Fritinancy

April linkfest

Journalist, novelist, and author Kurt Andersen (Spy magazine, Fantasyland, Evil Geniuses) wrote about “how an article about genomic sequencing led to an afternoon playing around with AI branding tools.” The names and logos these tools spat out—Dynester, Aerodynamiq, ModernZeal—led Andersen to muse about how real life is increasingly indistinguishable from science fiction.

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Speaking of science fiction, here’s a list of fictional super-metals, from Adamantium to Zortium.

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If you’re a fan of the New York Times Spelling Bee, you’ll want to try Tylogram, a new word-formation game created by William Shunn, the genius behind Spelling Bee Solver. As with the Bee, you’ll create words for points; slide the tiles around the grid to maximize their value. But it’s even trickier than that! (And fun.)

 

Word of the week: Cheersing

People have been cheerful since the 15th century and have cheered one another on for just about as long. But you may be surprised, as I was, to learn that we’ve been saying “Cheers!” as “a toast or salutation before drinking,” as the OED puts it, only since the 20th century, and relatively late in the century at that—the OED’s earliest citation is from the Sunday Times of Perth, Australia, September 14, 1930: “The brief toast of ‘Cheers, dears!’” We can also credit the Aussies with Cheers! as a parting salutation (“goodbye”), which they’ve been saying since 1937. The Brits, for their part, took to saying Cheers! to mean thanks by the mid-1970s, if not earlier, according to the OED blog. You can read more about British cheers on Lynne Murphy’s linguistics blog, Separated by a Common Language.

But drinking-salutation cheers as a verb? That was new to me until very recently.

September linkfest

“Texting is not destroying the language” and five other things you may not understand about English. (John McIntyre for the Baltimore Sun)

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A study of 597 logos found that “descriptive logos more favorably impact consumers’ brand perceptions than nondescriptive ones, and are more likely to improve brand performance.” (Harvard Business Review)

Old descriptive logos (left) vs. new nondescriptive logos (right).

Name in the news: Haven

A nonprofit company founded in January 2018 by three billionaire business titans – Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase) – and headed by a non-billionaire-but-not-doing-badly-at-all celebrity doctor, Atul Gawande, yesterday announced its name: Haven.

Connecting the dots?

 

Haven is being called a healthcare venture, but it’s not a care provider. It’s neither a hospital nor a clinic. Nor is it an insurance company. For now, it will be headquartered in Boston (a New York office is in the works) and serve only the employees of the three founders’ companies.

So what is it?

Here’s what Gawande, a practicing surgeon who is also the author of Being Mortal and a regular New Yorker contributor, says on the Haven website:

July linkfest

Last week wine distributor Lot18 and MGM – producer of the Hulu streaming series The Handmaid’s Tale – announced one of the more harebrained merchandising collabs of recent years: three wines named after the show’s most prominent characters, Offred, Ofglen, and Serena Joy. It went about as badly as you might expect, and within 24 hours the wines had disappeared from the Lot18 website.

 

May linkfest

Hotels.com registered the longest URL in internet history “to prove it has more than hotels.” (Adweek)

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“One very recent scandal in immigration politics in Britain was, improbably, named after a ship that sank decades ago.” (Lingua Franca) .

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Kim Kardashian’s decision to name her new lingerie line “Kimono Intimates” has provoked charges of cultural appropriation. But all Jezebel – and I – could think of was a 30-year-old condom brand.

 

Noun, voyager

In Advertising Land, parts of speech move freely across borders. Nouns become verbs (“Prepare to Pumpkin,” “Let’s Movie”); adjectives become nouns (“Welcome to Possible,” “The Power of True”). This functional shift, or anthimeria, happens in regular English, too – share and contact were nouns long before they were verbs – but it’s downright rampant in ad copy, as these recent sightings demonstrate.

Names in the wild: Westfield San Francisco Centre food court (and beyond)

I had a little extra time before meeting a friend at SFMOMA to see the “Soundtracks” exhibit (highly recommended), so I took a detour through for the food court of the Westfield San Francisco Centre on Market Street, looking for interesting brands.

I scored right away. “Interesting” doesn’t even begin to describe Loving Hut.

 

There is a lot going on here.

 

This all-vegan fast-food café had just opened for the day and there was already a long line of customers. I stood to the side and marveled at the weird name – a cousin of Pizza Hut, maybe? – and that fantastically hideous logo.

February linkfest

Why do so many robot names sound alike? FastCoDesign put the question to name developer Christopher Johnson, who explained that Kuri, Yui, Yobi, et al. “sound like the kind of names you might give your dog.” 

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Speaking of machines and names, Amazon’s Alexa is making life miserable for a lot of people named Alexis, Alex, and Alexa.

 

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Some good advice from Nielsen Norman Group, the user-experience people, on writing headlines, page titles, subject lines, and other “microcontent.”

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PROFANITY BREAK!

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Is shitgibbon the simian epithet of the year? After Daylin Leach, a Pennsylvania state senator, used the word in a tweet aimed at @realDonaldTrump, Ben Zimmer did some scholarly analysis for Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing; and for Slate’s Browbeat blog.

 

 

Then the MetaFilter crowd weighed in. (Sample: “No mention of the shitgibbon’s closest primate relative, the poontangutan?”)

Linguist Gretchen McCulloch considered “the origin and constraints of shitgibbon compounds.” (She thinks douchebaboon “would actually work just fine,” but shitbaboon and shitcanoe “are both pretty bad.”)

 

 

Geoff Nunberg – you may know him as linguist Geoff Nunberg from NPR’s “Fresh Air” – waxed poetic.

@bgzimmer @stronglang @browbeat Or to summarize the story as a double dactyl: pic.twitter.com/6im5FrMcEe

— Geoffrey Nunberg (@GeoffNunberg) February 12, 2017

And The Forward’s language columnist, Aviya Kushner, surveyed the whole megillah, observing parenthetically: “Many of us, even if we aren’t senators or linguists, can use a little bit of fun right now, and why not turn to insult-making as stress relief?”

Finally, we bid adieu to the zoo and consider the shit show. Or is it shitshow?

"Shit show" and "shitshow" are neck and neck in our data, and also in the world in general. https://t.co/nFAEvStqG1

— Kory Stamper (@KoryStamper) January 30, 2017

 

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END OF PROFANITY BREAK.

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How do new drugs get those strange-sounding names? (See also my post from last September about the psoriasis drug Taltz.)

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Where does new slang comes from?

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Australia has some pretty awesome ads about dying, I'll give it that pic.twitter.com/ib2aAmOmbK

— Matt Novak (@paleofuture) February 15, 2017

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The surprising history of snowflake as a political insult. 

 

I love this. Such a sublime failure of understanding how the 'putting the X into Y' headline fórmula works. pic.twitter.com/LU2cwXkwxb

— Nick Parker (@nickparker) February 10, 2017

 

Ben Yagoda has been seeing a lot of better in advertisements, and he doesn’t feel good about it.

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There’s better, there’s worse, and then there’s Thee Worst.

“Thee Worst” is Dutch for “tea sausage.” Hat tip: @AbsP.

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“Now that a sneering, orange man-child is sinking his tiny fingers into every aspect of American life, [branding] experts believe activism will become nearly as ubiquitous in the brand world as it is on college campuses.” Let’s see what they have to say.

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HOW ALL CAPS CAME TO SIGNIFY SHOUTING.

 

 

Imperfection

This headline popped up today on the home page of Uniqlo, the ubiquitous Japanese retail chain.

It links to the site’s jeans section, where the clothing is replete with rips, holes, and other “tasteful rough touches.”

Normally I’d focus on the verbing of imperfect – an example of anthimeria I hadn’t encountered previously. But as it happened I’d already been thinking about another sense of perfect: the grammatical sense. In grammar, perfect doesn't mean “impeccable”; it means “made complete” or “completely done.” 

The impetus for my musing was a tweet from @realDonaldTrump, a personal Twitter account, at 5:35 a.m. this morning: