Because my words-of-the-year list couldn’t cover the whole territory, here’s a list of upper-case names that stood out over the past year. For a different take, see Namerology’s name-of-the-year post about Volodymyr, which includes a discussion of language, identity, and spelling.
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Continue reading "Names of the year 2022: Fritinancy edition" »
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My annual list of brand names that stood out in 2021 is now live on the Visual Thesaurus. To read the column you’ll have to subscribe—or wait for the three-month paywall to lift and risk being way behind the times.
There’s a little bit of overlap with my Words of the Year list, published yesterday, but plenty of new stuff, too. Here’s a free excerpt from the Entertainment section:
Games were on our minds in 2021. In January, a struggling chain of brick-and-mortar video-game stores called GameStop became famous when a group of mischievous day traders, noticing that big Wall Street hedge funds had shorted the chain’s stock, began buying it and driving up its price, from $4 a share to $150. Even Tesla CEO Elon Musk got in on the fun, punnily tweeting about “Gamestonk.” (What’s a stonk? Read my explanation.)
A grimmer game caught our attention in November, when Netflix debuted the dystopian Korean drama series “Squid Game.” The title refers to a real-life children’s game popular in South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, in which the playing field resembles the body of a squid. By November, the show had become the streaming network’s most-watched series. The Korean title, “Ojing-eo Geim,” imports geim directly from English; the Japanese translation, Ika gēmu—a candidate for Japanese word of the year for 2021—also borrows the English word.
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My annual list of notable brand names is up on the Visual Thesaurus now, and I invite you to read it if you have a VT subscription (still just $19.95 a year!). I cover the 2020 brandscape from Animal Crossing to Zoom; the list includes a tongue-twister and a generic name. Here’s a free excerpt:
Aunt Jemima. The 131-year-old pantry-staples brand, named for a fictional, racially stereotyped character in post–Civil War minstrel shows, had long been controversial. 2020 was the year the brand's parent company, Quaker Oats, announced it would change the name at last. It was one of several big brand-image pivots: the Washington Redskins traded a slur for a generic name (see below), and Uncle Ben's — which like Aunt Jemima had built a business on the image of a Black servant — is becoming Ben's Original. As I observed in July, several "plantation" names are also being reconsidered. Read more about the history of Aunt Jemima.
Can’t remember last year’s big brand names? Read my 2019 review—no paywall—with links to earlier end-of-year columns. And then of course you’ll want to read my 2020 review.
Your blog bonuses:
Continue reading "On the Visual Thesaurus: Brand names of the year for 2020" »
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My year-end list of notable brands is viewable only by Visual Thesaurus subscribers, which can mean only one thing: It’s time to give yourself the gift of a subscription—still under $20 a year—or to give a subscription to someone else who loves words and language.
Wondering whether it’s worth it? Here’s one of the brands on my list:
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My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus takes a look back at ten brands that made a big impact in 2018, and explores the stories behind their names, from all those Amazon private labels (WULFUL, Dreamlish, GiGling EyE, et al.) to WW (formerly known as Weight Watchers) and Zara. Full access is restricted subscribers; here’s a taste.
Continue reading "On the Visual Thesaurus: Brand names of the year for 2018" »
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It’s my yearly roundup of brand names that made headlines and were linguistically interesting, including a few I’ve written about here: Velar, Keurig, Oath. Access is restricted to subscribers for three months (give yourself a gift!); here’s an excerpt.
Bonobos. Founded in 2007 as an e-commerce site, the menswear company Bonobos grew into the largest U.S. clothing brand built on the web. This year, it was bought by Walmart for $310 million in cash, an acquisition that was called more significant in terms of retail disruption than the Amazon–Whole Foods deal, also finalized this year. The Bonobos name is a nod to the endangered ape native to the region south of the Congo River. It's a curious choice for a company that sells only men's clothing: Lower-case bonobos live in female-led groups and are notable for their altruism, empathy, and peaceful behavior. The bonobo name was first used in 1954 by two European scientists who may have misspelled Bolobo, the name of a town near where the first specimens were collected.
Other names that made my list: Juicero, Gothamist, Mattress Mack, Pepsi, RompHim, Shero. Read the full column.
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Dictionary.com’s word of the year for 2017 is complicit. The selection is based on the number of online lookups, which spiked in March, when SNL featured a perfume ad parody; and in April, when Ivanka Trump said she didn’t know “what it means to be complicit.”
Collins Dictionary, based in London and Glasgow, got a head start on the WOTY competition in early November, selecting fake news over runners-up such as unicorn, echo chamber, and gig economy. (Related: My November 2016 post on fake.)
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My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at the most interesting and significant brand names of 2014. Not, I hasten to add, the biggest or most successful brands, but the ones that were “newly prominent or notable” (per the American Dialect Society’s criteria for words of the year) and exhibited linguistic and onomastic merit.
Access to this column is free to all – happy holidays! (But don’t you know someone who’d appreciate the gift of a Visual Thesaurus subscription?) Here’s one of my top 10 brand names:
Uber. The rideshare app—based in San Francisco and operating in more than 200 cities worldwide—was founded in 2009, but 2014 was the year it truly became a household word, not always for positive reasons. Yes, the company was valued at a boggling $40 billion in December, up from $18 billion a mere six months earlier. But it was also beset by controversy: lawsuits, protests by licensed cab drivers in many European cities, revelations of unethical behavior on the part of top corporate executives. On the one hand, “Uber”—German for “over,” but minus the umlaut—seemed to characterize the company’s above-it-all arrogance. On the other hand, the app is undeniably popular—so much so that “Uber for __” now describes myriad unrelated businesses in the “shared economy”: Uber for snowplowing, for kids, for pizza, for gentleman companions, for flowers, for marijuana, and on and on.
Update: “There’s an Uber for X,” a Seussian verse by Jason O. Gilbert. Here’s one verse:
There’s Uber for bikes,
And an Uber for gifting,
There’s an Uber for beauty,
If your face needs a lifting.
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Previous brands of the year (no longer paywalled): 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2009. (I took a break in 2010.)
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My new column for the Visual Thesaurus is a year-end look at some significant brand names of 2013. As I say in my introduction, it isn’t a list of the biggest or more famous companies; rather, it’s my subjective catalog of names that were “newly prominent or notable” (per the American Dialect Society’s criteria for words of the year), showed linguistic significance (or “interestingness”), and represented naming trends or breakthroughs.
Access to the full column is restricted to subscribers (subscribe! an excellent gift!). Here’s one of the 10 names on my list:
Redskins. Football’s Washington Redskins have had that name since 1937 – before that, the team was the Boston Redskins – but in 2013 there was renewed pressure to change what many Native Americans and others see as an offensive term. In a 29-page report issued in October, the National Council of American Indians spelled the name with an asterisk (“Redsk*ns”) and decried the team’s “ugly” legacy of racism. Ten members of the U.S. Congress, 60 clergy members, and President Obama called for a name change, and several newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, stopped printing the Redskins name in stories about the team. On the other hand, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford — not exactly free of controversy himself this year — also weighed in, saying a name change would be “ridiculous.”
Read the rest of the column. And watch this space in the next couple of weeks for more names and words of the year.
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The American Name Society is accepting nominations for Names of the Year, with the winners to be announced at the society’s annual meeting in Boston on January 4, 2013. Anyone can play; submit your nominations no later than January 1.
Here are my own picks in the categories established by the ANS.
Personal Name
Blue Ivy. The daughter of Jay-Z and Beyoncé, born January 8, was destined to make headlines because of her celebrity parents. But her unusual name – “Blue” because it’s Jay-Z’s favorite color, “Ivy” for the Roman numeral IV (maybe) – also guaranteed the spotlight. In October, Jay-Z and Beyoncé failed to get trademark protection for “Blue Ivy”: a Boston events planner had beaten them to it, in 2009.
Higgs. Scientists at CERN announced in July that they’d discovered a particle that behaves like the Higgs boson, aka the “God particle.” The particle is named for Peter Higgs, professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh.
Jeremy Lin. The New York Knicks point guard had a sensational season, and his surname was turned into a string of puns, from Linsanity to Linspirational to Linderella. Ben Zimmer wrote in February about the Lin-guistics of Lin-sanity.
Kony. Joseph Kony, the head of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a Ugandan guerrilla group, was the subject of a documentary film, Kony 2012, released in March. The film, produced by Invisible Children, Inc., went viral; it was seen by more than 100 million viewers within a week of its release. It also inspired a critical backlash. (Jen Doll includes Kony in her “2012’s Worst Words” roundup at The Atlantic Wire.)
Malala. First name of the teenage Pakistani activist who in October was shot by the Taliban for refusing to abandon her campaign for girls’ education. She is still recovering in a hospital in Britain.
Mitt. It’s possible that only the mother of 2012 Republican presidential candidate Willard Mitt Romney ever called him by his legal first name. Romney was named for family friend J. Willard Marriott, founder of the hotel chain, and Milton “Mitt” Romney, a cousin of his father’s.
Trayvon. The fatal shooting of unarmed Florida teenager Trayvon Martin on February 26 inspired national protests and more than 2 million signatures on an online petition.
Trade Name
FiveThirtyEight. Nate Silver’s polling-aggregation blog takes its name from the number of electors in the U.S. electoral college. I gave my reasons for choosing this name (and nine other notable brand names of 2012) in my recent column for the Visual Thesaurus.
Place Name
Gangnam. Did anyone not see the “Gangnam Style” music video this year? The monster hit by Korean pop star PSY takes its name from Seoul’s Gangnam District. On Language Log, Ben Zimmer wrote about a “Gangnam Style” spoof that featured linguist/political critic Noam Chomsky.
Gaza. Site of eight turbulent days of fighting in November between the Israeli and Palestinian forces.
Literary Name
Grey. The eponymous protagonist of the publishing phenomenon Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels. “Young entrepreneur Christian Grey” is “brilliant, beautiful, and intimidating,” with “singular erotic tastes.”
Amy. There’s been a spate of “Amy” characters in recent novels, movies, and TV shows: The protagonist of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl. Laura Dern’s character on the HBO series “Enlightened.” The baby on NBC’s “Up All Night.” Anna Chlumsky’s character on HBO’s “Veep.” The American teenager in ABC Family’s “Secret Life of American Teenager.” Mayim Bialik’s character in CBS’s “Big Bang Theory.” Rebel Wilson’s character (actually called Fat Amy) in the 2012 movie Pitch Perfect. “Amy” hasn’t been a top-ten baby name since the 1970s, when it was ranked #2 in the United States; I’m guessing the creators of all those Amy characters were also born in the 1970s – and grew up in a sea of Amys.
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