Fritinancy

Road trip: Huy Fong chili-sauce factory

I inherited my love of factory tours from my late father, who rarely missed an opportunity to schlep us kids to something (a) educational and (b) free. Among many other jaunts, I clearly remember touring a Chevrolet factory (loud) and a Chicken of the Sea tuna factory (smelly). I’m sure Dad would have approved of the Huy Fong hot-sauce factory in Irwindale (Los Angeles County), California, where the tour isn’t just educational and free, but also concludes with a giveaway: a generous bottle of one of the three Huy Fong products – sriracha, chili-garlic paste, or sambal oelek. 

What’s more, the founder of Huy Fong is an immigrant, as was my father. David Tran was born in Vietnam in 1945 into an ethnic-Chinese family that was exiled by the Communist government in 1979. The Taiwanese ship on which he departed was called the Huey Fong – “gathering prosperity” – and Tran adapted the propitious name for the company he founded in Los Angeles in 1980.

Figure of Huy Fong founder David Tran with oversize sriracha bottle, in the training room at Huy Fong headquarters.

 

Word of the week: Wypipo

Maybe you’ve never seen the word wypipo. I’d never seen it myself until a couple of weeks ago. But just say it aloud, or even silently: WYE-pee-poh.

Still not getting it? Take a look at this:

Via The Lisa B Experience (Lisa Beasley)

 

No? Here; I’ll help: Wypipo is white people with a dash of baby-talk and a lot of eyeroll. It’s used almost exclusively by people of color, almost always as a term of condescension, disparagement, or outright hostility. Its origins, like those of many slang terms, are murky, but there’s a better than zero probability that it was born on social media, where eye dialect thrives. (I first encountered it on Twitter.) As a written word, it’s pretty recent: Urban Dictionary has only two entries, the earliest of which is dated January 29, 2016: “Twitter slang or dialect that with read aloud sounds like ‘white people’ which is its actual meaning.” The example sentence in that entry is: “Girl wypipo are crazy, they let their dogs lick their mouths.”

It will probably not surprise you to learn that usage of wypipo has grown exponentially since the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, during the weekend of August 12.

August linkfest

Years ago, I named the world’s first “bidirectional” condom, so this story really spoke to me:

Diverse & Resilient, an LGBTQ organization in Milwaukee, decided to do something about the bland branding of free condoms. So it partnered with a local marekting agency, Cramer Krasselt, to create Naughty Bags, condoms designed by teens for teens. According to Adweek, the condoms are made “to be sex-positive, humorous, and cool” and feature “witty names like Pork Parka, Pelvic Poncho, Scuba Gear, Surge Protector and—our favorite—Papa Stopper.” Brilliant – in every sense.

On the Visual Thesaurus: The new eponyms

My new column for the Visual Thesaurus considers a batch of new brand names, including Mr. Cooper (the insurance company formerly known as Nationstar), Penny (a personal- finance app), Dave (another personal-finance app), Oscar (a health-insurance company), June (an “intelligent oven”), and Alexa (the Amazon device). All of these names are eponyms – derived from proper nouns. But unlike previous generations of brand eponyms – Wendy’s, Ben & Jerry’s, Mary Kay, Sam’s Club – these eponyms aren’t taken from the names of founders or founders’ relatives. Instead, they’re wholly fictional.

 

The illustration on Mr. Cooper’s website isn’t identified as the fictional Mr. Cooper, but it could be.

 

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

A corporate press release for Mr. Cooper said the name was selected from among thousands of candidates “to personify the next generation of home loan servicing and lending for the company”: It “represents a more personal relationship customers can have with their home loan provider.”

But can you really have a personal relationship with a fictional persona? Dave and June and the rest of the crowd are counting on it, but the assumption strikes me as disingenuous. The new eponyms are less suggestive of living, breathing humans than of characters in a play or – even more to the point – mascots.

We often think of mascots as representing sports teams or events: the San Francisco Giants’ Lou Seal; “Olly” and “Syd” from the 2000 summer Olympics in Sydney. But a mascot can be any person or thing that is supposed to bring luck. The word came into English in 1881 from French mascotte, a talisman or sorcerer’s charm; an 1880 French play, La Mascotte, popularized the word, which may have its origins in Latin masca, or “mask.” (It’s worth noting here that personal and person also come from a root – in this case, Greek – meaning “mask.”)

Read the rest of the column.

Blog bonus: My Pinterest board of fictional brand eponyms.

Word of the week: Based

It’s not uncommon for words originally used as slurs to be reclaimed with pride by the targeted group. Queer was reappropriated by gay people, deplorable by Trump supporters, and Impressionist by 19th-century artists.

It’s much less common for a pejorative term to be reclaimed twice. Yet that’s what’s happened with based.

Based was in the news earlier this year after confrontations between pro- and anti-Trump groups in Berkeley, California. Kyle Chapman, a 41-year-old Trump supporter, was arrested at a rally in early March for hitting an Antifa protester over the head with a stick. Chapman’s fans dubbed him Based Stickman and began creating a legend around him. Chapman, who was released on bail, had already racked up a colorful rap sheet that included three felonies. He was arrested a second time on April 10.

Based Stickman regalia. (Image source.)

 

 

Names in the wild: Westfield San Francisco Centre food court (and beyond)

I had a little extra time before meeting a friend at SFMOMA to see the “Soundtracks” exhibit (highly recommended), so I took a detour through for the food court of the Westfield San Francisco Centre on Market Street, looking for interesting brands.

I scored right away. “Interesting” doesn’t even begin to describe Loving Hut.

 

There is a lot going on here.

 

This all-vegan fast-food café had just opened for the day and there was already a long line of customers. I stood to the side and marveled at the weird name – a cousin of Pizza Hut, maybe? – and that fantastically hideous logo.

Word of the week: Screed

On Saturday, the technology blog Motherboard reported on a document titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” that had been posted by an unnamed male software engineer on a company mailing list and had subsequently gone “internally viral.” By the end of the day, another tech blog, Gizmodo, had published the complete 3,400-word text of the document, still without revealing the identity of the author.

The substance of the document, which criticizes Google’s affirmative-action programs for their anti-conservative bias while asserting that “I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity,” reveals a certain (possibly prevalent) mindset among a certain (possibly large) segment of the tech industry. It drew sharp responses from other tech-industry observers – see, for example, this piece by Ian Bogost for TheAtlantic.com and this one by Yonatan Zunger on Medium– and from Google’s own vice president for diversity, integrity, and governance Danielle Brown.

An excerpt from the Google email.

 

But I’m not here to analyze the arguments. I’m here to ask: What should we call the document?

The case of the forbidden letters

(Part of my Naming 101 series.)

The naming brief was comprehensive and clear, except for one line toward the end: “No names that begin with A, B, or F.”

Wait. What?