Fritinancy

Well Played, Zabar’s!

Detail of full-page ad in The New Yorker, November 30, 2015:

“Zabar’s baskets are the gift that trumps them all.”

 

 

Gee, whaddya think they mean by trumps? Any idea who that big-mouth pal might be?

Trust us, indeed.

 

 

Name in the News: Slack

Almost overnight, it seems, the world has fallen head over heels for Slack.

“I am basically in love with Slack,” declares About.me founder Tony Conrad in a testimonial on Slack’s home page. “Slack, a messaging tool designed for team collaboration, is the working digital world’s latest paramour,” writes Scott Rosenberg in an admiring article published earlier this month on Medium (“Shut Down Your Office. You Now Work in Slack”). “Slack is the new favourite tool of newsrooms” reads a headline in Digiday, which calls itself “the authority on digital media.” In April, Slack’s co-founders won a Crunchie—one of the technology awards bestowed each year by TechCrunch—for founder of the year. Slack is also the investment world’s BFF: launched less than two years ago, it has only about 750,000 daily users—more than two-thirds of whom pay nothing for the service—but is worth $2.8 billion, according to Business Insider.

 

Chart via Business Insider (May 19, 2015), which is shaky on its spelling of Pinterest.

 

The numbers and accolades are impressive. But how does that name—Slack—stack up?

April Linkfest

Don’t read “How to Name a Baby” to learn how to name a baby. Read it for insights into historical baby-naming trends and to confirm your hunches (e.g., “the popular girl name Reagan is for Republicans”). Also: charts!

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Given names are “one of the last social acceptable frontiers of class war.”Also: nominative determination, implicit egotism, and how the Internet has made baby naming more difficult. Part 1 of a four-part podcast series about names from Australian radio network ABC. The presenter, Tiger Webb, has an interesting name story himself. (Hat tip: Superlinguo.)

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The not-so-secret jargon of doctors is full of acronyms: a flea—fucking little esoteric asshole—is an intern, an FLK is a “funny-looking kid,” and an “SFU 50 dose” is the amount of sedative it takes for 50 percent of patients to shut the fuck up.

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Ever wonder what value-creating winners do all day? Here’s Business Town to enlighten you. It’s “an ongoing project attempting to explain our highly intangible, deeply disruptive, data-driven, venture-backed, gluten-free economic meritocracy to the uninitiated. With apologies to Richard Scarry.”

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Stop your whinging, Brits: a lot of those so-called Americanisms you profess to detest—like “gotten” and “fall”—were originally English.

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The spectacular neon art of the Walker Collection of American Signs, a swath of advertising history auctioned earlier this month in Proctor, Arkansas.

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Attention, domain shoppers and everyone who believes the best defense is an offensive offense: the .sucks domain went on sale in early April. There was an immediate buying frenzy; consumer advocate Ralph Nader promoted it in a commercial as “a protest word.” Now ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has asked U.S. and Canadian regulatory agencies to determine whether the the domain’s high price—$2,499 during the “sunrise” period—is illegal. (For more about the unusual relationship between Vox Populi—which secured the rights to sell the .sucks domain—and ICANN, see John R. Levine’s blog.)

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“The decision is made. The name won’t be changed.” – Tim Mahoney, head of marketing for Chevy, speaking to the Detroit Free Press about the Bolt electric vehicle, whose name is strikingly similar to that of the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid. In fact, a Spanish speaker would pronounce the two names identically. (Hat tip: Jonathon Owen.)

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I’ve been saying this for ages, but now I can quote the Harvard Business Review: Group brainstorming is a waste of time.

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“A brand of snack bars is made ‘in small batches at our own makery’. Makery? I am guessing that ‘makery’ is a portmanteau for ‘made-up bakery’.” Steven Poole on why the language of food packaging makes him sick. (Hat tip: Lynne Murphy.)

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Remember wack slacks, lamestain, and swingin’ on the flippity-flop? Of course you don’t. Why grungespeak was the greatest language hoax of the 1990s.

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Chart: How to say “It’s all Greek to me” in 30 languages. (For Greeks, it’s all Chinese.)

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Negative polarity item, critique drift, and other terms—many of them linguistic—that have caught the eye of tech writer/editor Mike Pope.

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Lindström, Minnesota, is getting its umlaut back.

English is the language where diacritics go to die. Except in Minnesota. #missionumlaut. h/t @SPNoir @JKealing pic.twitter.com/8q80R4n6nR

— Patrick Cox (@patricox) April 15, 2015

And don’t forget all those gratuitously umlautted brand names!

Stan Freberg, 1926-2015

Stan Freberg, a man of myriad talents who was often called “the father of funny advertising,” died Tuesday in Santa Monica. He was 88.

Freberg was born in Pasadena and grew up in Los Angeles; he turned down scholarships to Stanford University and the University of Redlands in order to pursue a career in radio. He became a successful comedian and a voice actor in cartoons—his was the voice of the beaver in Disney’s Lady and the Tramp—but it’s as rule-breaking advertising copywriter that I choose to remember him.

According to the New York Times obituary, Freberg went into advertising “because he considered most commercials moronic.” In 1957, after the CBS Radio Network canceled “The Stan Freberg Show” after just 15 weeks, Freberg formed his own ad-production company, which he called Freberg Ltd. (but not very). His motto, according to the Los Angeles Times obituary, was Ars gratia pecuniae: “Art for money’s sake.” He “set the standard for humor in advertising,” according to a tribute in Advertising Age: his work included campaigns for Chun King, Jeno’s Pizza, Sunsweet prunes (one of his prune ads starred Ray Bradbury, the science-fiction writer), Contadina tomato paste (“Who puts eight great tomatoes in that little bitty can? You know who. You know who. You know who”), and Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Freberg’s copy wasn’t just funny; it was subversive. He “used humor to declare war on postwar advertising,” writes the New York Times’s Douglas Martin: “Mr. Freberg even committed, eagerly, the ad industry’s greatest heresy: lampooning the deficiencies of a paying client’s own products.”

When he couldn’t get a paying client to underwrite his heresies, he went indie. His 1958 comedy single, “Green Chri$tma$” hardly seems dated today, nearly half a century later:

Deck the halls with advertising!
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la!
’Tis the time for merchandising!
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la!
Profit never needs a reason!
Fa-la-la, la-la-la, la-la-la!
Get the money, it’s the season!
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la!

Listen to the whole “Green Chri$tma$” recording. 

A few more Freberg links:

“Who Listens to Radio?” (1965)

“Elderly Man River” (1957)

“Take an Indian to Lunch” (1961)

“St. George and the Dragonet” (1953 parody of “Dragnet”)

A tribute from NPR that includes a sketch Freberg did with Harry Shearer (This Is Spinal Tap, “Le Show”).

 

New on the Strong Language Blog: It’s Sofa King Famous!

My latest post for Strong Language (“a sweary blog about swearing”) is about Sofa King: “a real brand, a parody brand, a tribute brand, a song title, the subject of a Saturday Night Live skit, and the punchline to a joke.” SNL may have popularized Sofa King, but there had already been a furniture store by that name in the UK for six years before the skit aired. (Tagline: “Our prices are Sofa King low!”) And the joke had been circulating online for at least a year before that.

Read “It’s Sofa King Famous!” And while you’re there, read my previous posts about naughty branding: “So Many Mother _uckers”and “A Pot to Piss In.”

Oh, Say Can You See?

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the writing of “The Star Spangled Banner,” which became the national anthem of the United States in 1931. In Baltimore, where Francis Scott Key wrote the lyrics, celebrations and historic events began on Flag Day, June 14, and will continue through Defender’s Day, September 14.

I’m guessing some anonymous wit at the U.S. Postal Service had the occasion in mind when she or he penned this tribute:

Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

 

As I’m sure you know, the anthem’s notoriously hard-to-sing melody was lifted from a popular 18th-century British drinking song, “To Anacreon in Heaven,” whose refrains include this couplet:

Whilst, snug in their clubroom, they jovially twine
The Myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's Vine. 

In other words: wine, women, and song.

August Linkfest

Media holding company Gannett’s new job descriptions for “the newsroom of the future” (“Content Coach,” “Engagement Editor,” et al.) are pretty close to self-parody. But that didn’t stop some anonymous wag—obviously very close to the machine—from creating a parody. Apply now to be a Bullshit Artist 1, Reduction in Force Synergy Coach, and other dream jobs.  (Via Romenesko.)

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“Avoid using areas or volumes when representing quantities” and other rules for data visualization, published by the U.S. Bureau of the Census … in 1915. (Via Ben Schmidt’s Sapping Attention blog.)

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Weird Al’s “Word Crimes” parody song got all the ink, but I got a bigger kick out of another of his new songs, “Mission Statement,” which would be a spoof of corporate buzzwords if the subject weren’t already spoofproof. Watch the video and read about how TruScribe, a “video-scribing” company in Wisconsin, created the catchy and effective graphics. I learned about TruScribe via a Wall Street Journal blog post about the Yankovic video. One commenter wrote: “The beautiful part of this is that I can watch it at work with my headphones on and to anyone passing by it looks like I’m just watching some motivational business video.”

 

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Remember the Toyota “Swagger Wagon” ads? (Actually, there’s a new one.) “White-guy rapvertising is never going out of style,” declares AdFreak. Proof: this new video for webinar platform On24. Sample lyric: “Just look at your core competencies and extend your brand/Drive your penetration, and then you’ll be the man.”

 

“Get your webinar on.” 

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“The tale of ‘scofflaw,’ born in Boston at a time when Prohibitionists were staging mock funerals of ‘John Barleycorn’ and fleets of Coast Guard rum-chasers patrolled Boston Harbor, shows that sometimes real words can actually be invented on demand. They just don’t always behave exactly the way their engineers hope they will.” (Boston Globe, via @ammonshea.) I wrote about “scofflaw” in a 2011 blog post. More on the language of Prohibition in this 2010 post.

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Speaking of (and to) Ammon Shea, the Oxford University Press had 10 questions for the author of Bad English and Reading the OED.

 

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How advertisers used World War 1 to sell, sell, sell. (The Atlantic.)

“The cussed Huns have got my gramophone.” Via The Atlantic.

 

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XBMC, makers of media-center software—the initialism originally stood for Xbox Media Center—recently changed its name to Kodi. From legal and branding perspectives, it was a smart move. But many customers took to the comments section of the company’s blog to protest vehemently.

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Jewelry designer Wendy Brandes made a necklace. Literally.

“If you buy this, I guarantee you will literally enjoy the shit out of it.” – Wendy Brandes

 

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Color, value, and the evolution of logos. (The Trademark Blog.)

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How some of the world’s most famous restaurants—including Le Bernardin, Per Se, and Chez Panisse—got their names. (Via @socialdiner.)

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Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky—whose new book, The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, comes out in September—takes a close look at the words we use for tea: “These tea words (‘tea’, ‘cha’, ‘chai’, ‘matcha’, ‘laphet’) are players in an unusual linguistic story, in which two differing pronunciations of a word reflect the two ways that Europe and Asia have traded over the last 500 years: by land or by sea.”

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Anne Curzan on how Iron Dome, the Israeli anti-missile system, got its name:

[T]he project leader’s initial idea was straightforward: the Anti-Qassam, referring to the type of missiles most commonly fired by Hamas. When that was rejected as “problematic,” he and his wife came up with Golden Dome, an image that brings to mind the palaces of Kubla Khan or perhaps (closer to home) the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. That name was rejected as being too ostentatious, so under the pressure of time, gold was reduced to a lesser metal, and Iron Dome was born.

Ad Absurdum

Some days I question my ability to distinguish satire from sincerity.

 

“Gluten free flooring” from Heritage Salvage. San Francisco Chronicle, July 12.

 

In a world where gluten-free shampoo is a real thing*, who knows? Because grain elevators, people!

 

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* Tip: Keep your mouth closed when you wash your hair. And don’t lick the floorboards.

July Linkfest

The leaves of Citrus hystrix are used in many South and Southeast Asian cuisines; they’re sometimes called by their Thai name, makrut, but in many English-speaking countries they’ve long been called kaffir lime. That’s changing thanks to a protest “against the racial and religious slur of ‘kaffir’,” writes Tiffany Do in SF Weekly (“Citrus-Based Racism Leads Market to Change Product Names”). “Kaffir,” which comes from an Arabic word meaning “unbeliever,” was appropriated by English colonizers in South Africa, where it was used as a slur and a term of abuse against blacks. “What’s most surprising in this whole controversy is that the issue hasn't been addressed – and remedied – before now,” writes SF Weekly’s Do. Most markets are switching to the neutral “lime leaves.”

Photo via Flicker/robinejay

 

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Who decides what makes a word “real”? Anne Curzan, a language historian and member of the American Heritage Dictionary’s usage panel, explains why she finds language change “not worrisome but fun and fascinating.” (TEDxUofM talk; video and transcript.)

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What do speakers of Japanese, Spanish, and Finnish call “John Doe,” Mr. Anonymous Average Guy? Baby Name Wizard looks at the names of “nobodies” around the world. (For inanimate placeholder names, see my 2008 post on kadigan.)

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Struggling with the best way to tell your corporate story? ThinkShift distills the narrative into five essential elements.

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“The CIA is a prescriptivist scold, a believer in the serial comma, and a champion of ‘crisp and pungent’ language ‘devoid of jargon’”: Michael Silverberg, writing in Quartz about the recently declassified—and “ruthless”—CIA style manual. (Via @jessesheidlower.) By the way, since June 6 the CIA has had a public Twitter account.

 

We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.

— CIA (@CIA) June 6, 2014

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Another reason for style-guide fans to rejoice: the BBC News style guide is “now fully and freely available online,” writes Stan Carey in his Sentence First blog. I was particularly amused by the “Americanisms” section, which includes this starchy sentence:

We say: meet (not ‘meet with’),consult (not ‘consult with’), talk to (not ‘talk with’), protest against a decision (not ‘protest a decision’), appeal against a verdict (not ‘appeal a verdict’).

And, n.b., the BBC does not punctuate the abbreviations i.e. or e.g.

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In the early to mid-1960s, Mad magazine carried on a “glorious” and “fearless” anti-smoking campaign through parody ads that “closely resembled the real ones that ran on television and in magazines,” writes David Margolick in the New Yorker’s Culture Desk blog. The ads attacked tobacco companies, ad agencies, and smokers with equal-opportunity opprobrium. Mad has always been ad-free, and—unusual for the 1960s—its offices were “largely smoke free” as well: the magazine’s publisher, William Gaines, “was fanatically opposed to the habit,” writes Margolick.

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It’s not every day that a name developer has the chance to name a radically new technology. Anthony Shore had such a chance when the makers of a “cinematic virtual reality” device hired him. Read about how Jaunt got its name.

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“Machines don't need names, but we feel the need to name them,” writes Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic (“Why People Give Human Names to Machines”). The urge has long been with us, or at least some of us: a siege engine was named “Domina Gunilda” (“Lady Gunild”) in an Anglo-Norman document of 1330-1.

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Some of Facebook’s conference rooms are named after bad ideas (Sub-Prime Mortgages, Land War in Asia). The genetic-research company 23andMe names its computer servers after characters and plot points in “Arrested Development” (Gob, Annyong, Nevernude). These and many more lists of “clever names that companies have called their conference rooms, servers, etc.,” via Quora.

(My favorite submission comes from Erica Friedman, who once worked for an ad agency whose conference rooms were named Ideation, Creation, Dream, Coopetition [sic], and Resonate. “It was horrible and miserable and it still makes me shudder,” she writes. Erica and I are not related, but we are definitely soulmates.)

Flowifying the Name Trends

A mysterious blogger whom I know only as The Least Shrew—her Twitter bio identifies her as Kaylin in Akron, Ohio—has done me the great honor of turning a peculiar research project of mine into a flowchart that she calls “How to Name Your Website.”

 

“Is your brand cutesy? Hardcore? Buddhist? None of the above?” View and embiggen the full chart.

 

That’s right: she studied my Pinterest boards of naming trends—Names That End in -ly, Brand Names with Gratuitous Umlauts, and all the rest—and applied linear logic to them.

Of course, for strict accuracy, the label should be “How to Name Your Company or Product”—this is a lot bigger than websites. And until I told her about The Name Inspector’s Wall of Namifying—the project that inspired my own collections—The Least Shrew hadn’t been aware of it, so all those -ify names—Rockify, Subsify, Wingify, et al.—don’t get proper representation.

But those quibbles aside, it’s a brilliant infographic. I’m deeply flattered.

Thanks to Karen for the tweet that sent me there.