Fritinancy

August linkfest

The rise of rifle logos in American branding: “[T]he terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 … put the US on a war footing for the next two decades and boosted the rifle’s prominence in the national psyche. While pistols have been the chosen weapons of traditional pop culture stars like spies, cops, and gunslingers, military combat prioritizes the rifle, and today’s gun logos reflect that.” (By James I. Bowie for Emblemetric)

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Speaking of guns (h/t Iva Cheung):

Here you go. The most American possible explanation of the Delta variant, and why it means you should get vaccinated and wear a mask, more than ever. pic.twitter.com/3dkSBLxWeX

— Dylan Meconis (@dmeconis) August 12, 2021

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September linkfest

Mountain Dew, the neon-yellow-green soft drink brand owned by PepsiCo, evidently failed to consult anyone in Scotland before it introduced its new ad slogan, “Epic thrills start with a chug.” If it had, it would have learned that chug is Scottish slang for masturbate. (Jelisa Castrodale for Vice, via Language Log)

 

That word: It does not mean what you think it means. Not in Scotland, anyway. (Via @jaysebro)

Word of the week: Blockchain

If you’re just a tiny bit aware of blockchain, it’s probably thanks to Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer virtual currency introduced in January 2009 and rising sensationally, if erratically, in value ever since. (On November 25 a single bitcoin was worth US$8,770.) Bitcoin was made possible through blockchain technology, which, put as simply as possible, is a linked and cryptographically secured list of transactions.

Blockchain – also known as advanced digital ledger technology, or ADLT – makes obvious sense for currency. But it’s much more than the core component of a quirky monetary system with an enigmatic inventor. “Simply put,” The Economist explained in an October 31, 2015, article, “it is a machine for creating trust.” And that means blockchain’s potential for secure transactions of many kinds is seemingly limitless. In fact, “blockchain for X” is fast becoming the new “Uber for X.”

Chart via PwC.

 

Word of the week: Aeroese

Aeroese: The universal language of airline pilots and air-traffic controllers. Pronounced arrow-ease. Also (and more commonly) known as Aviation English.

In an essay published last month in the online magazine Aeon, Mark Vanhoenacker – a licensed commercial pilot and the author of Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot – writes admiringly of the “clipped, technical majesty” of “the language of the sky”:

I like how different the language of the sky is from everyday English – indeed, we might give it its own name, Aeroese (though it’s also sometimes, and less aspirationally, called Aviation English). Above all, I love how Aeroese can somehow manage, in its technical, obscuring precision, to capture the high romance of flight – an aspect of my job, no matter how much I love it, that in the cockpit we rarely have reason to consider directly.

(Aeroese may be Vanhoenacker’s coinage: all the citations I found led back to his Aeon essay.)

Hard Times

Hard can be the opposite of easy or the opposite of soft; we can solve hard problems while listening to hard rock. Or we can think long and hard about two new ad campaigns that use hard in a specific, modern way.

Guest Post at Duets Blog: Fly the Tasty Skies

Today I’m guest-blogging at Duets Blog, a publication of Minneapolis trademark-law firm Winthrop & Winestine. My post, “Fly the Tasty Skies,” looks at new airline names borrowed from the produce aisle. JetBlue’s new Mint, which began operations last month, is just the latest entrant in a category that includes Peach, Mango, Vanilla, and Spice. The trend carries over to bank names, too—would you prefer a Tangerine or a Tomato?

Jet over to Duets Blog, read the post, and leave a comment if you like.

The Thrilla Called Vanilla

Food service on airlines may be disappearing, but food names on airlines are thriving, thank you very much. South Africa has Mango Airlines*, India has SpiceJet, and Japan has Peach, which I wrote about in 2011.

Now another Japanese airline is raiding the pantry. AirAsia Japan, which is wholly owned by ANA, the country’s second-largest air carrier, has been rebranded as Vanilla Airlines. (Or possibly Vanilla Air. Reports are inconsistent.)

To a speaker of idiomatic English, “Vanilla Air” may suggest a plain, nothing-special approach to in-flight amenities.** But that’s not how Japanese speakers perceive it, according to a report in Campaign Asia (all punctuation sic):

While the ‘vanilla’ is synonymous with ‘safe and boring’ in the English-speaking part of the world, it’s nothing of the sort to Japanese says McCann Worldgroup senior strategic planner, Sakura Irie. “The brand is clearly targeting young Japanese travellers so what it means in English, does not really matter.

“In Japan, vanilla does not have any connotation of being boring or bland – and the overall impression of the word is very positive. It is accessible, likable and familiar. Moreover, it gives the impression of being ‘pure and innocent’ and ‘kawaii’ – which means a lot more than ‘cute,’ it’s the feeling of emotional excitement, endearment and desire to be a part of or to own,” she continued. “It’s an interesting and in fact, very Japanese choice, I thought.”

No mention of whether Japanese speakers will struggle with the pronunciation of the L phoneme, which is virtually identical to R in Japanese.

AirAsia worked with “several” agencies on the rebranding, according to a Bloomberg.com report. Much is made in the press coverage of the report that AirAsia “sifted through” a list of 200 names, as if that number were astronomical and newsworthy. (The runner-up names were not disclosed. Spearmint? Cinnamon? Oregano?) In my professional experience, 200 names is a modest number to be developed for a major rebranding. I have to wonder, though, about the wisdom of presenting the client with that many names. That must have been one very long conference call.

But here’s a happy thought: Aren’t you looking forward to the merger of Peach and Vanilla? Mmm, swirly goodness.

(Hat tip: Rochelle Kopp. Headline source.)

 

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* OK for man, but how does woman go?

** Or a cheap drugstore fragrance for teen girls.

Invented Comparative Watch: Mobiler

No, not someone who lives in Mobile, Alabama. It’s another spin of the faux-comparative-maker machine.

 

“The Mobile Phone Just Got Mobiler.” Ad for Delta mobile app, back cover, The Atlantic, April 2013.

 

This particular ad is the only one I’ve seen that uses word play; other ads for the mobile app use a straightforward benefit approach (and depict the QR code that’s the whole point of the pitch). It’s always a little unsettling when an advertiser code-switches within a campaign.

Previously in Invented Comparative Watch: worldwider, Maker’s-er, deliciouser, funner-er.

On the Visual Thesaurus: How 'Livery' Changed Its Spots

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at how a very old English word, livery, has changed meanings over the last 700 years. Livery comes from Latin liberare, to liberate, via French livere, and it originally meant an allowance of clothing or food provided by a master to his servants or animals.

My interest is in a much more recent definition of livery: the distinctive look of a vehicle or product. You may have noticed this usage in stories earlier this year about American Airlines’ first new visual identity in 45 years.

 

Photo from Chicago Tribune: “American Airlines Reveals New Logo, Livery”

Full access to the Visual Thesaurus story is restricted to subscribers (who also get to read all the other great content on the site). Here’s an excerpt:

Meanwhile, in general usage livery’s meaning gradually shifted to “a servant’s uniform,” on the one hand, and “the renting out of horses for a fee,” on the other. (Livery can also be an adjective – “having the flavor or texture of liver” – but that’s beside the point here.) Livery also acquired a metaphorical sense of “outward appearance,” as in the line in a Shakespearean sonnet: “Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now.”

That figurative sense is the one preserved nonfiguratively in American Airlines’ “logo and livery.” But the path from Bard to brand was neither straight nor swift. Unlike many examples of contemporary commercial jargon, it first cropped up in the Old World and took more than a century to cross the Atlantic.

Read the rest of the column.

High Semicolonic

What’s that I see in this Delta Air Lines newspaper ad? Could it be … ?

“This Is New York; We Need to Look Good.” New York Times, Page A8, Oct. 17, 2011.

Yes, friends, it’s a correctly used semicolon in a newspaper ad—a very rare bird indeed.

Hard-working semicolons play many roles in sentence-building. (For a summary, read Grammar Girl.) Here, the semicolon connects two closely related independent clauses. The copywriter could have used a period, which would have been equally correct; but it would have created a more staccato rhythm instead of gentle undulation. The latter is more appropriate to an airline, I’d say.

Unfortunately, what we’re more likely to see in ads is the comma fault (also called the comma splice), in which a comma weakly struggles to bridge two independent clauses. I’ve faulted Coca-Cola ads for their comma faults.

Below the headline, the Delta copy gave me more joy:

At LaGuardia, we’re starting over with a brand new Delta Sky Club®, locally influenced restaurants, and revamped gate areas with iPads that let you order food right to your table (and play games while you wait).

I don’t care about the iPads: it’s the serial comma after “restaurants” that made my heart swell with happiness. Granted, the serial comma is a style choice, not a black-and-white rule, but it’s a choice I happen to prefer. (It helps with clarity, always a Good Thing.)

I was also pleased not to see a hyphen between “locally” and “influenced”—an all-too-common error. Adverbs ending in -ly never take hyphens.

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One more cheer for Delta: on the website, the customer-feedback section is labeled “Comment/Complaint.” Good for Delta for acknowledging that customers are sometimes dissatisfied.