If any non-Jews out there are starting a business, I am available to consult on whether your proposed brand name means “butt” in Yiddish pic.twitter.com/SnSXBTeem2
Processed-meat maker Oscar Mayer announced last week that its “iconic” Wienermobile—the adjective is apparently compulsory—which has tootled along American streets since 1936, would now be called the Frankmobile, a tribute to the company’s 100% Beef Franks. Say it ain’t so! said a bunch of branding folks of my acquaintance.
But hang on: Is this really a rebrand, or is it just a seasonal stunt? In my latest story for Medium I look at how the (branding) sausage is made. Enjoy, and don’t forget to clap (up to 50 times per story!).
Blog bonus #1: Wiener literally means “of/from Vienna” (Wien in German), just as frankfurter means “of/from Frankfurt.” If you’re interested in why we call a wiener a hot dog, Barry Popik’s Big Apple blog is the place to go.
Blog bonus #2: The Oscar Mayer wiener song, accompanied by the Wiener Whistle (now called the Frank Whistle ... at least for a while). The jingle was retired in 2016.
Blog bonus #3: The story behind that other Oscar Mayer jingle, “My Bologna Has a First Name,” as told by former Oscar Mayer marketing VP Jerry Ringlien. Watch all the way to the end to see the original ad.
Waiting to cross a street in my Oakland neighborhood, I noticed this sticker on a telephone pole:
“Need to be unpregnant?”
The blurry text on the left reads “Juniper Midwifery abortion pills by mail.” There are several services around the country that call themselves Juniper Midwifery (possibly because juniper needles are an abortifacient); this Juniper is based in New York and provides abortion pills in six states, including California, where surgical and pharmaceutical abortions are (still) legal.*
“Juniper” is a good name, but what really piqued my interest was unpregnant. I hadn’t seen the word previously—or thought I hadn’t—but in fact I just hadn’t been paying close enough attention.
My latest story for Medium was inspired by Medium’s own Project Zen, which promised to deliver a “zen-like reading experience.” What, I wondered, could that possibly mean? And what does zen mean in all those company names: Zendesk, Zenify, Zenhub, Urban Zen, and on and on? If you too are curious, hop over to The Zen of Everything, and don’t forget to clap (with one hand, if that’s your zen-like jam. And if you want to stay in the flow, here’s a referral link for Medium membership.
During the last month or so I’ve tracked more than a dozen stories about San Francisco’s retail “doom loop,” and spotted many others stories about other doom loops—in climate, banking, politics, procrastination—elsewhere in the US and the rest of the world.
Top four “doom loop” stories in Google News, May 13, 2023
The word often paired with “doom loop” is “spiral.” Sometimes the term is “death spiral”—and the editors are not referring to figure skating.
BlackBerry, the new feature film from writer/director Matt Johnson, opens in theaters on May 12. I saw it last month at the San Francisco International Film Festival, at Lucasfilm’s Premier Theater in the Presidio. (Driving directions specify “Look for the Yoda fountain.”) I enjoyed it a lot, and I bet you will too, especially if you loved your BlackBerry as much as I loved mine.
Blackberry 7280, circa 2003
I did notice one missing plot point, and so my latest story for Medium, “How the BlackBerry Got Its Name,” fills in the gap. Click your little keyboard to read the story and then tap the clap icon if you liked it—up to 50 times per story! That link will give you a free pass, but if you want more goodies, you can join Medium with my referral link.
McCall’s specialty was “retrofuturism,” a word he claimed to have coined. (The OED awards that honor to a 1988 issue of Inland Architect magazine. The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael used “retro-futurist” in a 1986 review of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.) As McCall defined it, retrofuturism entails “looking back to see how yesterday viewed tomorrow”—in McCall’s case, with sly faux-nostalgia and a keen eye for hucksterism and hyperbole. His first job after dropping out of high school was at a Toronto ad agency, and he later wrote copy for a Detroit agency that represented Chevrolet; he drew on those experiences to concoct automotive inventions with fanciful names like Bulgemobile and Bongo Beatnik Ferlinghetti Turbo-Hipster. Many of McCall’s delicious, fictitious car promotions originally appeared in the National Lampoon and were later included in The Last Dream-o-Rama: The Cars Detroit Forgot to Build. McCall also wrote about his automotive career in a memoir, How Did I Get Here?, which was excerpted—with wonderful illustrations—in the New Yorker.
Jack Dorsey, now the CEO of Block (formerly known as Square), is @jack on Twitter, which he co-founded. But over the last several months he’s abandoned Twitter in favor of two newer social-media platforms: Bluesky, which he co-founded; andNostr, in which he has invested, using Bitcoin. According to a New York Times articlepublished on May 3, since Dorsey joined Nostr in December 2022 he has been publishing there an average of 59 times a day, “including messages that take aim at Twitter and [Twitter CEO Elon] Musk.” (Gift link.)
The Bluesky name seems like a straightforward scion of Twitter: a real word suggestive of Twitter’s blue bird. “Blue sky” is also a metaphor for “unconstrained optimism or imagination,” as the Merriam-Webster definition puts it.
The Nostr name is less lofty and less transparent.
Nostr’s modest proposal: “A decentralized social network with a chance of working.”
Effortless style, effortless meditation, effortless cash flow, effortless HR, effortless entertaining, effortless change: If it’s worth doing, we’re being told, it’s worth doing with as little effort as possible.
A small sampling of the dozens of “effortless” brands and book titles that have multiplied over the last 20 or so years
In my latest story for Medium, “Against Effortlessness,” I investigate the buzzword and compare it with “We Try Harder,” Avis’s long-running slogan that made a virtue of effort. And I find evidence that the effortless tide may be turning. Read the story, clap (up to 50 times!) if you like it, and sign up for Medium to read more from me and other writers. It’s worth the effort!
I first encountered perk-cession about a week ago in a jokey Instagram reel:
But this portmanteau of perk and recession, spelled either with a hyphen or closed up, had already been circulating for a couple of months. The Wall Street Journal may have been first to use it in print, in an article dated March 8, 2023, “The Perk-Cession Is Under Way at Some Companies.” Subhed: “Big companies from Silicon Valley to Wall Street are scaling back the office extras many employees have come to expect”: