Fritinancy

Word of the week: XBE

Do you own a BE?

That’s a “business enterprise,” which sounds redundant only to non-enterprise-y people. Maybe yours is a small business enterprise (SBE), which, according to a top-ranked definition, is “a privately owned corporation, partnership, or sole proprietorship that has fewer employees and less annual revenue than a corporation or regular-sized business.” (It seems that where tax policy is concerned, the definition of “small” varies by country and industry and who knows what else.)

Maybe, on the other hand, yours is a woman-owned business (WBE). Or a minority-owned business (MBE). Or a veteran-owned business (VBE). Or a “disability-owned business” (DBE). (Can a disability own a business?)

Now suppose you want to talk about BEs collectively, and you wish to exclude large, majority-, male-, able-bodied, or nonmilitary BEs. You’re searching for an umbrella term.

And now you have one: XBE.

Not the XBE cryptocurrency. Not XBE the Xbox file extension. Not XBE LLC the Chicago-based software company, which is a—nounpile alert!—”horizontal construction optimization solutions provider.” 

And no, the X isn’t the Roman numeral X or the “Rated X for adult content” X.

This is the algebraic X: an unknown or undefined variable. 

Here’s how the global design firm CannonDesign, which creates “transformational places, plans and strategies that improve life,” uses XBE on its website:

June linkfest

“Controversial terms, from ‘abortion’ to ‘Zionism,’ tend to shut down dialog because they mean different things to different people.” The AllSides Red Blue Dictionary defines these hot-button terms across the political spectrum: “Until we fully understand what a term means to someone else, we don't know the issue and can't effectively communicate.”

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I’m enjoying (and learning from) the short essays Susan Orlean publishes on Medium, especially her stories about  the writing craft. Here she is on beginnings and on endings.

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After a four-month hiatus I’m back on Medium myself with some reflections on fifteen years of blogging. (And here’s your annoying-but-obligatory reminder that Medium contributors earn money from their stories only if enough people “clap” for them, and that up to 50 claps per story are allowable, nay, encouraged.)

Word of the week: Arum

Around midday last Monday I got an urgent call from my friend C.J.: “Come across the street right away! You’ve got to see this!” I know better than to disobey C.J., so I asked no questions, just shoved my feet into some sandals, grabbed my keys and phone, and dashed out my front door. In the driveway of the house directly opposite mine—a house I’d never once entered during the six and a half years I’ve lived on this street—was a Honda with with a hand-lettered sign taped to its rear window.

“Corpse flower (Amorphophallus titanum) UP DRIVEWAY – Thru Gate. Viewing ===>”

A corpse flower! This was definitely going to be good. 

On the Visual Thesaurus: Electric-vehicle lingo

My June column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at the brand names and specialized vocabulary of electric vehicles (EVs, BEVs, ZEVs, and their kin). As you may recall,  I’ve become a little obsessed with this subject ever since I researched and (finally) bought a PHEV—that’s a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.

Full access to the column is paywalled for three months; here’s an excerpt:

Word of the week: Peccy

I thought I knew quite a bit about Amazon. I have, after all, been a customer since September 1997. (My first order: The Cynic’s Dictionary and Idiom Savant: Slang as It Is Slung.) I’ve written about the company and its brands (see here and here, for example). I’ve read two books about the company: Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America (2021) and Brad Stone’s The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2014)*.

But I’ve never worked for Amazon, which may explain my not knowing that the company had a mascot called Peccy.

Name in the news: Phexxi

A new birth-control product, Phexxi, was the subject of a long story in the New York Times Styles section on June 10. “The pill helped start the sexual revolution,” reads the headline. “What will Phexxi do?”

What is Phexxi? According to the product website, Phexxi is a nonhormonal vaginal gel that “works to prevent pregnancy by altering the pH of your vagina, which is different from hormonal birth control.” Its primary ingredients are lactic acid, citric acid, and potassium bitartrate (the last ingredient is better known, at least to cooks, as “cream of tartar”). In May 2020, Phexxi filed for trademark protection and received FDA approval; the product went on sale in the US in September 2020. An ad campaign—notably a 60-second video that urges women to “get past your compromises and get Phexxi”—launched in early February 2021.

Screen grab from the 60-second ad

Does Phexxi work? Its parent company, Evofem Biosciences (“Science with a Soul”), says that in clinical trials “with perfect use,” the gel is 93 percent effective in preventing pregnancy. As for the Phexxi name—well, let’s talk about it.

Word of the week: Quinceañera

¡Feliz cumpleaños a mí! OK, not a mí, exactly, but a mi blog, which was born 15 years ago, on June 8, 2006. Which means I’ve outlasted The Former Guy by many, many Scaramuccis.

“Trump ends blog after 29 days, infuriated by measly readership”: Washington Post, June 3, 2021

A positive spin

I’m researching a longer piece on “plus” in branding, from plus size to Nic+Zoe to all those +-suffixed streaming services. Along the way I stumbled on a couple of new plussed-up brands with unusual naming stories.