April linkfest

Good news for liberal-arts majors: “Behind Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana are not just software engineers. Increasingly, there are poets, comedians, fiction writers, and other artistic types charged with engineering the personalities for a fast-growing crop of artificial intelligence tools.” (“The Next Hot Job in Silicon Valley Is for Poets,” Washington Post.)

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A small hotel group, Small Luxury Hotels of the World, is “ditching photos entirely in its new campaign and running text-only ads that flatter the target market by suggesting they'd never fall for typical tourism marketing anyway.” (“This Hotel Group Is ‘Unadvertising’ Its Properties with Intentionally Dull, Text-Only Ads,” AdWeek.)

 

 

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A long list of nonbinary gender identities, including schrodigender, demiboy, and neutrois.

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The smallest state in the Union, Rhode Island, decided it needed a new look, so it paid ultra-famous graphic designer Milton Glaser $400,000 to develop a new logo. It also hired an ad agency, IndieWhip, to create a new tagline, Cooler & Warmer, and a new website, which unfortunately included stock footage of a skateboarder in Iceland. That was in late March. By April 1 the state’s chief marketer, who had held the job since just before Christmas, had “agreed” to resign over the brand launch, which Governor Gina Raimondo said was riddled with “sloppy, unmistakable mistakes.” The state is keeping the expensive logo but has already canned the tagline: “Cooler & Warmer is not a tag line Rhode islanders like,” Raimondo said. “That has been made very clear.” One Rhode Island adman observed: “It violates a fundamental rule of marketing, which is if you want people to think your brand is cool, don’t say your brand is cool.”   

See some of the memes inspired by the slogan.

 

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“Americans have been trained to expect Chinese food at places with names like ‘Golden Dragon Buffet.’ If you were to open a Chinese restaurant named like ‘Dorchester Meadows’ it would probably tank.” Results of the Washington Post’s deep analysis of Chinese restaurant names in the U.S.

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“From Boston and Washington DC to Seattle and Denver, you can find places like LoDo, SoDo, SoMa, SoWa, all tracing their AcNa lineage back to SoHo, short for South of Houston Street in Manhattan (note: London’s Soho is not an acroname).” On the rise of snappy neighborhood names – “not quite acronyms, not quite portmanteaus, and not just abbreviations” – from the excellent design podcast 99% Invisible. 

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“The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” returns to Netflix for Season 2 today. An ad campaign proves our heroine is as clueless as ever – in this case, about slangy acronyms.

I wrote about “MILF” in a different context in 2013.

 

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A long list of interesting fashion-brand names, many of them small and (ahem) “artisanal.” A few new-to-me curiosities: Kowtow, Up in the Air Somewhere, Cherevichkiotvichki (an “impossible to pronounce” name that means “a shoe by Victoria” in “the old Slavic language”), Intentionally Blank, Terrible Records, and Death at Sea.

 

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God grant me the dgaf to lol at the things I can’t even, the swag to yolo the things I can, and the lifehacks to know the difference

— Brandon Hays (@tehviking) March 30, 2016

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An alphabetical listing of the words most “favored” by users of Wordnik, the online dictionary. (Two of the words on the list, apricity and petrichor, have also Fritinancy words of the week.)

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“Spelling in English is like one of those video games where, no matter how well you play, you will lose eventually. And how it got to be so is a long sordid tale of greed, laziness, and snobbery.” -- James Harbeck on why English spelling is so weird.

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“Brands have become so intrinsic to this campaign that we may need to coin a word to describe what's taking place: brandification? brandizing? How about brandomania, with a photo of Marlon Brando wearing a torn undershirt bedecked with the Adbusters flag?” Advertising critic Stuart Elliott on the role brands are playing in this very unusual election year.

 

After 10 years on Twitter, all he wanted was his own first name as his handle. Was that too much to ask?

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From linguist Arika Okrent, horrible jargon – like donate, contact, and interview – that we somehow got used to. (I wrote about contact, the verb, in a 2012 post.)

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Presenting the generic presidential campaign ad (via Language Log).

“Wherever I go, so do lens flares.”

Comments

[Jonathon Owen]

What on earth is "cooler and warmer" even supposed to mean? The temperature changes sometimes? The whole state is lukewarm?

[Nancy Friedman]

Jonathon: My best guess: "cooler" as in "We're hip!"; "warmer" as in friendlier.

[mike]

>horrible jargon – like donate, contact, and interview – that we somehow got used to

And yet we somehow don't learn from this that new vocabulary/usage is not the end of the world.

PS "to impact" got a negative response from a roomful of editors at their recent conference. Yet it's been with us for, what, 60 years?

[Dan Freiberg]

The main thing the Small Luxury Hotels ads do is call attention to themselves as ads. The agency has done a disservice to the client, while annoying and patronizing (I think) the market. Oh yeah, and giving no information about the product.