Fritinancy

Name in the news: Brigid Alliance

The first time I encountered the Brigid Alliance name, abut a month ago, I was half-listening to an NPR story about abortion resources, and I heard the name as “Bridge It.” Which made sense, I thought: The organization exists to cover the costs of travel, food, lodging, and childcare for women (aka “pregnant people”) seeking abortions in states where the procedure remains legal—to bridge the gap, in other words.

But no: It’s Brigid, one of the spellings of an ancient Irish personal name whose etymology translates to “the High One.” And there’s an interesting story behind that choice.

Word of the week: Internym

I figured I was pretty well acquainted with the -nym family, from acronym and backronym to mononym and toponym. (If you need a refresher, see Mike Pope’s 2013 column for the Visual Thesaurus, “What’s in a -Nym?”) But last Friday I stumbled upon a new (well, new-to-me) -nym that fills a gap I hadn’t known existed.

New from me on Medium: All about Oscar

How did that gold-plated statuette get its name? I dive into the theories—is “Oscar” industry jargon for “oscillation”?—and pick a favorite, just in time for the 95th Academy Awards ceremony on March 12.

Read All about Oscar (friend link)

Name in the news: Bellingcat

“It is not a war on Russian TV,” Stanislav Kucher, a Russian television host, told the New York Times in an article published March 8, 2022. “You will not see explosions, you will not see strikes on neighborhoods where civilians live, you will not see a lot in terms of troops, soldiers, heavy armored vehicles or anything like that.”

How to debunk—or even prebunk—Russia’s propaganda and disinformation? One answer is the work done by an open-source intelligence (OSINT) organization called Bellingcat. Founded by British journalist/blogger Eliot Higgins in 2014 and headquartered in the Netherlands, Bellingcat has researchers in more than 70 countries; it uses “publicly available data and citizen journalist analysis” to advance  “narratives of conflict, crime, and human rights abuses.” Geolocation tags, radar data, and satellite images are among the tools that Bellingcat researchers have employed in investigations from Syria to Yemen to Eastern Europe.

Bellingcat’s elegant wordmark

 

You can learn more about Bellingcat from its excellent website and Twitter feed; from a March 2021 interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air”; from a February 27, 2022, CBC story about Russian disinformation,; from a February 1, 2022, PBS interview with Eliot Higgins; and from a March 8, 2022, story in the Atlantic headlined “The Information War Isn’t Over Yet.” Higgins has also published a book, We Are Belllingcat (2021); when The Guardian reviewed it in February 2021, it called the book “a manifesto for optimism in a dark age”:

It argues that “cyber-miserabilism” – the doomy belief that big tech and bad actors have permanently screwed our democracy – is wrong. Instead, Higgins hails the internet as an “extraordinary gift”. In his view, facts still matter, accountability is possible, and people still care about the difference between truth and lies.

(I wrote about “miserabilism” in 2016. “Cyber-miserabilism” is a nice new twist.)

My focus here, however, is the Bellingcat name, which I’ve admired for years. I' regret only that it took Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to prompt me to finally write about it.

How Prego spaghetti sauce got its name

I’m ashamed to confess that until I read her New York Times obituary over the weekend I’d never heard of Laurel Cutler, who had a distinguished five-decade career on Madison Avenue and was named both “Woman of the Year” and “Man of the Year” by the American Advertising Federation. (Quite an achievement!) She died at age 94 on November 28, 2021.

The obit reads like a mini-history of mid-20th-century advertising, and I encourage you to read the whole thing. (My link bypasses the Times paywall.) One bit, though, stood out for me: the story of how Prego spaghetti sauce got its name:

The most important role she played in the Prego campaign, she told Inc. magazine in 1987, “was convincing them to change the name from Campbell’s Very Own Spaghetti Sauce, which was very much a 1970s concept, to Prego, which was much more ’80s.” The day before she had to present her proposal for a name, she scanned an English-Italian dictionary and plucked out “prego,” which means both “please” and “you’re welcome.”

Grazie, Laurel Cutler!

 

Ms. Cutler was also a futurist whose many accurate predictions included the “high-low” shopping trend: “‘The very same people would buy at Neiman Marcus in the morning and Kmart in the afternoon,’ she told Inc.”

It was quite a rise from an 80-cents-an-hour entry-level job as a contest judge at the marketing firm Reuben Donnelly.

Ms. Cutler’s 2016 memoir was never published. Maybe that oversight will be corrected now.

Name in the news: Block

Its best-known brand is Square, the payment app that launched in 2009 and whose fortunes soared during the 2020 pandemic as more retailers began accepting cashless payments. But as of December 10 the parent company—whose holdings also include the streaming-music service Tidal and the mysteriously named open developer platform TBD54566975*—will be known as Block. Like Facebook’s Meta and Google’s Alphabet, this is a corporate name change that will not directly affect consumers.

Block’s shape-shifting logo, an oddly shaped cube.

 

CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey, 45, a cryptocurrency enthusiast, had stepped down from his role as Twitter CEO on November 29.

Block will keep the ticker symbol SQ; its URL is block.xyz.

From the Twitter announcement:

May linkfest

Most naming advice in the popular media makes me clutch my head in despair, but this Inc. article by Minda Zetlin is different. Zetlin interviewed experienced name developers Anthony Shore and David Placek—both of whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with—and their real-world examples are smart and helpful. “Avoid names that describe your product” and “Don’t fall in love with one name” are the first tips, and yes, you’ve heard them from me, too. (h/t trademark lawyer Ed Timberlake)

*

Steer clear of negative words in your business name? Not necessarily. Read about how Calamityware got its name. (And read my own post on negative names with positive impact.)

*

I will probably go to my grave insisting on the distinction between lay and lie, so I got a satisfied chortle out of this table of cat tenses, from a Duolingo chat page. (Via Language Log)

How MoveOn got its name

Among the many, many political emails and texts filling my phone during this final pre-election sprint are daily communiqués from MoveOn, the progressive public advocacy group. Yesterday’s email, from the director of analytics, bore the subject line “This is a long email, but I hope you read it,” and sure enough: 1,143 words.

I no longer remember when or why I signed up with MoveOn, but I do remember how the organization got started and how it got its name. In fact, I remember attending an event shortly after its founding at which co-founder Joan Blades was the featured speaker.

Here’s the story.

Corona brands: King Arthur flour

Fourth in a series of posts about US brands that are thriving during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Around the end of March, a couple of weeks into California’s shelter-in-place directive, I used up the last of my flour on a batch of Marion Cunningham’s raw apple muffins—a recipe I’d first tasted, years earlier, at Cunningham’s house in Walnut Creek, where I’d gone to interview her. (I’ve forgotten what story I was writing, but I’ll never forget the warm muffins and strong coffee she served me. As I was leaving, she gave me her well-worn and annotated copy of The Breakfast Book, which I still use.)

When I ventured out to buy more flour, all of the shelves were bare. I’d had the bad luck to run out of provisions during a pandemic baking boom; flour mills had been caught short. I was late to this realization: In early March, King Arthur Flour—the oldest flour company in America and the country’s fourteenth-oldest manufacturer—had noticed a 600 percent jump in grocery-store sales of their products virtually overnight. “It was as if half of America had decided all at once that they needed to bake. A lot,” writes David H. Freedman in an engrossing story for Medium about the King Arthur company.

Finally found some!

 

The problem wasn’t supply—there was plenty of wheat available—but logistics. Until the pandemic, home baking had been in decline for years; flour mills like King Arthur stayed in business by supplying restaurants and commercial bakeries, which bought in huge quantities and which were now shut down. 

Freedman’s story reveals how King Arthur quickly adapted to meet the new market demands. It’s also full of other interesting tidbits. For one, the company has been employee owned since 1996. For another, employees call the Vermont headquarters “Carbohydrate Camelot.”

But the story doesn’t delve into the history and significance of the company name. So I did my own investigation.

Corona brands: Steak-umm

Third in a series of posts about US brands that are thriving during the COVID-19 pandemic.

My previous posts in this series looked at Lysol and Zoom, brands that have filled real-world needs—for sanitizing and for video-meetings, respectively—during the pandemic. This post is about Steak-umm, a brand whose claim to pandemic fame isn’t its product—although that product has its fervent fans—but its soothing, amusing, occasionally bemusing Twitter account.

many brands haven’t meaningfully responded to this crisis due to internal bureaucracies, self-preservation, or overthinking their “image,” so by the time any message gets out it’s just a watered-down ambiguous ad that’s like “in these uncertain times we’re still here ok”

— Steak-umm (@steak_umm) April 22, 2020