It’s the end of the year as we know it, and I feel linky.
*
New York-based creative director Lukas Weber turned some familiar online abbreviations – LOL, ROFL, BTW, and more – into familiar-looking logos. (Via Brand New blog)
*
“An examination of today’s American skull logos shows a variety of businesses exhibiting crude expressions of menace, juvenile assertions of badassedness, and more than a little fascist iconography.” (Emblemetric)
*
| |
|
This month we give thanks for WOTY, dictionaries, diet jargon, naming advice, and more.
*
Word-of-the-year season kicks off in traditional fashion with the Oxford Dictionaries selection. This year it’s toxic, as in toxic masculinity and toxic chemical. Interestingly, toxic derives from the Greek term for word for “poisoned arrow,” but only the “arrow” part. Toxic won out over other words on the shortlist, including incel, gaslighting, big dick energy, and gammon, the last of which was a Fritinancy word of the week in May. Oxford’s word of the year is “a word of expression that is judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year, and have lasting potential as a term of cultural significance.” Read more.
*
Big dict energy: The stupendously useful Green’s Dictionary of Slang – which was published in three volumes in the UK in 2010 and which moved online in 2016 – is now free to all users. Read more in Ben Yagoda’s post on Lingua Franca, and follow Jonathon Green on Twitter.
*
This tweet is good, and the thread that follows (click on the date stamp) is even better.
Trump cereals:
— The Volatile Mermaid (@OhNoSheTwitnt) November 15, 2018
- Total Witch Hunt
- Golden Shower Grahams
- Leerios
- ICE Krispies
- Porn Flakes
- Racism Bran
- Special KKK
- Your Votes Don’t Count Chocula
- Honeycombover
*
| |
|
Duck Fart, Buttery Nipple, and other “yummy cocktails with nasty-sounding names.” (Dictionary.com)
*
Tesla CEO Elon Musk made an April Fools’ joke about “Teslaquila.” Now the company has filed an intent-to-use trademark application for Tesla-branded tequila. (Bloomberg)
*
Video explainer: How the Beatles got their logo. (Brand New)
*
Moons can have moons and they are called moonmoons https://t.co/PsLixAufSS pic.twitter.com/mefZ7aFZ7X
— New Scientist (@newscientist) October 10, 2018
*
I’m quoted in this article by Corinne Purtill on the difference between asshat and assclown. (Quartz)
*
And here’s more about asshat. (Merriam-Webster)
*
| |
|
You know how Google names its Android versions after sweets like Kit Kat and Marshmallow? Well, writes Justin Pot, Microsoft should name its updates after dogs. (How to Geek)
*
Speaking of Kit Kat, the brand is hugely popular in Japan, in part because “Kit Kat” translates to “You will surely win.” (Fortune; h/t MJF)
*
A century ago, dozens of American girls were named Milady because of the success of a new product: the Milady Décolleté Gillette safety razor, developed to remove underarm hair. (And did you know that “underarm” was coined as a euphemism for “armpit”?) (Baby Name Wizard)
*
| |
|
Is an Eataly ad for truffles offensive to Italians and Italian-Americans? (Chicago Tribune)
| |
|
The last linkfest of 2017! Let’s exorcise this miserable year with some amusing and edumacational links. And have yourselves a merry little Festivus.
*
Drew Magary is back with the 2017 edition of his Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma catalog: “More than any reindeer parable or silly children’s rhyme, it is THIS catalog and its splendidly useless items wherein you and I can discover the TRUE meaning of Christmas, which is that it delays the pain and horrors of this shit world at least until after New Year’s.”
“You listen to me, Williams-Sonoma: There will NEVER be a fondueassaince. Ever.”
*
| |
|
In 1879, a telegraphic code book proposed SCOTUS as shorthand for “Supreme Court of the United States.” Ammon Shea, writing for the Merriam-Webster blog, traced the next -OTUS coinage to the 1890s, when telegraph operators began using POTUS to abbreviate “President of the United States.” Both acronyms became widespread, joined in the 1980s by FLOTUS (First Lady of the United States), which may have originated as Secret Service code for Nancy Reagan. “Time will tell if additional -OTUS words continue to join our language,” Shea concluded.
We didn’t have to wait long. In early February 2017, after President Trump lashed out at a “so-called judge” who halted his travel ban, SCROTUS began circulating widely on social media. This tweet appears to be the first to use the definition “So-Called Ruler of the United States.”
@jonathanalter ... SCROTUS stands for "So Called Ruler of the United States."
— Laura Sanders (@ViaDZine) February 4, 2017
On February 11, it entered the Urban Dictionary.
The coinage caught the attention of celebrities.
Overheard this new title for Trump: SCROTUS. The "So-Called Ruler of the United States."
— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) February 12, 2017
And at least one elected official.
DING, DING, DING! Here it is; THIS is what we've been looking for. pic.twitter.com/9tP5BIDJxh
— Sherry Frost (@frostnhstaterep) February 11, 2017
It even crossed the Atlantic.
Glad that McCain is speaking out on these matters. I heard a new one this weekend in England = SCROTUS So-called Ruler of The United States https://t.co/QjIJmUvBhB
— Mary Langford (@LangfordIEC) February 19, 2017
But the history of SCROTUS is older and more various – and dirtier – than the “so-called” acronym.
| |
|
On January 22, presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and defended a (provably false) statement by the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, about the size of the crowd at his boss’s swearing-in ceremony. Spicer wasn’t telling lies, Conway insisted; he was presenting “alternative facts.”
The phrase quickly became a social-media meme and an entry in Urban Dictionary. (Definition: “The worst of the four classifications of lies: lies, damned lies, statistics, alternative facts. Alternative facts are distinguished from the other damnable lies by the addition of gaslighting the listener.”)
And then it appeared in ads.
| |
|
A few years ago I wrote a guest post for the trademark-and-branding blog Duets Blog that, if I say so myself, seems as fresh and relevant today – especially today – as it did then. I’ve updated it a bit and am publishing it here as a public service.
**
| |
|
The ABC Family network, stigmatized by that F-word in its name, now calls itself Freeform. Network president Tom Ascheim told the Television Critics Association that the new name “not only elicits the moment of transition in the medium and a sense of ‘creativity’ and ‘spontaneity’ but also evokes [a] younger 14 to 34-year-old audience, whom he’s dubbed ‘becomers’.” So much to ponder in that single sentence. (Hollywood Reporter)
As for the Freeform logo, Brand New dismisses it as “atrocious in either its stacked or horizontal form.”
| |
|
