My latest story for Medium is about a zombie brand name: Blackwater.
Original Blackwater logo
The private military/security company, which was founded in 1996, jettisoned the Blackwater name in 2009 and has undergone two name changes and a merger in the dozen years since. But to the general public, and even to the media, it’s still Blackwater. Why?
Read “The Undead Brand Name” and follow me on Medium for more stories like this one (and also unlike this one!).
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I originally wrote about the Adimab cable-car ads in January 2011, when the company – which is in the antibody-discovery business – was one of several advertisers using the colloquial tag “not so much.”
At the time there was a reason for a small biotech company based in Lebanon, New Hampshire, to advertise on San Francisco cable cars: there was a health-care conference in town. According to the In Vivo blog, Adimab bought every ad on the Powell Street cable cars for a week.
Two years later, though, the ads keep chugging along, halfway to the stars, and I continue to puzzle over them. Lately I’ve been seeing the ads on the Hyde Street cable cars, which tend to be used almost exclusively by tourists, few of whom appear to be in a big hurry about anything, let alone antibody discovery.
For a company that boasts that its “integrated antibody discovery and optimization platform provides unprecedented speed from antigen to purified, full-length human IgGs,” the ads are positively whimsical.
“Antibody discovery. More. Better. Faster. Pick any three.”
“Think you’re set with antibody discovery? You were set with dial-up once too.” (Oh, snap!)
“Why did the antibody cross the road? Because it didn’t die in development.” (Scientist humor!)
One of the ads is in Chinese Japanese (thanks, Erin!). Translation, anyone?
The ads must be working (as recruiting ploys, maybe?), but I have no idea why.
Also a mystery: what “Adimab” means.* I tried to find out (email, voicemail), but no one at the company responded. I did learn from the website that one of the founders, a gentleman named Tillman U. Gerngross, is “one of world’s leading yeast biotechnologists” and a professor of bioengineering at Dartmouth. Originally from Austria, he previously co-founded GlycoFi, Inc., which was acquired by Merck. I cannot tell you what the U in his name stands for.
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* Commenter Alex did a Google search and learned that Adimab stands for Antibody Discovery Maturation Biomanufacturing. (Quite the mouthful.) Although I've now received a friendly email from a company spokesman, he did not confirm this name-origin story.
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Cucoloris: A screen with oddly shaped holes cut through it, placed before a light source to throw diverse shadows on an otherwise uniform surface. (Source: Idiom Savant: Slang As It Is Slung.) Also spelled cucaloris, kookaloris, kukaloris, cookaloris, cucalorus, etc. Shortened to cookie, kook, or cuke. Alternate names: gobo, ulcer, dapple sheet.
Wooden cucoloris, B&H Photo and Video, New York.
The film critic Roger Ebert, who died last week, included kookalouris in Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary, published in 1994. From his entry:
Popular in the 1930s; back in style again with the movies of Steven Spielberg, who uses a kookalouris with underlighting to show faces that seem to be illuminated by reflections from pots of gold, buckets of diamonds, pools of fire, pirate maps, and radioactive kidneys.
(Read more of Ebert’s movie tropes, including Inevitable Sister, Mid-Wife Crisis, Wunza Movies, and “Fruit Cart!”, in an excerpt published in the Visual Thesaurus. And scroll down for more on Ebert.)
It’s fairly well established that cucoloris, however you spell it, comes from the world of Hollywood cinematographers. Beyond that, however, the word’s origins and etymology are frustratingly unclear. In an episode that aired last year, Grant Barrett, co-host of the radio show “A Way with Words,” told listeners that he’d spent “days” researching a Double-Tongued Dictionary entry for cookie.
“Hollywood is filled with people who like to invent myth,” Barrett said. “I counted seven different origin stories for this term, and they’re fun, but they’re throwaway.” The best story he encountered is from a footnote in a 1954 issue of the Western Folklore journal, which called cucoloris “a coined word of no special philological significance or implication.” The writer did suggest, however, that cucoloris “might be related to the famed director George Cukor.”
Barrett’s etymological note for the cookie entry doesn’t mention Cukor, but it doesn’t reach any other satisfying conclusions, either:
A claimed etymology is that kukaloris is Greek for “breaking of light,” but there seems to be no evidence to support this, nor can the etymological claims in the 2001 cite below* be verified. Another claim is that it is named after its inventor, a Mr. Cucoloris; however, this, too, lacks supporting evidence.
* The word “cucaloris” comes from the Greek for shadow play.» —by Ivan Curry Directing & Producing for Television Nov. 29, 2001.
Nor is there evidence to support the assertion in TV Tropes:
The word cukoloris is Gaelic and means “ghost charm.” How a Gaelic word became a standard term in film production is unknown.
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A note about Roger Ebert: I never met or corresponded with him, but I was among his many admiring readers and Twitter followers—even when I was muttering “WTF?” about his conclusions. In 2010, I attended a program at the San Francisco International Film Festival at which he received an award; cancer had already taken away his ability to talk, but his impish wit and pointed opinions suffered not a bit from the intervention of a speech synthesizer. After answering questions from the stage of the Castro Theater, he introduced Julia, which starred Tilda Swinton – “Saint Tilda,” Ebert called her – and which Ebert assured us was a great, great film we were privileged to see. (Released in 2009, it had been largely ignored by theaters.) Now, I grant that Swinton is never less than fully committed to a role, but Julia was godawful: violent, amoral, ugly, pointless, and, at 144 minutes, seemingly interminable. About a third of the audience left before it was over. I stuck it out, but – to borrow a phrase Ebert himself made famous – I hated, hated, hated this movie. And yet I loved Ebert for championing it, and for being not just a critic but also an exuberant fan. I will miss him a lot.
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Four company names that are not as amusing, meaningful, or intelligible as their creators assume.
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Congratulations to Smorn on exceeding its Kickstarter goal before the deadline. Maybe the founders will set aside some of the excess cash for a new name, because the current one—a regrettable portmanteau of smart and horn—is doing them no favors. I guarantee you that no one will decipher “smart” from “sm-”or “horn” from “-orn.” When even TechCrunch says your product “is cooler than it sounds,” you know the name’s a problem. The product seems terrific; it deserves a smart name, not two unhelpful letters from the word smart. P.S. “Glorp”—for the glow-in-the-dark version—is no better. (For more on bad names that start with sm-, see this post about Smeg and this one about Smencils.)
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If I gave you four chances to guess what Ecwid is, I bet you’d lose—even if I showed you the logo.
European Community Wealth Information Department? Something about equitable? Something in Welsh? Ecological baby buggies for widdle tiny sextuplets?
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. This terrible name (for a maker of online shopping-cart software) turns out to be another regrettable portmanteau: a blend of “e-commerce” and “widgets.”
Let’s review: 1) “ec” does not connote “e-commerce” to anyone, 2) “wid” does not connote “widget” to anyone, and 3) “widgets” is very 2005.
Maybe “Ecwid” seemed brilliant in Russia, where the company was founded, but it’s unfathomable, not to mention icky-sounding, in the US. Now that the company has offices in Southern California, it’s time for a deep rethink.
By the way, when I tweeted about the Ecwid name last month, the company responded defensively:
@fritinancy good or bad, it’s unique, and we reap lots of benefits from that. And so do our customers too.
— Ecwid Team (@ecwid) January 30, 2013
Good or bad?
P.S. “Unique” does not translate to “effective.”
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μBiome uses the Greek letter μ—the symbol for “micro”—in its logo, but the English letter “u” everywhere else (ubiome.com; “uBiome is the world’s first effort to map the human microbiome with citizen science”).
So is the company name pronounced “microbiome” or “you-biome”? Or “mee-biome” (μ in modern Greek)? Or “myoo-biome” (μ in English)? It looks as though μBiome has learned nothing from the confusing example of μTorrent (scroll down to #4).
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When your company is called White Dental Supply and you don’t sell dental supplies, people naturally get confused. No matter how many times you say “We’re an Internet marketing company!” they still ask for floss samples. So you change the name. To Pitooey! With an exclamation mark. Because it sounds like what you do after you brush and rinse? No, because it’s “the language of penguins.”
Of course.
Unfortunately, the CEO speaks the language of buzzword bingo:
The name Pitooey! promotes the strong social media and mobile marketing background of our company. In 2013 we will be pivoting into a new industry with a suite of exciting products and services, and this name change reflects this exciting transformation.
Pfooey.
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Valentine's Day is Sunday, and retailers everywhere are on puttin' on the glitz. Also the red, the pink, and the heart-shaped boxes of chocolate.
Everywhere, that is, except for the corner of 20th and Broadway, Uptown Oakland.
The lonely little loveseat.
This is how the corner window of Sears, Roebuck— Oakland's only remaining department store—looked on February 10. If you're not familiar with Oakland, let me set the scene: This is as close as we get to Main Street. The busy 19th Street BART station is just outside of the photo frame. City Center and the federal buildings are a few blocks away.
And then . . . this: the saddest store window in town. A vacant leather loveseat (oh, the irony!) and ottoman on a limp rug that looks like a giant wine stain. It could be the stage set for a misanthropic, soul-curdling Neil LaBute play. The bachelor pad of a guy too depressed to create clutter. The office of the VP of human resources at Despair, Inc. The anti-Valentine.
Why so glum, Sears? Last June I gently mocked you for your surreal/zany/depressing Father's Day display, but that tableau— same corner window, by the way—was positively sumptuous compared to this one. Do you hate Oakland and wish you could be somewhere snazzier? Is the loveseat a metaphor for the hollow commercialization of Valentine's Day? A cynical allusion to love's labors lost?
Cue the mournful Japanese flute:
Loveseat on a rug—
empty, like my shriveled heart.
Somewhere, Cupid weeps.
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Your assignment: describe this tailored shirt for women.
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You're walking through Oakland's "Uptown" (formerly Downtown), where retail is scarce and often sad. (Example: the "Wig's" store.) As you round a corner near the 19th Street BART station, the sight of this window brings you to a confused halt.
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