Fritinancy

Word of the week: Mjolnir

The pharmaceutical company Merck announced on October 1 that its new oral antiviral medication reduced by about 50 percent the risk of hospitalization and death in people with mild or moderate cases of COVID-19, and that it would seek emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for its use in the US.

The new drug’s generic name: molnupiravir.

Multisyllabic pharmaceutical names are of course nothing new. What’s unusual is molnupiravir’s origin, and the fact that Merck has publicly discussed the naming story.

Dean Li, Merck’s head of research and development, told the medical publication Stat News:

“Our prediction from our in vitro studies and now with this data is that molnupiravir is named after the right — you know, it’s named after Thor’s hammer [Mjollnir], this is a hammer against SARS-CoV-2 regardless of the variant.”

“The mighty Thor cannot reach his enchanged hammer! Is this to be Loki’s final victory???”: Marvel Comics

Words of the year 2020: Fritinancy edition

 COVID, COVID, COVID, impeachment, COVID.

Just kidding. Sort of.

Yes, 2020 was the year in which Donald J. Trump was impeached by the US Senate House of Representatives. It was also the year in which he was soundly defeated at the polls by Joe Biden, although as of this writing his legal shenanigans and email grifting continue unabated, as I expect they will until Biden is sworn in on January 20, 2021.

But the impeachment took place in January and February, and in March everything changed thanks to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which has influenced our behavior and our language in ways we couldn’t have anticipated in early 2020. My list this year reflects many of those new COVID-inspired terms, but it also makes room for fashion and politics. Like the American Dialect Society, I give preference to words (or “lexical items”—acronyms and phrases appear here, too) that were new or newly prominent, widely used, and relevant to events of 2020. I’m also interested in words that were linguistically productive: capable of generating creative coinages.

By the way, this is my twelfth consecutive year of posting words of the year. I’m kind of shocked myself.

In alphabetical order, then:

Word of the week: Equisapien

Sorry to Bother You, now in theaters, was filmed in Oakland, California, where I live, with lots of recognizable landmarks in the background. But its characters are citizens of at least one alternate realm as well. The film, written and directed by activist-musician Boots Riley, begins as a workplace comedy set in a grim telemarketing firm – the film’s title comes from the script that our hero, Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield), must deliver – and quickly takes some surreal hairpin turns.

Lakeith Stanfield (left) and Armie Hammer in Sorry to Bother You

 

We end up in the offices of the ironically named WorryFree company, whose CEO, the hyper-libertarian Steve Lift (a composite of Steve Jobs and Lyft?), makes Cassius (also known as “Cash,” in case you didn’t catch on immediately) a Faustian offer he ultimately can’t refuse: $100 million in exchange for transforming – just for five years, you understand – into a bipedal horse-human hybrid. In the lingo of the film: an equisapien. It’s a word that, as far as I can tell, Riley invented for the film.*

I couldn’t find any images of Sorry to Bother You’s equisapiens, so here’s BoJack Horseman. More about him in a bit.

October linkfest

Fictional African countries are in the news these days thanks to the U.S. commander-in-chief’s name-checking “Nambia” and anticipation building for the Black Panther movie. (Marvel Comics fans will recall that the Black Panther hails from the land of Wakanda.) Naturally, there’s a Wikipedia entry on fictional African countries – updated to include Nambia. And here’s Marvel’s Black Panther wiki, which includes the Wakandan map and flag.

 

 

Five Naming "Rules" You Can Break with Impunity

Spend even five minutes searching for business-naming help and you’ll discover a lot of self-proclaimed experts dispensing free advice. In many cases, those “experts” are entrepreneurs themselves with one or two naming experiences to their credit—unlike professional name developers (me, for example) who’ve named hundreds of companies and products. As a result, much popular advice is of limited value (“Use a name generator”) or utterly untethered from reality (“Allow one day for the naming process”).

Now is the time to set the record straight. Here are five naming non-rules you can happily disregard:

Word of the Week: Tannoy

Tannoy: (UK) A loudspeaker or public-address system. From Tannoy, the trademark of a speaker manufacturer founded in London in 1926 and based in Scotland since the 1970s; genericized since the 1940s. Also used as a generic verb, “to call someone over a public-address system.”

Tannoy is a blend of tantalum alloy, the material used in an electrolytic rectifier developed by the company. The chemical element tantalum (symbol Ta) was discovered in 1802 and named for Tantalus, the character from Greek mythology who was forced to stand for eternity beneath a tree whose fruit was just out of his grasp. As you may have guessed, “Tantalus” is also the source of the English verb tantalize.

I knew about Tantalus and tantalize but had never encountered tannoy until I read a story by the actor John Lithgow published in the New York Times earlier this month. Lithgow is the only American in the cast of a current National Theatre production, The Magistrate; his essay is about the differences between US and UK theater customs. Here’s the lede:

The language of theater here is slightly different from ours in New York. The crackly speaker in a London dressing room is called the “tannoy.” The opening night of a London show is called its “Press Night.” When a stage manager announces the start of a performance, London actors don’t hear the word “places.” They hear “beginners.”

If you aren’t in London, you may be able to see Lithgow in The Magistrate in your own city through the magic of National Theatre Live, which broadcasts productions live (or almost live) to cinemas around the world. I caught The Magistrate in Berkeley last week and enjoyed it: it’s a late-Victorian farce, so expect plenty of groan-worthy plot contrivances along with well-earned laughs. The staging and acting—Lithgow’s included—are first rate. Check the site for broadcast dates.

Guest Post on Duets Blog: Nova Has Never Meant "No Go"

In a guest post for Duets Blog, I look at one of the most popular and persistent of all naming myths: the one about the Chevrolet Nova. The car hasn’t been produced since 1988, but the story about how the Nova name “failed” in Spanish-speaking countries—because it means “no go,” according to the legend—lives on.

Guess what? “Nova” isn’t “no va,” and the Nova sold well in Latin America.

Read the post to learn more about the “Nova” myth and why it has proved so surprisingly durable.

Some of my other guest posts for Duets Blog: white elephants, the Aveda trademark, Los Doyers, Festivus.

 

The New Yorker on Brand Names

Here’s how New Yorker staff writer John Colapinto begins “Famous Names,” in the magazine’s October 3 issue: with an edge-of-your-seat account of the naming process that resulted in … the BlackBerry! In 1998! Stop the presses!

That story was already well known to those of us in the branding business, and to many civilians as well, when Alex Frankel related it in greater detail in his book Wordcraft, which was published in 2004. It was repeated in newspapers and magazines. But maybe you haven’t heard it. In that case, read the New Yorker article. Yes, it’s behind a paywall. Sorry about that.

You should also read Colapinto’s article if you’ve never heard the story of Ford Motor Company and the branding of the Edsel. It occurred in 1957, and it’s been told in print about a zillion times. But maybe it was new to John Colapinto and his editors.

I wonder about those editors, though—or, more specifically, about the magazine’s vaunted fact-checkers. Maybe they were on vacation, or replaced by interns, when this quote from the story’s protagonist, David Placek, made it into print: “You want to name it something that the big guys—A.T.&T., Southwestern Bell, California Bell—would never think of.”

Memo from the Left Coast: there never was a “California Bell,”* only Pacific Bell. Oh, and while I’m being picky: New Yorker, may I introduce you to Snopes.com? I don’t believe you’ve met, because you clearly never read the authoritative debunking of the Chevy Nova myth. Nova does not mean “no go” in Spanish; that's no va, which has a stress on the second syllable rather than the first. As a matter of fact, the Chevy Nova sold quite briskly in Spanish-speaking markets.

Mythfire

There’s something supernatural about the fourth-generation Honda Odyssey van.

It’s a myth and a legend! Can you prove that it exists?

 

I noticed this billboard here in Oakland, then happened to catch one of the new 30-second national TV spots for the Odyssey. The ads’ tagline—“The Van Beckons”—avoids the myth/legend theme altogether, although there’s the usual mythmaking in the storylines, which are crafted to dispel the, uh, myth that vans aren’t sexy.

The ads are cleverly and expensively produced, but this one set off my internal alarm system.

 

That’s the Platters on the soundtrack. Note that the lyric cuts off right before “… smoke gets in your eyes.” Still, I found it impossible not to think about engine fires, which probably is not what Honda intended.

Watch the other spots (“Vanquility” and “Rock Van”) on Honda’s U.S. website. Agency is RPA, based in Santa Monica.

Debunking the Myths of Naming

How many of these naming myths do you accept as inalienable truths?

• A domain name must have no more than six letters.
• A name should be an empty vessel.
• Your name should yield almost no results in Google.
• Your name should start with a letter near the beginning of the alphabet.
• Your name should begin with/contain the letter(s)___
• Names of such-and-such a type are bad.

The Name Inspector expertly debunks all six of these naming myths in a post that's required reading for anyone embarking on the naming process.

During my own naming career I've encountered all of these myths and more.  A prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist insisted that the corporate name I was developing had to start with a K and be an empty vessel. (His own surname started with a K. The company, which he ended up naming himself, went bust not long afterward.) The six-letter shibboleth is especially popular despite being hokum. And the converse of Myth #6—only names of such-and-such a type are good—also comes up frequently.

Read The Name Inspector's post. Then read my own post about ten common naming myths.