Fritinancy

Um-productive

Two brand names and a few branching digressions.

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Umcka ColdCare.

 

Umcka products are derived from the medicinal plant Pelargonium sidoides, a type of geranium native to southern Africa. The brand name comes from a Zulu word for the plant, umckaloabo, which translates to “heavy cough.” According to the Umcka website:

In 1897, Englishman Charles Stevens went to South Africa hoping to cure himself of a respiratory illness.  While there, an African tribal healer gave him a remedy made from Pelargonium sidoides roots (a plant native to the coastal regions of South Africa).  Fully recovered, Stevens brought the remedy back to England where it became popular as Stevens’ Consumption Cure.

After excursions through Switzerland and homeopathy, Umcka came to American drugstore shelves as a sub-brand of Nature’s Way.

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Umpqua Bank (“The World’s Greatest Bank”).

 

Today the bank has branches along the Pacific coast between San Francisco and Seattle.  Umpqua Bank was founded (as South Umpqua State Bank) in 1953 in Centerville, Oregon. According to a Wikipedia entry, the bank’s founders were “a group of people working in the timber-logging business who wanted to create a means for their loggers to cash their payroll checks.” Earlier this week, the bank’s parent company, Umpqua Holdings Corporation, approved a merger with Sterling Financial Corporation of Spokane.

Umpqua is the Native name for several tribes that live in present-day south-central Oregon; the word has been variously translated as “thundering waters,” “across the waters,” and “satisfied.” It’s an unusual name for a bank—and Umpqua presents itself as an out-of-the-ordinary financial institution—but not an unusual word in its place of origin: southern Oregon is home to the Umpqua River, the Umpqua National Forest, Umpqua Community College, Umpqua Dairy, and Umpqua Transit (“UTrans”). The umpqua.com domain is owned by Umpqua Feather Merchants, which makes fly-fishing ties.

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Umpty: a word meaning “of an indefinite number.” The OED calls it “a fanciful verbal representation of the dash (—) in Morse code,” and dates it back to 1905. But a World Wide Words entry (under “Weird Words”) found much earlier citations “in which it was a nonsense syllable in poetry, for example as umpty-tumpty-tiddle-dee.” The earliest WWW citation is from 1884. WWW also mentions a more recent British expression, “give it some umpty,” (“an encouragement to effort”).

Iddy-umpty is early 20th-century military slang for Morse code. (Likewise, “umpteen” is believed to have originated among soldiers in World War I.) I found this in a post on the Virtual Linguist blog:

Troops were apparently taught to recognise whether a dot or a dash was being transmitted by the sound of the machine. A dot made an 'iddy' sound and a dash sounded like 'umpty'.

 

Iddy Umpty card game from 1920: “Quickly teaches you to read Morse.” Source: Board Game Geek.

 

A.A. Milne (yes, the author of Winnie-the-Pooh) used “umpty-iddy-umpty” and its variations in a passage about Morse code in his 1921 short story “The Red House Murder,” published in Everybody’s Magazine.

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Um… by Michael Erard (2007).

Um…: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean

From the website:

Covering a vast array of verbal blunders, from Spoonerisms to malapropisms to “uh” and “um,” linguist and author Erard creates a unique narrative blend of science, history, pop culture, and politics that gets at what really matter when we speak — and when we listen.

A "Pure" Dot-Com Domain? You Don't Need It.

Of all the myths associated with naming, the bogus rule that insists on a “pure” dot-com domain—a URL that’s an exact match for the name of your company, product, or app—is perhaps the most wrongheaded and damaging to your naming effort. It’s a zombie rule: a holdover from the late-1990s dot-com gold rush. The rule’s been dead for years, but it still nibbles away at brains.

Yes, you should devote resources (time and money) to your naming strategy. Certainly you should cast a wide net in your creative effort, using lateral thinking to explore metaphorical associations. You should make sure your name is distinctive and appropriate in its market(s). You should protect your name legally through trademark registration.

But rejecting a good name because an exact dot-com match isn’t instantly available? That’s foolish, and bad business.

Gradually, company founders and marketing directors are seeing the light. A recent post about naming on the Buffer blog—Buffer is a social-media-publishing app—includes some misinformation (use “real” words, make it two syllables, yada yada). But it does contain one piece of near-wisdom:

3. The domain name doesn’t matter

I see many, many founders limiting themselves with the domain name. One thing I’ve learned and embraced with naming my own startups is that the domain name doesn’t matter at all. The name itself matters much more than having the same domain name. Pick a great name, go with a tweaked domain name.

I don’t agree that the domain name “doesn’t matter at all.” It’s a brand asset, and I encourage clients to consider buying a for-sale domain if they have the budget for it. Many aftermarket domains are available for less than $2,000.

But I do endorse the “tweaked domain name” part. If you’re able to legally own your name in your trademark class(es)—a very big, very important if—and you can’t buy the pure domain, I urge you to break the zombie rule. Your URL does not have to be an identical twin; rather, it can be a helpful sibling—and an opportunity to build your brand.

Here are some examples of what an impure domain can do: 

 

Word of the Week: Seamful

Seamful: “An uncertainty in sensing and ambiguity of representations” in design, and especially in interaction design. (Source: Karin Andersson, “Seamful Design in a Seamful Society,” presented 2007.) The opposite of seamless.

Seamful is attributed to Marc Weiser (1952–1999), whose work as a chief scientist at Xerox PARC in the 1990s centered on what Weiser dubbed “ubiquitous computing.” (It’s now called “pervasive computing.”) Weiser used seamful in talks delivered in 1994 and 1995; according to a 2002 paper on seamful ubiquity by MacColl, et al., Weiser called seamlessness “a misleading concept” and suggested “that making things seamless amounts to making everything the same.” Weiser advocated systems “with beautiful seams” as a goal.

A different kind of seamful: Wolford Zehra stay-ups.

Thanks, But…

A San Francisco startup called Gramr has blasted past its $15,000 Kickstarter goal in less than two weeks and appears likely to reach its “stretch goal” of $50,000. Before I give you any links or clues, try to guess from the name alone what Gramr makes. Language-learning flash cards? National Grammar Day T-shirts? An app that corrects your faulty subject-verb agreement?

No, no, and no. Gramr looks and sounds exactly like “grammar,” but the company has a completely different mission.

Barbie, #Unedited

After decades of depicting artificially enhanced women in its annual swimsuit issues, Sports Illustrated has teamed up with a real doll to promote the 50th anniversary of the magazine feature.

The Barbie cover wrap appears on 1,000 copies of the magazine. Inside: a four-page Barbie ad spread. The issue hit newsstands on February 18.

 

Barbie herself turns 55 this year; her waist has gotten a little thicker, her feet a little flatter, and her thighs even more toothpick-like, but she’s still perky and game. In fact, the theme of the swimsuit-issue ad tie-in is #Unapologetic—yes, with a social-media-friendly hashtag. (New York Times ad critic Stuart Elliott noted that the singer Rihanna got there first with a November 2012 album called “Unapologetic”; Rihanna “often uses the hashtag #Unapologetic in social media,” Elliott wrote.)

The coordinated campaign has kicked up some controversy. But I remained neutral until yesterday, when a full-page ad, designed to look like an open letter, appeared in the main news section of the New York Times.

Now I wish Barbie would #ShutUp.

The headline is clever enough.

“Why posing for Sports Illustrated suits me.”

 

And the first sentence—“I am a doll”—seems to promise a playful, self-mocking first-person confessional. But the rest—all 500 words of it—is, I am sorry to say, as painful as a hike in five-inch stilettos: awkward, rambling, poorly punctuated, cliché-ridden. It’s like listening to one of those extemporaneous pageant-contestant speeches.

“Over time, I’ve become an icon,” Barbie humble-brags, “and as with all icons, I’ve been pulled into the cultural conversation”:

My bathing suit now hangs beside a Presidential power suit, Pastry Chef hat, and Astronaut gear in a wardrobe reflecting the more than 150 careers I’ve pursued to illustrate for girls that they can achieve anything for which they aim.

That’s a 40-word sentence. Did you make it through all the prepositional phrases? Note the Random Capital Letters and the tortured effort to avoid ending the sentence in a preposition. Barbie loves a zombie rule.

Barbie also loves “conversation”:

Every year, Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit [sic] drums up conversation and controversy.

Barbie is a little confused about what “word” means.

I, for one, am honored to join the legendary swimsuit models. The word “model,” like the word “Barbie^®,” is often dismissed as a poseable plaything with nothing to say. And yet, those featured are women who have broken barriers, established empires, built brands, branched out into careers as varied as authors, entrepreneurs and philanthropists. They are all great examples of confident and competent women.

I had not realized that a word could be dismissed as a poseable [sic] plaything.

Naturally, there’s a rousing finale, more appropriate for a middle-school debate tournament than for the nation’s newspaper of record.

So the Swimsuit issue is out, and there’s bound to be a conversation or two about the women in it. Ask yourself, isn’t it time we teach girls to celebrate who they are? Isn’t there room for capable and captivating? It’s time to stop boxing in potential. Be free to launch a career in a swimsuit, lead a company while gorgeous, or wear pink to an interview at MIT. The reality of today is that girls can go anywhere and be anything. They should celebrate who they are and never have to apologize for it.

If you’re keeping score—and since we’re talking about Sports Illustrated, why not?—that’s three “conversation”s.

Forget the sociology and gender politics for a minute: It’s depressing to see such amateurish copywriting from a major American brand. (Barbie is owned by Mattel, whose 2013 revenue was more than $6 billion; sales of Barbie products account for almost half of the revenue.) A full-page ad in the Times costs between $60,000 and $100,000. For a tiny percentage of that sum, Mattel or its agency could have hired an experienced copywriter to create a witty ad that burnished Barbie’s reputation rather than providing critics with more ammunition.

Then again, the closest Barbie has ever gotten to an actual writing career is “News Anchor.”

“A flair for journalism—and power pink!”

You can read the full text of the Times ad here, and there’s a roundtable discussion of the campaign in a recent Times “Room for Debate.” If you’re #undeterred, you can buy a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Barbie at Target for $19.99.

On the Visual Thesaurus: The Names of Film Production Companies

It’s Hollywood awards season, and while I intend to watch every minute of the Academy Awards broadcast, I’m only mildly interested in the traditional voting categories. Instead, I’ve been obsessed with the inventively named production companies behind some of this year’s Oscar nominees. That’s the subject of my new Visual Thesaurus column, “And the Oscar for Best Production-Company Name Goes to…”

Full access is restricted to subscribers. Here’s a preview:

Best use of an invented language: Esperanto Filmoj (Best Picture nominee Gravity) is the name of Mexico City–born director Alfonso Cuarón’s production and distribution company. Cuarón is a fan of Esperanto, the international language invented in the 1880s and spoken today by 100,000 to 2 million people worldwide. “I’ve done movies in different countries, and I believe that human beings are born human first and afterward they stamp the passport,” he told an interviewer last year. “So I was looking for a name that advocates that sense of ‘universal language’.” “Esperanto Filmoj” means “Esperanto films” in Esperanto; the word “Esperanto” means “one who hopes.”

Read the full column.

Blog bonus! One of my favorite production-company names doesn’t appear among this year’s Oscar nominees, but I can’t resist telling its story. Clint Eastwood’s production company, Malpaso Productions, was named for Malpaso Creek, located near Carmel, California, where Eastwood lives (and where he served a term as mayor in the 1980s). According to a Wikipedia entry:

The creek has very steep side slopes and had only one crossing (a ford only 10 feet above sea level) until 1935, when a concrete bridge was constructed for State Highway 1. When Eastwood agreed to take the role of the Man with No Name, his agent told him that it would be a “bad step” for his career. After the Dollars Trilogy made it big and Eastwood decided to run his own production company, he thought “Malpaso” would be an appropriately ironic choice.

Here’s another Wikipedia entry that lists a boatload of U.S. film production companies.

Here’s a set of flash cards so you can test your knowledge of production-company names. (Are you surprised that David Lynch’s production company is called Absurda & Asymmetrical? I didn’t think so.)

And here’s a GQ blog post from 2010 that offers lessons in naming your own Hollywood production company: “Self-deprecation works in Hollywood, as long as you're wildly successful. … If you direct, produce and edit all your films, moving fluidly from big budgets to experimental indies, go with Section 8 Prods. (Steven Soderbergh). If you redefined modern comedy, paving the way for Judd Apatow, there's always Conundrum (Peter and Bobby Farrelly).”

Speaking of Conundrum, here’s a slide from a 2011 Vanity Fair story about production-company names:

 

Guess the title of the VF story.

 

What would be your film production company name? I know mine.

Word of the Week: De-Elephant

De-elephant: To discuss an existing but unacknowledged topic (i.e., “the elephant in the room”). Also de-elephantify, de-elephantize.

I learned of de-elephant just last week, via a tweet of Stan Carey’s:

This word is now the elephant in the room RT @wordspy de-elephant v. To discuss an existing but unacknowledged topic. http://t.co/OajUA8Bk74

— Stan Carey (@StanCarey) February 12, 2014

Paul McFedries of Word Spy provided two examples of de-elephant from the week of February 10, and found a 2009 citation for de-elephantize. About “elephant in the room,” McFedries noted that “[t]his sense of the phrase is not as old as you might think, with the earliest OED cite only going back to 1984.”

At least one traditionalist found de-elephant de trop:

 

I think de-elephant is funny and useful. I’ve added it to my vocabulary along with recombobulation.

Elsewhere in pachydermal metaphors, I wrote about “white elephants” in 2012, and about the hybrid locution “the pink elephant in the living room” in 2009.

February Linkfest

Rebranding Cupid, just in time for Valentine’s Day. 

 

By Massive Media. See also my February 2010 post about another Valentine’s Day rebrand, this one by Under Consideration for Studio 360.

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An order of roastbeef with a side of stalefish? Yes, we’re talking snowboarding lingo. The Wall Street Journal’s Rachel Bachman interviews snowboarders; Ben Zimmer, at Slate, analyzes “I’ll just huck it,” which caused an “overanxious” BBC presenter to “freak out.”

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Leave it to the inventive and enterprising Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl, to turn language peeves (“literally,” “could care less,” “very unique,” et al.) into a card game in which the object is “to annoy your opponent to death.” She’s raising money for Peeve Wars through Fund Anything; contribute now to claim your own card set or another nifty reward.

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Speaking of peeves, the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg has had it up to here with verbal anachronisms in otherwise classy TV shows—like, say, Showtime’s Masters of Sex: “We live in a golden age of production design—but only for what we see, not for what we hear. Script-wise, anything goes, including the lexical equivalents of a jukebox in a frontier saloon or a zip-up toga on a Roman senator.” See also a response and amplification from the master of anachronism-spotting, Ben Schmidt. (As you may recall, this stuff annoys me, too.)

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Some people peeve about new, “unnecessary” words. But language blogger Stan Carey defends them: “Avoiding new and ‘needless’ words in formal contexts is all well and good, but what’s wrong with a grand superfluity elsewhere? Will the language look untidy if words float around not filling vital gaps? Will they gum up the works?”

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“We think first / Of vague words that are synonyms for progress / And pair them with footage of a high-speed train.” This Is a Generic Brand Video, from McSweeney’s, of course.

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Orenitram, a drug for pulmonary arterial hypertension, is an ananym: The name was created by reverse-spelling the first eight letters of the name of the drug company’s CEO, Martine Rothblatt. But that’s just the beginning of a truly remarkable name story, reported by Catchword.

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The new BuzzFeed style guide answers the really tough spelling and usage questions: Is bitchface one word or two? (One.) Is there an E in chocolaty? (No.) What’s the proper abbreviation of douchebag? (d-bag.) What’s the difference between wack and whack? (Look it up; it’s in there.) And, FYI, the word is spelled whoa. Don’t make us repeat ourselves.

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“Writing and editing are linked but distinct enterprises, and distinct temperaments are involved. Very few people can move smoothly from the one enterprise to the other.” – John McIntyre, one of the few. 

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The second lives of dead US brands: Woolworths thrives in Australia, Nextel in Latin America, Friendster in Southeast Asia, Mister Donut (“Misudo”) and Pan Am in Japan. (Hat tip: Rochelle Kopp and Shogannai.)

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Arika Okrent sorts out 11 brands with plural problems (topping the list: LEGO).

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A linguist (Gretchen McCulloch) explains doge grammar: “[B]roadly speaking, second-generation internet language plays with grammar instead of spelling.”

 

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Who names the color of the year? Professional namers, that’s who. The Boston Globe interviewed Bay Area name developer Anthony Shore for his insights into color naming; the article is headlined—care to guess?—“What’s in a Name?” (I tackled the subject of color names myself for a 2011 Visual Thesaurus column.)

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From the indispensable TV Tropes, the periodic table of storytelling.

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Speaking of charts and taxonomies, here’s a “marketing technology landscape supergraphic”—the logos of 947 companies in 43 categories—created by Scott Brinker.  Wow. Very names.

 

Read Brinker's follow-up post about the chart.

Nicely Named: Bevel

When you enter an crowded, established, not-very-exciting market with the goal of upending expectations, the best way to signal your intention is with a distinctive product name that avoids the naming trends in your category.

That’s exactly what Tristan Walker, a former Wall Street trader and Silicon Valley executive, has done with Bevel, his new shaving system for men with coarse, curly hair (mostly but not exclusively African-American men, like Walker himself).

 

The weighted razor and skin-preparation products are meant to reduce and prevent ingrown hairs and razor bumps.

 

To understand how revolutionary the Bevel name is—and to appreciate the elegant, understated product design—take a look at some competitors.

 

    

Bump Fighter                                                                       Bump Patrol

 

       

Bump Stopper-2                                      Bump Terminator

 

          No Bump                                        Bump Down

 

Yes, it’s all bumps out there.

There are Bump products for the ladies, too:

Bikini Bump Blaster

 

The companies behind these products have fixated on a common strategy, naming the problem. Bevel stands out because it names the solution: a razor whose single blade is angled (beveled) to shave close to the skin. (Yes, a single blade. Walker is “deeply skeptical about multi-blade razors,” according to a TechCrunch story about his company: “He holds that because you can’t patent single-blade razors, there’s no incentive for incumbent companies like Proctor [sic] & Gamble to invest in the best solution.”)

And because the Bevel system is sold as a fairly spendy subscription service, it doesn’t require retina-burning graphics to command your attention in CVS or Walgreen’s. The products can speak with the quiet authority of good design.

The Bevel name succeeds on sound and appearance, too. Its velvety, liquid consonants suggest smoothness, while the V in the middle of the word—echoed in the logo—suggests the shape of an angled blade.

Bevel.com was, of course, taken. (It redirects to an optometry website with a different name.) The choice to go with a modified domain, GetBevel.com, was smart and appropriate.

(I was a little disappointed, however, that the company’s Twitter bio includes a pronunciation guide. Really?)

Bevel is the first product and “flagship brand” of Tristan Walker’s startup enterprise, Walker and Company. It’s pure coincidence, as far as I can tell, that this Walker evokes a much older hair-care brand—also developed by an African-American for African-Americans—with the Walker name.

The Madam C.J. Walker company of Indiana was founded in 1910 by Sarah Breedlove Walker, who used her husband’s initials as her business name. As a young woman Sarah Breedlove Walker had suffered hair loss; the products she developed to treat the condition proved so popular that she became America’s first female self-made millionaire.

 

Madam C.J. Walker 1998 U.S. postage stamp

The company thrived for more than six decades after Madam Walker’s death in 1919; in 1985, the company was sold to Raymond Randolph, who had worked in the black-haircare industry since the 1960s. The products are once again for sale under a slightly modified name, Madame C.J. Walker Hair Products. 

There have been many published biographies of Madam Walker. The one I want to read is On Her Own Ground, published in 2002 by Madam Walker’s great-great-granddaughter, A’Lelia Bundles.  

How “Fiddler on the Roof” Got Its Title

There’s been a lot in the news about the 50th anniversary last week of the Beatles’ first appearance on US television. But 2014 marks another musical half-century mark as well: the anniversary of the 1964 Broadway premiere of Fiddler on the Roof, the musical about Tevye the milkman and his family and neighbors in the fictional shtetl (Jewish market town) of Anatevka.

Happily, a new book about this improbably successful and resonant show celebrates the occasion. Wonder of Wonders, by theater critic and journalism professor Alisa Solomon, charts the phenomenon from its origins in Yiddish-language literature and theater through its transformation at the hands of a creative team of thoroughly assimilated American Jews—and its subsequent diaspora throughout the world. (According to a famous anecdote, when Fiddler arrived in Japan the local producer was incredulous that the show had been a hit in America—after all, it was “so Japanese.”)

To quote the New York Times review, the book is “as rich and dense”—and as delicious—“as a chocolate babka,” the swirly Eastern European yeast bread. There is indeed much to savor, but I’m going to zoom in on a topic of special relevance here: the title of the show.

The short stories on which Fiddler was based had been written between 1894 and 1904 by the great Yiddish writer who published under the pen name Sholem-Aleichem. (I’m using Alisa Solomon’s spelling and punctuation.) By the time the American director Jerome Robbins began shaping the material into a musical, the working title was Tevye, the name of the main character. But with rehearsals looming for the out-of-town opening in Detroit, in July 1964, the show’s producer, Hal Prince, wasn’t satisfied:

The authors and Prince had batted around ideas for months and they all agreed only that “Tevye” was too bland and too vague. “A Village Story,” “To Life,” “Listen to the Fiddle,” “Make a Circle,” “Once There Was a Town”: their list kept growing, but nothing zinged. “To Light a Candle,” “My Village,” “Three Brides and a Man,” “A Village Tune,” “Homemade Wine,” “Not So Long Ago,” dozens more. The authors liked “Where Poppa Came From,” but Prince preferred a name that suggested that the show was a musical. In late March, he called the question. “Anything on the list will do,” [book writer Joseph] Stein told him. “I don’t care anymore.” Prince scanned the list and made the choice. “But it doesn’t mean anything,” Stein said. Prince shrugged and replied, “Well, that’s the title,” Fiddler on the Roof went into rehearsal on June 1.

Hindsight is easy, of course, but it’s clear that Fiddler on the Roof  was an inspired choice—and, contra Stein, full of meaning. The eponymous fiddler (played in the original production by Gino Conforti) opens and closes the show with his sad-sweet melody; his precarious position on the roof is the overarching metaphor for the characters’ predicament, teetering between old and new. (The roof violinist was a favorite motif of the Russian-French-Jewish artist Marc Chagall, who was Robbins’s first choice to design the sets and costumes for Fiddler. Chagall declined by cable: TROP OCCUPE POUR ACCEPTER FAIRE DECORS.)

But the also-rans are telling, too—and instructive for anyone struggling with a title or a name. Their flaws run the gamut from overly literal (“Where Poppa Came From,” “Once There Was a Town”) to unduly sentimental (“To Life,” “To Light a Candle”) to misleading (“Homemade Wine”). A great title, like any great name, invokes the senses while being multilayered, pleasant to say, and effortlessly suggestive. Fiddler nails it all.

A few other naming tidbits from Wonder of Wonders:

• The pen name Sholem-Aleichem is a common Hebrew/Yiddish greeting, “literally ‘Peace be unto you’ but the conversational equivalent of ‘How do you do?’,” writes Solomon. The writer’s birth name was Sholom Rabinowitz.
• Jerome (“Jerry”) Robbins—the brilliant and temperamental dancer, choreographer, and director who before Fiddler had been responsible for a string of Broadway hits, including Fancy Free, West Side Story, and Gypsy—was born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz in 1918. He was not related to Sholem-Aleichem. “Rabinowitz” is a common Jewish surname meaning “son of a rabbi”; Robbins Americanized it because at the time, he said, “I didn’t want to be a Jew.” (That sentiment would change dramatically during the development of Fiddler, although he never became an observant Jew.) Speaking of names, Robbins named them as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee, in 1953.
• The Wonder of Wonders title comes from a line in “Miracle of Miracles,” sung by Motel the Tailor in Fiddler’s first act.