Fritinancy

February Linkfest

The Seattle Seahawks lost the Super Bowl to the New England Patriots. Maybe they’d have fared better under one of the other names nominated in a 1975 naming contest, including the Rainbeams, the Lumberjacks, and the Needlers. (Mental Floss)

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“Check the trademark early on,” “Avoid focus groups,” and other good advice about naming from professional name developers. (Communication Arts)

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A Krispy Kreme UK store withdrew a Facebook ad promoting “KKK Wednesdays” (Krispy Kreme Klub Wednesdays) “after users pointed out that KKK is also an abbreviation for the Klu Klux Klan.” (The Guardian, via Bonnie Taylor-Blake.)

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“People talk about expensive meals using sex metaphors; for noodle joints and cupcake counters, they resort to drug lingo.” A visit to a London pub with linguist Dan Jurafsky, author of The Language of Food. (The New Yorker)

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The Daily Brute, The London Asswipe, The Quibbler, and other fictional newspaper names. (Wikipedia)

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“Be specific—but not wordy” and other tips for naming a blog. Includes a nice shoutout for Strong Language, where I publish from time to time. (The Daily Post)

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Would you spend $30,000 to find “a unique name for your unborn child? A wonderful first name that sounds so good that it just had to be invented? A brand-new name with an exciting derivation and unmistakable history? “ This Swiss firm—whose own name is tough to pronounce—is banking on it. (erfolgswelle® AG)

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A drugroll—um, drumroll—for the 2015 drug name awards. It’s a tough, confusing field: Zerbaxa, Zontility, Vimizin, Zykadia… (Gary Martin)

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Last week North Korea’s Workers’ Party released 310 exclamatory new slogans created to mark the country’s 70th anniversary, and Western news media have been having a glorious people’s field day with them. “Even allowing that they probably come off more melodious in their original Korean,” observed NPR, “some of the commandments are so awkward that it's hard to imagine them sounding right in any language.” Some are malodorous (“Let the strong wind of fish farming blow across the country!”), while others are creepy (“Let us turn ours into a country of mushrooms by making mushroom cultivation scientific, intensive and industrialized!”) and still others could have come from an overeager U.S. marketing department (“Go beyond the cutting edge!”). Here’s the complete list on KCNA Watch, an official English-language publication of the Korean Central News Agency.

May Linkfest

I’ve been interested for years in advertisers’ penchant for turning adjectives into nouns and nouns into verbs. In his regular column for The Week, James Harbeck, a linguistics-trained editor, looks at why these switches—collectively known as anthimeria—work. It’s all about bisociation: “You have two things operating on two different planes or according to two different scripts, and at the point where the two meet, you jump from one to the other. … Bisociation tickles your brain, and that’s just what marketers want to do.”

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Here’s something lovely: Vernacular Typography, “dedicated to the documentation and preservation of vanishing examples of lettering in the everyday environment.” A project of the New York Foundation for the Arts, it catalogs ghost signs, Coney Island signs, no-parking signs, subway signs, grammatical-error signs, and much more.

Graham Home for Old Ladies, catalogued in the Architectural section.

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Think it might be fun to name a racehorse? Be sure you read the Jockey Club’s naming rules first. Here, for example, are three types of ineligible names:

• Names clearly having commercial, artistic or creative significance;
• Names that are suggestive or have a vulgar or obscene meaning; names considered in poor taste; or names that may be offensive to religious, political or ethnic groups;
• Names of winners in the past 25 years of grade one stakes races.

There are 14 additional no-nos on that list.

( Via Dustbury.)

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Why do so many Chinese restaurants in the U.S. and around the world use “Tasty” in their names? Victor Mair investigates at Language Log. Commenters weigh in with other Chinese-restaurant name trends, including “Panda,” “Garden,” and “Wok ’n’ Roll.”

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Oxford Dictionaries has an app that identifies your “birthday word”: a words that entered English the year you were born. If you’re an OED subscriber, you can narrow the field to the month as well as the year. Read Dennis Baron (Dr. Grammar) on his own birthday word, “gobbledygook.”

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Why do we call parrots “Polly”? The answer, says Mental Floss, has almost nothing to do the feminine nickname.

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Reason #46,312 to love the Internet: Every Apple reference on “Futurama” and “The Simpsons.”

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Reason #46,313: The best worst names in superhero comics, compiled with frightening thoroughness by Drew G. Mackie of Back of the Cereal Box. A few of my favorites: Egg Fu, Microwavebelle, Flemgem, and Rice O’Rooney (the San Francisco Threat). If you don’t know why the last one is so bad it’s good, watch this. 

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Electric-car manufacturer Tesla recently abandoned its Model E trademark, and Duets Blogger Martha Engel wonders whether Ford Motor Company—which still owns the Model T mark, as well as its own Model E trademark—had something to do with it. Meanwhile, the Oatmeal’s Matthew Ingram waxes rhapsodic about his Tesla Model S: he loves everything about it except the name. He prefers “Magical Space Car.”

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On April 22 the New York Times launched The Upshot, an online section that focuses on politics and policy. The name was chosen over 45 also-rans, including Crux, Kernel, Sherpa, and Uncharted. Why did The Upshot prevail? “It’s simple and straightforward,” the editors write, “and there’s no inside joke or historical reference you’ll need to understand what it’s about: a clear analysis of the news, in a conversational tone.”

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Now that Pied Piper, the fictional startup in HBO’s “Silicon Valley” series, has an official logo, how well does it stack up?

 

Betabeat (“The Lowdown on High Tech”) does a comparative analysis and pronounces it “safe” but “off to a good start.” The green color, notes Betabeat, signals equilibrium, harmony and balance. And according to Hindu tradition, the green chakra represents self-love — which, to be fair, is the only kind of love anyone in Pied Piper is getting so far.” Via Brand New. (Also see my post about the Pied Piper name.)

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In November 2012, voters in Washington State legalized marijuana use and authorized the licensing of retail outlets to sell cannabis. (Voter turnout, Wikipedia notes with no apparent irony, was 81 percent, “the highest in the nation.”) Now that Seattle’s first pot stores have been chosen by lottery, let’s take a look at their names. Lots of greens (Greenjuana, Evergreen, Street of Greens, Green Vision, Greenco, Behind the Green Door), quite a bit of 420 (Seattle 420, 420 PM Corp, Highway 420, 420-911), and a few whose owners appear to be fans of “The Wire” (Bellinghamsterdam, Vansterdam, Hamsterdam, New Vansterdam). Kinda meh, if you ask me, but hey—it’s still a budding industry. (Hat tip: Benjamin Lukoff.)

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In related news, Fast Company’s Co.Design blog talks to four cannabis-industry experts about “how to brand a high-demand, once-illegal product.” Cherchez les femmes, says Cheryl Shuman, who points to “stiletto stoners”—successful working women who smoke pot—as a key demographic. (Hat tip: Irene Nelson.)

HBO’s “Silicon Valley” Gets into Naming Trouble

The trouble isn’t the unimaginative name of HBO’s new comedy series, which the pay-cable network has just renewed for a second season, just three episodes into Season 1. Rather, I’m talking about the major plot point of Episode 3, “Articles of Incorporation,” which aired Sunday night.

The business and tech bloggers who covered the episode found nothing amiss in the story. But to anyone who knows how business names work, it betrays the naïveté of the show’s creators.

The protagonist of “Silicon Valley” is a programmer, Richard, who’s inadvertently developed a file-compression algorithm. For reasons that haven’t yet been explained (and may never be), he named the algorithm—and the start-up he creates around it—“Pied Piper.”

Everyone but Richard hates the name. But that’s not his biggest headache.

“Nobody's Gonna Buy a Car Named Howard!”

Like much of writer/actor Larry David’s oeuvre (“Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Sour Grapes), the HBO original film Clear History, which premiered on August 10, is a comedy about envy, resentment, and failure. But what sets Clear History’s plot in motion is something else: a product name.

The film’s opening scenes are set in Silicon Valley in 2003. Will Haney (Mad Men’s Jon Hamm), founder of Electron Motors, is introducing his employees to a breakthrough invention: an electric car that’s better than anything else on the road.

“I know what you’re asking,” says Haney. “What are we going to call this bold new vision?” Ta-da: the Howard.

Fictional Brand Name: Ablixa

Side Effects, the new film from Steven Soderbergh that’s now in theaters, is a twisty thriller, more gris than noir, in which almost every character is taking mood-adjusting prescription drugs. Beta blockers, Adderall, Paxil, Effexor, Celexa, Zoloft, Wellbutrin—in the film, these real-world drugs are casually discussed at cocktail parties and liberally dispensed by doctors for pre-interview jitters, anxiety, the blues, you name it. (Another recent release, Silver Linings Playbook, also features a memorable conversation about name-brand meds. Is this the dawn of Cinema Pharma?)

The pivotal pill in Side Effects, however, is an invented one. “Ablixa” (generic name “alipazone”) is introduced as an antidepressant with an upbeat slogan—“Take Back Tomorrow”—and some worrisome side effects that include confusion, suicidal thoughts, and sleepwalking (and also, as it turns out, sleep-table-setting, sleep-loud-music-playing, and sleep-vegetable-slicing).

To say anything more about the plot would spoil the pleasures of this grim yet exhilarating movie, so I’ll stick to the Ablixa story, which contains some surprises of its own.

 

Nicely Named: Crixa Cakes

The other day my neighbor Margitta raved to me about a cake from a Berkeley bakery called Crixa Cakes. Now, I'm a big baked-goods fan, and I live near Berkeley, but I'd never heard of Crixa Cakes. When I located it online, I was surprised to learn it is celebrating its tenth anniversary.

And of course I was curious about the name. What on earth did "Crixa" mean? Margitta couldn't tell me; all she knew was that the owners, a married couple, were Hungarian, or maybe Russian, and that the bakery sold Central and Eastern European specialties. Did "Crixa" come from Hungarian or Russian? Or maybe Albanian or Maltese or Basque, all of which I dimly recalled having a lot of X's? Or was it a word invented to chime pleasantly with "cakes"?

None of the above, as it turns out. But owners Elizabeth Kloian and Zoltan Der had anticipated my question. Here's what their FAQ says:

Crixa is lapin for crossroads. Lapin is the language of the rabbits in Richard Adam's [sic] novel Watership Down. In the book Crixa is the center of Efrafa, the rabbit warren. It is located at the crossing point of two bridle paths.

In Berkeley, Crixa Cakes is at the crossroads of Adeline Street and Shattuck Avenue on the site of an old horse stable.

Well, I am impressed. I'd read Watership Down (by Richard Adams) years ago, and seen the excellent animated movie, too (warning: too scary for young children). I remembered that the rabbit characters spoke their own language, Lapine (from lapin, French for "rabbit"), but I'd forgotten all of its vocabulary, and it had never occurred to me to mine that text for my own naming work.

In sound--crispy consonants, mouthwatering alliteration--and meaning, "Crixa" is an inspired choice for this former horse stables-turned-bakery at a city crossroads. It's fresh and unfamiliar yet easy and fun to pronounce, and its story makes it memorable. And the charming logo (see above) underscores the literary association. Congratulations--and happy anniversary!

P.S. On the sign, cukrászda comes not from Lapine but from Hungarian. It means "confectionery."

P.P.S. Oh, and the pastries? Friends, I performed time- and calorie-consuming research, and I'm happy to report that there are some delicious names on the menu. There's a Soprano Tiramisu ("with a dark streak"). There's a Rigó Jancsi cake that comes with a great story. And there are the suggestively named Fatima's Thighs, made with rosewater and almonds and a prodigious quantity of butter: sublime.

Fictional Brand Names

Someone--or more likely some obsession-driven cabal--with a whole lot of free time has compiled this list of fictional companies cited in books, movies, and television shows. They're helpfully organized by industry. Under "Financial," I especially like Rive Droit Bank ("The Right Bank for You"), from the very funny 1990s TV series The Tick, starring Patrick Warburton.