sold to San Francisco bartenders, one by one), and at least 30 other inventions.

The first of those inventions was a humble one: a little device that removes pills from knitwear. Kanbar tells the story of its inception in Secrets from an Inventor’s Notebook, a charming and informative first-person account of his life of invention. The tale includes this anecdote about how the device got its name:

I actually wanted to call my invention “Balls Off!” but this was 1964 and everyone said, “Are you crazy? [I get asked that a lot.] You can’t call it Balls Off!” For once I relented and went with a name my friend Helen Shufro came up with: the D-Fuzz-It® Sweater and Fabric Comb.

Later in the book, Kanbar relates how SKYY got its name (“Adding an extra ‘y’ to ‘sky’ gave the name a twist and made it even more distinctive. It worked for Exxon, didn’t it?”). He also dispenses advice about naming, some of it useful (“You have to imagine your name being used in the situations your customers will find themselves in”). But I must take issue with Kanbar’s dictum that “commonly used words can’t be trademarked.” Nonsense, as a glance at the roster of famous trademarks—from Apple to Virgin, from Dove to Gap, from Twitter to, yes, single-Y Sky—attests.

Read more about Maurice Kanbar in this 2012 profile in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Y: Because We Like You

Here’s a naming trend that snuck up on me: names that substitute Y for I. Sometimes the Y stands in for short I, as in Glympse; sometimes it’s pronounced like long I, as in Mynd. The trend is most noticeable among technology startups, but I’ve seen it in retail names, too.

Why have so many companies gotten Y’s? I’m tempted to point to Skype, the voice-over-IP service that was founded in 2003 and acquired eight years later by Microsoft for $8.5 billion. But Skype isn’t an example of letter substitution; the name is said to be a contraction of “sky peer to peer.” And another Y name, Swype, is a year older than Skype.

It’s possible we’re seeing the shadow of Y Combinator, the “seed accelerator” (venture-capital-firm-plus-incubator) founded in 2005. (The firm was named after the higher-order mathematical function.) Sneak in an orthographic homage to your patron? Y not?

Then again, the letter Y has intrinsic graphic appeal. It can resemble a fork in the road, a champagne glass, or a stick figure with outstretched arms.

And let’s not overlook Lazy Domain Syndrome, best summarized as “We couldn’t get a dot-com domain with the dictionary spelling, so we jury-rigged it.” With varying degrees of success, as these 10 names prove.

Word of the Week: Hypnopompic

Hypnopompic: Of or relating to the process of awakening from sleep. From Greek hypno- (sleep) and pompē (a sending forth or escorting).

“Hypnopompic” was coined by the British poet and psychical researcher F.W.H. Myers (1843–1901). The word first appeared in print in Myers’s posthumously published Human Personality and Its Survival of Physical Death (1903):

To similar illusions accompanying the departure of sleep, as when a dream-figure persists for a few moments into waking life, I have given the name hypnopompic.

The counterpart of “hypnopompic” is “hypnogogic”: of or relating to the period just before one is fully asleep.

I encountered “hypnopompic” after a colleague sent me a link to the website for Shadow, “an innovative alarm clock that helps you record and remember your dreams.” The site is lovely but minimal—the tagline is “Community of Dreamers”—so I hunted around until I found a more explicit description on Crunchbase:

SHADOW is a mobile application that helps you remember and record your dreams. Modern alarm-clocks rip you through your hypnopompic sleep state so rapidly, it’s nearly impossible to remember your dream.

SHADOW uses an escalating alarm that gradually traditions [sic] you through your hypnopompic state and is ready to record when you turn off the alarm. 95% of all dreams are forgotten if not recorded in the first 5 minutes of waking up. We believe this is a huge data set that is literally being forgotten.

The value of this data set isn’t clear, at least to me*, but the Shadow site design is, well, dreamy. I like the Shadow name, too: it’s a good example of a suggestive (i.e., non-descriptive) mark, and the URL (discovershadow.com) proves that you don’t need a “pure” domain to effectively claim your territory. In May 2013 the blog Startup Plays included Shadow in its list of “the top 35 startups in tech that TechCrunch missed out on.”

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* “But what about the benzene-ring dream?” you ask. It may never have happened.

The Thrilla Called Vanilla

Food service on airlines may be disappearing, but food names on airlines are thriving, thank you very much. South Africa has Mango Airlines*, India has SpiceJet, and Japan has Peach, which I wrote about in 2011.

Now another Japanese airline is raiding the pantry. AirAsia Japan, which is wholly owned by ANA, the country’s second-largest air carrier, has been rebranded as Vanilla Airlines. (Or possibly Vanilla Air. Reports are inconsistent.)

To a speaker of idiomatic English, “Vanilla Air” may suggest a plain, nothing-special approach to in-flight amenities.** But that’s not how Japanese speakers perceive it, according to a report in Campaign Asia (all punctuation sic):

While the ‘vanilla’ is synonymous with ‘safe and boring’ in the English-speaking part of the world, it’s nothing of the sort to Japanese says McCann Worldgroup senior strategic planner, Sakura Irie. “The brand is clearly targeting young Japanese travellers so what it means in English, does not really matter.

“In Japan, vanilla does not have any connotation of being boring or bland – and the overall impression of the word is very positive. It is accessible, likable and familiar. Moreover, it gives the impression of being ‘pure and innocent’ and ‘kawaii’ – which means a lot more than ‘cute,’ it’s the feeling of emotional excitement, endearment and desire to be a part of or to own,” she continued. “It’s an interesting and in fact, very Japanese choice, I thought.”

No mention of whether Japanese speakers will struggle with the pronunciation of the L phoneme, which is virtually identical to R in Japanese.

AirAsia worked with “several” agencies on the rebranding, according to a Bloomberg.com report. Much is made in the press coverage of the report that AirAsia “sifted through” a list of 200 names, as if that number were astronomical and newsworthy. (The runner-up names were not disclosed. Spearmint? Cinnamon? Oregano?) In my professional experience, 200 names is a modest number to be developed for a major rebranding. I have to wonder, though, about the wisdom of presenting the client with that many names. That must have been one very long conference call.

But here’s a happy thought: Aren’t you looking forward to the merger of Peach and Vanilla? Mmm, swirly goodness.

(Hat tip: Rochelle Kopp. Headline source.)

 

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* OK for man, but how does woman go?

** Or a cheap drugstore fragrance for teen girls.

More “Classic”

Here’s a little follow-up to my recent Visual Thesaurus column about the meanings of “classic” in  branding lingo. (Access to the column is still restricted to subscribers, but you can read an excerpt here.)

In today’s New York Times, advertising columnist Stuart Elliott reports that Turner Classic Movies – one of the “classics” I wrote about – is stepping up its marketing efforts, starting with a subtly redesigned logo.

Elliott writes:

As Turner, a division of Time Warner, pursues its experiential strategy for TCM, it counterintuitively is not playing down the “Classic” in the channel’s brand identity to appeal to younger consumers. Indeed, after the recent graphics redesign, the word “Classic” “has been accentuated,” [TCM general manager Jeff]  Gregor said, and now appears in boldface, with “Turner” and “Movies” remaining in regular type.

Although research has found that two-thirds of the channel’s estimated 62 million viewers each month are ages 18 to 49, Gregor said that “ ‘Classic’ is not a negative in any way,” because viewers deem TCM to be “more a mind-set than an age,” providing “context and curation” for the films it presents.

(What is it about “Classic” and Atlanta? In 1985, another mainstay of the city’s business landscape, the Coca-Cola Company, added the word to the brand name of its flagship soft drink, Coca-Cola, and removed it in 2009.)

Also, what is it about “curation”? I’ve been writing about this pretentious word and its derivatives for years now, and even included “curate” in not one but two Words of the Year lists (2009 and 2011), which should have been the kiss of death. But apparently there is no cure for the curating fad.

Is the Meaning of “Hybrid” Changing?

I had to have some body work done on my car, a Honda Civic Hybrid, and I needed a rental for the duration. A friendly woman from Enterprise Rent-A-Car picked me up at the body shop. We had this conversation en route to the rental office:

Me: Can I rent a hybrid?

She: Oh, yeah. We have lots of hybrids. But not full hybrids.

Me: [silent, puzzled]

She: You know, they still need gas.

Me: [not sure I heard correctly] But … isn’t that what a hybrid car is? Gas and electric?

She: I mean, they’re hybrid but not completely electric.

I pondered this for the remainder of the drive. I thought at first that my driver simply didn’t know that “hybrid” means “a combination of two things.” (The word originally meant “mongrel.”) That she had some other definition in her head.

After I got back home I did a little research and learned that there are, in fact, full hybrids and mild hybrids. A full hybrid—the Toyota Prius, for instance—can run on just the (gasoline) engine, just the (electric) battery, or both. A mild hybrid, like my Civic, can’t run on battery power alone; it needs both power sources.

Maybe, I thought, it was “full hybrid” that had confused Ms. Enterprise.

Enterprise does rent Priuses, and they are indeed full hybrids—meaning they run on gas and/or battery power. Enterprise does not rent plug-in electric vehicles (EVs) like the Nissan Leaf or the Tesla, which are not hybrids at all: they run on battery power alone.

I thought about Ms. Enterprise, who looked young enough to have spent her entire driving life in the world of hybrid vehicles. (The Prius was introduced in the U.S. in 2000, the Civic Hybrid in 2001.) I wondered whether for her, and maybe for a whole cohort of younger drivers, “hybrid” had lost its original “combination-of-two-things” meaning and now signifies “less than 100 percent gas-powered.” Or, perhaps, just “nontraditional in some nonspecific way.”

Of course, a sample size of one isn’t much to go on, and I may be over-extrapolating. Let me know if you have additional data.

Meanwhile, at the Enterprise office, I encountered another not-quite-right expression.

“We will be CLOSED on MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 2nd in observation of the Labor Day holiday.”

 

Yes, you “observe” a holiday like Labor Day, but the noun that’s wanted here is observance, not observation. Observation is a synonym for “perception”; observance means “the act or custom of celebrating a holiday.” (Mighty Red Pen wrote a nice explanation a few years back.)

And does anyone say “Happy holiday!!” in connection with Labor Day? Not in my experience.

Normal Distribution

Four of these Normals have gay themes. Ellen Barkin is in two of them.

 

Attempting Normal, by Marc Maron (2013).

 

“The New Normal” (NBC, 2012–2013). (Ellen Barkin #1.)

 

Different Is the New Normal (documentary about Tourette syndrome, 2011).

 

Virtually Normal, by Andrew Sullivan (1995).

 

The Normal Heart, by Larry Kramer (1985). A revival production was staged in New York in 2011 (Ellen Barkin #2) and is currently touring the U.S. and being adapted for television.

 

Next to Normal, rock musical by Brian Yorkey (on Broadway 2009—2011).

 

Almost Normal (2005).

 

On the other hand, MINI is Not Normal.

 

 

 

Could it be … abby-normal?

 

 

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More title trends: The Modifiables, In the House, Fall Guys.

Word of the Week: Gentefication

Gentefication (hen-tay-fee-KAY-shun): A Spanglish portmanteau of Spanish gente (“people”) and the English suffix from “gentrification.” Defined as “the process of upwardly mobile Latinos, typically second-generation and beyond, investing in and returning to the old neighborhood.” (Leslie Berestein Rojas, Multi-American blog, KPCC (Southern California Public Radio), December 28, 2011.)

The coinage of gentefication is attributed to Guillermo Uribe, who grew up in the mostly Mexican-American East Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights. In 2006, Uribe converted a 60-year-old Boyle Heights bar, the Metropolitan, into Eastside Luv Wine Bar y QUEso¹, “a sleek bar that attracts younger patrons whom some call Chipsters, for Chicano hipsters,” according to a story about Boyle Heights published in the New York Times on August 18, 2013. Reporter Jennifer Medina writes:

To many, these newer landmarks along First Street are clear signs of gentrification.

To Guillermo Uribe, who opened the bar several years ago, it is something else: gentefication. These are people — in Spanish, gente — who enthusiastically talk about maintaining the area’s deep sense of Mexican-American history.

Gentrification, on which gentefication is based, first appeared in print in 1973 in the Times of London, according to the OED. The verb form, gentrify—”to renovate or convert (housing, esp. in an inner-city area) so that it conforms to middle-class taste; to render (an area) middle-class”—had appeared the previous year, also in a British publication.

The Eastside Luv website is enthusiastic, playful, and sincere about its origins and intentions:

The decision to change the name was not easy to make, but felt it was necessary to communicate the LOVE we have for our Chicano/Pocho²/Latino EASTSIDE experience. …

The improvements are mostly inside (which is where all improvements should start) and consist of: custom CHAINdeliers inspired by lowrider chain steering wheels, Low Rider Lounge Shairs upholstered in Dickies and Pendleton fabric and clear plastic as Grandmas did, Wino Bench Seating upholstered in black corduroy inspired by gangster business casual wino house slippers, Light Sconces & Cabinets adorned with chicken wire... just to name a few of the elements inspired by our East Los Angeles existence.

We are, however, well aware that before BROOKLYN AVE became Cesar Chavez Ave, Boyle Heights was home to a large Jewish community.³  So, we decided to make our cocktails using Soju⁴ (ehhh)... actually we decided to design the inside to look and feel like many of the beautiful turn of the century Victorian and Craftsman Bungalows that dominate Boyle Heights... only a bit sexxxier.

“I [Heart] Eastside Luv” T-shirts and sweatshirts carry a visual and verbal pun: the heart symbol is the Sacred Heart, seen frequently in Mexican Catholic iconography; and the acronym for Eastside Luv also stands for “English as a Second Language.”

Besides gentefication and Chipsters, contemporary East L.A. slang includes:

Tweecanos: Chicanos on Twitter

Googlear: to Google (using the Spanish infinitive-verb ending -ar)

Feisbuk: “Facebook” rendered in phonetic Spanish

MariachiOke: karaoke with mariachi music. (Read about other -oke blends here.)

 

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¹ Queso means “cheese” in Spanish, but the orthography turns the word into a bilingual pun meaning, roughly, “so what.”

² Pocho: “an Americanized person or thing of Mexican origin, including Americanized Mexican Spanish” (Double-Tongued Dictionary). See also the Wikipedia entry.

³ Personal aside: My father grew up in Boyle Heights when it was a mostly Jewish neighborhood, and graduated from Roosevelt High School. My grandmother is buried in a Boyle Heights cemetery.

⁴ Soju is a distilled liquor made in Korea, traditionally from rice, wheat, and barley. I think this joke is a slightly off-target reference to the Jewish custom of eating at Chinese restaurants on Christmas, but I could be wrong. See Aswang's comment about "so Jew."

August Linkfest

“The Man Who Has Stolen the Straw” (Armenian), “Way of the Birds” (Estonian), and other cultures’ names for what we call the Milky Way.  In Sanskrit, the galaxy is called “Mandakini,” which translates to “calm” or “unhurried,” but could also be the name of the latest swimwear sensation. (Via @mashedradish.)

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“The Internet is a James Joyce novel”: on the playful language of image macros.

Image macro via The American Scholar.

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Love it or loathe it, “impactful” didn’t originate in business jargon or advertising copy. And, as Language Log’s Mark Liberman discovered, its use is decades older than you think.

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Saturated golden-yellow means “big independent film,” and 14 other movie-poster clichés.

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Alpha-stacking—pushing movie titles to the front of the alphabet—is becoming more common. One independent-studio head says it’s because “Americans are lazy people. They can’t be bothered to go past ‘L’.”

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The director Lee Daniels can’t catch a break with his movie titles.

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The baby formally known as Prince: Ben Yagoda on the naming customs of the rich and royal. (Plus: “delivered of a son” and “mommy tummy.”)

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“Is there anything preventing a company from calling its active ingredient supercurol? Well, yes.” James Harbeck on how prescription drugs get their names.

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Did Spotify start the namifying trend? The Name Inspector provides infographic evidence. (See his Pinterest Wall of Namifying, too.)

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“That’s a good idea,” “It’s gonna be awesome,” “We should talk,” and other banal phrases that American businesses have trademarked.

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The most popular ad campaign in Japan—it’s been running for six years—features “the White family”: mother, daughter, father (a human in a dog’s body), son (a black American), and maid (an alien incarnation of Tommy Lee Jones). Quentin Tarantino and a Japanese astronaut have made cameo appearances. The ads are for SoftBank, a mobile provider;  there are no subtitles, but the surrealism transcends the language barrier. Watch a bunch of the ads here.

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People have been literally exploding over non-literal literally. The Visual Thesaurus rounds up the online reactions to the controversy, including this one from the Oxford English Dictionary’s Fiona McPherson: “We literally cannot see what all the fuss is about.”

 

And that’s it for this month. Literally.

On the Visual Thesaurus: What Does “Classic” Mean?

From classic rock to Turner Classic Movies, from Classic Roast coffee to MapQuest Classic, we’re living in a new Classic Era. My new column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at the many ways classic, noun and adjective, is used in branding, sports, technology, and other realms.

Full access is restricted to subscribers. Here’s an excerpt:

In April 1985, Coca-Cola — then celebrating its 99th year — announced it would be retiring the original Coke recipe and replacing it with reformulated “New Coke.” The switch was a huge miscalculation, triggering public protests and boycotts. Less than three months later, the company bowed to pressure and brought back the old formula under the name “Coca-Cola Classic.” Finally, in 2009 — long after “New Coke” had disappeared from shelves — Coca-Cola dropped the “Classic.” (It endures in the names of various Coca-Cola Classic sports tournaments and road races.) By then, “classic” had come to signify, to a large part of the population, “the original version” or “the previous version” or even “the good stuff before they started messing with it.”

Read the rest of “Of Coke and Cat Food: The ‘Classics’ Among Us.”

And here’s a blog bonus: In his new book Yes, I COULD Care Less: How to Be a Language Snob Without Being a Jerk, Bill Walsh—a copy editor for the Washington Post and author of two other books on language and usage—devotes a chapter to retronyms, words that “differentiate the original sense of something from a new iteration.” Dairy milk and hen egg are two of his examples. And then there’s this:

Now that all manner of dessert-y concoctions are called martinis merely because they’re served in martini glasses, the menu-journalism community has had to invent the term classic martini. …

Then there’s the daiquiri. If you’re younger than 45, you probably don’t know what that really means. A daiquiri is rum, lime juice and sugar. … “Oh,” you big-city-cocktail-bar-frequenting youngsters are probably thinking right now, “you mean a Hemingway daiquiri!” Uh, right. That seems to be right up there with a classic daiquiri among efforts to indicate that a daiquiri is, in fact, an actual daiquiri.

Extra credit to Walsh for “menu-journalism community.” (I wrote about “The X Community” trope back in 2010.)