Fritinancy

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.)

January Linkfest

“Picking a product name is all agony and no ecstasy,” writes Trello founder Dan Ostlund (“The Agonies of Picking a Product Name”). His detailed account of his own DIY effort is a cautionary tale, although he doesn’t explain why the company felt it necessary to jettison its perfectly good placeholder name.

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Top executives writing about verbal branding may be a trend now. Here’s Larry D. Kramer, president of the Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, California, on how his organization developed a new tagline (“What’s in a Tagline?”):

When I first proposed reexamining the tagline, I felt almost sheepish. The Hewlett Foundation pays little attention to self-promotion (that itself is a core value here), so why bother putting time and effort into something so marginal. Instead, the project proved to be both interesting and fruitful—an opportunity to reaffirm and remind ourselves about who we are and who we want to be.

You’ll have to scroll down to the tenth paragraph to learn what the new tagline is. Otherwise, nice process story.

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Ad Week rates the brand extensions of 2013: the worst (Grateful Dead skis) and the best (Google Glass).

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This parody trailer for the new Muppet movie, Muppets Most Wanted, aired during Sunday night’s live Golden Globes broadcast, and it was so smart and funny I wished I could hit the rewind button. AdFreak says the promo “does a double public service by also making fun of all the mass-media self-adulation that studios crank out during Hollywood awards season.”

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The Oxford University Press blog has a comprehensive words-of-the-year roundup that includes words of the year in Spain, Norway, France, and elsewhere. I’m fond of “plénior,” the mot nouveau pour 2014; it’s a more positive word for “senior citizen” that implies “full of life.”

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While we’re in Oxford, check out the Oxford English Dictionary birthday word generator, which scours the OED database for words’ first occurrences, 1900 through 2004, and offers up one for your birth year. If you were born in 1984, for example, your word is “shopaholic.” Happy 30th, you crazy shopper, you!

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“In books, movies, and media, the most popular title word is ‘new’,” according to Worldcat’s survey of more than 1 billion titles, summarized in The Atlantic.

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“Unneeded warnings against sentences that have nothing wrong with them are handed out by people who actually don’t know how to identify instances of what they are warning against, and the people they aim to educate or intimidate don’t know enough grammar to reject the nonsense they are offered. The blind warning the blind about a nonexistent danger.” That’s linguist Geoffrey Pullum in “Fear and Loathing of the English Passive.” It will be published later this year in the journal Language and Communication; but you can read the PDF now. Pullum cites 46 examples of tsk-tsking about “passive” constructions that aren’t passive at all. 

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Does Twitter seem like a foreign language to you? New York Magazine has a handy decoder for hatefave, Florida man, whoa, and other lingo (“The 2013 Twitter Glossary”). One of the terms, because, was chosen American Dialect Society Word of the Year for 2013; another, subtweet, was one of my 2013 words of the week.

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“Breaking it down Barney-style,” “Embrace the suck,” and 29 other phrases that only people in the military will understand, in Business Insider (hat tip: Patrick LaForge). For more on “embrace the suck,” read Ben Zimmer at the Slate language blog Lexicon Valley.

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“A mini-car named Hustler? Japan’s brand names raise eyebrows.” Via Reuters (hat tip: Rochelle Kopp of Japan Intercultural Consulting).

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U.S. readers: Have you/youse/y’all taken the Harvard Dialect Survey? Quick—take it now. Then, just for laughs, compare your results with Sarah Larson’s parody for the New Yorker’s humor blog, “What Do Y’all, Yinz, and Yix Call Stretchy Office Supplies?”

By the way, the HDS tells me I might be from Salt Lake City, a place I’ve visited exactly once and which about 700 miles distant from my true birthplace, Los Angeles.

December Linkfest

A new language quarterly, aptly called Babel, brings linguistics to a general audience without dumbing down the subject. Published at the University of Huddersfield (UK), the magazine covers “issues relating to many different human languages” – and some non-human ones, including, in the first issue, Venusian. I’m already looking forward to the second issue, which will include an article about “the secret linguistic history of brand names.”

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At Word Routes, Ben Zimmer recaps the year in words and picks his word of the year. (Surprise – it isn’t fiscal cliff.) I published my own list earlier this week.

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Do not ask science-fiction author John Scalzi to write for free. No, really – don’t even think about it.

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In the 1920s, when TV was still in its infancy, retailers used fake television broadcasts to trick customers into entering stores. Smithsonian magazine’s Paleofuture blog explains how it was done. 

Faked TV demonstration from 1926, via Smithsonian.

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From caucus to urbane: the words that spiked each week this year in look-ups at Merriam-Webster online.

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Catalog love: Your L.L. Bean Boyfriend. He’ll “build you a table and then have sex with you on it.” (Via Girls of a Certain Age.)

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From Jen Doll at The Atlantic Wire, the best (worst) typos, mistakes, and correrctions [sic] of 2012.

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Holly Buchanan of Marketing to Women Online picks the  commercials that did the best job of marketing women in 2012. She has strict criteria:

In order to pass The Buchanan Test a commercial must do three things. It must feature women who:

1. Are outside of the home
2. Are in a role other than that of "mother"
3. Are NOT doing yoga

(For comparison, see Bechdel Test.)

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“So it looks like the New Orleans Hornets are going to change their name to become the Pelicans.” A defense of the new team name by Barry Petchesky at Deadspin. (Naughty language advisory.)

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From my favorite info-viz site, Muckety (“Mapping the paths of power and influence”): The Trump Fund for the Gutting of Red Herrings and other think tanks we’d like to see in 2013.

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I grew up in Los Angeles and always wondered why the Ralphs supermarket chain didn’t have an apostrophe in its name. Now, thanks to Los Angeles magazine, I know: the business was founded (in 1873, at Fifth and Hill streets) by George Ralphs.

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“Twitter is a machine for continual self-reinvention”: Matt Haughey on why he loves Twitter and hates Facebook.

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Something to play with while you’re waiting in line to see The Hobbit, which opens in theaters today: the hobbit name generator and the Elvish name generator. (Via @Wordnik.)

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Like it or not, the “fiscal cliff” metaphor is here to stay. Linguist George Lakoff explains why.

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“I sculpt baby names from love, from hatred, from the reality of this hellhole of a world that you’re forcing an innocent life to endure.” Bob Powers, artisanal baby namer, at McSweeney’s. Yes, he jests. Mostly. (Via Karen Wise.)

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Over at The Atlantic, sociology professor Philip Cohen asks: Why don’t parents name their daughters Mary anymore? (Also via Karen Wise.)

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From Copyranter: The best men’s underwear commercial ever.

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According to Helen Sword, author of a column for the New York Times and creator of something called the Writer’sDiet test, a “zombie noun” is any noun (proliferation, formation, indication) that “cannibalizes” a verb. Now linguistics grad student Josef Fruehwald, blogging at Val Systems, delivers an incisive counterpoint. “Ain’t nothing like exploiting the collective dysmorphia of a nation to push your quarter-baked usage decrees,” says he.

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Via the brilliant Maria Popova at Brain Pickings: Alice in Wonderland as a subway map.

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And to all a good night.

What makes a bad name bad?

I write about all kinds of names, including the bad ones. I believe every company and product deserves a distinctive, memorable name—and no company deserves a name that’s embarrassing or awkward.

But what makes a bad name bad? Well, unlike Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each bad name is not bad in its own unique way. Here are the badness patterns I see most frequently:

Counterintuitive spelling. A coined name like Nyoombl needs to be pronounced phonetically (if at all), but it isn’t—not by a long shot. Reasonable assumptions about English pronunciation dictate that Virgance be pronounced with a hard G, but it isn’t. We look at Brayola and mentally rhyme it with Crayola, but that’s not what the company wants us to do. Moral: Don’t make us work this hard. It’s a name, not a cryptography test.

Inappropriate connotation. If you know nothing about what Infegy actually does, you might deduce that it had something to do with “infamy,” “effigy,” or “infect.” When I look at Reniquity, all I see is “iniquity”—over and over again. FlubIt suggests failure, GloSmart evokes furniture polish … and those interpretations have nothing to do with the companies in question. (Don’t even get me started on Analtech.) Moral: Consult several dictionaries, not just one. Make one of them a slang dictionary. Then get some advice from someone who understands language.

Awkwardness. These are the names that put the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble or force incompatible sounds to cohabit. They’re a frequent consequence of machine-generated names, most of which simply fuse word parts into artificial blends without considering logic or ease of pronunciation. But humans can create awkward names, too: consider Herdict, Mathnasium, and AbbVie. (And see The Name Inspector for more examples.) Moral: If the name flunks the telephone test, it’s not going to inspire positive word-of-mouth.

The bandwagon effect. So many names end in -ly. So many names end in -ify. Remember, a name needs to be distinctive and memorable, and you won’t achieve those goals by doing what all the other kids are doing. Moral: Do some research into naming trends. And get a professional opinion.

What about cross-cultural naming gaffes, you may be wondering. Contrary to widespread belief, they are relatively rare. (That story about the Chevy Nova doing poorly in Spanish-speaking countries? It’s a myth.) If you’re taking your company or product global, you should certainly invest in a linguistic screen to rule out a major blunder. But, as we’ve seen, people can accept a brand name that means “cease and desist” in Swahili (Hulu) or one that suggests “oral sex” in Russian (Mondelez). The bad names I see—and I do see a lot of them—are making mischief in English, not Swahili or Thai or Malay.

December Linkfest

The A.V. Club looks back at the year in band names. It was a good year for punctuation themes: W-H-I-T-E, Friend Slash Lover, TL;DR. (Hat tip: Henry Alpert.)

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In Word Routes, Ben Zimmer looks at the year in words. His list partially overlaps mine, but he also singles out a few I didn’t catch: twinkling, lip dub, and narb, for starters.

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A different take on words of the year: Merriam-Webster reports on the words that spiked in online lookups over the last 12 months. From April 15: ersatz, after the US Postal Service admitted that the new Statue of Liberty stamp mistakenly features a photograph of the half-size replica at the New York New York Casino and Resort in Las Vegas.

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Laura Wattenberg of  Baby Name Wizard announces the name of the year for 2011. It represents, she writes, “the rise of the virtual name.”

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Why are informers called “rats” and spies called “moles”? The Explainer, at Slate.com, explains.

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Buzzfeed picks the 90 best Twitter accounts of 2011. Yeah, they overlooked Fritinancy again.

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Trendwatching’s list of “12 crucial consumer trends for 2012” includes, as usual, some over-the-top coinages, including flaw-some (“To consumers, brands that behave more humanly, including exposing their flaws, will be awesome”), eco-cycology (“Brands will increasingly take back all of their products for recycling … and recycle them responsibly and innovatively”), and emerging maturialism (“Expect frank, risqué or non-corporate products, services and campaigns from emerging markets to be on the rise”).

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Last year the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan organization that lobbies for government transparency, published a tongue-in-cheek name generator for political action committees (PACs). The generator randomly spews out names like Fanciful Floridians Against Cruella de Vil and Captains of Industry for Growth—names you’d never expect to see in real life. Except … it turns out that dozens of real PACs lifted their names from the Sunlight Foundation generator.

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Linguist Lauren Gawne, who blogs as Superlinguo, recently presented what may be the world’s first academic paper on LOLcats and language. (“Don’t call it kitty pidgin!”) Watch the presentation.

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Speaking of linguists doing cool stuff, Erin McKean wrote earlier this month about “the secret language of bros”—aka the dudeification of English—for the Boston Globe. “Perhaps the most unlikely bro- blend,” she reports, “is Bronies, used to refer to male fans of the ‘My Little Pony’ television cartoon and toys.”

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And speaking of manly lingo, Old Spice has a new holiday ad campaign that brings back the original “man your man could smell like,” Isaiah Mustafa. As “MANta Claus,” Mustafa promises to buy gifts for all 7 billion people on Earth. See all 36 MANta Claus videos here, and read my February 2010 post on Mustafa’s original work for Old Spice.

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Lowering the Bar, the legal blog, reports (in a post titled “Assorted Stupidity #32”) on two new government-project names. PRODIGAL is being developed by Georgia Tech for the Pentagon; the name is an acronym for “Proactive Discovery of Insider Threats Using Graph Analysis and Learning.” (LtB: “Translation: it reads your mail.”) And Palantir is the name of a company that’s working with the CIA on data-mining. LtB: “Nerds like myself will know that palantir is taken from ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ in which a palantir is a crystal-ball-type item that was created with good intentions but virtually always deceived and corrupted the user. And that’s the name they picked.”

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Real Android phone name or silly, randomly generated Android phone name? Honestly, it’s hard to tell. (Via @ahundredmonkeys.)

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Where does the term “stocking stuffer” come from? Former Boston Globe language columnist Jan Freeman investigates.

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“There is nothing inherently disrespectful about Xmas,” writes Dawn McIlvain Stahl at Copyediting.com. “Those who use it are not putting an X where Christ used to be. You could even say that those who use Christmas are putting a Christ where X used to be.”

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On the other hand:

Via John McChesney Young; also here.

October Linkfest

I haven’t written about Kindle Fire, the name of Amazon’s new tablet device (although I have written about how the Kindle got its name). But that’s mostly because a couple of my colleagues covered the territory so well on their own blogs. The Name Inspector called the Kindle Fire name “redundant” and “metaphorically incoherent.” But Catchword gave the name an A and said it was “short, catchy, evocative, and stands out in the marketplace.” Me? I agree with the Name Inspector’s logic, but I don’t think customers will approach the name logically. Kindle Fire is a good-enough name. 

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Not many national retailers dare to name their wares as esoterically as Anthropologie does. If you’ve wondered where names like Varvara Maxi Dress and Hypsometric Tint Cardi (from the current season) come from, the style blog In Pursuit of Pretty Things is here to help with a helpful Anthropologie primer. (I took a stab at decoding Anthropologie product names myself in a 2009 post.)

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Need more Anthro? A new blog, Anthroparodie, does a nice job of spoofing the genre. I liked the Bucolic Spider Crusher: “Constructed of pure, river-washed stone from an Appalachian rivulet, this invention—ancient, yet ever-effective in its simplicity—allows you to leisurely macerate arachnids and insects of all varieties into a silky pulp.”

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How did we go from the disparaging X of Brand X to the “entertainment-focused, tech-forward” X of X Games and X Prize? Lexicon Branding’s director of linguistics, Will Leben, analyzes the evolution of X in brand naming and makes a few predictions.

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At first blush, the story sounds like David v. Goliath: Suburban mom starts a skin-care brand for girls, names it for her daughter (awwww), and gets sued for trademark infringement (oh noooo) by big, similarly named cosmetics company. But there’s more to Willa v. Wella than meets the sentimental eye. Trademark lawyer Lara Pearson sorts out the issues on her Brand Geek blog: “It’s nice to want to name your product line after your daughter, but that doesn’t mean you can. If my kid were named Nikey, do you really think I could name my clothing store that too?” (UPDATE, Oct. 14: Willa company founder Christy Prunier settled the trademark dispute with Procter & Gamble, which owns Wella, and won the right to use the Willa name. According to an earlier article, Prunier’s legal fees amounted to an estimated $750,000—substantially more than the average small business could have afforded.)

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Laurel Black thought she’d come up with a really clever name for her design business: Anaglyph. I think you can tell where this story is headed; read the sadder-but-wiser conclusion on Laurel’s blog.

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The new operating system for the Windows Phone boasts that it’s “a smarter way to app.” On his Evolving English II blog, Mike Pope notes that this verbification may represent a first for the very versatile app,which was voted 2010 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society.

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Are you ready for alphalux, blingamalism, freesumerism, and menaissance? They’re all real coinages found on a UK style sheet that covers future trends. There are many more, and I had to look every damn one up. See the whole list on Rantings of a Sub-Editor.

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A new book, The Wage Slave's Glossary, is a compilation of words we use to describe work in 21st-century America: from Blackberry prayer to Xerox subsidy, giganomics to microboredom. Here’s a sampling in The Atlantic. (Hat tip: aem76us.)

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NASA’s two robotic spacecraft, code-named GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B (for Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory), need real names “that capture the spirit and excitement of lunar exploration.” So the agency is holding a contest, open to U.S. students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Names must be accompanied by a short essay explaining your choices. Deadline: November 11. The winner(s) and their teacher(s) will be invited to participate in a teleconference with GRAIL mission team members. (Via A Hundred Monkeys.)

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Robert Lane Greene, author of You Are What You Speak and contributor to The Economist’s language blog, Johnson, dispels 10 myths about language, including “You can’t end a sentence with a preposition” and “English has spread because it is flexible and open to new words.” I wrote about Greene and You Are What You Speak in an April 2011 post.

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Here’s a sweet idea: Turn your first name into a candy brand, courtesy of the NameCandy candy-name generator. I’m Nanchoco-Rocks (“hunks-o-chocolate with real Nancy!”). And you?

February Linkfest

The Name Inspector has detectified a disturbifying trend in namifying. Can you guessify what it is?

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Teachers take note: name development is an excellent way to engage kids with the mechanics of language. For evidence, read this post by Catchword name developer Aaron Hall about his very educational visit to a fourth-grade classroom.

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Inc. magazine asked seven advertising and branding pros their advice for writing memorable taglines. The answers include “Don’t be afraid of going long” and “Negative is not always a bad thing.” (Via Irene Nelson.)

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Speaking of ad agencies, why are so many of them now calling themselves “brand innovation companies,” “consumer engagement agencies,” “idea manufacturers,” and other euphemisms? Analysis from a chief creative officer (itself a title that didn’t exist in the Mad Men era). (Via Catchword.)

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It’s been a big week for gamers and linguists following the Jeopardy matchup between humans and IBM’s “Watson” (aka the Nerd Super Bowl). The conclusion airs tonight; meanwhile, read Greg Lindsay’s account in Fast Company of how he beat Watson three times in “top-secret sparring rounds.” If you missed the broadcasts, you can see the questions and answers on the Jeopardy archive, an almost-comprehensive 25-year database. Here’s Monday’s show; here’s Tuesday’s. Here’s contestant Ken Jennings in yesterday’s live Q&A about the contest on the Washington Post website. And here’s computational linguist Philip Resnick’s Feb. 14 post on Language Log, “Jeopardizing Valentine’s Day,” about what goes into Watson’s question-answering technology.

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You too can write a bestseller! Just fire up the Malcolm Gladwell book-title generator to create boffo titles and subtitles like Wink: The Power of Thinking While Simultaneously Flirting. (Via AWSamuel.)

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If you use a computer keyboard—and not, say, an IBM Selectric—here’s why you should never, ever insert two spaces after a period.

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Finally, à propos of not much: Craigslisp.

November Linkfest

The New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year, announced yesterday, is refudiate. Runners-up included vuvuzela, bankster, and nom nom. Read all about it. For the curious: my archived posts about NOAD’s words of the year for 2007, 2008, and 2009.

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If you, like me, see red when you find misspellings, errors of fact, and grammatical mistakes in published books, help is at hand. Typoze allows you to report typos online, thereby contributing to “improving the overall quality of published material.” I’ve done it; it’s easy and satisfying. My only question: Where do I report the typos in Typoze’s own web and blog content?

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After 94 years, beloved spokeslegume Mr. Peanut finally, um, speaks. And he sounds a lot like Robert Downey, Jr. (Ad Broad.)

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Rob Beschizza was struck by how the New York Times’s stories about the Iraq War Wikileaks material “could get through such gruesome descriptions — fingers chopped off, chemicals splashed on prisoners — without using the word ‘torture.’” So he created a torture euphemism generator. Why should Times reporters have all the fun? (Via Mark Peters.)

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If you’d lived in Chaucer’s time, you’d have known what sort of work a cautioner, a pannarius, and a tapley did. Find definitions for those and other trade names on this fascinating list. Despite the list’s title, the names are not “Old English”; they’re old, and they’re from the British Isles, but their etymologies are variously French, Latin, German, and Middle English. (Via Kevin Smokler, aka Weegee.)

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The New York Times blog Schott’s Vocab has been performing an invaluable service by reprinting archived entries from American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society. Here, from 1934, is one of my favorities: a glossary of shoe-salesman lingo. A brief excerpt: “The widths of the shoe, A, B, C, D, and E, are called Al, Benny, Charley, Dave, and Eddie. These names are used to conceal the size from the customer.”

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The Gobbledygook Grader reveals how much of your writing (or a colleague’s) is ridden with “gobbledygook, jargon, clichés and over-used, hype-filled words.” Just copy and paste a passage into the window to receive your grade—and tips for improving it.

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“Wants pawn term, dare worsted ladle gull . . .” Surely you know the rest of the “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut” tale, right? Hint: read it aloud, slowly. (Or listen to the recording.) From San Francisco’s wonderful, one-of-a-kind Exploratorium. (Hat tip: Mighty Red Pen and Trochee.)

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How do you pronounce Cthulhu? Linux? Mister Mxyzptlk? To the rescue, from Geekosystem, comes the ultimate geek pronunciation guide. Mister Mxyzptlk, by the way, is not to be confused with the hip New York store Mxyplyzyk, named for the same Superman character but spelled differently and pronounced “mix-ee-pliz-ik.” (Hat tip: Karen.)

He’s on a Roll

When Old Spice’s spokehunk*—aka The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, aka Isaiah Mustafa—made his screen debut back in February, he was, famously, on a horse. His second commercial showed him swandiving (OK, “swandiving”) into a hot tub. The ads, and the “I’m on a horse” line, became almost overnight that most coveted of media phenomena: the viral hit. But what was even more remarkable was how quickly and astutely Old Spice’s agency, Wieden + Kennedy, capitalized on the buzz. A team of agency writers, directors, and tech folk turned the social-media comments into scripted, personalized response videos.

Some of the videos were addressed to celebrities (George Stephanopoulos, Ellen De Generes, etc.), but most went out to civilians such as this alphanumeric admirer:

If you have sufficient sitzfleisch, you can watch all the videos on the Old Spice YouTube channel (almost 200 in all). Then check out ReadWriteWeb’s post on the making of the videos. According to W+K’s global interactive creative director, Iain Tait, technical and social-media experts worked closely with the creative team. “We have people shooting and we’re editing it as it happens. Then the social media guys are looking at how to get that back out around the web ... in real time.”

 

All the videos were shot over two days this week before Mustafa wearily but gamely announced The End. But there’s an afterlife: An Old Spice voicemail generator puts Mustafa’s unctuous voice into your outgoing phone message.

And there’s already been a well-executed parody of the ads, created by—surprise, surprise!—the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University.

(Via Geekosystem.)

Read my original post about the Old Spice ad campaign, which includes embedded video about the making of the first ad.

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* I’m indebted to AdBroad—who wrote an admiring appraisal of the Old Spice campaign—for that moniker.

 

The Sum of Its Parts?

Quick quiz: What do you think GloSmart does?

The "smart" part of the name is easy; it's the "Glo-" that may be harder to agree on. Chances are, though, that you thought of something like this:

Or this:

In both of these examples, "glo" means "glow." Indeed, the U.S. trademark database is full of glo-for-glow marks: Miraglo, Heat & Glo, Safety Glo, Orange Glo, Glo Brite, and so on.

Not so fast, though. GloSmart is a different story.