Fritinancy

March linkfest

A link of my own to kick things off: I wrote for the Strong Language blog about a product name I was surprised (to put it mildly) to encounter in a family-owned, family-friendly grocery store in Berkeley, California.

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I also continue to publish about once a week on Medium, a platform that actually pays me! This week’s story is about Pepsi’s new logo—and the logo that preceded it, back in 2008 (friend link), which the branding agency sold with a totally bonkers presentation. If you’re not a Medium member, use this referral link to join. Yes, there’s a fee, but you’ll gain access to lots of other good writers, too. And maybe you’ll want to start publishing there yourself, and you’ll be glad you made this tiny investment.

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For more than a century, the New York Times’s nameplate included a period. Then, one day in 1961, it was gone. “Dropping the period caused much consternation and soul-searching at the Times, until finally the production manager came up with the calculation that eliminating the period would save some $600 a year in ink!” (Steven Heller for Print Magazine)

The final full stop?

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Nugget, Nugg, Nug

The stimulus for this inquiry came from Simulate, a newish “bioengineered food” company with a brutally honest name and slightly unsettling packaging.

Simulate chicken-flavored modified-wheat-protein Nuggs. I can’t explain why one package says “chicken” and the other doesn’t, or why the chicken looks so skeptical. Is this an example of suicide food? Or just a normal poultry gaze?

 

The Simulate company was founded in 2018 by a 19-year-old “serial tech entrepreneur,” Ben Pasternak; it’s based in New York and maintains a tech-y affect in its marketing. (Its slogan is “Upgrading the World to a Positive Food System”; the package instructions include “Pull Tab to Install”;  the website includes a “changelog” of product updates, with version numbers.) The company filed for trademark protection for “Simulate” and “Simulate Nuggs” in 2021. The latter filing stipulates: “NO CLAIM IS MADE TO THE EXCLUSIVE RIGHT TO USE ‘NUGGS’ APART FROM THE MARK AS SHOWN.”

So what is this thing called “nuggs,” anyway?

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New from me on Medium: Do we [heart] New York?

Yes, I’ve been MIA this week, but I have an excuse, or at least a story: I’ve been working on a piece for Medium about the new “We ❤️ NYC” campaign, unveiled on March 20.

Read it here: The [Heart] of the Matter.

That’s a friend link that will bypass the paywall; if you’d like to join Medium (so many benefits!), please use this referral link.

And here’s a blog bonus: I spotted this variation on “We ❤️ X” in a San Francisco Muni bus earlier this week.

We ❤️ Muni Operators, with a QR code inside the ❤️

 

Could this be the most productive snowclone in history?

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Thanks to T. Kent Jones, James I. Bowie, and Erin O’Connor for inspiration and data.

 

Going negative

Is it ever smart to choose a negative tagline? Some brands say “Positively yes!” Discover which ones, and how they went negative, in my latest story for Medium: “The Sneaky Power of a Negative Tagline.” Don’t forget to clap!

"Forsake your namesake"

Let the record show that I consume neither whisky (as it’s spelled in Scotland and Canada) nor whiskey (Ireland and the U.S.) and that, as fond as I am of my Irish and Irish-American friends, I am not a fan of St. Patrick’s Day, which in San Francisco, at least, might as well be called St. Inebriate’s Day. 

Still, for some reason I’ve been targeted on New Twitter by a promotion for Bushmills USA, the Jersey City arm of Old Bushmills Distillery of County Antrim, Northern Ireland. And the ad has been breaking my head.

Word of the week: Elevated

Suddenly, it seems, elevated is everywhere all at once.

New from me on Medium: All about Oscar

How did that gold-plated statuette get its name? I dive into the theories—is “Oscar” industry jargon for “oscillation”?—and pick a favorite, just in time for the 95th Academy Awards ceremony on March 12.

Read All about Oscar (friend link)

Name review: Five new(ish) tech companies

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these roundups, hasn’t it? Let’s take a look at some names making headlines in the tech world. In alphabetical order:

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Word of the week: Galoot

There were 40 accepted words in the solution to the March 5 New York Times Spelling Bee, and one of them was galoot.

Was it a coincidence that on that very day two contributors to the American Dialect Society listserv discussed the origins of this word?

New from me on Medium: A four-letter word

Not the sort of four-letter word I write about for the Strong Language blog. This four-letter word is just, and it played a significant role in a famous American advertisement.

Read all about it (friend link): The Four-Letter Word That Changed Advertising History.