Fritinancy

September linkfest

I’ve read more books about Trump, Trumpism, and What It All Means than is probably healthy for me, but until I read Thank You for Your Servitude, by Mark Leibovich (Penguin Random House, 2022), I’d never laughed my way through a Trump book. Leibovich, a veteran Washington correspondent (New York Times, The Atlantic), focuses not on “your favorite president” but on the lickspittles and soul-sellers who sought relevance through their obeisance to him, most notably Senators Rubio (R-FL), Cruz (R-TX), and Graham (R-SC), all of whom had been loudly contemptuous about TFG  before he became the nominee and they made the bread-butter connection. Leibovich is the rare insider with an outsider’s sense of irony, and he’s a master of the snappy sentence. Here’s one example, about former Republican National Committee Reince Priebus, who became 45’s much-put-upon first chief of staff: “No matter how much Trump had roiled the Republican water, it remained Priebus’s job to carry it.”

On the Visual Thesaurus: "Bound" for glory

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus was inspired by an email from reader Dan Freiberg, who sent me this photo of a bottle of Windex glass cleaner.

“100% Ocean Bound Plastic”

 

Dan wrote: “To me, this doesn’t mean what I think SC Johnson” — parent company of Windex—“wants it to mean.”

Investigating exactly what ocean bound means led me down some twisty paths. According to a Danish organization called Ocean Bound Plastic, ocean bound plastic—yes, there should be a hyphen in there—is land based, whereas ocean-waste plastic is retrieved from waterways and then recycled. But that was just the beginning, because bound has multiple meanings and at least four unrelated etymologies. 

Access to the full column is paywalled. Here’s an excerpt:

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.

April Linkfest

Don’t read “How to Name a Baby” to learn how to name a baby. Read it for insights into historical baby-naming trends and to confirm your hunches (e.g., “the popular girl name Reagan is for Republicans”). Also: charts!

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Given names are “one of the last social acceptable frontiers of class war.”Also: nominative determination, implicit egotism, and how the Internet has made baby naming more difficult. Part 1 of a four-part podcast series about names from Australian radio network ABC. The presenter, Tiger Webb, has an interesting name story himself. (Hat tip: Superlinguo.)

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The not-so-secret jargon of doctors is full of acronyms: a flea—fucking little esoteric asshole—is an intern, an FLK is a “funny-looking kid,” and an “SFU 50 dose” is the amount of sedative it takes for 50 percent of patients to shut the fuck up.

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Ever wonder what value-creating winners do all day? Here’s Business Town to enlighten you. It’s “an ongoing project attempting to explain our highly intangible, deeply disruptive, data-driven, venture-backed, gluten-free economic meritocracy to the uninitiated. With apologies to Richard Scarry.”

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Stop your whinging, Brits: a lot of those so-called Americanisms you profess to detest—like “gotten” and “fall”—were originally English.

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The spectacular neon art of the Walker Collection of American Signs, a swath of advertising history auctioned earlier this month in Proctor, Arkansas.

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Attention, domain shoppers and everyone who believes the best defense is an offensive offense: the .sucks domain went on sale in early April. There was an immediate buying frenzy; consumer advocate Ralph Nader promoted it in a commercial as “a protest word.” Now ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has asked U.S. and Canadian regulatory agencies to determine whether the the domain’s high price—$2,499 during the “sunrise” period—is illegal. (For more about the unusual relationship between Vox Populi—which secured the rights to sell the .sucks domain—and ICANN, see John R. Levine’s blog.)

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“The decision is made. The name won’t be changed.” – Tim Mahoney, head of marketing for Chevy, speaking to the Detroit Free Press about the Bolt electric vehicle, whose name is strikingly similar to that of the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid. In fact, a Spanish speaker would pronounce the two names identically. (Hat tip: Jonathon Owen.)

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I’ve been saying this for ages, but now I can quote the Harvard Business Review: Group brainstorming is a waste of time.

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“A brand of snack bars is made ‘in small batches at our own makery’. Makery? I am guessing that ‘makery’ is a portmanteau for ‘made-up bakery’.” Steven Poole on why the language of food packaging makes him sick. (Hat tip: Lynne Murphy.)

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Remember wack slacks, lamestain, and swingin’ on the flippity-flop? Of course you don’t. Why grungespeak was the greatest language hoax of the 1990s.

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Chart: How to say “It’s all Greek to me” in 30 languages. (For Greeks, it’s all Chinese.)

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Negative polarity item, critique drift, and other terms—many of them linguistic—that have caught the eye of tech writer/editor Mike Pope.

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Lindström, Minnesota, is getting its umlaut back.

English is the language where diacritics go to die. Except in Minnesota. #missionumlaut. h/t @SPNoir @JKealing pic.twitter.com/8q80R4n6nR

— Patrick Cox (@patricox) April 15, 2015

And don’t forget all those gratuitously umlautted brand names!

In the Wild: Slushify

Spotted at Bed Bath & Beyond: a new -ify coinage.

I believe this design template is called Everything But the Unicorn.

 

The product’s name is Slushy Magic – the package contains “magic cubes” (filled with saline solution or gel, possibly) and a “Slushy Magic Cup” – but the stated benefit is slushification. Can you slushify your Zenify? Why, yes, you can!

But wait, the suffixifying fun has just started! As the Slushy Magic product video says, “It’s slush-a-licious!”

If you think that’s over-the-top, read this loopy Amazon review:

Upon discovering this vast beauty located in a not-so-local WalGreens, my happiness meter jumped from “Oh gawd, I need tampons” to “HULLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO SLUSHIES” (no I did not forget my lady things, I just happened to possibly mistakenly pick up cotton balls and twine). Of course, being the impatient person I am, I immediately ripped open that beautiful cyan blue box, with the happy children on the front, their precious cherub faces, gleaming at me with their cheery smiles as if to say, “Come to my slushy fountain, drink upon the abrosia [sic] of the Gods!”. In my exuberance, I did happen to endure the brutal, stabbing wound of a papercut, and some may or may not have gotten on the cup. It is alright, we all need more iron in our diets. Joyfully, I threw the saline-filled-whatevers into the freezer in wait for my delicious slushy shakin’ morning!

Take it from me: She’s just getting warmed up.

Somewhat related: Robert Lane Greene on the nounification of adjectives.

Bonus vocabulary fun: The OED says slush (“partially melted snow or ice; soft mud; food of a watery consistency; rubbishy discourse or literature”) is of “doubtful” origin. Slush fund (“a fund used to buy luxuries or to bribe”) originated in the 1830s in the U.S. Navy. The drink known as slushy goes by many other names, including Hawaiian ice, shave(d) ice, snow cone, and snowball. And that’s just in the U.S.; see this Wikipedia entry for slushy synonyms around the world.

Naughty Names

There are names that push the envelope and names that push buttons. Here are three names that do both—one of them deliberately, one of them wrongheadedly, and one of them seemingly without a clue.

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On one level, Bootie Babe, a nail polish and fragrance brand, is a playful pun on “beauty.” On another, it’s one more example of the assification of American branding. (See my previous posts on this subject: “Booty Pageant,” “Bottoms Up,” and “Cheeky!”) You could say the callipygian packaging is cute … or lewd.

 

Image from Pinkii.

The company, which is based in San Francisco, was founded in 2011 by Mark O’Hara, whose previous experience had included forming a 15-piece funk band called SuperBooty. According to the website, O’Hara launched Bootie Babes singlehandedly, designing the logo and website, applying for trademarks and patents, and overseeing product development. He clearly had fun with color names, which aim to appeal to tweens and teens. The purple on the left, above, is called Purp Slurp, and the blue is Hella Baloo. (Whether the overt sexuality is appropriate for this demographic is a subject I’ll leave to other critics.)

Unfortunately, O’Hara also seems to have taken the DIY approach to the rest of the brand language, which is an amateurish, trust-deflating mess. Here’s a line from the “Info” page:

SuperBooty President and CEO Mark O’Hara wanted to create a humorous, bold and truely [sic] unique beauty product that would literally “stand out” from the competition.

And the product name is misleading. This is a bootie—i.e., a short boot:

Gentle Souls “Barne Voyage,” via 6pm.com

And this is a booty:

Beyoncé, via Viennie V. (The headline on the story is “Beyoncé’s Booty Is Inspiration for Rare House Fly’s Name.”)

Yes, they’re pronounced identically. But their different suffixes are clues to their different meanings. And wouldn’t “Booty Babe” make a clearer reference to “beauty”?

Then again, maybe not.

(Hat tip: The Beheld.)

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Erin McKean tweeted me a photo of Sloshee margarita ice pops and wrote: “Saw this at the grocery store and thought you’d enjoy the name.”

@Fritinancy saw this at the grocery store and thought you'd enjoy the product name: pic.twitter.com/2RACLga4

— Erin McKean (@emckean) May 23, 2012

 

 

Well. The name is an obvious pun on “slushy/slushee/slushie,” a generic term for a syrupy-sweet crushed-ice beverage. Unfortunately, Sloshee also evokes “sloshed,” a synonym for “intoxicated.” Alcoholic beverages can promise romance, adventure, and sex, but getting wasted? That’s a no-no.

But that may be the least of Sloshee’s troubles. For one thing, the company (based here in Oakland, I regret to say) can’t decide whether its name is “Sloshee” or “Sloshees.” (I couldn’t find a trademark application, so maybe the founders are still making up their minds. Or they may be lost in a product-testing haze.) The website admits to “a year of business and legal hurdles” before the 2009 launch. The copywriting hurdles still haven’t been surmounted. From the About page:

Sloshees started in July of 2004 after observing how fun and refreshing popsicles can be after a hot summer day. We thought to ourselves, wouldn't it be awesome if popsicles had alcohol in them? The idea was formed over a few beers but it took almost 5 years to solidify into a business.

“A few beers”? Next time, try coffee.

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And speaking of stumbling over hurdles, reader Stacey Kimmel-Smith, an equestrian who blogs at Behind the Bit, sent me an email about a clothing brand she’d seen at a tack shop in New Jersey.

 

 

“The company is European,” Stacey wrote, “and I wonder if maybe they selected the name without knowing that it sounds like a ‘bad word’ in English.”

When I finally stopped laughing, I checked out the Horze website. It’s replete with unintentional humor:

Who is Horze? Click here to see a movie. [Safe for work!]

Team Horze. [Cheaper by the dozen?]

This is the nature of Horze. [They’re born that way.]

Try it out yourself: Imagine strolling into a tack shop and saying, “Show me your Horze.”

There may be a cultural excuse here: Horze is a Finnish brand, launched in 2003 as an offshoot of Finn-Tack. Surely, though, there must have been at least one English-speaking person around to warn the founders that changing the S in “horse” to a Z results in “whores,” not Equine Zorro.

When I shared the Horze link on Twitter, Jonathon Owen (@ArrantPedantry) reminded me of this much-shared writing exercise posted on eBaum’s World:

 

"Oui, Oui, Oui" All the Way Home

There’s only one little piggy in this set of combat-ready bendable toys. Monsieur Tofu is a “soy boy.”

 

Front of package.

 

 

Back of package.

 

Naturally, I get a kick out of “Mr. Bacon”: as some of you know, I’m very fond of “mister” names. But why is the tofu dressed as Mr. Peanut? And what’s up with “Monsieur”?

Tofu is Asian, of course, not French, unless you think of tofu as soy cheese—which it is, sort of—and you think of all cheese as French. (Remember Bart Simpson’s “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”?) But does that explain “Monsieur Tofu”? I don’t think so.

Here’s my best guess: Tofu is stigmatized as fancy-pants food for pinky-bending snobs, and “monsieur” is code for “elite” and “effete.” Never mind that you can buy tofu at Walmart, or that a pound of tofu costs less than half of what a pound of bacon costs.

In a different decade, they might have gotten away with calling Mr. Bacon’s opponent “Tofu-San.” Today a Japanese stereotype is unacceptable. Caricaturing the French, though—that’s perfectly kosher. Which is more than you can say about Mr. Bacon.

I found “Mr. Bacon vs. Monsieur Tofu” at Powell’s Sweet Shoppe in Berkeley. You can also buy it from Archie McPhee.

Chaise What?

An original box for a Barbie Go-Together Furniture Kit, circa 1963, is currently on display at the California Design, 1930-1965 exhibit at LACMA.^*

 

“Chaise longue & side table with 3-D garden setting and accessories!”

Mattel no longer sells this kit, but even if it did, I doubt the seating element would be called a “chaise longue,” which is the correct term. (It’s French for “long chair.”) eBay sellers don’t accept that spelling: they all call it a chaise “lounge,” and so do many other Americans. (In Britain, apparently, the chaise longue is seen only in museums.) In fact, hewing to the correct pronunciation and spelling is liable to tag you as (a) a stickler, (b) a snob, (c) an interior decorator, or (d) French.

But beware the recency illusion: “longue” began shifting to “lounge” at least 150 years ago, according to Michael Quinion of World Wide Words. In his terrific memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid^**, Bill Bryson, who was born in 1951, recounts this story from his childhood in Des Moines:

I remember one day my father came in, quite excitedly, with a word written down on a piece of paper.

“What’s this word?” he said to my mother. The word was “chaise longue.”

“Shays lounge,” she said, pronouncing it as all Iowans, perhaps all Americans, did. A chaise longue in those days exclusively signified a type of adjustable patio lounger that had lately become fashionable. They came with a padded cushion that you brought in every night if you thought someone might take them. Our cushion had a coach and four horses galloping across it. It didn’t need to come in at night.

“Look again,” urged my father.

“Shays lounge,” repeated my mother, not to be bullied.

“Well, it’s just ‘long,’” my father said gently, but gave it a Gallic purr: “Shays lohhhnggg,” he repeated. “Isn’t that something? I must have looked at the word a hundred times and I’ve never noticed that it wasn’t lounge.”

“Lawngg,” said my mother marveling slightly. “That’s going to take some getting used to.”

“It’s French,” my father explained.

“Yes, I expect it is,” said my mother. “I wonder what it means.”

For the record, my family also owned a shays lounge with covers that didn't need to come in at night.

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* LACMA is one of more than 60 arts institutions participating in Pacific Standard Time, a fascinating and multifaceted retrospective of Southern California art, architecture, and design from 1945 through 1980. I visited six of the participating museums last weekend: the Huntington, the Norton Simon, the Skirball, the Getty, the Hammer, and LACMA. Pacific Standard Time continues through May 2012.

** Highly recommended. The audiobook, which is read by the author, is especially wonderful: Bryson is as lively a reader as he is a writer.

Eat, Drink, and Be Spooky

Piedmont Grocery, a neighborhood institution since 1902, gets into the Halloween spirit early and enthusiastically. Here’s some of what I discovered there on a recent visit.

 

Fear and The Ghost hot sauces are made with Bhut Jolokia, “the ghost pepper of India, officially the hottest in the world.”

 

Sweet Death, Sudden Death, and Original Death hot sauce from Extreme Foods.

 

Also available in Spanish translation. ¡Siéntase vivo!

 

Ceramic miniatures from Kah Tequila.

It says here that “kah” means “life” in the Mayan language; the ceramic vessels are “inspired by traditional Calaveras (skulls made from sugar) which are used in Day of the Dead rituals to symbolize death and rebirth.” Click anywhere on the Kah Tequila text for a surprise.

 

McSteven’s Vampire Brew Blood Red Hot Chocolate.

Also on the shelf from McSteven’s: Spider Cider and Skeleton Brew.

 

PoiZin Sonoma County zinfandel, “the wine to die for.”

I love the PoiZin name, which is extended on the website: PoiZin Pen, PoiZindex, PoiZin Us. The prose on the back of the bottle is suitably purple:

As she stands in the clearing the cold wind dances through the trees, swirling her golden mane over her diaphanous, silken black gown. The full moon melts into the paleness of her skin. As she stirs the cauldron of Zinfandel she chants an other worldly [sic] incantation. From vials as old as the echoes of time she adds minute pinches of her ancestry. Her slender fingers rub together as the grains fall...

If you can tolerate more of that sort of thing—I chose to quit after “minute pinches of her ancestry”—the full text is here, along with a video about how the bottles are etched.

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Previous Halloween posts: “Perish: The Thought” (2006), “Excellent with Steak. Or Stakes” (2007), “Brands to Die For” (2007), “Whistling in the Graveyard” (2007), “Hauntrepreneurs” (2009), “Undeath Takes a Holiday” (2009). It looks like I took a holiday in 2008 and 2010.

Short and Sweet

Inspired by Christopher Johnson’s new book Microstyle, which I reviewed yesterday, I’m devoting a few blog posts to good examples of micro-messages. Here’s some of the short, well-executed copy I’ve noticed lately.

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Stella & Dot, a direct-sales jewelry company, invites website readers to join its sales force with this clever enticement:

Become a Stylist

No Glass Cases or Ceilings

“No glass cases” evokes a picture of museum-like department-store displays, which say “Look but don’t touch”—unlike Stella & Dot’s warm, friendly approach. The glass ceiling, of course, is the barrier to professional advancement that frustrates many women. And “stylist” may be just a fancy word for “saleswoman,” but it makes the job sound chic, creative, and powerful.

In just eight words, a vivid image that’s a model of brand consistency.

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The next two examples come from the Wayback Machine—specifically, the wonderful Flickr sets of Mr. Frank Kelsey, who photographs matchbooks, sugar cubes, ashtrays, cigarette lighters, and napkins once used as tiny advertising vehicles. Here’s a Marina Lounge cocktail napkin (from the late 1940s, I’m guessing) that condenses a lot of branding and humor into just a few square inches.

 

Curious about the pink elephants?

The art and typography on these artifacts are euphoria-inducing, and I was floored by how much attention was lavished on the miniature messages. Here’s a sugar cube from “Indianapolis’ Smartest and Gayest Restaurant.”

 

I’d love to see a revival of these message-laden freebies.

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Finally, here’s a sample packet—excuse me, sachet—of Method laundry detergent.

 

The copy reads:

(It’s small, but not this small, silly. This is a sample.)

Even the instructions on the reverse have a spark of brand personality.

To use: Snip sachet open, squeeze all product into tray or directly into machine. Rush to store and buy.

For the record, that “Fresh Air” scent made my eyes water and my head throb. The copy, on the other hand, is indeed refreshing.

More micro-messages tomorrow.