Fritinancy

April linkfest

Journalist, novelist, and author Kurt Andersen (Spy magazine, Fantasyland, Evil Geniuses) wrote about “how an article about genomic sequencing led to an afternoon playing around with AI branding tools.” The names and logos these tools spat out—Dynester, Aerodynamiq, ModernZeal—led Andersen to muse about how real life is increasingly indistinguishable from science fiction.

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Speaking of science fiction, here’s a list of fictional super-metals, from Adamantium to Zortium.

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If you’re a fan of the New York Times Spelling Bee, you’ll want to try Tylogram, a new word-formation game created by William Shunn, the genius behind Spelling Bee Solver. As with the Bee, you’ll create words for points; slide the tiles around the grid to maximize their value. But it’s even trickier than that! (And fun.)

 

Names in the wild: Westfield San Francisco Centre food court (and beyond)

I had a little extra time before meeting a friend at SFMOMA to see the “Soundtracks” exhibit (highly recommended), so I took a detour through for the food court of the Westfield San Francisco Centre on Market Street, looking for interesting brands.

I scored right away. “Interesting” doesn’t even begin to describe Loving Hut.

 

There is a lot going on here.

 

This all-vegan fast-food café had just opened for the day and there was already a long line of customers. I stood to the side and marveled at the weird name – a cousin of Pizza Hut, maybe? – and that fantastically hideous logo.

Heroes Everywhere

The heroic drumroll continues in the world of commerce! Some recent sightings:

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Delivery Hero, a Berlin-based food-delivery service that operates in 23 countries, was in the news earlier this month when it announced its acquisition of German rival Pizza.de. Delivery Hero was founded in 2011.

 

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Last week San Francisco-based ModCloth (“democratizing fashion one indie, vintage, and retro-inspired style at a time!”¹) became the first retailer to sign the Heroes [sic] Pledge for Advertisers, a promise not to digitally alter images of models. The pledge was created by the Brave Girls Alliance, which wants to give families “multi-layered, diverse, intelligent, and strong media characters to enrich their girls [sic] imaginations.” (I’m not sure what Brave Girls Alliance has against possessive apostrophes. And while abstaining from Photoshop is rare in fashion photography, I doubt that actual heroics are involved.)

 

Via AdFreak

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AdFreak is rather fond of “hero” itself.

 

Dan Cassaro told Showtime: “It is with great sadness that I must decline your enticing offer to work for free,” and then he shared the sentiment on Twitter.

Principled? OK. Clever? Sure. Heroic? Not in my book.

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Finally—for now, anyway—there’s mxHero, a San Francisco email-management startup that last month closed a $1.8 million seed round of financing.  

“MX” is an abbreviation for “mail exchanger,”² which Wikipedia defines thus:

a type of resource record in the Domain Name System that specifies a mail server responsible for accepting email messages on behalf of a recipient's domain, and a preference value used to prioritize mail delivery if multiple mail servers are available. The set of MX records of a domain name specifies how email should be routed with the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).

(For more on “X,” see my Visual Thesaurus column, “The X Factor.”)

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As I’ve written elsewhere—see my September 2013 Visual Thesaurus column—“hero” names have proliferated since the attacks of September 11, 2011, when the need to identify and praise people in rescuer roles became acute.³ See also my blog follow-ups in October 2013, early March 2014, and late March 2014.

 

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¹ For more “One X at a Time” slogans, see this, this, and this, for starters.

² MX is an abbreviation for other words, too, including motocross (the sport) and Mexico (the Internet country code). My favorite Mx—brand new to me—stands for Mixter, “an uncommonly used English honorific for genderqueer. It is a gender neutral title used by few people and its use has yet to be made official in general, although Brighton and Hove city council in Sussex, England, voted in 2013 to allow its use on council forms.” (Source: Wikipedia)

³ Of course, there’s always the strong possibility of a less-elevated rationale:

 

Via TechCrunch, transforming nerds into heroes since 2005.

Follow-ups

Some stuff I’ve seen recently that reminds me of stuff I’ve written about previously:

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X & Y names: Tyler Doyle of A Hundred Monkeys notes the rise of “the blank-and-blank restaurant” in the Bay Area: Fish & Farm, Flour + Water, Box and Bells, Bourbon and Beef, et al. I wrote in 2010 about “X + Y restaurants,” and I have a Pinterest board of X & Y retail names (59 and counting!). 

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Heroes:  Quidsi, the parent company of a clutch of e-tailers (Diapers.com, Soap.com, Look.com, et al.), thinks very highly of its workforce and “culture.” Its employees aren’t just model citizens. They aren’t merely heroes. They’re superheroes! With … superpowers?

 

Quidsi: Latin for “what if.”

 

I wrote about “hero” worship for the Visual Thesaurus in September 2013; I published follow-ups in October 2013 and earlier this month.

By the way, for an interesting take on “our culture” as a code word to screen out older (i.e., over 30) job applicants, see “The Brutal Ageism of Tech” in the New Republic.

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Not your close relative’s X: Intacct, a “cloud accounting company,” wants you to know it ain’t no dinosaur.

 

“This ain’t your grandpa’s financial system.”

 

Earlier posts about “Not your close relative’s X” here and here.

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Super-comparatives: Harry’s—cute name for a shaving company—isn’t just sharp. Or sharper. It’s sharperer. And less expensiver. Clever branding or risky linguistic overreach?

 

Note the apostrophe on the razor handle.

All the self-consciously hip brands are doing it, of course. Here’s a promo for ABC’s “Revenge”; the tagline is “Later. Sexier. Revengier.” 

 

 

Hat tip to Ben Zimmer for the video link.

See my previous posts on closerer and deliciouser, Maker’s-er, funner-er, gooderest, creamier-er-er, mobiler, and huge-ier (et al.).

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Food portmanteaus: Taco Bell is testing a quesarito (a hybrid quesadilla/burrito), which will come as old news to Chipotle customers. The owners of a couple of Shoprite markets in New Jersey claim to have invented the donnoli (hybrid donut/cannoli).  At the Donut Fest in Chicago back in January, an NPR reporter tasted a doughscuit (“an impossible mix of doughnut-fried sweetness and crumbly biscuitness”) And the Portland, Maine, bakery Little Bigs got slapped down in its attempt to sell a cronut imitation as a crauxnut. Little Bigs asked customers to suggest a new name. The winner: C&D (for “cease and desist”).

And this just in: The New York Times reports on the cragel (croissant + bagel), the mallomac (Mallomar + macaron), the scuffin (scone + muffin), and other hybrid baked goods.

For more food mashups, see my most recent post about the “frissant.”

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Caps and consonants: Yep, still a THNG! DSPTCH sells camera straps, bags, and related accessories in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood. Or is that DGPTCH?

 

Meanwhile, Japanese retail giant Uniqlo has launched SPRZ NY, “a new global project where art and fashion meet, creating something magical.”

 

Spores? Spritz? Something Preternaturally Random and Zany? Nope, nope, nope. Surprise!

More retail vowellessness here, here, here, and here. And here’s my 2012 post about vowelless restaurant names.

More Heroics

I’ve been tracking the (over)use of “hero” in branding for about a year. I rounded up my findings for a Visual Thesaurus column last September on “‘Hero’ Worship,” but the “hero” pileup continues, as these recent sightings indicate:

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Discovery Communications’ Military Channel rebranded last week as the American Heroes Channel. (Whoops—“not a rebrand but a broadening,” said group president Henry Schleiff.) “American Heroes Channel expands on the American Heroes Channel’s [sic] promise to honor the great defenders of our freedom, while providing a rare glimpse into major events that shaped our world and the trailblazers and unexpected advocates who made a difference,” according to a press release.

All that, plus a “What Gun Are You?” quiz.

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Draper University of Heroes is an unaccredited institution whose curriculum does not, you may surprised to hear, include CPR, firefighting, or hostage negotiations. Rather, students learn “media training,” “branding,” “fundraising,” and “innovation.”

From the home page:

Located in Silicon Valley, Draper University of Heroes is the brainchild of free-spirited venture capitalist Tim Draper, aka “The Riskmaster”. We are an unconventional world-class residential and online school for the brightest young entrepreneurs from around the world. We built this school because the world needs more heroes.

Tim Draper, a founder of the venture-capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, is on the record as saying he modeled Draper U after Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series. He even borrowed the lightning-bolt motif for his logo.

No Quidditch amid the course offerings, although one enterprising student boasted to TechCrunch that he was selling sex toys as part of a class assignment.

Meanwhile, Tim Draper was lately in the news because of his ballot initiative to split California into six states.

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Finally, if you watched last Sunday’s Academy Awards broadcast you were assailed with the show’s theme, “A Celebration of Movie Heroes.” The definition of “hero” was a little elastic, encompassing Superman, Tom Joad, Karen Silkwood, and—that pint-size wizard again!—Harry Potter. After the ritual In Memoriam montage Bette Midler sang “The Wind Beneath My Wings”; “Did I ever tell you you’re my hero?” never sounded more sycophantic than when accompanied by a portrait of “Julian Meyers, publicist.” And best-actor winner Matthew McConaughey told the audience that his hero is “myself, ten years from now.”

Follow-Ups

New sightings in categories I’ve written about previously:

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“Plus.”

Edward Banatt (@ArmaVirumque) recently tweeted a photo of a verbified “plus” he’d seen in the wild:

The menu is from the fast-casual restaurant chain Chili’s, which uses “Plus Up Your Steak” throughout the franchise.

Commercial verbifying of “plus” began at least 70 years ago with Walt Disney; “plus up” has a specific, non-Chili’s meaning in governmental budget negotiations. Read more.

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“Hero.”

Camera company GoPro has been advertising its new Hero3 models. (I’d missed the Hero1 and Hero2, which may not have been promoted as aggressively.) The company’s tagline is “Be a Hero,” which is slightly awkward. (“I am a camera”?) Tip: Never use your product name generically.

The Einstein Noah Restaurant Group, maker of Noah’s bagels, exhorts customers to “Be the Office Hero”:

 

Also spotted: TradeHero, a stock-trading app; and the unrelated Screenhero, “an app that turns any Mac or PC into a completely collaborative environment,” according to a TechCrunch report.

Read more about “hero” worship in branding.

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Comparatives.

You know about Dumberer. Now there’s Smarterer: “over 900 crowdsourced assessments tests to help thousands of recruiters and job seekers around the world quantify any skill in minutes.”

More neo-comparatives here, here, here, here, and here.

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“Zen.”

I recently encountered the term “annoyvation,” one of whose definitions is “an innovation born of a small annoyance.” TicketZen fits into this category. As its home page puts it, “Parking tickets suck. Paying them doesn’t have to.” (Good idea, fuzzy syntax, what with those confusing -ings.)

For more on the Zen of brand naming, see my Pinterest board and “Zen and the Art of Startup Naming” in Bloomberg Businessweek, in which I’m quoted.

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“ -Licious.”

Jessica wrote in her Beauty Marks blog about Samplicio.us (“Simply Better Surveys”). Mr. Verb wrote about “the hilariously named” Englicious, which “aims to be a complete online resource for teaching English grammar in UK secondary schools.” And scientist/educator Marc D. Hauser’s new book about human cruelty is called Evilicious.

More -licious names here (and follow the link in that post for still more -liciousness).

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Dictionary definitions.

Last week I received an email from Democrats.org with the gratuitously syllabified “com•pro•mise (v.)” in the subject line.

 

And yet in both the featured quote and the call to action “compromise” is a noun.

 

 

 

Read more about dictionary definitions in advertising and branding in my Visual Thesaurus column “Branding by Definition.”

On the Visual Thesaurus: “Hero” Worship

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, “ ‘Hero’ Worship: The All-Purpose Admiring Appellation,” looks at the sharp increase in the use of hero in the media and, especially, in branding. Access is restricted to subscribers; here’s an excerpt:

More and more, the news media grant hero status to prominent people, regardless of verifiable valor. Earlier this year, for example, I heard an announcer for a San Francisco public-radio station referring to the jazz musician Dave Brubeck as “the late Bay Area hero.” In a 2007 post on his Editor’s Desk blog, journalism professor Andy Bechtel cited a front-page promo headlined “Heroes Pass Away in Movies, TV, Football.” Ingmar Bergman a hero? “Let’s be careful not to confuse achievement with heroism,” Bechtel advised.

But what really opened my eyes to “hero” was the U.S. trademark database. I’d been vaguely aware of a few brands with “hero” in their names, such as the music game Guitar Hero (introduced in 2005). I was surprised, however, to learn that there were 1,569 live “Hero” or “Heroes” trademarks and more than 2,000 dead (abandoned) ones. Even more surprising: more than half of all those marks, live and dead, were registered after 2001. Of the live trademarks, 610—nearly 39 percent—had been registered since January 2011.

Read the rest of the column.

Blog bonus! Here are some of the more interesting “Hero” trademarks I encountered:

• Liquid Hero (beer)
• Hangover Hero (from Hero Labs; no connection to Liquid Hero)
• Yolk Hero (egg separator)
• Bible Hero Vitamins for Children
• Hero cigarettes (trademark registered in 1951 and still in use)
• Tragic Hero athletic apparel
• Swing Hero (golf training aid)
• VINHeros [spelling sic]. That’s VIN as in Vehicle Identification Number.
• Neck Hero (bed pillow)
• Hole Hero (“adult novelty items … accompanied by a novelty cape”)

And in what can only be seen as an inevitable development, there’s also an Anti-Hero India Pale Ale, “for all the ambivalent warriors who get the girl in the end.”