Fritinancy

Flowifying the Name Trends

A mysterious blogger whom I know only as The Least Shrew—her Twitter bio identifies her as Kaylin in Akron, Ohio—has done me the great honor of turning a peculiar research project of mine into a flowchart that she calls “How to Name Your Website.”

 

“Is your brand cutesy? Hardcore? Buddhist? None of the above?” View and embiggen the full chart.

 

That’s right: she studied my Pinterest boards of naming trends—Names That End in -ly, Brand Names with Gratuitous Umlauts, and all the rest—and applied linear logic to them.

Of course, for strict accuracy, the label should be “How to Name Your Company or Product”—this is a lot bigger than websites. And until I told her about The Name Inspector’s Wall of Namifying—the project that inspired my own collections—The Least Shrew hadn’t been aware of it, so all those -ify names—Rockify, Subsify, Wingify, et al.—don’t get proper representation.

But those quibbles aside, it’s a brilliant infographic. I’m deeply flattered.

Thanks to Karen for the tweet that sent me there.

Follow-ups

Some stuff I’ve seen recently that reminds me of stuff I’ve written about previously:

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X & Y names: Tyler Doyle of A Hundred Monkeys notes the rise of “the blank-and-blank restaurant” in the Bay Area: Fish & Farm, Flour + Water, Box and Bells, Bourbon and Beef, et al. I wrote in 2010 about “X + Y restaurants,” and I have a Pinterest board of X & Y retail names (59 and counting!). 

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Heroes:  Quidsi, the parent company of a clutch of e-tailers (Diapers.com, Soap.com, Look.com, et al.), thinks very highly of its workforce and “culture.” Its employees aren’t just model citizens. They aren’t merely heroes. They’re superheroes! With … superpowers?

 

Quidsi: Latin for “what if.”

 

I wrote about “hero” worship for the Visual Thesaurus in September 2013; I published follow-ups in October 2013 and earlier this month.

By the way, for an interesting take on “our culture” as a code word to screen out older (i.e., over 30) job applicants, see “The Brutal Ageism of Tech” in the New Republic.

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Not your close relative’s X: Intacct, a “cloud accounting company,” wants you to know it ain’t no dinosaur.

 

“This ain’t your grandpa’s financial system.”

 

Earlier posts about “Not your close relative’s X” here and here.

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Super-comparatives: Harry’s—cute name for a shaving company—isn’t just sharp. Or sharper. It’s sharperer. And less expensiver. Clever branding or risky linguistic overreach?

 

Note the apostrophe on the razor handle.

All the self-consciously hip brands are doing it, of course. Here’s a promo for ABC’s “Revenge”; the tagline is “Later. Sexier. Revengier.” 

 

 

Hat tip to Ben Zimmer for the video link.

See my previous posts on closerer and deliciouser, Maker’s-er, funner-er, gooderest, creamier-er-er, mobiler, and huge-ier (et al.).

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Food portmanteaus: Taco Bell is testing a quesarito (a hybrid quesadilla/burrito), which will come as old news to Chipotle customers. The owners of a couple of Shoprite markets in New Jersey claim to have invented the donnoli (hybrid donut/cannoli).  At the Donut Fest in Chicago back in January, an NPR reporter tasted a doughscuit (“an impossible mix of doughnut-fried sweetness and crumbly biscuitness”) And the Portland, Maine, bakery Little Bigs got slapped down in its attempt to sell a cronut imitation as a crauxnut. Little Bigs asked customers to suggest a new name. The winner: C&D (for “cease and desist”).

And this just in: The New York Times reports on the cragel (croissant + bagel), the mallomac (Mallomar + macaron), the scuffin (scone + muffin), and other hybrid baked goods.

For more food mashups, see my most recent post about the “frissant.”

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Caps and consonants: Yep, still a THNG! DSPTCH sells camera straps, bags, and related accessories in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood. Or is that DGPTCH?

 

Meanwhile, Japanese retail giant Uniqlo has launched SPRZ NY, “a new global project where art and fashion meet, creating something magical.”

 

Spores? Spritz? Something Preternaturally Random and Zany? Nope, nope, nope. Surprise!

More retail vowellessness here, here, here, and here. And here’s my 2012 post about vowelless restaurant names.

The -ly Name Trend: Not Just for Tech Startups

My guest post for Duets Blog yesterday (helpfully tagged “mixed bag of nuts”) looked at the epidemic of copycat names—in particular, the 193 names ending in -ly that I’d documented on Pinterest.

One day later, there are 196 -ly names on the board. I spotted two of them not in TechCrunch, my near-bottomless resource, but on the shelves of my neighborhood Safeway.

Brightly paper towels promise “virtually lint-free shine.”

 

Softly toilet paper.

 

The Guys and Dolls fan in me hoped Safeway also carried Nicely-Nicely paper cups. No dice.

The character was called Nicely-Nicely Jones in the original Damon Runyon stories. For more on Runyon and his creations, here’s a wonderful appreciation by Adam Gopnik, published in the March 2, 2009, issue of the New Yorker.

Follow-Ups

New sightings in categories I’ve written about previously:

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“Plus.”

Edward Banatt (@ArmaVirumque) recently tweeted a photo of a verbified “plus” he’d seen in the wild:

The menu is from the fast-casual restaurant chain Chili’s, which uses “Plus Up Your Steak” throughout the franchise.

Commercial verbifying of “plus” began at least 70 years ago with Walt Disney; “plus up” has a specific, non-Chili’s meaning in governmental budget negotiations. Read more.

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“Hero.”

Camera company GoPro has been advertising its new Hero3 models. (I’d missed the Hero1 and Hero2, which may not have been promoted as aggressively.) The company’s tagline is “Be a Hero,” which is slightly awkward. (“I am a camera”?) Tip: Never use your product name generically.

The Einstein Noah Restaurant Group, maker of Noah’s bagels, exhorts customers to “Be the Office Hero”:

 

Also spotted: TradeHero, a stock-trading app; and the unrelated Screenhero, “an app that turns any Mac or PC into a completely collaborative environment,” according to a TechCrunch report.

Read more about “hero” worship in branding.

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Comparatives.

You know about Dumberer. Now there’s Smarterer: “over 900 crowdsourced assessments tests to help thousands of recruiters and job seekers around the world quantify any skill in minutes.”

More neo-comparatives here, here, here, here, and here.

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“Zen.”

I recently encountered the term “annoyvation,” one of whose definitions is “an innovation born of a small annoyance.” TicketZen fits into this category. As its home page puts it, “Parking tickets suck. Paying them doesn’t have to.” (Good idea, fuzzy syntax, what with those confusing -ings.)

For more on the Zen of brand naming, see my Pinterest board and “Zen and the Art of Startup Naming” in Bloomberg Businessweek, in which I’m quoted.

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“ -Licious.”

Jessica wrote in her Beauty Marks blog about Samplicio.us (“Simply Better Surveys”). Mr. Verb wrote about “the hilariously named” Englicious, which “aims to be a complete online resource for teaching English grammar in UK secondary schools.” And scientist/educator Marc D. Hauser’s new book about human cruelty is called Evilicious.

More -licious names here (and follow the link in that post for still more -liciousness).

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Dictionary definitions.

Last week I received an email from Democrats.org with the gratuitously syllabified “com•pro•mise (v.)” in the subject line.

 

And yet in both the featured quote and the call to action “compromise” is a noun.

 

 

 

Read more about dictionary definitions in advertising and branding in my Visual Thesaurus column “Branding by Definition.”

Names of Interest

A few bulletins and follow-ups:

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I was interviewed by Businessweek for “Zen and the Art of Startup Naming,” about the proliferation of “zen” names (Zendesk, Zendrive, Zenify, etc.). For more, see my Pinterest board of Zen names.

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Zen names notwithstanding, it looks like Y is the new Z. Last week I wrote about names that substitute Y for I, and I just recently I discovered a new double-Y name, Swayy. It’s a startup that “brings you the best content to easily share with your audience and followers, based on their interests and engagement.” Is the name meant to be pronounced with a plaintive ayy? Or is it just another case of “We rejiggered the spelling to get a cheap domain”?

Speaking of Sway(y), here’s your rhumba interlude.

 

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And speaking of trends, will we ever see the end of the -ly naming fad? Evidently not, if Evidently is any evidence. The Toronto-based “creative content agency” (their phrase) also hops aboard the “you deserve it” bandwagon with this statement on its Facebook page:

There’s an asterisk after “We produce the engaging content your brand deserves”; the clarifying footnote reads “Deserves, in a good way.” Yes, “deserve” can flip its meaning—“Shame on you; you had it coming” or “You’re a winner!”—as I noted in my June column for the Visual Thesaurus, “The Ads We Deserve.”

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I love a name with a good story and a clever double meaning, which is why I’m so pleased by Rich Brilliant Willing, “America’s premier contemporary lighting and furniture design manufacturer.” The company was founded in 2007 by three RISD graduates whose surnames are—pay attention now—Richardson, Brill, and Williams.

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Another name that pleased me: she++, “a Stanford-based community for innovative women in technology.” The name is a pun on the programming language C++. I love the logo, too.

Read more about “plus” in branding in my April column for the Visual Thesaurus, “Shall We Plus?”

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Finally, here’s your bad name of the week: Twibfy, a dopey and nearly unpronounceable name for a company that calls itself “an inspirational platform.” (Translation: Pinterest wannabe.) You won’t find the name story on the Twibfy website, but on Twitter a company spokesperson said it’s an acronym (!) for “The World Is Beautiful From us to You.” (Random capitalization and awkward syntax sic). When you search for “Twibfy,” Google asks whether you mean “Twiggy.” That spells twouble. (Hat tip: Catchword.)

Repetitiously

I haven’t blogged for a while about startup names that end in -ly, but that doesn’t mean the trend is ebbing. On the contrary, I’m up to 153 – one hundred fifty-three! – pins on my “Names That End in -ly” Pinterest board.* The most recent additions: Fastly (“real-time caching”), Warmly (an alarm-clock app), and Scopely (a mobile gaming platform).

Also on Pinterest:

Shop at X & Y! (two-part retail names joined by an ampersand or plus sign)

Brand Names with Gratuitous Umlauts (and other needless diacritical marks)

Death Brands (and near-death brands, like Food Coma)

Square Brands (Foursquare, Squarespace, et al.)

Boxy Brands (Birchbox, Dropbox, Parabox, et al.)

The Zen of Brand Naming (Zenify, Zendesk, et al.)

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Make that 154: I just pinned Feastly, “homemade meals prepared and served in a cook’s home.” Thanks for the tip, Moira!

Names in the News: Summly

Congratulations to Nick D’Aloisio, the 17-year-old British programmer who this week sold his news-reader app for iPhone, Summly, to Yahoo for a reported $30 million. He invented the app when he was just 15.

 

 

It’s quite a business coup, and no surprise that the story made the front page of the New York Times.

Alas, the “Summly” name breaks no new ground at all. It may have been coined to suggest “summarize,” but it has an ambiguous sound (some? sum?) and a trite construction. Summly is the 147th pseudo-adverbial -ly name I’ve pinned on my Names That End in -ly Pinterest board.

September Linkfest

New York City gangs take their names very, very seriously, according to “Gang ‘Slang’ers,” in the New York Post. “It took us about a month to come up with our name,” said Piff Montana, a member of the Get Touched Boyz of Jamaica, Queens. … We wanted a name that would make an impact.” The full list of 300 or so gang names reveals a preoccupation with numbers and precinctspercentages: there are gangs called 5 Precinct Percent, 10 Precinct Percent, 40 Precinct Percent, and so on up to 122 Precinct Percent. (Hat tip: NameFlash. And thanks to Dave for correcting me on "precinct.")

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New additions to World Wide Words: eastwooding, mirror fasting, underbragging, and gramping. No, gramping is not a misspelling of glamping.

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Looking for a title for your book? You can’t go wrong with “The Elements of ___,” says Poynter.org’s Roy Peter Clark, who lists more than 25 knockoffs of the Strunk and White original. Here’s the one that inspired his post:

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Before she founded the online dictionary Wordnik, Erin McKean worked on the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, a reference that isn’t just for writers but is also by writers—i.e., various writers were invited to contribute notes on words that interested them. One of the writers assigned to McKean was the late David Foster Wallace, who, she writes, approached the copyediting phase as if “someone invited him to an all-day grammar seminar (with celebrity photo signings and vendor's expo hall), combined with a debating society picnic, where the topic was ‘RESOLVED: This Comma Should Be Removed.’ (You're not surprised, are you?)” Read the whole delightful account at “It was wonderful, marvelous, magnificent, superb, glorious, sublime, lovely, delightful ...”

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The Chamomile Tea Party was formed in 2010 as an alternative to “the rancor between the political left and right” in the US. It’s using modified World War II posters to get the point across, and you can view and download the posters on Flickr.

 

By outtacontext.

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In brand naming, many clients panic if a name is more than five letters long. According to Baby Name Wizard, there’s a contrary trend in baby-boy naming, at least in the US: fear of short names. Finn becomes Finnegan, Quinn becomes Quinlan, and—most boggling of all—Levi becomes Leviathan (“the twisted serpent to be killed at the end of time”) or Leviticus (the third book of the Old Testament, notable mostly for its litany of laws about skin diseases, sacrifices, and genital discharges).

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Fellow name developer Chris Johnson (aka The Name Inspector) has created my new favorite Pinterest board: the Wall of Namifying, “logos of companies whose names end with -ify (or, in one case, -efy).” As you probably know, I share his obsession. (And speaking of Pinterest, I’m trying my hand at a similar project: cataloguing the many, many -ly names and logos.)

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Linguist Arnold Zwicky collected some wonderful names of minor-league baseball teams, including the Albuquerque Isotopes, the Colorado Springs Sky Sox, the Fort Wayne Tincaps, and the Lansing Lugnuts. Then he followed up with an imaginary list of his own. I’m rooting for the Baton Rouge Compacts.

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From the Autoextremist blog, a slightly jaundiced guide to the latest auto-industry terms. An “accidental tourist” describes “executives devoid of the qualifications necessary to properly perform the duties assigned to them”; “greenage” is a program’s environmental potential. (Hat tip: Lance Knobel.)

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Speaking of jaundiced, there’s nothing like a Condescending Corporate Brand Page to say “We're a big corporate brand using Facebook. So look out for us asking you to like and share our stuff in a faintly embarrassing and awkward way.” Read more about the CCBP in Fast Company. (Note: the CCBP is British in origin—its URL contains “corporate bollocks”—but the themes are, alas, universal.)

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He is the very model of an amateur grammarian.

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I attended the Brand New Conference last year, when it was held in San Francisco, but couldn’t make it to New York for this year’s conference. Thankfully, organizer Armin Vit has compiled the best quotes and tweets from the event. Here’s a provocative opinion from UK designer Miles Newlin: “Stories have an end, and unless you want to think of your brand as having an end, then forget the storytelling idea, and forget people who talk about brand storytelling.”

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See what happened when New York Magazine sent a reporter to TechCrunch Disrupt SF to ask startup founders about their “chronically misspelled” company names. It’s, uh, Osom. (Thanks, Jessica!)