Fritinancy

"Defund the police"?

Since the shocking, videotaped killing of George Floyd, an African American man, by a white Minneapolis policeman on May 25, tens of thousands of Americans have taken to the streets in protest. In many places, demonstrations against police violence were met with callousness and more police violence, often military style.

You can’t have a protest without slogans, and of all the slogans that have appeared during these protests, the one that has been the most visible and provocative is “Defund the police.” On HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” host John Oliver devoted an entire show to the slogan and the issues behind it. The president, unsurprisingly, took the bait and tweeted repeatedly in opposition. A couple of his supporters escalated the threat.

“Defund the police” T-shirt via Etsy

I’ve been following the arguments over “Defund the police”—from “Is there a better way to say it?” to “What does it even mean?” (Interestingly, the OED doesn’t include a definition for defund that means “withdraw financial support from something,” although American dictionaries do.) My conclusion: Whenever you have to explain a slogan by saying “What we really mean is…”, it’s a bad slogan and you’re losing the argument.

Especially when your “explanation” uses a word like “decommodify” that needs more explanation. I don’t know who created this graphic; I found it on Reddit.

 

The commentary that spoke most directly to me comes from a Twitter user who goes by The Hoarse Whisperer and who tackled the subject the way those of us who work in branding and communications would.

Corona brands: Zoom

Second in a series of posts about US brands that are thriving during the COVID-19 pandemic.

There are other video-conferencing tools—Webex, GoToMeeting, Blue Jeans, Google Hangouts—but during the COVIC-19 pandemic one brand has so dominated the landscape that “Zoom” has become the generic default for the whole category and the basis for a raft of new portmanteau words. As a March 23, 2020, New York Times headline put it: “We Live in Zoom Now.”

June linkfest

Happy solstice, and a few self-serving announcements:

1. You can now follow me on Instagram, where I post an average of one image a day—never a selfie, and never a “Story,” an Instagram feature I find annoying.

2. Over on Medium, I published “The Sound of a Name,” about the effects and uses of sound symbolism in naming.

3. I’m quoted in Heather Schwedel’s story, for Slate, about why Postmates shouldn’t use “Postmate It” as its slogan.

And some other-serving links:

August linkfest

Caterpillar, the heavy-equipment manufacturer, has had a registered trademark for CAT since 1949. Now it’s extending CAT to a footwear line. And not just steel-toed boots, either: these oxfords are women’s street fashion. (Duets Blog)

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The method Google Maps uses to name city neighborhoods “is often mysterious. The company declined to detail how some place names came about, though some appear to have resulted from mistakes by researchers, rebrandings by real estate agents — or just outright fiction.” (New York Times)

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September Linkfest

Today is National Punctuation Day, a semi-whimsical holiday invented in 2004 by journalist and marketing guy Jeff Rubin. I leave it to others to wail over missing commas and misplaced apostrophes. I celebrate in my own way: by recognizing creative, quirky, and mysterious punctuation in logos, brand names, and marketing communication. (Check this space on Friday for another story about a mysteriously punctuated brand name!)

 

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In July, A+E Networks relaunched its Bio. channel—yes, that’s Bio-with-a-period—as FYI,—yes, that’s FYI-with-a-comma. The channel’s programming “covers a range of stories and experiences that reflect how people actually live their lives today” and “embraces an adventurous, personalized and non-prescriptive approach to peoples’ [sic] taste, space, look, story and more.”

I have no idea what that means. I do know that it’s people’s, people.

 

“The comma is always a lighter hue and alludes to the idea that there is always something more on FYI.” – Loyalkaspar, the branding agency that designed the new logo.

Additional print work was done by Los Angeles agency And Company. Yes, that is its name.

And Company has its own punctuation story:

And Company logo.

Via Brand New, which had this to say about “FYI,”:

The name of the new channel is certainly catchy. Not only does it work on the same level as other popular cable channels like AMC, TNT, FX, TBS in that it’s an acronym but it also works as lexicon commonly used in verbal and written communication when saying “for your information” proves to time-consuming.

The name is fine. The comma is annoying.

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I’d somehow missed the news that in late 2013 Verizon introduced a tablet device named for a punctuation mark: the Ellipsis.

 

A November 2013 upgrade announcement.

 

“Ellipsis”--“a series of dots that usually indicates the intentional omission of a word, sentence, or whole section of a text without altering its meaning”—comes from a Greek word meaning “omission.” Maybe Verizon was thinking of ellipse or eclipse. Honestly, I have no idea.

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Speaking of ellipses, Language Log recently considered their hidden meaning. Are the three dots a marker of melancholy? Confusion? Exasperation? Advanced age? Be sure to read the comments.

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This bath mat from InterDesign is called the iDry Mat!—their exclamation point, not mine. I have no idea why it’s there, but it took me an absurdly long time to stop seeing the “i” as a Spanish-style inverted exclamation mark.

 

 

In her National Punctuation Day roundup for Time, Katy Steinmetz notes that “Exclamation marks are becoming harder to avoid, for those who would like to avoid them.” Why? “Because people need something to fill the gaps left by informative cues we get only in face-to-face communication—the raised brows, the wide eyes, the smile.” 

Not sure what this has to do with bath mats, but hey! Whatever!

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Some punctuation says “Get with the program(ming).”

 

sf.citi stands for San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology and Innovation. I asked my Twitter followers how they interpreted the logo and I got various answers: “Looks like source code.” “The parentheses signal that a variable is being declared: many possible values, only one operation.” I also learned that SF is a generic object-oriented programming language (although that may not be relevant here). Charles Hill (Dustbury) probably hit the nail on the head when he said the logo is meant to convey “We can handle it, whatever it is.”

One of sf.citi’s projects is Circle the Schools.

 

It looks like source code. But sometimes an apple is just an apple.

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Ding*—yes, Ding-with-an-asterisk—is the new name of Ezetop, a service that allows owners of pre-paid mobile phones to add credit (in UK parlance, “to top up”). (Ezetop remains the name of the Irish parent company.)

Not to be confused with Bing, of course.

 

Brand New once again found the name “quite catchy”: “It sounds like you just won a prize—ding!” But a few commenters pointed out that the asterisk should have six points “like the star key on a phone.”

As for me, I find it irksome that “top up” is hyphenated so randomly on the website. The verb should be hyphenless (but isn’t, except when it is).

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Is it co-worker or coworker? June Casagrande of Grammar Underground lays down the (short) line:

Perhaps it’s my AP Style background, but I greatly – greatly -- prefer “co-worker.” Without the hyphen, the first thing I see is “cow.” The whole word looks, at a glance, like it’s pronounced “cow irker.” I’ve worked with a lot of people over the years, and as far as I know, none of them has a history of harassing cattle.

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Speaking of confused punctuation, Non Talbot Wels (that’s his real name) tweeted this photo of a Pepsi Next promotion:

 

 

Taste less sugar? Tasteless sugar? A period or dash at the end of the second line would have been in excellent taste.

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Looking for a suitable gift for NPD 2015? For $125, Art We Heart will sell you an Ampersand Garden wall hanging, handmade in Los Angeles of air plants, wood, and moss and measuring about 11 inches square.

 

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Previous National Punctuation Day posts: 2007, 2009, 2013.

 

 

 

Word of the Week: Emoji

Emoji: Cartoonish icons used to communicate emotion in email and texting. From the Japanese; a blend of “e” (Japanese for “picture”) + “moji” (“letter”).

Some of the emoji icons available on Apple devices.

Think of emoji as the lazy person’s emoticons: no careful combinations of parentheses, semicolons, and carats; no tilting your head to puzzle them out. Or think of them as hieroglyphics for the global postliterate era. 

In an article about emoji published last month in the New York Times, reporter Jenna Wortham provided some background:

Emoji have long been popular among cellphone users in Asia. They first emerged in Japan in the 1990s, said Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how young people use digital media in Japan and the United States. Cellphone carriers first added the images to differentiate their phones from those of rivals, and they caught on as an efficient way to quickly convey a specific thought, mood or joke.

Since so many of our daily interactions are happening over mobile phones, it makes sense that people would crave new ways to convey meaning other than plain text, said S. Shyam Sundar, co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University.

“Text as a medium is particularly dull when it comes to expressing emotions,” Professor Sundar said. “Emoticons open the door a little, but emoji opens it even further. They play the role that nonverbal communication, like hand gestures, does in conversation but on a cellphone.”

Emoji are now standard on Apple devices running iOS 5. For the iPhone-deprived (or resistant), Gmail also offers an emoji keyboard in which some of the characters are animated. I’m still trying to figure out the context in which a pincer-wiggling lobster would express le mot juste.

I may need to enroll in Intro to Narratives in Emoji, a Tumblr of stories and movie plots distilled into emoji. Here, in its entirety, is Taxi Driver:

Unsatisfying Subject Line of the Day

This email from Saks Fifth Avenue arrived in my inbox this morning.

 

 

An exclusive Tory Burch event that will “leave me wanting more”? Sounds like an invitation to disappointment. To leave someone wanting more means to under-deliver. Saks, however, is trying to say something quite different: “When you see the new Tory Burch collection, you’ll want more clothes!”

How can I be sure? Here’s the footer on the email: 

 

 

An email subject line may seem like a minor detail, but remember: it’s the first message a customer sees, and it can make the difference between opening an email and sending it directly to Trash.

This isn’t the first time I’ve suspected that Saks is employing copywriters who aren’t entirely comfortable with American English vocabulary and idioms. See my November 2009 post about “opportunistic.”

August Linkfest

Even among billionaires, there’s room for improvement. See how Bill Gates has transformed his presentation techniques over the last few years. (Presentation Zen, via Brand Mix.)

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One way to add juice to a presentation is to use effective metaphors—for example, Gates’s “12-foot truck trying to get under a 10-foot bridge.” Listen to James Geary, who calls himself a professional aphorist, explain how metaphor works and why it matters. (The Pollywog Blog.)

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Want to become a name developer? Or name your own company or product? Nothing beats practice, practice, practice, but study helps, too. The Thingnamer blog has pored over some of the best books on naming and given each one a mini-review and an honest rating, from “Must Own” to “In Need of Update—Avoid.” Click through to buy.

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“When do you need an exact .com—and when can you get away without one?” In a succinct yet comprehensive video tutorial, Laurel Sutton, a principal at Catchword Branding, provides the lowdown on finding the right domain name.

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Two brand-related posts on Nancy’s Baby Names: “How Many Babies Are Named Ikea?” (answer: many more than necessary) and “Car Names As Baby Names.” (No, I’m not the Nancy of Nancy’s Baby Names. Meet the other Nancy here; read my own post on deciphering the IKEA naming system here.)

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Here’s a bit of irony: Condé Nast, which shut down Gourmet magazine in 2009 after 68 years of publishing, is getting into the restaurant business. The first titles to be licensed: Vogue and GQ. Brandchannel speculates about what the signature dishes of other hypothetical Condé Nast eateries might look like. (Glamour: “Are you really hungry for dinner? Or love?”)

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The San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant blog, Inside Scoop, asked readers to nominate the worst restaurant name in town. There are 112 comments so far; “Squat & Gobble”—yes, it’s a real restaurant, with two locations and an X + Y name—appears to be the unpopular favorite. (Via NameFlash.)

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What do Grace Kelly, Kurt Vonnegut, Johnny Weir, and Sherlock Holmes have in common? They’ve all had asteroids named after them. But first they had to win approval from the International Committee for Small-Body Nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union. (Mental Floss.)

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Bored with Buzzword Bingo? Take your most-loathed corporate jargon (“move the needle,” “realize negative gains,” “ideate”) to Unsuck It for an instant translation. Or click “I’m feeling douchey” for a random jargon-to-English conversion. (Hat tip: Karen.)

The 411 on 404

The 404 error message, that is. According to linguist and prolific author David Crystal, "404" was the number of the room at CERN, in Switzerland, where the World Wide Web was developed. Update: Or not. See Tomas's comment, below.

I discovered that tidbit and many others in Crystal's Words Words Words, whose chapter titles all start with "word"--Wordsmithery, Wordbuilding, Wordrisks, Wordbirths, Worddeaths, and so on.

Here's a link to some classic 404 error messages as well as some creative variations.

And in news otherwise unrelated except that it involves a three-digit number beginning with "4," perhaps you've heard that California's Compassionate Use Act, passed by the voters in 1996, allows the medical dispensation of marijuana. In 2003, the State Legislature modified the act with a piece of legislation formally known as--wait for it--SB 420. Yes, "420," as in ... 420. Sheer coincidence? Well, the bill's author was former State Senator John Vasconcellos, who represented the Silicon Valley area for eons and whose obituary will almost certainly include his role as the godfather of California's self-esteem movement. High technology, high self-esteem ... I rest my case.

I read about SB 420 in this fascinating New Yorker article by David Samuels about the weird world of medical marijuana in the Golden State. In additional to numerological trivia, the article shares some marijuana nomenclature, e.g.: Sour Diesel, Bubba Kush, AK Mist, Purple Urkel, Jedi, and Gush ("a robust mixture of Goo—a lighter, giddier high—and Kush").

Crowd Control

Counter sign at Café Dibartolo, Grand Avenue, Oakland: