Fritinancy

Name in the News: Charlotte's Web

This “Charlotte’s Web” isn’t the beloved children’s book by E.B. White. But it does have a connection to childhood.

Some background first:

The five Stanley brothers of Wray, Colorado, grow medicinal marijuana in greenhouses and—now that medical and recreational cannabis are legal in Colorado—outdoors. Federal law prohibits them from shipping their product across state lines. But they’re hoping to circumvent that ban through what reporter Dave Phillips, writing in the New York Times last week, calls “a simple semantic swap: They now call their crop industrial hemp, based on its low levels of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in pot.”

That isn’t the only name the Stanleys have changed in their drive to “serve thousands of people instead of hundreds,” in the words of 27-year-old Jared Stanley, one of the brothers.

Here’s how Phillips tells the story:

The brothers, who had a Christian upbringing in conservative Colorado Springs, started a small medical marijuana business in 2008 after seeing the relief it brought to a relative sick with cancer. At first, they grew mostly marijuana high in THC that packed a serious psychoactive punch. On the side, they experimented with breeding plants low in THC but high in another cannabinoid known as cannabidiol, or CBD, which scientific studies suggested was a powerful anti-inflammatory that a handful of small studies showed might have potential as a treatment for certain neurological conditions, including seizures and Huntington’s disease.

For years, this variety languished unused in a corner of their greenhouse. “No one wanted it because it couldn’t get you high,” said Joel Stanley, 34, the oldest brother and head of the family business. They named the plant “Hippie’s Disappointment.”

Then, in 2012, a Colorado mother named Paige Figi came seeking CBD-rich marijuana oil for her 5-year-old daughter Charlotte, who has a genetic disorder called Dravet syndrome, which caused hundreds of seizures per week.

After a few doses of oil made from Hippie’s Disappointment, Charlotte’s seizures all but stopped, and two years later, daily drops of oil keep her nearly free of seizures, Ms. Figi says. The Stanleys renamed the plant Charlotte’s Web.

“Industrial hemp” is a smart repositioning tactic. And “Charlotte’s Web” is ingenious and poetic: allusive rather than descriptive; out of the 1960s and into the future of cannabis branding. But although the state of Colorado has accepted “industrial hemp,” and although some 200 families now rely on oil from Charlotte’s Web for their children’s health, the federal government—which during the George W. Bush administration tried to ban all hemp products with even a trace of THC—remains unconvinced. “In the last four months,” writes Phillips, “the [Drug Enforcement Administration] has seized thousands of pounds of nonintoxicating industrial hemp seeds, including a shipment bound for a research project at the University of Kentucky.”

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For more of my posts on marijuana branding, start here.

Heroes Everywhere

The heroic drumroll continues in the world of commerce! Some recent sightings:

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Delivery Hero, a Berlin-based food-delivery service that operates in 23 countries, was in the news earlier this month when it announced its acquisition of German rival Pizza.de. Delivery Hero was founded in 2011.

“Our Hero, Our Values.” Image from DeliveryHero.com. All web content is in English.

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Last week San Francisco-based ModCloth (“democratizing fashion one indie, vintage, and retro-inspired style at a time!”¹) became the first retailer to sign the Heroes [sic] Pledge for Advertisers, a promise not to digitally alter images of models. The pledge was created by the Brave Girls Alliance, which wants to give families “multi-layered, diverse, intelligent, and strong media characters to enrich their girls [sic] imaginations.” (I’m not sure what Brave Girls Alliance has against possessive apostrophes. And while abstaining from Photoshop is rare in fashion photography, I doubt that actual heroics are involved.)

 

Via AdFreak

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AdFreak is rather fond of “hero” itself.

 

Dan Cassaro told Showtime: “It is with great sadness that I must decline your enticing offer to work for free,” and then he shared the sentiment on Twitter.

Principled? OK. Clever? Sure. Heroic? Not in my book.

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Finally—for now, anyway—there’s mxHero, a San Francisco email-management startup that last month closed a $1.8 million seed round of financing.  

“MX” is an abbreviation for “mail exchanger,”² which Wikipedia defines thus:

a type of resource record in the Domain Name System that specifies a mail server responsible for accepting email messages on behalf of a recipient's domain, and a preference value used to prioritize mail delivery if multiple mail servers are available. The set of MX records of a domain name specifies how email should be routed with the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).

(For more on “X,” see my Visual Thesaurus column, “The X Factor.”)

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As I’ve written elsewhere—see my September 2013 Visual Thesaurus column—“hero” names have proliferated since the attacks of September 11, 2011, when the need to identify and praise people in rescuer roles became acute.³ See also my blog follow-ups in October 2013, early March 2014, and late March 2014.

 

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¹ For more “One X at a Time” slogans, see this, this, and this, for starters.

² MX is an abbreviation for other words, too, including motocross (the sport) and Mexico (the Internet country code). My favorite Mx—brand new to me—stands for Mixter, “an uncommonly used English honorific for genderqueer. It is a gender neutral title used by few people and its use has yet to be made official in general, although Brighton and Hove city council in Sussex, England, voted in 2013 to allow its use on council forms.” (Source: Wikipedia)

³ Of course, there’s always the strong possibility of a less-elevated rationale:

 

Via TechCrunch, transforming nerds into heroes since 2005.

Word of the Week: Snowden Effect

Snowden effect: “The increased awareness of the extent and scope of illegal or excessive surveillance in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations; the increased desire to be protected from such surveillance.” (Source: Word Spy.)

Paul McFedries of Word Spy traces the origin of “Snowden effect” to the title of a June 10, 2013, article in Esquire by Charles P. Pierce. Pierce wrote:

It seems as though the surveillance stepped up in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing. I don’t recall anyone warning about that in the immediate aftermath. If you want to see what effect, if any, Edward Snowden’s revelations have had on the country, and on what it’s doing to itself, look for it there. I would almost guarantee you that you won’t like what you see.

Edward Snowden is the 31-year-old American technology contractor who in June 2013, while working in Hawaii for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, disclosed thousands of classified government documents to the media. Since August 2013 Snowden has been living in Russia, where he was recently granted a three-year renewal of asylum.

The Google Trends graph for “Snowden effect” shows several spikes since June 2013 and a drop in citations since May 2014. In fact, there have been several mentions of the term in August 2014 alone: see “For German, Swiss Privacy Startups, a Post-Snowden Boom” (Wall Street Journal “Digits” blog, August 20); “The Snowden Effect: Yahoo to Join Gmail in Offering Users End-to-End Encryption” (Forbes, August 7); and “Facebook’s Security Chief on the Snowden Effect, Messenger App Backlash, and Staying Optimistic” (Washington Post “The Switch” blog, August 12).

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Eponymous effects previously featured here: Zajonc effect, Streisand effect, Dunning-Kruger effect, Bradley effect, and a roundup of assorted others.

Name in the Wild: Tria

I was making a beeline through Bloomingdale’s in San Francisco, short-cutting through the store to get to Market Street, when a brand name stopped me in my tracks.

Not just any brand name: a name I’m proud to claim as one of my very own.

Tria hair removal laser 4X at Bloomingdale’s.

 

In the more than seven years since I worked with Tria’s creators (a company then called SpectraGenics, later renamed Tria Beauty) on the naming project, the brand has flourished. The company originally produced a single device, the first clinically proven laser hair-removal device for home use. It was sold through doctors’ offices. Now the Tria name is also found on two brand extensions: the Age-Defying Laser and the Blue Light, an acne treatment. And in addition to Bloomingdale’s stores across the U.S., the devices are sold onlineat TriaBeauty.com and in specialty beauty stores.

Read my April 2007 post about naming Tria (originally upper case, now upper and lower).

 

 The Tria saleswoman clearly thought I was a bit barmy, snapping photos of her floor display.

 

Pardon me while I kvell just a little.

Reflexive Fun

Two news-to-me items:

1. Toyota Europe has sold a “city car,” the Aygo, since 2005. The name is pronounced EYE-go, and it’s meant to express “freedom and mobility”—as in “I go.”

2. For this year’s “new generation” Aygo, Toyota wants you to “Go Fun Yourself.” (Hat tip: Dan Clayton in Essex, UK.)

 

British ad via RRG Group. Campaign by Saatchi & Saatchi London.

 

It’s a double whammy, folks! Numero uno, another candidate in the Near-Profanity Sweepstakes, F-word division. It’s a category already overpopulated with entries like Fresh ’n’ Easy’s “It’s about time life was this f’n easy” and Booking.com’s “Look at the booking view!” (For more, see my post from June 2013.)

And numero two-o, it’s another example of the funny uses of funin the language of commerce. We’ve seen comparative fun (funner), superlative fun (funnest), and even super-comparative fun (funner-er). Now Toyota has transformed fun into a reflexive imperative verb.

The Italians must think the slogan is untranslatable.

Via Luca Crescenzi Events: “TOYTOA – AYGO è felice di invitarti a: ‘GO FUN YOURSELF’ #areyoufun.”

 

 

But the French? Mais non.

 

“Passez en mode fun.” Via WN.com.

 

 

As for English-speakers, in case you didn’t quite grok the quasi-vulgarity, Toyota and Saatchi drive it home, so to speak, with “For fun’s sake.”

Inspired by a popular acronym and hashtag, #FFS.

 

You may recall that Toyota isn’t the first mass brand to hop on the F train. Last year Jell-O verbed funin a boundary-pushing campaign called “Fun My Life.” The #FML hashtag made it clear that Jell-O knew exactly which boundaries it was pushing. Bye-bye, Bill Cosby.

 

Despite the boggling number of Urban Dictionary upvotes, FML does not mean “Fix My Lighthouse.”

 

What else can we say about Toyota’s creative effort? Well, the copy avers that “The spirit of playfulness is alive in this small car.” The spirit of punctuation, however, is on its last wobbly legs.

Sophisticated dramatically styled and compact. We’ve designed our best small car ever, now it’s time you got involved.

When Agency Spy reported on the campaign in June, one commenter was unamused:

The idiocy of this slogan truly boggles the mind! I’m an avid user of the longer F word in the right context, but Toyota has shot itself in the foot with this one...not funny, not clever, won’t sell cars.

And the Daily Mail’s car reporter, Chris Evans, cried “false advertising”:

Go Fun Yourself? What? How? Where? With whom?

There is no fun in this car. I know, I checked – under the bonnet, under the seats, in the glove box and for three days.

Three days of driving that I’ll never get back. This car doesn’t look fun, it doesn’t feel fun, it doesn’t drive fun.

Finally, and with apologies to Aygo, I go out with the joke that inspired the title of the Oscar-winning 2012 movie Argo, as well as the title of the movie-within-the-movie:

- Knock knock.

- Who’s there?

- Argo.

- Argo who?

- Ar … go fuck yourself!

 

On the Visual Thesaurus: New Names from (Very) Old Words

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at the centuries-old roots—as in Middle English and even Old English—of thirteen modern brand names. Access to this month’s column is free to all (but you should subscribe anyway!); here’s an excerpt:

Hobby Lobby. Founded in 1970 in Oklahoma City, where it still has its headquarters, the craft-supply chain made headlines earlier this year when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., that the company did not have to pay for insurance coverage for female contraception under the Affordable Care Act. Both hobby and lobby have long histories in the English language: In the late 13th century, a hobyn was a small horse or pony (a sense maintained in “hobby-horse”); by the late 1600s the word had come to mean “favorite pastime or avocation.” Lobby was adopted in the 1530s from medieval Latin, where laubia meant “a covered walk in a monastery.” By the end of the 16th century it referred to “a large entrance hall in a public building”; the political sense—“a group seeking to influence legislation”—arose in the 1790s in the new United States of America.

Other names on my list include Apple, Gap, Kindle, and Inkling.

Read the rest of the column, and let me know in a comment of other old English words that have been turned into successful contemporary brands.

 

Word of the Week: Data Lake

Data lake: “A massive, easily accessible data repository built on (relatively) inexpensive computer hardware for storing big data.” (Source: Wiktionary.) “The opposite of a data warehouse, meaning they're huge pools of data stored in its original format instead of being collated, sorted and filed.” (Source: ReadWrite.)

The last several years have seen a growing focus on the uses of “big data” (the term was a strong contender for word of the year in 2012). Perhaps inevitably, there’s been a reaction against what’s perceived as big-data hype. Now, reports Matt Asay in the online technology publication ReadWrite, a prominent industry analyst, Gartner’s Nick Heudecker, “has come out swinging” against “the data lake fallacy”:

It was … surprising to see Heudecker go after one of the latest buzzwords making its way around Big Data circles: the data lake. Espoused by a variety of vendors (usually Hadoop vendors, but not exclusively so), the data lake is a mythical happy place for data to reside in its native format until someone within the enterprise needs to analyze it. 

(Hadoop is “an open-source framework for processing and storing vast amounts of business data.” The company was founded in 2005 and named after a toy elephant owned by the son of one of the founders.)

From a Gartner press release dated July 28, 2014:

“The fundamental issue with the data lake is that it makes certain assumptions about the users of information,” said Mr. Heudecker. “It assumes that users recognize or understand the contextual bias of how data is captured, that they know how to merge and reconcile different data sources without ‘a priori knowledge’ and that they understand the incomplete nature of datasets, regardless of structure.”

While these assumptions may be true for users working with data, such as data scientists, the majority of business users lack this level of sophistication or support from operational information governance routines. Developing or acquiring these skills or obtaining such support on an individual basis, is both time-consuming and expensive, or impossible. 

Coinage of “data lake” is credited to James Dixon, James Dixon, co-founder and chief technology officer of the open-source business-analytics company Pentaho*. In an October 14, 2010, blog post Dixon wrote:

If you think of a datamart as a store of bottled water – cleansed and packaged and structured for easy consumption – the data lake is a large body of water in a more natural state. The contents of the data lake stream in from a source to fill the lake, and various users of the lake can come to examine, dive in, or take samples.

It’s possible that the lake metaphor was influenced just a bit by the data cloud metaphor, which has been in circulation for about 20 years. When referring to new, abstract, and abstruse phenomena, it may help to create parallels to old, concrete, and familiar concepts.

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* The “penta” in Pentaho is a reference to the company’s five founders. I haven’t found an explanation for the “ho”; the company is based in Orlando, Florida, not Tahoe or Idaho.

Be Plus

Back in December 2012 I wrote about Be. wines, a Beringer brand targeted at young women. “Be.” is a cute ’n’ sassy truncation of “Beringer,” and each varietal is tagged with an imperative: Be.Bright (Pinot Grigio), Be.Radiant (Riesling), Be.Flirty (Moscato), and so on.

 

So much cleverness obviously begged to be imitated. And so behold (or Be.hold) Be toothpaste from Crest, which I spotted at Walgreen’s earlier this week.

 

Crest launched the “innovative new line” back in January. According to a press release from Procter & Gamble, Crest’s parent company:

“Crest is always looking at trends to develop products that give consumers a unique yet effective experience,” said Rishi Dhingra, Marketing Director, Procter & Gamble. “Crest Be® was developed out of the research and insights that consumers are looking for experiential purchases. The new toothpastes not only provide the foundational benefits needed for oral health but allow for an unexpected experience through flavors that offer personal expression.”

As you can see, not only does Be toothpaste share a name (albeit an unpunctuated one) with Be. wine, it also duplicates the commanding tone. “Be Dynamic” is the brand’s “lime spearmint zest™” flavor; “Be Inspired” is “vanilla mint spark™”; and “Be Adventurous” is “mint chocolate trek™.” Yes, the TMs are [sic].

Chocolate-flavored toothpaste is weird enough; I’m not convinced I want to invite a trek into in my mouth. (All those muddy boots…) Some unexpected experiences are best left unexperienced. 

August Linkfest

Media holding company Gannett’s new job descriptions for “the newsroom of the future” (“Content Coach,” “Engagement Editor,” et al.) are pretty close to self-parody. But that didn’t stop some anonymous wag—obviously very close to the machine—from creating a parody. Apply now to be a Bullshit Artist 1, Reduction in Force Synergy Coach, and other dream jobs.  (Via Romenesko.)

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“Avoid using areas or volumes when representing quantities” and other rules for data visualization, published by the U.S. Bureau of the Census … in 1915. (Via Ben Schmidt’s Sapping Attention blog.)

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Weird Al’s “Word Crimes” parody song got all the ink, but I got a bigger kick out of another of his new songs, “Mission Statement,” which would be a spoof of corporate buzzwords if the subject weren’t already spoofproof. Watch the video and read about how TruScribe, a “video-scribing” company in Wisconsin, created the catchy and effective graphics. I learned about TruScribe via a Wall Street Journal blog post about the Yankovic video. One commenter wrote: “The beautiful part of this is that I can watch it at work with my headphones on and to anyone passing by it looks like I’m just watching some motivational business video.”

 

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Remember the Toyota “Swagger Wagon” ads? (Actually, there’s a new one.) “White-guy rapvertising is never going out of style,” declares AdFreak. Proof: this new video for webinar platform On24. Sample lyric: “Just look at your core competencies and extend your brand/Drive your penetration, and then you’ll be the man.”

 

“Get your webinar on.” 

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“The tale of ‘scofflaw,’ born in Boston at a time when Prohibitionists were staging mock funerals of ‘John Barleycorn’ and fleets of Coast Guard rum-chasers patrolled Boston Harbor, shows that sometimes real words can actually be invented on demand. They just don’t always behave exactly the way their engineers hope they will.” (Boston Globe, via @ammonshea.) I wrote about “scofflaw” in a 2011 blog post. More on the language of Prohibition in this 2010 post.

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Speaking of (and to) Ammon Shea, the Oxford University Press had 10 questions for the author of Bad English and Reading the OED.

 

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How advertisers used World War 1 to sell, sell, sell. (The Atlantic.)

“The cussed Huns have got my gramophone.” Via The Atlantic.

 

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XBMC, makers of media-center software—the initialism originally stood for Xbox Media Center—recently changed its name to Kodi. From legal and branding perspectives, it was a smart move. But many customers took to the comments section of the company’s blog to protest vehemently.

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Jewelry designer Wendy Brandes made a necklace. Literally.

“If you buy this, I guarantee you will literally enjoy the shit out of it.” – Wendy Brandes

 

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Color, value, and the evolution of logos. (The Trademark Blog.)

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How some of the world’s most famous restaurants—including Le Bernardin, Per Se, and Chez Panisse—got their names. (Via @socialdiner.)

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Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky—whose new book, The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, comes out in September—takes a close look at the words we use for tea: “These tea words (‘tea’, ‘cha’, ‘chai’, ‘matcha’, ‘laphet’) are players in an unusual linguistic story, in which two differing pronunciations of a word reflect the two ways that Europe and Asia have traded over the last 500 years: by land or by sea.”

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Anne Curzan on how Iron Dome, the Israeli anti-missile system, got its name:

[T]he project leader’s initial idea was straightforward: the Anti-Qassam, referring to the type of missiles most commonly fired by Hamas. When that was rejected as “problematic,” he and his wife came up with Golden Dome, an image that brings to mind the palaces of Kubla Khan or perhaps (closer to home) the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. That name was rejected as being too ostentatious, so under the pressure of time, gold was reduced to a lesser metal, and Iron Dome was born.

Word of the Week: Taphephobia

Taphephobia: Fear of being buried alive. From Greek taphē burial, grave (whence also epitaph) and New Latin phobia. Also taphiphobia, taphophobia.

 The Premature Burial (1962). Image via Gallery Hip.

 

The OED has no entry for any of the spellings of this curious word; other sources, including Collins Dictionary and Webster’s Third International, provide brief definitions but no date of first usage. I first encountered it in At Home: A Short History of Private Life, Bill Bryson’s chatty and informative 2010 chronicle of domesticity through the millennia. Taphephobia comes up in Chapter XV: The Bedroom, amid a long section on death (causes of, customs surrounding, etc.).

Taphephobia was coined sometime in the mid-19th century, Bryson avers with some confidence. The Victorians had “some peculiar anxieties about death”:

Catalepsy, a condition of paralysis in which the victim seemed dead while actually being fully conscious, became the dread disease of the day. Newspapers and popular magazines abounded with stories of people who suffered from its immobilizing effects. One well-known case was that of Eleanor Markham of upstate New York who was about to be buried in July 1894 when anxious noises were heard coming from her coffin. The lid was lifted and Miss Markham cried out, “My God, you are burying me alive!” …

For at least a generation such stories became routine in even serious periodicals. So many people became morbidly obsessed with the fear of being interred before their time that a word was coined for it: taphephobia. The novelist Wilkie Collins placed on his bedside table each night a letter bearing standing instructions of the tests he wished carried out to ensure that really had died in his sleep if he was found in a seemingly corpse-like state. Others directed that their heads be cut off or their hearts removed before burial, to put the matter comfortably (if that is the right word) beyond doubt.

 

Nor is taphephobia itself dead and buried. Here, in its entirety, is an item published in ArtVoice in January 2009 :

Freud [!] de Melo, 73, operates a quirky tourist park in central Brazil that features stone models of Noah’s Ark and other sculptures, but he also notoriously suffers from taphephobia, the fear of being buried alive, and one of his sculptures is his own elaborate, fear-assuaging crypt. His vault houses a TV and fruit pantry, has access to fresh air, and features two built-in plastic cones that act as megaphones to the outside, reassuring de Melo that if he is buried too soon, he will be able to protest (as he demonstrated for a Wall Street Journal reporter, for an October dispatch, screaming into the countryside, “Help me! Come quick! I’ve been buried alive!”). (Taphephobia was more common in centuries past, afflicting George Washington among others, because doctors often missed lingering signs of life in sick patients.)

According to IMDb, there was a 2006 movie called Taphephobia (synopsis: “A man wakes up buried in a coffin, alone with the light from a cell phone”), possibly never released. And mark your calendars:: Taphaphobia, an episode of the web series “In Fear Of,” is scheduled to air, appropriately enough, on October 31, 2014.