Fritinancy

September linkfest

I’ve read more books about Trump, Trumpism, and What It All Means than is probably healthy for me, but until I read Thank You for Your Servitude, by Mark Leibovich (Penguin Random House, 2022), I’d never laughed my way through a Trump book. Leibovich, a veteran Washington correspondent (New York Times, The Atlantic), focuses not on “your favorite president” but on the lickspittles and soul-sellers who sought relevance through their obeisance to him, most notably Senators Rubio (R-FL), Cruz (R-TX), and Graham (R-SC), all of whom had been loudly contemptuous about TFG  before he became the nominee and they made the bread-butter connection. Leibovich is the rare insider with an outsider’s sense of irony, and he’s a master of the snappy sentence. Here’s one example, about former Republican National Committee Reince Priebus, who became 45’s much-put-upon first chief of staff: “No matter how much Trump had roiled the Republican water, it remained Priebus’s job to carry it.”

For naming inspiration, look outside

Where do you find a brand name? More specifically, where do you find a powerful, memorable, lasting brand name?

The answer, in one famous instance: outside the window.

In 1982, computer scientists John Warnock and Charles Geschke were working in Warnock’s garage in Los Altos, California, on a page description language for controlling printing. The product would end up being called PostScript; in 1985, Warnock and Geschke would license it to Apple.

PostScript is a solid product name. But Warnock and Geschke, who had been colleagues at Xerox PARC, had bigger plans. They needed a company name that wasn’t defined by, or limited to, a single product.

They found that name when they looked outside the garage window and saw Adobe Creek.

 

A fallen redwood in Adobe Creek. (Wikipedia)

 

February linkfest

Stuart Elliott, who used to be the New York Times’s advertising columnist, now writes about ads for Media Village. Here’s his take on the commercials that aired during Super Bowl 50. (“Though it's the biggest feel-good day of the year, Madison Avenue tried hard to bring viewers down – not only with those commercials, but also with spots with strange, off-putting and downright weird characters and premises.”

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Naming Advice from a Cartoonist

And not just any cartoonist, either.

Bob Mankoff is the cartoon editor of the New Yorker, which means that, among his many other duties, he judges the magazine’s weekly caption contest. Since the contest went weekly in 2004, readers have submitted more than two million entries. Inevitably, Mankoff has pondered why some captions succeed and others fail. And in one chapter of his new memoir/history How About Never—Is Never Good for You?*, published earlier this year, he shares his advice about how to beat the odds.

Here’s the thing: the advice doesn’t apply only to cartoon fans and contest hobbyists. To my surprise and delight, I found that it’s highly pertinent to my own discipline of name development.

October Linkfest

When McDonald’s met Play-Doh, and other examples of peculiar co-branding. (Marketplace)

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Forward thinking, incremental thinking, and three other proven alternatives to brainstorming. (Strategy+Business)

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Worst. Infographics. Ever. (WTF Visualizations, via The Guardian, via Paul Wiggins)

 

Bad math, bad spelling, and … chickens? Many more like this at WTF Visualizations.

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“Years ago, I asked one of my mentors what he thought was the hardest part of designing a typeface. I was expecting ‘the cap S’ or ‘the italic lowercase’ or something like that. But he answered without hesitation: the name. Finding the name is the hardest part.” (Tobias Frere-Jones on the names of typefaces, via Michael Bierut)

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M life (“Own Vegas”) is MGM Resorts’ customer rewards program. M’life Wellness is a fledgling medical marijuana dispensary in Las Vegas. Does MGM have a trademark case? (Las Vegas Review Journal, via Proof of Use)

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“Can I stipulate the awesomeness of a lawsuit based on parts of speech?” Ben Yagoda on the trademark dispute between management consultant Dov Seidman and yogurt maker Chobani over the slogan “How Matters.” (Lingua Franca)

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In a tribute to Hayao Miyazaki, director of My Neighbor Totoro and many other brilliant animated films, a new species of velvet worm has been named Eoperipatus totoro. (Via Tom Moultrie)

             

Eoperipatus totoro.                                        Catbus in My Neighbor Totoro.

 

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“Foodster,” “chefstaurateur,” “drool-worthy”: the food site Eater would very much like to ban their use forever. Not sure what “kerfuffle” is doing on that list—it’s a perfectly cromulent word! (Eater, via Lisa Newman-Wise)

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“Crone”? “UAV”? “RPA”? A lot of people in the drone industry hate the word “drone,” but they can’t agree on a replacement. (Wall Street Journal)

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Acronym of the month: PNIS (Proceedings of the National Institute of Science, a not exactly factual entity). PNIS calls itself “the journal that publishes just about anything (real or fake)”; categories include HARD (Honest And Reliable Data) and SOFD (Satirical Or Fake Data). “An analysis of the cost of raising a child like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes” is, you will be gratified to know, an example of HARD research. (Via Christopher Phipps)

 

Crank Up the Symphraxometer!

Here’s a fascinating artifact, courtesy of Lists of Note: a handwritten list of names created by Thomas Edison and his colleagues in 1877, the year the Edison phonograph was introduced. Most of the names are compounded from Greek or Latin roots; the list includes helpful translations (“Atmophone = vapor or steam sound”).

The list affords a rare peek into a long-ago naming process and into the concepts Edison was struggling to define. You can see how the team would fix on a word part—graph or phone—and build on it. Name development still relies on this very basic skill.

From a 21st-century name developer’s perspective, the list is revealing in other ways, too.

• It’s a surprisingly short list: only 55 names if you count all the variations (e.g., Electrophemist electrophemy electropheme). By comparison, I came up with 200 names for a recent project; my naming partner developed about the same number. That’s about par for the course. I couldn’t help remembering that Edison famously made hundreds (or thousands) of attempts at a working light bulb; when asked about his failures, he is said to have replied: “I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully found 1,000 ways not to make a light bulb.” (Some versions of the story make it 10,000 failures and 10,000 ways.) Clearly, Edison had more patience with filaments than with prefixes and suffixes.
  
  
• The names are almost identical in style: all Greek and Latin (these gentlemen knew the classics!), all descriptive, all three or more syllables. A more comprehensive list would include shorter words (e.g., Pronto), English words (Hark), and metaphors (how about Euterpe, named for the Greek muse of song?). We would also see different types of word parts, such as the -ola that appeared a couple of decades later in the Victor-Victrola.
  
  
• Edison must have stipulated that his own surname was not to be used in forming the name. That’s selfless, but it was also a missed opportunity, given that the last syllable of Edison’s name, son, means “sound.” In fact, son, sonic, and their variants don’t appear on the list at all. But there’s also no Ediphone or Edigraph.
  
  
• The ultimate choice, phonograph, does not appear on the list. In fact, phone appears only as a suffix. I’d love to know how and when someone got the brilliant idea to move that word part to the beginning of a word.

Or maybe simply to “borrow” the whole word. Phonograph had been invented more than 40 years earlier, in 1835. It originally meant “a character [graph] representing a sound [phono],” and referred to shorthand writing. Edison must have known about the word and decided to appropriate it for his device. (By the way, he called his sound recordings phonograms.)

One last comment: in a million years, I’d never have come up with “Symphraxometer.” The handwritten note gives the word’s meaning as “pressure meter,” but I can’t help hearing a symphony.

Thanks to HangingNoodles for the link to Lists of Note.

Clarity and Mystery

Stephen Sondheim, for those of you who don’t follow musical theater, is the genius who wrote the lyrics for West Side Story and the music and lyrics for Company, Follies, Into the Woods, and many other brilliant stage works. He has now published Look, I Made a Hat, the second volume of his collected lyrics and commentary. (The first volume is Finishing the Hat; both titles allude to Sondheim’s 1984 masterwork, Sunday in the Park with George.)

In his “Reintroduction” to Look, I Made a Hat, Sondheim offers brief commentary on “a gallimaufry of miscellaneous subjects.” I bookmarked the entry on Clarity:

Let me be clear about clarity, however: of itself it is, in the end, not very nourishing. Narrative art must be clear, but it must also be mysterious. Something should remain unsaid, something just beyond our understanding, a secret. If it’s only clear, it’s kitsch; if it’s only mysterious (a much easier path), it’s condescending and pretentious and soon monotonous.

Substitute “a name” for “narrative art” and the passage is equally true. Purely descriptive names are clear but weak—legally, aesthetically, and narratively—while purely coined or fanciful names are frequently silly, opaque, or off-putting. In the middle are the suggestive names: names that allude to a quality or function yet require the customer or user to exercise a little imagination. These names, like great narrative art, blend clarity and mystery in just the right proportions. 

 

Mandy Patinkin as George in the 1984 production of Sunday in the Park with George.

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Speaking of good names, the two volumes of Sondheim’s collected lyrics are available in a slipcovered set called a Hat Box.

Help Launch a New Fiction Magazine

UPDATE, January 6: Mission accomplished! Thanks to all who contributed.

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It’s probably never been easy to be a writer of short fiction, but it’s probably never been harder than right now to make a living at it. Brian White wants to fix that. And he needs a little help.

Brian is a copyeditor at the Boston Globe whom I follow on Twitter and on his blog, Talk Wordy to Me. His new project, Fireside, will be a quarterly magazine that publishes fiction of all genres and—here’s the important part—pays its writers a fair rate. (The going rate for fiction, Brian reports, is an appalling 5 cents a word. Fireside will pay 12.5 cents a word, or $500 for a 4,000-word story.)

To launch Fireside—a very appealing name, by the way—Brian has put it up on Kickstarter, which gets the public involved in the funding of creative projects. It’s an all-or-nothing deal: the project must be fully funded or no pledges are redeemed. Brian has set a goal of $6,500, and as of this morning he’d raised about $2,700 toward that amount, mostly in pledges of $25 or less. The deadline is January 6; if the full $6,500 isn’t raised by then, no money will change hands and Fireside may join the ranks of worthy ideas that never got off the ground.

I’d hate to see that happen. And it doesn’t have to, because I have a plan.

On an average day, about 750 regular readers (as opposed to random searchers) visit my blog. Those regular readers most likely come here because they—you—are interested in words and writing and the creative process. That means you’re in the target audience for Fireside. You may even be a fiction writer who’d like to be published in Fireside.

So here’s my idea: If each of you pledges $4 or more each, Brian will meet his goal and Fireside #1 will be on its way to reality. Pledge a little more, and there’s hope for an Issue #2.

As they say on public radio, you can make a pledge right now. Or, if you need a little more persuading, you can keep reading.

You regular readers know that I don’t do this sort of thing very often. I don’t think I’ve ever asked readers to send money anywhere. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I care a lot about this project of Brian’s.

Once upon a time, not all that long ago, almost every popular magazine published at least one short story, and often more than one, in every issue, all year round. And by popular magazines I mean mass-circulation and general interest, not “literary.” F. Scott Fitzgerald published his short stories in The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire; Willa Cather and Kurt Vonnegut wrote fiction for Collier’s Weekly. Tom Wolfe published The Bonfire of the Vanities in 27 installments in Rolling Stone. I grew up reading short stories by less-famous (but compulsively readable) authors in my mother’s copies of Good Housekeeping and Ladies’ Home Journal; later on, I read the young-adult fiction—some of it written by actual young adults—in Seventeen.

Now? Good Housekeeping and Redbook still publish fiction, I’m happy to report, but not Ladies’ Home Journal or O or Real Simple or Wired or Esquire or Vanity Fair. The New Yorker and The Atlantic publish a single short story per issue (except for special all-fiction issues); they’re almost exclusively “literary” stories, which in my experience means they’re often plotless and unfathomable. 

In every medium we’re inundated with information, opinion, and memoir. Fiction, which used to be part of every literate person’s everyday experience, is a threatened species.

Fireside aims to be a modest corrective to this discouraging trend. I’m eager to see what Brian, an excellent editor, can do with it. I’ve already made my pledge. How about you?

Word of the Week: Amigurumi

Amigurumi: The art of knitting or crocheting small stuffed animals and anthropomorphic creatures. The word is formed from the Japanese words ami, meaning crocheted or knitted, and nuigurumi, meaning stuffed doll.  (Source: Wikipedia, which adds, “The prevailing aesthetic of amigurumi is cuteness”—a subject that merits its own Wikipedia entry.)

In “Zombies & Robots & Bears, Oh My!,” published in Crafts, Volume 1, Mary Belton writes that the stitched-doll trend started in 1997, when an art student named Sun-Min Kim created the first Uglydolls. By 2003, Belton writes, “Uglydolls were a bona fide hit.” Two years later, a new online crafts marketplace, Etsy, introduced a larger variety of amigurumi to online customers. Early in Etsy’s existence, company founder Robert Kalin organized an amigurumi contest in which he encouraged “mashups and mutants.” According to Belton,

Contest entries included butter & toast, a pirate squid, a turtle bird, an angry sheep, and a coffee bean. The pirate squid took first place.

A recent Etsy search found 17,865 matches for “amigurumi.”

Here’s an example from San Francisco amigurumi artist NerdJerk (“Inspiring smiles one geek at a time”).*

Bomb-Omb crocheted wind-up toy by NerdJerk.

*I discovered NerdJerk at one of the craft sales hosted by Berkeley craft studio Knit-One-One.

 

Previously on Word of the Week: Yarn bombing.

 

Oscars Ad Recap

While the rest of you were DVRing past the commercial breaks or using them to refill your popcorn bowls, I was taking notes on the ads that ran during Sunday night’s Academy Awards broadcast. Here’s a summary.

Lows

1. I detested the endless barrage of unimaginative JCPenney ads. Their only marginally interesting feature was the company’s new logo, which made its on-air debut Sunday night. The Brand New blog revealed last week that the logo had been designed by a third-year graphic-design student at the University of Cincinnati. Because that’s how 109-year-old multibillion-dollar nationwide chains now roll, apparently.

New JCPenney logo

As if the ads weren’t enough, a JCPenney sign even appeared during the opening montage with actors Anne Hathaway and James Franco. (Watch the montage—arguably the high point of a mediocre awards show—here. JCPenney is in the Back to the Future sequence, around 5:27.)

Naming note: JCPenney (no more periods or spaces; we’re young and hip now!) was called Golden Rule when it was founded by James Cash Penney in 1902.

 

2. ING Direct’s ads featured the staggeringly inane tagline “Touch the ball.” Yep, that’s going to restore my faith in the American financial system.

 

Highs

1. Kudos to JPMorgan Chase for “Change,” which employed 3D paper animation to create a sophisticated version of a child’s pop-up book. The agencies responsible were Psyop and McGarryBowen. (Hat tip to Purple Penning for that info.) Watch the spot at the Strictly Paper blog.

 

2. After that weird cross-dressing spot that aired during the Super Bowl, Living Social must have decided—wisely—to change course. The two new ads that debuted on Sunday had an infectious score and a charmingly homemade look, like a deconstructed version of last year’s “I’m on a horse” campaign for Old Spice. And they kept the brand promise front and center.

 

One final note: Twitter was the place to be for Oscar watching (and snarking). Here’s a favorite tweet from Slate political reporter Dave Weigel in response to a Stella Artois spot.