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Stephanie Campisi notified me via Twitter of a name change she found noteworthy: Lystable is now Kalo.
I’d missed the news, but I was intrigued enough to do some digging. What I found were some lessons in how not to name a company and how not to introduce a new name.
From an email announcement sent to Stephanie. Keep this sentence in mind as we proceed.
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When is a press briefing not a briefing? When it’s a gaggle, sometimes held en route to somewhere, sometimes in the James Brady Press Briefing Room, sometimes excluding the biggest media outlets in the U.S.
“White House Excludes Several Outlets From Press Gaggle,” NBC News, February 27, 2017
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Should you spend $1.5 million on a domain? Almost certainly not. As A Hundred Monkeys puts it: “While your emotions should guide you in naming dogs, kids, and boats, they need to take a back seat while you mull over dropping seven figures on a domain.”
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An illustrated glossary of typography terms. (Hat tip: Glen Turpin.)
From Canva.
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A tweet from @Mededitor last month sent me down the vegan equivalent of a rabbit hole.
@Fritinancy @LouiseHarnby @stronglang @gdoslang You get the sense that FoodKick is channeling the voice of Thug Kitchen: https://t.co/vwtdYlOErT
— Mededitor (@Mededitor) April 11, 2017
I’d written about Thug Kitchen a few years ago, but I hadn’t seen TK’s new cookbook. I couldn’t resist going past “Fast As F*ck” on the book’s cover – the point of Mededitor’s tweet – to the Amazon description, which contains this sentence:
TK holds your hand and explains ingredients from chickpeas to nooch so you'll feel confident knowing exactly what the f*ck you're cooking.
Nooch? It sounded vaguely salacious, which wouldn’t be out of keeping with the TK style guide. (Chapter titles in the new cookbook include “Freshen the Fuck Up” and “Hot Box.”) But it turns out that nooch isn’t nasty or brutish, it’s just short. For nutritional yeast.
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(Part of my Naming 101 series.)
I frequently talk with company founders and executives who need a new name but don’t have the budget for professional naming services. Because I believe that everyone deserves an effective, appealing name, I do my best to show them how to tackle the challenge on their own. Sometimes that leads to a phone call – I use the Clarity service – during which I direct the do-it-yourselfer to my evergreen post on how to write a naming brief, the essential first step of any naming process.
Mission accomplished, right? If only.
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America, we have lately been told – mostly but not exclusively by conservatives – has a “smug liberal” problem. The problem is characterized by “a condescending, defensive sneer toward any person or movement outside of its consensus, dressed up as a monopoly on reason,” wrote Emmett Rensin in Vox last month. It’s evident in the attitudes of late-night comedians, wrote David French last week in the National Review; its features include “the generous use of selective clips from Fox News, copious amounts of mockery, and a quick Wikipedia- and Google-search level of factual understanding.”
Via TruthFeed, identified as a “questionable source” by Media Bias Fact Check.
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Welcome to another installment of “Brands That Don’t Understand English Vowel Sounds”! Our subject today comes courtesy of David Lloyd Clubs, established in 1982 and headquartered in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, UK, so unfamiliarity with the language is most likely not an excuse. The company calls itself “Europe’s premier racquets and fitness provider,” but the new class it announced last week is especially tailored for people who prefer to get fit without actually moving around. This is what it’s called:
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If you’ve followed college controversies over the last couple of years, you’ve heard about microagressions and safe spaces, both of which were on my 2015 Words of the Year list (and the lists of many other people). Both of those terms arose out of 1970s New Left movements in the U.S. Now comes no-platform, a British import that’s the latest vogue word among politically aware college students.
The verb no-platform, according to the Oxford Dictionaries entry, means to prevent someone whose views are regarded as unacceptable or offensive “from contributing to a public debate or meeting, especially one at which they had originally been invited to speak.” The entry’s example sentences: “Dozens of other speakers have been no-platformed because they hold non-leftist opinions”; “If we want to debate the limits of free speech within the law we can't really do that consistently by no-platforming extremists.”
Via The Rebel (Canada), February 21, 2016: “‘No-platforming’ is the new college campus craze!”
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