Fritinancy

Grimace

I have a confession: I have never eaten at a McDonald’s. Once, many years ago, I ducked into a Mickey D’s in Berkeley to use the restroom, and then ducked right out again. And once when I was babysitting a cranky child I briefly pacified him with a Happy Meal. But I myself have never eaten a Big Mac or a McRib or an Egg McMuffin or even the McDonald’s “salad.” I am, obviously, a Bad American.

I’m not totally ignorant. I’ve watched The Founder, the demi-factual 2016 film about Ray Kroc and the McDonald brothers, so I’m familiar with the origin story. And I’ve written about “You Deserve a Break Today,” the hugely influential McDonald’s ad campaign that ran from 1971 to 1990.

Like just about everyone, I knew about Ronald McDonald, the clown mascot who first appeared in Washington, DC, in 1963. (He was originally portrayed by Willard Scott, former Bozo the Clown, future Today Show weatherman.) But somehow I’d never, even once, heard of the big purple blob called Grimace, a denizen of McDonaldland who’s celebrating his 52nd birthday this month.

Grimace evolution via McDonald’s Wiki

 

And I might have remained blissfully unaware of Grimace were it not for a June 12 post about Grimace’s birthday on The Impulsive Buy, a blog about fast food and supermarket snacks. To celebrate the occasion, McDonald’s is offering a combo meal consisting of a Big Mac or Chicken McNuggets, fries, and a Grimace’s Birthday Shake. The shake, writes TIB correspondent Marvo, “has a delightful blueberry flavor that reminds me of the fruit at the bottom of a blueberry yogurt but a little more intense.”

But enough about food. What’s the Grimace story, and why the name?

Mascots in the news

I have mixed feelings about mascots. The whole concept of adults dressing up as animals—“wearing the fur,” in the haunting phrase from Stephen King’s novel Joyland—strikes me as more than a little creepy. On the other hand, a high school classmate of mine moved to Orlando and enjoyed a satisfying career portraying either Chip or Dale (she switched between them) for the guests at Disney World, and I’m happy for her.

I’ve written about mascots when I’ve found a naming angle. That’s what happened this week: I read three fascinating stories about mascots that are also about names and naming. And fandom. And storytelling.

Luigi Francisco Seal, better known as Lou Seal, the San Francisco Giants’ mascot since 1996. Read a Q&A with him here. Image via Reddit.

Cleveland's baseball team is now the Guardians

They could have been the Spiders. Instead, Cleveland’s major-league baseball team, known for more than a century as the Indians, will be called the Guardians. The change will take place at the end of the 2021 baseball season.

The “Guardians” name pays tribute to a Cleveland landmark: the twin Guardians of Traffic statues on the Hope Memorial Bridge, near the team’s home ballpark, Progressive Field. Sports Illustrated provided some historical detail:

The Guardians of Traffic statues have flanked both sides of the Hope Memorial Bridge since 1932. Each of the four-winged Art Deco figures sports winged helmets and crowns, and each statue holds a different vehicle to signify "the spirit of progress in transportation," per bridge engineer Wilbur Watson. Each guardian stands 43 feet tall, and they remain the only public Art Deco monuments in Cleveland.

Word of the week: Peccy

I thought I knew quite a bit about Amazon. I have, after all, been a customer since September 1997. (My first order: The Cynic’s Dictionary and Idiom Savant: Slang as It Is Slung.) I’ve written about the company and its brands (see here and here, for example). I’ve read two books about the company: Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America (2021) and Brad Stone’s The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2014)*.

But I’ve never worked for Amazon, which may explain my not knowing that the company had a mascot called Peccy.

June linkfest

This month’s book recommendation, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, by Kathryn Schulz, is ten years old and as timely as ever.

I wrote last month about Schulz’s excellent pieces for the New Yorker, and I’m here to tell you that Being Wrong is every bit as well researched, witty, and graceful. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that I’m fascinated by failure, but hey—everyone has a story to tell about wrongness petty or vast. Schulz’s catalog of errors includes explorers undone by mirages, buyers beset by remorse, the famous gorilla-on-the-basketball-court experiment, the impossibility of saying “I am wrong” (as opposed to “I was wrong”), and the ’Cuz It’s True Constraint (a name I love). She dips into cognitive psychology, history, philosophy, aesthetics, and religion; Newsweek called the book “intellectualism made fun!” and it is.

I listened to the audiobook, and immediately discovered that I’d been wrong for ages about the pronunciation of the author’s last name. It rhymes with pools, not cults.

You can read an excerpt from Chapter 1 here.

It's about time, Aunt Jemima

When Quaker Oats announced Wednesday that it would be changing the packaging and name of its 131-year-old Aunt Jemima brand, my immediate response was: What took them so long?

Original pancake mix with the most recent Aunt Jemima update, circa 1989. I’ve been unable to learn the name of the woman whose image is used in the current packaging; she may be a composite.

 

This is a brand name whose racist roots are only thinly covered by a modern mascot. It’s a troubled name that hurts far more than it helps. Its retirement is decades overdue.

On the Visual Thesaurus: The new eponyms

My new column for the Visual Thesaurus considers a batch of new brand names, including Mr. Cooper (the insurance company formerly known as Nationstar), Penny (a personal- finance app), Dave (another personal-finance app), Oscar (a health-insurance company), June (an “intelligent oven”), and Alexa (the Amazon device). All of these names are eponyms – derived from proper nouns. But unlike previous generations of brand eponyms – Wendy’s, Ben & Jerry’s, Mary Kay, Sam’s Club – these eponyms aren’t taken from the names of founders or founders’ relatives. Instead, they’re wholly fictional.

 

The illustration on Mr. Cooper’s website isn’t identified as the fictional Mr. Cooper, but it could be.

 

Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers. Here’s an excerpt:

A corporate press release for Mr. Cooper said the name was selected from among thousands of candidates “to personify the next generation of home loan servicing and lending for the company”: It “represents a more personal relationship customers can have with their home loan provider.”

But can you really have a personal relationship with a fictional persona? Dave and June and the rest of the crowd are counting on it, but the assumption strikes me as disingenuous. The new eponyms are less suggestive of living, breathing humans than of characters in a play or – even more to the point – mascots.

We often think of mascots as representing sports teams or events: the San Francisco Giants’ Lou Seal; “Olly” and “Syd” from the 2000 summer Olympics in Sydney. But a mascot can be any person or thing that is supposed to bring luck. The word came into English in 1881 from French mascotte, a talisman or sorcerer’s charm; an 1880 French play, La Mascotte, popularized the word, which may have its origins in Latin masca, or “mask.” (It’s worth noting here that personal and person also come from a root – in this case, Greek – meaning “mask.”)

Read the rest of the column.

Blog bonus: My Pinterest board of fictional brand eponyms.

Mr. Product

I’ve been working on a massive update to my series on “Mister” brand names (coming soon!). Meanwhile, I stumbled across a couple of Misters that deserve special mention of their own.

Meet Mr. Product Volume 1 and Mr. Product Volume 2. Image via Brand New.

Troubled names

If your brand name is telling an inappropriate story—possibly even offending or angering people in your audience—would you want to change it?

The answer seems obvious. But recent news stories suggest that intransigence and a tin ear sometimes trump ethics and common sense.

Yes, I’m talking about the Washington Redskins (football) and the Cleveland Indians (baseball), long-established names once again making news for something other than athletic feats. I’m also talking about a newer, smaller brand that’s been in hot water for reasons that may not be apparent to non-Hawaiians: Hula, an app for promoting STD awareness and prevention.

Washington Redskins area rug via Home Depot

 

“Redskins” is a slur against Native Americans. “Indians” is more neutral, but the team mascot, “Chief Wahoo,” is a cringe-inducing cartoon stereotype.

Chief Wahoo, mascot of the Cleveland Indians.

 

And hula is much more than grass skirts and undulating hips: to native Hawaiians it’s a sacred ritual. 

Name in the News: El Paso Chihuahuas

Grant Barrett, co-host of public radio’s “A Way with Words,” alerted me to a new name that’s provoking howls among some baseball fans: the El Paso Chihuahuas.

Logo by San Diego design agency Brandiose, which specializes in sports-team identities.

 

The team is the Triple-A affiliate of the San Diego Padres; under new ownership by the MountainStar Sports Group, the team is moving to El Paso in 2014 after three seasons as the Tucson Padres.

The “Chihuahuas” name was chosen in a fan contest. According to the MiLB (Minor League Baseball) website:

The smallest of the world’s dog breeds was chosen over four other finalists in a “Name The Team” contest that garnered over 5,000 submissions, triumphing over Aardvarks, Buckaroos, Desert Gators and Sun Dogs. …

El Paso general manager Brad Taylor said Chihuahuas was chosen as the team name because they “represent fun and are fiercely loyal.” The region’s fans were able to submit names through the team’s website. The list was narrowed based on creativity, marketability, fun, relevance to El Paso’s unique character and the ability to trademark the name.

“El Pasoans played a significant role in identifying our new team name – they attended focus groups, suggested several hundred different names, and voted in record numbers for all the names,” said Alan Ledford, president of MountainStar Sports Group.

¡Ay, chihuahua! Just because they crowdsourced the name doesn’t mean the whole crowd approves. “What a complete slap in the face to all of us El Pasoans!!!” lamented Scott Ziegler in a comment to the MiLB article. “#Padres must be thinking it will motivate players to get to the Majors quickly,” tweet-snorted Kenneth Dame. As of yesterday afternoon, more than 8,000 people had signed a Change.org petition asking MountainStar Sports Group to “not only strongly reconsider the name of our city's baseball team, but allow our taxpayers to vote on the final name, not just simply ‘recommend’ ideas for the name.”

Well, you know how I feel about mob rule democracy in creative decisions.

Not all of the response has been negative, the San Diego U-T reported. Consider this tweet from Chihuahuas broadcaster Tim Hagerty:

It took the Tucson Padres three years to get 10,000 Facebook likes. It took the El Paso Chihuahuas 20 hours.

— Tim Hagerty (@tdhagerty) October 23, 2013

Here’s my own dos pesos: A polarizing name—even a negative name—can make a strong brand. And “Chihuahuas” scores well compared to some other baseball-team names. Padres? Sexist and faithist! Indians? Racist! Two major-league teams are named for socks. Socks! (I do, however, tip my cap to the Amsterdam-Gloversville-Johnstown Hyphens.) By contrast, the association of Chihuahuas with “small and feisty”—feisty comes from feist, “a small, belligerent dog”—seems appropriate and engaging.

“A Meticulous Metric of Team Names.” Embiggen (and order the poster.)

 

Then there’s the international-friendship potential: Why couldn’t the city of Chihuahua, Mexico, name its baseball team the El Pasos?

And for you brand nostalgists, just imagine: the advent of the Chihuahuas could portend the resurrection of the Taco Bell chihuahua of blessed memory (1997-2000).

¡Yo quiero Taco Bell! ¡Yo quiero Chihuahuas!