Fritinancy

A Ro by Any Other Name

I usually can come up with a theory to explain copycat names and naming trends. In the early aughts, many companies chose double-O names (Qoop, Squidoo, Doostang, ooVoo) to sound like Google. All those X + Y names (Mizzen + Main, Standard & Strange, Coral & Tusk)? They evoke Ye Olde Tymes, with the modern bonus of yielding cheap domains. Lately, we’ve seen a cluster of first-name names like Oscar and Emma, the better to blunt the cutting edge of technology.

But the explanation for one mini-trend has eluded me. Perhaps you, dear readers, can help.

Word of the week: Glyph

Glyph: A nonverbal symbol such as an arrow; a carved groove on a column or frieze; any computer-generated character. From Greek gluphe, a carving; imported into English around 1727 from French glyphe.

Glyph was in the news last week following the death of Prince, the musician who in 1993 changed his name to a symbol of his own design, partly in an act of defiance against his uncooperative record label, Warner Bros.

 

Prince’s “Love Symbol” combined the male and female symbols and a stylized horn.

Nicely named: Gateway

What’s so special about “Gateway”? Not much, at first appraisal. The word appears in more than 600 trademarks, including that of a pioneering U.S. computer company founded in 1985 in Sioux City, Iowa. (That company, whose original name was Gateway 2000, used a Holstein cow as its mascot; it was bought in 2007 by Taiwan-based Acer, which also acquired Gateway.com and which now produces computers under the Gateway brand.)

“Gateway” names abound in the San Francisco Bay Area thanks to the region’s association with the Golden Gate and the bridge that spans it. There are Gateway apartments, a Gateway Bank, a Golden Gateway hotel, and a long-planned Gateway Park at the foot of (confusingly) the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge.

But the Gateway I want to praise here is Oakland-based Gateway Incubator, which is named for a different sort of gateway.

On the Visual Thesaurus: “Common sense”

Common-sense gun laws. Common-sense conservatism. Common Sense Nation. “The courtroom of common sense.” Politics and the media have been awash in common sense lately, so I decided to investigate. My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, “Common Sense and Sensibility,” takes a close look at this commonplace expression and its meanings.

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

Word of the week: Motto

Motto: A brief statement that expresses a goal, ideal, or principle. From the Italian motto, “a saying or legend attached to a heraldic design,” and ultimately from Latin muttum (“grunt” or “word”). Related to French mot (“word”) and English mutter (“to mumble”).

I’ve written so much and for so long about slogans and taglines that I was surprised to find that I’d never written about the meaning and uses of motto. I’ll get to the distinctions between those words – motto, slogan, and tagline – in a bit. First, though, the reason to talk about motto this week.

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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Ampersandinistas

Two huge companies on opposite sides of the globe. Two ad campaigns with ginormous budgets. Two teams of copywriters burning the midnight oil, pushing themselves to be original and authentic and cutting edge.

And powerful, too. Let’s not forget powerful.

Let’s see what they came up with.

Word of the week: VORP

VORP: An acronym for “value over replacement player.” Coined by baseball statistician Keith Woolner circa 2001 as a way to measure  “how much a hitter contributes offensively or how much a pitcher contributes to his team in comparison to a fictitious ‘replacement player,’ who is an average fielder at his position and a below average hitter” (definition source: Wikipedia).

In the years since Woolner invented VORP, the term has been adopted by tech startups as a means of grading employees, writes Dan Lyons in Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble, a memoir published earlier this month. Lyons, who had been laid off at 52 from a reporting job at Newsweek, considered himself lucky to be hired as a “marketing fellow” by a 10-year-old Boston company called HubSpot, which sells “software that lets companies, most of them small businesses like pool installers and flower shops, sell more stuff.” (The company line, writes Lyons: “Our spam is not spam. In fact it is the opposite of spam. It’s antispam. It’s a shield against spam—a spam condom. HubSpot has even created a promotional campaign, with T-shirts that say make love not spam.”) Lyons had spent most of his career writing about technology, and knew nothing about marketing. Still, he needed a job and prided himself on being a quick study. Besides, as he writes in a New York Times op-ed: “I thought working at a start-up would be great. The perks! The cool offices!”

Let’s get personal

I’ve been noticing a mini-trend in corporate naming: personal names. The names are usually (but not always) female, and they’re often a little old-fashioned. At their best, they add emotional appeal, humanize a company – especially a technology company whose actual workings may be opaque – and make a brand seem like a friend or family member.

Here are some of the personal names I’ve been tracking:

Word of the week: Sad

Sad: Showing, expressing, or causing sorrow or gloom; depressing; inadequate.

Sad is neither new nor obscure: it’s been with us since Old English, and even young children understand at least one of its meanings. But it’s been in the foreground in recent months thanks to a series of tweets published by a front-runner in the U.S. presidential primaries. “I believe we may be witnessing an evolution in the use of that word,” said Mike Vuolo, co-host of the language podcast “Lexicon Valley” in a February episode. If so, it would be only the most recent twist in sad’s long and interesting history.