Fritinancy

Word of the week: Magenta

Every December since 1999, the color mavens at Pantone have announced a color of the year for the upcoming twelve-month period. The Pantone color for 2023, revealed earlier this month, is Viva Magenta, a color that

balances boldness with a feeling of fun. This dynamic mix exudes rebellion, but not at the expense of softness. It embodies an expression of fierce grace, inspiring us to show up with confidence and humanity. The digital space has accelerated globalization, and as a result, we are more deeply connected to each other than ever before. We can never fully understand what lies beneath the surface of the friends and strangers we meet, but we can always work to deepen our empathy. The Color of the Year 2023 speaks to our desire to take on new challenges and try the unconventional while meeting others with compassion.

That’s a lot of words for a color that looks like this.

 

Unless it looks like this.

Image via Pantone.com

Red? Purple? It’s a mystery.

 

Women’s high-top sneaker in Viva Magenta from Cariuma.

Word of the week: Bimbo

Ms. magazine, which launched 50 years ago this summer, wasn’t destined to be called Ms. In a roundtable interview about the magazine’s founding, published this week in the New York Times Sunday Review, Letty Cottin Pogrebin recalls that one name she and her co-founders considered was Sisters. Another was Sojourner, in honor of the 19th-century African American activist Sojourner Truth. And at one point, co-founder Gloria Steinem suggested Bimbo. “She meant it as an ironic appropriation,” Pogrebin told the Times, “but in those years, we didn’t have the luxury of irony.”

This wasn’t the only bimbo-drop in the June 19 Sunday Review: On the very same spread as the Ms. story is an essay about “BimboTok,” a “sex-positive and sex-work-positive” subset of TikTok where “comedians and creators mix makeup tips with articulations of left-leaning politics” while “talking about how hot and dumb” they are. “BimboTok came about at a time when the girlboss had more or less faded as a trendy cultural type,” writes the author, Sophie Haigney. “Bimboism offers an opposing and, to some, refreshing premise: Value me, look at me, not because I’m smart and diligent, but for the fact that I’m not.”

Neither of these stories troubles to define bimbo; both seem to take it for granted that we know what it means: An unserious young woman with what used to be called loose morals. An airhead. A floozy.

But bimbo wasn’t always an insult. It didn’t even always refer to a woman. Originally a masculine Italian diminutive, the word migrated a century ago into American slang, where it changed its sex and its sense.

Word of the week: Paparazzo

The death, on April 30, of the American photographer Ron Galella brought the fun-to-say Italian borrowing paparazzo back into the news. Galella, who was 91, was a “paparazzo extraordinaire,” the Telegraph and the Guardian headlined. “He personified the paparazzi,” the New York Times obituary reported, using the plural form: “brazen and relentless in chasing the famous, particularly Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.”

Galella himself proudly accepted the title of “paparazzo extraordinaire,” appropriating it for the title of his 2012 memoir.

Advertisement for a 2012 book-signing event for Ron Galella: Paparazzo Extraordinaire via New York Gossip Gal.

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.

Word of the week: Cascatelli

By one food expert’s count, there are at least 300 types of pasta, from teeny pastini to largish lasagne, and those 300 types have at least 1,200 names, depending on which region they’re made in. You might think there was nothing left to discover or invent, pasta-wise, but you would be wrong. Behold the newest shape—and name—in the pastaverse: cascatelli.

 

 

Word of the week: Gambit

I usually wait for at least three sightings of a phenomenon to declare a trend. But in the case of gambit, I decided that two big, unrelated occurrences within a single week were sufficient. They were certainly enough to start me scurrying down multiple rabbit holes, etymological and cultural.

Can a name be TOO distinctive?

(Part of my Naming 101 series.)

As trademark lawyers love to remind us, distinctiveness is a paramount goal of brand naming. A name doesn’t need to be original – consider Dove deodorant and Dove chocolate — but it does need to stand out in its category.

But can a name ever be too distinctive – too much of an outlier to connect with its intended audience?

I recently spoke with a business owner via Clarity, the expert-advice service, who wanted my opinion on a name that was distinctive in the extreme. This person, a graphic designer in the Pacific Northwest, was dissatisfied with her current business name, which combines her initials with “design.” She’d come up with a new name and, she told me in an introductory email, had already bought a couple of domains associated with it. The name she wanted my opinion on was MOZZAFIATO.

Mozza-what?

 

It sounded distinctive, all right. It also sounded like nothing I’d ever heard of. Google Translate told me mozzafiato is an Italian word meaning “breathtaking,” which is nice but not helpful. How was this name going to help the designer grow her business?

Portmanteaus in the wild: Seattle and Vancouver

Last week I took the Coast Starlight to Seattle, a city I hadn’t visited in decades, and Vancouver, BC, where I’d never been at all. The journey was leisurely and scenic, the weather was mild and dry, and the political climate shift after I crossed the border was startling in the best possible way. I don’t think I’d fully appreciated how exhausting it has been, over the last 18 months or so, to live in the U.S. until I found myself in a country where sanity and courtesy appear to be the norm.

Oh, and I did some brand-spotting. The theme: portmanteaus, good and bad.

How Serra got its name

Recreational cannabis has been sold legally in Oregon since October 1, 2015; since January 1, 2017, dispensaries have been required to apply for and receive licenses from the Oregon Liquor Control Commission. In early January, the Portland Business Journal reported* that the OLCC had received 1,907 recreational marijuana license applications in 2016, and that the total number of licensed retailers had more than doubled in 2016, from 99 to 260.**

One of those green rush beneficiaries is Serra, which opened its first store in Portland in 2016 and which now operates a second Portland store as well as one in Eugene, home of the University of Oregon.

 

Logo design and application by Thomas C. Bradley for Official Mfg. Co., Portland.

 

The stores have been praised for their high-end aesthetics (“The most sophisticated cannabis dispensary in the city, if not the country.” – Wallpaper. “When you leave Serra, the feeling is similar to leaving Anthropologie: slightly numbed by the curated beauty of the place, a sense of being underdressed, but without the guilt of paying too much for something you'll ruin in one smoke sesh” – the Potlander, which is not a typo). And the verbal identity is similarly bar-raising: no “leaf” pun, no 420 variation, no “green,” no “bud,” no “Mary Jane.” 

But where does “Serra” come from, and what does it mean?

Word of the week: Risotto

Risotto: “An Italian dish of rice cooked in stock with ingredients such as vegetables and meat or seafood” (OED). The dish is associated with northern Italy and particularly Milan (risotto milanese). From Italian riso (rice) and the diminutive suffix -otto. ItalyHeritage.com offers alternate etymologies: “Some say it came from an exclamation of Frederick Barbarossa, who praised a ‘Risum optimum’; others maintain it derived from a term used by the Insubres, the Celts that inhabited Lombardy, ‘risott.’”

Risotto was in the news last week because of a tidbit in Democratic National Committee chair John Podesta’s emails, which were hacked and released by WikiLeaks. Business Insider’s Allan Smith tweeted the revelation:

LEAKED: Wikileaks hack reveals John Podesta's secret to creamy Risotto pic.twitter.com/A5dW4mG9c6

— Allan Smith (@akarl_smith) October 11, 2016

(Also revealed: Like many people, Podesta has trouble with possessive its.)