Fritinancy

Nicely named: Amberlink

“The Internet Is Rotting,” reads the headline, and it’s no overstatement. The article beneath the hed, published in The Atlantic on June 30, 2021, was written by Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard who has spent a lot of time thinking about the World Wide Web and its discontents. He’s worried, as we all should be, about the alarming impermanence of our digital artifacts. And he’s proposing solutions.

Swim or sink

It’s not often that I have a chance to write about the intersection of naming and swimming, two of my primary interests. But in the last seven days I’ve seen two swim-related names that caught my eye, for better and for worse.

I remember reading about Swimply—“a marketplace that connects owners of underutilized swimming pools with people seeking to gather, swim and escape locally”—not long after the company launched in June 2018. “That’s a really bad name,” I thought back then. “But hey—the founder is only 20 years old. Of course he’ll change it!” Right? Wrong.

It’s still Swimply—a portmanteau* of swim and simply—and it’s still bad.

Ro, Ro, Ro

Ads for erectile-dysfunction drugs are so ubiquitous on cable-news channels that I rarely give them more than a glance. But a few months ago I saw an ad for an ED service whose name caught my attention: Roman. Nice, I thought: A classical allusion with man embedded in the name.

I no longer remember exactly which ad I saw, but this long-form spot should give you the idea of Roman’s cocky positioning. Yes, I said cocky.

 

I was interested enough to do some research. And then I was even more interested.

Retail watch: Three good names

Women’s-wear retailer Anthropologie is launching a new “inclusively sized” (women’s 16 to 26) collection today. The collection’s name is clear, simple, and elegant: APlus.

 

Anthropologie’s last foray into fashion sub-branding was the misbegotten BHLDN, which I wrote about in 2011. I am happy to report that APlus is a vast improvement: The capital A evokes the parent brand, and the “plus” in this context is positive rather than pejorative. My favorite label for this category remains Alexander McCall Smith’s “traditionally sized,” but APlus gets a high grade from me, too.

(For more on the use of “plus” in retail – you may be interested to know that at one time in U.S. history the category was called “stout” – see my 2015 post “Plus Is Equal.”)

For naming inspiration, look outside

Where do you find a brand name? More specifically, where do you find a powerful, memorable, lasting brand name?

The answer, in one famous instance: outside the window.

In 1982, computer scientists John Warnock and Charles Geschke were working in Warnock’s garage in Los Altos, California, on a page description language for controlling printing. The product would end up being called PostScript; in 1985, Warnock and Geschke would license it to Apple.

PostScript is a solid product name. But Warnock and Geschke, who had been colleagues at Xerox PARC, had bigger plans. They needed a company name that wasn’t defined by, or limited to, a single product.

They found that name when they looked outside the garage window and saw Adobe Creek.

 

A fallen redwood in Adobe Creek. (Wikipedia)

 

August linkfest

Years ago, I named the world’s first “bidirectional” condom, so this story really spoke to me:

Diverse & Resilient, an LGBTQ organization in Milwaukee, decided to do something about the bland branding of free condoms. So it partnered with a local marekting agency, Cramer Krasselt, to create Naughty Bags, condoms designed by teens for teens. According to Adweek, the condoms are made “to be sex-positive, humorous, and cool” and feature “witty names like Pork Parka, Pelvic Poncho, Scuba Gear, Surge Protector and—our favorite—Papa Stopper.” Brilliant – in every sense.

Nicely named: Gateway

What’s so special about “Gateway”? Not much, at first appraisal. The word appears in more than 600 trademarks, including that of a pioneering U.S. computer company founded in 1985 in Sioux City, Iowa. (That company, whose original name was Gateway 2000, used a Holstein cow as its mascot; it was bought in 2007 by Taiwan-based Acer, which also acquired Gateway.com and which now produces computers under the Gateway brand.)

“Gateway” names abound in the San Francisco Bay Area thanks to the region’s association with the Golden Gate and the bridge that spans it. There are Gateway apartments, a Gateway Bank, a Golden Gateway hotel, and a long-planned Gateway Park at the foot of (confusingly) the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge.

But the Gateway I want to praise here is Oakland-based Gateway Incubator, which is named for a different sort of gateway.

Name in the News: Lava Mae

It’s hard to stay clean when you’re sleeping on the streets. A new San Francisco nonprofit, Lava Mae, has an ingenious remedy: transforming old Muni buses into mobile bathrooms, complete with stall showers and toilets, that travel to neighborhoods with the greatest need.

Lave Mae and its founder, former public-relations executive Doniece Sandoval, were featured in the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this week on the occasion of the unveiling of Bus No. 2. Sandoval’s plans include expansion throughout California.

“Delivering dignity, one shower at a time.” For more on the “One X at a Time” sloganclone, see this 2012 post (and follow the links for more).

According to the Chronicle story:

Lava Mae’s simple solution of providing homeless people with showers and toilets has captured the attention of people around the world, many of whom have asked Sandoval to help them create a similar program.

To deal with the huge interest, Sandoval is working with the International Centre for Social Franchising, which is based in London but also has an office in San Francisco. It seeks to help organizations with a social benefit replicate their work in other places around the world. 

Sandoval has decided to focus on serving 30,000 homeless people around California by 2020 — and recently met with state Sen. Holly Mitchell of Los Angeles to discuss a Lava Mae-type program there.

There’s a feel-good story behind the Lava Mae name, too. Here’s how the organization’s website tells it (verbatim):

In Spanish, “lavame” means “wash me”

In our culture, we refer to vehicles in the feminine as in, “She’s a beauty, isn’t she?”

In the South, (where our founder grew up), it’s not uncommon for people to have two first names e.g Billy Bob, Peggy Sue. Putting it all together gave birth to the name Lava Mae

Via Ken Garff Auto Group.

 

OK, the copy needs some, um, cleaning up. If you want to be picky about it – hey, it’s in my job description! – it’s “lávame,” with an acute accent to mark the stress on the first syllable. And I cringed a little at the bio that reads “Brett is the principle and founder of StudioTerpeluk.”

I’ll stop quibbling now and instead reaffirm that I like the Lava Mae name: it’s friendly, personal, down-home, clever, and bilingual. (The echoes of Fannie Mae and Sallie Mae, which also aim to help people in need, may be intentional.) And I applaud the work Lava Mae is doing. In a region dominated by whiz-kid techpreneurs whose idea of “making the world a better place” is selling an app that does stuff your mom used to do for you, this is a truly creative and, yes, disruptive initiative.

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Related: Pee wall.

Name in the News: Marvina

This week a San Francisco startup, Marvina, launched its subscription delivery service for medical marijuana. For $95, $175, or $325 a month, San Franciscans who are qualified under California’s Compassionate Use Act can receive 7, 14, or 28 “top-shelf” grams of cannabis, tastefully packaged and delivered to their doors by an employee of a medical-marijuana dispensary.  

 

“Co-founder Dane Pieri came up with the idea because he was intimidated and overwhelmed by the cannabis dispensaries,” writes reporter Zara Stone in OZY.* “‘It’s like when you’re in the grocery store at the wine aisle; we didn’t know what to do,’ he told OZY. He thought he’d create a service where choice wasn’t in the equation.”

And the name? Here’s the story on the Marvina About page:

What does Marvina mean?

Nothing. Well actually its [sic] a nod to Malvina Reynolds, one of our favorite songwriters. Her song Little Boxes was also the theme song of one of our favorite TV shows, Weeds. (Ok, when we talk about Weeds we really mean seasons 1-3 because the other seasons really don't compare to those first three. If you're a fan of the show you know what we mean.)

For those of you unfamiliar with Malvina Reynolds (1900-1978), here’s a brief bio. Her birth surname was Milder; she was anything but. Here she is singing “Little Boxes.”

“Weeds,” of course, was Showtime’s long-running series about a housewife named Nancy (which also happens to be the name of Malvina Reynolds’s daughter) who starts selling marijuana after her husband’s premature death leaves her family in dire straits. The name of the fictional community in which Nancy lives, Agrestic, has been adopted by a marijuana dispensary in Corvallis, Oregon.

Marvina is an elegant portmanteau**—mar from marijuana and vina from Malvina—that stands out amid the ticky-tacky clutter of similar-sounding names in this area (see my post on 420 names). The Malvina Reynolds connection has extra resonance for a service that delivers its product in “little boxes.”

Speaking of weedy names, I’m headed to Portland, Oregon, for the next several days to attend the annual meeting of the American Name Society and sister organizations. On Saturday afternoon I’ll be giving a talk at ANS titled “Velvet Elvis at the Mary Mart: The New Normal Nomenclature of Legal Cannabis.” I hope to see some of you at my session – or maybe at the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year vote Friday afternoon.

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* Sorry, I don’t know how OZY got its name. Look on their works, ye mighty, and despair?

** The company’s writing style, as we’ve seen, is less elegant.

Name in the Wild: Hue and Cry

I have a soft spot for very old words and idioms that are kept alive in contemporary brand names. Like this one:

Hue & Cry Security Systems, spotted in Oakland, California.

 

 

Hue and cry first appeared in English in the late 13th century “as an Anglo-French legal term meaning ‘outcry calling for pursuit of a felon’,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, which adds that “the extended sense of ‘cry of alarm’ is 1580s.” It’s a short, distinctive, and perfectly evocative name for a security company.

The hue in hue and cry is an Old French word meaning “outcry, noise, war or hunting cry” (“probably of imitative origin,” says the Online Etymology Dictionary). It’s unrelated to the hue that means “color,” which comes from Old English hiw (“color, appearance”).

For some other brand names derived from very old words—including Bluetooth, Kindle, and Whirlpool—see my August 2014 column for the Visual Thesaurus (no longer paywalled).