Fritinancy

Who let the doggerel out?

Rhyme in advertising, once a well-practiced art form, is now almost defunct. As I wrote in the Visual Thesaurus a few years ago (“Ads That Rhyme: Past Their Prime?”), “By the time Orson Welles intoned ‘We will sell no wine before its time’ — a slant or ‘imperfect’ rhyme — for the Paul Masson brand in the late 1970s, Americans were experiencing verse fatigue. Within a few years, rhyming jingles had all but evaporated.”

Still, I have a soft spot for those rhyming ads of yore, which were often catchy and well crafted. So it was with a hopeful heart that I discovered a full-page, inside-back-cover ad for Geico with a seven-line verse in the March 12 issue of the New Yorker.

Alas, poetic justice was not to be served.

Word of the week: Tankie

I stumbled across tankie on Twitter last week, where it appeared in the name of a recently added account, The Tankie Awards 2018. The word was new to me, although I’ve spent some time exploring other tank-y usages, including the verb to tank, the idiom in the tank for, and the noun tankini. A tankie was, from the looks of it, something different: more political, more disparaging, and more British. And, in this 50th-anniversary year of the Prague Spring, quite timely.

 

Soviet tanks in Prague, 1968. Source.

March linkfest

“Most verbs stay basically the same in different grammatical roles. ‘Walk’ looks like ‘walks’ and ‘walked.’ But the word ‘be’ looks nothing like the word ‘am,’ which looks nothing like the word ‘were.’” (Arika Okrent for Curiosity.)

*

When I wrote about mansplain, in September 2010, the earliest citation I found for the word was from an April 2009 Urban Dictionary entry. Now lexicographers at the OED have antedated mansplaining to a May 2008 comment about the TV show “Supernatural.”Katherine Connor Martin, Oxford University Press’s head of US dictionaries, says the OED usually waits a decade or so before adding new words, but makes exceptions when a word “is deemed important enough.” (Quartz)

Mansplain magazine via Matt Round

Word of the week: Bracket

“Is there a Trump firing bracket?” asked Josh Marshall, the editor and publisher of Turning Points Memo on Twitter. It was the beginning of March Madness, the annual NCAA basketball championship, and the middle – or the beginning of the middle, or the end of the beginning – of a dizzying string of dismissals from the White House. The latest departure: FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, two days before he would have been eligible to retire with his full pension.

The answer to Marshall’s question: Yes.

Dear, dear

According to business-etiquette experts Barbara Pachter and Will Schwalbe, starting an email with “Dear ___” will likely be perceived as “old-fashioned” or “a bit too formal.” Much safer, they tell Business Insider, to use “Hi.”

Tell that to the people coming up with titles for new or recent movies, TV series, plays, and books. For them, it’s “Dear” all the way down.

On the Visual Thesaurus: The story of -o

My recent explorations of sicko and rhino led me to wonder about other words that end in -o and how they arrived in English. Those words are the subject of my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, “The Story of -o.” Full access is restricted to subscribers for three months; here’s a taste:

Word of the week: Rhino

You know it as a shorter, simpler way to say “rhinoceros.” But in the 17th and 18th centuries rhino was slang for “money,” and the related adjective rhinocerical was slang for “wealthy.” And no one is sure why.

These are not the rhinos you’re looking for. (But they sure are cool in Black Panther.)

 

Rhinoceros, from Greek roots meaning “nose-horned,” entered English around 1300; it referred to the herbivorous odd-toed ungulate, two species of which are found in Africa and three in Southern Asia. Rhino- also appears in combination forms such as rhinoplasty (plastic surgery of the nose; first appearance in print: 1828); rhinolaryngitis (1891); and rhinovirus (1961). As the shortened form of the animal name, the word first appeared in print in 1870. But nearly two centuries earlier it was popularly used in England to mean “cash,” and by 1697 the idiom “ready rhino” (or “ready rino”) was in circulation.

 

Can a name be TOO distinctive?

(Part of my Naming 101 series.)

As trademark lawyers love to remind us, distinctiveness is a paramount goal of brand naming. A name doesn’t need to be original – consider Dove deodorant and Dove chocolate — but it does need to stand out in its category.

But can a name ever be too distinctive – too much of an outlier to connect with its intended audience?

I recently spoke with a business owner via Clarity, the expert-advice service, who wanted my opinion on a name that was distinctive in the extreme. This person, a graphic designer in the Pacific Northwest, was dissatisfied with her current business name, which combines her initials with “design.” She’d come up with a new name and, she told me in an introductory email, had already bought a couple of domains associated with it. The name she wanted my opinion on: MOZZAFIATO.

Mozza-what?

 

It sounded distinctive, all right. It also sounded like nothing I’d ever heard of. Google Translate told me mozzafiato is an Italian word meaning “breathtaking,” which is nice but not helpful. How was this name going to help the designer grow her business?

Word of the week: Suitress

The third season of “unREAL,” the Lifetime drama that’s set behind the scenes at a fictitious dating show called “Everlasting,” premiered last week. The previous two seasons were satires of the long-running not-unreal “reality” show “The Bachelor,” with a single “suitor” choosing from among a bevy of competing women. This season serves up a female protagonist – or, as the characters refer to her, a “suitress.” Played by Caitlin FitzGerald, who also portrayed Libby Masters in “Masters of Sex,” suitress Serena is presented as a Silicon Valley tech billionaire, “the female Elon Musk.”

Caitlin FitzGerald, left, as Serena, unhappily wearing a revealing gown chosen by cast regulars Shiri Appleby and Constance Zimmer.

 

But what sort of female, or feminine, is suitress?

The most interesting names on the Fast Company list

Every year Fast Company publishes a list it calls World’s Most Innovative Companies: “more than 350 enterprises across 36 categories,” including biotech, finance, retail, and space, as well as five geographic sectors (Africa, China, India, Israel, and Latin America). I’ll leave the innovation metric to FC’s editors; what I wanted to know was: Which of these companies have the most appealing, distinctive, and interesting names?

In creating my own list I quickly eliminated names that are merely descriptive, like Social Capital, Safe Catch Foods, and GE Healthcare. I also discarded names that have been around too long to draw much attention to themselves: Amazon, for example, is an outstanding name for reasons I explored in a 2013 post, but it no longer seems innovative. The same goes for Spotify, the name that launched a thousand (well, almost) -ify imitators.

I reluctantly passed on a few names I found intriguing, such as Gunpowder & Sky, a global video studio, if they didn’t provide any naming backstory. And it should go without saying that I excluded names in the overstuffed let’s-just-tack-an-ly-suffix-on-it category. Sorry, Scopely and Collectively.

Here, then, are my top ten Most Interesting Names on the Fast Company list.