Fritinancy

January Linkfest

I’ve always wanted to name a perfume. Maybe I should just invent my own, as Sarah Marshall of The Hairpin did with her Unreleased Celebrity Fragrances: Acedia by Louis CK, Sherlocked by Benedict Cumberbatch, and a bunch of others, each with a pungent description.

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Continuing with the made-up names theme, here’s a crayon collection with grown-up color names:

 

I’m digging “Void of Existential Anguish Black.”

Via Arnold Zwicky, who adds a story about the Eagle Shirtmakers color-naming contest of 1961, which yielded submissions like Roe Cocoa, Unforeseeable Fuchsia, and Noblesso Beige.

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Also from Arnold Zwicky: How the dobro got its name. Dobro is a registered trademark of the Gibson Guitar Corporation, which means we all should be capitalizing it; it’s also an eponym, a portmanteau, and a word meaning “goodness” in most Slavic languages.

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“We gave you way too big an advance to call this book Freakonomics,” said the publisher of the book that gave rise to an entire freakin’ industry. Briefly considered as substitutes: Economics Gone Wild, Bend It Like Veblen, and Dude, Where’s My Rational Expectation?

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Earlier this month, the American Dialect Society voted phablet – the coinage that describes a smartphone-tablet hybrid – the word Least Likely to Succeed. (Phablet shared the dubious distinction with YOLO.) In a Word Routes column, Ben Zimmer traces the origins of phablet and ponders why nobody loves the word. (For the record, I’d revive an old word, tabloid, to replace phablet. Here’s my 2009 post about tabloid’s fascinating history.)

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Let’s squeeze in one more Word of the Year 2012 story. This one’s by linguist Arika Okrent, who rounds up eight countries’ words of the year, from entroikado (Portugal) to watture (France). J’aime beaucoup watture!

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“Focus more on connotations and less on definitions” – Lexicon Branding’s advice for choosing a name.

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“The next time someone tells you that they can’t accept a name with risk, consider asking them if pouring money into a brand that no one notices and no one cares about is more or less risky than investing in one that just might have a shot.” – Tate Linden, founder of the branding agency Stokefire, in a Q&A with the Wordnik blog.

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Whoever named the top 10 cannabis strains of 2012 was having way too much fun. (Via a tweet from Whatever It Is, I’m Against It.)

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What can the online dating site OKCupid teach us about naming? It’s all about standing out from the crowd, says Beth Gerber of Catchword Branding.

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Ever remember hearing that HAL, the computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, was meant to represent big bad IBM? (Just move the letters H-A-L forward one space in the alphabet.) A new video sets out to prove that the theory isn’t so farfetched after all.

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Ben Schmidt, who’s written about anachronisms (or prochronisms) in Mad Men and Downton Abbey, listens for anachronisms in Lincoln, the Stephen Spielberg movie written by Tony Kushner. Examples: “barrage” (of artillery) didn’t enter the lexicon until 1900, and “peace talks” wasn’t coined until the Vietnam War. Bonus for Lincoln-lingo nerds willing to pay for the privilege: Ben Zimmer’s Boston Globe interview with Kushner. There’s a related (free) article at Word Routes.

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How did Lockheed Martin’s famous Skunk Works get its name and mascot? The Zinzin blog follows the scent and tracks down the story.

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What’s your favorite legal word? The ABA Journal’s readers testify. (Via a tweet from Beauty Marks.)

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Two from Ad Freak: The ad agency pronunciation guide…

 

 

.. and a taxonomy of ad-agency names.

 

(Click to embiggen.)

Every Breath You Take

Ever get the feeling you’re being stalked?

“We Know You’re Out There”: J. Crew Fall 2012 ad campaign.

 

 

“You Know Who You Are”: tagline of Girls of a Certain Age blog.

 

“There You Are”: tagline of new Chanel No. 5 ad campaign starring Brad Pitt. (Via Selectism.)

Potty Humor

You have to hand it to Poo-Pourri.

“Forever changing the bathroom experience.” Note angel tooting on throne.

For starters, the product has a catchy rhyming slogan: “Spritz the bowl before you go and no one else will ever know!” You just don’t see enough versification in marketing copy nowadays.

I also give Poo-Pourri credit for coming right out and saying “stinky poop smell” instead of some wan euphemism.

And the brand extensions evince what one of my readers once called “dedication to the theme.” To name just a few: Trap-a-Crap (“a natural Before-You-Go spray that takes the odor away”), Déjà Poo (another “before-you-go” spray; what a name!), Heavy Doody (yet another “preemptive bathroom scent”), Pooch-Pourri (spray it on your pet’s coat), and Royal Flush (“the fresh essence of eucalyptus works in synergy with spearmint”). Do I need to add that most of these products are available in gift packaging? For that very special, thick-skinned someone, it goes without saying.

Poo-Pourri is, of course, a pun on “potpourri,” which since the mid-18th century has signified a miscellaneous collection. It often refers specifically to a fragrant medley of dried herbs and flowers. It didn’t start out that way, as the word’s etymology reveals: pot pourri literally means “rotten pot” in French (from Spanish olla podrida, ditto)—the English cognate of pourri is “putrid.”

Which makes Poo-Pourri even more … redolent than you’d first suspect.

More experiments in excremental branding here, here, here, and here.

Hat tip: Nancy Nall.

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P.S. Speaking of potty humor, I recently learned that American Standard, the toilet manufacturer, is headquartered in Piscataway, New Jersey. Yes, Piscataway. Piss. Scat. Away. Well played! Now, if only they had a branch office in Flushing, New York.

Word of the Week: Swagger

Swagger: “To behave with an air of superiority, in a blustering, insolent, or defiant manner; now esp. to walk or carry oneself as if among inferiors, with an obtrusively superior or insolent air” (OED). Also a noun: a swaggering movement or gait; boastfulness; braggadocio (American Heritage Dictionary). 

Shakespeare may have been the first to use the verb in print, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600):

What hempen homespunnes haue we swaggring here, So neere the Cradle of the Fairy Queene?

Jonathan Swift turned swagger into a noun in his 1725 poem, “A New Song on Wood's Halfpence”:

The butcher is stout, and he values no swagger;
A cleaver’s a match any time for a dagger...

Swagger may derive from the much earlier swag, which also was a verb before it was a noun. In the early 1520s swag meant “to move with an unsteady gait”; it probably came from Old Norse sveggja, to swing or sway. I’ll have more to say about swag (and also schwag) in another post later this week. Meanwhile, let’s take a look at swagger in the news and in the ads.

Fancy Shmancy

Jessica Simpson, the singer-turned-actress-turned-shoe-and-clothing-designer-turned-parfumieuse, has loaned her name to a new fragrance, I Fancy You, introduced in July. It’s the latest variation on a Simpsonian fragrance-nomenclature theme that began with plain old Fancy (2008) and now includes Fancy Love and Fancy Nights. All of the fragrances are made by Parlux.

 

 

According to Fragrantica:

The fragrance opens with fruity notes of Fuji apple and pear. The heart is made of white flowers such as tuberose and lily of the valley, settling at the woody - musky sandalwood base.

Woman’s Day positively gushes:

A soft, velvety floral musk, I Fancy You naturally expresses the charming ‘Girl Next Door’ side of Jessica Simpson: delightful, kind, loving and innocent with just a hint of flirtatiousness. In the graceful tradition of young courtship, I Fancy You is like a love letter proclaiming the joy of discovering the perfect someone to share a first romance.

In other words, it’s a whole lot of nose candy.

But it’s the name that smells off to me. It’s not that I don’t accept “to fancy” as meaning “to like” or “to be attracted to”—I just don’t accept it as authentic from a 31-year-old woman from Abilene, Texas. It’s too British.

At one time, about 100 years ago, the verb “to fancy”—a contraction of fantasien, to fantasize about—was about equally popular on both sides of the pond.* Today, Americans use “fancy” mostly as an adjective. (Exceptions include the mocking “Fancy that!”, the frequently misquoted Tennyson line “In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,” and Cat Fancy magazine.) Wikipedia’s “list of words having different meanings in British and American English” has this to say about “fancy” the verb:

US colloq. equiv. of “to fancy” is “to like” something or someone (or regarding tastes and preferences, “to love”); “fancy” as a verb is now used in the US almost solely by UK ex-pats, but was once oft-used by Southern gentility (landed gentry)

Or as a blogger for the Amarillo (Texas) radio station KISS-FM put it, somewhat more crudely, in a review of “I Fancy You”:

Who say’s [sic] “I fancy you” anymore? Anybody? Can anybody think of the last time they’ve said that while trying to be serious? I told my grandma about this and even she thought it was dated!

Sometimes an American writer will exploit that sense of fustiness for effect, as in this contemporary (as in, yesterday) account of a date with an unhappy ending:

Right before my friend flirted her way into a life-long relationship, she pushed me into a young lad whom she thought I would fancy. 

“I Fancy You” is definitely miles, if not continents, away in tone from the title of Ms. Simpson’s 1999 hit, “I Wanna Love You Forever.” I wonder whether someone in the Simpson entourage was under the influence of a more recent minor hit, “Do You Fancy Me?”, which was featured on Season 6 (2009-2010) of the American TV series Grey’s Anatomy. The singer, Kerry Leatham, is originally from Colchester and now lives in London.

Do you fancy me, or am I living in make believe?
Am I someone just to pass your time?
To pass lonely hours ’til your heart can be free,
Then you'll forget all about me

Listen to the song in context and on its own.

Do You Fancy Me? was also the name of a short-lived British TV series.

As for me, this what I think about when I think about “fancy.”

 

Naturally.

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* See, for example, the Ngrams for British and American usage of “you fancy.”

 

“The Names You Can Smell a Mile Away”

Speaking of cologne names, last night’s episode of Parks & Recreation featured a hilarious subplot about a launch party for a new cologne, Allergic for Men (tagline: “Cause a Reaction”).

The buoyant yet feckless Tom Haverford hosts the party for the scent’s creator, Dennis Feinstein, “a real up-and-comer in the world of microbrewed perfumes and body sprays.” Tom explains the Feinstein mystique to Ben, a fellow Pawnee, Indiana, civil servant.

Tom: Think of all the scents he’s created—Attack, Yearning, Thickening, Itch, Coma, Side Boob…

Ben: Dennis Feinstein, though? I dunno, he should probably change his name to something more exotic if he wants to make it big in perfume.

Tom: Oh, his real name is Dante Fiero, but he changed it to Dennis Feinstein because that’s way more exotic in Pawnee.

Watch the full episode here. Read Dennis Feinstein’s faux bio—which touts him as the creator of “the names you can smell a mile away”—here.

Sniff and Scratch

“The ultimate goal of any career is to have other people smell like you,” writes columnist Joel Stein—tongue firmly planted in cheek, as usual—in the Feb. 21 issue of Time magazine. “And while I contemplated many methods of accomplishing this, the only scalable one was to create my own fragrance.”

Accordingly, Stein engaged the services of a fragrance consultant, one Kecia Coby, and did some market research at his local Sephora.

Next, we had to decide what to call my cologne. This was tough, since all the good ones were taken: Kimora Lee Simmons’ Fabulosity, Mariah Carey’s Lollipop Bling, Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku Lovers Sunshine Cuties Lil’ Angel. Coby and I decided, after much discussion, to call my cologne Snarky, since that seemed a little more playful than my first choice, Joel Stein by Joel Stein.

In related news, Lady Gaga has announced that her first fragrance, still in development, will smell like blood and semen.* What to call it? I nominate “Deflower.”

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* Lending new resonance to “eau de toilette.”

Word of the Week: Accord

Accord: In the language of perfume, “a balanced blend of notes which lose their individual identity to create a completely new, unified odor impression.” (Source: Now Smell This, a perfume blog.)

Christopher Brosius, the nose behind CB I Hate Perfume, defines accord somewhat differently, as “a single scent that captures a very specific smell.” He writes:

[An accord] might be the smell of a particular flower or perhaps a special bouquet of flowers or an exotic wood. An accord might also capture the scent of a very particular thing – maybe an ocean breeze, or a bit of driftwood, a mushroom or the forest floor. An accord might also be the smell of old leather gloves, freshly made carrot cake, a roll of cellophane tape or a brand new box of crayons. An “accord” can even capture a more complex but still particular experience: like walking through a meadow or a locker room or perhaps passing by a bakery or laundromat. All these different notes are then combined to create complex perfumes. In essence, accords are the words a perfumer uses to tell the story of a particular perfume; they are the Vocabulary of Perfume & using them creatively is the grammar of the Language of Scent.

His own accord vocabulary, Brosius writes, is based on reality. He offers 15ml vials of accords with names (and aromas) not usually encountered in the fragrance aisle: Baby Butt (Clean), Bananas Foster, Celo Tape, Doll Head, English Novel, Mushroom (chanterelle or white truffle), My Birthday Cake, Tortilla Chip, and Wet Pavement London—as well as eight variations of leather, from Baseball Glove to Spicy.

Why is his company called I Hate Perfume? Brosius explains in a manifesto whose first section reads:

I hate perfume.

Perfume is too often an ethereal corset trapping everyone in the same unnatural shape

A lazy and inelegant concession to fashionable ego

Too often a substitute for true allure and style

An opaque shell concealing everything – revealing nothing

A childish masque hiding the timid and unimaginative

An arrogant slap in the face from across the room

People who smell like everyone else disgust me

I thank Manolo the Shoeblogger for the introduction to CB I Hate Perfume. In a December 13 post, Manolo called Brosius “the most original, uncompromising, and iconoclastic of scent designers,” and added that one of his own favorite scents is Memory of Kindness, which is classified as a perfume, not an accord. Brosius describes Memory of Kindness as “the shining green scent of tomato vines growing in the fresh earth of a country garden.”

He’s on a Roll

When Old Spice’s spokehunk*—aka The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, aka Isaiah Mustafa—made his screen debut back in February, he was, famously, on a horse. His second commercial showed him swandiving (OK, “swandiving”) into a hot tub. The ads, and the “I’m on a horse” line, became almost overnight that most coveted of media phenomena: the viral hit. But what was even more remarkable was how quickly and astutely Old Spice’s agency, Wieden + Kennedy, capitalized on the buzz. A team of agency writers, directors, and tech folk turned the social-media comments into scripted, personalized response videos.

Some of the videos were addressed to celebrities (George Stephanopoulos, Ellen De Generes, etc.), but most went out to civilians such as this alphanumeric admirer:

If you have sufficient sitzfleisch, you can watch all the videos on the Old Spice YouTube channel (almost 200 in all). Then check out ReadWriteWeb’s post on the making of the videos. According to W+K’s global interactive creative director, Iain Tait, technical and social-media experts worked closely with the creative team. “We have people shooting and we’re editing it as it happens. Then the social media guys are looking at how to get that back out around the web ... in real time.”

 

All the videos were shot over two days this week before Mustafa wearily but gamely announced The End. But there’s an afterlife: An Old Spice voicemail generator puts Mustafa’s unctuous voice into your outgoing phone message.

And there’s already been a well-executed parody of the ads, created by—surprise, surprise!—the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University.

(Via Geekosystem.)

Read my original post about the Old Spice ad campaign, which includes embedded video about the making of the first ad.

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* I’m indebted to AdBroad—who wrote an admiring appraisal of the Old Spice campaign—for that moniker.

 

Word of the Week: Yarn Bombing

Yarn bombing: "The surreptitious or unauthorized placement of knitted objects on statues, posts, and other public structures." — Word Spy

Word Spy's earliest citation for yarn bombing (sometimes spelled yarnbombing) comes from the Ottawa Citizen, March 11, 2006:

There's a subversive group of knitters in Montrose, Texas, for example, calling themselves Knitta, that say they "yarn bomb" neighbourhoods with knitting graffiti — colourful knitted objects they leave in unexpected places — to help bring a warm, fuzzy feeling to their communities.

The Knitta group was started in 2005 by pseudonymous knitters AKrylik and PolyCotN; their first project was a doorknob cozy. Group members styled themeselves after rap artists and assumed names such as Knitorious N.I.T., SonOfAStitch, and P-Knitty. The practice spread throughout North America and the United Kingdom. 

Some yarn bombers publish their work in blogs. KnittaPlease (motto: "We knit graffiti") is a tongue-in-cheek allusion to "nigga, please," street slang for "give me a break." Yarnbombing.com ("Improving the urban landscape one stitch at a time") cast off the cloak of anonymity when its authors, Mandy Moore and Leanne Prain, published a book.

The bomb in yarn bombing is an older slang term from the lexicon of spray-can graffiti. To bomb (or hit) is to spray many surfaces in an area. A bomb can also be a spectacular failure (chiefly U.S.) or a spectacular success (chiefly U.K., but appropriated in U.S. slang as "the bomb").

Yarn bomb is just one of many -bomb compounds invented in recent years. See, for example, photobomb (to hijack a photo by suddenly entering the frame; watch video of Oscar-nominated actress Gabourey Sidoube describing to TV host Jimmy Kimmel her photobombing of Jake Gyllenhaal); Google bomb (the practice of using anchor text to manipulate search engine results, often for malicious purposes); meat-bomb (a parachutist); and, in the world of product trademarks, Flowerbomb, a fragrance by Viktor & Rolf. See other bomb compounds and definitions at Double-Tongued Dictionary.

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Bus photo from Yarn Bombing.