Fritinancy

December Linkfest

On the last linkfest of 2013, the Internet gave to me:

The ugliest Christmas sweater of them all: From REI, so it isn’t just hideous, “it’s packed with technical features and built to withstand decades of holiday wear.” Oh, it’s also fake.

 

Christmas carol grammar. On Mental Floss, Arika Okrent identifies the troll in “troll the ancient Yuletide carol” and the “yon” in “Round yon virgin.” And on Visual Thesaurus (subscription required), Erin Brenner takes on the lie/lay distinction in carols, using examples such as “Long lay the world in sin and error pining.”

Sheep counting. Stan Carey, author of the fine blog Sentence First, explains an old counting system used by shepherds in some parts of the UK. All together now: yan, tan, tethera, pethera, pimp…

A language map of Britain. From the Oxford Dictionaries blog:  “In the summer of 2012, supreme language-lovers David and Hilary Crystal set off on a tour round Britain, visiting 57 sites associated with key developments in the English language.”

New reindeer names. Laura Wattenberg of the Baby Name Wizard blog offers a 21st-century update to Dasher, Dancer, Blitzen, et al: “Now, Skylar! now, Stryker! now Ryker and Jaxon! / Now, Cabot! now, Copland! now Sawyer and Paxton!”

A new stadium name. Berkeleyside reports that the field-naming rights at UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium sold for $18 million to Kabam, a mobile-gaming company founded by three Cal grads. It’ll still be Memorial Stadium: the naming rights cover only the field.

Up-to-date military slang. The movies always get it wrong, writes Ben Brody in the Global Post: “Soldiers fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have developed an expansive new military vocabulary, taking elements from popular culture as well as the doublespeak of the military industrial complex.” It’s “bird,” not “chopper,” and an “oxygen thief” is a useless soldier. Hat tip: Ben Zimmer and Kevin Grant. (Bonus link: my 2007 post about Iraq war slang.)

Much doge. Wow. Psychologist and language columnist Jessica Love writes in The American Scholar about “the delicate dance between humor and inscrutability” in two Internet memes, doge and because + noun. If you haven’t yet become acquainted with doge, here’s a best-of-gallery. (Hat tip: Angus Grieve-Smith.) Wondering how to pronounce “doge”? Slate interviewed several experts and then let the Internet decide. “Wow. Such confused” polled a strong third.

Image via Slate.

Fifty shades of blue. Can you discern the difference between LinkedIn blue and Disqus blue? IBM blue and Evomail blue? Test your powers of perception at Name That Blue, then graduate to pinks, reds, purples, greens, and a whole lot of tech companies you’ve never heard of.

Helvetica the perfume. “We have created the ultimate Modernist perfume – a scent distilled down to only the purest and most essential elements to allow you, the content, to convey your message with the utmost clarity.” Translation: for $62, not including tax and shipping, you get distilled water in a clear bottle with a label.

“For those who dare to be the same.” Image via AdFreak.

Hideous holiday music. I note with sadness the passing in 2013 of Jim Nayder, curator of Chicago Public Radio’s Annoying Music show (frequently heard on NPR); and of Regretsy (“Where DIY Meets WTF”), the blog that compiled the very worst of Etsy craft projects. But there’s hope for both camps of mourners: the multitalented April Winchell, who ran Regretsy for four years (posting as Helen Killer), can still be found on her eponymous blog. And in an effort that would do Jim Nayder proud, she’s compiled her own catalog of wretched holiday tunes, from “Homo Christmas” (by Pansy Division) to the Bethlehem Rap, from “I Yust Go Nuts on Christmas” and “Yingle Bells” by that great, great faux-Swedish entertainer Yogi Yorgesson (né Harry Stewart) to the world’s worst version of “O Holy Night.”

And speaking of holiday traditions, watch this space for my annual Festivus Airing of Grievances, coming later this week.

Name Changers, Part 1

My “recently renamed companies” file is so big I’ve decided to split it into two posts. Come back tomorrow for more.

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The Oakland Coliseum, home stadium of the Raiders and the A’s, will be renamed Overstock.com Coliseum. The six-year naming-rights deal will cost the Utah-based e-tailer “a modest $7.2 million,” reports the New York Times baseball blog, Bats. The new name is “fitting,” say San Francisco Chronicle columnists Matier & Ross, “considering how many unsold tickets the two teams have on many game days.” But don’t get too fond of Overstock jokes (overstuffed? oversight? overcompensating?): Overstock is rebranding itself as O.co (.co is a top-level domain that’s become a popular alternative to .com), and the company retains the right to rename the Coliseum. Will they serve cocoa at O.co Coliseum? In Oco-land? Will O.co Coliseum merge with neighboring Oracle Arena and become the Ocoracle Sportsertainment Complex? Inquiring minds, etc.

By the way, “Overstock.com” will be the Coliseum’s fourth name in its 47-year history. After three decades as the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, it was renamed Network Associates Coliseum in 1998 and then McAfee Coliseum in 2003. McAfee’s naming rights expired in 2008, and the Coliseum has used its original name ever since.

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More sporting news: Sports channel Versus, which debuted in 1996 as the Outdoor Life Network, will change its name within 90 days, reports Multichannel News. The new name will “have a strong utilization of NBC in the title,” said NBC Sports Group chairman Dick Ebersol, an expert in corpspeak. Versus is owned by NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast. I’ll be sorry to see Versus go; as I wrote in 2009, the name “speaks directly to the competitive spirit.” But apparently not to everyone: I recently stayed at a hotel whose TV guide included a listing for “Verses.” The 24/7 poetry channel? (Hat tip: MJF.)

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Qwest, the Denver-based telecom company, is being rebranded with the name of its new owner, CenturyLink. That’s one less Q-name, one more very peculiar tagline. “Stronger connected”?  (Via @Catchword.)

 

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Shwowp, which earned the highly uncoveted Worst Brand Name of 2010 award from naming agency Eat My Words, is now Buyosphere, “a tool to help you take control of your shopping history.” In what must have been a very satisfying twist, Eat My Words got to do the renaming after Shwowp’s self-directed experiment in crowdsourcing flopped. There was one hitch, co-founder Tara Hunt told TechCrunch: the startup didn’t have enough money to buy the Buyosphere domain, which was owned by a squatter.

Hunt wrote the site owner an email, explaining the (sob) story, “I was like, I have 500 bucks,” she said. Needless to say he took her offer.

Needless to say? More like “mirabile dictu.” In my experience, domain squatters are not so easily moved by a weeping woman.

Six Naming Questions You May Have Overlooked

Let’s say you’ve spent a lot of time and money developing a name that’s distinctive, legally available, and a good match for your naming brief. You can still end up with a less-than-desirable name if you neglect to ask  these important questions.

1. How will it look in lower-case spelling? A name like IfByPhone or PopUpEdu depends for clarity on intercap letters. On Twitter and other applications, however, the name may appear in all lower-case letters—ifbyphone, popupedu—with a potential loss of intelligibility and pronounceability.

2. How will it look in black and white? Color can transform your company or product name into a sharp-looking logo. But for some applications—press kits, white papers, email—you won’t have the benefit of color. If you rely on color to make your point, as the Big Ten athletic conference did in its recent logo redesign, you risk losing your message. (I’m not saying that Big Ten is necessarily confusing anyone, but a smaller organization that attempts a similar strategy may be asking for trouble.)

3. How will it read in the newspaper? Speaking of black-and-white, print journalism isn’t dead yet. No matter how stridently you insist on accent marks or punctuation in your name (Aol. and Yahoo!, I’m talking to you), the business reporter on deadline is unlikely is share your obsession.

4. How does it sound on the telephone? Or in everyday conversation, for that matter? I've written previously about the counterintuitive pronunciation of Virgance. Here’s an even more-boggling example: μTorrent, a popular file-sharing client, is spelled with the Greek letter μ (mu), which is commonly pronounced mee (in modern Greek), myoo (in English), or micro (in scientific measurements). But μTorrent’s URL is utorrent.com. The program’s Swedish creator, Ludvig Strigeus, “usually” pronounces the name as “you torrent” but has also suggested “microtorrent,” “mytorrent” (my, pronounced mee, is Swedish for μ), and “mutorrent” as possible pronunciations. For a consumer-facing company or product, this much word-of-mouth confusion would be catastrophic; it’s not exactly wonderful for μTorrent, either. (See also #3, above.)

5. Do you have a misleading or undesirable acronym? I’m currently talking with a prospective client, a startup, whose working name is a three-word idiom that ends in a word starting with “U.” Reduced to its initials, the company looks like a university. That’s misleading, but it could be much worse: the initials could be a real WTF.

6. Finally, do proceed carefully with those qrazy Q-names. I still don’t know whether QRANK is pronounced “cue-rank” or “crank.” And that makes me cranky.

 

Halftime Show

In honor of  Big Game weekend, a couple of football-related items.

You've heard of the Rose Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl. (Gooooo, naming rights!) But you may not have known—I didn't—that some two-year colleges have bowl games, too. In the Bay Area, we have the Eagle Bowl, the Bulldog Bowl, and the Silicon Valley Bowl. And in the Central Valley, Modesto Junior College will host its 17th annual Graffiti Bowl tomorrow. Where does "Graffiti" come from? Well, Modesto is the home town of director George Lucas, who memorialized his high school experience in the 1973 film American Graffiti. The movie was actually shot not in Modesto but a couple of hours north, in Petaluma; nevertheless, Modesto has adopted "Graffiti" in a slew of civic names, including Graffiti Night (the first Saturday after high school graduation), the American Graffiti Festival (sponsored by the Kiwanis), and Graffiti Summer.

Seems like a good enough opportunity to revisit my all-time favorite graffiti cartoon. And here's a list of college bowl names present and past.

Modesto also has the most poetic city slogan in the United States:

Photo by Thomas Hawk.

Joan Didion wrote about that sign in Slouching Towards Bethlehem; it's how you distinguish Modesto from its Central Valley neighbor Merced, she said.

While going a-googling for that Modesto info, I discovered the Versus Channel, which is what Outdoor Life Network became in September 2006. As OLN, the channel focused on fishing and hunting; now it's an indoor-outdoor network that broadcasts extreme sports, hockey, "combat sports," and even darts. It's owned by Comcast.

I like Versus as the name of a sports channel: it speaks directly to the competitive spirit, even echoing gladiators and chariot races. (Versus is Latin, after all.)

But I found myself veering away from TV to ponder "versus," the word. In fact, I've been waiting for a branding moment to share these thoughts.

Versus is a preposition; in English, it doesn't change form. Or isn't supposed to. However, back in 2005 Neal Whitman wrote in his blog, Literal-Minded, about what he thought was his young son's idiosyncratic use of "versing" as a participle to mean "fighting against in a contest." It turns out that "to verse [someone/something]" isn't all that rare. Language Hat wrote about it, too, and one of his commenters (a Canadian, for what it's worth) offered that he'd been using "to verse" since the late 1970s or early 1980s.

But wait, there's more! I've been hearing a lot of constructions like one LeBron James used in a radio interview: "The Cavaliers verse [some other team]." (Apologies; I haven't been able to find the clip. I'll post a link if I locate it.) James was using verse the way another speaker might use versus, to mean against, but he was ... what? Conjugating it? Inflecting it? Truncating it? Imposing some hypercorrect notion of subject-preposition agreement?

This non-poetic verse shows up in print, too. It's a multi-sport infraction: See "Yankees verse the Phillies," "Lions verse Rams," "the avalanche verse the flyers" (anonymous commenter at 10:17 a.m.).

Clearly, verse is versing versus for the upper hand. (For the win?) Which will prevail? Perhaps one of you linguists—Mr. Whitman? Mr. Verb? Mr. Hat?—would care to weigh in.