Fritinancy

Name in the News: CannaCon

I’m winding up #WeedWeek—a series of posts on the marketing of legal marijuana—with a look at CannaCon, a four-day cannabis convention and expo coming to Tacoma, Washington, next week.

“Nation’s Largest Cannabis Expo.”

 

In 2012, Washington State voters passed Initiative 502, which legalized the possession and cultivation of marijuana in small amounts; the first legal retail sales in the state began in early July 2014. As a result, Washington has become a hub of legal-cannabis—or “cannabusiness,” as it's being called—activity. Sponsors of next week’s convention include the National Cannabis Chamber of Commerce, Dope magazine, MJBA (Marijuana Business Association, “the authoritative voice of legal marijuana in America”), and Marijuana Venture (“the news source for professional marijuana growers and producers”).

Overall, the marketing is polished, sophisticated, and even witty.

 

National CC of C logo, with smoking eagle and cannabis leaf rampant.

 

 

WPA-style MJBA poster on the California MJBA website.

 

Linguistically, CannaCon follows a venerable naming convention (pun intended) for fan gatherings. The original enduring X-con was Comic-Con (aka San Diego Comic-Con International), founded in 1970 and held annually ever since; the con is shorthand for convention. (According to Francesca Coppa, author of “A Brief History of Media Fandom,” part of a collection of essays on fan communities, con for convention had already been in use since at least the early 1940s.)

In 2010, the linguist Mark A. Mandel presented a paper at the American Name Society’s annual meeting on what he dubbed “Conomastics,” a blend of the con affix and onomastics, the science of naming. Mandel focused on gatherings of speculative fiction, fantasy, alternate history, and related interests, including media, music, gaming, and furry. Among the X-cons he reported on were Gaylaxicon (“gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered people and their friends”; from gay and galaxy); Smofcon (Secret Masters of Fandom Convention); MaulCon (gaming; held at a mall); Daikon (the Japanese national con, held in Osaka; dai means “big,” and a daikon is a big radish); LepreCon (Arizona science-fiction art and literature convention originally held in March on St. Patrick’s Day, more recently in April or May); SpoCon (“a full-spectrum science-fiction and fantasy convention held in Spokane, Washington”); and Millennium Philcon (the 2001 Worldcon, or World Science Fiction Convention, held at the turn of the millennium in Philadelphia; also a pun on Millennium Falcon, Han Solo’s ship in Star Wars).

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Previously on #WeedWeek: Budtender, “Just Say Know” (Leafly), and How Otoké Got Its Name.

Related: Tweed (a licensed Canadian marijuana grower), ganja-preneur.

For further reading, see “High Time,” the New York Times’s multi-part series on marijuana (including a pro-legalization editorial), which ran in the paper last week.

How Otoke Got Its Name

I’m generally not a fan of company names that require phonetic pronunciation guides, but I’ll make an exception for Otoké Horticulture, a Colorado-based consultant to marijuana growers throughout the United States. The name story is just too good.

It’s “oh-toh-KAY.” P.S. Surely they can improve on the Papyrus typeface.

 

Given the company’s line of work, I at first surmised that the name was a thinly veiled allusion to “Oh! Toke!” It certainly seemed apt. (Did you know that the verb to toke refers exclusively to inhaling marijuana, and may come from Spanish tocar, to touch? I didn’t.)

But then I wondered about the acute accent over the e, which clearly alters the pronunciation. A brief bout of research revealed that otoke, pronounced oh-toh-kay, is Korean for “what to do?” or “what do I/we do?”

Image from Dramafever: “101 Korean pop culture words you absolutely must know.” (Also on the list: bagel girl, “a girl with a glamorous body and a baby face.”)

 

Well, that works pretty well, too.

But guesswork won’t suffice for How They Got That Name, so I emailed the company. The response, from co-owner Kurt Badertscher, was prompt—and cryptic.

There is a  personal story behind it, which is usually a bad basis for a name. 

I persisted. Kurt relented.

[Company co-owner] Kerrie [Badertscher] had a native American friend who called her Otoke telling her it meant star of hope in Cherokee. When she started the company, she decided to call it Otoke and went looking for the Cherokee meaning only to find out her friend had been hitting on her with the start [sic] of hope line and the only place we can find a real meaning was that in Korean, it means What’s up/happening or such.

 

It isn’t often that a failed pickup line becomes a successful business name. Well played, Otoké.

By the way, if you live in a state where marijuana cultivation is legal—like, say, Colorado—you may want to buy the Badertschers’ magnum opus, Cannabis for Capitalists. The table of contents (which is all I’ve read) runs to more than nine pages, and looks to my untutored eye to be pretty darned comprehensive. I admit I’m curious about the epilogue: “R.I.P. Mary Jane Superweed.”

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Previously on #WeedWeek: Budtender, Just Say Know (Leafly).

“Just Say Know”

Leafly, which calls itself “the world’s largest cannabis information resource”—and which Business Insider has called “Yelp for weed”—took out a full-page ad in Sunday’s New York Times to congratulate New York State for passing the Compassionate Care Act, which legalizes the medical use of marijuana. The ad ran on Page 19 of the main news section.

 

The Times ad, via Leafly.

 

A version of the ad also appeared on the Times website. Someone with a puckish sense of humor placed it adjacent to media reporter David Carr’s Monday column.

 

 

Carr, in case you didn’t know, published a memoir in 2010 about his drug-and-booze-plagued youth and adulthood. Here’s a bit of the book review that ran in the Times:

Back in the 1980s, when he was a reporter for an alternative weekly in Minneapolis and later for a local business monthly, Carr had a cocaine problem that spiraled downward from snorting to smoking to injecting. He also drank too much, did some low-level dealing and was arrested innumerable times.

Of course, the ad placement could be a coincidence.

The Leafly ad works on several levels. It depicts smartly attired, purposeful-seeming young adults who, we’re told, have fought serious illnesses.  (Marijuana: It’s not just for stoners!) It strikes a serious, science-y tone with those faux periodic-table abbreviations for cannabis strains. (The tamer ones, to be sure. You’ll have to visit the Leafly website to read up on Matanuska Thunder Fuck, Jack the Ripper, or AK-48.)

And it puns effectively on “Just Say No,” the much-trumpeted (and mocked) slogan—inspired by a comment by Nancy Reagan, wife of the president—of the U.S. War on Drugs* campaign of the 1980s and 1990s.

Mrs. Reagan saying no with a smile. Via The College of William & Mary, “Mainstream Drug Use in America.”

 

“Just Say Know” is appropriate to Leafly’s “knowledge is power” brand. Here’s an excerpt from the company’s press release about the Times ad:

We want to help New York patients learn about cannabis and make responsible and informed consumer choices about the product best suited for their medical conditions. Patients need a reliable, mainstream information portal about cannabis that is free of classic stoner stereotypes, and we truly believe that Leafly is the resource for them.

Note the language:

Responsible. Choices. Information. Medical conditions. Resource. 

Very earnest. Very judicious. Very smart.

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention the Leafly name, one of the dozens and dozens of Names That End in -ly—apps, startup companies, news organizations, and more—that are so very popular at the moment. It’s a name that blends into the brand landscape so predictably, so boringly, that you’re hardly aware that it represents a substance that will still get you prison time in a majority of jurisdictions. (To date, only 23 states and the District of Columbia have legalized some form of marijuana commerce.)

Indeed, almost everything about the ad and the company speaks in reassuring tones and mainstream tropes. The only suggestion of rule-breaking—and it’s a faint one—appears in the tiny type under the #justsayknow hashtag: “A Privateer Holdings company.” Privateer—“a private equity firm shaping the future of the legal cannabis industry”—takes its name from a seventeenth-century term for an armed, privately owned vessel commissioned for war service by a government.

In short, the ad seems to be signaling a new era in legal, mainstream marijuana marketing.

Here’s what Jesse Walker wrote about the ad in the libertarian publication Reason:

The most striking thing about the ad is that it isn’t striking at all. It would be easy to flip past this quickly without recognizing that it's about cannabis—and even if you do pause long enough to see what's being advertised, the idea of an ad for a marijuana review site in The New York Times just doesn't sound all that bizarre anymore. That’s when you know a social revolution is succeeding: when it starts to feel banal.

 

Previously on #WeedWeek: Budtender.

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* Or, as some of us prefer to call it, the War on Some Drugs.

Word of the Week: Budtender

Budtender: A worker at a dispensary of medical or recreational marijuana who helps customers with their selections. Formed from bud (of marijuana) and bartender.

As of July 2014, 23 states and the District of Columbia had laws legalizing the sale and use of marijuana. Two of them, Washington and Colorado, have made marijuana legal for recreational as well as medical use, and Oregon voters will decide in November whether to legalize adult use of marijuana. With the changing legal climate come new additions to an already fragrant lexicon of cannabis use.

Last month, for example, New York Times reporter Lois Smith Brady—who created the paper’s “Vows” feature back in 1992—wrote about some new wedding rites in Colorado and Washington.

Today, there are “budtenders” (think sommeliers, only they work with cannabis instead of wine) in every dispensary, to help couples who are so inclined find the ideal strains for their weddings. Bec Koop just opened a business, Buds and Blossoms in Alma, Colo., to advise those who want to include marijuana in their centerpieces, dinner salads, bouquets and boutonnieres (or “bud-tonnieres,” as she calls them).

Brady cautioned not to read too much into such enterprises:

It is hard to predict if pot will become more or less popular at weddings in the future. Mark Buddemeyer, a Colorado budtender whose nickname is actually Bud, expressed doubts that marijuana would ever become widely acceptable at weddings.

“We’ve got to get to the point where smoking is classier than drinking,” he said. “A bride blowing out a big cloud of smoke is not necessarily attractive.”

Eating cannabis-infused cake—referred to as a “medible” in the article, a contraction of “medicinal edible”—may find more favor.

Legal marijuana has also spawned many new business names, including several mentioned by Brady: Get High Getaways, a bed-bud-and-breakfast in Denver; Green Life Consulting, “an advisory firm for those who want to start marijuana-based businesses”; and 710 Labs, “which manufactures concentrates like hash oil.” (Why “710”? When you turn the digits upside down they spell “OIL.”)

The earliest citation for budtender in Urban Dictionary is dated April 7, 2010: “a barista that can’t pass a drug test.” A July 4, 2011, definition includes this personal aside:

These are also some of the luckiest motherfuckers on the face of the earth. Despite that, you should still tip them as heavily as you can possibly afford to.

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Related: my posts on Tweed and ganja-preneur.

Name in the News: Tweed

The main headline in the business section of Sunday’s New York Times was “When Cannabis Goes Corporate”; the story centered on Tweed Marijuana, one of 20 companies officially licensed to grow marijuana in Canada.

Tweed Marijuana logo. Lovely typeface.

 

There are no precise equivalents to Tweed outside Canada, where marijuana cultivation and sale are federally regulated.* But even without direct comparison, the Tweed name stands out as multilayered and highly distinctive.

Word of the Week: Ganja-preneur

Ganja-preneur: “An American capitalist profiting from the recent pseudo-legalization of marijuana in the U.S. by opening up a dispensary that sells the plant in smokeable form to registered medical marijuana patients.” (Urban Dictionary, Jan. 15, 2010.) Also spelled ganjapreneur.

 

San Francisco Chronicle, May 19, 2012. Headline was changed in the online version.

 

Ganja, a synonym for marijuana, is the English spelling of gānjhā, the Hindi word for “hemp,” which comes from Sanskrit gañjaḥ (“hemp”). According to the OED, ganja first appeared in print in 1800, in a letter from the Duke of Wellington. In recent years it has become a prefix in many slang terms, including ganjacologist, ganjanomics, ganjarrhea, and ganj o’clock. (Thank you, Urban Dictionary!) 

Ganjapreneur T-shirt from Etsy.

 

For many other -preneur blends, including ecopreneur, funpreneur, mommypreneur, and warrior-preneur, see my 2009 post “Enterprising Language.”