Fritinancy

Word of the week: Animalic

Animalic: Related to animals; used in discussions of perfume to refer to scents derived from or reminiscent of animals, such as musk or civet.

The New York Times devoted some ink in its Thursday Styles section last week to the “feral fragrance clouds” that are captivating “high-fashion niche circles.” “Maybe it’s the desire of millennials to reclaim their beastly odors in an age of technological detachment,” reporter Rachel Syme speculates, “but fragrance buyers are newly excited to smell as if they come from an elegant zoo.”

One of the new perfume brands besotted with beastly odors is Zoologist, founded in 2013 by Victor Wong, a game developer in Toronto who became a gamy-scent developer when he teamed up with a British perfumer, Chris Bartlett, to create Beaver. Yes, that’s what it’s called.

New name beat: Citroën Cactus

John Kelly, an American writer now living in Ireland, tweeted this week about a car he’d spotted in Dublin: the Citroën Cactus. “Name meant to evoke feelings of Wild West off-roading?” he mused.

Good question, and a very piquant name indeed. I decided to grasp the nettle.

Superlativest

Spotted on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland: a sign plugging the Jack in the Box Buttery Jack burger.

“Juiciest. Butteriest. Craviest.”

 

 

Sticklers will tell you that of those three adjectives, only juiciest is legit. I’m more concerned about the logical fallacy. Juicy and buttery (and their superlative forms, legit or not) describe the burger itself. But who or what is doing the craving?

.@Fritinancy @JackBox So, the burger is juicy and buttery but somehow is also animate such that it itself has cravings and is thus "cravy"?

— Kevin Sullivan (@languageNhumor) October 27, 2016

Also defying logic: the nutritional value of this sandwich. It contains 820 calories, 470 of them from fat. Its 1150 milligrams of sodium constitute 48 percent of the recommended daily allowance. (Hold the fries!)

Jack in the Box is also proudly serving – and coining – brunchfast, which would seem to require another superlative: brunchfastest.

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Elsewhere in the supersized world of advertising adjectives: funnest, Maker’s-er, closer-er and delicious-er, gooder-est.

Word of the week: Nasty

Nasty: Filthy; offensive; unpleasant; morally corrupt. Documented since the late 14th century (in the “filthy” sense), but the etymology is murky. There are similar words in related languages – nestig (“foul”) in Dutch; naskot (“dirty”) in Swedish – but the OED says “the relationship between the forms is unclear.”

Nasty was all over the news last week after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interrupted his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, during their third debate on October 19, leaning into the microphone and saying she was “such a nasty woman.”

 

At about :19.

You could look it up

This is the top half of a full-page ad for Salesforce Tower that appeared in last Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle.

 

From the Wikipedia entry: “Salesforce Tower, formerly known as the Transbay Tower, is a 1,070 ft (326 m) supertall office skyscraper under construction in the South of Market district of downtown San Francisco.” It was built on spec; naming rights went to Salesforce.com after the cloud computing company leased 714,000 square feet and became the building’s anchor tenant.

 

The headline of the ad isn’t much of a headline at all. It’s cribbed directly from Oxford Dictionaries (syllabification, phonetics, definition, and example sentence) and the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus (synonyms). As reading material, it’s boring. As an advertising strategy, it is as shopworn and ineffective as that ancient device of the inexperienced public speaker who opens with “The dictionary defines community as …” As logic, it’s a fallacy called argumentum ad dictionarium – “the act of pulling out a dictionary to support your assertions” – and it’s cleanly eviscerated on RationalWiki.

Dictionary-definition copy is lazy. It’s unpersuasive. It doesn’t convey a distinction or a benefit; it doesn’t evoke an emotion or express a call to action. It borrows authority rather than staking its own claim.

On the Visual Thesaurus: A column about nothing

About zero, that is. It’s my nomination for number of the year.

Full access to “A Column about Nothing” is restricted to subscribers for three months; here’s an excerpt:

Zero is a synonym for “nothing,” of course, but its value in branding – and in English idioms – is often positive. The name of the Sub-Zero Freezer Company, founded in 1945, suggests extra-low temperatures. (There are also an unrelated Sub Zero ice cream company, based in Provo, Utah; and a Sub Zero liquid for e-cigarettes.) A restaurant called Zero Zero, which opened in San Francisco in 2010, takes its name from the finest grain of flour, known as “00.” Coke Zero, introduced in 2005, contains zero sugar or calories, a boon for dieters and diabetics. And Zeroth, a platform for “brain-inspired learning” from telecommunications company Qualcomm, appropriates the ordinal form of zero to create what one reviewer called a “vaguely sinister” brand name that may reference the zeroth law of thermodynamics (“if two thermodynamic systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other”).

 

Read the rest of the column to learn about zero tolerance, Generation Zero, and the strange magic of size 0, 00, and 000.

Read past columns now liberated from their paywall:

• A few things about “thing”
• Unpacking “hack”
• Talking sense about “common sense”
• How “journey” became a well-traveled metaphor

 

Word of the week: Risotto

Risotto: “An Italian dish of rice cooked in stock with ingredients such as vegetables and meat or seafood” (OED). The dish is associated with northern Italy and particularly Milan (risotto milanese). From Italian riso (rice) and the diminutive suffix -otto. ItalyHeritage.com offers alternate etymologies: “Some say it came from an exclamation of Frederick Barbarossa, who praised a ‘Risum optimum’; others maintain it derived from a term used by the Insubres, the Celts that inhabited Lombardy, ‘risott.’”

Risotto was in the news last week because of a tidbit in Democratic National Committee chair John Podesta’s emails, which were hacked and released by WikiLeaks. Business Insider’s Allan Smith tweeted the revelation:

LEAKED: Wikileaks hack reveals John Podesta's secret to creamy Risotto pic.twitter.com/A5dW4mG9c6

— Allan Smith (@akarl_smith) October 11, 2016

(Also revealed: Like many people, Podesta has trouble with possessive its.)

October linkfest

The origins of cinema terms like blockbuster, cliffhanger, and McGuffin. (Oxford Dictionaries blog)

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Test your knowledge of advertising slogans. (Mental Floss)

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The return of Spy magazine – the great satirical publication of the 1980s and 1990s – as an Esquire pop-up, and not a moment too soon.

 

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After the second presidential debate on October 9:

"Unproud," top lookup @MerriamWebster, goes back to 1500s, but has never before been applied to Twitter follower counts. #makinghistory

— Kory Stamper (@KoryStamper) October 10, 2016

 

Naming a company? Don’t worry about snagging a dot-com domain. (A Hundred Monkeys)

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What if you lose the right to your company name … and the name is your own? When it happened to fashion designer Kate Spade, she changed not only the brand name but her own. (The Fashion Law, via Catchword)

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“What it is about the name ‘Trump’ that sells, and would it sell if it were changed a bit” – to, say, “Thwimp”? (Sound symbolism from linguist George Lakoff for Alternet)

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Meflection, merkining, cookie-grubbing, and other neologisms for the Trumpian Era. (Lili Loofbourow for The Week)

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The strange case – as in legal case – of the Hasbro toy hamster named Harris Faulkner and the Fox News anchor named Harris Faulkner: “either a really weird coincidence or some very niche cross-marketing on Hasbro’s part.” (Consumerist)

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Green’s Dictionary of Slang – “quite simply the best historical dictionary of English slang there is, ever has been […] or is ever likely to be” – is at last online. You can browse headwords gratis; full access is an exceptionally reasonable $60 a year. Read Ben Zimmer’s post for Language Log; read Stan Carey’s review.

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I love the OED entry for owsell. How did such a useful word become obsolete? pic.twitter.com/1VeSIXA3es

— Simon Horobin (@SCPHorobin) October 7, 2016

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Sixteen “amazing” beer names from the 2016 Great American Beer Festival, as ranked by Porch Drinking (not to be confused with the Porch of the item below). (Via @OurBoldHero)

 

Trump Hands IPA from Cannonball Creek Brewing Company: “light bodied and finishes dry with a moderate hops bitterness.”

 

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British swear words ranked in order of offensiveness. (The Independent)

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Thirteen Seattle entrepreneurs tell the stories behind their brand names, including Tune, Socrata, and Porch. (Geekwire)

 

The D-words

Earlier this week I spoke via Clarity, an expert-advice service, with a CEO who was considering changing his company’s decade-old name. He told me he didn’t have the budget for professional naming services, so he and his business partner, both tech guys, had attempted to come up with a new name themselves. After 12 (!) months of brainstorming, they finally had a couple of candidates. One name, the CEO told me, was a great description of their product. The other name described what their customers wanted. They’d already bought a bunch of domains – some for more than $1,000 – related to both names.

I kept silent, but I heaved a private sigh. Within five minutes, my caller had mentioned the two troublesome D-words of naming: describe and domain. One of those words can doom a branding project; the other is almost always a distraction.

I’d hoped to hear a different D-word, the one that matters: distinctiveness. But my caller admitted he hadn’t known it was a factor in brand development.

That CEO is far from the only client I’ve worked with who has focused, misguidedly, on descriptive names and “available” domains and neglected (or been unaware of) distinctiveness. It’s such a common oversight that I wanted to take some time to talk about it.

Word of the week: Lewd

Lewd: Lustful, preoccupied with sex; obscene, indecent.

Lewd was headline writers’ go-to adjective in coverage of a leaked 2005 audiotape in which Donald Trump boasts to Billy Bush*, the host of TV’s Access Hollywood, of, among other things, being able to “do anything” to women – including “grab them by the pussy” – because he’s “a star.” Judging from online dictionary lookups, it’s a word many people weren’t familiar with.

 

Lookups @MerriamWebster, in order: knell, deplorable, grope, lewd, misogyny, pussy, death knell, apoplectic, surreal, banter.

— Peter Sokolowski (@PeterSokolowski) October 7, 2016