Fritinancy

Name in the news: Opill

Earlier this week the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the non-prescription sale of Opill (norgestrel), a progestin-only daily oral contraceptive. Although norgestrel has been used in prescription contraceptives since 1973, Opill is the first oral contraceptive approved for over-the-counter (OTC) sale in the U.S.

Opill’s manufacturer, Perrigo—an American-Irish company with headquarters in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Dublin—said the contraceptive will be available in the U.S. in early 2024.

Opill package

 

The announcement represents mostly good news for, as the website puts it, “people capable of becoming pregnant.” (The fly in the ointment: Under the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies aren’t required to cover the cost of over-the-counter birth control. Opill’s retail cost hasn’t yet been disclosed.) But what about the naming news? Good, bad, or meh?

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

Name in the news: Comirnaty

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today granted full approval to the COVID-19 vaccine manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech. The vaccine, which will be marketed as Comirnaty (generic name tozinameran), had been administered under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) since December 11, 2020; more than 200 million doses have been administered in the U.S. since that date.

The Comirnaty name didn’t just appear out of the blue today. I mentioned it in a May 2021 column on vaccination terminology and vaccine names. And Fierce Pharma reported on it back in December 2020, interviewing Scott Piergrossi, president of operations and communications at Brand Institute, the pharma-naming agency that developed the name for Pfizer-BioNTech. “The name is coined from Covid-19 immunity, and then embeds the mRNA in the middle, which is the platform technology, and as a whole the name is meant to evoke the word community,” Piergrossi told Fierce Pharma:

Word of the week: Bicycle Day

This is a big week in the altered-consciousness universe. Tuesday, April 20, is, of course, 4/20, the date “cherished by pot smokers around the world as a reason to toke up with friends and massive crowds each year,” as a 2019 Vox article put it. The holiday pays tribute to the afternoon hour, 4:20 p.m., when a group of stoners at San Rafael High School, in the San Francisco Bay Area, would gather in the early 1970s to get high. (The shift from time of day to calendar date works only in the U.S.; everywhere else in the world April 20 is 20 April. But I haven’t heard of anyone trying to make “204” work.)

I’d known (and  written about) “420” for years. But  until very recently I hadn’t known about the week’s other big event: April 19, Bicycle Day. It commemorates the day in 1943 that the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann took some LSD and then rode his bicycle home from the Sandoz laboratory in Basel, where he was employed.

 

Bicycle Day blotting paper via eBay

Names in the news: Bamlanivimab and beyond

Yes, there have been other things going on besides the bonkers yet tedious aftermath of the US election.

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Word of the week: Cold turkey

It started with an ad that materialized on my screen for no apparent reason.

 

“With CHANTIX, you can keep smoking at first and ease into quitting.”

 

I don’t smoke, hadn’t been searching for anything cigarette-related, and—whoa, what was that goggle-eyed bird doing in a smoking-cessation ad?

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.

December linkfest

The Namerology blog picks the defining baby names of the last decade—“The names that were not just hugely popular from 2010-19, but vastly more popular than in decades past…and future. They’re flying high, yet as the ’10s draw to a close they’re already starting to decline from their dizzying popularity peaks.”

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Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn combed his newspaper’s archives for the first mentions of products, technologies, ideas, and terms that have become part of life since late 2009. His chronological list goes from A (Angry Birds) to Y (YOLO), and includes a bunch of words and brands you read about here first, including showrooming, FOMO, trigger warning, and antifa.

July linkfest

“Companies change their slogans and catchphrases all the time to keep themselves fresh in customers’ minds. But DiGiorno might be the only one that has kept the same catchphrase, but changed the implication.” (Eater)

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“Sometimes I look at license plates for new prefix ideas. Sometimes I borrow from the names of cats or dogs.” How two women in Chicago create all those names for generic prescription drugs. (David Lazarus for Los Angeles Times; via MJF)*

Word of the week: Blockchain

If you’re just a tiny bit aware of blockchain, it’s probably thanks to Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer virtual currency introduced in January 2009 and rising sensationally, if erratically, in value ever since. (On November 25 a single bitcoin was worth US$8,770.) Bitcoin was made possible through blockchain technology, which, put as simply as possible, is a linked and cryptographically secured list of transactions.

Blockchain – also known as advanced digital ledger technology, or ADLT – makes obvious sense for currency. But it’s much more than the core component of a quirky monetary system with an enigmatic inventor. “Simply put,” The Economist explained in an October 31, 2015, article, “it is a machine for creating trust.” And that means blockchain’s potential for secure transactions of many kinds is seemingly limitless. In fact, “blockchain for X” is fast becoming the new “Uber for X.”

Chart via PwC.