Fritinancy

Name in the Wild: Wheels of Justice

I snapped this sign on Mountain Boulevard in Montclair Village, a neighborhood of Oakland:

Wheels of Justice Cyclery

 

An odd name for a bicycle shop, I thought. I seemed to recall a proverb, or a quote from a famous person, along the lines of “The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.” Well, what bicyclist wants slow, grinding wheels?

I looked it up, and it turns out the original quote is a little different, although it’s frequently misrepresented: It has to do with “the mills of the gods” rather than “the wheels of justice,” and it goes all the way back to ancient Greece. In his poem “Retribution,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow singularized the deity:

Though the mills of God grind slowly;
Yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience he stands waiting,
With exactness grinds he all

But guess what? This is totally beside the point! Because the name of the shop has nothing to do with Longfellow or the Greek Skeptics. It’s an eponym. The owner’s name is—wait for it—Justice Baxter.

Now, “Justice” is a fairly uncommon boys’ name in the United States. The Baby Name Wizard Name Voyager shows it appearing out of nowhere sometime in the 1980s. (I don’t know Justice Baxter’s age, but he’s owned the bicycle shop since 2002, so he may have been born right around then.) The name’s popularity among boys peaked at 411 per million babies in 2006, and it’s been dropping ever since.

 

 

Also in the 1980s, “Justice” began showing up as a girls’ name. It hasn’t been as popular for girls, but that graph line is still rising.

 

 

Baby-name experts have categorized Justice among the new “virtue names”—21st-century counterparts to the Faith, Hope, Charity, Patience, and Comfort so popular with the Puritans. Other “new virtue names” include Logic, Rhyme, Reason, Destiny, Curiosity, Savvy, and, yes, Virtue. 

A female Justice—17-year-old Justice Toliver—was in the news last week because of a tragedy: She was the victim of a fatal shooting in her Oakland, California, apartment. The prime suspect, her 14-year-old brother, turned himself in to police yesterday.

A word of warning: Don’t even think about naming a child of either sex “Justice” if you live in New Zealand. Since 2001, according to Harper’s Index (August 2013), New Zealand’s Registrar of Births, Deaths, and Marriages has rejected baby names 311 times. Sixty-two of those rejections have been for the name “Justice.”

Yes, that headline would read “Justice Denied in New Zealand.”

The -ly Name Trend: Not Just for Tech Startups

My guest post for Duets Blog yesterday (helpfully tagged “mixed bag of nuts”) looked at the epidemic of copycat names—in particular, the 193 names ending in -ly that I’d documented on Pinterest.

One day later, there are 196 -ly names on the board. I spotted two of them not in TechCrunch, my near-bottomless resource, but on the shelves of my neighborhood Safeway.

Brightly paper towels promise “virtually lint-free shine.”

 

Softly toilet paper.

 

The Guys and Dolls fan in me hoped Safeway also carried Nicely-Nicely paper cups. No dice.

The character was called Nicely-Nicely Jones in the original Damon Runyon stories. For more on Runyon and his creations, here’s a wonderful appreciation by Adam Gopnik, published in the March 2, 2009, issue of the New Yorker.

Guest Post for Duets Blog: Trendifying Adverbially

My new guest post at Duets Blog, “Trendifying Adverbially: When Naming Fads Become Epidemics,” takes a serious look at copycat naming. Why are there at least 193 195 companies or products whose names end in -ly? What explains the surge in names that end in -ify? Is lack of awareness to blame, or the opposite—an eagerness to hitch one’s star to a branding bandwagon?

Read the post—and leave a comment with your own observations, if you like.

Word of the Week: Trebuchet

Trebuchet: A stone-throwing engine of war. The word was imported from French into English in the 13th century, when the device was invented; the French verb trabucher meant “to overturn, overthrow,” from tra- (from Latin trans-, here expressing “displacement”) and Old French buc “trunk, bulk.” (Source: Online Etymology Dictionary.)

Drawing from Real World Physics Problems, which notes that “the payload could be thrown a far distance and do considerable damage, either by smashing down walls or striking the enemy while inside their stronghold.”

Trebuchets have been in the news lately because of their role in the antigovernment protests that have been taking place in Ukraine since November 2013. “The Battle for Ukraine Is Being Fought Using Ancient Military Tactics” read a January 22 headline in Business Insider. While protesters favoring European integration built a trebuchet in the capital city of Kiev (or Kyiv), government forces adopted an ancient Roman shielding tactic called the testudo, Latin for “tortoise.”

Photo: Reuters/Maks Levin. More photos at The Atlantic and Slate.

 

What’s the difference, you ask, between a trebuchet and a catapult? I looked it up for you. According to Jarod’s Forge, a history blog written by museum curator Jarod Kearny, a catapult is “any device that throws an object, although it commonly refers to the medieval siege weapon”; a catapult uses tension for its throwing force. Trebuchets “are a TYPE of catapult, using gravity (with a counterweight) or traction (men pulling down), to propel the arm and often employing a sling at the end of the arm for greater distance.”

The distinction is sometimes overlooked in coverage of the Ukrainian conflict. RT.com (formerly known as Russia Today) called the machine a catapult:

Puzzled protesters and journalists watched Monday as a group of masked people studied some plans, standing next to a pile of long wooden poles they had carried to a central Kiev area earlier.
It soon turned out the protesters were building a catapult – or, as some argued, a trebuchet.

And there was this:

RT @Walldo: naturally the homemade catapult used by protesters in Ukraine has its own Twitter account -> @ukr_catapult

— Robert Loerzel (@robertloerzel) January 23, 2014

Other words that frequently appear in coverage of the protests include Maidan (square, plaza), a word with cognates in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu; Berkut (“golden eagle”), the riot police; and Moskal (a derogatory term for a resident of Moscow). For more, see this Radio Free Europe glossary.

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Previous Fritinancy coverage of antique weapons: Bayonets.

You Know Jack

Jacks of all trades, new or newly noted:

BackerJack.

 

“A website dedicated to curating cool crowdfunded projects” – TechCrunch, January 15, 2014.

 

JackThreads.

“Your premium online menswear shop, offering a curated selection of guy gear & gadgets”—including Beardos. Founded in 2008; acquired in 2010 by daily-deals site Thrillist.

 

 

Two Jacks Denim.

Retail store, 2355 Broadway, Oakland.

From the Two Jacks Denim website:

Our inspiration is two distinctly American writers known for their rugged individualism, sense of adventure and wild prose, Jack London, born in Oakland, and Jack Kerouac, native of Lowell, Mass., home to many of America textile mills during the Industrial Revolution.

Minor correction: Jack London spent his childhood in Oakland, but he was born (in 1876, as John Griffith London) across the bay in San Francisco.

 

Most jacks derive from the English proper name Jack, including the first one, jakke, “a mechanical device,” which first appeared in the late 14th century. The Online Etymology Dictionary has an extensive entry on jack and its variations. Here’s an excerpt:

The proper name was used in Middle English for “any common fellow” (mid-14c.), and thereafter extended to various appliances replacing servants (1570s). Used generically of men (jack-of-all-trades, 1610s), male animals (1620s, see jackass, jackdaw, etc.), and male personifications (1520s, e.g. Jack Frost, 1826).

As the name of a device for pulling off boots, from 1670s. The jack in a pack of playing cards (1670s) is in German Bauer “peasant.”* Jack shit “nothing at all” is attested by 1968, U.S. slang. The plant jack-in-the-pulpit is attested by 1837. Jack the Ripper was active in London 1888. The jack of Union Jack is a nautical term for “small flag at the bow of a ship” (1630s).

The verb sense—to hoist, to raise—was originally an Americanism from the mid-19th century, as was the figurative sense—“to increase prices, etc.” (1904). The Online Etymology Dictionary again:

Jack off (v.) “to masturbate” is attested from 1916, probably from jack (n.) in the sense of “penis.”

Also covered in the jack entry: Jack o’ lantern, jackknife, jackhammer, jackboot, crackerjack, jackanapes, and jack-in-the-box.

The Oxford English Dictionary has many additional entries for jack. Monterey Jack cheese is named for David Jacks (originally David Jack), a Scottish-born dairy rancher who first made the cheese in Monterey County, California, in the 1880s. Jack as a slang term for money is an Americanism from the late 19th century. And since at least 1930, the verb to jack has meant “to take illegally, to steal”; this jack is a shortening of the earlier hijack (origin unknown).

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the children’s game known as jacks comes from jack-stones, originally check-stones, “a small smooth round pebble.”

Jacks game from How Retro, which also gives the game’s history and rules.

 

See also my posts on the “Jacked” naming trend: here and here.

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* Fans of the television show 24 (2001-2010) will recognize this juxtaposition.

How Adderall Got Its Name

“Profits for the A.D.H.D. drug industry have soared,” writes Alan Schwarz in “The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder,” New York Times, December 15, 2013. “Sales of stimulant medication in 2012 were nearly $9 billion, more than five times the $1.7 billion a decade before, according to the data company IMS Health.” The leading brand in this category, Adderall, was introduced in 1994 by Richwood Pharmaceutical Company, which was sold in 1997 to a British company, Shire. Roger Griggs, the Richwood executive who launched Adderall, now “strongly opposes marketing stimulants to the general public because of their dangers.”

From the Times article:

Modern marketing of stimulants began with the name Adderall itself. Mr. Griggs bought a small pharmaceutical company that produced a weight-loss pill named Obetrol. Suspecting that it might treat a relatively unappreciated condition then called attention deficit disorder, and found in about 3 to 5 percent of children, he took “A.D.D.” and fiddled with snappy suffixes. He cast a word with the widest net.

All.

For A.D.D.

A.D.D. for All.

Adderall.

“It was meant to be kind of an inclusive thing,” Mr. Griggs recalled.

It succeeded on that count. Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cited in the Times article show that “the diagnosis had been made in 15 percent of high school-age children, and that the number of children on medication for the disorder had soared to 3.5 million from 600,000 in 1990.” 

Word of the Week: Preawareness

Preawareness: Also pre-awareness. Movie-business jargon for an audience’s sense of comfortable familiarity with a concept, a brand, or a series, thus all but guaranteeing box-office success.

From a 2010 post on the screenwriting blog Go into the Story:

Why the fixation with pre-awareness titles / pre-branded brands?

* Because consumers will already know a preexisting brand, it makes the studio’s job easier to get consumers’ attention when marketing the movie

* If preexisting title is a nostalgia brand for Gen X (e.g., Transformers) or Baby Boomers (e.g, Battleship), that widens the target audience beyond adolescent and young adult males

* Automatic merchandising tie-in to preexisting brand offers expanded revenue stream

In other words, a pre-awareness title can feel more like a sure thing than an untested original screenplay.

Preawareness is “the enemy of originality,” writes film producer Lynda Obst in her 2013 book, Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business, and films without preawareness “are the endangered species of the movie business.” 

Christopher Nolan’s Inception, released by Warner Bros. [in 2010], based on an original script by Nolan, is one such film that many in the industry doubted would open at the time, as it had no famous title or comic-book hero to hang its hat on. But it opened liked gangbusters due to a brilliant marketing campaign. This is why people like Warner Bros. president of worldwide marketing Sue Kroll are the new Hollywood stars.

“[T]here is good news for Moses and Noah fans,” wrote a New York Times book reviewer in her brief review of Obst’s book: “Hollywood has recently realized that Bible stories have ­preawareness.”

Watch Obst tell a story about how preawareness works (sorry, video wouldn’t embed).

The earliest citations I found for this marketing sense of “pre-awareness” are from 2009. This one is from a November 17, 2009, post on the Adaddinsane blog, which is written by an anonymous web developer and screenwriter in London:

“Pre-awareness” is the movie industry buzzword it’s fashionable for writers to hate. It’s the word that gives us endless sequels, remakes (“re-imaginings”) and adaptations, and an apparent fear of original ideas.

There is an ordinary word that covers the concept: familiarity.

Pre-awareness is also invoked in other types of marketing, as in a 2013 Marketo campaign for “The Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation”:

Launching a pre-awareness campaign would help us build buzz around the release of our guide as well as generate new leads prior to the launch.

Other senses of “pre-awareness” have been around for nearly a century. Google Books led me to a 1917 philosophy book, Mind by Basil Blackwell, that includes several citations. Here’s one:

Thus on lifting a cup of coffee to our lips we have pre-awareness of the coming taste before the taste-receptors are stimulated.

Judy Protas, 1922-2014

Judy Protas may have been famous only within the insular world of New York advertising. But some of the ads she wrote, including the 20th-century classic “You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy’s Real Jewish Rye,” have been been famous across the country for more than half a century.

Ms. Protas, a retired executive at New York agency Doyle Dane Bernbach, died January 7 at 91. Margalit Fox wrote the obituary for the New York Times, which I commend to you.

Here’s Fox on the Levy’s campaign:

Though its evocative tagline is often credited to William Bernbach, a founder of DDB, or to Phyllis Robinson, the agency’s chief copywriter, period newspaper accounts and contemporary archival sources make clear that the actual writing fell to Ms. Protas, who, working quietly and out of the limelight, set down those dozen durable words.

We didn’t have Levy’s in California, so this may have been the first Judy Protas ad I ever saw:

The walls of the mezzanine of the Ohrbach’s store on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles were decorated with ads like this one, which was far from current by the time I laid eyes on it. (The store, part of a New York-based chain, closed in 1987.) I remember my bemusement—a talking cat? in a fancy hat? with a cigarette holder?—and my delightthat this discount retailer valued advertisements highly enough to treat them as art. (Yes, I was an ad nerd even as a child.)

“Ohrbach’s … wanted to disabuse consumers of the notion that discount equaled déclassé,” writes Fox:

Beneath the headline — “I Found Out About Joan” — Ms. Protas’s copy went on, cattily, to describe the impecunious Joan’s pretensions to wealth before conceding, “She does dress divinely,” and concluding, “I just happened to be going her way and I saw Joan come out of Ohrbach’s!”

Protas also wrote the lyrics to the Cracker Jack jingle, “which in full (‘lip-smackin’, whip-crackin’, paddy-whackin’, knickin’-knackin’, silver-rackin’, scoundrel-whackin’, cracker-jackin’ Cracker Jack’) has the trochaic rush of a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song,” writes the inimitable Fox.

The career of Judy Protas serves as a reminder that not all Mad Men from advertising’s golden age were men. For further proof, see my post about Lois Wyse, who coined the Smucker’s slogan; and my Visual Thesaurus column about “you deserve it” slogans, which includes the story of how Ilon Specht came up with the long-lasting L’Oreal slogan “Because I’m Worth It.”

Read more about the Levy’s Rye Bread ad campaign at Barry Popik’s Big Apple blog.

On the Visual Thesaurus: Dud(s)

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, “Duds We Love, Duds We Don’t,” starts with a question: How is clothing similar to bombs that don’t detonate? The answer: They’re both called duds. And not by accident.

Access to the full column is restricted to subscribers (just $19.95 a year!). Here’s an excerpt:

Short words are handy for brand naming, too, so it’s no surprise that “duds” is a popular combining term for casual-clothing labels. Cuddl Duds, a manufacturer of thermal underwear and pajamas, has been in business since 1978; regardless of how you feel about the truncation of “cuddle,” you’ll have to grant that the “ud” repetition makes the name fun to say.

Cuddl Duds package.

 

A scan of the U.S. trademark database also turns up live trademarks for Dorm Duds (pajamas), Chef Duds (restaurant apparel), Dazzle Dudz (iron-on patches), O Duds (organic-fiber clothing), Storm Duds (umbrellas and ponchos given as promotional items), Lil’ Duds (children’s apparel; variously spelled abbreviations for “little” are common among brand names), Doggiduds (yes, clothing for dogs), and many other Duds. There are a number of Duds ’n Suds coin laundries nationwide; the ones in Reno, Nevada, have on-site slot machines and beer, giving the business name a double meaning.

And then there’s Milk Duds, the candy brand that’s been around since 1926. You’ll have to read the rest of the column to learn its story.

Blog bonus: I keep it strictly G-rated for the Visual Thesaurus, but I can’t resist sharing some slightly risqué “duds” marks in the US trademark database:

Milkdudz nursing bras and apparel. (Tagline: “Not Your Mommaz Nursing Wear.”) Trademark application filed and abandoned in 2007, possibly because of that little Milk Duds problem.

MILF Duds clothing. Also filed and abandoned in 2007. Nice try, guys.

Dildudz filed for trademark protection in May 2013 and is still awaiting registration. A description from the website: “a line of novelty outfits that you can use to play ‘dress up’ with your favorite dildo or vibrator.”

Dilduz fireman.

January Linkfest

“Picking a product name is all agony and no ecstasy,” writes Trello founder Dan Ostlund (“The Agonies of Picking a Product Name”). His detailed account of his own DIY effort is a cautionary tale, although he doesn’t explain why the company felt it necessary to jettison its perfectly good placeholder name.

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Top executives writing about verbal branding may be a trend now. Here’s Larry D. Kramer, president of the Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, California, on how his organization developed a new tagline (“What’s in a Tagline?”):

When I first proposed reexamining the tagline, I felt almost sheepish. The Hewlett Foundation pays little attention to self-promotion (that itself is a core value here), so why bother putting time and effort into something so marginal. Instead, the project proved to be both interesting and fruitful—an opportunity to reaffirm and remind ourselves about who we are and who we want to be.

You’ll have to scroll down to the tenth paragraph to learn what the new tagline is. Otherwise, nice process story.

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Ad Week rates the brand extensions of 2013: the worst (Grateful Dead skis) and the best (Google Glass).

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This parody trailer for the new Muppet movie, Muppets Most Wanted, aired during Sunday night’s live Golden Globes broadcast, and it was so smart and funny I wished I could hit the rewind button. AdFreak says the promo “does a double public service by also making fun of all the mass-media self-adulation that studios crank out during Hollywood awards season.”

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The Oxford University Press blog has a comprehensive words-of-the-year roundup that includes words of the year in Spain, Norway, France, and elsewhere. I’m fond of “plénior,” the mot nouveau pour 2014; it’s a more positive word for “senior citizen” that implies “full of life.”

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While we’re in Oxford, check out the Oxford English Dictionary birthday word generator, which scours the OED database for words’ first occurrences, 1900 through 2004, and offers up one for your birth year. If you were born in 1984, for example, your word is “shopaholic.” Happy 30th, you crazy shopper, you!

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“In books, movies, and media, the most popular title word is ‘new’,” according to Worldcat’s survey of more than 1 billion titles, summarized in The Atlantic.

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“Unneeded warnings against sentences that have nothing wrong with them are handed out by people who actually don’t know how to identify instances of what they are warning against, and the people they aim to educate or intimidate don’t know enough grammar to reject the nonsense they are offered. The blind warning the blind about a nonexistent danger.” That’s linguist Geoffrey Pullum in “Fear and Loathing of the English Passive.” It will be published later this year in the journal Language and Communication; but you can read the PDF now. Pullum cites 46 examples of tsk-tsking about “passive” constructions that aren’t passive at all. 

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Does Twitter seem like a foreign language to you? New York Magazine has a handy decoder for hatefave, Florida man, whoa, and other lingo (“The 2013 Twitter Glossary”). One of the terms, because, was chosen American Dialect Society Word of the Year for 2013; another, subtweet, was one of my 2013 words of the week.

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“Breaking it down Barney-style,” “Embrace the suck,” and 29 other phrases that only people in the military will understand, in Business Insider (hat tip: Patrick LaForge). For more on “embrace the suck,” read Ben Zimmer at the Slate language blog Lexicon Valley.

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“A mini-car named Hustler? Japan’s brand names raise eyebrows.” Via Reuters (hat tip: Rochelle Kopp of Japan Intercultural Consulting).

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U.S. readers: Have you/youse/y’all taken the Harvard Dialect Survey? Quick—take it now. Then, just for laughs, compare your results with Sarah Larson’s parody for the New Yorker’s humor blog, “What Do Y’all, Yinz, and Yix Call Stretchy Office Supplies?”

By the way, the HDS tells me I might be from Salt Lake City, a place I’ve visited exactly once and which about 700 miles distant from my true birthplace, Los Angeles.