Fritinancy

Ever Lovin'

Names that incorporate “ever” are more popular than, well, ever. But the concept has been around for more than a century. Here are three old-school “ever” brands and eight that have appeared since 2005.

 

The originals

Eveready.

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Eveready batteries, circa 1920s. Via Eveready.com.

Founded in St. Louis in 1896 as American Electrical Novelty & Manufacturing Company). The company changed its name in 1905 to the American Ever Ready Company, which was shortened to Eveready in 1917. Since 1980, the Eveready Battery Company has sold both Energizer and Eveready batteries.

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Everlast.

Now associated with boxing, Everlast was founded in the Bronx in 1910 as a swimwear manufacturer:

Seventeen year-old Jacob Golomb, the son of a tailor and an avid swimmer, was dissatisfied with swimsuits of the time that barely lasted a season, and began making suits that he guaranteed would last for a full year.

In 1917, a young boxer named Jack Dempsey asked Golomb to make protective headgear that would last more than 15 rounds; two years later, Dempsey won the world heavyweight championship wearing Everlast gloves.

In 2002 Everlast extended its sporting-goods brand into men’s grooming products with the “Everlast Original 1910” label. (The cologne has base notes of patchouli, leather, tonka bean, and musk.)

Everlast is also the stage name of the American rapper, singer, and songwriter Erik Francis Schrody.

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Everclear.

 

Current Everclear branding.

 

Everclear is a brand of pure grain alcohol whose original formula (190 proof, or 95 percent alcohol) is illegal in 14 states. (California and some other states sell a 151 proof version.) The brand name was first used in commerce in 1917 by the American Distilling Co.; the brand is now manufactured and sold by Luxco of St. Louis.

The rock band Everclear, formed in Portland, Oregon, in 1991, takes its name from the alcohol brand.

Death Week: Tricks and Treats

The Days of the Dead come to their inevitable end (boo!) with a quick survey of deathly branding.

The floor display for Sinful Colors’ “To Die For” Halloween collection, at Walgreen’s, features a disembodied hand that appears to be on the verge of reanimation. The polish-color names themselves don’t quite measure up, deathworthiness-wise, unless there’s something I’m missing in Unicorn, My Turn, and Over It. Of course, if you think about it long enough, you start to see morbid overtones in all of those names.

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Is that ominous-sounding, be-umlautted word an IKEA product or a death metal band name? Take the IKEA or Death quiz and test your powers of discrimination (or obsession).

The quiz was created by Pittsburgh ad agency Gatesman+Dave. Not only did I do pretty well (15 out of 20), but I also learned that there is a sub-genre of death metal called Pure Depressive Black Funeral Doom Metal. Unless that guy made it up.

(Via AdFreak. For extra credit, see my 2007 post on the IKEA naming system.)

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Ever wonder why video-game characters die the way the do? It all started in 1983, Drew Mackie writes in “Three-Dimensional Death in a Two-Dimensional World,” when Nintendo’s Mario Bros. made its debut. In the game, Drew writes, Mario “leapt to his death, more or less. It’s weird when you think about what you’re actually seeing: In a game where Mario spent the whole time either facing left or right and scurrying along a two-dimensional plane, he died by facing the screen and jumping off the platform, toward the screen.”

Mario death leap via Back of the Cereal Box.

 

The death leap caught on:

[I]t ended up everywhere in video games from that era — mostly Mario-style platformers, of which there were many, but some other genres too. Your character died, and he or she looked at directly at the screen — at you, effectively — before they spasmed and leapt into oblivion. It’s like they were saying, “Hey. Fuck you. You killed me.” And then the leap. It seems strange, given that it adds a z-axis into a world that often only had an x and a y previously. But that’s how it happened.

Happy Halloween, and stay away from the turtles.

Death Week: Defunct, Obit, and More

Death Week rolls on:

The oft-reported death of magazines may be exaggerated, but the existence of at least three magazines about death is a confirmed reality.

Defunct is “a twice-annual magazine featuring writing about all things defunct,” according to the Twitter bio. The description on Poets & Writers is more detailed:

Our far-flung contributors have interpreted “defunctness” in their own often idiosyncratic ways and have brought back the dead, salvaged the past, revealed their obsessions as writers do. We’re looking for reviews of everything that has had its day: defunct technologies, theories, fads, foods, religions, civilizations, etiquette, customs, slang, assumptions, or even things we wish would become defunct. Imagine a review of the Aztecs. Or a review of the Dodo. Or a review of the Eight Track Player.

The magazine is based in Iowa City and is staffed by university students. Does it pay contributors? Nope. Does it charge a “reading fee”? Yep. And that, I am sad to say, means that Defunct is Dead To Me.

(Defunct, by the way, comes from Latin roots that mean “discharged,” “finished.”)

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Obit is an online magazine, launched in 2007, that, like Monty Python in Life of Brian, looks on the bright side. One of its taglines is “What death can mean to the living and what living may have meant to the dead”; its mission is “to begin a ‘movement’ of bringing death out into the open.” One section is punnily titled Mourning Roundup; another section, Best Sendoffs, looks at cryonics, cremation fees, and the social-media-afterlife site DeadSocial.

(Obit is an abbreviation of obituary, from Latin obitus: “departure, a going to meet, encounter,” which in ancient Rome was a euphemsm for death.)

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More to Death, “the official magazine of the Natural Death Centre” (Twyford, Winchester, UK), offers upbeat fare like “Here Come the Girls: A Look at the Growing Number of Female Funeral Directors” and thought pieces like “What Happens to All the Pacemakers?” “Natural death” is a bit of a misnomer: it really refers to natural burial—coffinless or in a nontoxic box.

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Then there’s the ghostly Good Bye!, “the journal of contemporary obituaries,” which shuffled off this mortal coil in 2002 after six years of quarterly publication: “But in the interests of history, this archive remains as a virtual tombstone to the days when a Xerox machine and a rudimentary knowledge of html were enough to earn the world's disregard.”

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If it’s dead magazines you’re looking for, check out “The Twelve Greatest Defunct Tech Magazines Ever” (it was published in 2008, so the burial grounds may be a bit more crowded now), Magazine Death Pool, and the Wikipedia entries on defunct magazines of the United States (including GOSH!, Creepy, and Eternity, but mysteriously missing two of my favorites, Lear’s and Mirabella) and of the United Kingdom (including Modern Boy, Christian Remembrancer, Photo Bits, and, of course, Punch).

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Previously on Death Week: Demised, Shroud of Purrin.

And from the archives: “Death to Branding!” my July 2012 column for the Visual Thesaurus (no longer paywalled).

Death Week: Shroud of Purrin

Death Week continues with an odd, quasi-religious product-name pun: Shroud of Purrin, used by Nau International, Inc., for a line of waterproof outerwear. The name is a play on Shroud of Turin, believed by some people to be Jesus’ burial cloth, which has been on display at the cathedral in Turin, Italy, since 1578.

Nau’s Shroud of Purrin jackets look neither funereal nor otherworldly.

 

Nau Shroud of Purrin Trench for women.

 

Nau Shroud of Purrin Hoody for men.

 

But “shroud” has meant “burial cloth” since the mid-16th century—just about the time the Shroud of Turin was moved to Turin. (In Old English, the noun form of “shroud,” or scrud, referred to any garment.) Calling a piece of adventure outerwear seems to portend a dire, “To Build a Fire” outcome.

I confess I couldn’t decipher “Purrin” at all—or rather, I couldn’t help seeing it as “purulent” (full of pus). A customer-service rep at Nau set me straight: it’s meant to represent purring, as in (quoting the website copy here) “feline-soft interior fuzz.”

Perhaps it’s appropriate for Nau to reclaim a word associated with death: the adventure-clothing company, which is based in Portland, Oregon, was itself brought back from the grave not long ago. When I originally wrote about Nau, in 2008, the company had issued a going-out-of-business manifesto. Two years later, it was back among the living, having been bought by another socially conscious outdoor-gear company, Horny Toad, which trimmed inventory and implemented other cost-cutting measures.

Nau, pronounced “now,” is a Maori word meaning “welcome.”

I couldn’t find a trademark filing for “Shroud of Purrin,” but I did find a few other “Shroud” trademarks, including Poly-Shroud (for railway freight car axle bearings), Crimson Shroud (a video game title), Powershroud (portable electric fans), Refrigerated Shroud (refrigeration equipment), Add-a-Shroud (electrical plugs and receptacles), and Butterfly Pallet Shroud (cardboard floor display units).

Alas, the trademark for Snuggle-Shroud (“cloth used for burial of pets”) is deceased, defunct, expired, and, moreover, abandoned.

Miscellaneous non-trademark fact of interest: in British colloquial parlance, according to the OED, “shroud-waving” means: 

 (a) n. the practice of attempting to gain support for health-care funding by highlighting the life-threatening consequences to patients of underfunding; (in extended use) concentration on the negative effects of a particular policy, etc., in order to influence public opinion; (b) adj. that engages in shroud-waving.

First documented usage: 1967.

Previously on Death Week: Demised.

Word of the Week: Demised

Demised: Laid off, downsized, dismissed, fired, rightsized, made redundant, simplified, subjected to synergy-related headcount restructuring.

The list of synonyms for “fired” is long and growing, as corporations attempt to distance themselves from the gloomy realities of ruthless staff-slashing.

 

The Guardian (UK), April 24, 2013.

 

“Demised” is etymologically accurate—the Latin roots mean “to send away”—but its kinship with the synonym for “death” makes it more of a dysphemism than a euphemism.

I wrote about the legal meaning of demise—“to grant or transfer by will or lease”—in April 2012. The original meaning of “demise,” from the mid-15th century, was the legal one; the meaning was extended to “death” (because that’s when estate transfers usually occur) in the mid-18th century.

It’s Death Week on Fritinancy: a daily report on deathly words, names, and branding, culminating on All Hallows Eve, October 31. Read my previous “death” posts.

Dead to the world

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-May, with the fog bearing down hard on the bay and a look of weary desperation on every shopper’s face. They were all looking for something, but I had a sneaking suspicion what they were looking for wasn’t hardboiled euphemism. Not on Floor 2, in Bedding. Not with a spa velour cover.

 

La-Z-Boy Big Sleep memory foam contour pillow at Bed Bath & Beyond. Discontinued, defunct, passed away, crossed the bar, picked up the harp, took its last rest.

 

“You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was.” – Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

 

The Big Sleep (Warner Bros., 1946).

World Capitals

For reasons best left undisclosed*, I recently found myself looking up facts about California cities. I wasn’t searching for nicknames or mottoes, but somehow I ended up on Wikipedia’s List of City Nicknames in California, and … well, there went the afternoon.

The list doesn’t include one city nickname I’ve always liked: Manteca, in Central California, is known as Fat City. (Manteca is Spanish for “cooking fat.”) But it does contain plenty of nuggets, many of them new to me (a California native). I learned, for example, that Chatsworth, in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, is sometimes called San Pornando, and that San Francisco has more nicknames (ten) than any other California city.

Then there are all the “X of the world” cities and towns. A lot of them.

I’d known, of course, that Castroville is the Artichoke Center of the World and that Gilroy is the Garlic Capital of the World; indeed, I’ve attended the Artichoke Festival and the Garlic Festival. But some of the other world capitals surprised me:

Auburn: Endurance Capital of the World. (The Sierra foothills city, about 50 miles east of Sacramento on I-80, is “home to some of the most challenging and historic endurance events on the planet.”)

Bishop: Mule Packer Capital of the World.

Chico: Almond Capital of the World.

Fallbrook: Avocado Capital of the World and Raisin Capital of the World. (But also see Selma, below.)

Forestville: Poison Oak Capital of the World. (Hey, I’ve been to Forestville. It ain’t that bad!)

Holtville: Carrot Capital of the World. (I had to look up Holtville on a map. It’s a town of about 6,000 in Imperial County, about 10 miles east of El Centro.)

Indio: Date Capital of the World. (I have fond memories of spring vacations in Indio. It’s in the hot, dry Coachella Valley, near Palm Springs on the map but worlds away in style. We’d always stop at Shields Date Gardens to order date shakes and watch a grainy black-and-white documentary called The Romance and Sex Life of the Date.)

Shields Date Gardens, via Canuck Rennsau’s Flickr stream.

 

Lodi: Tokay Grape Capital of the World and Zinfandel Capital of the World.

McCloud: Blackberry Capital of the World. (Really? Well, it’s a nice little town up near the Oregon border in the spectacular Siskiyou Mountains. Worth a detour.)

Oakdale: Cowboy Capital of the World. (Don’t tell Bandera, Texas.)

Oxnard: Lima Bean Capital of the World and Strawberry Capital of the World. (Watch out, Watsonville!)

Pearsonville: Hubcap Capital of the World. (Pearsonville, pop. 17, is home to at least one very enthusiastic resident.)

Salinas: Lettuce Capital of the World.

Selma: Raisin Capital of the World. (Yes, there’s a Selma in California.)

Tulelake: Horseradish Capital of the World. (Sadly, the horseradish industry is shrinking.)

Watsonville: Strawberry Capital of the World. (Don’t tell Oxnard.)

Willow Creek: Bigfoot Capital of the world. (Had to look this one up, too. It’s in Humboldt County, near the Trinity River. Population about 1,000.)

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I understand the inclination toward superlatives, but where city mottoes are concerned, I prefer the poetic: Modesto’s sublime “Water Wealth Contentment Health,” Del Mar’s much-imitated “Where the Turf Meets the Surf,” Redwood City’s briskly reassuring “Climate Best by Government Test.”

I’m drawn to dark mottoes, too, like San Francisco’s “The City That Waits to Die.” But no California city beats Colma, just south of San Francisco, which Wikipedia reminds us was “founded as a necropolis in 1924.” One of Colma’s mottoes is “It’s Good to Be Alive in Colma”; it’s also known as “The City of the Silent” and as “The City That Waits for ‘The City That Waits to Die’ to Die.”

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* Because they’re boring.

The Long Coffee Break

I learned about Death Wish Coffee too late to include it in my week of death brands posts. But better late (haha) than never.

 

Image via AdFreak.

Death Wish comes with a caveat:

Disclaimer:  This is not your regular morning coffee.  This is not your store bought coffee. You will not find this coffee at your local diner or at your sissy Starbucks. Death Wish Coffee is the most highly caffeinated premium dark roast organic coffee in the world. This is Extreme Coffee, not for the weak. Consider yourself Warned.

One pound—beans or ground—costs $19.99.

Too bad Death cigarettes (1991-1999) aren’t still around. They’d be the perfect accompaniment to a cup of Death Wish.

 

Image from Making the Modern World.

Death cigarettes were the brainchild of British branding guy B.J. Cunningham. Watch a 2010 video of Cunningham talking about—what else?—branding.

Unleash Deadly

Just in time for Life-or-Death Week here at Fritinancy, Karen sent me this photo of a display at Dick's Sporting Goods in Natick, Massachusetts:

Predator Lethal Zones soccer footwear.

 

Deadly? Those candy-colored shoes look pretty cheerful to me. The lethality is more overt in an Adidas video that shows the shoes (“boots” in the UK) being shot from artillery.

But what about the slogan, “Unleash Deadly”? Rest assured  that the grammar is deliberately off. Yes, transitive “unleash” normally takes a noun as object (“Unleash the hounds!”). Despite its -ly suffix, “deadly” is an adjective here, which makes “Unleash Deadly” parallel in structure to another famously iconoclastic slogan, Apple’s “Think Different.”

 

Adidas is using the #unleash hashtag in social media.

 

To those of you who are wringing your hands over this evidence of the decline and fall of “good grammar,” here’s a gentle reminder: Advertising is supposed to command your attention, not lull you with predictability. “Unleash the Predator LZ” or “Unleash Deadly Force” would be grammatically correct but undistinguished. “Unleash Deadly”—clipped, memorable, ominous—makes you look twice.

And, as you’ve noticed, it does that by incorporating the D-word—formerly off limits in branding, now a hot trend.

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Previously on Life-or-Death Week: Thanatourism, Death to Branding, Lifelike.

 

Names in the News: Lifelike

In his campaign speeches, Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney has been touting his business experience, especially his work as chief executive of the investment firm Bain Capital. Lately, though, that experience has come under scrutiny. Some of the attention has focused on one of Bain’s smallest and least successful investments: the Lifelike Co., which sold customized dolls that resembled their little-girl owners. The duration of Romney’s involvement in Lifelike has called into question the candidate’s claim that he began a “leave of absence” from Bain in 1999.

From the Washington Post, July 14, 2012:

Romney served on the Lifelike board from its founding in the mid-1990s until 2001, according to the former governor’s financial disclosure forms and other public records. Romney described his responsibility as a board member in his testimony in 2002 before a state panel considering a challenge to his eligibility for the ballot.

This being Life-or-Death Week at Fritinancy, I’m more interested in the name of that defunct company—forced into liquidation in 2003, according to the Wall Street Journal—than in financial arcana.

Here’s the Post’s description of Lifelike’s product:

Lifelike occupied a specialty niche in the doll business: 2-foot high replicas of actual children, fashioned using photographs supplied by parents. They sold for $150, under the brand name “My Twinn.’’

“Lifelike” is a descriptive name not just for the company but also for Romney, whose public persona has been characterized as “wooden” and “robotic.” In April, the candidate’s wife, Ann, said on a Baltimore radio show: “[I]f people think the candidate seems too stiff at times as the host suggested … we better unzip him and let the real Mitt Romney out’.” (As several commentators later noted, this was not the most felicitous of phrasings.)

Romney had personal connections to Lifelike—a college and business-school friend brought him the investment idea—but might he also have been charmed by the product name? After all, My Twinn is pretty darn close (as Romney himself would put it) to “Mitt Win.”

Back in January, New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd rubbed it in:

He has clearly brought a My Twinn on the trail — a plastic replica of a candidate who’s often described as a plastic replica: white teeth, gelled hair, windowpane shirt, Tommy Bahama jeans.

The Lifelike Co. is dead and buried, but the Lifelike name lives on in other quarters. Las Vegas has a Lifelike Hair Center that specializes in hair replacement, restoration, and retention. LifeLike Productions, in Point Reyes Station, California, is “a leading producer of state-of-the-art multimedia marketing tools”; it owns the lifelike.com domain. There’s also a Canadian Lifelike Dolls magazine, whose readers collect “reborn” dolls (also known as “living dolls” or, creepily, “unliving dolls”): vinyl dolls manufactured to look like real human babies. A 2003 book, Life Like Dolls: The Collector Doll Phenomenon and the Lives of the Women Who Love Them, was written by a man, A. F. Robertson. It devotes three pages to the My Twinn brand.

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More Life-Or-Death posts: Thanatourism, Death to Branding.